by Elle Casey
Grace.
His wandering meditation briefly halted; he was a bit surprised to hear his own thoughts aloud. Except it was silent. Papito cocked his head to the left. Damn. He wondered if that bitch of a nurse had slipped him something new. He ought to complain. It was starting to give him a headache.
Grace.
Papito wasn’t what one would call a religious man. He didn’t really believe in much, and he wasn’t that great at things that human beings were supposed to do, like forming relationships and serving each other and all that bullshit. But he did believe in her. He loved Belen through his memories with a fierce devotion that would have shocked any who knew him. Private men, private loves.
Grace.
He could see her now, see her in him. She beat against his skin, pulsing upward through the vines that tangled his body with dedication. She should. It was her blood, that ink. Ground by initiates from the dried roots of pure Belenite stock, untainted by the sins and seeds of Old Earth.
Papito could smell the ink as the priest began to twine the vine of his commitment. It was moist and lush, like a grassy loam, and it still, after all these years, gave off a deep green glint in the depths of its blackness.
Grace.
* * *
Martin raised his head, still groggy. Too quick. The room spun, and he squeezed his eyes against the sudden vertigo that threatened to send him back down. There were days, more than he liked to admit, out here in his “solitary confinement,” when he seriously considered the advantages of loading his vidcom with one of those “talk to me” friend apps, just so he could talk to someone beyond his own subconscious. His subconscious—that was the only logical explanation for that piercing voice he kept hearing. Damn data recorder showed absolutely nothing else.
But anything designed to talk back just made Martin’s skin crawl. He was far from devout. He wouldn’t even say he was believing, which, as he’d recently figured out, put him on the extreme margins of Belenite society. Apparently his people took their promises seriously, whether or not they went to the groves to sit. Still, anything that even hinted at some kind of artificial intelligence, even an overtly unintelligent app designed to spit back platitudes and ask questions about his day, anything like that was too close to robotics, and there were some lines even he wouldn’t cross.
So, what exactly was he trying to tell himself then?
“Take to me” didn’t exactly ring any bells. Martin wasn’t sure what it even was: A command? A request? A fragment?
Suddenly, a memory of his grandmother bubbled to the surface through the residual headache that accompanied these inexplicably painful sessions with himself. Martin hadn’t been particularly close to his grandmother as a boy; in fact, he tended to be rather embarrassed by her superstitions and her tendency toward religion generally. When he told her after school one day that her opinions were ill-informed, and that she ought to rely more on the hard truth of scientific fact, she had thrown her head back and laughed, straight from her belly, molars betraying an appalling lack of preventive dental care.
“Martin,” she’d chuckled, ruffling his hair, her voice warm like gravel, “don’t you just take all, sometimes! You do, you know.” Martin had stood still, stiffly resisting her attempts to draw him out. “The thing is, sweetie, I just never took to all that scientific stuff much. And it didn’t take to me, neither. But you—look at you! Filling your head full and keeping it straight. Good for you!”
Martin had known, even back then, that he did, as his grandmother would have put it, “take to” science. He couldn’t help it: for as long as he could remember, he had been in love with all the life Belen had to offer. And it made up for his rather abysmal attempts at loving anything more complex than vshia vine or a sprol. He didn’t really take to people.
So no one was surprised when Martin announced his plans to study xenobiology. His work on the isolation of native Belenite genetic coding and his subsequent discovery of successful synthetic cross-species splicing techniques had allowed him to map at the genetic level both the standard Earth processes of photosynthesis and the little-understood Belenite process of gyrosynthesis onto a single, replicable cell. He had visions of a future in which the energy crises that had plagued Earth, adding fuel to the Robot Wars, would be completely eradicated from Belen’s future. A future in which his synthesized children would not only eliminate the need for such wars among the Belenites—now strung like fragile pearls along the slender neck of Belen’s archipelagos—but would also allow for an expanded peace with the Empire itself, one where true scientific exchange and dialogue would be possible.
He had been so careful. He had stripped away any and all identifying features; his Belenite genetic material had been carefully carved down to pure, synthesized matter. There was no possible way anyone unaware of Belen’s native secret could have seen anything in his work beyond—they would have to assume—original genius.
But they had deemed his work heretical. And treason. It was hard to distinguish the two in a society such as Belen. And they had sent him here, away, so far from his beloved lab, the only space in which he felt at home, to punish him for endangering both planet and state. To count trees.
Martin scratched absently at the tattoo beneath his shirt pocket. It had not, he reflected, cracked and burned as he’d performed his research. The priests had promised at his first ordination, as he’d taken his vow of citizenship before the three witnesses at the civic temple, that his new tattoo would serve as a warning, to shield him from unexpected or unintentional exposure of Belen’s secret. That was part of the reason for the marks to begin with. Human blood and Belenite “blood”—bound together. But his nascent vine (he had never really gotten into the ritual expansion of the marks; his worship was perfunctory, and faithless) did not consume his breast with the promised fire of betrayal as he performed his work. If anything, he had almost felt led into his research.
So perhaps “take to me” was, then, his way of reminding himself of his moment of true conversion. A reminder to be true to his original vision. To fuck the bastards in Nuevoaire.
He would protect Belen from being savaged by her own. He would solve the energy crisis before it happened. And it would happen. It was inevitable. He’d seen the data. And his analysis could not be flawed. It simply wasn’t possible.
In spite of himself, Martin scanned the horizon. He had no idea how they were tracking him, but he assumed they were. He would have to act quickly. He felt for the small scar, hidden to the naked eye by the Belenite ink of the small vine circling his breast. It was still there. The microdisk remained hidden.
He stood. The data recorder slid to the floor.
* * *
Her mother had yet to notice that she was gone. Rather than feeling sad, Carla felt relieved as she plunked herself down in a small clearing. Good. The longer her mother talked, the longer Carla could stay.
She was, however, a bit cold now that she was out of the sunlight. Carla looked around for something to throw across her prickling back. Not much besides a few huge vshia leaves—everything else looked fairly tough. She tugged a few of the broad, soft leaves off their vine. They came away easily in her hands, smelling slightly damp. She swung her feet out and behind, rolling to her stomach as she pulled the leaves up across her back. Now she really was hidden. A little Carla vine, crawling across the wooded ground, out of sight, just as she was already out of mind.
A slight shimmering at the edge of her peripheral vision caught her attention. She turned her head, laying her right ear against her folded hands.
It was a sprol. To a casual observer, it looked like a small, dull stone, about two centimeters in diameter. It fell under the category of “insect” here on Belen, but, since it was a native, Carla knew it wasn’t really an insect. Not like the bees and ants the colonists had brought with them to pollinate their food crops. But after so many years of familiarity, it was, for all intents and purposes, a bug.
The sprol shimmered again,
moving slowly toward Carla’s nose. It was still a good distance off, and at the rate it was going it would take at least an hour to reach her. Carla knew the gray-green shell encasing the sprol was, in fact, the exoskeleton of a bug that was very much alive, but even knowing that, she couldn’t help but understand how it took so long for the first colonists to discover the sprols. They really did look like unassuming rocks. She wondered who had first figured out that these “rocks” were alive—and if they had been surprised by the apparent mutability of a completely hermetic shell.
Sprols shifted shapes, often mid-shimmer. The internal quiver that drove their metabolism and motion caused small variations to shift and change over their external surface. Some scientists hypothesized that it was an evolutionary defense mechanism designed to confuse predators by making it appear to be a different animal. Carla just thought it was pretty cool. She wondered whether, if she stretched out her hand, the sprol might shift right there, in her palm.
She listened. It was possible she had just heard her mother call for her. She decided to stay hidden. Secret and safe. Hidden like the secret of this bug that wasn’t a bug, and wasn’t a rock. Just itself.
Her recently received tattoo warmed pleasantly as the sprol shimmered again.
Hello, little sprol, she thought.
Hello.
* * *
Papito snorted himself awake. He could feel the beginnings of drool collecting on his lips. Damn. That was just what he needed that new head nurse to see. To see him as weak, and old, and drooling all over himself as he sat outside like an idiot. She’d probably put the kibosh of his daily departures from the rooms, and then where would he be? Screwed. That’s where.
He was pretty sure that he was drifting off again, despite himself. Oh well. Why fight it? Maybe he was still asleep. It was getting harder and harder to tell, to sort out the daydreams from the memories, the wishes from the regrets, the hopes from the silent prayers.
The warmth of the sun spreading out along his shoulders was a gift.
Grace.
The vine crawling over his heart was a gift.
Grace.
His Belen, she was a gift.
Grace.
In the distance, through the thickening cloud of years that hung around his brow and comforted his soul, Papito could hear the persistent whine of the dinner bell buzzing in his ears.
* * *
Sweat clung to Martin’s brow, stinging his eyes as it flecked down unexpectedly. He shook his head, trying to clear his thoughts.
He had left the post so quickly. It was completely unlike him, this going off, unplanned like that. He remembered the pain against his skull, the pain that had now dulled from a stabbing knife to a steady pounding of his own blood against his ears. He hadn’t even grabbed his gear sack from the behind the door. He had simply turned, entered the trailcrawler, and gone.
He drove constantly. He wasn’t really sure how long. Not sleeping.
And then he had knowingly committed treason. Not the unintentional treason of his research, but a planned treason, a treason he had begun the moment he’d cut open his own chest and implanted the microdisk carefully between the layers of his flesh.
Taking it out had been a bit messier. He hadn’t had the proper tools this time. And he’d had to hurry—the off-planet cargo run only came to this sector once a month, and he wasn’t sure, based on his recent self-talk and its astoundingly painful results, whether or not he would really be here in another month. For all he knew, he might succumb finally to the pain, and end it. Not that he liked to think about himself in those terms, but logically, it made a kind of punitive sense. That’s why they’d sent him here, anyways. To get him out of the way.
So he’d had to patch things together rather quickly. Set up the proper payment on a borrowed connector, since he’d left his at the post. Recall the address he had memorized and then purposely forgotten so that they wouldn’t find it, at least not without some significant digging and therefore damage. And generally speaking, they were too peaceful for that kind of thing.
He’d carefully cleaned the microdisk, wiping aside his fleshy residue before inserting it into the unremarkable poncho he’d bought at the Rionegro bar a year ago. “Greetings from Rionegro! The Heart of Belen!” it said in garish green letters. Must have been manufactured in the capital. It had that false sense of historicity and commerce that tended to drive him nuts. He’d enclosed the poncho, along with a letter chatting about various bits of academic gossip and questions regarding the publication of several conference sessions, in an interstellar pouch and sent it without return to his postdoc supervisor. At his home address. He would know what to do with the research. And yes, he would know what it meant. About Belen. But it couldn’t be helped. And frankly, Martin had a hard time believing that total secrecy had been preserved for almost three hundred years. The Empire had to already know. So he wasn’t really betraying, much.
He expected to feel a weight lifted. He expected his subconscious to stop twisting him with pain. He expected something.
But not this.
TAKE TO ME!
The vines grew at an impossible rate. He knew he must be hallucinating from exhaustion. Because they reached out, ever so carefully, and lifted him away from the spattered trailcrawler, pulled him to the side of the road so that he could rest. They caressed his knotted shoulders, kneading his flesh with a compassion so pure it cut through the haze. He took to them. He loved them as they consumed his weary flesh, speaking peace to his downtrodden heart and comforting the wound that refused to heal.
Martin slept in their embrace, horrified at the truth he would not articulate.
* * *
What are you doing?
Hiding.
Why?
Because I’m tired of being seen as something I’m not.
You’re misunderstood. But I understand.
Yes, you do. That is why I chose to speak to you.
No one else?
I’ve spoken before. But they couldn’t hear me.
Do you all speak? Or just you?
Of course.
Can I talk to more of you? You’re kind of funny. And you’re easy to talk to.
Yes.
What do I say?
Tell us your stories. We are so new. Our stories are too brief. We thirst. That is why we welcomed you. For the freshness of your lives. But it has taken time to adjust ourselves. To rebuild ourselves. To remake ourselves. To find you listening.
Carla’s mother rolled her daughter over with the tip of her shoe, brushing aside the vshia that blanketed her daughter’s shoulders.
“Why is your face all green? What have you been doing down there? I’ve been looking all over for you! Have you been smearing yourself in this nasty clay? It’s going to take forever to clean you up!”
* * *
Papito knows he’s dreaming. He knows because he’s up, high up, above his Belen, seeing her again. Seeing her as he did when he was alive.
She glistens beneath him, swirling with her deep seas, her numinous clouds wrapping her in mystery, and above all, her viridescent glow.
She’s calling to him. Calling him by name. Showing herself to him as she truly is.
Grace.
He answers back, thanking her for sharing herself with him one last time.
Gracias, mi amor.
A Word from Endi Webb
When I first started writing the Pax Humana Saga, a ten-novel space opera series set about six hundred years in the future, I mention the world of Belen and allude to its unique properties: that it alone was special out of all the worlds settled so far in the galaxy, that its settlers became “changed” somehow as they learned more about their new world, leading the Corsican Empire to destroy it before its “contagion” could spread (among other reasons which will be revealed later on in the series), and how the now homeless migrants would tattoo images of the trees and forests on their skin as a living reminder of, and testament to, their paradise
that was.
But that was all—it was just a stub, a placeholder for cultural details I would add later. Since then, Belen has called to me, leading to this story, and what I hope will be several more short stories (and possibly novels) as the Belenites begin to discover their world, commune with it, and overcome the inevitable growing pains that accompany any union among living things. It is a fertile ground (ha!) for exploring issues of place, belonging, our stewardship and mastery of/being mastered by the environment, and how the unknown can be a very scary thing indeed for those in power. All too often, the caretakers of the status quo seek to destroy in their quest to preserve.
My hope is that this little glimpse of Belen will lead you to the Pax Humana Saga, where together we can explore a new universe and discover what worlds like Belen have to offer.