by Dave Rudden
My fingers wrap round the handle and pull.
I don’t know what lies at the forest’s heart. I don’t know what happened to my wife, or what is happening to the Doctor, and whether interfering with it will doom Outsmawe, its Elders and my faith.
But, as I stare down at the axe in my hands, I realise I am curious to find out.
If entering the forest the first time was like slipping into a lake, now it is like trying to sail one under a storm. It does not want me to return for the Doctor. Branches gouge. Roots squirm underfoot. It feels as if every burr and thorn is seeking my flesh, and the tough woollen clothing of Outsmawe proves no defence at all.
The axe is a different story.
The forest cuts me, and I cut back, hacking a path through bush and vine. Lift and fall, slash and crop; a lifetime of fear and anger in each and every blow. It is punishing – the most punishing thing I have ever attempted in my life. My arms weep sweat. My cuts ooze blood.
If the forest’s attention were not so squarely on its sacrifice, I think I would have made no headway at all. But, like a great beast absently flicking away flies as it feasts, the forest’s mind is elsewhere, and so, step by aching step, I advance. The axe is weapon and compass both – after a lifetime of following orders, resistance becomes my guide. I take the most tangled route, go where the branches knot the tightest to try to force me back.
I cut, and I hew, and I climb, and I crawl.
Hours pass. Days, maybe. I begin to think I’m dreaming when I see the great metal shapes jutting from the undergrowth – fragments like debris from a wreck. Some are nearly invisible beneath coats of moss. Others are so tall they fight the trees for space. Sometimes the ground beneath my feet is soil. Other times it is a dirty, artificial white material I have never seen before. In some places the white material is peeling back, and I see iron underneath, more iron than I have ever seen in one place.
Iron ships, I think blearily. Is this where they came to rest?
And then the half-blunt axe, now as much a part of me as my hands or my heart – hits nothing but air. My exhausted eyes refocus. There is space here to breathe. There is soft grass underfoot, broken only here and there by the swelling of roots. No, not roots – cabling. A tangle of white pipes that pulse and purr.
I freeze. A forest servant, three metres of bulbous body and skeletal limb, steps over my kneeling form without so much as a whisper. It reaches its talons, each one long as a child’s arm, up into the canopy, and I have to scramble as cut branches begin to rain down.
It’s pruning the trees. Caring for them.
I see another on its knees, repairing a stretch of broken pipe with swift, smooth motions of its fingers, and then another three working as a team to fell an entire tree, blade-fingers flashing as they take it apart. The tree does not resist them, as I have seen with the cutting teams. Instead, it falls with something like relief.
In the silence that follows, I hear a voice.
‘You know, it’d be far politer to first explain why you’re killing me, and then kill me. Don’t you think?’
The Doctor. Still asking questions. I could laugh, if I had the breath. Instead I push my wobbly legs into a run.
I find him in a clearing, beneath the largest tree I have ever seen. You could have fit the entire village of Outsmawe within the circumference of its massive trunk, its bark as thickly wrinkled as the folds of a brain. I have seen trees grow up and around tools, submerge them in their flesh, but this tree is so huge that it has gathered up and swallowed up great pieces of the broken iron ships so they jut out like thorns.
At its base, about head-height off the ground, there is a great horizontal slash. Like an axe-scar, two metres tall and thirty across. White pipes spill from the gap in their hundreds to sink deep into the earth, and when light pulses from inside the scar the pipes pulse too.
This is the heart of the forest. This is the tree from which all other trees grow. And beneath it lies the Doctor, with a forest servant’s hands round his throat.
‘On reflection,’ he croaks, one hand jabbing weakly at the air, ‘I think I’d prefer an altar.’
I start forward, axe raised, but as I do so another servant drops from the canopy above, landing hard on the hooked talons of its feet. It rises, fully a metre taller than me, head bobbing on its stem neck, and lunges with a scything hand. Blocking the blow with the axe nearly throws my old body from its feet.
‘Doctor!’ I shout, trying to circle around to him and keep my attacker at bay. ‘What should I do?’
The Doctor clips the creature attacking him across the face, and when it rears back I catch my first proper glimpse of what’s happening. The forest servant isn’t strangling him. It’s pushing him into the roots beneath the tree. The bark has opened like cracked, dry lips and is trying to suck him down with fitful gulps, like an Elder working a lozenge beneath their gums.
‘RENEWAL.’
The voice comes from everywhere and nowhere.
‘RENEWAL REQUIRES SERVICE.’
The forest. The forest is speaking, and its voice is so world-shatteringly loud that beside it the Doctor’s is barely a gasp.
‘The pipes! Cut the pipes!’
He must be mad. There are hundreds of them. Where would I start?
And then I see – deep in the gap of the gargantuan tree, the pipes come together like veins into a single artery, thick as a waist. I don’t know if my axe will even dent it. But I have to try.
A wild swing makes the nearest servant jerk back, bemused and wary. I don’t think they fear me at all, but I think the forest has a long memory, and this place has suffered under the simple technology of an iron cutting edge. More servants are gathering now too, sickle claws gleaming with sap.
Move, woman. I hear the words in her voice, and I run like I have never run before.
I vault across the tangle of roots swallowing the Doctor and leave half the skin of my palms on the rough bark as I half climb, half scramble my way into the cut above. A clawed hand hooks the back of my coat, and I fling it off clumsily before the servant can use it to drag me from my feet, then turn to bring the axe hard into its face, sending it staggering into the path of its siblings.
It buys me a handful of heartbeats. I clamber to the heart of the cut, and raise my axe above the drumming, pumping pipe.
‘Do it!’ the Doctor shouts. Only his head still remains exposed. ‘Now!’
‘How did you know?’ I ask.
The servants are forcing their gangling bodies into the cut. One swipes, the talons passing so close they ruffle my hair. I don’t know what flows through this artery, but it may as well be faith, the faith of a hundred generations all the way back to the black sea and the iron ships. Those first people, one a year, who sacrificed their service so that others could live.
‘How did you know I didn’t believe?’
‘Because you still mourn her,’ the Doctor says.
I bring the axe down.
And it stops, an inch from the skin of the pipe.
‘ATTEMPT TO HARD-INTERRUPT MAIN GROWFUEL PUMPLINE DETECTED. WOULD YOU LIKE TO ACCESS SETTINGS?’
‘Yes!’ the Doctor shouts. ‘Very much so!’
I tug on the axe, but it won’t move. Something invisible is holding it dead in the air. The servants have stopped climbing over each other too, pulling themselves out of their tangle to stare back at where the Doctor is emerging from his coffin of roots.
Tentatively, I let go of the axe. It stays hanging in the air.
‘These old terraforming systems are robust,’ the Doctor says, panting. ‘Practically indestructible. All sorts of defences built in if you try to interfere with them.’
‘Doctor, what are you –’
He bends down to pick up his umbrella from where it came free from my pack, dusting it off with the back of a hand. ‘Thing is, they’re here to make your world liveable. If you do try to interfere with them, they assume you’ve got a good reason. So they do the software equiva
lent of letting you speak to the manager.’
My expression makes him grin. ‘Terraforming, my dear, is the act of making an inhospitable world hospitable. Standard equipment for a colony ship. It’s a complicated process. You need a machine that can change the soil, a machine that can change the air, a machine that can even change the seasons. Machines that won’t pollute the land while they’re doing it. You know what I call a machine like that?’
I shake my head numbly.
‘A forest.’ He waves his umbrella around him. ‘But this one isn’t doing its job. The machine is broken. It needs … well. It needs a service.’ He places a hand on one of the forest servant’s chests. It cocks its head like a dog expecting a rub behind the ears. ‘There’s a seed of truth in every religion. That’s what makes them so pervasive. And your people have been talking about service for years. Sending someone to the heart of the forest. Ritual is just another word for interface, after all. I thought it was a sacrifice at first. So did you, though you didn’t use the word.’
I step back from the floating axe, out to the lip of the cut in the tree. From my vantage point, I can see more forest servants loping from the trees – a hundred, two hundred – their wickedly bladed limbs hanging loosely by their sides. The roses in their eye sockets shiver in the breeze.
‘Not angels. Not demons. Gardeners. That’s what the forest was asking for. Servants, to care for it. I don’t know what happened to the original colonists – whether your records were damaged, or time and hardship just made you forget, but it’s no wonder the seasons are out of sync if you’ve been overfeeding the machine without …’
‘Without what?’
Jabbing his umbrella into the soft earth so it stands unaided, the Doctor slips his hand into his pocket, then withdraws it to reveal a whirring metal tool.
‘I wondered why you didn’t call it sacrifice. It’s an odd little detail – a little holdover of truth from before things became so clouded. I love details like that.’ He smiles. ‘It isn’t sacrifice, if you know they’re coming back.’
The tool in his hand purrs, and the pipes tremble and twitch. I flinch as the axe suddenly falls harmlessly to the ground. The forest servants clutch their heads as if in pain, or in release. Those long, branchlike fingers tighten and pull. Bark peels away in curls of grey. Petals fall like snow.
‘Organic exoskeletal life-suits,’ the Doctor says. ‘The ultimate healthcare package. It’s a machine meant to bring life. It doesn’t want anyone to die.’
The closest servant splits like a nutshell, and a person falls out, shaking, blinking like a newborn. The massive frame of the creature begins to disintegrate into ash and particles of bark, and the person looks up with utter confusion on their face.
It’s Magdela. Last year’s sacrifice. ‘I was dreaming,’ she says, half to herself. ‘I was dreaming of a forest.’
‘FACTORY SETTINGS RE-ESTABLISHED. TERM OF SERVICE – ONE YEAR.’
Bark splits with a sigh, and the hollow of roots that nearly swallowed the Doctor reopens. I look down from the gap. Something sad has entered the Doctor’s eyes.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘I’ve reset it so it will release on the year, instead of just holding them. That should stop the out-of-control growth as well. But the forest still needs maintenance. It still needs a servant.’
Servant after servant cracks open, men and women spilling out on to the grass. And among them …
There are flowers dusting her shoulders. There are petals in her hair. I reach my hand up, suddenly conscious she hasn’t aged a day. But I am old, I am old now with the waiting …
And then she smiles. She smiles like springtime.
‘It’s all right,’ I respond. ‘I know what I have to do.’
Next winter isn’t that far away.
7
Christmas with the Plasmavores
‘It is a French name,’ said Henri Plasmavore, and smiled so widely you could see every tooth in his head. ‘Very common.’
‘Very normal,’ added Madeleine Plasmavore. She was smiling too, but she had no teeth at all. ‘Very human and normal.’
They filled the doorway of the Sullivan home like jelly in a mould – a pair of squat, fleshy rectangles in identical black button-up coats. Henri had a red scarf crimping the dead white skin of his neck. A beret had deflated on Madeleine’s scalp. Other than that, it was surprisingly difficult to tell them apart.
Catherine disliked them on sight. This was not an uncommon reaction for Catherine. It wasn’t that she had anything against people, on principle, but she had simply decided six months ago that she had met enough of them and didn’t need to meet any more. There was a quota. She had reached it. Her father had tried to explain to her that there wasn’t a quota, actually, and, even if there was, she couldn’t have reached it because she was nine. This was just one of the many things on which Catherine and her father did not see eye to eye.
‘And your car broke down?’ Maurice Sullivan was small, for a dad. He dressed in oversized cardigans, even in summer, and his receding hair stuck up in tufts, as if waving for help.
Maurice needed help with a lot of things. He had to be reminded to take his anxiety medicine. He sometimes worked so hard he forgot to eat, and Catherine had to remind him to do that too. The only reason there was a stubby little Christmas tree in the corner was because Catherine had reminded him it was Christmas, and she wished she’d had the presence of mind to also remind him that you didn’t open the door to strange people at midnight on Christmas Eve.
But now he had, and the Plasmavores loomed over them both like the twin halves of a Venus flytrap about to snap shut.
‘Engine trouble,’ Henri Plasmavore said. His voice was flat and nasal, more like a photocopy of a voice than the real thing. ‘Isn’t that right, Madeleine?’
‘It is right, Henri.’ Madeleine’s voice was strange in an equal yet completely different way – a soft and rustling whisper that sharpened without warning on certain letters, like finding thorns in dry grass.
Behind them, the storm raged. It wasn’t a good storm. Good storms were snowstorms and thunderstorms. This was a bad storm, full of shrieking wind and sideways rain. Catherine could see the dots and flecks of rain besieging the hallway’s honey light, even with two flesh rectangles blocking the door.
Maurice peered at the strangers. ‘I’m not much of a mechanic, I’m afraid. But if you’d like to come in and wait while you call someone?’
The Plasmavores’ smiles widened. ‘We would.’
They didn’t speak at the same time. That would have been creepy. Instead, they spoke slightly out of time with each other, which was worse.
‘Dad …’
The Plasmavores’ eyes lowered. Catherine ducked further behind Maurice’s leg.
‘Yes, Catherine?’
She could say something. She should say something. There was something off about the Plasmavores. Something artificial. Their eyes glittered without reflecting the light. Their skin had a peculiar shine, like fingernails or teeth. Alarm bells were jangling in Catherine’s head.
If she did say something, Maurice would listen. Most adults didn’t. They said things like ‘not now’ or ‘shh, the grown-ups are talking’. This was especially true when it came to Catherine, who liked sharing facts about scorpions and horror movies, and planning what to do in the event of a zombie apocalypse. She had it on good authority from the kids in her class that liking these things made her ‘weird’, which was fine, because in Catherine’s opinion not planning for a zombie apocalypse made you an idiot.
Maurice wasn’t a perfect dad. He forgot things. He burned dinners. Sometimes Catherine felt that she was parenting him.
But he never called her weird.
Maurice looked down at her, his eyes kind and a little weary. ‘Is everything all right?’
Catherine forced a smile. ‘Yes, Dad.’
Henri Plasmavore grinned down at her. ‘Marvellous,’ he purred. ‘Amélie?’
; The two Plasmavores separated wetly to reveal the small shape of a girl standing behind them, just where the Sullivan porch light gave way to the dark. She was Catherine’s age, as blonde as Catherine was dark, her hair a complicated mass of ringlets bouncing and eddying in the wind. Rainwater glistened like diamonds on her bright yellow mac.
‘Amélie Plasmavore,’ she said, brushing a drop of rain from her little button nose before sticking out her hand for Maurice to shake. ‘How lovely to meet you!’
That clinched it for Maurice. He shook the little girl’s hand, half grave and half smiling, then hurriedly beckoned all three Plasmavores inside the cramped little hallway. Amid the confusion of limbs and unbuttoning coats, Catherine found herself face to face with Amélie, who gave her a dazzling smile. She didn’t look like the older Plasmavores, with their square heads and pressed, waxy grins. She looked like one of those German girls in old-fashioned storybooks who lived on the top of mountains and were eighty per cent dimple.
People aren’t always like their parents, Catherine thought. That made her a little sad, so she stopped thinking it. ‘Let me go put on the kettle, Dad?’
Maurice squeezed her shoulder. ‘That’s a great idea!’
‘What a sweet child,’ Madeleine said, as Catherine scampered to the kitchen.
‘Oh, Catherine’s not sweet,’ Maurice said, and though he was joking the words snagged Catherine for a second on her way up the hall. ‘She’s Catherine.’
‘All children are sweet.’ Amélie’s laugh was like the tinkling of bells. ‘If you get the seasoning right.’
By the time the Plasmavores had removed their coats and hung them up in the hallway, Catherine had laid out a spread on the coffee table in the sitting room. The Sullivans’ house was small, but Maurice liked to say it was ‘compact’. You didn’t need a lot of space when everything had its place. That was another thing Maurice liked to say.
They’d moved into the little two-up two-down after … After.
Catherine had her bedroom – a dark cave walled with books about witchery and urban legends and military tactics. Maurice’s bedroom was mostly an office, where he wrote his books on local history, with a cot bed in the corner. Downstairs was a little kitchen – polished to as much of a gleam as the worn counter would allow – and the sitting room, with an overstuffed chair and two-seater couch that was just long enough for Catherine to lie flat out.