We were on a rise of land, a canal beyond some high shrubs; rocky ground, though the soil was deep and moist. The tree was young, slender compared to its neighbors, but the central bole was already as wide as a small house. We were standing at the perimeter where the outer ring of buttrees roots rise up from the ground, soaring to support the lowest branch. The buttress was as thick as my waist. One of the huge main branches had dropped a prop root that was now home for a flowering vine with a sweet, unearthly smell. The branches soaring out and the bole soaring up were at the point of reaching the canopy, and already the upper leaves of the Dirijh were brushing the undersides of the branches of its nearest neighbors. Light fell in startling showers, bars of gold. Beyond the Dirijh on one side was a break in the canopy, and in the center of the meadow was what remained of a decaying tree, covered with vine and fringed with meadow grass but too huge still for anything to disguise.
“Amazing,” I said.
“He’s a very special tree, they’ve been breeding for him a long time.” He had told me this before, in his letters. “I’m the only sym he’s ever had. He’s a little unsettled that you’re here.”
“Really?”
“The trees think of us as their own. They don’t like to be reminded of when they were without us.”
I knew him when he smiled like that, and I was glad that the thought of his tree made him smile. Though there was something discomforting in the thought of the possessiveness of a tree.
“But he’s glad you’ve come. He tells me so.”
“He?”
“He has male and female flowers, but the female flowers are sterile.”
“To avoid self-pollination?”
Binam shrugged. “It’s what he wants.” We were inside the ring of buttress roots, near the main bole. “He can reverse all that and bloom with sterile male flowers and fertile female flowers if he wants, or he can have both. But for now, he’s a he.” He tugged on something, pulled it out of the growth around the buttress. “We wove this for you. My friends and I.”
A ladder woven of supple vine. Binam climbed directly up the bark, using the bark fissures for hand and footholds. I slung the bag over my shoulder and started up the rope ladder, but now that Binam was using his muscles, he was much faster than me, and knew his tree well enough that he moved by instinct, or so it appeared. He streamed up the bark to the first branching, and then led me along the branch to a flattened outgrowth overhung with a thick canopy of leaves. The syms call this kind of growth a dis, the standard Ajhevan word for sitting room. The Dirijhi learned to make the dis for the comfort of the symbionts.
Filling the dis were carvings, some for practical uses like sitting, one the height of a table. A variety of tones and weights of wood, including what looked like cork. All grown out of the main wood of the dis. “I don’t live down here,” Binam said, “this is for our guests. I live up higher. But I think you should have this dis, lower to the ground.”
“Thanks.” I set my bag on the branch, noted the fine pattern of the bark. Along part of the bark, moss was growing, and an ancillary tree had wrapped its roots round the branch and rooted into the moss and whatever organic matter was under it; this tree was flowering, a scent like vanilla. The flower was yellow with deep, rich, golden-to-brown tones in the corona.
“Are you the carver?”
“Yes. Do you like them?”
“Very much.” I ran my hands along the back of the nearer chair, the smooth polish of the wood.
“We do them together, the tree and I,” Binam said. “That’s part of the game. He throws the wood out of a branch or sends it up from the ground and I work it and polish it. I even polish with leaves he gives me,” he was pausing, trying to think of a way to say in words what rarely had to be put into words at all, “leaves like sandpaper. He buds them and they flush and dry and I use them for the polish.”
He was beaming. My little brother.
We watched each other, and suddenly I could read those strange eyes for a moment. I went to him and embraced him and he leaned against me, and the texture of his skin was cool and tough, the body beneath firm and spongy, so that I could not read from his shoulders or back whether he was really tense or frightened, as I had thought from what I read in his eyes. “It’s been such a long time. I hardly know what to say.”
“I must seem very strange to you.”
I shook my head and held him against me. “You seem very familiar. You’re my brother.”
Three
We got through those first uncomfortable moments when my mere presence in front of him made him feel as though he had become a freak. He looked me over head to toe, ran his hands down my arms, in my hair. He had lost the thick brown hair I remembered, his head was that mottled leaf color, covered with soft plant hairs, stiff and sticky when I touched them.
“I had forgotten what my body used to look like,” he said, laying his fingers against my skin. We had been looking at the picture cubes, one of them taken on the trip to Greenwood when Binam got lost. “You’re so warm. I like your skin.”
“I like yours, too,” I said, touching his neck, the smooth cool outer dermis, tender as a new leaf.
“I’m cool. I’ve been vented today, and I’m taking in moisture.”
“Vented?”
“I let out air through stomae in my skin. I like to let it build up and do it all at once.” Looking above. “We’re in the hot part of summer. I share the heat of the tree.”
“You help it cool off that way?”
“No,” he shook his head. “It’s only to share. The tree likes the heat on its top leaves, they have a very tough cuticle, and we make a lot of energy that way. I share the heat so I’ll know what it’s like. Just to share it. That’s all.”
“Does the tree have a name?”
“Yes. A string of proteins about four hundred molecules long.” He was smiling again, comfortable. “It would translate to something like, ‘Bright-in-the-Light.’ But that’s a very quick way of saying it. The trees don’t trust anything that’s too quick.”
I shook my head in some amazement. “It’s hard to comprehend. When they talk, what’s the speech like?”
“Nothing like speech,” he said. “More like a series of very specific flavors. I’m afraid it would seem quite slow to you.”
“What about to you?”
“Time is different, according to where I am. Now, for instance, I feel as if I’m blurting things out to you in a rush. If you weren’t here, I’d most likely be higher in the tree, sitting still, listening to the day, and time would pass very slowly. I don’t have a time when I talk to the tree, because the tree is always there, in my head. That’s part of the link that gets made when you meld. But if I want to talk to another tree, if we do, since we generally do everything at the same time, we listen to the linked root. The trees have a communicating root they send out, they’re all networked, and if there’s some conversation going on in the link, maybe we join it, or if there’s not, we send out a hello to the neighbors to find out who’s in the mood to talk.”
I liked his face when he talked. He reminded me of the stories of people who lived in fairy-tale forests, old tales that had come to Aramen with the Hormling, most likely, about elves and fairies and whatnot. A people who lived in a wild forest with some kind of connection to the land that a modern person could not hope to attain. What the Erejhen sometimes claim for themselves, though I have seen precious little evidence. I could picture Binam as an elf out of fairyland, and I wondered if that were better than to call him a symbiont in my head. A name that implied he was dependent on something else, that he had only an incomplete identity on his own.
“You’re a symbiont, too,” he said. “There’s no shame in it.” But here, for the first time, was an expression that I could easily read: discomfort.
“You can tell what I’m thinking?” I asked.
“The tree can. When you’re as close as this.”
“How?”
He shr
ugged. “I don’t know. It’s not something I can do.” Smiling in a teasing way. “If it makes you nervous, I can tell him not to share any of it with me.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said. “What do you mean, I’m a symbiont?”
“You think of yourself as one thing. But your body is millions of things, millions of living creatures all joined in some way, and conscious in some way. You couldn’t survive without the bacteria in your gut, the mitochondria in your cells. You’re an assemblage, you just don’t think about it.”
“All right, I get the point.” I added, “I’ll try not to think of anything I don’t want to talk about.”
“If you do, the tree will know anyway. That you don’t want to talk about it.”
The sun was going down by then. I was sore from bouncing against the truss, had hardly slept all night. I yawned and Binam said, “I never even asked about the trip.”
“Do you ever ride the trusses?”
“Not in years, since I was a guide. But I remember.”
“The trees should consider a nice bio-engineered replacement animal with a smoother ride.”
He laughed. Good to hear that he could still make the sound. “That will never happen. Unless the trees learn how to bio-engineer for themselves. The trees think the Hormling charge too much money for the transformation.”
“The Hormling would charge for air if they could figure out how to license lungs,” I said, repeating a joke that was current in Feidre fifteen years ago, but which my brother had never heard.
He cocked his head. “Well, in my case, they have licensed the lungs, and the skin, and most of the rest.”
Sunlight fading. He would leave me to eat and rest, see me in the morning. No need to rush the visit. Come sundown, he would get sluggish anyway, so he wanted to climb to his bed. I didn’t ask where that was. As he said, we had time. I kissed him on the cheek, though. We had been affectionate and close, when we were kids, not like some brothers and sisters. He climbed up the tree, limber as anything, moving quickly into shadow.
Four
I spread out my sleeping bag, pulled up the night netting over my face, lay there for a while and opened flaps some more to let the air circulate. I had chosen the far edge of the dis, where the leaf cover grew sparse; I could see a piece of the night sky where the canopy had broken, where the dead Dirijh lay slowly decomposing. So close to the Cluster, all I could see were her golden stars, so many beautiful yellow suns, and if I let my eyes go just out of focus, it was as if I were in space, staring into the huge hollow between them, the matrix of burning stars and me hanging in space, orbiting somewhere over Aramen near the white moon.
Maybe it was inevitable that I would dream about being a child with Binam, in the days when we lived on the algae farm with our parents. There are many styles of family on Aramen, but ours was still one of the common ones, easy and adaptable on a planet that still felt like a frontier at times: a man and a woman with a life contract, having children together and raising them. Our parents had settled at the edge of the East Ajhevan wetlands, a country called Asukarns, New Karns, because early on it reminded somebody of a place on Senal. We were only a couple of hours, trip by putter to the edge of the Dirijhi preserve, and our parents used to take us there, till Binam began to get obsessed with the trees.
I dreamed of one of those trips, when we were camping on the bank of a creek, looking into the deep green gloom on the other side. We were within the posted limits of the camp ground but I wondered if the symbionts were watching us from the closer trees, to make sure we stayed on our side. Binam wanted to cross the creek but Mom repeated the story of little Inzl and Kraytl, who vanished into the forest leaving a trail of bread crumbs behind them, so they could find their way out again. But the tree roots ate the bread and the trees themselves conspired to confuse little Inzl and Kraytl, and they were imprisoned by an evil tree and almost eaten themselves before their good parents found them. We were the right age for the story at the time, and, in my dream, I was terrified all over again, and, in the way of dreams, we were no longer listening to the story but inside it, and I found myself wandering deeper into the forest with Binam’s hand in mine and my parents nowhere to be seen. Binam clutched a sack of bread and looked up at the trees with terror glazing his eyes….
I had never thought of myself as Kraytl when I was hearing the story on my mother’s knee, my brother beside her on the bedroll. I had never thought of Binam as Inzl or the two of us as orphans, but here were we both, sleeping in a tree in Greenwood.
When I woke, something with wings was sitting on a branch looking at me, and I wondered what it found so interesting, but when I looked again, the shadow had vanished. White moonlight outlined everything, while the red moon was a thin crescent. The air was as mild as when I fell asleep, though it must have been early morning by then; the canopy holds heat in at night as efficiently as it holds heat out during the day. Some low breeze stirred.
I felt restless and got out of the bedroll, walked around the dis, listened. Choruses of insects, night birds, reptiles, a host of voices swelled in the air around me, eerie, a symphony. The Dirijhi are true to their nature as plants and have remained a part of the wild, but have at the same time learned to manipulate many parts of nature. It seemed awesome to me, now that I was here among them, these huge dark shapes in the night, listening as I was to this chorus of animal voices, wondering what part was wild and what part was the trees.
I could think to myself, these are frog songs, and grasshoppers, and crickets, and lizards, and birds, and feel as if I knew what I was hearing. But for Binam, what were these sounds to him? What news was passing all around me, my senses dull to it?
I sang a song under my breath, along with all the rest. Silly, half tuneless, something from the girls’ commune. Sliding into my sleeping roll again, remembering that the tree would know what I had been thinking, that I had wakened with a winged monster hovering over me, that I had felt lost and wondered where I was.
Five
Binam knelt over me, finger to his lips. Early. He gestured, up, with a finger, would I come up?
It was plain I was to make no sound, so I nodded, slid out of the sleeping roll still wearing my clothes.
He climbed, and I followed as best I could. By watching him, I saw the hand-holds and toeholds he used in the places where the distance between the branches was too great, but these places were few, thankfully, and we mounted through the leafy levels of Binam’s tree to the sky.
To the east was the gash in the canopy where the old tree had fallen, where the sunrise now played itself out in a thousand shades of crimson, azure, violet, against a backdrop of clouds. We could not climb higher and the tree was not yet so tall that I could see along the top of the forest, but I was close enough.
“Remember when I got lost?” Binam said.
“And the sym found you in the top of a tree, just sitting there?”
He nodded. Smiling with an expression I could recognize as peaceful. “I come here every morning. It’s my favorite place.”
He sat there, the picture of contentment. But I remembered the feeling of distance in his letters. “Are you still happy here?” I asked, looking him in those white eyes.
He made a sound that was supposed to be laughter, though he sounded out of practice. “You don’t waste time with small talk, even in the morning, do you?”
“Small talk. What an idea.”
He was peeling some layer of tissue off the back of one of his hands. Flaky bits of leaf drifting down on currents of air. For all the world like a boy on a riverbank picking at a callus, or at the dead skin on his fingertips. “I’m dry,” he said, “I need to swim.”
“Well?” I asked.
He was distant, hardly hearing my voice. His eyes so pale, the pupils so tiny, he could have been looking in any direction at all, or in none. For a moment, I thought he wanted to answer, and then it didn’t seem important any more. We sat for a long time in the cool lifting breez
e, the heat of the distant sun beginning to strip the clouds away. Light fell on Binam, bringing out the rich greens and softer-colored variations along his skin, and he closed his eyes and sat there. “I can’t tell you what a sweet feeling this is.”
“The sunlight?”
“Yes. On my chloroplasts.” He licked his lips, though the moisture looked more like sap than saliva. “I can feel it in every nerve.”
“It must be nice.”
He nodded. “This is the best time of day for it. Later, it’s too hot; I can’t take so much of the sun, not like the tree.”
“Is this something you need?”
He nodded again. “I don’t know the science for it, I can’t tell you why. But I need a certain amount of sunlight to keep my skin growing. The outer part dies off when the new inner tissue ripens, this time of year.”
I had brought a calorie bar with me, my breakfast, which I pulled out of my coveralls and unwrapped.
“Breakfast,” Binam said. “That’s the word. This is where I come to have breakfast.”
“A nice place for it.” The bar, essentially tasteless, went down quite handily.
“The tree is somewhat repulsed by that,” Binam said. “Chewing and eating. It’s very animal.”
“I am an animal.”
He had closed his eyes again, murmured, “Yes, he knows you are.”
“And you?”
“Sometimes there’s still too much animal in me,” he answered.
“Is that your opinion, or the tree’s?”
“Both.”
A silence. I let the obvious questions suspend themselves. He was welcome to his opinions, after all. “You don’t talk much, do you?”
“Talk? Me and the tree?”
“No. In words, like right now, I mean. You couldn’t remember the word for breakfast.”
He shrugged. That gesture came quite naturally. “I don’t get much practice.”
“What about your neighbors?”
“If we’re close to our hosts, we don’t really need to talk.”
“You read each other’s minds?”
He nodded. “I guess that’s the easiest way to think of it.”
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