Susurrus on Mars

by Hal Duncan

  Renart can only shrug surrender, hands empty of explanation. He works at the human level, engineer of affect, fouterer with the gubbins of sensation. He can only savvy her work in metaphors, as an anthropology of dryads living in the trees. Computational analyses of synchronicitous patterning in physical super-systems... to him that just means number-crunching chaos till you find what you’re looking for, footsteps of gods that don’t exist.

  They don’t exist, says Ana. She’s talking about echoes in shift, shadows in span, things that only translate, mathematically translate, into stories. He doesn’t understand.

  Breezing across the surface of the world outside, the godling of the Martian winds, son of Zephyrus and terraformed Ares, Susurrus understands.

  •

  SWIPPER AND WHIPPETY, Jaq dreeps down from a branch of Baucis, loosing with a swing to land smackdab on the basalt fo’c’sle in a superhero crouch steadied with one fist, barely a slap on the rock underfoot but with a stramash of ramage springing back above that sets the white flash of a rabbit’s scut bouncing off into the grass of his sward. Nekkid but for Puk’s Geister jerkin, and all the more nekkid for it, he’s followed sharpish by Puk in britches of paisley, crimson and jade, more daredevil than Jaq’s monkeyboy poise: a running jump, whooping, from the treehouse itself, arms windmilling in air, bold in his Earther frame and scorn of Martian gravity, landing with a crump into a roll in the grass beyond the rock—more a spill than roll, really, which ends with him on his back, but still, a sound trumping by courage, if not poise, and rivalling in gusto, setting them equal over all, in Shim’s reckoning, which both with magnanimity dispute, good heathens that they are, each declaring the other victor, not from self-abasement but from mutual esteem and, in no small part, ardour.

  Jaq, sauntered from the rock to offer a hand, insists. Puk, latching grasp and hauling himself up to his feet, contends.

  It is precisely many weeks, days and hours into the harpagmos—many being the most accurate measure for time fluttered by in stints made immeasurable in the warp of shift and span, days of fuckery passing in a tick, idle hours lazed in the grass, playing Fourier Harmonies, stretching wide as a starscape. A wheen weeks and a pochle of days now for the two whiffets maybe, but who’s to say? Without a stick to cut a chack in for every moment of weight worth tally, a mere clockware call for stint would be inaccurate.

  Arbiter of the exploit, Shim leans sideways on the trunk of Philemon, Don behind with an arm crooked round her waist, chin on her shoulder; Joi lounges with arms folded, back to Baucis: Jaq’s cohort popped by on an excursion from Erehwyna to see how the cretins are getting on, haven’t seen them for yonks, do they want to come snoop the old mines in Euripus Mons? They wander out from under the shade, to a new disposition on the rock: Don hopped atop it, thumbs tucked in his britches; Shim seated slantways with an arm as prop; Joi with one leg up, leaning forearm on thigh. The cretins don’t have to come, if they’re busy being cretins, but it’ll be peachy, spooky in the depths, and there’s the paintings left during the Interregnum.

  Glances between Puk and Jaq, one antsy and awkward, one curious and double-taking to scry, then Jaq blinks and hedges that they did have plans which they could drop but... He almost dints Joi private that some snag in the scheme’s a panicky no-no for his matelot, ixnay, but Joi twigs it anyway, or savvies the tact here at least, and smoothly brushes it no bother, just a whim while passing. So instead they crack some beers from the treehouse stash—because hospitality—savour a few ticks of catching up, then Jaq’s cohort scoot, leaving the cretins to their fun.

  Cretans, says Jaq.

  Don grins, tips a wink and a wave, and they’re off.

  And after, the gusto of cameraderie is such that the moment of fret seems history to Puk, scrambling up the rope ladder for another beer, and Jaq’s tenty to broach it. A phobia? They’re both unlocked to each other’s privates, quirks declared as kinsey and hanker. Ah well. He notes to keep edgy for hints, and when Puk’s eased he’ll savvy Jaq, he’s sure, in time. Whatever it is.

  Susurrus knows, felt it in the prickle of hair on the back of Puk’s neck, how their Greek idyll clicked with mineshaft depths, and snicked three striplings round a rock to an image out of Poussin, a whiplash thought of tombs, and of stone collapsing, crushing, killing: et in arcadia ego. And it wasn’t a fear for himself. That would’ve been fine.

  Catch! cries Puk from the crow’s nest treehouse, and Jaq catches the beer one-handed.

  •

  THE BLACK POPLAR, Dryope, Populus nigra, is a middling-large deciduous tree, reaching thirty metres tall, with a bole diameter of one and a half metres, her bark the grey-brown of a dusty elephant’s hide, thick furrowed, heavy burred, trunk sloping as if to reach, not up to the gods, the sun or sky, no, not fastigiate as elsewhere, but reaching over as to some other on the ground. Perhaps to the two fleshlings lazing in the ryegrass.

  In Poland, her shoots and leaves, rhomboid to cuneate, five to eight centimetres long, six to eight centimetres broad, were glabrous. Here, subspecies betulifola of Western Europe, they carry a fine down. Dioecious, she flowers in catkins, is pollinated by the wind, by Susurrus, who snakes round her even now as Apollo did, once or twice, far ago, shape-shifting from the tortoise she was charmed by, that she laid on her lap as she fell asleep, only to awake in the windings of that serpent, yes, Apollo, sire of her son, Amphissus, who she was suckling some nine months and a little later as she wandered by a lake one day and came upon a lotus tree.

  She picked a bloom for her son to play with. The tree trembled, bled an ichor that rooted her to the spot the moment it touched her skin, transforming her from the feet up. Her husband sprinted to her frantic cries, arrived in the nick of time to snatch Amphissus from her arms, mark her plea to raise him never, never, never to pick flowers.

  She may still be reaching for him, still pleading. She may be reaching out to the fleshlings.

  •

  JAQ PUFFS, SCATTERING to Susurrus the umbel of a dandelion, lying on his back, watching parachutes of seed and pappus drift away into the blue.

  If you touch the juice seeping from the stem of a plucked dandelion, says Puk beside him, it means you’ll pee the bed. In French, dandelions were known as pissenlit, in English pissabeds. Dandelion is derived from dent-de-lion, teeth of the lion. Taraxacum oficinale. It is actually a diuretic.

  A few bracts picked, Jaq flicks the stalk away, rolls away to pluck another flower, then heaves up to straddle him, tap him on the nose with this other bloom and trail it down over lips, under chin.

  If you hold a buttercup, he says, Ranunculus repens, under the anterior belly of someone’s digastric muscle, like this, and the sunlight reflected just so bathes the jut of jaw with a golden glow... it means they like butter.

  Coyote’s makeshift eyes, says Puk. One day he was throwing them up in the air and catching them, showing off, and Eagle came down and snatched them. So he had to improvise, grab the first thing that came to hand.

  Facts or fictions, neither is telling the other anything they need to hear, not in the words.

  When all knowledge is not just at your fingertips but in them, in a hangnail or a nip of keratin eponchyium, little claw snag gnawed in nerves or idling, sliver pricking lip or tongue for a second then spit ptooey to riverside sedge, rushes underfoot, before you grab rough hemp, kick back and swing out on the knot-end of a rope to whooping whirl of limbs and cannonball sploosh, not caring that you can’t skinnydip in the same river twice says Herakleitos; when you only have to need a fact for the PAN in your frown of brow to pinch it for you from the hylenet, slip it into your nous, then:

  All schooling is a matter of stance.

  •

  WHITE POPLAR, POPULUS alba, she was named Leukippe as a girl, Leuke for short, most beautiful of all Oceanid nymphs, mirror of Persephone, carried off by Hades to live out her natural in his domain. Hell holds no fear for her then, not now, not here. How to face the fleeting of life is as clear as the shouts of boys
she hears riding Susurrus far ahead of nekkid flesh, the holler of wheeling wildlimbs careening down slope of sward, race braked only at the crash through copse so they can chimpwalk across the log of an elder her now fallen, bridging the burn to the other bank, the water-meadow that is one edge of their summer’s domain, at which she waits.

  She is dioecious, rust red stamens on male catkins on another tree, grey-green of female catkins on this, produced months back in early spring. Pollinated now, maturing with the turn of late spring to early summer, already lengthening to nigh on ten centimetres, forming the green seed capsules. Sneakily, she is also trying to propagate herself with root suckers sprouting from her lateral roots, dreaming of the clonal colony she may form, binding the sandy soil of the burn’s bank as she does so. She might make the whole slim river an avenue all the way to where it joins the Rio Erehwyreve. She delights, as noted by Horace, to grow by the riverbank. Why? It was by the Acheron in the Elysium Fields that Hades transformed her upon death. It was by the Acheron in Thespratia where a Herakles fresh from that same underworld found her foresting the Aventine Hill on his way to slay fire-breathing cannibal giant Cacus, lurking like Australopithicus in a cave lined with skulls of his victims. Great Herakles squeezed the very blood from the ogre’s throat, popped his eyes from their sockets with his grip, the sort of feat admired by boys such as these now sprinting for the finish line of her trunk

  She is a middling-sized deciduous tree, her trunk up to a metre in diameter, crown broad and rounded, seldom higher than sixteen to twenty seven metres. Young shoots and infant buds are downed with white-grey, just as the five-lobed leaves of four to fifteen centimetres in length sport a thick white scurfy down, which wears off the upper but not the underside, where it is thicker, staying white until the leaves fall in the autumn. It was from these leaves double-sided green and white as life and death that Herakles wove a crown for himself to celebrate his deed. All athletes after, in games sacred to Herakles or in funeral games—because all funerals should have games joyful as the Olympics at Elis where she was the only wood used in sacrifices to Zeus—all athletes in such games wore wreaths not of laurel but of her, in victory.

  The stripling-limbed victor of these two, now slapping a hand on her trunk and crowing, he should have his eromenos weave such a crown. It would look magnificent on hair as leonine as Herakles’s Nemean togs, over a face carnelian as the blood of Cacus’s defeat.

  His hand, as he steps back, brushes down over dark diamond-shaped marks on her smooth pale, grey-green bark, inverse of scales, so neat they seem diagonal tiles cut out by some wayward scrapbooker with a scalpel. They are just her though, wholly natural. All that is not her is the hemp rope that the fleshling grabs now, scuffling, slipping, springing, with a backkick off the balls of his feet, off toes almost, to swing out, whooping. And even that she is not sure of. Even that feels a part of who she is.

  •

  THE PHANTOMS ARE not AIs, Ana explains, neither artifice nor intelligence being adequate notions for the quirks of corrade and collage she’s studying, these emergent sentiences wrought in slow accretions of shift, mycelial plethora of span.

  You frame phantoms as genuine agents, says Renart, but geists...

  The corpse rotting in its grave shifts more than the geist, she says, and the geist has no span, nada. Too much like us and not enough.

  Her stance brooks no quibbling. Such a black and white view Renart might tend to counter—a brockit view is a broken one, he’s like to say—but he’s no hanker to tempt her fire. In the Massinger homestead, now hued and honed to her throughout, seated on the Rietveld chairs at the kitchen table under the window, bustle of outside wafting in on Susurrus, picking at pomegranate seeds she wouldn’t hear of him declining, she clicks as Erehwynan as any, but it’s clear she inherits her father’s thrawn resolve, which he, by all accounts, inherited from his own, only with a flip out of zealot and into rebel.

  It’s the new mirror test, far as I’m concerned, she says. Anyone who can’t see the scission between self and geist? Isn’t a self.

  Harsh stance, says Renart. Surely if it plays like a self, you’re as well to stance it back as one.

  He doesn’t say, but he lost a sister as a kidster, long ago now, can see the solace in a geist, not in the fancy of eternity, but as a remembrance, to visit and chat with years on, after the fading of grief.

  See? That’s why I’m a pataphysicist and you’re a pataphysician. Creatives, she shakes her head.

  •

  CULTIVATED IN ARCHAIC orchards with the apple and the pear, the fig and olive, Punica granatum, pomegranate, is a small deciduous tree or shrub which grows to a height of five to eight metres, bearing a fruit around the size of an orange, red with a juicy red pulp, rich in blood red seeds that once, as signifiers of female fertility, made it an attribute of Hera, goddess of marriage, fruit of Aphrodite too, but prohibited as food for initiates in the mysteries of Demeter and Persephone, the latter of whom had stubbornly refused to eat at all while hostage and unwilling fiancé of the underworld king, until sly Hades tempted her with pomegranate seeds and, finally relenting while he’d wandered off or looked away, Persephone took the bait and sprung the trap upon herself, Askalaphos, keeper of the pomegranate orchards of the netherworld, reporting to his master that she’d tasted of the seed, the poor girl then condemned to spend a part of every year in this dismal domain, albeit Askalaphos reaped his own unsweet reward at the hands of Demeter, who turned him to a screech owl perching on the branches of the first fruit tree of his own orchard, the very pomegranate sent to Hades from the goddess Hera, in metamorphic punishment for having boasted herself more beautiful than the very bride of Zeus, one day, back when she wore her own flesh, as she lay abed with her great hunter husband, giant Orion and, snuggling into her, he whispered her name: Sidê.

  •

  I’M SORRY, SAYS Jaq. I’m really... I didn’t mean it.

  Puk tromps ahead through pinnate fronds, feet thrashing furious.

  I’m sure it’s not him, says Jaq helplessly. I didn’t think.

  On a tree stump, twigs sprouting round the wirrocks in what trunk rose stunty out of thick roots, Jaq spotted the grey-brown ball of an owl pellet, bone and fur, poked it with the twig he’d been chewing and joshed he could glean, in the ruin of it, music, poetry, philosophy, astronomy, mathematics, and science—Apollo Sminthius, you see, mouse god on Tenedos.

  Where are you going? Please, I’m sorry.

  As fust or oose on a rotting fruit in a still life, it seemed only a natural shading of this vital summer they’ve been living, part of the game of Greek idyll—elegy an inherent aspect; but he savvied even before done blurting that he’d dropped into a ravine, all but dangling a dead mouse in Puk’s face and dubbing it Apple. Idiot. And before he’d even yanked himself from the wreckage of realisation and all the potential pointless fumbles to explain that sprang instant to his nous, to just pour out abject horror at being a graceless witless boor, Puk was already through aghast and hurt and enraged, and simply away.

  Jaq hurries after him, still pleading at first, quieting as Puk crashes on through the ferns, his back a wall of cold wrath, set to it speaking of something beyond placations, something placations will only further incense. When the stint of this stretches beyond mere huff, Jaq twigs that something deeper than he savvies, twigs that he needs to just give space to whatever it is, so he lets himself drift behind. Stops when Puk does, at the river’s edge. Waits. Eventually, that something eases its ineffable complexity to simple anger, and a while after that Puk turns, comes stalking up to him.

  Why would you even say that?

  Jaq, currently two to four centimetres small, point five centimetres slight or less, bearing on his glabrous, downcast face a heavy inflorescence of shame, carrying some dozen seeds of self-rebuke, and when crushed, as now, exuding a distinct aroma of regret, doesn’t know.

  Why? Why would you even say that?

  He didn’t think.

  It’
s enough to win an amnesty of sorts: a punch in the arm and a silent return, Jaq in tow, to the treehouse; a few hours of brooding on one side and reserve on the other; a tense foray into the stead for grub with Renart tactfully ignoring the atmosphere; then eventually, later, a long conversation that clears the air with explanations, apologies, forgiveness and not a word from either of the two on the actual raw wound Jaq accidentally reopened.

  •

  HE WAS A titan once, Sykeus, Ficus carica, the edible fig, one of that ancient race who ruled before the gods, rammied with them in the first great war. When it smacked him in the face he was on the losing side, he fled from Zeus through time itself, finding refuge from the king god’s lightning wrath in transformation at the hands of Gaia in one aeon, Demeter in another. The goddess of the earth was resting from her weary search for Persephone, you see, having been offered shelter by a kindly Phytalos, when Sykeus leapt out of the war and into sight, as luck would have it, just as she was casting round for some way to reward her host.

  So, she snatched Sykeus from the aether and transformed him to a fig tree, planted him there for Phytalos in the early Neolithic village of Gilgal I, in the Jordan Valley, thirteen kilometres north of Jericho, where nine subfossil figs of a parthenocarpic type would eventually be found and dated to around 9400–9200 BCE. That one who was once a Titan should retain such deep antiquity seems fit, Susurrus reckons. Predating the domestication of barley and legumes, one thousand years before humanity tamed wheat and rye, that find of Sykeus’s intentional planting and cultivation back on Earth, back before Susurrus was even sprung, stanced itself to be the first known instance of agriculture, and given the scouring and rebuilding of the old world in the aeons since, that find seems now unlikely to be easily usurped. If there are older tamings undiscovered, only gods and titans know.