Page 12 of Overgrowth
“My father owns a summer home on one of the little islands off the coast,” she said, eyes on me. I might as well have been the only other person in the room. Someone from the wall was finally here to listen to her story—and no matter how many times she’d told it, I got the feeling that until someone like me heard it, none of those tellings would really count. Not to her. “We used to go every year, until I had my accident.”
I said nothing. Neither did Graham. David, who had clearly heard this all before, remained beside her, setting one heavy hand on her shoulder, like he could keep her from floating away if he held on tightly enough.
“I was eight. I used to live in the woods. I was planning to go to work for the National Forest Service. Daddy used to joke that he’d wind up buying me half of the Appalachian Mountains for a birthday present, and I always said it would be a great gift, because I wanted to keep them safe and protected. I’d been hiking around our summer home since I was six. They kept a close eye on me the first summer, and not such a close eye the second summer, and by the third summer they trusted me enough to let me go wherever I wanted, as long as I made it home by sundown.”
Toni’s stare was fierce and unforgiving. “They didn’t have to worry about kidnappers, because we were in the middle of nowhere and you couldn’t get to the island without a boat, and no one came out there unless they had good reason. They didn’t have to worry about paparazzi, because we’ve always been the boring kind of rich, the stock market and investments and getting normal jobs anyway, so you’ll know the value of a dollar kind of rich. Not the sort of rich that has a reality show and a clothing line and attracts a lot of attention.”
“You have an observatory,” said David.
Toni spared him a quick smile. “Not interesting enough, and most people don’t know I’m here. I’m Daddy’s little secret now. The girl who went into the woods and hurt herself so badly she lost her mind—which I didn’t do.” She returned her glare to me. “I’m not insane. Everything I say is true. It’s just a truth most people don’t want to see, because it’s not comfortable, or convenient, or easy.”
“No one said you were insane,” said Graham conciliatorily. “This is all just a little hard for us to swallow.”
“To be fair, I do have PTSD, for reasons she”—Toni jabbed a finger at me—“would totally understand, if she were human. Did she ever tell you how she got here? How a plant person could look exactly like a normal, ordinary human?”
Graham looked uncomfortable. Toni smirked.
“Didn’t think so,” she said. “See, it’s not a nice process. It’s not some sort of alien-telepathy thing where they drop a baby on a childless couple and suddenly, bam, they’re accepted—and it’s not a Midwich Cuckoos thing, either.”
“ Midwich Cuckoos ?” Graham asked blankly.
“ Village of the Damned, ” I said.
“Of course you read the classics,” said Toni. “How can you throw an alien invasion if you don’t understand how the fictional ones failed?”
I said nothing. I just scowled at her.
“Back to my story, if you don’t mind,” she said. “I was eight: I went into the woods, hoping I would find something interesting: I found it. Or rather, I smelled it. It was like… fruit punch and popcorn at the movies and my mother’s sugar cookies, all blended together. It shouldn’t have smelled good, not with that mix, but it did. It smelled so good that I wanted it more than anything else in the world.”
She stared at me as she spoke, until it felt like her gaze had physical weight. I squirmed. She smiled, slow and predatory.
“Oh, no,” she said. “You get to listen. I’ve had to live with this for my entire adult life, and so now you get to listen. You’re the first one to stand still long enough to hear it. Aren’t you lucky?”
“Only if you’re going to let us hear the signal when you’re done,” I said, voice shaking.
“Of course I am,” she said, with a shrug. “I was always going to. They’re coming. I want to know why. You owe me that much.”
I was starting to be direly afraid I did—that we, my distant, unknowable people, did. Because those scars on her arms matched the pattern of light caresses that sometimes ran along my own, when I nestled into the patch of alien flowers in my impossible midnight forest.
“I followed the scent,” said Toni. “I found a flower that didn’t look like any other flower I’d ever seen. It had dragonfly wings for petals. It moved. It knew I was there, and it wanted me to come closer. The scent got stronger. My feet kept moving. I knew it was a bad idea. I didn’t want to get any closer to a flower that could actually see me, and I kept walking anyway, because I didn’t have a choice anymore. It was the worst thing that had ever happened to me. I mean, it only got to be the worst thing for a few minutes, but that was long enough.”
She looked at me, and I looked at her, and she continued, in an almost singsong voice, “Smelling that flower took away everything I had. If the whole invasion is like that, we’re doomed. Mammals depend too much on scent to handle an invasion of evil perfume.”
I didn’t say anything.
“So I walked to the flower, and when I got close enough, it grabbed me.” For a moment, she looked… affronted, like a plant grabbing a person was offensive on some deep, unendurable level. Like it was something that should never have been allowed to happen. “It had these long vines, all tucked around the base of it, where they wouldn’t be as noticeable, and it grabbed me.”
That was how the pod-delivery blossoms worked, if you didn’t touch the flower quickly enough. I remembered, very dimly, my encounter with one—or the original Anastasia’s encounter, to be more precise, since I had still been a seed sleeping in the heart of a flower. I had come later. “How did you get away?” I asked.
“I screamed,” she said. “I don’t think I was supposed to. I think the plant was supposed to stop me from doing it. But it didn’t get the vines around my neck fast enough, and I screamed like I was being murdered, which I guess I was. My father was close to hear me. He came running, and he cut me free. Not fast enough.” She held up her arms again. This time, with the full story behind them, the scars were less familiar than they were sinister, terrible reminders of what had happened to a little girl in the Washington woods, the little girl whose life I had stolen.
It didn’t matter that I’d been a seed at the time, unable to decide for myself who my host was going to be, and it didn’t matter if I had lived her life as fiercely and honestly as I knew how. It didn’t matter if I was an alien who thought like a human, thanks to nurture triumphing over nature in almost every way that mattered. She was still dead. Anastasia Miller was still dead, and she was always going to be. I was a replacement, but I was no substitute for the woman the real thing might have become.
“When he pulled the vines off me, they ripped off half my skin,” said Toni serenely. “I had to be airlifted off the island. It was touch-and-go for over a week. I can’t stand being surrounded by trees anymore. I didn’t eat vegetables for years. Had to get my vitamins from PediaSure and pills. And then there was the part where I needed therapy because hello, post-traumatic stress disorder, while my father was in total denial about what he’d seen, so he didn’t even want to look at me anymore. I lost my future. I lost my father. I lost everything because a pretty flower in the woods tried to eat me up like a cookie. So see, I believe you, because I almost was you. I almost died and came back a traitor. Aliens are real. No one wants to hear it, because what the hell are we supposed to do about this sort of situation? But they’re real, and they’re coming, and they’re already here. You’re already here.”
“Yes,” I said softly.
“Do you remember how much it hurt?”
“No,” I said. Graham was staring at me, cheeks pale and eyes bulging. He’d always done his best to believe me, but there was choosing belief, and then there was being forced to confront it.
Not that this proved anything. He could convince himself I was incorporating Toni’s delusions into my own, if he wanted to: that her scars were self-inflicted or the result of some childhood ailment, and I was playing along because if she’d seen the flower in the forest, she was proof of everything I’d ever tried to explain. I didn’t expect him to turn me into a liar for his own peace of mind, but then, I’d never expected him to believe me in the first place. Humans were always going to be a mystery, in some ways, no matter how close I came to being one.
The itch in my elbow was closer to a throb now, like something was worming its way through muscle and bone. I clasped a hand over it, looking steadily at Toni.
“I don’t really remember much of the time right before Anastasia was converted,” I said. “Part of that is because the mind doesn’t consciously retain much that happens before the age of five or so. Even humans are a little chaotic when they’re infants and toddlers. Add in an alien intelligence trying to file and categorize all those memories, and it shouldn’t really be a surprise when some things get lost.”
“But you know it had to hurt her.”
“Yes.” Even if I didn’t remember the pain, I remembered the process, remembered it with a clarity shared by few of my childhood memories. I remembered it as an intimate, wonderful thing, the flower that was my twin using all its resources to construct a new home for me to live in, the precious second seed that needed to be planted in the best possible soil. I remembered the caress of root-threads as they coaxed me out of the shell that had been my salvation, moving me into the next phase of my existence.
I didn’t remember the taste of Anastasia’s blood, but I remembered the feeling of something wonderful nurturing me, swelling within me, until I was so tight and full I burst my shell, and the next stage of my life could begin.
“Did you have a choice?”
That was an easy question, finally. “No,” I said. Then, in case that wasn’t enough, “I don’t think the flower did either. We were both doing what we were made to do. It was made to take care of me until it could find somebody for me to replace, and I wasn’t even a sprout yet. That happened after we caught Anastasia.” The real process was much bigger and more complicated than that, enough so that even after a whole lifetime of considering it, I didn’t fully understand. Why hadn’t my flower grabbed a deer or an escaped dog or any of the other large mammals that roved the forest? How had it known to go after a human? Really, why wasn’t “I” a moose right now?
What made people different enough to make them good targets?
“Okay,” said Toni. She yanked her sleeves back down and turned to her computer, beginning to type again.
“Okay?” I asked blankly.
“None of this is okay,” muttered Graham.
I shot him an alarmed look. He refused to meet my eyes. I felt the blood rise to my cheeks, burning hot and bitter in my veins, and kept my hand clamped over my itching elbow.
“Nope,” said Toni, with surprising cheer. “None of this is okay at all. This is all basically the opposite of okay. But it’s what we have to deal with, and if we’re going to stop an alien invasion from taking out our planet, we need to start working.”
“There’s no invasion, Toni,” said David. He sounded weary, and the look he gave me wasn’t kind in the slightest. I couldn’t decide whether he believed her and hated me for being an alien, or whether he was humoring her and wanted to shake me for encouraging her delusions. Either way, he didn’t like me anymore, if he ever had.
“They’re coming,” said Toni serenely. “They’re almost here, or they wouldn’t be calling ahead to tell their little spies to start getting things ready.”
“That’s why you released the signal,” I said. “You knew people like… people like me would hear it, but that wasn’t as important as making sure the government heard it.”
“Heard it, and couldn’t pretend they hadn’t,” said Toni. “If I’d sent it through proper channels, instead of releasing it to the press, they could have said, ‘Gosh and golly, little astronomer, that was awfully nice of you to record that piece of deep-space chatter, now go away and let the big kids deal with it.’ Which they wouldn’t have done.”
“If you mention Area 51, we’re leaving,” said Graham.
“No, you’re not,” said Toni. “If you were going to leave because I sounded like a conspiracy theorist, you would have walked out like, twenty minutes ago. You’re just threatening to walk out because you don’t like that I made your girlfriend sound like a monster which, PS, she totally is. Just because Felicia decides to fight against the rest of the Darkstalkers, that doesn’t make her any less of a bad guy.”
I glanced at Graham, baffled. He shook his head, looking as confused as I felt, and the icy shell that had been forming around my heart seemed to crack and fall away a little. We could still share confusion. We could still share each other.
He didn’t think I was a monster. Even if he was being forced to think about what his beliefs really meant, that didn’t mean he thought I was a monster.
“Government might have known about aliens before this, might not,” continued Toni easily. “I mean, the shape of the invasion sort of implies there are other species out there—or there were, once, before they got devoured alive by the plant people. You don’t go zero to this sort of hunting strategy. So maybe there’s been contact before, from civilizations that aren’t even there anymore, because they’ve been eaten. Or maybe we’ve been in constant contact for decades, and that’s where frozen yogurt and memory foam really come from. None of that matters.”
“So what does matter?” Graham asked.
Silence, I thought. What mattered was that if the government had been in touch with all those people, they’d never told any of the rest of us about it. They’d never sent out a warning about flowers with wings for petals, or the unexpected scent of every good thing in the middle of the forest. They had never been willing to tell, to share what they knew, choosing the status quo over preserving lives and changing the world.
Toni glanced at me and smirked, reading my thoughts in my face. “None of you can lie for shit, you know that? Every one of you I’ve ever met has been an open book. It must be part of the process, because I’m an awesome liar when I need to be. What matters, dude who dates plants, is that even if the government has known about aliens for years, we haven’t. We’ve been allowed to bumble along in the dark, with no idea what is or isn’t out there. So maybe I’m not giving them the benefit of the doubt and this is going to be as much of a surprise for them as it is for the rest of the world, or maybe they’ve been hiding shit. It’s cool either way. My signal’s out in the world, and people can hear it anytime they want, and even if no one knows what it says, they know it’s from space. They know that we’re not alone.”
“That isn’t going to stop the invasion.” My voice: my words. Graham shot me another stricken look. I kept my eyes steadfastly forward, refusing to look at him. If he was starting to hate me, I didn’t want to see that shining in his eyes.
“No, but it may help us get ready,” said Toni. “Humans are pretty badass when we need to be. We survive all sorts of shit that should kill us. If we’re prepared when you fucking space weeds come to take our world, maybe we’ll stand a chance.”
I didn’t say anything. Toni swung between resignation and defiance like an out-of-control pendulum, and I wasn’t sure how to deal with it. If she had been one of my customers, I would have asked her to calm down before I was forced to terminate the call. Sadly, that didn’t work in face-to-face interactions.
“So I just need them to believe me,” she said, and hit a quick series of keys. “If that means kicking off an international panic because everyone is expecting the aliens to swoop out of the sky at any moment, I’m cool with it. I’ve been living with the idea for most of my life, and I’m still standing. So come on, Marigold. Tell me what this says.”
She hit another key, and the signal out of space filled the room in static pop and strange harmonics, like a whalesong stolen out of the sky. It was white noise at first, fizzes and hums and other, deeper notes, none made by any intentional mind.
Then the signal began.
It rose and it fell and I closed my eyes, letting it wash over me and carry me away, because I knew this sound, I knew this song. It was the signal from the news and it wasn’t at the same time. That signal had been flattened down and equalized to sound more dramatic, trimming away the fat—the pauses, the hisses, the hesitations that were the message taking form. This was what I had been supposed to hear all along. This was what the forest had been trying to whisper to me when I went there during the night.
The sound cut off abruptly. I flinched, unable to keep from reacting to the sudden hole where the world was supposed to be. I opened my eyes, and they were all staring at me, Toni and David and yes, even Graham, who had never looked at me with quite so much confusion in his eyes.
“Well?” demanded Toni. “What does it say?”
“Stasia?” said Graham. “Is it real?”
They were conflicting questions. They were the same question. I swallowed, reaching up with both hands to push my hair back from my face, and said, “It’s real. It’s ours. I mean, it’s from our fleet.”
Graham’s laugh was tight and bitter. “I guess that’s a good thing. We don’t have two invasions heading for us at the same time. Hoorah for that.”
Somehow, I didn’t think he meant what he was saying. I raked my hands through my hair again, trying to let the motion steady me, and said, “They’re coming. They’re… I think they’re really close now. It won’t be much longer before they get here.”
“You’re not answering my question, Tulip,” said Toni. “What does it say ?”
I looked at her. “I can’t tell you.”
Her eyes narrowed. “That wasn’t the deal.”
Right. “Okay, first, we didn’t have a deal so much as you talked a lot and assumed because I wasn’t making you stop, I was agreeing with everything you said. I’m sorry you nearly got eaten by one of our conversion flowers when you were a kid.” That was mostly true. I was sorry, because it seemed to have messed her up pretty seriously. But there would still have been an Antonia Fabris in the world if she had been consumed, and maybe that one would have been happier. It was difficult to say. “I didn’t do it. I sprouted on the other side of the country, and I’m not sorry to be what I am.”
“I bet your parents would say otherwise.”
That stung. I squared my shoulders, and said, “That doesn’t matter, because they’re not here. I’m here, and I say I never agreed to anything. I’d tell you anyway, because it’s only fair, except I can’t. The message is… It doesn’t translate to this language. I’m not sure it translates to any language on this planet.”
“How do plants even have a language?” she spat.
“I don’t know,” I said, with absolute sincerity. “There’s a lot I don’t know. I’ve been waiting for the ships to arrive for my whole life, because maybe they know the things I don’t. I hope they do, at least. But I know what it says. I just don’t know how to put it into Earth words.”
“Try,” said David, and his voice was cold: for the first time, he sounded like he might actually believe what Toni was saying.
“Um.” I raked my hands through my hair again. “Okay. They’re saying they’re some distance away—I can’t tell you how far, the distance literally doesn’t translate into anything I can say in English—but they’re coming, and they’re so proud of us for surviving, they know we’ve been waiting for them to come and get us, and they’re going to be here soon. Very soon. Less than one full sprouting season.”
“How long is a sprouting season?” asked Graham.
“I don’t know. ” I glared at him, making no effort to conceal my frustration. If anyone was going to understand how much this bothered me, it should have been him. “The words they’re using, they’re just… I can understand them, sort of, but it’s like knowing what the cat means when it starts meowing. You don’t really share a language. You share some basic ideas of what it is to be alive, but that’s where it falls apart. That’s how it is with me and this signal. I think that’s how it’s going to be for all of us and the signal. We’ll recognize it, because it was meant for us, but we’re not going to be able to translate it the way you translate the Swedish instructions on your IKEA furniture.”
“How can you even understand that much if you don’t speak the language?” asked Toni.
“I don’t know,” I said. “But they’re coming. If that’s what you wanted to confirm, it’s confirmed. They’re coming.”
“Can we have a copy of the raw data?” asked Graham.
Toni turned to stare at him. “You come here, you don’t tell me anything I didn’t already know, and now you want me to share my findings with you? With her ?” She jabbed a finger at me. “She’s the enemy. Even if you can’t see that now, you’re going to see it pretty soon, when her people get here and you have to pick a side.”
“You seem pretty confident that I’m going to pick humanity.”
“We all will. Even those of us who don’t have much reason to like people are going to choose humanity, because the alternative is extinction. You, Rose.” She focused on me again, and I successfully fought the urge to take a step backward. “Do you know where you’re going to take your stand? Because I’m betting it’s not with the species you introduced yourself to with a murder. That little girl you killed, she’s dead. You can walk around with her face and her name and her family and pretend you’re doing all the things she would have done, but you know it’s not true just as well as I do. You’re a liar and a thief, and you’re not going to choose the monkeys over the trees. It’s going to cost you everything, and you’re going to side with your own species anyway, because that’s what people do. We side with our own.”
“Graham is one of your own, and he’s the one asking for a copy,” I said.
Toni drew back, looking surprised. Then she laughed. “I guess that’s true,” she said. “So sure. I’ll run one off for him—for you too. Maybe you’ll figure out what you want to know. But you haven’t finished paying for it yet.”
“No?” I asked.
“No.” She narrowed her eyes. “I said I wanted to know why. You said you’d tell me. You owe me that much.”
I didn’t owe her anything. She was just a woman with a telescope and a satellite array, which she happened to have pointed at the sky at the right time. I could walk away with my conscience clear, and never look back. But she had made the choice to share the signal with the world, which was why we were here, listening to it, having some small degree of warning that whatever mission had seen me planted on this planet was finally drawing to an end. So no, I didn’t owe her, but maybe I pitied her a little. Maybe pitying her was enough.
“They’re coming because that’s what we do. We come, and we harvest, and we go. Maybe someday we come back, but it takes a long, long time.”
“Why?” asked David. He was the one who supposedly didn’t believe in any of this, but there was a certain fascination in his expression all the same.
“Because it takes a long, long time for another harvest to be ready,” I said.
I saw the horror on his face. I saw the confusion, and the denial, and the hope that maybe he was right and I was wrong: this was all a lie.
“I’ll be outside,” I said, and turned, and walked away.