Glass and Gardens

by Sarena Ulibarri

  “We have fruit.” Steve looked insulted, as though her words were a personal slight.

  Bita laughed. “No, we don’t. We have blobs of protein injected with artificial flavorings and synthetic vitamins.”

  “You’re not going to be one of those mothers, are you?” He laughed as he took her hand.

  “What do you mean?” It was Bita’s turn to look insulted now.

  “The kind who’s obsessed with keeping her children from the evils of processed foods. Who’ll spend a fortune on groceries to get real wheat and corn from halfway across the world.”

  “Who said I wanted to be a mother at all?”

  ***

  Ailanthus wants nothing more than to be a mother. Nothing more than to give life. If she had the means, she would be her kind’s Eve without a breeze-whisper’s hesitation. If she had the means.

  She’s been listening to the young woman, watching her as she tries to solve the forest’s “sustainability problem,” a problem Ailanthus equates with death. Not only her own—that she might bear bravely—but that of the forest itself.

  Is there an afterlife for a forest of steel? A bright city of glory where branches won’t rust, where their limbs won’t snap in strong winds? And there, will they be reunited with those who’ve gone before? Their ancestors of fragrant wood and soft leaf?

  ***

  “The numbers don’t look good, Bita.”

  “Just six more months,” she begged.

  Not five years earlier, it was Aunt Gigi pleading for help, and now how the cogs had fully turned. Bita placed her hand on one trunk, then the next, searching for hope amid the rusting forest. Its rattling had grown so loud the women had to shout to be heard, but still Bita strained her ears, leaning in close, for some sign of that small, trusting voice.

  “They’re pulling our funding,” Aunt Gigi said.

  “Then I’ll work without pay.”

  “We need to consider other viable options.”

  They both knew that there were no other viable options. Without the trees, the carbon dioxide levels would rise too quickly. Without the trees, everything would die.

  “We need to start looking for solutions elsewhere,” Aunt Gigi said.

  Bita pressed her hand against another tree’s trunk. “Please…”

  And from somewhere deep within the clanking, clanging tree trunk, a single syllable emerged.

  “Yes.”

  ***

  Ailanthus has never encountered the thing the woman calls a seed, but each day, she pushes her roots out farther, searching. The seams and joints creak as they unfurl the years’ worth of gnarls and reverberate as they clash against those of her brethren.

  The woman presses her hand to the metal trunk and speaks of a long-ago time, when in this place stood a true forest, with branches eternally vibrant.

  “Evergreens.” The whispered word echoes through Ailanthus’ branches, burrows deep in her soul.

  Weeks pass. The woman wearies, resting her back against the trunk as she scribbles thoughts and ideas onto a plastic tablet, then shakes her head and erases them. The sweat on her brow is slick against the trunk’s steel plating, but still, Ailanthus searches, calling upon her silent brethren for help.

  Her roots extend, each tube stretched thin, breaking apart rock and ever searching. With the additional effort, she barely creates enough energy to keep her own processes functioning, much less power anything else. Around her, her brethren crumble and fall, carried away in beak-sized bits by the birds alighting on every branch, pecking and dismantling each leaf.

  Lightning ignites the abandoned ruins, far on the forest’s edge. Only the woman’s swift call for help saves Ailanthus from the same fate.

  Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

  ***

  The tree was dying. Its energy output was less than ten percent what it was just weeks ago. Still, Bita wouldn’t give up. She shooed the birds from its branches and sheltered it from the rain, all while she sat in the shade of its branches and tried to devise a solution.

  She soon ran out of spare parts to dull its rattling and materials to patch the rusted holes in its trunk. When a sparrow alighted upon it, it looked so natural a movement, Bita didn’t even think to shoo it away until it had already tucked itself inside.

  Perhaps that was what did it in, in the end.

  Within moments of the bird’s nesting within its trunk, the tree gave a jolt and a shudder, its branches extending one final time. The gears ground to a halt, and it let out a groan.

  “Don’t give up,” Bita pleaded. “Look. Just look what once was.”

  She held up the image on her tablet of a lush, green tree in the center of a garden. Quercus wislizeni: the live oak.

  The tree gave no sign of seeing.

  ***

  Her limbs are immobile. Her gears are rusted stuck. Yet in that stillness comes a silence she’s never experienced before. All her life has been filled with noise, the noise of mechanical parts clinking and clanking and shifting and moving. A noise she’s associated with life.

  But now, in the silence, she can hear those around her. Their dying thoughts fill her consciousness. The noise, the bustle, the wheels of progress which they’d so desperately tried to keep moving… that was the thing disconnecting them.

  In half-whispered thoughts, Ailanthus calls upon the others. She tells them what to look for, where they might find it. And then, she waits, saving her last reserves of energy.

  ***

  Bita fell to her knees, head bent against the metal panels so corroded that she could almost, just almost, imagine that it was the roughness of true bark. Her hand dropped to the ground beside her, and there she felt…something.

  There, protruding from the black soil, entwined in the mechanical tree’s roots, was a block of amber. Within it was something she’d only seen in pictures of long ago: the battered, half-broken, yet undeniable form of an acorn.

  ***

  Ailanthus’ branches never rust. Her leaves are always bright. She looks down upon the cloud-swirled sphere, at the bright blotches of green.

  Evergreen.

  ***

  Wendy Nikel is a speculative fiction author with a degree in elementary education, a fondness for road trips, and a terrible habit of forgetting where she’s left her cup of tea. Her short fiction has been published by Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, Daily Science Fiction, Nature: Futures, and elsewhere. Her time travel novella, The Continuum, was published by World Weaver Press in January 2018, with a sequel forthcoming. For more info, visit wendynikel.com

  New Siberia

  by Blake Jessop

  1.

  I fall backward off the solar collector, and for an instant my splayed fingers brush the dawn. The drop is long enough to try naming constellations I don’t recognize in the alien sky. I hit the sand on my back. The impact is surprisingly soft; I survive it. Air rushes out of my lungs like I’ve stolen it and my new world wants it back. I am unwelcome, and the desert swallows me to drive the point home.

  I yell her name. I can’t pronounce it as well as she pronounces mine. Amphisbaina. Try it. She slithers down from the array with the speed I once managed in the snow of Arkhangelsk. I go blind, drowning in silica, but I can feel her move. The desert is a muted membrane, like the surface of cloudy water, and when she bellies down and reaches for me with both hands I have already broken the surface tension and disappeared.

  Amphisbaina pulls me backward from the quicksand with a long hiss of effort. The sheath she wears scrunches up as she writhes across the face of the dune. I scrabble inelegantly as she pulls. I can feel the subtle power of her tail; her entire torso adheres to the surface of the desert, reading it, and she waves herself the way I might have, once, if I were treading water. My shoulders tumble into her chest and we flop onto firmer ground.

  “Nadezhda,” she says, her breathing a hiss, and I hear her layer you clumsy creature into the three Cyrillic syllables. Nagan
speech is panharmonic. They use tone to shade meaning, not adjectives. Amphisbaina chastises me with my own name.

  I struggle to my feet, shaking sand from my gear. Individual grains are forming chemical bonds with my sweat, leeching water out of me. I travelled between the stars to settle here, to save my species. We found a new earth, a chance to start the great voyage over, only to discover our new home already occupied.

  Learning to communicate, our hosts selected Naga to describe themselves. They call us what we call ourselves, Human, because they’re far better at learning our languages than we are pronouncing theirs. Amphisbaina does a little shimmy and the sand drops from her easily. She straightens her sheath. Her scales are just a few shades darker than the dunes. I would say she stands my height, but I do not know the right verb. She rears, I suppose, at my eye level; leans back against her long tail and crosses sinuous arms. There is a little sympathy in her posture. Faint pity.

  “Watch,” Amphisbaina says, and searches for a word, “your step.”

  2.

  There are only so many ways to become sapient. Evolution converges. We killed the Earth, destroyed the Garden of Eden, and have taken up residence with the snakes.

  The fleet calls us vanguards, which is flattering, but what we are is laborers. Zeks, if I were cynical, sentenced to build the city. I am not cynical at all. I believe in my work, I’m just afraid that I will never find meaning in it. That’s fine. We fled here not to become lovers or artists, but to survive. I can live with it.

  The giant solar panel is set flat atop a pillar, one of many that glare upward in an uneven tile across the dunes. There is a spiral groove in the column that makes it easy to slither up. Handholds have been hurriedly welded on to accommodate my less graceful appendages. I started the day’s work by falling off the massive hexagon, so Amphisbaina lets me climb first this time, spotting for me. I scramble up, again without setting my safety line. I’ve wasted enough time, and I’ve always been prone to doubling bad bets. Adrenaline still floods my limbs, and I’ll shake if I don’t work. This is the first time I have looked forward to brushing silt from the interlocking panels.

  I am unused to this work. On Earth I was a botanist and spiritual counselor. Similar jobs; seeds and scripture both whisper to me about the shape the world, if I listen closely. I never imagined planets as having edges, but they do. We took ours past one. With more time we might have done better, but as it was, our Bolthole Drives could only work once. Humanity spread to the cosmos like dandelion spores blown on a solar wind. It is hard to admit you’ve killed a planet; like arguing with a lover until you know you will never speak to him again. The shame erodes you, even if it was your ancestors who did the damage, who taxed you without your consent and brought you into their collapsing biosphere to die. We fled into the dark instead.

  The strange thing about bending spacetime is that you don’t actually spend any time doing it. The jump was subjectively instantaneous. I fed my fellow travelers soy and consolation. I could not have saved anyone if we went astray; just helped them live and die as they drifted into the infinite. We did not miss, however, so I never had to guide them through starving to death in deep space. We found our new world in an endless summer, every bit as beautiful as our Lagrangian telescopes had suggested, but not nearly as bountiful.

  Our Garden of Eden turned out to be a desert planet. This irony was not lost on us, but finding radio transmissions rising to greet us defied irony. I helped write the protocol for this infinitely unlikely eventuality; my greatest contribution finished long before we jumped. Humanity considered finding an inhabited world only as a matter of form; the odds against it were astronomical. We jeered at fate, and our skepticism proved too tempting for the gods.

  3.

  Broad daylight here is broader than any I have ever known. I need to rest.

  “You eat,” Amphisbaina says, “all the time.”

  Gross, her lilt explains, in both senses of your word. She ate before we set out, and won’t again until after we return. I watched her lever her jaws wide and swallow something that faintly resembled a spinghare in its entirety. It will last her a full week. Nagans are mesotherms, only slightly warm-blooded. They are spare, precise creatures who never so much as contemplated pillaging their world. Amphisbaina, who somehow made her meal look graceful, watches me suck down soy protein gel with her arms folded.

  Rather than landing in a cloud of scintillating vapor and turning this world into another Plymouth Rock, humanity petitioned. We floated free, lost bone density, and waited to be heard, entombed without warmth or seasons. There were doomsayers and hawks who suggested that we had an avian’s right to kill snakes. They were overruled. We learned this much conquering the Earth; we must do right or nothing at all. The Naga listened.

  Rather than a moment of victory, which would have been easy enough, we experienced the great relief; the Naga accepted our petition, and we descended to begin civilization anew. What I expected, as a botanist, was to plant seeds, but water is precious in an eternal summer. My life’s study is unexpectedly outdated; it doesn’t take much water or many botanists to grow soy. Producing energy is easier, but requires many more hands, so I clean the solar collectors that power our New Siberia. In this very apt cosmic joke, Amphisbaina teaches me to survive.

  Her world’s habitable zone is wide and consistent. Temperatures drop toward the poles, which makes them the third world. Too cold during dust storms to comfortably support unprotected life, even in summer. Local life, anyway. It’s undesirable, like living in Russia, so that’s where the Nagans allow us to settle. The atmosphere is oxygen rich, but thin, so it gets cold when the sun sets. Our hosts weave blankets for the night just as we do.

  In the weeks since I met Amphisbaina I have found comfort speaking to her. First as a recitation then, later, when I understood that she genuinely prefers to listen, as a reassurance. This meeting has long been the dream of both our species, whether we admit it or not. This is not the mythic garden, however, and we are hardly gods, so we keep our hopes quiet. Distance remains between us. At first I thought Amphisbaina was taciturn, alien. I think now it is simple preference; she likes listening to me.

  I sometimes find her daring, flashing intelligence difficult to deal with. She hurts my pride with every command about where to put my feet. Solar collectors are no more her profession than mine; yet she became an expert scarcely seeming to try. Being a stellar voyager and lagging behind her makes my spirit ache and scours my confidence. I have been trying to guess why she’s really here. Part of confession is knowing what to ask, and when. I finish eating and we take up our tools again.

  “It hurts you to be here with me,” I say. This is the Russian way of addressing serious sentiment; directly.

  To clean each solar cell we drag a microfiber weave across it, one at each end, leaving contrasting trails in the dust. Amphisbaina stops and considers me. I feel like a mouse. We don’t yet know how to read one another’s faces, so it’s easy for her to be mysterious.

  “It does,” she says. It does.

  There is no subtext in her voice. No allegory. Just that.

  “I understand,” I say, “I know the cold. I was born there.”

  As I speak I close my eyes and struggle to reveal myself the way she does. The way I would in prayer. I try to say: to join you I sat and shivered in the dark, trying to memorize your language. Trying to decipher your faith. Praying to you instead of God. Begging to be let into the light.

  She stares at me. When Amphisbaina listens, she seems to devote her entire body to the effort, as though she could smell truth, see emotion in the heat of my skin. She listens, even after I stop speaking. I think I’ve touched her. Now I wonder how. Wonder where.

  “I…” she says, and pauses so long that I think she may have decided not to answer, “…declined a mating opportunity.”

  It’s so pedestrian, I laugh. It took my species thousands of years to stop doing that. And we have stopped, almost. I’m here becau
se I’m obsolete, not unwed.

  “Thank you for telling me the truth,” I tell her.

  “You make it easy,” she says, and the lush hiss of her voice is beyond my skill to read.

  4.

  “We must take shelter,” Amphisbaina says, tasting the air. Now.

  I don’t question her instincts, even armed with triangulated weather ladar from the colony ships. All the technology in the spiral arm isn’t as good as her forked tongue or the tiny, scaly dips beneath her nostrils. Even distant, which she has been since we met, Amphisbaina likes to listen. She senses everything.

  Without overture, the Naga reaches out and touches the spot between my brows, trails a smooth finger down the bridge of my nose. I start.

  “Feel,” she says; “breathe.” A storm is coming.

  I try sniffing the air. All I smell is sand, heat, and the organic aftertaste of the gel. She gives a shake of the head, not unkindly, and I start unpacking the storm shelter. We cover a vast acreage during our seven day shift, far from help and far from home. Dust storms are usually brief, but as violent as Siberian blizzards. As I lay out long polymer tent poles, she surprises me again.

  “Finish the garden story,” she says. It will ease the work.

  Amphisbaina recently divined my former profession, and I think she finds it a little ridiculous. She is a modern animal, not given to superstition, but I can tell she loves stories. Nagan society was late-industrial when we arrived, and Amphisbaina is obviously educated. I started at the beginning, and have come as far as the garden.

  “The serpent convinces Eve to eat from the tree of knowledge. She convinces Adam, the male, to eat as well, and the fruit grants them an understanding of good and evil. God casts them out of the garden, either because they have lost their innocence or to take it from them, depending on your interpretation.”

  Amphisbaina shakes her head a little. I know her well enough to recognize this gentle bobbing as a gesture of reflection, not impatience. When she speaks, there is both pride and laughter in her voice.