Dark Corners

The Green

Ifelt myself dropping through the darkness, the words of my mother still in my veins:

I struck. My shell cracked but did not open. I reached to force open the crack, but my limbs were not yet full and still weak.

I forced my fingers against the crack until I saw green light entering, filling my tiny chamber. I traced the crack down beneath my legs and then I jumped up and landed upon the crack.

I knew this would make the seed move.

I heard the heavy sound of wings beating the air just as the shell beneath my feet gave way, sending me down between the leaves and blades, down among the roots and molds.

There, a creature of slime.

Tubular, segmented, colored with a hot hue. It filled its yawning maw with soil and long dead creatures of the green now brown, black, and rotted. I readied the thorns on the backs of my hands, soft as they still were, but the creature had no interest in me. I still lived.

I was flattened as a great weight landed above me and a mind shattering scream filled my hearing. When I could look again, I saw half of the tubular creature writhing among the roots, the slime pulsing pink and yellow from its severed end. Another scream and the huge beak snapped down once more and the creature of slime was no more.

I became as the roots around me: cold, motionless, unthinking, unfeeling, the brown over me like hair. The great beak struck down twice more, the second time turning over a piece of rotted leaf. Finding nothing there, the creature beat its wings and was gone.

Slowly I turned my face up to look through the blades of grass, the moss fronds, ferns, and vines. High above them, her crown almost hidden by everything between us, my mother towered above the world. She had taught me well, for I was still alive to say so. Now there was my duty to her.

The fireblades would surround my mother. I found her root, turned my face away from her, positioned the needles of light from above my mother’s crown to my left, and began walking through the blades as my thorns hardened. On my journey four times creatures of slime moved to make a meal of me, and four times I left them in pieces for each other. From the creatures of flesh I hid.

Child, hear this:

When I reached the edge of the world, the place where the fireblades stood their ranks, my head was above the mat of the forest. The upright grasses and ferns still towered over me, but now I was too big to draw the interest of the creatures of slime who crawled. The slime creatures who took to wing, however, now found the spaces between my thorns attractive places to lay their eggs. Twice each cycle of lights I bathed myself in the acid drips of the marabark. It made my skin brown and cracked, but it kept away the egg layers.

By the time the fireblades turned red and prepared to let fall their children, I was tall enough to see the curve of the fireblade’s circle around my mother. Too I could see another like myself preparing to gather the children of the fireblades far toward the morning light.

I crept close to her and said, “Child of our mother.”

The other whirled and presented her thorns and shining teeth as she faced me. “My sister,” she replied, although she did not relax.

I asked the question of burden. “How many sisters have we?”

“There is one other. She is dead by now. She was slow and stupid.”

I held out my upper limbs and cried at this. “Two? There are only two of us? How can only two of us care for the children?”

“We must,” answered my sister. “If we fail, our mother dies.”

Before we parted we shed our thorny skins, became soft, crept into each other, and embraced. It was a moment that lifted me far above the world into a land of feeling, warmth, and glory. Then we parted, prepared to do what we could to serve the children.

“There is only you and one other,” said a fireblade, its single scarlet leaf pointed toward the sky.

“This is not sufficient,” cried another. “Our parents had seven to care for them, yet they complained at how few they were. Our parents’ parents had sixteen.”

I could not quiet their fears, nor was that my task. Their pods were bursting and I had to gather the children.

In a bag I plaited with blades of grass I placed the children of the fireblades. When full, the bag was very heavy. I searched my side of the scarlet circle surrounding my mother. In the circle of the fireblades there were thin places filled only with the old and battered. There I clawed the soil. There I placed the children. There I spat the water I gathered and discharged the fertile remains of the things I ate. I waited for the tiny green tips of the children to show themselves above the soil.

My guard was interrupted as a fireblade said, “Your sister is gone! Your sister is gone, the children of the other side with her! There is a break in the wall!”

I shut out the wails of the fireblades until all I could hear were the creatures of flesh and slime within the circle. Crawlers near the tree, fliers buzzing in the light shafts, munchers eating the dead. There was nothing strange.

I crept to the base of my mother’s trunk, listened carefully, and began the journey around her. I climbed her small roots, walked around her large ones, jumped the cracks she had made in the boulders her roots had split. All the while I searched and listened for my sister.

With my back to my mother, the first light came now over my right. I stood atop one of my mother’s roots and looked into the distance where the circle of fireblades stood. As the fireblades on my side had said, there was a break in the wall. As I approached it, the fireblades on either side wailed, “Tree child, tree child! You must bed the children in the gap. You must, else your mother dies!”

“I have none. All of my children are in the soil. What happened to my sister?”

“Creatures, they came,” said another blade. “Strange creatures of flesh and stench: strange flesh; stranger stenches. They cut through us here. We called to your sister and she tried to stop them, but they cut her down as well. Your mother they cut with a strange thing. When they left our circle they took the piece of your mother, your sister, and the severed fireblades with them.”

“Where did they kill her?” I asked.

“Where you are standing,” answered a third.

I stepped back and examined the ground, searching first for the children of the fireblades. Finding none of them, I searched for shreds, a drop of fluid, some part of my sister. I found drops of her fluid gathered in the cup of a leaf. I touched it, felt it, became it, my mind released to enter the being of each cell, the thing of it, the reality of their worlds.

I saw what she had seen. I saw the strange creatures of flesh, smelled their stench. Upright walkers, curious large heads capped with fur and covered with dead plant fibers. The sounds they made were their talk, and my sister had absorbed their talk.

They had approached the wall of fireblades.

“Use the chem proof gloves to touch them. The leaf excretes an acid that can eat through your hand in a second. Look at the burn on my arm from yesterday.” The one pulled up a covering and showed a limb to the other. The skin on the limb was light tan save for the burn. There it was deep red and pale yellow. The one nodded at my mother’s crown. “They protect the tree.”

“Look at the size of it, Tasha. That trunk must be a hundred meters or more around.”

“More, Curt. The flyby put the tops in this stand at just under eight hundred meters.”

“Can you find some blown down branches? If that wood is commercial, we’re going to be set for life.”

“Nothing on the ground. I’m guessing anything dead that lands down here isn’t around very long.”

“Look, I want to get to the tree to get a core sample. Let’s lose some of these acid plants and make a path.”

“I’m pretty sure that’d expose the tree to damage from something outside the ring. Maybe some of those jawed ground crawlers we picked up yesterday. They’re wood eaters.”

“It’s just one tree, Tasha. On survey we saw hundreds of millions of them.”

And they brought out a strange appendage that severed the fireblades at the ground. As the first creature began cutting, the second one watched. My sister turned to fluid, flowed between the blades, and came up behind the two creatures, picking their minds for their terrors. As my sister rose from the fluid, the second creature cried, “Whoa, Jesus!” The creature pulled a thing from its belt, aimed it at my sister, and sent a bolt of cold blue lightning through her. She fell.

“My god! My god, what’s that? Curt?” asked the creature with the cutter.

The other bent over my sister’s still twitching form. “It looks like a cross between a human and a dragon. Look. Fingers, legs. Human feet, but scales. Look at those bat wings. It’s some bizarre kind of gargoyle.”

The human called Tasha took something from its belt, held it over my sister, and said, “Vegetable fibers. This is a plant.”

They both stood in silence for a moment, then the one called Tasha said, “We’ll bring it back with us. I bet this is what cares for the acid plants. Keep your piece out just in case there’re more of them.” Then the creature resumed cutting through the wall of fireblades. The image dimmed. The image died. My sister was dead.

The creatures had my sister’s body. That meant they had to have the children for the other side of the circle, as well. Already the slime creatures who gnaw were sniffing at the opening in the fireblades. It would only take one of them to bore into my mother and lay its eggs. After that the eggs would hatch and soon the great tree would come crashing down to the forest floor where its remains would soon be devoured.

The gnawing creatures did not cross the stumps of the blades. They still put out their deadly fluid. But soon, no more than a day or two, they would become dry and harmless. I walked through the gap, crushed two of the gnawing creatures, and faced the fireblades.

“Bend across the gap,” I told them. “It is all you can do until I return with the children.”

It was the only time I ever ventured beyond the ring of fireblades, but there was no time for wonder. I searched the ground, the leaves, and branches for signs, absorbed the information they had, and followed.

Mists caressed the tree mosses as I found the two creatures. It was deep into the night, the sounds of the forest hushed. They were in a strange metal shelter. I became as the mist and seeped into the cracks to watch and to listen.

The one called Tasha was reclining beneath sleek coverings of soft metal fibers. The one called Curt was bending over a thing which appeared to make pictures on another thing before him. The picture was of my mother’s sign.

“Tasha,” the one said. “Wake up and look at this.”

“What?” Tasha looked at the picture, her eyes widening. “What a beautiful grain.”

“This wood has everything. Beauty, strength, dense cell matrix, but lighter than pine. It cuts like basswood, smells better than cedar, and the tests I’ve done so far peg it as more rot resistant than cypress.”

“How old is it?”

“I don’t know. You’d need a core twenty-five meters long to get near the center. The core I got was only two meters. Anyway, I count around a hundred rings every three centimeters or so. If that ratio holds true throughout the stick …” He began poking another thing with one of his fingers.

Before he could finish, Tasha said, “Over eighty thousand years old. That makes it over a hundred thousand on Earth. The oldest living things in the universe.”

“Until they discover something older next year.”

The strange words were spoken in an excited manner. I needed to know their meanings.

I flowed along the interior surfaces until I reached the place where Tasha reclined. I flowed through the fibers of her coverings and was surprised as she jerked her leg away from where I had touched her. “What’s the matter?” asked Curt. “A bug get in your sleeping bag?”

“I don’t know. Just a chill. Put the strength tests on the readout.”

The picture changed as I pondered the thing she had called “a chill.” Some aspect of my touch had been foreign to her senses. I studied motion, and the motion had been less than the billions of beings that inhabited her skin. I studied color, but the creature appeared not to have a sense of vision beneath the covers. She seemed to have no sense of thought touch at all, and, compared to her stench, I had no odor at all. Her leg was warm. I altered my temperature and once more touched her leg. She did not notice and I flowed to the end of Tasha’s leg and toward her head and over to her other leg. Soon I filled her. I touched her, felt her, became her, my mind released to enter the being of each cell, the thing of her, the reality of Tasha’s world: strange feelings, strange passions, strange purposes, curious goals.

The readout on the screen now meant things to me. The body of my mother, cut into pieces, could endure a variety of forces. Other readouts and the content of Tasha’s mind showed the pieces of my mother’s body could be exchanged for numbers in a computer, and that the numbers converted to wealth and survival for Tasha.

Tasha and Curt had taken all of their money, all of the credit they could obtain, and all of the money they could beg from family and friends, to bid for the development claims on a world that had but a number. A morning away was their ship. Elsewhere other humans were testing waters of lakes and seas, collecting biological specimens, and minerals. The reports from all of the teams were incredibly glowing. I could feel what Tasha felt. The golden dawn was within her grasp.

There were a few technical problems. How to cut down a tree fifty meters in diameter. Beam cutters could do it, but how to keep much of the valuable product from shattering as the top of the huge tree struck the ground. Perhaps they would have to lower the trees to the ground with hover mules. Perhaps the wood was strong enough to take the shock of being felled. Nothing mattered. The market for good wood was lucrative enough to justify almost any expenditure.

Tasha closed her eyes and rolled until she was upon her back. She allowed the warmth of success and victory to cuddle her moment. So many had told them they were insane. So many had hidden their own cowardice by calling Curt and Tasha’s courage and sense of adventure “immaturity.”

“Still thinking about what your uncle said?” Before Tasha could answer, Curt’s lips nuzzled her ear. “Screw ‘em. Screw the whole chicken parade.” He kissed her lips and I became frightened as waves of strange feelings flooded through Tasha. I joined with the feelings, became them, knew them.

“We have won, haven’t we, Curt?”

“Are you kidding? With what we and the other teams’ve turned up? You bet we’ve won. Right now I could take what little we know and sell our rights for a hundred thousand times the money we put up, and that’s nothing compared to what we’ll be pulling down in investments, and that’s nothing compared to what we’ll be producing in three or five years.” His hand slipped beneath the covers and cupped one of Tasha’s breasts. “God, baby, we are winners. We are goddamned genuine winners.”

Later, as Curt entered Tasha, I flowed into him, became him, knew him. The feelings were explosive, but I rode them until the pair at last fell asleep. As mist I flowed from them to a place in the wall where I now knew my sister was being held. I pulled on the handle and peered into the icy depths of the box. Pieces of my sister, still in the strange shape of the gargoyle, were in the box along with many other creatures of root and leaf, flesh and stench, and slime. I searched through them all, a sickness spreading throughout my center; a sickness that confused me. I paused and allowed the feeling to be.

It was pain. It was sadness, loss, anger, loneliness, love destroyed. These were the things Curt and Tasha would have felt had they discovered their own sister sectioned and stuffed into a refrigerator. I put the feelings aside. There was something I needed to do, and I could not do it if I felt. Besides, the feelings were not mine.

None of the dishes within the box contained the seeds, which meant they still had to be within my sister’s body. I poked among the bagged parts until I found a large piece of the torso. I removed it from the box, startled at how cold it was. Its outside had been hardened by the cold. I flowed through the wrapping and searched until I found the pocket of plaited grass deep within her.

She had done well. There were the seeds of many thousands of fireblade children. I gathered them within myself and returned again through the wrapping.

“What in the hell are you?”

I looked toward the humans. Curt was standing naked upon the floor, a beam weapon in his hand. Tasha was sitting up, facing me, a beam weapon in her hand, as well.

I allowed the memories of my cells to make my mist into a Tasha, which gave me a voice. “I am a child of my mother,” I answered.

Their faces appeared strange. I brought back both Tasha’s and Curt’s feelings and memories. They were horrified at what they saw. I became Curt, and that horrified them even more. I became both of them and Curt screamed, “Stop it! Stop it, damn you! What are you? What are you?” I again became mist.

“I am what I have always been.” How else could I answer their frantic questions?

Curt moistened his lips, took a breath, and pointed his weapon at my sister’s pieces. “Those belong to us. What were you doing in there?”

“Recovering the children.”

“What children?” asked Tasha.

“The children of the fireblades. My sister had them when you killed her. I took them from her body.”

Again Curt pointed toward the cold box. “That thing was your sister?”

“Yes.” I whirled my mist and looked at the pieces of my sister. She had been too slow. Both of my sisters were dead. They had both been too stupid and too slow. It was the time of changing.

“We’re sorry about your sister,” said Tasha as my mist thinned and filled the small compartment.

“Hey!” Curt called. Where are you?”

“Where you are,” I answered. “I am you, I am Tasha, all of us are for the changing.” I dissolved us and flowed from the shelter, the sounds of their screaming vibrating my aura.

When I reached a place in the forest where I could see my mother’s crown, I could see leaves of yellow among the green. Without someone there to guard her and to care for the children of the fireblades, something had gotten through. Already she was dying.

“See?” I said to the humans within me. “See, she dies.” I found a clear place upon the forest floor and began scratching the ground to make a new circle. Once the ground was soft, in a ring I planted the children of the fireblades. I stood in the center of the ring and watched the days and nights it took for the children as they broke through the soil, grew, and began to color red.

The humans begged and pleaded, shouted their apologies, made endless promises, and begged some more. It was all there in their memories, however: their plans for my world. Their plans interfered with my purpose. Once the fireblades were thick and strong, my task was to care for my own children. Then, in turn, my children would care for the children of the fireblades.

“Why don’t you just kill us?” Tasha screamed. “Kill us! Why don’t you kill us?”

I could not kill them. After all, we had loved together, dreamt dreams of riches and power, tasted the sweet sweet taste of victory with each other’s tongues. My feet rooted and my limbs spread wide as my small crown of green began its climb toward the top of the forest. There I watched my mother lose her crown and then fall to her rest.

If my children do their tasks well, it will be a long time before I am allowed to rest. I plan to bring the humans into my awareness every thousand years or so to relive those feelings of love, power, and success before I put them away again. I tell you about them, my children, for I cannot keep them in my awareness for very long at a time. Even though I love them dearly, I confess that after the first three hundred years Curt’s and Tasha’s screaming became quite annoying.

So, children, always remember:

There are:

creatures of root and leaf

creatures of flesh and stench

creatures filled with slime

we are of root and leaf

we are the green