The Verse:
The smallest, the eldest,
The father of them all.
The Vision:
A man who looks vaguely like my father is bending over to measure a small sapling. “I knew it!” he says.
Commentary by Archbishop Co’oal Venesti:
I’m afraid Xenobotany is a bit beyond my understanding. However, it seems that this prophecy reinforces the words of His Sublime and Holy Radiance Ailann Tiarnan, Archon of Skarsia: man’s evolutionary destiny is entwined with that of the Cu’enashti.
Commentary by Elma, High Prophetess of Skarsia:
Of course I’m right. The editorial staff of Xenobotany Today is a bunch of losers.
Commentary by Archbishop Seth:
Cüinn and that squirrel. Ah ha ha ha.
Commentary by Prince Cüinn Cleary:
So I had to break the bad news to Tara: “Yeah, the Cantor says that I and I is a freak, and yeah, Ailann says I and I is a god, but the scientific community isn’t having it. There’s an article in Xenobotany Today that says the whole thing’s propaganda, and has nothing to do with taxonomy.”
“I always publish through The Journal of Xenobotany,” sniffed Tara. “They’re just slagging off a rival.”
It kinda made me nervous, you know, to go against Tara because anything she says is perfect, even when she’s totally wrong. I shuffled around a little and cleared my throat. “Yeah, I’m not too happy about it either. I mean, I thought up such a cool name for our species: Pseudonau’gshtium deus. I know that the Convocation has never been happy about the pseudo business, but, as it turns out, it’s right. Your paper proved it. The Cu’endhari aren’t true nau’gsh. They’re nectarines on exponential growth hormone. We’re colonists from Earth, just like you. No wonder the Arya snub us. But anyway, even though they’re being idiots, the editors, that is, not the Arya, well, the Arya are being idiots too, but that’s beside the point. Um, what was the point? Oh, that the editors kinda have a little point, which is that the whole thing about I and I coming from one of the old squirrel trees was something Elma saw in a vision. Um, ‘Drug-induced prophecy is not science,’ I think they said.”
“Tell that to three millennia of ayahuasqueros.”
“Xenobotany Today doesn’t accept articles from ayahuasqueros.”
“That’s because ayahuasqueros are crazy people who take psychoactive chemicals and talk to plants.”
“Um, Tara…”
“Why do you think I publish in the Journal of Xenobotany? Actually, talking to plants isn’t so much a problem. It’s when the plant talks back.” She gave me a look that said conversation over.
I shuffled around a little and cleared my throat. “Well, I was thinking that maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to go looking for it. You know, go back to where you found the seed.”
“What you’re trying to tell me is that you want to meet your father.”
I was flabbergasted. The idea had never entered my mind.
But it would be interesting and perhaps instructive, said Dermot. Jamey agrees with me.
“Do you remember where it was?” I said, kinda dodging the question.
“In general. It was deep into the Seaspring Forest. I was looking for the biggest seed that I could find. I had this idea that if I went far enough north, I might find an Arya. My geography was a little challenged – but then again, I was only seven years old. The thing is that I just grabbed a bunch of fruit. I didn’t look at the pits until I got home – I wore rubber gloves and washed them off under running water. I didn’t know if I could get poisoned by the juice on my hands.”
“Apples will only make you sick. Getting juice on your hands won’t hurt you.”
“I didn’t know that. It’s probably better to be on the safe side when dealing with poisonous plants, isn’t it? I’ve managed to grow them for years without killing myself, so I’ll take that as an affirmation. Anyway, come to think of it…”
Tara’s face got all screwed up, like she was thinking hard. “Your seed was the biggest one with the thickest husk. But the fruit – I had mostly the red apples from the common nau’gsh that were growing wild, but I did have a few green and one blue.”
“A green or a blue one wouldn’t be from a squirrel tree, though.”
“I don’t know. I’ve never actually seen a squirrel tree. Isn’t that strange? I’m supposedly the foremost expert on nau’gsh, and I’ve never seen a squirrel tree.”
Come to think of it, had we ever seen a squirrel tree? “Hold on, I’ll ask Jamey,” I said.
Tara made herself a double rhybaa and tonic. “Want anything?”
“Root Riot on the rocks. I never drink alcohol. It kills brain cells, and I have a good brain.”
“You can fix your brain with alchemy,” said Tara. “Like you fix mine. Otherwise, it would have been pickled enough to put in a jar ten years ago.”
“Jamey said that most of the squirrel trees are dead. They were a first generation of pseudonau’gsh that produced seeds which grew into Cu’endhari.” After I said it, I started to think about it. And then I had to sit down. “Wow,” I said. “Wow. We thought that the squirrel trees were around for millions of years, but…”
“Not if the first seed came from Sider’s expedition.”
“Maybe there was only one generation of squirrel tree.”
“There are a couple of them I know of that are still around. The one called Juicy Old Lady up on Matthias Point is supposed to be around twelve, thirteen hundred years old. But that’s amazing when you consider that our best varietals of peach only last around a hundred. No matter how much modding and selection we do, they’re still vulnerable to the least little blight or grub. Heritage peaches only last twelve to thirty.”
I was flabbergasted. “That’s less than a human lifespan. A lot less. I absolutely don’t get it. From an evolutionary standpoint, how did peaches survive?”
“Beautiful flowers, delicious fruit – humans like them, and so they cultivate them. Peach trees thrive because they’ve evolved to be attractive to humans.” Tara stared at me for a moment. “That’s a Cu’enashti philosophy if I’ve ever heard one.”
I wasn’t too sure I liked where this conversation was heading. “Well, we’ll never see one sitting around here,” I said. “Let’s take a walk in the forest.”
*****
The Seaspring Forest wasn’t that far away from Court Emmere – maybe 30 kilos up the headlands. But it got pretty untamed pretty fast – because it was in a blue zone, it was taboo for humans to use it for agriculture. You’d get the occasional person who built a house in a clearing, but no one would dare to cut down a tree. Mostly, the humans had avoided the deep forests for nine centuries out of fear and respect for the forest spirits – that would be us. Humans had avoided the forests until the tourism bureau realized how much money was in it. Well, it’s better than the latest thing – families selling tours to their own groves. “Seed-packet brides,” they call it.
Tara had changed her clothing into something more practical for a hike: a cropped blue jacket, a black, frilly loli skirt, black stockings and heavy, laced boots. “The first time I went hiking on Earth, everyone looked at me like I was crazy. They were all wearing these awful khaki trousers. I know part of it is that the camo colors are different, but they laughed at me and said I was obviously a princess who had never done any serious work out in the wild. And I told them that my outfit was perfectly practical for fighting. And they said that I had to cover my skin because of the ticks.”
“Ticks,” she said thoughtfully. “I’d never considered. There are no insectivoid creatures that evolved opportunistically on Dolparessa. All of them are harmless pollinators. The old Skarsian species wouldn’t have brought them here, any more than we’d put fleas in the gene banks.”
“You brought spiders, though.”
“Spiders are a useful part in an ecosystem involving insects. Population control. We didn’t bring any of the really nasty ones.”
It was late summer, and both the wild nau’gsh and the Cu’enmerengi were in fruit. Cu’ensali never fruit, and the pattern of Cu’enashti fruiting is dependent on circumstance. For the first kilometer or so, most of the trees were either wild nau’gsh or Cu’ensali. “Don’t you think it’s weird how many Cu’ensali there are?” I said.
“Why?”
“Well, now that everyone knows the truth about the nau’gsh, people come hiking all the time.” In fact, most of the Cu’ensali trees were bedecked with ribbons, bouquets, photographs, stuffed animals… “Looks like a lot of people trying to get noticed.”
“I need to pass a law about littering in the forests,” Tara said, annoyed. Dried twigs snapped resolutely beneath her boots. “But you’re right. Are there really so few people attractive to nau’gsh to get them to want to make the leap?”
“Maybe it’s because the Cu’ensali are just kinda stupid,” I said, which is really what everyone knows is true. “The Cantor said that they’re about as smart as the average felinoid. Of course, she said that after they ditched her lessons.”
Suddenly, a small pink sprite darted from between the leaves, buzzing around my face. She circled a few times before stopping in front of me and smacking her tiny fist of pink energy against my glasses. “Who’s stupid, ape-licker?” Then she was gone.
“I think I will never cease to be amazed at how many annoying forms of sentience there are in the universe,” said Tara.
“You should try attending a Combine meeting.” We trudged for another half-an-hour. “Are we getting closer?”
“I really went far in. I wanted to find a big tree.”
“By yourself? Weren’t you afraid of tigrons?”
“There aren’t any tigrons here. Just squirrels and bloobirds. But the bloobirds won’t attack unless you provoke them.”
I stopped in my tracks. “You were seven years old, Tara. A squirrel can take down a child.”
“Oh, they’re not so bad. You had one in your branches for years.”
“We wouldn’t let it hurt you. Besides, that was a pretty small squirrel.”
“Even the big ones stick to their trees. So you just stay away from trees…”
Our feet ground to a halt, even as our logic did. “If you stayed away from trees with squirrels in them, chances are, you didn’t pick up fruit from a squirrel tree.”
“But I know I did,” Tara said, kicking at the mulched up leaves on the ground. “I started to tell you…I think I remember that there was something weird about the fruit that your pit came from. It was small, like a common nau’gsh. That’s why I was so surprised that such a big pit was in the center. But it wasn’t the same cherry red of a nau’gsh fruit. That’s why I was asking about the color.”
We walked a little further. Then I saw it. “A squirrel tree,” I said.
“I’m pretty sure this isn’t it. I’m pretty sure that I didn’t start to collect the fruit until the sun started to descend. I told myself I’d walk all morning, and then turn around in the afternoon, to make sure I could get back before dusk. Of course, my legs were a lot shorter then.”
I didn’t say any of the thoughts that came into my brain like what a weird little girl or what a stubborn little girl or what an obsessive little girl prone to strange notions. I didn’t say them because my cock was so hard all of a sudden. It’s just this sort of thing that really turns a tree to lumber, if you get my driftwood.
Tara noticed. “I haven’t seen any tourists for a while,” she said. “Too much work and not enough Cu’endhari for them to bother.”
Tara leaned back against the tree and lifted her skirt. I pushed her against the bark, yanking down her panties, hoisting her up as her legs wrapped around me. I may look like a nerd, but I’m actually pretty strong – very strong when we’re home on Dolparessa. No sooner had I put my cock into a very happy place than a furious ball of blue fur dropped down from a low-hanging branch and hissed. It was an enormous squirrel, the animal emanation of the tree itself.
I barred my teeth and hissed back. It jumped, startled, and then raced back into the branches. “That’s showing it who’s higher on the evolutionary ladder,” I grunted in a surge of testosterone. And then my brain stopped working for a while.
“Are you trying to summon the forestry service?” gasped Tara a few minutes later.
“Sorry. I’ve always been expressive.” At just that moment, a large yellow apple came sailing from the branches, hitting me square in the temple and knocking my glasses to the ground. “Ow,” I said. “Good thing I don’t really need them to see.”
“I’ll get them,” said Tara. “Zip your trousers.” But as Tara bent over, a second apple came sailing, making a thwacking noise as it hit her in the rump. She jerked around, facing the tree. “You little creep! I’ll have you drawn and quartered for that!”
The squirrel sneered and ducked between the arcing branches of a large bough. “It is his tree,” I said. “I guess if someone started doing the vertical bop against Atlas, I’d think it was sort of rude.”
“Aren’t you supposed to protect me?”
“I didn’t see it coming. I guess I and I doesn’t think yellow apples bounced off your butt are a big deal.”
“Yellow,” she said. “I didn’t gather any yellow apples.”
“This is a bust,” I said.
Are you kidding? said Tommy. You got some major forestry action – and the squirrel was even nice enough to let you get off before he started pelting fruit at you.
That’s true, I mused. The time was not wasted. Even a quickie was enough for a little pollen to get into the air, and I could feel the fruit developing on my branch.
“Well, it was just a little further, up past that ridge. We might as well keep going since we’re almost there.” Tara ran a bit ahead, until she reached the highest point. At the apex, there were quite a few squirrel trees, most of them quite young. Then she stopped. At first, I thought she was waiting for me. But she said, “I’ve seen this before. I mean, I’ve seen it in an amrita vision. It was down there – a man who looked a little bit like my father was measuring a sapling. He said “I knew it!”
“That tree there? But that tree is pretty small.” We half-walked, half-slid down the slope to where the tree was. The slope was covered in dead brush, and a few dead trees were nearby – squirrel trees. But the tree she was looking for was still alive. “It’s even smaller than a common nau’gsh.”
“Cüinn, the leaves.”
The leaves were green. “A green tree can’t grow in the blue zone.”
Tara pulled a scanner from her belt-pack. “It has a nau’gsh taproot – extending down at least twice the height of the tree.”
I placed my hand upon it. “Yup. It’s warm.”
She pulled down a branch laden with fruit. The fruit was parti-colored, unlike most of the more-or-less solid colored fruit of nau’gsh species. It was a gorgeous swirl of reddish orange and yellow. “It’s doing well for such an old tree.”
“Jamey says it’s a Bright Nebula nectarine.”
Tara handed me a fruit, pointing her scanner at it. “It’s a Bright Nebula nectarine,” she said. “Pretty much what I expected. And yeah, that’s the same color, more orange than red, of the fruit I picked up.” She pulled a second fruit from the branch, and bit into it.
“Tara!”
“It’s just a nectarine, Cüinn. It’s not poisonous. Not quite ripe enough, though.”
“You’re eating my dad, Tara.”
“Eww. Okay, I see the point in not doing that. However, this is exactly the right kind of pit, yes.” She jogged up the slope, and stood, scanning the nearby area. “I see a few more live squirrel trees and a lot of dead ones. But mostly, wild nau’gsh. No Cu’endhari at all. It looks like this tree mutated into the progenitor of those squirrel trees. I don’t see how it’s possible that Ash could have come from the same tree.”
“Atlas was cultivated under much different conditions, Tara. For one, you were probably the first human out here since Ernst Sider. The seeds that became Cu’endhari were probably carried further out by the squirrels. Probably to intentionally increase their range – those squirrels aren’t stupid.”
“Well, at least the squirrels that aren’t squirrels aren’t stupid. They also seem less hostile.”
“Yeah. Why do you suppose the Old Skarsians brought such nasty animal life to Dolparessa?”
“Guard dogs? They were hiding a treasure.”
Tara took a few samples of leaves and bark, placing them, along with several nectarines, in her pack. “It’s funny,” she said. “I picked a seed that I was sure wouldn’t grow because I was trying to game the divination. If the seed didn’t sprout, it meant that I would never take root on Dolparessa. When I was a little girl, I went back and forth between here and Skarsia. My uncle and the Matriarch were so mean to me – every time I looked up at the stars, I just thought about how wonderful it would be to get out. But the seed took root, and the tree that grew from it was the only thing that could make me feel at home on Dolparessa. How ironic.”
I could feel it now, that little girl who wanted the stars so badly, could feel a seed inside a fruit saying pick me and I will give them to you. The choice came so much earlier than the grand jeté. I had to get back to work on the wormhole experiments.
I could feel Ernest Sider, planting a nectarine pit. “That tree wasn’t an accident.”
“No,” Tara agreed. “Sider planted his favorite fruit, to see if it would grow here. He wanted the planet he gave to his descendants to have nectarines.”
I could feel it too, the force of Sider’s will as he thrust the seed into the ground. And in two generations, the nectarines had taken the world for Sider’s children, taken it away from the Arya who had held it for a race long dead.