Page 31 of Overgrowth

Somewhere above North America: time unknown

Invasion ongoing

1.

I woke with a gasp, and promptly started to gag as mammalian instincts kicked in and told me I wasn’t meant to float suspended in a column of golden fluid; that I would, in fact, drown and die if I attempted that particular feat. The fact that I’d been doing it without issue for some unknown period of time didn’t seem to matter to my sudden, instinctive conviction that I was going to die.

Thrashing, I slammed my hands against what I assumed was a glass barrier. They broke through with a moist sucking sound, shattering the thin vegetable membrane that had been keeping both me and the fluid contained. It rushed out with a glurping, wet finality, carrying me with it, sending us both crashing to the moss-covered floor. I lay there, naked, wet, and gasping for air that my logical mind was insisting ever more loudly I didn’t actually need.

Moss. Wait. I rolled onto my back, unsurprised when my eyes found a high, distant ceiling of what looked like woven ferns, green and leafy and protecting us from whatever was outside. The moss was cool against my back, almost comforting, like the embrace of a good friend, and—

I sat upright, wiping the slime from my eyes. Friends. My friends. The vines had taken them as they had taken me, and humans—real humans— did need to breathe, no matter what the voice of the forest might try to say. I staggered to my feet, drip ping viscous fluid everywhere, and whirled around to look at my surroundings.

I was in what could best be described as a grove, surrounded by trees that looked like a cross between mangroves and ancient oaks. Their trunks were twisted and weathered, each bigger around than most dining room tables. Large yellow fruit hung from their branches. I took a step closer to the nearest. The fruit pulsed, opaque and filled with something that moved, small twitches of animal vitality. I put a hand over my mouth.

It was Jeff.

His eyes were closed and his clothing was gone; the few strips of human-colored skin he had remaining were in the process of detaching from his body, leaving clean green skin behind. His twitching seemed to be entirely automatic, not tied to any kind of conscious motion. If it hadn’t been for the liquid surrounding him, I would have thought he was sleeping.

// yes. //

The whisper was no louder than usual, but was terribly urgent for happening when I was awake. I turned. There were more of those trees, with more yellow, fluid-filled fruits dangling from their branches. There was nothing else. Only trees, and moss, and the strange prisons of my friends.

// come. //

One of the trees twitched. It was a small motion. It was still visible, and so alien that it took my breath away. I had to swallow laughter. I was almost certainly on a spaceship; I was naked, and green, and no longer needed to breathe; at least one of my companions had been shoved inside a giant apricot to have a nice rest. All that, and it was the moving tree that bothered me.

Maybe it didn’t matter how much the pollen modified my thoughts. My humanity would win out in the end.

I walked cautiously toward the tree that had gestured me forward. It moved its branches again, and there were my clothes, and Jeff’s, and Tahlia’s, folded in neat little piles. Their shoes were gone. Apparently, they no longer needed those. I picked up the pieces I recognized, shaking them out before awkwardly pulling them over my sap-sticky limbs and tugging them into place as best as I could. I felt better once I was no longer showing my green ass to whatever happened to wander up behind me. “Human” was still an unusual-enough form for my people that I doubted most of them would understand what my nudity meant, but that didn’t mean I wanted to explain.

A narrow channel was worn in the moss in front of the beckoning tree, curving around the trunk. I gave my shirt a final tug and started walking, feeling the soles of my feet grip the ground, feeling my legs strengthen with every step. Was it me working out the last of the kinks from my nap, or was I actually pulling nutrients out of the soil? I knew virtually nothing about my own biology. It was unnerving.

The path wound through more of the massive trees until it began sloping downward, the moss giving way to ankle-high grass. I realized where I was going a moment before I reached the edge of the bowl cut into the ground, and beheld the flowers.

They looked like they did in my dreams, smaller than the one that made me, but with dragonfly wings for petals and soft, sticky-smelling centers. Their tendril-vines writhed gently, never quite stilling, never moving aggressively. There must have been thirty of them, and seeing them lifted my heart and stopped it in the same moment. This was the vehicle of the invasion, the true invasion, the one that began with infiltration across the gulf of stars. This was—

// home. //

The whisper was sweet, soft as the breeze generated by their tinkling petals. I felt nothing from the flowers but love. They were welcoming me in the only way they knew how, scenting the air with their perfume and inviting me to come, to lie down in their midst and let them know me completely, let them under stand the shape of this new cultivar, grown in the soil of a new garden. I took a step forward.

A tentacle covered in velvety green fur, like moss but softer, wrapped around my wrist and held me fast. I froze, staring at it, trying not to scream. I had seen it before, in a pollen-fueled dream, but it had seemed less… organic, then. Everything Jeff and I had experienced in our hallucination of the scout ship had felt real. Now, looking at Second’s tentacle, I realized we had been experiencing the cheery cartoon version of our own species, with all its dangers and darkness cleansed away.

Some of the mossy fronds were longer than others, tipped in creamy yellow. Tiny parasites like aphids clung there, abdomens exposed to the air. Others were chewing on the moss. Second didn’t seem to notice, or maybe she just didn’t care; clearly, this was normal for her, even if it was terrifying and strange for me.

// hello, sister // she said. The words were accompanied by a soft fluting sound I guessed must be her native language.

I didn’t want to see her face. I didn’t want to turn around and know what she really looked like, what my eyes had interpreted as a friendly, lemur-like creature. I had accepted her as my sister. I had accepted her as my kind . I wasn’t sure acceptance could stand up to reality.

Another soft, fluting noise. // it is difficult, in the beginning. you may find me fearsome. but I will always be your sister. I will always care for you. in time, perhaps, you will care for me as strongly, and for the brothers and sisters we find in the next garden, waiting to be brought home. //

“Are you reading my mind?”

The tentacle constricted and then relaxed, a gesture I interpreted as laughter. // there is no need. the flowers tell me what your words mean—you have such a loud language, so sharp, so full of edges. it is like stony soil. it makes us richer. //

“Wait until you hear Mandy when she’s mad,” I muttered.

Another laugh from Second. // when I was carried from garden to homeship, I felt the same as you must be feeling now. all things around me were so strange, so different from the forest-cities I knew. the brother who greeted me was terrible to behold. he is my dearest friend and confidant now. he is very eager to meet you. your eye will grow accustomed to the sight of me, as your heart already has. //

“A homeship… Are we in space? Are we in outer space right now?”

// we are outside the range of your garden’s atmosphere by a hundred of your miles. // Second sounded, as always, infinitely patient. I was her charge, and she was going to take care of me. // we brought you here to prevent loss. one of the other seedlings was hurt. so badly hurt. she had to be tended, or she would not have lived. you, also, needed tending. //

“But the senator—”

// he was not hurt. he was lost. the scout you encountered then was not equipped to carry so many. we could not have saved you all. //

All… “We had humans with us. Natives of this garden, the people we’re templated off. Where are they? They need to breathe if they’re going to stay alive.” Please tell me you didn’t stuff them in those fruits, I thought. Please tell me they’re okay.

// ah. your pets. I will take them to you, if you will do a thing for me, first. //

“Anything.”

// look at me. // Her tentacle squeezed my wrist lightly before letting go, retracting into the space behind me. It was my move. I could stand here forever, if I really thought I needed to.

Slowly, trembling, I turned around.

The basic strokes of her had been present in the pollen haze: there was some similarity between her face and a lemur’s, and while I was willing to assume the creature she had consumed as part of her growth process hadn’t been mammalian—not by Earth standards, anyway—it looked as if it had been close enough to have strong similarities. Her skin, the same shade of green as my own, was ridged with wrinkles and glistened with sticky sap that looked surprisingly like mucus. Her eyes bulged, supported by hard fleshy shelves that jutted from the lines of her cheekbones, sharper and more angular than a human’s could ever have been. When she blinked, her lids approached from either side, rather than closing from the top down. Her mouth was small and pursed, almost like a sphincter. She couldn’t have been a predator. She didn’t have the jaws for it.

I didn’t look any lower. Her face was a horror and a shock, but it had enough in common—terribly—with the lifeforms I was accustomed to that it didn’t actually make me want to scream and run away. If I looked lower, that fragile peace might shatter, and I might find myself in trouble.

The flesh around her eyes crinkled as several of her top tentacles waved. She was, in her way, smiling.

// you are terrible to me as well, sister, with your smoothness and your smallness and your worthless limbs // she said, not unkindly. // you can see me and I can see you, and we can see our kinship for all of our differences, we remain united. //

United… “The pollen from the scout ship, that let me talk to you,” I said. “Is it changing me? Is it changing us ?”

Second’s tentacles waved in clear distress. // this is not a good thing to speak of. you wished to see your pets. //

“Not if I’m going to eat them,” I snapped. “They’re not pets, they’re friends. This… this species”—I waved at myself, indicating form, if not function—“forms very strong social bonds. Most of us never made many, but the ones we have are important to us. They matter. Our mental health requires them.”

// interconnecting roots // said Second, her mental tone filled with awe. // but we have seen war. we have seen privation and need, even amongst plenty. if the social bonding of your host garden is so strong, how is it that these things can be? had the garden been nothing but peace, we would have left you planted, to age and die among your hosts, and gone to the next world in need of replanting. //

“That sounds a lot like a justification.”

// it is as it is. we do the work of the Great Root. we leave the peaceful gardens to flourish. we take the warring ones, and improve them through our presence. //

There was so much about that that I wanted to unpack and understand. I left it for now, and said, “There’s war and famine and all sorts of bad stuff here because humans can only hold so many other humans in their minds at one time. They’re interconnected to a point. They need those connections to stay stable.”

// and you need those connections as well? // Second waved her tentacles in bewilderment. // this is not a common thing. how many such connections do your hosts require? how many of you must be planted in each crop? //

“What do you mean?” I paused. “And you still haven’t answered my question about the pollen.”

// all will be known when all is meant to be known. // Whenever she “spoke,” the words were accompanied by the hooting sound I’d heard before. It was remarkably varied for a language that appeared to have no consonants. // friends or pets, I can take you to them, if you will stop asking things you are not yet ready to know. //

“All right,” I said, after a moment’s hesitation. “Take me.”

Second turned to slither-walk down the path, and I followed her, trying to study my surroundings without staring at the surface of her mossy carapace. Evolution had made her, and our species—whatever it was called—had stolen her, keeping her in her own image. But why? Why wouldn’t we revert back to the mossy-hill form that First had shown me, in the shadow of the pollen?

I remembered how beautiful First had been. Had that been true, or had that been another trick, like Second’s cartoonish harmlessness? They were trying to ease us into things. I should probably have been grateful. Instead, I was scared—and scared of the moment when I would stop being scared.

They had dropped us here to acquire cultural literacy, to learn the people we were intended to infiltrate and destroy. Second and the Swift had both been welcoming, even ingratiating, but they stressed family relationships Jeff and I hadn’t even known existed as if they should trump everything else. Maybe for our original species, that was how it worked. Humans could be xenophobic, afraid of what they didn’t know. I wasn’t getting any fear from Second. Instead, I was getting… not quite disdain, but something similar. She simply didn’t care about these people who weren’t a part of her copse. They had no relevance to her.

What if humanity’s real distinction in the universe was hyper-sociality? The ability to form and maintain connections with people based on nothing more than a common interest or experience? I was starting to wonder whether the vague unsociability that seemed to run through every member of my species wasn’t a tweak like the compulsion to announce our origins, but an innate function of what we were. Humanity—the humanity we’d stolen from our hosts when we devoured them—could be the aberration. By the standards of our parents, we were the hyper-social ones.

It was bizarre. I didn’t like the implications, and so to distract myself, I began looking around as I followed Second through the ship, studying the different trees.

They were trees, of that there was no question: they had trunks, and branches, and things that I could interpret as leaves or needles, although they took so many dissimilar forms that only their proximity made them recognizable as connected. Some had trunks like honeycomb, so full of holes that they came pre-drilled for nesting purposes. Others were covered in thorns like bony teeth, and still others actually had teeth, set into openings like pitcher plants. As we walked by, one of those toothy maws opened and spat a neatly stripped skeleton onto the mossy ground.

Second, who saw me looking, waved her tentacles in approval. // we carry every garden with us // she said. // the trees of my host’s garden bring me great comfort and happiness. I sit beneath them, and taste their fruits, and remember the days of my youth. when I seed, my children will know those fruits as well, and understand how delicious was their parent’s garden. //

“So there are going to be Earth trees here?”

// so many, of so many kinds. we will build a paradise in image of your garden, and all will know its glory. we have been here before, and those trees still flourish, on the ships that once came. //

“What did you eat, the last time you came?”

// so many things. // Her tone was evasive; she said nothing else after that, but continued down the path.

“Great,” I muttered. “What killed the dinosaurs? Oh, alien space plants killed the dinosaurs. Next question? Yes, the rights are available, Mr. Shyamalan.”

Second didn’t answer me, but she hooted softly, and I could all but feel her amusement. It was getting easier and easier to read her, to know what she was thinking. I couldn’t tell whether that was familiarity or the pollen at work. I didn’t like that. My thoughts were supposed to be my own, not dictated and revised by proximity to my own species.

The path wound through the trees, apparently allowed to set its own borders. Roots broke through the moss here and there, some stationary and recognizable as kin to our Earth trees, others moving in small, deliberate arcs as they hunted for prey. I gave those ones a wide berth. It was hard to say whether they would consider me edible, but I had no desire to get into a tug-of-war with a tree.

We began climbing a small slope. Second’s tentacles made it easy for her—she seemed to view gravity as something of an afterthought—while I struggled to reach the top. She caught my wrist with one of her top tentacles, keeping me from tumbling over the edge and into a basin filled with flowers. Not the kind that birthed me, which were tall and crystalline: these were much smaller, perhaps the height of an adult tomato plant, with petals like the wings of morpho butterflies, blue and silver and glis tening in the light. But they were clearly from the same original world; their structure betrayed them.

Tendrils like swollen roots extended from the base of each flower, tangling and twisting over one another, forming a net that covered the entire floor of the basin. They were massed over the center, forming a latticed dome. I peered at them, trying to figure out what was in the middle.

Then I saw a flash of red, the color of Graham’s hair, and I knew.

Ripping my arm out of Second’s grasp, I flung myself into the basin, sliding down the wall and crashing into the front wave of the flowers. Their petals fluttered in silent dismay, and some of them actually moved away from me, showing an animal awareness as unsettling as it was expected. Of course they could move. Everything here could move. Any world capable of creating something like me would have to have created more-mobile vegetation. Nothing happens in a vacuum.

When I reached the root-dome, I began clawing at it, trying to make the individual tendrils let go. They felt unpleasantly like bones, dry and terrible and warm, so damn warm. I didn’t want to think about what could have made them that warm.

I had a terrible feeling I already knew.

At first, the individual roots making up the dome were rigid, refusing to yield to me. Then, bit by bit, they began letting go, letting me peel them back, breaking the tension. I kept scrabbling, kept fighting, until abruptly the entire dome unwound, the flowers choosing to retreat rather than keep fighting me.

There on the ground were my friends, all of them, naked as the day they’d been born: Toni and David, Mandy and Graham… and Lucas.

Lucas, whose skull was split like a ripe pomegranate, showing the terrible red and white and gray inside. Lucas, whose skin was pierced with a hundred roots, all of them pulsing slightly as they pulled the last of the life from his body, drinking him deeply, and I couldn’t even be angry, I couldn’t blame them, because his injury… it wasn’t the sort of thing a human could survive. If he was still alive to feed them, it was because they were keeping him that way, not because he was going to get better. No one sustained that much brain damage and got better. Half his head was gone.