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 shrugged. “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 handholds 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 breeze, 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.”
“Is it better than talking?”
“It’s nothing like talking. There’s no way to compare it.” His smile, for a moment, familiar, the way his eyes were shaped, familiar, my little brother from thirty years ago. “I like talking, as a matter of fact, right now. I forget you have to decide to do it, then you have to decide what to say. You can hide things when you talk. I’ll miss it when you’re gone.” He stirred, reaching down with a foot, and just at that moment a cloud blanked out his moment of sunlight. “But I really want to swim.”
“Can I come, too?”
He led me down to the dis and I stripped out of my coveralls. When we were on the ground he led me to a place where steps descended into the water. I followed him, taking off the rest of my clothes by the edge of the canal.
“It’s clean,” he said, easing into the liquid with hardly a ripple. “You don’t have to worry about what’s in the water.”
It felt wonderful to slip into the silky liquid, to glide along the surface beside this moon-faced creature. We floated lazily in the early light, a hint of mist along the canal. Near the woody knee of one of Binam’s neighbors, we stopped and headed back again. I swam close to Binam to hear the sound he was making, a low vocalization deep in the throat, like the purr of a cat. “I love to drink,” he said, turning on his back to float.
“This does feel wonderful.”
“You can’t imagine how wonderful, if you’re part leaf.”
I laughed. “You do this every morning?”
“Yes.” We were ashore now, seating ourselves on the lower step, still mostly immersed. “It’s one of the things I can do that the tree envies. Though he shares it.”
“Shares?”
“Through the link.”
Silence, then. I was looking up at the Dirijh, trying to see the tree as Binam saw it, a living mind, a partner. I had been waiting to ask a certain question, and felt it was a good time. “Why did you change your mind and decide to let me visit you, this time? You always seemed so certain it was a bad idea.”
He slid up from the water, dripping onto the stones. “I didn’t change my mind.”
“You still think it’s a bad idea?”
He looked at me. Nothing recognizable, at that moment, in his face. “I don’t mean to make you uncomfortable. I know you’re my sister, but that was a long time ago, longer to me than it seems to you, even. Time isn’t the same for me and you. So I didn’t really want you to come. But now I’m glad you’re here.”
“Well, thanks. I guess.”
He shrugged again. The gesture this time appeared less natural. “I can only tell you the truth, Kitra.”
A chorus of birds, eerie calling high in the trees. Some of it sounded rehearsed, as if it were a piece of music some bird was performing.
“Are you upset?” Binam asked.
“No.” I looked my brother square in the face. “I didn’t simply want to come to see you, either, Binam.”
“Then I expect we’re approaching the same point from different places. There’s an elegant way the trees have of saying that, but I can’t put it in words.”
“What do you mean, we’re approaching the same point?”
“You came to talk to the trees about independence,” Binam said. “I’m right, I know I am. Because that’s why they want to talk to you.”
Just then, in that eerie quiet, pandemonium of a kind. Something fell out of a tree across the canal, followed by a chorus of birds and animals, a sound as if every leaf on every tree were shaking, and Binam leapt to his feet in alarm.
“Oh, no,” he said, watching something moving on the ground; he looked sickened, as if he were nauseous; then he said to me, “Stay here, please,” and slipped into the water and swam across.
From other trees in the vicinity, other syms were descending, altogether invisible before, then suddenly in sight, maybe a dozen.
What had fallen from the tree was another sym, and when it stood (I could not tell what sex it had been) I was horrified; the poor creature looked flayed, as if it had been beaten, or worse, partly eaten, and the syms were picking something off it with their fingers, the injured sym shaking, a green fluid oozing down its face, chest, legs; not a sound coming out of it, or them. The healthy syms surrounded the sick one and picked what I guess were insects out of its ravaged skin, the injured one standing and shaking, some of the others helping to support it, and when they were done, they checked the injured one again head to foot and then laid it on the ground, cleaned the soles of the feet. One of the syms, not Binam, brought a large piece of vine and began to squeeze milky fluid out of it, which Binam took onto his palms and rubbed gently over the injured one.
This took a while. I watched. At first without any self-consciousness, then, noticing that some of the syms were looking my way, I began to feel as if I were intruding and drew back from the bank of the canal. When it w
as clear that Binam would be busy for a while, I climbed to the dis and made myself tea, using the micro-cup in my kit.
When the wait stretched beyond a full marking, I took out a portable reader and scanned some of the downloads I’d brought, items from the various nexus publications I tried to keep up with. A lot of technology is forbidden in Greenwood; for instance, I couldn’t do a portable VR intract or immerse myself in one of the total-music wave stations; none of the technologies we use to feed data directly into our own neural circuitry functions in Greenwood, so I was reading for the first time in years, scanning printed words with my eyes.
The whole time, I was aware of commotion, activity on the ground across the canal. A pair of trusses arrived at a certain point, bearing more syms from farther off, I guess. Everyone sat around in a circle beneath the tree involved, and the injured sym sat with them. I suppose this was some kind of meeting. I was aware of it, trying not to spy.
When the circle dissolved and the trusses disappeared, Binam returned to his tree. He climbed to the dis, shoulders slumped, visibly distracted, shaken, though his eyes were so very difficult to read. I was sitting on one of the upraised pieces of wood on the dis, looking out over the clearing. He sat with me for a while, put his hand in mine, the same shy gesture as when he was eight, the texture of his skin tough and resinous, cool. “I’m sorry that took so long,” he said.
“What happened?”
He shook his head.
“Tell me.”
“I don’t want to.” He looked up at the canopy, the bright slivers of sky beyond the leaves. Breathless, and due to the physiological alterations, he appeared to be breathing with only the top half of his chest. “I need to climb higher for a while. When I come down, we’ll talk again. Do you mind?”
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