Page 32 of Overgrowth

The others looked like they were sleeping, pillowed on beds of small violet flowers that blinked at me like alien eyes. Different vines, these ones pale purple, a few shades lighter than the flowers, ran up their nostrils and held their mouths closed.

// the pollen gives sweet dreams to all hot-blooded species we have discovered in our travels // said Second, the hooting seeming almost like an afterthought to her silent words. // it does not harm them. //

“How do I wake them up?” The thought that perhaps it might not be a good idea to wake them here, in a completely alien world that was hard for even me to deal with, never crossed my mind. They were asleep. There was no way for me not to see them as in dire and immediate danger. They needed to wake up.

// the little cousins keep them dreaming // said Second. // they will be safe until we are ready for them to awake. //

“I’m ready for them to be awake now. ” I turned, leveling a narrow-eyed glare on her. The horror of her face and form had worn off during our walk; now she was still terrible and strange, but she was also my sister, and we were having our first real family fight. Goodie for us. “Tell me how to wake them up, or I’m going to start ripping things out by the root.”

// remarkable how violent this garden is // she said, with almost-academic fascination. // touch the tendrils of the little cousins. they will know their job is done. they will withdraw. //

The little cousins had to be the flowers that had rammed their vines into everyone’s noses. I bent to touch them, and stopped, considering my options.

My instinct was to wake Graham first. Of all the people on the ground, he was the most important to me, and he was a scientist; he might take all this in stride. Of course, that also meant that if the little cousins had done something to damage my friends—something Second might not know about, being such a newcomer to the wonders of human biology—I would be learning about it from, again, the person most important to me. It seemed like a bad risk.

Toni was a wild card. Sometimes she was on our side and sometimes she wasn’t. but she was also a scientist, and David was big enough to hurt me if he panicked, and Mandy…

Mandy had been Lucas’s friend before she was mine. The sight of him, laid out and feeding the flowers, might be more than she could handle.

Decision made, I leaned forward and touched the vines running into Toni’s nose with one trembling finger. They twitched at the contact, before beginning to pull away.

They moved with surprising speed for something that looked so much like an Earth plant, unwinding themselves from Toni’s body inches at a time. The second surprise was the sheer length of the vines. They seemed to go on forever, first slick with what I assumed was mucus, then with something darker and more viscous. I didn’t know what kind of fluid that was, and I didn’t want to ask.

The last of the vines slithered out of Toni’s nose. Her eyes snapped open, and she sat up with a gasp, hands convulsively clutching the mossy soil beneath her. She looked around, eyes getting wider and wider as she took in everything around her. Finally, her gaze settled on Second. Her lower lip began to tremble. The skin around her eyes twitched.

She screamed.

“Toni!” I flung myself into her field of vision, cutting off the line of sight between the two of them. It didn’t help. I leaned forward and clapped my hand over her mouth, smothering the sound. She looked at me, eyes rolling wildly, chest heaving with the effort of continuing her scream.

“Breathe,” I said, and sucked in a slow breath, hoping she would follow my example. She didn’t. I kept my hand clamped over her mouth. “You have to stop screaming, and you have to breathe normally. You have to. Or I’m not sure they’re going to let you stay awake.”

That did it. Toni stopped screaming. She sucked in one long, wavering breath, and then another, before tapping my wrist with her free hand. Cautiously, I let her go.

“We’re on their ship,” she said, as soon as her mouth was free.

“Yes,” I agreed.

“That’s… Is that one of them ?” she asked, pointing at Second.

I glanced over my shoulder. The horror, which had already been dimming, dwindling to a dully felt idea rather than an immediate and urgent fear, had faded even further while I was talking to Toni. My monstrous sister looked as harmless and nonthreatening now as she had while under the influence of the scout ship’s pollen.

The human mind is infinitely adaptable. The mind of a creature capable of taming and colonizing an entire universe must be even more so. I turned back to Toni.

“This is my sister, Second,” I said, keeping my voice as calm and level as I could. Calm seemed like the most appropriate tool, given the situation. “She and I were sprouted from the same kind of seed, but her seed grew on a different planet, so we don’t look the same. I can talk to her through a sort of extension of the forest. She doesn’t want to hurt you.”

// your pet will be consumed, as will all its kind // said Second, in a tone that would have been reasonable, if not for the horror of its contents.

Toni, who heard only gentle hooting, relaxed slightly. “Re ally? Because she looks like something Wes Craven would have decided to make for a kiddie show host.”

“Really,” I assured her, while privately glad the pollen didn’t extend to true humans. “Are you all right? Are you hurt? Can you breathe?”

“I’m fine.” Toni took a deep breath, blinked in evident surprise, and then took another. “I’m… better than fine. I haven’t been able to breathe this easily since we left Maine. What did those plants do ?”

// the little cousins are used to restore and stabilize good crops that are not yet finished // said Second. // they can keep our stores healthy and filling long past when they would otherwise have been exhausted. //

I was not going to tell Toni any of that. “The flowers can sort of… They’re like little medical service centers,” I paraphrased. “They find damage, and they repair it.”

“Ah,” said Toni flatly. “They keep us fresh so you fuckers can eat us.”

// the crop understands. // Second sounded honestly delighted, like this was the best outcome she could have imagined.

I could think of a few better ones. “No one here is going to eat you,” I said.

“Can you make that promise for this whole fleet? For an entire species? Because I don’t think you can, and that means you’ve just abducted us all”—Toni waved a hand to indicate our sleeping friends—“from our home planet and carted us off into space to feed your alien plant buddies.”

“Family,” I said quietly. “And no, I can’t make that promise for my entire species, but I can promise you no one is going to hurt you while I have any say in the matter. You’re with me. I’ll do the best I can to keep you safe.”

“Right,” said Toni, after a long pause to consider. “Guess you’re the best shot I’ve got at getting through this bullshit choose-your-own adventure in one piece.” She finally turned to look at the others. Graham and Mandy barely got a glance. She looked at David longer, frowning at the tendrils extending up his nostrils, the way they pulsed and twitched.

“Was I like that?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “The flowers—Second calls them the ‘little cousins,’ so I guess they’re from our homeworld—keep the people they’re working on asleep.”

“Probably direct cerebral stimulation. Crude and disgusting, but effective. It feels like my nostrils got cleaned out with a Roto-Rooter.” She leaned closer. “How do you get them out?”

“Touch them and they withdraw.” I paused. “Well, if I touch them, they withdraw. I don’t know what they’d do if you touched them. You’re a mammal. They might decide they needed to get back to work.”

“Let’s not test it yet.” Slowly, she turned her attention to Lucas. I did the same. A knot formed in my throat, making it difficult to swallow… but there was no real sorrow behind it. He was dead. He was meat. I couldn’t bring him back, so why should I be overly worked up about it?

This was bad. Lucas had been my friend for years. He had provided me with a place to live and a shoulder to cry on when I’d needed it. I’d been intending to live with him until Graham and I got married, or until Roxanna insisted he throw Mandy and me out on the street—and that had seemed unlikely in the extreme. He’d been as loyal to me as I had been to him.

Even when he’d learned I hadn’t been kidding all these years, I had never been kidding, he’d come to help me. He’d been willing to stand beside me when every instinct he’d inherited from his primate ancestors—who had been smart and fast and lucky enough to tame a planet, making it a good garden for people like us to come and take as our own—had been screaming for him to run and not look back.

Lucas had gambled everything on our friendship being stron ger and better and cleaner than going to war against a force so vast that all the armies of the Earth would have difficulty comprehending it. He had gambled… and he had lost.

And I wasn’t even sad.

As if she sensed my distress, Second’s voice said, softly, // they are not worth mourning. they will fertilize good soil and grow strong seedlings, and so their place in the garden will be fulfilled. your lack of sadness says only you are remembering who you were always intended, by the Great Root’s mercy, to be. //

“Ever hear of a thing called a weed whacker?” I asked, without turning to face her. “Ask the collective unconscious of your spies on Earth, and shut the fuck up.” My sorrow might be broken. There was nothing wrong with my anger. Nothing at all. It was blazing as fierce and bright as it ever had, searching for a target that deserved it. The aliens who’d started all this; the humans who were doing their best to escalate it. Anyone and everyone was in the line of fire.

“He’s not dead,” said Toni. “He should be dead. Why isn’t he dead?”

“The little cousins again.” I pointed at the small flowers surrounding his head. Their vines didn’t match the ones that pierced his skin; while they also pulsed, they looked more like they were pushing something in than pulling something out. “They’re… they’re keeping him alive.”

“Ah.” Toni twisted enough to face Second. “You. Monkey-flower. Can you understand me? Raise your tentacles if you understand me.”

Second lifted the tentacles of both arms, waving them slowly in the air in front of her. Toni nodded, expression satisfied.

“Good,” she said. “You can clearly keep us alive long past the point where sensible mortality would have failed. The human body can continue to produce blood indefinitely. Why, with these two things being true, are you planning to invade us? Can’t you just stuff a few hundred people in your pantry and be done?”

// she cannot hear me // said Second, with some distress. // how am I to answer her? //

“I’ll relay,” I said. “Answer.”

Second gave a low, mournful hoot. As no translation accompanied it, I guess that it was her host species’ version of a sigh.

// the resources needed to sustain the little cousins are vast // she said, and I repeated, half a beat behind. // they will consume almost as much as we take from this good crop, and when they are no longer able to find excess, they will consume the crop that nurtures them. if we were to take only a few, we would soon have nothing at all, and we would wither and starve. //

Toni nodded thoughtfully. “So it’s absolutely a resource-management issue. If you can’t manage your resources, you run out. Whatever species you look like… what happened to them? Are there any of them left?”

Second shifted on her tentacles, looking uncomfortable. It was easy for me to read her now, and getting easier all the time. Soon, she would look as ordinary to me as the humans I’d grown up with. When that happened, it felt as if some intangible Rubicon would have been crossed in my psyche, and there would be no going back. Maybe there was already no going back. Maybe the idea that there could be was all denial.

Maybe there had never been any going back.

// they… endure, yes, they endure // she said, and I echoed, while Toni’s expression grew ever more thoughtful. // not all places are like this one. not all ships carry the sameness. //

“Uh-huh,” said Toni. She looked directly at me as she continued: “Let me tell you what I think it is you do, and you’ll tell me whether I’m right. Won’t that be fun? I think it will be fun. What I think it is you do, is you make collector ships, like this one, and you load them with samples of the dominant biological systems in your horrifying collections, and you bring on representatives of whatever planet you’re getting ready to invade, and you see what happens to them.”

Second was silent, and so was I.

“I mean, you’re not coming here and leaving without a box lunch or two thousand, so you need to know what humans can and can’t handle. What scares them. What they respond to.”

// make her stop // murmured Second.

“She’s uncomfortable with this line of thought,” I said.

Toni nodded, looking pleased. “It was the allergies, you know? A quarter of your spies died of anaphylactic shock. They couldn’t handle the proteins they encountered on Earth.” She sounded obscurely proud of that fact, like she had been personally responsible for the existence of allergens. “These ‘little cousins.’ You were using them to study our biology and make adjustments that would make it easier for us to survive on single-system ships. There’s a whole ship modeled after your home planet, isn’t there?”

// we preserve // said Second uncomfortably. // we do not destroy. we clean out the old growth and allow new growth to flourish. //

“Meaning I’m right.” Toni kept her eyes on me as I finished relaying. “They’re going to make a ship like this one, and they’re going to fill it with Earth. They’re going to create a dozen forest ecosystems, a hundred, all the trees, the plants, the animals that live there, and then they’re going to fill those ecosystems with us. With abductees they’ll carry to the stars. With livestock. And bit by bit, those box lunches will be replaced by themselves, remade in our image. They’re going to steal our faces, like we were just pretty baubles they could put on without understanding them. And then they’re going to go out there and do this all over again, to somebody else. To some other planet that deserved the chance at something better.”

// your pet is very clever // said Second. // we should kill it. //

“No one is killing anybody,” I said sharply. “Toni, what did you mean when you said they were making adjustments to your biology? Do you feel different?”

“I’m allergic to virtually everything,” she said. “I always have been. I don’t think I’ve been able to breathe out of both nostrils at the same time in over a decade. Well, here I am, surrounded by the biggest, most diverse botanical garden I’ve ever seen. I just had a flower rammed literally up my nose. And I can breathe just fine. It doesn’t take a genius to know the colonialist alien biotech is better than ours, and when you’re talking about an alien species that actively retains biological artifacts of all the different worlds that they’ve consumed, that tech would have to be worlds better, pardon the pun. Also I only screamed a little, and I should be way, way more upset right now. So we’re talking modification.”

“Do you think it’s safe to wake the others?”

Toni gave Lucas’s body a sidelong look. “I think they’re going to be unhappy, but I don’t think we should put it off any longer than absolutely necessary. Those little plants rewired my allergies and did something to my brain chemistry. The longer we give them, the more damage they can potentially do.”

That was all I needed to hear. I moved toward David, bending and running my fingers down the vines that tied him to the little cousins. They began to writhe and withdraw, leaving him gasping. I left him for Toni, moving on to Mandy and—most importantly, however much I didn’t want to admit that—Graham.

Mandy was starting to cough when Graham opened his eyes. I moved so my body was blocking her view of Lucas and grabbed the sides of his face, keeping his attention locked on me. He didn’t fight. He stared at me, eyes wide and bewildered.

“Stasia?” he said. “Your hair…”

Toni hadn’t said anything about my hair, but Toni wouldn’t have, would she? Toni didn’t care whether my hair was blonde or brown or bright green; Toni didn’t care about anything that didn’t immediately affect Toni. It would have been refreshing, if we hadn’t been in so damn much trouble.

“Mandy, I know you can hear me,” I said, voice tight. “Both of you, listen. Pay attention. I need you to focus on me, and pay attention.” I could hear the faint staccato sound of Toni murmur ing something I presumed was similar to David, keeping him focused, keeping him from noticing either the living corpse on the ground or the living nightmare standing nearby, keeping unwilling watch over us.

Graham licked his lips before asking, in a voice that cracked with both excitement and dread, “Are we on their ship?”

“We are. One of them, anyway.” I didn’t know the size of the fleet and it didn’t feel relevant just now: it felt like something we could deal with later. Something we would have to deal with later, since it wasn’t like we could turn them back. “Can you keep looking at me?”

“What don’t you want us to see?” asked Mandy. There was a sharp edge of panic under her voice, tamped down hard but still creeping toward the surface.

I hated to do this to them. I hated that we were all here, trapped, at the mercy of the species that created me. I and all my kind had been sent to Earth to become culturally literate and learn to hate the humans, and on the whole, we had done exactly what was expected of us. But humans were social creatures, which meant that we had become social creatures, and our hatred—all our hatreds—was inevitably underscored by love.

Had that ever happened before? I hoped so. I hoped humans weren’t the only species in the universe to learn how to love outside their immediate families, to see themselves as the part of something bigger and wider and more important. And I hoped not at the same time, because if it had happened before, if this sort of thing was common enough to have precedent, then there was no chance Earth was anything but doomed.

Graham sighed. The sound was deep and lonely, seeming to come from the very bottom of his lungs. “Lucas,” he said quietly. “She’s trying to keep us from seeing Lucas.”

I nodded, unsure what else to do.

“I saw him get shot,” said Mandy. “I thought he died.”

“Not quite,” I said. “But he’s not… he’s not Lucas anymore. The part of him that was Lucas didn’t make it after… I mean, that man shot him…”

“He shot him in the head,” said Graham. “There’s no way he could have survived that.”

“He was an organ donor,” I said, desperate to justify what had happened before they had to face it for themselves. “He always said he wanted his body to help other people if he wasn’t going to be using it anymore. And now he’s doing that. Sort of.”

Graham closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them again, they were filled with infinite sorrow. “Show me,” he said.

I glanced to Mandy. She nodded, agreeing with him. I sighed, and moved, taking the obstacle out of their line of sight.

Mandy put a hand over her mouth in unconscious imitation of Toni. Graham just looked, expression gravely neutral.

“What are the roots?” he asked.

“They’re draining his blood as his body generates it,” I said. “He’s not suffering, he’s not in any pain, and he’s not there anymore. But his body hasn’t quite… it hasn’t died yet.”

Mandy squeaked. I turned to look at her. Both her hands were clasped over her mouth now, pressed down tight, like she was trying to keep her breath inside. She lowered them slowly when she saw me looking, expression miserable.

“Is that what they’re going to do to us?” she asked, in a small, scared voice. “Tie us down with vines and drain… drain the life out of our bodies until we stop? Until we aren’t there anymore? Stasia, I love you, you are my sister in all the ways that matter, I don’t care what world you’re from, I don’t care what color you bleed, but… but I can’t do this. I can’t be tied to the ground and drunk dry by a bunch of plants. I can’t.”

// you see? your only family is here. your only home is here. they will reject you. they will always reject you. //

The soft hooting sound that accompanied Second’s words was enough to attract Mandy and Graham’s attention. They turned. Mandy, seeing her first real alien—not just a human being painted green, but a real, undeniable alien—screamed, lurching to her feet before collapsing into the flowers. Her body landed on the open stretch of soil between the patches of little cousins, utterly limp, unmoving.

Before any of us had the chance to recover our senses or react, roots boiled out of the ground, plunging themselves into the exposed skin of Mandy’s arms and instantly inflating to half their original size, pulsing as they drained her. Graham shouted and lunged for her. I grabbed his arm. He turned to stare at me, utterly betrayed.

“What the hell are you doing?” he demanded. “They’re killing her!”

“They’ll kill you too!” I shoved him aside and dropped to my knees next to her, starting to grab the roots. As before, every time I touched them, they withdrew. This time, however, they left beads of blood glistening on her skin, the scent perfuming the air around me even more strongly than the flowers.

She wasn’t using it anymore. I needed to check the extent of her injuries. This was for her own good. Holding my justifications firmly in mind, I swiped my thumb over her forearm, wiping the blood away. There were no holes; the roots had apparently sealed them on their way out. That was good. I popped my thumb into my mouth, sucking the blood away.

That was better. God or Great Root help me, but that was so much better.

When I turned around, Graham was watching me with horror, and Toni was watching me with accepting resignation. I honestly wasn’t sure which was worse.

“She’s going to be okay,” I said. “The little cousins let go as soon as they realized she wasn’t for them.”

// we have to go // said Second. // gather your pets. we have spent much time here, and that time will not return to us. //

“Where are we going?” I asked.

// First requests your presence // she replied.

Oh.