Get. A. Grip.
I meant to contact you before this. About three hours ago. But what I said was “Irrevocable spine leads the interstellar maxim through hat rack and loving illustrious spikenard.” Believe me, it did make sense at the time.
Oh, yeah, your message is over a month old.
For your information, it wasn’t just that I was high on Gyre. That’s a given. I was also avoiding you.
Why? Because I can’t lie. I’m a lousy liar. Being a poor liar is a qualification for a prophetess.
If you had asked, I’d have to tell you what I saw, and you would have dropped your leaves. I would have had to tell you that Ashtara’s actions provoked the SongLuminants, who came to judge the Nau’gsh, and they were entirely prepared to wipe out all of your people, down to the last seedling. And what good would that have done? You couldn’t stop it.
He handled it.
I knew he’d handle it.
You know it’s not his fault that he is what he is. You’re the liar, Elma’ashra. You lied to your people for years – for their own good – and I stayed on Eirelantra so I wouldn’t give away the show. And you’re still lying. You’re lying every time you say “my Chosen.”
I chose you, bitch. Just like Tara chose Ashtara.
The great secret why the Cu’enashti make their “choice” is that they don’t choose at all. Or rather, the choice is yes or no. It’s a matter of encountering a human with a very strong and very particular kind of willpower. I think the best word might be “delusional.” There are a lot of people who can get lost in dreams. They watch vids and take drugs. But there’s a certain kind of person who says, “My dreams will be real because I will it.” It’s a kind of fiat. It’s magic. It’s delusional.
A Cu’enashti accepts the fiat. Like you accepted me, Elma’ashra. You accepted me, but you didn’t say yes. Ashtara said yes.
Tara was the kind of little girl who would go deep into the Seaspring Forest, gathering fruit, poisonous fruit that she’d been warned against. She cut the fruit open and looked at the seed-pits, then chose the largest, roughest one thinking it was the least likely to sprout. And then she took it to the most unlikely place on the vastly fertile world of Dolparessa, a cliff on the side of a mountain of near-solid rock. The tree was supposed to be her destiny, and she thought she wanted to die. But that isn’t what she wanted at all. And sixteen years later, she says, “This tree will marry me.”
All this is a matter of public record. But I’ll tell you what I saw, the punch line to the joke. I know which tree was Ashtara’s father tree. Tara went deep into the forest. Unlike the trees near the blue line, which are mostly seedlings of trees that have been in contact with humans for centuries, in the deep forests there are trees that never took the leap at all. Ashtara’s father was an Old One – not sentient. Like you, Ashtara is first generation. It’s unusual to see in this day and age, but not at all impossible.
Elma’ashra, you pretend that the Cu’endhari have a “culture,” but do you know how many millions of years it took humanity to evolve? How many evolutionary dead ends there were before Homo sapiens came out on top? The Cu’endhari developed sentience in reaction to the presence of the human colonists a little under a millennium ago. But there’s nothing that says that every tree reacted to the stimulus in exactly the same way. In fact, we know they don’t.
Let’s just play amateur xenobiologist for a minute. We have a subspecies of tree that grows two to eight trunks, typically three or four. There is an animating principle attached to the tree which creates a human body. Each trunk has a human personality. The personae are submissive, passive, imitative, eager to please, and accepting – even if it means the loss of everything they love. The Cu’enashti never questioned the Great Silence. They are fundamentally conservative. Because the animating principles are attached to the tree, they are tied to the planet of their birth, and feel a horror at the thought of the vastness of space.
Now we examine a specimen in which the animating principle is not attached to a particular tree, but has produced two trees, each with twenty-five trunks. The personae are vastly different, ranging from submissive to aggressive, even violent. They are innovative, headstrong, and politically motivated to the point of megalomania. Because the animating principle is not attached to a particular tree, it is inherently spacefaring – let’s stop and look at that. Excuse me, there are no known species that are inherently spacefaring. Everyone needs a ship, a space suit, something in order to survive the vacuum. The SongLuminants cheat because they get someone else to do their travel for them while their lazy bubble butts camp out on a convenient mollusk. But ASHTARA FLIES THROUGH SPACE ON HIS OWN POWER.
Any moron can see that he’s not even your species, Elma’ashra. So leave him alone. He knows what he’s doing.
And get a house in town, so I can contact you when I need you. Who knows when an emergency might come up? Well, yeah, I do know. But seriously, I might find a grey hair.