The Speaker for the Trees Read online

  The Speaker for the Trees

  By Sean DeLauder

  For Laura, Graham, and Symmetry

  Table of Contents

  Prelude

  1. Sign

  2. Mr. Visitor

  3. Background First, Then a Toaster

  4. A Very Handy Device

  5. Planet Plant

  6. The Chamber of the Council of Plants

  7. Forked

  8. In the Garden of the Plant of Ultimate Knowing

  9. Abduction

  10. A Brief Visit

  11. A New Garden

  12. Awakening

  We humans look rather different from a tree. Without a doubt we perceive the world differently than a tree does. But down deep, at the molecular heart of life, the trees and we are essentially identical.

  —Carl Sagan

  Prelude

  At the center of a round table was a bonsai plant in a shallow but wide pot—a miniature tree twisted into place and deformed like an over-tightened screw. Two people sat on opposite sides of the table, each watching the other while the plant watched them both in mute fascination, listening. The plant was only dimly aware of the world around it, its thoughts tiny and fleeting, centered mostly around a childlike want for light or water, but the bonsai knew the woman was named Anna and the man was named Hedge.

  The bonsai was not smart when compared to most plants, content just to be rather than to be something, but it seemed clear to the bonsai that Hedge had as much in common with the bonsai as he did with the woman, and that struck the bonsai as peculiar. This peculiarity was a source of endless curiosity for the bonsai, for it made the plant wonder what Hedge was doing here, how he could seem to be one thing and yet be another, and what the purpose of his strangeness might be.

  There were things a bonsai could never hope to fathom, like simple arithmetic or crossword puzzles, but it took great pleasure in knowing it was in the presence of something remarkable, some unspoken profundity that no one else could detect, but the bonsai could feel. It was the electric tension of anticipation, those heightened moments in a normal person's day before they are interrupted by the unexpected shock of an amazing discovery that leaves them changed forever.

  So the bonsai listened, and watched, sensing the gathering storm and waiting for the bolt to strike.

  Sign

  Hedge was fat.

  His round, sagging body stretched a short-sleeved shirt with faint yellow stains in the armpits, and his skin, which had a faintly greenish tint, was dark and peeled on the back of his neck and the top of his head from spending long hours under the sun. Fat and bald, but not slobbery and sloppy. Hedge could be best described, in most respects, as ordinary.

  The perfect disguise.

  No one suspected he was a plant sent to the planet by the legendary Plant of Ultimate Knowing to observe humanity and, if necessary, protect them from one of countless interstellar perils, such as bursts of interstellar radiation, drifting planetoids, invading space armies, or appearances by the infamous Visitors. No one he told took him seriously.

  Of the many perils, the peril of Visitors was utmost. Visitors were a mysterious species who wandered the cosmos, spreading destruction wherever they set foot. They had been here before, in fact, hundreds of millions of years ago. Soon after the planet suffered a catastrophic rhinoplasty at the hands of a comet that altered the planetary ecosystem, shifting the balance of dominance from reptiles to mammals. But these appearances were rare. As best as Hedge could tell, the greatest threat to humanity was a persistent volatile nature it had yet to outgrow.

  For the moment, Hedge’s only mission was to remain hidden. A mission could change at any moment, but this one had remained the same for 20 years.

  Hedge regarded the plate before him with resignation. It was empty with exception to a small, triangular pork chop, but it seemed a larger task for one who had labored on several offerings already. He took a breath, straining the buttons on his shirtfront, then let it out in a long, quiet sigh.

  Across the small kitchen table sat Hedge's round, unthreatening earth wife, Anna. It pleased him to know she was highly symmetrical. After all, it was in symmetry that humans found beauty, and to know that she was beautiful gave him a very human sense of pride and accomplishment in having something other humans desired.

  She stared back at him with a furrowed brow and pressed lips. Her eyes flicked from his face to his unmoving hands clenched around the flatware, to the plate, and back again. He knew she was worrying that his ulcers were boiling or that he didn't enjoy the pork chops. These worries were, of course, completely ridiculous.

  Ulcers were an impossibility since Hedge processed light into energy and had no stomach. Whether he liked the pork chops or not was irrelevant because he had no taste buds and stored food in an empty vacuole for later disposal. So he stared back at her, absorbing the expression and tracing her face with his eyes. People appreciated that. Paying attention. They also appreciated the opportunity to express their concerns, so Hedge indulged her in typical human fashion.

  "What?" he asked in a nasal tone tinged with annoyance.

  He forked a bit of pork chop, pulled it off with his teeth and felt it tumble down his neck tube and drop into the heap of bits in his bulging middle part.

  "Something is the matter," she said, her forehead creased. "You seem... I don’t know. Strange."

  For all their simplicity, humans could be remarkably perceptive, though they didn't know it most of the time, and their ability to thrust straight through deception and see to the heart of truth was often lost with childhood. By adulthood humans had trained themselves to be coy and manipulative in response to the coy and manipulative society in which they lived, which led them to believe that everyone was trying to be as coy and manipulative as themselves and were uncertain about what was true and what was not. Beyond their few flashes of clarity, everything became a muddle of colliding doubts.

  Hedge wiped a wadded napkin across his chin.

  "Well," he began.

  He'd explained this before. Each time the same response. A roll of her eyes, a grimace, and a shrug. Why did he bother indulging her? It may have been love, but from his studies he knew other humans felt a strong upwelling of sensation when they loved. A swelling of chemicals such as oxytosine and vasopressin in the brain and blood that Hedge did not experience because he had xylem and phloem tissues that moved fluids through a decentralized and essentially brainless body. There was no primary nerve cluster where all thoughts gathered. There were no hormones that gushed from a pituitary gland to elate him, make his heart beat faster, and rush them through his circulatory system to touch the outermost reaches of his inner spaces. Only nutrients ferrying through his body to prevent the tissue from becoming dry, dark, and dead.

  "I'm not really from this planet, but I'm here to protect it. For the plants. No one expects trouble, but if there were something cataclysmic, a transdimensional war whose proximity jeopardized this planet for example, you should be safe with me, earth wife." He paused, allowing her to consider, and took another bite. "You know," he added around a mouthful of pork chop, "I don't even have a stomach."

  She blinked, mouth falling crookedly ajar. Then, as expected, her eyes screwed in a quick circle. She stood, pushed in the chair, and lifted her plate.

  "You think everything is a joke," she said.

  She didn't suspect anything. No one did. With exception to Scud Peabody, but he was a genius.

  As far as Anna was concerned they had met at a squaredance in Topeka. They talked long into the night. She invited him to dinner and he enjoyed her pork chops. Two months later they were married. Hedge took a loan, bought a house on a wide plot. He tended beehives an
d they didn't sting him. She made pork chops. He ate them. It was love. That was their story.

  A history that had been penciled onto the tablet of her memory during her abduction. They did this every so often, rewrote a bit of someone's past, usually when they wanted to insert an operative into the social fabric of a community. A human cohort, they had found, lent much to the deception.

  At the moment her back was to him, ponderous backside swaying arhythmically as she bent over the sink and scrubbed at the stubborn stains of a coffee mug. She was better this way. Hidden from a violent past, abusive parents. She'd been unhappy, wandering through a forest in the rain when they found her, bruised and bleeding inside, afraid to go back home. It was easier to scribble over memories a person didn't want to remember, so they searched for these people—the abused and neglected. They repaired her insides, repaired her sundered mind. Now those memories were gone.

  Hedge looked to his plate, the wide slab of meat staring back at him in all its enormity, and felt the uncomfortable weight of too many chunks already inside him. Once, in a similar predicament, he had regurgitated the pork chops onto the table in a warm stew of ragged chunks, but that had made Anna cry. He had yet to find an equally effective manner of emptying himself since, but the sight of Anna in tears flooded him with a sense of wrongness.

  There was a bonsai plant in the center of the table, a solemn and tiny tree that always seemed to be watching him. Even now he felt it was staring at him, waiting for him to make a decision. So he lifted the plate, stretched his face around the porcelain while she wasn't looking, and dumped everything into his gullet. The stretching heaviness in his middle became unbearable. He needed to purge.

  The chair scrubbed across the floor when he stood.

  "I'm walking," he said, then added an appreciative belch in afterthought. "Uuurp."

  Earth wife Anna fluttered her fingers above a shoulder and Hedge passed through the living room and out the front door of their two-story farmhouse. The house stood inside a white rail fence Hedge had constructed, beside a wooden barn whose weathered boards were turning gray, and a corn field beyond.

  She would find the empty plate and be happy. Then she would curl in bed beside him, read a few pages of a dull story and fall asleep. She would do the same if she were angry, but she would not enjoy the story, would not drop off to sleep. Her mind would flutter and despair and wake up harried. It took him a great long while to realize the reason for this was that she loved him. It took still longer to realize she wanted him to love her in return. And one of the larger parts of love involved consuming pork chops.

  His midsection burbled angrily.

  Love was invariably harder some times than others.

  The screen door whined and smacked shut behind him as Hedge lumbered across the porch and down the steps, walked beside the bed of dipped, snoozing flowers that traced the house and crunched across the gravel drive on the way to the barn.

  It was a cool night, with gentle breezes that knocked solitary, ringing notes from the porch wind chime. A full moon stared down at everything with an expression of permanent awe, bright enough that Hedge could see the swooping black boomerangs of bats as they swung back and forth over the small pond behind the house. Bees droned dully in their hives, fat and sated by a hard day's work.

  Hedge unfastened his pants and let them slide to his ankles, knees bent with his back against the shrub-ringed barn, feeling the weight inside him shift as he prepared to empty his vacuole behind a bush in an act many humans referred to as "taking a dump" where the raccoons would find it. It was a confusing tangle of words since he wasn't taking, but giving. There was scarcely enough room to take any more. Then a flash of light silhouetted him, pants down, against the side of the barn. Long enough to draw his attention from the current process.

  It came from the cornfield.

  "Hedgelford Bran Johnston!" cried the earth wife from the kitchen window. Her tone was raking and furious, a tone used in conjunction with his full name only when deadly serious—a frightful state that sometimes rattled even Hedge, which was strange because humans were largely undangerous when compared to the evolutionary paths other creatures had taken. Notably, the Fire-tailed Xiz, which could detach and launch exploding parts of its body at prey, attackers, and its own insubordinate children. "Get your pants up, this instant!"

  Earthfolk were fundamentally modest, clothing the majority of their flesh under the pretense of preventing chills. And rightly so. The majority were hideously misshapen, flesh drooping from their bodies like broad, baggy coat pockets turned inside out. His own shape had a peculiar tentacle in the midsection for which he had yet to find a use except to drain a reservoir of waste fluid, though his earth wife found it fascinating. Oddly enough, oftentimes so did Hedge, and he didn't mind indulging her.

  This time he was too distracted to obey.

  Ignoring her calls, Hedge stared into the field. Sure enough, the light came again—a bright white pillar of cold brilliance that struck in the center of the field, throwing thin shadows against the ground. Hedge took a step forward. And fell in the dirt, legs caught in the pants he hadn't bothered to draw up. Fitting irony.

  Jerking the pants to his waist, Hedge ran to the house, flashed past a scowling Anna and up the stairs as quickly as the torpid body would allow. He banged open the bathroom door and pulled the drapes aside to stare into the cornfield. And there they were, visible in the moonlight. Patterns flattened into the crops as though a giant had stretched a foot out of the heavens to stomp frantically after an invasion of scrambling cockroaches. To anyone else they were an unintelligible jumble of circles and tangled lines like the brambles of an impassable briar patch. To Hedge they were words, instructions, a message he understood in an eyeblink.

  Danger. Immediate recall and report.

  Danger from what, he wondered. Supernova? Solar radiation? Visitors?

  Hedge exhaled a deep, shuddering breath.

  He was going to need a toaster.

  Mr. Visitor

  “You know they’re here, don’t you?”

  Burt blinked, clearing the blur from his eyes as he emerged from a gentle half sleep brought on by staring into the campfire and feeling its warmth lick his face. He looked down and saw he was seated on the overturned bucket he’d used to carry fish from the boat. Blearily, he looked to his left and saw the shimmer of stars on the lake. He watched the descending moon and its reflection creep toward one another, wondering if they would bounce when they met and go caroming off in some unexpected direction, then felt a poke in his ribs.

  He turned back to the right and found Clem, hat crushed down to his eyes, a few inches from his face. He appeared to be waiting for something.

  “Who’s here?” Burt responded at last.

  Clem sat back. Pointed to the ground.

  “People what watch us at night when we’re sleepin’. People what ain’t really people, but they look like us and talk like us and smell like us. Studyin’ us. They don’t like what we done with this place.”

  “Who?”

  Burt looked around the campsite. He studied the low-hanging trees, but didn’t see anything out of place.

  Clem leaned in close and answered the question with a gust of fish-smelling breath.

  “Mole folk.”

  Burt’s eyes hooked back to Clem.

  “Mole folk?” Burt repeated.

  Clem had subjected Burt to his bizarre conspiracy theories before. Clem had once claimed the trees were telling his wife, Thistle, he’d been at the Bus Stop Bar instead of helping Burt patch a pontoon on their boat. He stuck to this theory even after the bartender of the Bus Stop Bar called his wife to come and collect him after he’d passed out in the entrance.

  “Was the damned trees,” Clem told him a few days later. “They’s pivved at me ‘cause I nicked their roots with the mower the other day. I done ought to cut ‘em down, but then the wife would know I’s onto her. They’re in cahoots, you know.”

  Everything
that seemed normal to anyone else seemed suspicious to Clem. Lately, anything out of the ordinary was the work of an insidious group of tiny-eyed, subterranean ground diggers that somehow had the ability to look just like people and were always causing mischief that might otherwise have happened of its own accord.

  “There ain’t no damned mole folk, Clem,” said Burt. “Ain’t nobody watchin’ us. Ain’t nobody that look like us, talk like us, or smell like us that ain’t us. The only folk out here is you and me.”

  Burt jabbed a finger at Clem, then himself for emphasis.

  In response, Clem raised a hand and pointed past Burt.

  “And that feller.”

  Burt turned. Sure enough, a man stood behind him, looking from one of them to the other, an enormous smile on his face.

  He was dressed in a black suit and tie, carried no camping gear, and wore sunglasses beneath a tree-shaded night sky. His skin was as chalky white as the moon behind him. The smile on his face was unwavering, unnaturally large, and didn’t sit quite straight, like the fissure in a broken watermelon. It might have been any of these oddities that drew their attention, but it was the stainless steel toaster he held in both hands that caught their gazes, and they watched in awe as their distended reflections grew and shrank on its silvery surface.

  Burt and Clem exchanged glances with the visitor, then with each other. Finally, Clem broke the silence.

  “What is that?” he asked.

  The visitor followed Clem’s gaze to his hands.

  “This,” said the visitor, with a voice deep with gravity, “is a toaster.”

  “Oh,” said Clem, disappointed.

  “Not what he expected,” Burt explained.

  “What did he expect?”

  “Just that,” said Clem. “But… not that.”

  “Something more,” explained Burt.

  The visitor appeared perplexed.

  “I see,” said the visitor, not seeing.