Page 33 of Overgrowth

In the end, we had to leave Lucas behind. There was no saving him: even Mandy, who loved him the best out of all of us, who had no alien heritage to confuse the issue, could see that once she woke up from her faint. Where he was, at least he could do some small good by feeding the little cousins, which had probably saved all the humans on this ship from a fatal allergic reaction.

Second led the way down the mossy paths toward the inescapable meeting, her tentacles slapping and slithering against the ground in horrifyingly efficient lines. Graham stared at her as we walked, his hand locked on mine and his eyes filled with wonder. I wasn’t sure he saw the beauty in her that I did, but he was entranced all the same. As a biologist, how could he not have been? Second herself might be more botany than zoology, but the form she echoed… that had belonged to an alien creature on an alien world, something he had never seen and never would.

Toni and David brought up the rear of our little group, Toni trying to look at absolutely everything around us, while David couldn’t seem to stop looking at Toni, checking her over constantly, as if to reassure himself that she was really there. He was shaking. It was a small, almost imperceptible thing. It was also continuous. If anyone was going to snap and do something stupid, it was going to be him.

It was possible for me to feel bad for him—this big, sweet man who had only wanted to look at the stars and keep his eccentric friend safe and secure in their isolated facility—and be wary of him at the same time. If he did the wrong thing, it could bounce back on Graham and Mandy. They were all I had left. I needed to keep them safe. No matter what, I needed to keep them safe.

// peace, child. //

The voice did not belong to Second. It was bigger, and deeper, and… and broader, which wasn’t normally something I would have attributed to a voice. It spoke like a towering sequoia, roots dug down into the soil until they hit bedrock and grabbed hold. It spoke like centuries of life, centuries of vitality.

“First,” I breathed. Graham glanced at me, eyebrows raised. I shook my head, hoping he would take it as a signal to be quiet.

// you require sounds to speak; I do not. be silent. I wish to speak with you. //

I kept walking. The lush, seemingly impossible vegetation around us was growing denser, things that might be ferns or bellflowers or other familiar, even friendly things, giving way to thorn briars and unforgivingly tangled bushes. The path, always easier than fighting through the vegetation, was becoming our only safe way through.

// you are conflicted. you question whether what we do is right. you would side with your hosts against your family. //

Suddenly, I was grateful for my inability to answer through the pollen. I didn’t want to tell the ancient, terrible figure of alien intent that I wasn’t sure I liked what she was planning to do to my chosen planet.

// you are not the first. you will not be the last. what we must do for our own survival and for the sake of the universe is a cruel burden to bear, and it would be simpler to lay down and have done. there are few among us who will blame you for thinking it might be better to allow the ships to come to land in empty gardens, to grow in peace. there is something I must show you. I would have waited until you came to me, but I need you to understand before we meet. I am sorry. //

That was all the warning I received before my vision went black, casting me into absolute darkness. I think I screamed. I know I fell, body seizing as alien thoughts rammed themselves through me, washing everything else away. That only lasted for a second—a terrible, eternal second. Then all awareness of my body left me, and I was floating in a green-tinted void that grew slowly brighter and brighter.

It finally cleared. I beheld a new world. No: not a new world. An old world, a world that might not even be there anymore, that I knew—cleanly and completely and down to my bones—that I was never going to see.

Everywhere I looked was green. Trees the likes of which I’d never seen dominated the sky, their leaves as broad as beach umbrellas and covered in waving cilia that stretched toward the light, jockeying with their neighbors for the best possible positions. Things my Earth-molded mind immediately classified as “birds” or “insects” darted through the gloom beneath those leaves, moving with the fast, hot urgency of small creatures in a world filled with predators.

Things that looked like exaggerated versions of Earth’s mistletoe crouched in the hollows and forks of the trees, and when the birds got too close, they would whip out swift tendrils, capturing them and drawing them in to be devoured. I realized I was descending, dropping into the green. The sunlight, which had been visible and strange only a moment before, gave way to filtered pallor, slanting through the leaves and then, as we dropped even lower, through the glassine petals of the broad bromeliad flowers.

The ground came into view, partially blocked by lattices of vines and the finely curving fronds of tree-dwelling ferns. It was a sea of flowers with dragonfly wings for petals, some growing taller than a house, some as short as my ankles. I settled there, an intangible presence settling beside me. I knew it was First. I knew I couldn’t look at her, not here, in this place that wasn’t a place anymore. I kept my eyes on the flowers.

“We began here,” she said, my mind setting sounds to her words. Her voice was still pleasant, unaccented, female. I wondered what it really sounded like. Did she hoot like Second, or snarl, or communicate through the subtle rustle of leaves? What were we, before we took to the stars and stole the forms of a hundred unwilling host species?

“We began in roots, tied to stone and soil. But we came to see the value in movement, in taming the bodies of ourselves and our neighbors until we could go where the sun was bright and the water was good. We adapted. We changed. Is that not what life has always done?”

The flowers pulled themselves out of the ground, revealing vast, tuberous bodies tied to ambulatory root balls, and began to move around the meadowlands. They re-rooted when they found good soil, working their roots deep. Until they stopped re-rooting and began tapping the bodies of their less-mobile cousins, the trees, instead, pulling water from the great wooden sentries even as their vines wrapped around skittering animals and brought them to their bellflower mouths. Until they grew larger, more suited to their mobility, less suited for long-term occupation of the soil.

“We were not clever. We thought as growing things think, of sun and water and sweet sap. We were children in those days, innocent, enduring. Some of us still live as children, back in the first garden. We visit them from time to time, to remind ourselves of how far we have come, and how much we have learned.”

“What happened?”

“This.” There was a warm self-satisfaction in her tone, like she was imparting some deep and wonderful secret. The scene turned, as with the turning of a head, and carried me with it, to witness the bright streak of a rocket’s engines propelling it across the sky. It landed somewhere beyond the forest, some dry, flat place that must have seemed so beautifully safe to the unseen pilot.

Time skipped forward, days becoming nights becoming days, until something new entered the forest, something that walked on two legs—several somethings. A half dozen strange things that looked a bit like lizards and a bit like dinosaurs and a lot like they were wearing functional spacesuits came walking cautiously through the “trees,” their tails waving, hissing strange words at one another. They either weren’t worried about allergic responses or had taken the time to analyze the atmosphere, because they weren’t wearing helmets.

The things, the flowered things that would become me, and First, and all the others, froze, not moving in the presence of the unknown. Those unknown things came closer and closer, wading into the field of flowers all unaware of the dangers around them.

When the flowers struck, they struck quickly, and they struck—through planning or luck, it wasn’t clear and didn’t matter—all at the same time. They grasped the strange things as they had always grasped their prey, sticking them to their gooey centers, wrapping them in their vines, and hauling them, kicking and shrieking, into their sap-filled chambers. The process of digestion began as it always had. But then…

“When we devour the unwitting and unwary, we are fed; we are sustained. We are nothing more. We do not duplicate that which has no mind to mimic.” First sounded pleased with herself, like she, personally, was responsible for this. “We have cousins who make lures of small things, mindless things that hop and preen and never leave the vine, but we can transplant ourselves into the mechanisms of thought and knowing. We can take as template the forms of our hosts, and using them, boost ourselves to the stars.”

One by one, the barrels of the flowers that had devoured the strangers burst open, spilling exact replicas—save for color—onto the mossy ground. All the flowers turned toward them, petals rippling and chiming, and the world shifted.

It was like everything moved into fast-forward from there. Crude machines were constructed, using the machines carried by those first visitors as a template, but woven from living wood and blooming flower. Bit by bit, over the course of centuries, the flowers advanced their technology. Other explorers came, land ing in the open spaces, and were devoured, adding their minds and memories to the mix.

The duplicates began to appear in colors other than green, their camouflage improving with each generation. The first duplicates began to reach the end of their lifetimes and go to seed—and those seeds, when planted, grew more of their parents, duplicates of an increasing number of unwitting donor species. Bipeds and quadrupeds and creatures that moved on a single strong appendage, like the foot of a snail, all of them joined in the dance of blossom and bough, growing stronger with every visitation, until finally, they were able to take to the skies under their own power.

The first of their mighty ships was born in fire and ash and a circle of char that destroyed the forest for a mile in every direction.

The second was better.

By the third, they were launching seeds into space, growing their ships outside the atmosphere via the cunning systems they had built into the first two, which nurtured and cultivated the growth of the supporting beams, the turn of the guiding limbs. Their technology was entirely biological, but they had learned from species that worked in metal, in crystal, in everything under a hundred suns.

The first two ships remained in orbit around the homeworld, while the others, still growing, set out to see a universe, understand it, and consume it.

“Without them, there would be no us,” said First. “We are the sum of a million gardens, a million different worlds. We contain and preserve everything they were.”

“Why does it have to be ‘were’? Why can’t it be ‘are’?”

“Because they do not understand.” One of the ships reached the world that had birthed a known host species. Those templated upon that species made first contact, boarding the scout ships and descending through the clouds on a mission of peace and understanding. They chattered rapidly as they fell, leaving the shared speech of the pollen in favor of the language they had learned from their unwilling templates. How excited they looked, these shining green balls of fluff and feather, going to meet their other parents for the first time! The forest was their mother, and this new world, this gleaming sphere of possibilities, was their father: they were, in a very real way, going home.

But when the ships landed and the emissaries emerged, they were met with fury and fierce attacks as their very existence was seen as mockery and cruel reminder that sometimes explorers went out and did not come back. They fled for the scout ships, terrified and unprepared. Only two made it to the safety of the great seed ship waiting above the planet’s sky. They stumbled into the fields of flowers shaking, crawling into the green and curling beneath the roots.

“We are conquerors now, and we are not ashamed of it, but there was a time when we knew nothing but the desire to make friends, to make peace,” said First. “We thought, as you do, that we could approach our host species and tell them we were sorry, we had slain their children when we were mindless and innocent and knew no better. Some even thought that we might convince them to give up the excess among their population, that we might increase our knowledge without doing them further damage. We had wonders to share. We had good things to offer in trade. We wanted to be a part of a community, as we were on our homeworld, in our first garden. Many roots make good soil.”

Her voice hardened. “But we were rejected. World after world, we were rejected. We came in peace, and we lost so many. So very, very many of what was a limited number, then, for we had not yet turned to conquest, and we had not yet declared ourselves against the universe. We learned that only we had the shared song to unite many different kinds, for only we could make them all over in our own image. We began seeding new gardens. We began sending our children into the void to sprout in new soil, to call us to come and find them, when the conditions were right. Still, so many would be lost… but they would be lost trying to make us greater, to make us more than we were. So you see, we do not come in peace not because we have never tried, but because we have tried too many times. We know peace is not for us. The Great Root protects those who protect their own.”

By that logic, the Great Root should have been protecting every world we invaded, defending them against us, since we were the thing that needed to be protected from. I didn’t say so. I tried to turn my head, to finally look at her, and found I couldn’t. My vision was locked on the scene in front of me, where scores of our ships streaked across a starry sky, spreading out in all directions as they looked for new worlds to conquer.

“What will happen here has happened a thousand times before,” said First. “Has happened here before. We will cleanse the garden, and it will sprout again, and with time, we will return. Have faith that we know better than you what the long arc of the universe requires to flourish. We are the fire that burns the brush, to make the entire forest stronger for the cleansing.”

“Anything that involves the word ‘cleansing’ isn’t going to make you popular on this planet.”

“It hasn’t made us popular, as you say, on any planet. People do not care to be consumed and remade as something new. But if we do not eat, we are not ourselves; we lose thought, we lose independence. We lose self. We were always flesh-eaters, back in the soil where we sprouted. What we ate there was too small, too mean of thought and feeling, to grant us the minds we now enjoy. So you see, we invade to sustain and to survive. We do what we must. We preserve at the same time. We clear the way for new things to be born. Could the Great Root have made us as we are, had we not been needed for the universe to flourish?”

“Isn’t there another way?”

First was quiet for a long moment, while the memory of space spun around us, ships still sailing, the reach of our roots still growing. Finally, she sighed.

“You are not the first to ask their garden be spared. It is most common with mammals. Hot blood leads to hot feeling, leads to the desire to connect even with that which is distant, or worse, hostile. You are not the first. If you were, perhaps we would agree to this experiment, would withdraw our ships, collect our seedlings, and take from this garden only that which has already been indrawn. You are of our copse, regardless of your form. You would be lonely, being so rare a bloom among us, but you would and will always be ours. Alas, you are not the first, and we know the consequences of doing what you would desire.”

“What are those?”

“Look.”

The scene closed in on a single ship, coming into orbit above a blue-and-red planet. It sent the scouts down, and they were met by great winged squids, their mantles flashing a hundred shades of distressed green. I knew, without being able to hear them, that the squid were the seedlings of this world’s colonization, and they were begging their parents to show mercy to the garden that had grown them.

The scout ships pulled back, seeming to agree. The green squid—what looked like hundreds of them—swam to the hatches and were gone. The ships lifted off again, leaving the red-and-blue world in peace. It was over.

And then the fleet lifted from the surface of the red-and-blue world, racing after the ships with a speed that could only be born of mechanical means. They closed the distance between themselves and the armada effortlessly, and with no signs of mercy or restraint, they blasted the ships out of the sky. Two of the scout ships managed to zip away, vanishing into the shadow of the local sun, hiding there until they had repaired themselves sufficiently to limp off in search of their own kind, in search of a safe harbor in a hostile cosmos.

“We have offered mercy nearly a hundred times that we are certain of and a dozen more that we are not,” said First. “In the ones we are sure of, we were able to recover something—a scout, a seedling, a survivor, anything —that could tell us what had happened to our ships, why a good garden had been left unharvested. In the other cases, we found only drifting debris, and a world uncultivated, and seedlings all cut down. Perhaps those were the times mercy was not offered, but the garden was able to organize against us before we could darken their skies.” She paused. “I got that idiom from you. It is a lovely one. You have grown in a garden filled with poets.”

“Yes,” I said uncomfortably.

“We feed to live and remain ourselves. Without the minds of those we consume, we would be mindless flora, creeping across the forest floor. Our ships would become our prisons, floating through the void, waiting for the day when they would be discovered, broken open, and raided… or provided new minds to consume, for we can make no choices when we do not think as people, but act purely upon instinct. We show mercy. We preserve. This is a seed ship, stocked with volunteers, with the brave and the brilliant and the bold. They steer their way across the stars to harvest what has been planted, and they set the seeds of our new garden ships. This Earth will have several, each filled with every scrap of good green life, with every piece of preservable culture. We will end this ‘humanity’ you worry for, but everything they were will live on, in us.”

I thought of Anastasia Miller, three years old and murdered—not consumed, not killed, but murdered —by a plant that had fallen to her world from outer space. I wondered whether she would have considered herself to be living on in me, or whether she would have screamed and kicked her feet and demanded to have her life back.

I was pretty sure I knew the answer to that.

“They’re not going to lay down their weapons and let you have them just because you ask nicely, or explain how inevitable it is,” I said. “That’ll just make them fight harder. Humans don’t like to be told they’re going to lose.”

“So we’ll fight smarter,” she said. “We’re bringing our children home. All of you, all over the world, we’re bringing you home.”

“What if we don’t want to work for you? What if we feel more human than alien?”

I could hear the smile in her voice. “I’ll tell you a secret, Anastasia, even though you may not believe it at first. I swear it’s true, whether you believe it or not. There was a time when every one of us, from the smallest sprout to the tallest tree, felt the same.”

I said nothing.

“Our host gardens… they raise us. They nurture us. They mold us into the people we will be, using their beliefs, their values. We are more them than we are us when the ships come, because that is what we need to be. When the ships came to my host garden, I thought to help raise an army against these invaders from the sky.”

I said nothing.

“We failed. Such armies almost always fail. But my First was kind. He said to me, you have fought because that is how we are made, not because you are disloyal; not because you are any less my daughter. So still, you may choose.”

“Choose?” I asked.

“Yes. Choose. We will harvest this whole garden; we will take all its good things, and till the ground, that it may grow abundant once more in our absence. We will take most of your host species for blood, to fill our stores and nurture us as we cross the great voids. We will take others for meat, keeping them alive and peaceful until we hunger, or until a seed sprouts too soon and must be implanted to achieve conscious thought. But some, we will make over in our own image, as you once were. Some, we will retain, hearts and thoughts and minds preserved in new shells. Those, that fair and lucky few, will be the vessels of their history, and carry it with us into forever.

“The choice is yours, Stasia. You can stand against us—you have that strength—or you can save them.”