The Speaker for the Trees Read online

  Hedge shivered and shook, wringing a few drops of water from his heavy flannel shirt.

  Every so often a series of thin black devices like toadstools rose from the sod, gurgled and burped hollowly, then sent out a thick mist of cold water. The chill water kept the dirt moist, serving as a medium through which nutrients could travel.

  Clothing, Hedge observed, worked just like dirt, soaking up water and holding it in place so nutrients could move from here to there within the cotton fibers. Of course, clothing didn't need nutrients or water. Clothing didn’t have growing parts like leaves or fruit. What clothing did was become clingy and unpleasant when filled with water, and water was cold, which made Hedge’s teeth chatter. Clothing wasn’t to blame. It was just obeying a law of physics Hedge didn’t understand.

  A human, on the other hand, knew better.

  Humans always made coincidences and random misfortune out to be clever conspiracies. They not only gave inanimate objects the ability to reason and act, fascinated by the fantastic possibility that everything was imbued with a spirit and motivation, but often made the assumption that these inanimate objects were aware of their detrimental effect on the world around them, and worst of all, they were doing these things on purpose.

  Anna had once stubbed her toe on the staircase as she carried laundry to their bedroom and fell forward in a heap. She cursed and writhed, clutching her foot as the clothing unfolded itself and slouched back down the staircase, then pounded on the carpeted steps as if punishing them for tripping her.

  So it was strange, Hedge noted, that he was standing here, wet and uncomfortable, trying in very human fashion to guess what purpose his clothing had for soaking up water, and contemplating the possibility that it was just trying to be mean. Which was, of course, ridiculous.

  Other agents who decided the wet clothing was a burden had simply removed it.

  Hedge sighed, shifting in the disgusting dirt. He wanted desperately to rinse his feet and don a pair of shoes. That, too, struck him as strange.

  He was a plant, so it made perfect sense to be standing in enriched dirt, soaking up nutrients of a potency that did not exist on the human planet. It should have been gloriously intoxicating. Yet this felt strange, maybe because it had been so long since he'd done it. He felt unusual doing this rather than the inefficient human means of nutrient uptake to which he’d grown accustomed. Even though much of what he took in through his mouth was placed in a storage vacuole for later disposal, there was a kind of pleasure in the act of eating, of feeling the textures of certain food and savoring their aroma. Many humans took great pleasure in eating, which was undoubtedly why so many of them grew to be very cumbersome and large.

  Tentatively, Hedge bent and scooped up a handful of the cold, wet sod and put it in his mouth. He chewed.

  Grainy, bitter, and foul. Hedge spat it out. Several plants regarded him with annoyance at the sound and the plant ahead of him turned again, raised a finger to her lips, then turned back. Hedge wiped his face and tried to avoid their gazes. He couldn’t look down. Dirt was disgusting. So all that remained was up.

  The night was thick and starry, the tiny white dots packed tightly against one another. The more he stared, the more he saw. Gradually he became aware of dimmer stars hovering beyond the more dominant ones, then still dimmer ones behind those as if he were peeling back layer after layer until he would at last reach the magnificent center of a great and profound onion.

  Humanity called it space. Outer space. That's exactly what space was. The empty distance between objects. It was nothing. Yet it was a palpable nothing because it prevented those things that wanted to be together from being so.

  The slow groan of the great doors parting drew his attention away from the sky and Hedge saw a familiar face enter the lobby, eyes downcast. Broad across the chest with a square face and thick, caterpillar eyebrows. Still dressed in the red and black flannel shirt he'd been wearing days before. Seeing someone he recognized helped Hedge feel more at ease.

  "I saw you on the television a few days ago," said Hedge as the figure came close.

  John Elm stopped and looked at Hedge, eyes glazed, face twisted by lingering confusion.

  "Yeah," he answered distantly. Then, after a moment of thought added, "Yeah."

  "Almost told them everything, eh?"

  Hedge chuckled to himself, recalling how close they had come to disaster.

  "Guess so," John replied. He puffed his cheeks and exhaled. "Don't much matter now, though, what bein' they're gonna destroy the place."

  “Oh, really?”

  For an instant Hedge didn't understand. Destroy the ShopMart selling the toasters? The parking lot where John had been interviewed? None of that made any sense. A moment passed before Hedge realized John was telling him, with an air of mild disappointment, that the Council intended to destroy the entire planet.

  “Yeah,” said John. “Really.”

  Hedge controlled himself. There was no need for alarm. This was a ruling issued by the Council of Plants, and thus a ruling that need not be questioned. But inside he could feel something winding up. Hedge became fidgety and restless, and his eyes darted here and there—at the listless agents around him, at the great doors from which issued a sense of complete indifference, at the space overhead in which planet Plant bobbed and rolled like an empty barrel, drifting out with the tide as the universe expanded and taking him further from the place he'd called home for twenty years.

  His mind spun aimlessly, images of the place he remembered sweeping up and away so quickly he could only register a sense of desperation and loss. Impossible. Inexplicable. This was far worse than he suspected. In fact, he could think of no way to make the situation any more dismal.

  As if in response, a black rod extended from the ground beside him, gurgled, and sent out a shower of chill water.

  "Th-th-th-is is t-t-t-terrible," Hedge mumbled through chattering teeth. His gaze was intense but empty. All he could see was Anna's open and innocent expression as it gazed up into the sky, fascinated as the first rainbow waves of beautiful ruin fell upon humanity.

  "Too bad," John agreed. He puffed at the water running down his face, then wiped at it with his hand. "Kinda liked it there. Oh well." He shrugged, began to shuffle away, then stopped. He came back to Hedge, whose astonishment was absolute. "Say," he added. "Did you have trouble with the safety valve phrase? My earth children insisted they didn't have an uncle Edwin."

  The Chamber of the Council of Plants

  It was bright inside the chamber of the Council of Plants. Not blinding, but a brightness that squeezed shadows to faint pencil lines. Hedge stood on the central platform at the base of the chamber where hundreds of plants looked down on him from tiered levels that rose to the acme of the pyramid. Those who stood where Hedge stood now often had the uncomfortable sense of being a germ looking up the shaft of a great microscope.

  The council members looking down on him took in every detail, from his muddy, drenched clothing, to his fat, almost hairless body. Had Hedge been looking at them, he might have picked out the details of the council members as well. Some were as large as rainforest trees with wide canopies and trunks encased in thick stockings of knitted ivy cords while others appeared to be no more than stooped flower stalks topped by a few feathery petals.

  But Hedge did not look around. Nor did he speak, or respond to questions, or make any outward motion. Instead, he stood before the Council, jaw canted and open, stunned speechless. Not by the impressive chamber or by the weight of so many eyes upon him. These things teetered at the rear of his mind, small and distant, waving frantically for fear of falling overboard and being lost in the wake of other thoughts.

  Hedge didn't see the council plants. He'd already forgotten where he was. Forgotten his responsibilities to his species. His mind had been set adrift by the information given him by John Elm. Thinking of Anna and Scud and the bees and the squeaky hinge on the screen door and the disturbing hum-brrzap! of the bug lamp ke
eping him up at night and where to fit more pork chops and the mortifying thought that very soon all these trivialities would soon be rendered irrelevant.

  He was so lost in thought that he didn't hear the Council's questions until they addressed him a third time.

  "Agent Hedge!"

  Hedge jolted. He was back in the chamber, dripping, feet caked with mud, shivering. The great majority of plants in this chamber lacked eyes, but it was clear their attention was focused upon him. Hedge blinked, wondering how long he’d been standing there.

  “Yes?”

  "I am pleased to have your attention,” said a plant on the lowest tier. The plant was a gathering of long, mossy tendrils that draped over an ivory tabletop encircling the room. “My name is Chairplant Gulliver Stingfruit. I would like you to describe your observations of humanity. What do you make of them?”

  A metal bar protruded before the plant, which Hedge supposed amplified the plant’s voice and carried it through the chamber. While many plants could develop vocal cords, lungs, and various apparatuses to shape passing air into discernable sounds, many plants chose to remain true to their origins since all of plant society was based upon maintaining the status quo. Plants were rooted to the ground, immobile and, barring seasonal alterations, unchanging. Nothing required change, unless something strayed from the pattern plants had established, and then only to return it to the pattern. Which was why humanity had first come under scrutiny. They were a species of numerous social and political constants, such as discord and war, but were nevertheless constantly in flux so far as their technology and ambition was concerned.

  The Council was silent, patiently awaiting his response.

  His mouth opened. It wasn't until Hedge resigned himself to speak that he realized he wasn't sure what to say. Had he done his job? Had he observed humanity as he was supposed to? The majority of the time he'd spent working on various household chores, speaking with Scud Peabody at the diner, and watching the television with Anna. He should have been probing and infiltrating and discovering the dirty dark secrets which humanity kept buried in shoeboxes under the flowers and great vaults deep within their insidious institutions. Unfortunately, he’d never gotten around to it.

  "Humans are very, ah, busy," Hedge began. He shivered. "With various projects. Space travel, thermodynamics, fission reactions, physics, horticulture. I, for example, cultivated an agricultural domain that produced food and other wares for carbon dioxide producing organisms, thus promoting the continuation of the life cycle on..."

  "We are not interested in your activities and efforts to impersonate humans, agent Hedge," another plant interjected, "but the activities of the humans you observed. We do not deign to be human, we only emulate them to lull them into a false sense of security and thus learn their true nature. What are their ambitions? How do they plan to achieve them? Do they have any long-range plans for their race? Do those plans extend beyond their own planet? Are they benevolent or malevolent? Do they seek knowledge or dominion?"

  Hedge cleared his throat.

  "To be a better human is to better understand them, don't you think?"

  A heavy silence fell. The idea of being human for any reason was surely distasteful. That all the plants here were restricted to flowerpots or the dirt to which they were rooted seemed to be evidence of that. There wasn't much purpose for a plant to move around, but Hedge couldn't bear the thought of being restricted to a vase or a patch of dirt having experienced the limited mobility that allowed him to travel to any dirt he chose.

  Hedge detected this urge to argue and realized it was one of many human traits he had acquired in his time amongst them.

  "This is an example of what humans refer to as Flippancy," Hedge said quickly. "They are a very sarcastic species, and for this reason it is sometimes difficult to understand what they mean because often, such as when they are being flippant, they mean just the opposite of what they say."

  "A telling piece of information," said Stingfruit gruffly. "Please answer the question."

  "Because my location was largely rural I did not come into contact with a great many humans."

  "Then what of those you did meet? What was your understanding of them?"

  Hedge thought of the diner and the vindictive Garry Thorne, how they swarmed upon Scud like fire ants. He thought of the television, always spewing doom and frightening Anna. Hedge’s experiences could easily serve as encapsulated encounters with the whole of humanity. They were nasty and dangerous. Yet Hedge could not bring himself to tell the Council such a stark and brutal truth.

  "They did not appear to have any plans for galactic conquest," Hedge answered. That, at least, was true. Humanity was largely decentralized. They joined together in factions, but hadn't mustered their collective might, and thus their achievements were muted. "However, I am sure there is much more to learn and would be glad of the opportunity to continue in this role."

  There were murmurs and grumbles from the Council as they conferred with one another. Stingfruit spoke again.

  "Yes," he said. "A sentiment shared by a number of your peers."

  "Indeed," agreed another. "It is a most suspicious phenomenon, this desire to return. One that cannot help but make us wonder if the humans have infiltrated our system of spies in order to save their species from certain ruin. A ruin, I might add, they richly deserve. Perhaps a few humans are posing as plants that are posing as humans and intend to report to their masters. Foolish though they may be, there are quite a lot of them, so the probability is very high that one of them could insert themselves into our network by chance or design."

  "Most like by chance," said another.

  "Are you such a counterspy, agent Hedge?" asked Stingfruit.

  It was probably because Hedge had spent so much slow time in the presence of humanity that the gravity of this question did not penetrate immediately. He stood several moments before realizing he was suspected not just of treason, which was stunning of its own accord, but of being human as well.

  "Me? A counterspy? I don’t think so. No, no. Of course not. Why should I wish to spy upon my own kind? We have done nothing worthy of scrutiny, have we? I just want to assist in the fashion that I am best able."

  There was murmuring amongst the plants for a few moments before the chairplant spoke to him again.

  "Very well, Hedge. While your prolonged exposure to humanity has clearly dulled your judgment and made you argumentative and flippant, as you say, we believe you."

  "However," said still another, "though we appreciate your services, you will not be returning in such a capacity. Humanity has been deemed too reckless, and will be liquidated."

  So it was true. Hedge felt his insides plummet.

  "Liquidated? Why?"

  "Humankind is not a pleasant race," explained the chairplant in a sighing, faintly agitated tone which made it seem as though it had done so several times before. "On a grand scale, their history is laced with war and social unrest. On a small scale they exhibit a general intolerance of one another, resulting in various levels of criminal behavior, including the murder of their own kind. This sort of behavior is unacceptably hypocritical for a species which deems itself sentient and civil. Behavior that we believe is a direct consequence of having forward-facing eyes."

  Hedge wasn't certain he'd heard correctly.

  "Forward-facing eyes?"

  "Yes," said Stingfruit. "They simply cannot help themselves."

  "I don't understand."

  Another plant made a blustery, throat-clearing noise. It too was on the lowest level. A short, drooping tree no taller than Hedge, with foliage that reminded him of a thick, brushy mustache. It made another noise and Hedge saw its leaves flutter where the words passed. Certain it had the attention of the chamber, the plant spoke.

  "It is a scientific fact that those creatures with forward-facing eyes use this feature to hunt prey, using the depth perception it permits them to pinpoint their lunges. Whereas those creatures without eyes, or with
eyes on the sides of their head, are passive and use their panoramic vision to elude stalking predators who have forward-facing eyes. Those with eyes on the sides of their head consider their surroundings more thoroughly, while those with forward-facing eyes pick a target and plow blindly toward it, oblivious of how this approach disrupts their environment."

  A much taller plant beside the mustache plant, with a long, pale trunk and a few sharp leaves at the top, continued.

  “All they see are objectives and obstacles to be met or overcome or obliterated as they rumble forward in a straight line, over, under, or through. Nor do they ever see the havoc they leave in their wake, the forward-facing eyes fixed already upon their next objective. This aggression has led to recklessness in virtually every aspect of their society, playing a notable role in their technological progress. Reckless advancement is their most reliable method of discovery, learning more through accident than ingenuity, diving wildly forward in pursuit of success rather than taking stock of the effects their experiments have upon the world around them."

  Here the chairplant resumed control of the argument.

  "Their frequent use of thermonuclear devices and particle accelerators not just in times of war, but also experimentally out of lunatic curiosity, is extremely disturbing. They are not just a danger to themselves, or others, but to Everything. It is for that reason that we must intervene."

  "There is only one solution," said a plant near the acme.

  "We must protect the universe."

  “One cannot trust those with forward-facing eyes.”

  The voices sounded from several places now as numerous plants added their input.

  "It is our duty to every creature, every system, every grain of matter that we do so and do so thoroughly. When a branch dies, before it becomes filled with insects or infection to poison the rest of the plant we cut it off. The universe itself is a plant. So it is with a species that poses a threat to the universe."