“Which side won the war?” Old Plant asked the Kelp, when they had their promised meeting, less than a hundred and fifty seasons later. It had thought many times of summoning the Kelp leader in the preceding seasons, when the Plant seeds near the coastline had failed to germinate.
But in the end it hadn’t; there was no use arguing with such short beings. They had no ability to conceptualize the timescale of Plant life. The only way to grow was outwards.
The majestic Kelp that floated past it had less than half the stone stems attached as its predecessor had, and had introduced itself as Sporden, Arch Memory.
“My great-great-great-great-great-grandancestor’s side won the war. The revolutionaries,” said the Memorarch.
Sure enough, the acidity had risen, and the waves were weighted down with the heavy taste of halocarbons.
“You have been alive since my ancestor’s time,” the Memorach said. “And you are a powerful being with control over land and sky. We would not have been able to expand into the Scarlet Sea, if you hadn’t controlled the pollen haze, all those years ago.”
“You have not reproduced beyond the limits of the atmospheric balance,” Old Plant said. “The Memorarch of that . . . era, was true to its word.”
“No,” said the Memorarch, writhing in the underlanguage, “We the revolutionaries were true to our own vision, one of enduring prosperity not unending expansion. And so, we are no longer the ‘revolutionaries.’ We are now the ‘regime.’”
“The atmosphere remains in balance,” Old Plant continued, “but you have made permanent changes to our world. You are the inheritors of your great-grandancestor’s oceans, which are now filled with lime and runoff from deep below the continent.”
“We like lime,” the Memorarch said. “We use it to build up the Kelp beds.”
Old Plant had lost the ability to feel frustration millions of seasons ago. It had seen many Plants bloom and wither.
“You have failed in your duty of custodianship,” it said to the Memorarch, who didn’t take it kindly; the alderkelp along the coastline began to drift closer to the shore.
“That’s something only my future generations will be able to judge,” the Memorarch told it, before washing back to the deep ocean.
Old Plant began monitoring the balance of the atmosphere closer than it ever had before. The regime was involved in many struggles over the following generations, it surmised from the chemical content of the south wind. One was clearly a reprise of the old internal war; the rest, fights against the natural limiting factors of the seas.
Time passed. Short Plant grew and spread. The morning glories trended sap green, then teal, then slate blue until after hundreds of thousands of seasons they forgot that they had ever been green in the first place. Atlas Plant put out a new growth of exploratory white leaves, the broad-spectrum leaves, and Old Plant swelled with secret pride.
It talked very occasionally to the Memorarchs of the Kelp in those days, and slightly more often to the rotating alderkelp that floated along the shores. Their internal strife weighed so heavily upon them they soon forgot their history with Old Plant, and each generation spoke to it with a fresh voice.
“We’re taking on a new project, and we’d like your help,” one of them said to Old Plant, after the passage of tens of thousands of seasons. It was calling itself Sporen these days, like its title had sloughed off somewhere over the years along with an old memory. Old Plant’s memories did not slough off like shed bark, but stayed buried within like old growth rings.
Old Plant had been about to start a seasons-long rest cycle. But it was rare these days that they sought out Old Plant, and for the sake of the growing things on the continent, Old Plant wanted to know what they were planning before it slept.
“We want to learn to hibernate.” Sporen said. “Specifically, we want our gametophytes to hibernate until they sense a trigger condition. Do you have gametophytes? That’s what your pollen is, isn’t it? That’s what our scientists have always assumed about you, but we’d love to look into it more if you are willing to answer some questions!”
Old Plant did not want to exchange questions and answers with the Kelp scientists. It had no use for idle chat about fluid dynamics, or coral polyps, or the movements of the stars.
“What do you want us to do?”
“The method we’ve devised for guided evolution is pretty complex,” Sporen began. Old Plant wasn’t a scientist and so its mind began to drift.
“ . . . with this method the life span of a single spore could stretch out for thousands of years! But we will need a period of adversity to test the trigger conditions. I remember that once long ago you threatened to release corrosives into the oceans. Could you still do that, under controlled conditions, in a purposeful way?”
“No, I don’t think we can,” said Old Plant sleepily. A wind was racing up the marshland corridor, and it was already allowing its highest branches to defoliate. How risky for the Kelp it would be, and for so little reward. Even if the Plants did release corrosives, they wouldn’t be able to stop it or take back the chemicals, should their experiments fail.
“Appeal to Atlas Plant,” it advised them.
“Who is Atlas Plant? You’re not the leader of the Plants anymore?”
As much as I ever was, Old Plant thought, but it was already beginning to drop its white leaves and could barely control its chromatophores anymore. And anyway it didn’t particularly care, because by the time it woke up Sporen would be a different Kelp.
Old Plant fell into rest before it was able to watch Sporen drift away on the burgundy tides. For the first time the Kelp felt a little less foreign to it. Old Plant could understand better than anyone the desire to experience dormancy. But it wasn’t the same for the Kelp as it had been for Old Plant.
No, not the same thing at all, it thought as its trunks stiffened up and its roots rested, melting deeper into the earth. Old Plant slept.
It dreamed of the beginning, of renewal, of the reason that the Plants of the continent called it “Old” Plant and never “Long” Plant. When they said that name in Slow Speak, an olfactomimetic language, they built the word “Old” with an enveloping protein that broke open on contact, a prefix meaning “belonging to.” Inside this casing lay a single primordial chemical, an abbreviated version of the germination trigger. The “Old” in its name was a word that meant “belonging to the beginning.”
The beginning to which Old Plant belonged was very different from the world of today. For one thing, the groves that now spread across all parts of the continent were at that time each no more than ten or twenty trunks, and those trunks were squat and their branch pattern spread wider, leaves reaching out in every direction for sunlight, which shone weakly through a thick layer of cloud.
The trees barely spoke in those days; they needed all of their resources just to continue growing. They didn’t wait for a mast season, for the perfect conditions, to make a seed; they had to strive every season to reproduce or they would die out. They didn’t have an underlanguage. They just put out their roots and drank the sandy soil dry.
Then one day—back then there were days, though the planet’s slow rotation had long since stopped—the world ended. Subterranean vents rumbled, molten rock spilled across the continent, methane bubbled up through the deep hypoxic waters at the poles, making the sea look like it had come to a rolling boil.
The seeping, killing ash clouds passed over the continent. The oceans filled with bloom after bloom of strange new sulfidogenic bacteria that ate the water-dwellers of the old age and belched hydrogen sulfide into the atmosphere. The nautiloids died. The sky was dark. The protective layer of ozone that had cradled their planet for so long was seared away.
Into this dying world, one of those small, short prehistoric Plants released a seed, which fell from the catkin into a freshwater lake. The lake was so warm it germinated, and under the water, safe from the hydrogen sulfide, and protected from the ultraviolet radiation scorching t
he continent now that the cloud cover had been washed away, that Plant from the beginning grew.
It wasn’t meant to grow under water. It had to force a trunk up to the surface and keep it alive long enough to sprout leaves and pass precious elements to its developing root system. The air was laden with acidic aerosols, and the ultraviolet radiation at the surface was feverishly mutagenic. Its trunks reached up, then died, then reached up again. And when finally—after what would have been millions of seasons, had the Plant been able to tell what seasons were forming above it—it had built up a robust root network that spread the length and breadth of the pond, it fell into dormancy, and it waited.
Time passed, and the Plant did not know how much because it slept deeply.
Then light came back to the earth, bright and yellow, warm on the muddy ground where the lake had dried up, clear because it was filtered through ozone and not through the ash clouds. The Plant, which now was really Old Plant, found itself in the most ideal circumstances: no struggle for sunlight, no interminable cold nights, just vast acres and acres of land free and clear of other competing organisms. It spread its grove far and wide and put up a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand trunks in between each lightning season.
And when there were other seeds to be had, Plant seeds, that had been trapped in gravel, or stewed in saltwater, or simply not germinated under the harsh conditions of the earlier era, it nurtured them. Soon the Plants were masters of the continent.
So it understood why the Kelp wanted to hibernate, why they might want their spores to wake up in a different era. After all, in some sense, Old Plant was itself living in the afterlife of its people.
Being so short, Kelp seemed to lack the capacity, or the foresight maybe, to understand that there were certain limiting factors. After waking up in that glorious sunshine so many millions of seasons ago, Old Plant and its people had kept a careful watch over the planet on constant guard against the conditions that had caused the first extinction event. They drilled their roots deep and they learned to read earth tremors and tectonic shifts, and in this way they knew that eventually, the life cycle would end. Eventually, the earth would no longer be hospitable to any lifeform at all, and their clonal groves, which regenerated fresh new trunks as the old trunks aged, would be around to see it.
The second extinction event, the final one, was coming soon now. Soon by Plant standards, soon even by the measure of the shorter beings, maybe within a hundred generations. It was hard to tell exactly when the effects of the methane clouds would overwhelm the ecosystem, but Old Plant had woken up to be there at the end.
Each east wind season brought a citric tang, and the sea level had risen as it took in more dissolved gas. The seawater flogged itself on the coast at Old Plant’s roots. Methanogenic bacteria lurked under the ocean surface. The Kelp would enjoy this change, it thought, right up until the climate ate them. Their ocean territory was eating away at the shore, and they thrived in the longer cold-water seasons.
One of them was coming up to it now.
“Hello, I’m Sporen,” the Kelp said. Sporen was its surname now, its given name only given in one of the Kelps inaccessible underlanguages.
Its trail of stone stems was much longer than its predecessor Sporden.
“Sporen. I have not spoken with your kind in quite some time.”
“Yes, well. Things are changing now.”
Old Plant’s branches quivered.
“We could have been a good resource for each other,” Sporen said. “But we failed to share our resources, and so in the end we failed to take advantage of them.”
For a moment, Old Plant thought that Sporen was talking about their two species. It thought of all the ways in which the oceans guided the ecosystem, and what the Kelp might have had to bargain with if it had not dismissed them all those millions of seasons ago. If Old Plant had spared the energy to keep up with their exhausting and constant generational cycles, then the Plants could have had a deeper understanding of the ocean and forewarning of weather patterns.
It almost felt a moment of remorse, but then it saw the pronouns; Sporen meant we the Kelp failed to share amongst ourselves. And anyway, what good were a few seasons of forewarning of a flood or an algal bloom, when they knew that this had been coming all along? The rain, when it rained these days, was heavy with dissolved methane.
Sporen was still talking.
“—a system of rules, laws, it’s a type of technology really, and our species has always been innately competitive with each other, while at least from the outside, you appear to be competing only with other kinds of plants. And doing so from the top of the ecosystem.”
“And you want my . . . advice?” Old Plant asked.
“Yes, if you’ll give it.”
Old Plant thought about this for a while, but Sporen didn’t lose patience and drift away; it just waited, watching, as the sun reached unprecedented temperatures above them. Fatalistically, this lulled Old Plant.
“It’s probably not worth it,” Old Plant finally said.
“What is that supposed to mean?” Sporen asked.
“You may not realize this, but the conditions of the world have been changing. Maybe it happened too slowly for your people to realize. But each year, warm water season gets shorter, and heavy rain season becomes more violent. These changes are only going in one direction. I’m sorry to say it to you, but the tide is coming in. Our seasons are numbered.
“Your people compete amongst themselves for resources, and this is a part of your natural strategy. Even if you change that now, within a few generations, you will all be extinct. We will as well. Let us live out our last days in peace. Let us finally rest.”
“No,” said Sporen. “No, I don’t think we will.”
“You will,” said Old Plant. “I’m sorry to tell you this, if you cannot see it yet. This earth might be habitable for you, and maybe for your progeny, but there it will end. There will be no great-great-grandspawn.”
Sporen had used the in-group pronoun again. “No, I don’t think we will,” it said. “And I wouldn’t bet on this planet lasting until the methane has a chance to take its toll.”
“It is taking it now,” Old Plant said.
“We look up into the stars from the dark side of this planet. There is an asteroid coming that will make impact within my lifetime. It’s large.” Sporen thrashed its tail of stone stems. “It’s large enough that I won’t see my grandspawn. That, not the methane, will be the real extinction event.”
They both paused. Old Plant reached up into the sky with its newest shoots, one last golden burst of growth before the end.
Could it be true? Did it matter if it was? Old Plant was ready for extinction, and the difference in time was no more than the blink of an eye.
“The impact site will be on the horizon of the dark side. Just on the other side of the Aragonite Sandbar, in the Scarlet Sea,” Sporen said to no response. “We’ll go there together to produce our gametophytes.”
They had changed their ecosystem all those years ago to give themselves easy access to the Scarlet Sea.
“They’ll be crushed, your spores,” Old Plant said.
“Some of them. Some of them will be thrown out into space, where conditions will trigger dormancy until they land on a habitable surface.” Sporen waited calmly.
“It’s the wrong season for a trip to the dark side. You won’t be able to drift back before the impact,” Old Plant said.
“I’m not doing it for me. None of us are. We’re doing it for our progeny and not for ourselves.” Sporen sank a little deeper below the waves, its equivalent of a long sigh. “I feel bad for you, long-lived as you are. You can’t see anything beyond this life cycle.”
Old Plant remembered its first conversation with the Kelp. It had thought almost the same thing of them, then. But it had been wrong; it had missed something fundamental about their community, a difference not of strategy but of society. Old Plant reached down into the rhizosphere to where
its roots clasped Yellow Plant and Atlas Plant and Quaking Plant, and soaked their roots in a simple message of love and support.
“Go then,” it said. “Go. And flourish.”
The season was turning. Sporen went.
Old Plant turned its broad-spectrum white leaves, its “seeing” leaves—the ones it always thought of as young—away from the ocean for the first time. Toward the sky.
It waited for a long while. No, for a short while, in fact, but for the first time since it was a seedling, every second felt long to Old Plant. It didn’t want to miss this.
The sunlight was ever harsher, and Old Plant waited out a season. A cloud boiled across the sky. The world sank into twilight.
Far away, barely breaking their horizon line, a gray orb appeared like a new bud.
Cooper Shrivastava Page 2
