Revelations

by Pam Crane

told."

  "If you're sure?"

  "What other options do we have? Destroy the child? Unthinkable. No. Find some baby clothes and a Bounty pack, and with your permission I'll run Baby home to Tintwhistle and have a long talk with Ray. I'll update you as soon as I'm confident he's onside, and then we can get onto SETI."

  So that"s what happened. I went to live with Ray and Shirley in their woodland farm cottage north of Glossop, and had regular visits from Pablo, a SETI astrobiologist, whenever he could get away from conferences and meetings to check on the progress of his very own, and alarmingly very real alien protegee.

  I was definitely an androgyne. They called me Zee. As I grew, I was continually monitored. An EEG suggested a human brain but extremely busy in areas normally quiescent. My eyes opened normally, but were unusually large, with purple and yellow irises. I was ravenous; Shirley kept running out of formula and weaned me early. Then I ate everything given to me, and, once mobile, had to be restrained as nothing growing in the garden or surrounding woodland was safe. Creatures, however, became loved friends. I would be found curled up with the cat, or playing tag with foxes on the lawn. If I stood very still, dozens of birds would fly onto my outstretched arms and we sang together. The little scaly bumps on my back were imperceptibly swelling. By my 5th birthday I was as tall as Pablo.

  And I was asking questions.

  "Why aren't you green?" "Why do you kill slugs?" "Why don't you eat my red mushrooms?" "Why can't I watch TV?"

  TV would mean the Big Reveal. It was banned. I was getting plenty of basic tutoring from Ray, who had been a Primary school teacher before the air crash that took his legs, and Pablo opened my eyes to the marvels of the universe - but of the real 21st century world and its cultures I knew nothing.

  And that's the way it stayed. I was so tall by my teens that I needed an annexe to live in. Under my loose clothes the bumps were turning into wings and tail that began to stretch and move.

  On my 18th birthday after the fuss of gifts and candles I went out onto the lawn to greet the birds ... and heard a voice in my head.

  "Time to leave,"

  Who was that?

  "Time to stretch your wings, Zee."

  "Who is that?"

  "I am your parent. Our mental connection is now secure, and we're ready for action."

  To my mind came a vivid image; of a great green winged being, with infinite hope and love in its eyes.

  "Stretch your wings."

  I did. They cast huge shadows over the house and lawn. Shirley rushed out of the front door.

  "Ray! Ray! Help, Pablo! Zee is ..."

  Flying. My wings took me high over the woods beyond the homes of my birds. Onward through evening sunshine to scattered clusters of buildings I never knew existed; then over mightier and mightier conurbations dazzling with lights and hectic with millions of pink and brown people.

  "Feed, Zee, and keep flying."

  I swooped downward toward a swathe of welcoming green, tore hungrily into the stems, leaves, blossoms of the gardens there; then rose into the sunset sky.

  "Follow the sun, my wonderful child! And wait for my word."

  The ever-strengthening wings took me over ... "cities, Zee," and beautiful mountains peaked in white; then there was endless blue ... "the sea, my child," and then less and less life-giving green as the lands below me parched, and fires raged, and dark people moved in swarms like ants and locusts, and as I dropped lower I heard the percussion of bombs and guns, the crying of brutalised women and children, a raging destruction that tore my soul.

  "Grow, Zee! Feed on the Light! Your will can fill the sky!"

  I obeyed my parent. My wings reached from horizon to fiery horizon, illumined by the setting sun. Looking down, I saw all human motion cease.

  A great cry went up.

  "Allah!"

  "Oh God!"

  "Save us!"

  A single missile pierced one pounding heart; it instantly mended.

  "There is hope for them now," my parent said. "You will very soon understand. Your life's work has begun."

  Back to Top

  THE GREENING OF TERRA

  First came the dreams ... then the screams.

  Brian woke up in a muck sweat, busting for a pee and hung over from the bizarre ride of the last half-hour. "We get Triffids" his wife had said, her dreamself placatory. He had stared at their roof where the plantlets had started lifting the tiles, and watched as tendrils crept into the guttering of this aged house that was and wasn't theirs ... hunting for water ... water ... and then his eyes were wide open.

  "Rosina..."

  "Brian?"

  "It happened again."

  "Weirdness. Not our house - not this house - but like we'd been there forever. A sort of invasion..."

  "Like my beetle dream?"

  "Plants this time. You said Triffids."

  "I did?"

  "But no UFOs. Oh when are we going to get a decent night?"

  "Brian, I think we may need to look at our marriage. All this intrusion, all these dreams of a home in danger; they have to be trying to tell us something. I could make an appointment with Jill if you like ... "

  "I am not going with you to a shrink!"

  "Look, we've all known each other for years. If anyone can decode our hidden agendas she can. She was brilliant with my post-natal depression, and the empty nest. Maybe work is encroaching too much now. Or we have friends who aren't really friends ... oh lord, you aren't having an affair are you?"

  "No I am not. And maybe Jill isn't a friend. Or maybe rattling around this place on our own out of surgery hours is making us paranoid."

  "Brian, give me a cuddle?"

  "Of course. In a minute ..."

  He returned, relaxed. "Come here."

  Next morning Brian spilt half his coffee when something scuttled across the kitchen floor. Rosina wept over the floor-cloth. Patients muttered to each other on the way out that the doctors were both looking at them oddly. Some had double prescriptions. The writing was even worse than usual. Afterwards the pair stood outside in the early evening sunshine, and looked up at their roof. Some of the tiles seemed to be lifting.

  "It was that storm last month," said Rosina. "The place is old. Maybe we don't need Jill, maybe we simply need a decent tiler."

  "But what is that green thing?"

  Brian was beginning to shake. He needed ... there not to be something unfamiliar on his roof. As he stared, and then his wife stared, a wave of curly lime unfurled from behind the chimney stack and rolled silently down the entire pitch toward the gutter. Unable to move, the two of them watched in utter horror as an immense and convoluted light green something rapidly and totally enveloped their house, surgery and all, until the only thing visible was a pulsing vegetable mass.

  The asteroid had passed between the planet and its moon. At the moment of closest approach the scheduled fast freeze shattered the creviced rocks that had cradled Viridis' dormant spores over this last stage of their interstellar journey, and the gravitational pull of the new, watery world sped them home.

  The science was right. The sentients had predicted an atmosphere rich in carbon dioxide, nitrogen and water that nourished life-forms not dissimilar to themselves in the planet's rhythmic sunshine. Levels of polluting oxygen were relatively low. Any spore that survived the stresses of entry and lodged in a safe niche to split its glossy carapace would immediately absorb everything it needed for rapid and healthy growth. Rebirth in a new colony here would slowly empty the old and distant planet of a population at risk of extinction. Viridis would be left to its suffocating oxygen and the few creatures that could survive in the wrecked environment.

  Tendril 1 now luxuriated in the rich spectrum of an unfamiliar star, relaxed over one of the planet's many geometric protuberances. His swift weight gain was crushing it. There were nutrients in the debris but he would have to move soon. Others who had travelled with him were now spilling out of their protective shells, feasting and maturing. Hundr
eds of stomata covered elastic skins filling with bright chlorophyll. The tiny lips of the stomata moved, setting up a whispering that ran on the air between adult and adult, announcing arrival, greeting friends, exchanging data. All had observed the small life-forms gathering at a nervous distance; all had sent out introductory waves to the unusual green beings who were their nearest cousins here ... and were puzzled that they never spoke, barely responded, but remained in their places, their thousands of tiny appendages only stirred by the evening breeze. All over the land-mass the travellers from Viridis were making themselves cautiously at home.

  "My God." said Brian.

  "Are we back in the dream?"

  Neighbours and townsfolk who had fled homes and businesses before their nightmare collapse were converging on every square yard of open ground, interspersed with the flashing blue lights of the emergency services. The Mayor had been taking a tea-time nap and escaped in his underpants; no-one took any notice of his entreaties for calm. There were both women and men in hysterics, small children pallid with fear, one or two would-be heroes who strode out of the crowd toward the massive green invasion only to be pulled back by a dozen anxious hands. The screaming carried on the air to the increasingly sensitive green skins. It was nearly sunset; on Viridis Tendril 1 and his companions would be contracting for the night, but there was too much disturbance here from the small creatures still running out from underneath them as more and more travellers settled and spread.

  Brian grabbed Rosina's hand and fought his way to the front of the shrieking