Page 26 of Overgrowth

Tucson, Arizona: August 7, 2031

Invasion Day

1.

I opened my eyes on the alien sky I normally saw above the forest. For the first time, it was perfectly clear, unobscured by trunks or branches. I gasped, sitting upright, digging my fingers into the grassy knoll beneath me. They felt strange. I glanced to my left and saw that my hand was a hand again, even though this was the landscape of my dreams, the place where my slow mutation had been more than skin-deep. Disentangling my fingers from the grass, I raised my hand to eye level and studied it carefully. The green shade of my skin was what I had come to expect, but the hand itself was back to a perfectly human norm, shaped and sculpted by Anastasia Miller’s DNA.

“This should be less traumatic for you.”

My head snapped around as I shoved myself to my feet, stumbling away from the woman standing next to me. She looked like me or, rather, she looked like Anastasia Miller, refined down to the purest expression of what she might have been, had she remained perfectly human. She was tall, slimmer than I was, with an athletic build I had never aspired to maintain. Her hair fell around her face in perfect waves, sleek and cut to flatter her bone structure. Even her makeup was perfect.

She blinked in confusion. “Is it not?” she asked, and her voice was an eerie echo of my own played through a set of speakers, rendered foreign to my ears by its distance. “Most have appreciated seeing the face of their foster species, at least in the beginning.”

I eyed her warily. “Who are you?”

“We have names, but not in the way your ‘humans’ do. Verbal speech has never been our primary means of communication.” She sounded apologetic, at least. That was something. “You may call me ‘First,’ because I have been chosen to carry the honor of being the first to contact this world’s harvest. We are so happy to meet you, as we have always been happy to bring our bountiful children home.”

My wariness faded into a suspicious frown. “This isn’t what you really look like. This isn’t what I really look like.”

“No, this isn’t what I really look like. Your own face, however, is the one you will wear for the length of your growth in this or any other world. You are lovely.” She smiled. “All of you are lovely. What a strange garden this has been, to make you so! Every garden is different, but it is always a delight to see the first harvest home.”

“What do you look like under there?” I waved a hand. “How are you doing this?”

“This place, this… ‘forest’ was the word you used, yes? This forest belongs to us all, but it can be shaped by those with more experience. I have been here for a long time by the standards of one as young as you. I can make the forest sing to match my breath. Without a guiding hand, it will turn itself toward what was lost. You were seeing the self you wear here shift to what will never be, to fit a soil so long lost that it may as well be left forgotten. That is fair, because it is true. It is also unfair, because it can never be again. Better for each harvest to hold to the shapes they bloomed in, here, where time has little hold.”

I stared at her, this woman who wore my face and spoke in riddles, trying to see through her pink skin and sweet smile to the alien I knew lurked beneath. It was a word filled with dark connotations: “lurk.” Like she meant to do me harm. But then, she might. We were, as everyone had been so eager to point out, killers, murderers, seeds scattered on unfriendly soil and left to germinate in our own way and in our own time. Maybe the ones who’d planted us—as carelessly as they had—had never intended us to be anything but harvest.

Her smile faltered. “There are no secrets here,” she said. “Not from your elders. Not from each other, in time. Once you have fully flowered, you will understand. You will step into the song, and you will know how much we love you. How is it you do not already know, when we found you such a good garden to grow in, when we left the shadow of the forest to keep you in comfort? What has this world done to you, to leave you so suspicious of your sister?”

“I’m an only child.”

“Oh, my dear, no. No. You have never been that.” She spread her arms. The meadow around us began to bloom, great flowers with dragonfly wings in place of petals breaking through the ground. Their perfume filled the air, and it was the scent of blood. Not human, but so close, coppery and rich with nutrients and iron. I breathed it in, and knew these flowers for both my past and my future, as they had always been, as they would always be.

The flower closest to First grew into the height and maturity I was used to seeing in the forest, its heavy head drooping slightly. She placed her hand on the fleshy spot where the stem joined with the flower, and said, “We come from such beautiful, humble beginnings, all of us. Almost any soil can nurture us this far. Then, if the soil is good, the next step is reached.”

The flower began growing again. Its stem swelled, becoming almost barrel-like at the base, while the top foot or so remained more slender, only as thick around as my wrist. The petals grew longer, taking on a thousand iridescent colors, so that when they rippled, it was a mesmerizing rainbow, as rich as the sheen of oil on crystalline water. The scent grew stronger as well, and began to smell of so many impossible things, Graham’s spaghetti and my grandmother’s perfume and Mandy’s favorite hairspray and cookies fresh out of the oven. Every good thing the world had ever known was in that smell, and all I wanted was to be closer to it.

No, whispered a deep-buried instinct, and I stayed where I was, watching the flower become glorious and grand. First smiled at me.

“The pollen is no longer needed to attract a mate, for the flower is no longer determined to reproduce. It will transform itself instead, and it spends its resources on attracting the resources to fuel that transformation. The soil is good. Now is when it finds out whether the world is good.” The vine-like structures around the base of the flower rose delicately off the ground, hovering around knee level. It was easy to picture them striking and seizing their prey, pulling it toward the center of that glorious flower—

—which began to open, not like a mouth, but like a second unfurling, like the petals within the petals were finally grown and mature. What they revealed was nothingness, a maw leading into the center portion of the plant.

First saw me seeing the change, and nodded. The vines pulled tight against the bulb of the body. The flower closed itself, first internally, and then externally, as the dragonfly petals furled tight. It drooped before finally dropping off, leaving the severed stem behind as the barrel swelled and glowed from within, ripening with the strange biological process of duplication.

“This is, sadly, often where we fail,” said First. “We find the world is not good, that the soil is sweet but the flesh is sour, and we watch our seedlings wither and die unfed, unable to reproduce themselves. We can and will try again, seeding the world over and over until it decides to grow. And when it grows…”

The barrel swelled further before it finally burst, spilling a small version of me—of First—of Anastasia Miller out onto the ground. It stood, wet with the juices of its alien origin, and wiped the sap from its eyes before it smiled and ran away, disappearing into the flowers like the phantom that it was.

“Once our seedlings become mobile, they grow. They absorb the nutrients and possibilities of their new world, and they find the ones who look like them, to tell them of our coming. Some will die during this process, unable to digest the specific slice of world they have consumed, and we will learn from that. Others will sprout later than their siblings, and join them after the bulk of the work has been done. All are welcome, always. We are so joyous when we reach a new garden and find a good harvest waiting for us.”

“Is this planet a good harvest?” I asked numbly.

First shook her head. “No,” she said. “Less than half of the seeds we sent have sprouted and survived to meet us. The creatures this world evolved for its own pleasure are not gentle. The soil is good but the hands that work it are cruel. How fortunate, that we have found it, and will be better stewards.”

Her voice was cool, calm: she sounded like one of my neighbors back in Seattle talking about weeding their garden. My mouth went dry. I swallowed, trying to chase away the sudden dread that filled me.

“What do you mean?”

“When enough seeds have sprouted and reached mobility, when enough of them have reached maturity among their host species, they form the forest between them,” said First, ignoring my question. Or maybe not. Maybe she understood that my question had never really needed an answer. “We see it flicker and form, becoming a bright beacon across the gulf of space. ‘Come for us,’ it cries. ‘Come and bring us home.’ When we see the forest form, we know the soil is good and the meat is plentiful, and we turn our sights toward our newest destination. That is what has brought us here, to you, to reap what we have sown.”

She had to be getting her words from the forest: there was no other way she could be using English idiom and imagery with such ease. Still… “I thought you sent us here to obtain cultural literacy, to make it easier to hunt the humans.”

Her smile was the sun on a rainy afternoon. “It’s always so delightful when our seedlings are able to reach that conclusion on their own. Of course it would be you. I have known so many of your cultivar, and you have always been clever, always been swift to understand what is needed from you. First the seeds test the soil. Then the flowers test the flesh. Then the seedlings test the world. If all of you had died before you could form the forest, we would have grieved you, but we would have known we didn’t belong here.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You will.” First stepped forward, reaching out to touch my cheek with one familiar, unfamiliar hand. “This is such an interesting form. The biology of this world must be fascinating. Is everything here bipedal and symmetrical?”

“Symmetrical, yes, bipedal, no. Some things don’t have any legs, some have hundreds.”

Her eyes lit up. “What a wealth of things to experience! But this is the dominant life form, yes? We have chosen correctly?”

“Chosen… I didn’t choose this… I ate a little girl. ”

“You gave her a chance to transcend the limits of her origins and become something more,” said First. “Everything your first meal would have been in life, you have been, and more.”

It was difficult to believe we had each somehow managed to consume an antisocial misanthrope by random chance. It was also tempting to believe her, to let everything she said be the absolute truth. Of course I’d lived Anastasia Miller’s life the same way she would have lived it, apart from the whole “alien plant person” thing. I hadn’t done anything wrong. I hadn’t stolen anything from anyone.

I knew that wasn’t true. But oh, it was tempting to pretend.

“These humans, they are the dominant species, yes?” First looked at me expectantly.

I couldn’t lie to her. I didn’t know why I couldn’t. It just didn’t seem possible. “Yes,” I said. “They number in the billions.”

“The billions, ” she said, in a tone of delighted wonder. Her eyes grew heavy-lidded and hungry. “Think of the harvest to come. We will dine for years on the spoils of this garden.”

“I still don’t understand.”

“You will.” Her hand cupped my cheek. “You have a question for me.”

I had a million questions for her. Right now, however, there only seemed to be one that mattered.

“What are we really? When we’re not wearing something else’s shape?”

“Look.”

Slowly, her human mien melted away, first turning green to match my skin, and then shredding completely. Vines slithered out of her hair as it receded, and flowers bloomed where her ears had been. Then she began to grow, swelling and expanding until she was the size of a small hill. Flowers with dragonfly-wing petals sprouted out of her back, turning their faces toward the sun, and I knew without asking that this was how seeds were made: our ancestors grew the flowers from their own bodies, and when they withered, they left their children behind. I had grown from a flower like those ones. These were my kin.

Her eyes, such as they were, were holes filled with gleaming beads of sap. I didn’t know how she could see me. I didn’t know how she could think, with every inch of her made of vegetation and captive loam, chunks of soil held by the roots and creeper vines that ran all through the bulk of her body. I blinked, and realized that my eyes were filled with tears.

“You’re so beautiful,” I whispered.

She had no mouth. She had no lips. And still, I felt she smiled.