A Cactus Garden

by Jo Bannister

  Michal said nothing. Nothing at all suitable came to mind. He did not know if he was mad or if she was, and though it seemed likely that one of them was it did not seem all that important which. He went on holding her, only glad that he had finally come in useful.

  At length Shah raised her head from Michal’s breast and said quietly, “He’s over there.”

  The Drone was sitting under a great silver-grey tree, gnarled with age, sparsely peppered with turning leaves. Many of its leaves were already fallen among its knotty spreading roots, arthritic as its branches, where they formed a thick palliasse for the squatting Drone. The stocky creature, perfectly camouflaged, sat quite still, and the dead leaves made no sound. The Drone’s round eyes, half hooded, studied the man and woman knowingly. He was chewing thoughtfully on a dry twig.

  Shah straightened out of Michal’s arms. Still holding his hand, she took a few soft steps towards the small impassive figure. “May we speak with you?”

  Michal tugged her hand and whispered, “They cannot talk.”

  “They can talk to me,” said Shah. “Can’t you?”

  The Drone inclined his grizzled head. He took the stick from his mouth and with it indicated the leaf carpet beside him, under the tree. Shah folded gracefully cross-legged before him. The leaves whispered around her. Michal, reluctantly and more awkwardly, sat down beside her, eyeing the forest creature with disfavour and distrust.

  “We are not a tolerant entity,” said the Drone; or something very like it, though the words he used and the sense he made were often at variance and his sentence structuring suffered from a confusion or possibly a deliberate blurring between the singular and plural when he spoke in the first person. It soon became clear that the grey man was not so much speaking as providing a means of communication for another: another whom Shah associated, intuitively or fortuitously but anyway correctly, with the massive consciousness of which she was already aware. What that consciousness was also became clear, as the Drone proceeded.

  “We are not a tolerant entity,” but we were prepared to tolerate the people of the ship. They were few, compared with us, and they lacked the means to become many. They were crippled and had nowhere else to go, and once here they could not leave. We would have preferred for them to have been cast away elsewhere, but we were not blind to the probability of their feeling the same way. We were prepared to co-exist for the remainder of their lifetimes, which is not a great span measured as we measure it.

  “They cut into the forest. They hacked and laid waste and burned, and let in the sun. This caused us pain, and anger waxed in us. But the people needed a place of dwelling, and if they could not live in the forest it was not perhaps unreasonable for them to make a clearing. The forest is great. We endured their small vandalism. Then they dug into the earth. This was to make bricks for their dwelling. We endured. They dug deeper, for oil to power their Hive. They needed power. We endured. They dug fields and tanks, for food. Still we endured.

  “They they took the crystals. This made us very angry. The crystals could not shelter them, feed them, warm them or give them light. They have no possible use or function – they are merely a by-product of our planet’s natural chemistry. As such they are a part of that unity which all the elements of our world compose. The people had no good reason to take them. We began to hate them for their rapacity.

  “We endured still while they contented themselves with those crystals they took from the workings in the small world of their clearing. But when they came into the forest, and toppled trees that had been centuries in the growing to steal the crystals nestling under their roots, we could tolerate no more. The forest exacted a vengeance. Those who came paid back to the earth something of the richness they had wrung from it. After that the people stayed out of the forest.”

  Michal said, “Shah, this is pointless – that thing could not talk if it wanted to. Let us go home.”

  Before she had time to register surprise at his words, Shah felt the surge of animosity focusing on him: not so much from the Drone, who remained impassive, as from the trees and the mossy living carpet and beneath that the ground itself. There was nothing to see, but Michal caught his breath and bent his head into his hands and rolled slowly onto his side, and a little whimper escaped him.

  Shah said sharply, “Leave him be.”

  The Drone said mildly, “He is one of the Hive people. He has no business here.” He was watching Michal twitch with gentle satisfaction.

  “I’m here because you asked me to come,” rapped Shah, “and he is here because I asked him to come, and if you want any favours from me you will keep your hands, fronds and minds off my friends.”

  The squatting Drone sounded amused, though his eyes were as flat as ever. “You surely do not think you can fight us for him?”

  “I can not only fight you but beat you, unless you are prepared to sacrifice whatever usefulness you believe I have. You didn’t summon me here only to discuss your grievances. Contend with me, then, at your peril.”

  From the quality of the grey-green silence Shah judged she had succeeded in startling the Drone, or rather the consciousness which animated it. Its amazement, however, could be no more than a pale shadow of her own. Sometimes, she thought with a sense of wonder, I do things that make Paul’s activities look like a textbook on discretion.

  The Drone said, pettishly, “Have him.” The tight knot of Michal’s body slackened suddenly and he rolled onto his face, moaning.

  Shah ignored him, thinking it best. She said, “I was about to enquire what you did to them. I no longer feel the need to ask.”

  “We are not a tolerant entity,” the Drone said again. The word ‘entity’seemed increasingly to indicate a community, a consensus, a totality. “We expect to see debts repaid and reparations made by despoilers. As the air absorbs those that invade it, so the forest consumes those who trespass here. We waste very little.”

  “I’m sure you’re an example to us all,” Shah said coldly.

  “This is our world,” replied the Drone. “It suits us; it has no need to suit others. Those who cannot cope with its nature should leave; those who cannot leave must learn to cope.”

  “I can cope,” said Shah. “I can also leave. So you’re going to have to come to terms with me.”

  “You are angry. Over them?” The Drone regarded Michal as Shah might regard a slug.

  “I don’t think a lot of the people of the Hive. They’re greedy, lazy, cruel and decadent, and taken as a whole – there are notable exceptions – they haven’t the initiative to come in out of the rain. But even they appear winsome by comparison with blood-thirsty trees. You’ll never know how lucky you were to have the Hive people land here, with their shiftless get-rich-quick-or-don’t-bother philosophy. The galaxy is teeming with peoples who would have turned your planet into a farm by now, and marshalled your damned trees into hedgerows.”

  “Is it also,” asked the Drone, “teeming with telepaths?”

  Shah took a hold on her temper. “No, I don’t believe so.”

  “Then we have been doubly lucky.”

  “What do you want with me?”

  Shah was conscious of being surveyed, inspected, from more angles than were available to the unmoving Drone. The response was long in coming. “The – thing – was right. We cannot talk. We are not talking now. See: our mouth moves only upon the twig. No sounds come, none that he can hear. We speak only upon the ether. He speaks only on the audio frequencies. You have access to both.

  “In the long past these you call Drones were as he is now. They evolved as he did, communicated as he does, formed cultures not dissimilar to his. They passed their days in comparable, though hopefully more profitable, ways for a million years. Then we out-evolved him. We became like you. Our minds learned to speak soundlessly. We found truth and beauty and great comfort in that community of thoughts, and over generations we lost the desire and thereafter the means to speak aloud. We passed into the great silence, that lasted acr
oss this world – uninterrupted except by the murmur of the leaves – until the ship came.”

  “Are there no birds, no insects?” asked Shah: she no longer knew if she spoke words or thought them.

  “Neither. There were both, but we destroyed them in our growing. It was not intentional. It happened before we knew it, and only afterwards did we understand how. We achieved the zenith of our physical evolution at the expense of all other life. Only the trees endured. So we made our communion with the trees.

  “Now our evolution is taking us beyond you too. You look at this small, shambling, silent creature, brown and grey like the deep forest, slow and unresponsive, without grace or greatness, and you take him for an evolutionary cast-off, a withering branch, his line either aborted in its destiny or over-peaked and degenerating. In way you are right. His physical form is degenerative. Its usefulness is coming to an end. His grandchildren’s children, or their children, will have no bodies at all.

  “We are in a process of transition. Soon – as we measure time – no tangible fabric will stand between these people, their thoughts and the totality of their environment. Wholly psychic beings, unrestricted by weak and cumbrous bodies, they will live forever, grow immeasurably great, learn unknowable things. The world will be their body and their spirit will inhabit the trees. Where there is now communion there will be unity. The people of Mithras – the real, original, enduring and undying people of Mithras – are in the process of becoming their own god.”

  Shah’s skin crawled and her scalp pricked eerily. She whispered, “There would be no people.”

  “That is another way of putting it.”

  “This is what you want?”

  The Drone seemed to laugh, although no ripples disturbed his bland face. “Our desires are hardly a prime consideration when evolution is determining its goal. For be assured, this is the fate of nations: ours, yours, his, any that survives the dangers of its own angry adolescence must come at last to this maturity. Where else is there to go?

  “But since you ask the question, then yes: the prospect is pleasing to us. We have been in the world a very long time. We know it intimately. It is a world characterised by conflict. In our youth we thrived on conflict, conquering and relishing both battle and victory. Later the charms of war palled. We strove for equilibrium, for a world in balance, without violence or change. But the nature of the physical world is to change, to develop, and the universal laws of progression would not stand still because we of Mithras had reached where we wanted to be. We are weary of contention – even the small daily contentions necessary to life: obtaining food, drinking, selecting mates in order to reproduce our kind. We are tired of life as you know it. We crave peace: not the defeat which is death but the continuing peace of stasis. We are ready to step aside onto that parallel plane where the demands of physical existence have no place and only the freed mind may face the centuries with serenity.”

  “But,” ventured Shah, “won’t you be bored?”

  “Oh no,” said the Drone with conviction. “Oh dear me no.”

  Michal was back in the land of the living. With the heightened consciousness that came of talking with the Drone, even without probing Shah was aware of the hurt in him. His pain and his fear grieved her, because she held herself responsible more than either the Drone or the forest. The safety of the Hive was both tenuous and transitory, but it held good for as long as the illusion of it lasted. Shah had pricked that bubble, and Michal would never know security again. He knelt hollow-eyed, awash with despair. Shah put out her arm and drew him to her. He sat against her, not looking at her, mute, like an injured sheepdog. His spirit had been the only gentleness on a harsh world full of egotists, and she had damaged it; and if she had destroyed it the memory of that lost trust would be as a haunting to her. Soon now, she promised a trifle absently, she would take him out of this baleful wood and see what could be done about repairing him; but first there was this other matter to resolve.

  “I still don’t understand what role you expect me to play.”

  “Recorder,” said the Drone. “We wish some record of our sojourn on this world, and our continuing association with it, to pass out to the stars. We do not know if we are the first people to achieve this translation. In the nature of things it seems unlikely; and yet we are an ancient race, we know of none older, and nothing we have heard suggests that others have reached this ultimate haven first. The galaxies should know that Mithras was once the home of men and will soon be the nucleus of a unified cosmic intellect. Mithras will be the first sentient world.”

  “But what do you want me to do?” cried Shah.

  “You need do nothing more,” said the Drone. “You have listened. You will remember. While you live, wherever you go you will seed the memory of Mithras, whether you would or not. You are our heir, custodian of our history. The key to the mystery of life lies in your hands. You may hold it or bestow it elsewhere, but you cannot return it. The burden of knowledge is yours. Our task is done.”

  The Drone was gone. Shah supposed dully that he must have got up and walked away but – introspectively brooding, wrestling with the onus Mithras had tricked her into accepting, feeling the enormity of the heritage weighing on her mind and spirit and bones, angry and sour with feelings of having been deceived and betrayed although in fact neither deceit nor betrayal had been employed – she did not notice. She noticed very little for quite some time. Then, gradually, reason and good faith began to reassert themselves. If it was true that she had been used, at least she had not been abused. The knowledge lodged with her, however unwelcome in its concentrated form, was fascinating, even wondrous, and might conceivably do someone some good some day. If she did not know what to do with it now, it was probably also the case that there was nothing she could do with it now, least of all give it back. Like a cure for piles, she thought with a sudden glint of humour, the day would come when it would seem very important indeed, but in the meantime the whole strange portentous saga could be safely relegated to a mental bottom drawer. The weight lifted.

  About that time she realised that the deafening psychic clamour of the silent forest that had yielded only to the Drone had returned but in a transmuted form, mayhem shrunk to a friendly murmur; and that Michal was still on his knees beside her like a penitent. She tapped the back of his hand with a grimy forefinger. “If you stay like that much longer your legs will go to sleep.”

  Michal breathed an audible sigh. He stood up and looked round at the grey-green jungle. He looked up at the streamers of pale light pricking through the high leaf canopy. His eyes were blank, almost as flat as the Drone’s. There was no image of his thoughts in them. He offered his hand.

  Shah took it and let him draw her up. “I don’t suppose you understood much of what was going on there.”

  He looked blankly at her. “There was nothing to understand. You and that thing stared at each other. I asked you to come away. Something hurt me. I do not know if it was you or it. I doubt if it matters. You are part of this, are you not?” Distress was creeping visibly into his eyes and audibly into his voice. His hand waved unsteadily. “This damned forest has strangled and bled us for fifteen years. Now when we finally get help we find even our rescuers prefer the forest! God knows, Shah, I have few enough illusions about my people – but can we possibly be worse than lethal trees and devious snake-eyed little torturers? If even Mithras is too good for us, where shall we find rest?”

  Tears shone in Shah’s lustrous almond eyes. His plea flayed her soul. “Oh Michal, I wouldn’t hurt you for worlds! I’m not siding with the forest, only listening to it. You can’t imagine what’s going on here, and they can’t tell you – only me. But being able to speak on their frequency doesn’t make me one of them. Some people hear a wider range of sounds than others, but hearing like a dog doesn’t make you a dog.”

  “What is a dog?” asked Michal, without curiosity.

  “I’ll tell you,” promised Shah. “I will tell you, everything we said
, though I don’t know how much you’ll understand. I don’t know if I really understand it myself. Paul will know.” The memory of his terse, incisive intellect cut through the fog of her woolly thoughts like a beacon and she warmed to it. “Michal, we have to get out of here, back to the Hive. I have to talk to Paul.”

  “I want to go home,” Michal said dully. Shah did not know if it were consent or protest or just an expression, as understated as the visible tip of an iceberg, of his new pain.

  Shah took his arm, missing the thrill of pleasure that had greeted her earlier embraces. “Let’s go home.”

  With the psychic activity of the forest diminished to a background hum, she was able to locate and follow that other susurration, harder-edged and more discordant, emanating from the Hive. They walked between the grey columns, silent on the soft ground, until the strengthening sun raised up the green thicket before their faces. Their eyes had adjusted to the subtle tones of the deep wood: the bright verdure of the thrusting, coiling hedge seemed to them livid to the point of vulgarity.

  It offered them no hindrance. They passed through it as they had seen the Drone do. The brambles seemed to coil out of their way, the clutching thorns unzipping. Still Shah held onto Michal’s hand as if both their lives depended on it.

  Where the hedge yielded, abruptly and with a bad grace, to the clearing, Michal stopped, literally and metaphorically poised between two worlds. He stood quite still, looking out across the scoured earth.

  Shah stopped beside him, searching his blank face anxiously. “What is it, Michal?”

  He nodded at the Hive. “It has shrunk,” he said. “And it is ugly.”

  Hurting for him, Shah pushed past to draw him into the sun. “Come on, let’s see what they’ve all been up to. Look, there’s the shuttle. Paul’s inside: I can feel him. There’s someone with him. And there’s –”