by Nolan Oreno
“Is that-?" she asked as she slowly sat herself up.
Another drop hit her helmet's visor in that instant, then another, and then another, all originating from the outside, soaring through the large opening in the plastic screen. Not before long there were hundreds of them, cascading evenly from the cobalt sky and wetting the dry ground below. They were so tiny they might have gone unnoticed if Autumn had not been searching the stars for one last miracle.
Epilogue: The Forest
“What happens now?" the two men asked themselves, hovering above the broken body of the third, buried halfway in the sand.
There came a change in the air, and something began tapping at the tops of their helmets, but they chose not to notice it. They pushed at the dead body with the soles of their boots and again nothing happened. The wind stirred the sand around them.
“We start over," a woman said from the doorway.
They turned to her. Autumn Florentine was stepping onto the sand from the concrete embankment of Tower One, clutching at her belly. She shuffled towards them with little energy left.
“What did you do?" Maven asked neutrally, eyes returning to Saul in his grave then back to her. “You murdered him. He’s dead."
Autumn rested herself against a steel column along the sandy path and grimaced in pain. She made an effort to control her panicked breathing, and then she continued closer toward them.
“I protected my baby. He was going to murder the both of us. I chose to save two lives instead of one, and I know I made the right choice."
Maven turned towards Franco and cocked his head. Franco spoke up.
“It wasn’t supposed to go like this. None of this was- No one was supposed to die," Franco said in a daze.
Autumn stopped about ten paces from them leaving an empty space between the conversation. The two men now noticed her legs were trembling and wet.
“He’s dead," Maven repeated again, and thought on this truth for a moment, weighing the consequences. “Gone."
“He was going to kill the baby," Franco said out loud to nobody. “Why would he do that? We wanted to stop him. He wouldn’t listen to us."
Autumn braced through a few seconds of a birthing tremor that rattled her body.
“Because-" she winced. "None of this was about survival or holding us back from extinction. It was about him. It was always about him- not you, not the colony, not humanity. It was about his desire for power and control over people, and the pleasure he got out of it. You must see this now. He didn’t care-" She fought back a wave of pain. “-didn’t care what happened to us, he never did, or else why would he try and kill our only hope of a future?" She looked down.
It was clear Maven and Franco were deliberating on what to do next. In this spare time, Autumn looked around until she found what she was really looking for. Her Crawler, parked aside a nearby building, directly behind Maven and Franco.
“You need to let me go," Autumn said carefully, taking a step forward. “The baby is coming now. I need to get someplace safe, for the both of us."
Maven held up his glove. “I can’t let you do that," he enforced.
Autumn stopped, mind racing for a way out of the situation. “Yes, yes you can, Maven. Please, I’m nearly out of oxygen. I’ll die here if you don’t let me go. I know you don’t want that."
His voice shook as he spoke across the gulf. “No, you can’t go back to them. You’ll tell them what I did to Janya, and what I let Saul do to you. They’ll hate me for it, even more than I already hate myself. They won’t let me live. They’ll exile me into the desert just like they did to Hollis, and I’ll die alone."
“No, listen to me, there won’t be anymore more exiling, or killing, or hate," Autumn assured. “I promise you, everything will change from here on out. They can forgive you because everything will change."
“How could I believe you?" Maven shouted, and he pointed to Saul’s corpse. “That’s just what he promised me! A lie!"
“Look up," Autumn replied matter-of-factly. “Just look up, Maven, and you’ll see."
After letting out a nervous chuckle, Maven took to her advice and tilted his helmet upwards. “There’s nothing-"
Tap. Tap.
Beads of water began collecting on his visor. One, then two, then three. They were separate at first, roughly five of them spaced apart, and then they began merging together with their neighbor. The congregation of water grew large enough to partially obstruct his view, transforming the dotted starscape above him into a messy watercolor painting of light. He dropped his head back down, letting the water fall from the glass shielding over his wide-eyes.
“Rain?" he belted.
By the time he leveled out his gaze, he found that Autumn was long gone. He looked to Franco in astonishment who too was staring into the storm. Both of them let out a cry of joy and confusion. It was raining on Mars. Rain, on Mars. A weaker rain than one would predict on Earth, closer to the consistency of a light mist, but nevertheless rain. Water. Natural water.
Everything will change.
A Crawler’s engine revved behind them. It choked through the sand at first, when eventually it picked up enough traction too quickly burst from the confines of the city and enter the open desert with great speed.
“The Hub is the other direction. Where is she going?" Franco asked, returning his head to the clouds.
“The forest," Maven said smiling.
The sand became denser and denser the further Autumn drove. The rain, heavier. All the while Autumn laughed. She knew laughter would drain her oxygen tank at a quicker rate, but she also knew it did not matter. She refused to look at the amount of time she had left to breathe, because whatever the number read, it would be enough to get her to where she needed to go. As if she were on her way to a future that was already written for her, Autumn had no fear she would end up anyplace that could harm her. Some would call this faith, but she believed it to be something much more tangible and based in science. The universe, it seems to her, in all its perceived randomness and chaos, sometimes might work for a certain outcome. Whether or not this outcome was always for the good or for the bad, or for the now or a millennium from now, Autumn could not be certain. In this case, however, Autumn and the universe had the same desire for the same end, and it just so happened that it was to give humanity of second chance.
The sandy plain turned to clay, clawed into by streaks of falling rain. This made it more difficult for the Crawler to maintain its speed and control. The vehicle glided across the twilight swampland, tearing deeper into the soil. A couple of times, it nearly slid into the arms of a daunting dune, but Autumn maneuvered it the other direction, keeping herself on the right path. She showed no fear. She was on the right path.
Even further into the desert, the wet clay turned to mud. The Crawler coughed and choked as it continued through it. The tires, not designed to drive on swampy landscapes, caught themselves in pockets in the mud, rattling the cabin of the vehicle. Muck was flung along the shielding of the Crawler, turning its tan coloring black. Eventually, the tires found a trap they could not escape, and the vehicle shook to a halt. Still, Autumn showed no fear.
She exited the hatch of the Crawler to find herself directly at the base of the Valles Marineris, just as would be expected, and she began the climb through the sludge to the overlook. Her boots dug into the muck, leaving an imprint that lasted long after she left, and it proved to be an easy climb to the top. Outlook Station Seven passed by on her right. The incline began to level out, and the overhang to the valley approached her.
There, behind a misty curtain of rain, at the edge of the valleys drop-off, was what looked to Autumn like a ghostly figure. It loomed there, wide arms outstretched, facing away from her and towards something far more beautiful. She quietly inched forward. It was looking down into the gulf, paying no attention to anything else. Nothing arose Autumn’s suspicions that the Creature's presence was something to fear, so she got even closer, trying to make sense of its
form. Her gloved hand was reaching for its luminescent body when suddenly it leaped off the rocky platform and opened its massive white wings. It joined the falling rain and drifted to the valleys basin, disappearing before Autumns eyes into the fog.
Autumn gasped in amazement, but not only at the Creature. She was now at a position where she could examine what the valley held inside.
“It’s real," she whispered.
The expanse of the once a barren gorge was now covered by an immense forest. The parade of trees crawled through the valley and filled the farthest distance Autumn could see. Smaller groupings of the trees clung to the lower walling of the canyon system, attempting to break onto the greater desert plain above by advancing up the incline. The inner region was far denser than the rest where it was even closer to the original site where she had planted the seedlings. The trees hid whatever ground stretched beneath their thick plumes of crystal white leaves. It all looked like a garden of cauliflower from the height Autumn was observing them, aligned without order or containment, and without an end. She wanted to be down there, surrounded by Hollis’ creations, and feel his life in theirs. She wanted to follow the Creature. She wanted to make sense of it all.
The descent was without incident. The closer she got to the forest, the more she realized how massive it really was. The pathway lead her along the valleys side and directly into the heart of the shining silver arbor, and once within, she quickly became lost in its vastness. In every direction was a tree, firmly rooted in a mossy bed of white grasses and fungus that linked every nearby tree. Each of the tree’s gray-tinted trunks was as wide as the drum of a water tower and taller than that of any tree Autumn had seen in even the most exotic places on Earth. Their branches reached high above her, building a dense canopy of snow white leaves that trembled by the weight of the light rain. Water droplets glided between the cracks in the roof of pedals and found its way inside to the grasses beneath.
The light from the stars also found its way through the leaves and into to the woodland. It lit a path for Autumn to follow, directing her along a narrow causeway bordered by the twisting roots of the countless trees. Connected to this intricate root system was every stem of life that erected within the forest. It occurred to Autumn that as a result of this connectivity, the forest was one massive organism, rather than the hundreds upon hundreds of separate entities it appeared to be. She made her way through the tangled web of roots, in awe of the grandeur of the entity she was exploring, and if she listened closely she could swear she heard it breathing.
Autumn followed the root system to a clearing in the forest. She could see here that the roots from every tree were sourced into a single tree that laid in the center of the clearing. This tree was particularly more visually striking than the rest. It had a soft white glow emanate from its bark, and its structure seemed to mount itself more strongly in the soil. Aside its trunk, Autumn could make out a little green flag lopsided in the dirt. It was her marker from the original planting site of the EDN’s. She had stumbled upon the core of the forest, where the first seedling sprouted and pioneered the future landscape of Mars. Before her was the tree of life.
As Autumn trekked nearer to the distant tree a warning signal shrilled from her helmets display panel: Suit is emptied of O2 reserves. Immediately refill tank or return to oxygen enriched environment.
Autumn was so entranced by the beauty of the grove that she failed to realize how hard it had been for her to breathe. Luckily, she now found herself in an oxygen enriched environment. She loosened the outer bolt on her neck-harness, unhooked the safety latch, and began twisting her helmet upwards against the rain. Only for a split second did she pause, allowing herself time to appreciate the awaiting world that had been granted to her and the man who was behind it all. If Hollis’ science and calculations were correct, then everything would be okay. Everything, just as he always promised.
She looked at her suit’s environmental readout. Radiation levels were normal, and the atmosphere was a perfect 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen. Filled with an unbreakable trust, Autumn lifted the encasement from her sweat-caked face and took a full and deep breath, dragging as much of the surrounding air into her body as possible.
Clean and pure. The dissipating warmth from inner circulatory systems of the trees heated the surrounding environment to a comfortable tropical climate. The moisture produced by the leaves, which was harvested from water deep within the crust of Mars by the roots, coated Autumn’s skin in a thin shield of water. The air was cool and minty, and it dampened her expanding lungs. There were notes of a sweetness in the air too, soft and subtle enough to warrant another deep breath to reinvigorate the addictive taste and texture. It was a transcendent experience for Autumn to fuel her hurting body with the life force of the forest, and she accepted the trees charity with gratitude.
The warm rain trickled down Autumn’s cheeks and blended with her tears. She turned her head upwards and spun about in circles, capturing as much of the water as possible in the valleys of her dry skin. Her mouth remained wide open, drinking and laughing all at once. Never had the rain felt so good to her. She wondered why she never noticed it before, on Earth, when the rain fell so often. Why, she asked herself, did she remain indoors or under an umbrella, hiding from the sky, when all along the rain felt so warm.
Autumn dropped her head and readjusted herself to the encircling forest. She parted her wet hair from her shining eyes, still laughing in boundless joy. She quickly composed herself upon noticing a shadowed body not far away. Standing beneath the forest's first tree, further into the clearing, she once again saw her mysterious visitor. Hidden behind its translucent wings, it’s hands of four fingers were touching the gray bark of the tree, inspecting the machine that it was. Its fingers moving along its maze of markings as if to ascertain if it was real or not. Autumn started to silently move through the rain-soaked mossy glade to make the very same judgment of the figure. It was the very same visitor that had haunted Hollis since the beginning, and where she once questioned its existence, it now showed itself to her without barriers in between them. A reunion was long overdue.
“Don’t run," Autumn spoke kindly, close enough for a conversation. She was uncertain if it could understand her, so she focused on positive tones. “Please."
The rain beat down on the both of them. The Creature turned slightly to her, still hidden behind its glassy wings.
“No more running," it surprised her with a quick response. “Not anymore."
The Creature's voice was warm and inviting, just like the rain. She had heard it before.
“You were the one who answered me, weren’t you," she said slowly, coming into awareness of the goodness of the thing that stood before her. “When I was asking for an answer."
The Creature turned to face her and almost fooled her as to being human, but the resemblance quickly faded upon deeper inspection. Its eyes were far too large, taking up half of its face, and they were sharply almond shaped. A deep black film coated them so that it was difficult to guess where it was looking, possibly it being everywhere at once. It was lacking a nose, only three small strips which Autumn assumed were its nostrils. The Creature had no mouth and no ears, and instead of hair, a row of protruding flaps extended down from the back of its head. To Autumn, they almost looked like large gills. Its body was a leaner and more muscular version of a normal human, and it was elongated greatly at its waist, sprouting a long pair of arms and legs from its hourglass torso. From its shoulders came a thin set of wings which were folded at the moment and tucked into a larger set of the gills on its back. What was perhaps most unique about the Creature was it full-body translucence, allowing Autumn to see directly through it to the great tree on the other side. The only thing that obstructed the view was what looked to be hundreds of bright golden orbs swimming around within the body, and each orb appeared to have their own life to them. The light of the swimming orbs made it hard to Autumn to maintain direct eye contact with the Creature.
&
nbsp; “Yes," the Creature said from nowhere. “I spoke to you, just as I spoke to him."
“But why? What do you want?" she asked in awe.
Something told Autumn the Creature was smiling.
“It is not what I want, it is what you must want for yourselves. I am here not to take something from you but to give. I wanted you to see it for yourself," it said.
“See what?"
“This," it said, lifting its long arms into the air. “All around you. What you could have. What you have now. What you will have."
“I don’t understand," said Autumn, looking at the crop circle of trees that bordered them. “You did this?"
The winged humanoid tilted its long chin slightly downwards. “I only aided the process. I did what I could do without interfering in the natural order of things. I am not allowed to manipulate your courses. You must find it yourself. However, sometimes I find another way to guide you. I showed both of you the path so that you may take it to this place."
Autumn tried to comprehend the subject matter to pose purposeful questions, but she failed to see the agenda of the spirit. “What are you?"
“I am what you could become."
Another cryptic answer. Autumn focused. “You were like us once?"
“I was. Long ago, before the first of your species emerged from the seas, we were as you are now."
“We? There are more of you?"
The Creature turned its head upwards. “There are many more, countless more, but they are far from here. I am the only one in your vision. The others do not come here anymore."
“Why not?"
“We have tried in the past. We went to billions of species, including your own."
“You’ve met my people before?"
“We only revealed ourselves to the few of your kind who had the capacity to shape your species path. Prophets, as you called them. We have done this a few times in your civilization’s history, showing those the way who can perceive it, but they were always killed by your own. Their knowledge was feared when it should have been embraced."
