Come the Apocalypse, Part 2
A novella by Robert Hegwood
Follow this link for part 1.
A TIME TO WEEP
Mother Xenia wept. A profound sadness engulfed her and cut trails across her cinder blackened cheeks. The strange scent hung heavy in the air like the fragrance of silence. She stumbled up the gangway to the shuttle. In a dark alcove beneath a work-station, four luminous eyes raised to meet her. It was the little mother huddled tight against a bulkhead. Over her gathered limbs other tiny clusters of eyes blinked like distant stars.
“Blessed Theotokos, save us.” Mother Xenia knelt before the little creature. “Here’s a pretty mystery. There’s room. We will share. I must go out again to find my friend. Stay put. You will be safe here. This old bucket’s tougher than a prairie fire.”
She stood and retrieved another pastry and laid it within the little mother’s reach. The old nun’s com-bud sputtered to life. It was Yellow Meadow.
“Beloved Mother, Third Parcel does not answer. He will be overrun if he does not return now.”
“I have an idea. Seal the couch chamber, the service deck, and pilot’s bridge. Let down the gangway and rotate the descent thrusters to face the fire.”
Mother Xenia played a hunch. She exited the shuttle to find Third Parcel, only to meet a troop of hundreds of varied arthropod analogs. These were joined by dozens of scaled, furred, and feathered creatures that bustled along beside them, hurrying towards the gangway as the first tendrils of smoke threaded the air with the scent of the inferno. The thunder of the approaching herd grew closer. She could not yet see them, but she heard the dreadful bellowing of those who ran too slowly.
She checked Third Parcel’s location on the heads-up. There was no time. Death by stampede or fire seemed certain. Locks on the habitat released, and with a deep whirring, its broad cargo gangway descended. It was then that she noticed the lone icon propped upon the tree. The thunder of hooves had grown deafening, and she hurried to retrieve the Theotokos. Perhaps she could shield herself behind it and save herself from trampling or from the searing horror that followed.
She lifted the icon and turned to see Third Parcel emerge from the smoke, his ocular carapace dark as sin. He waddled like mad for the gangway. Just as the crazed Gom passed the first of the landing struts, the initial wave of desperate grazers surged like living cave paintings from the smoke, tongues lolling, eyes wild and red.
Mother Xenia thrust the icon of the Theotokos before her and strode forward, her own eyes wide and the Kyrie Eleison a stammer upon her lips. All around her, great leaping bodies kicked away to the right and left, dashing for the perceived safety of the wood. She could feel the heat as the wall of fire pressed closer. Crackles and explosions reached her ears. The fire had found the flanks of the little wood where flame-engulfed trees burst like bombs.
The thunder of hooves had been replaced by the roar of the fire when she found Third Parcel’s ruined body in the flattened grass just within the perimeter of the habitat’s underbelly. A faint tocking exited her translator as “Save Us.” Mother Xenia swiped at her eyes with a char blackened fist. She made the sign of the cross and advanced against the devouring blaze.
Behind her, the stampede had halted as if it met a wall just at the wood. The beasts fidgeted, confused, exhausted, but with their last strength they faced towards the fire, and then by ordered ranks entered the habitat until no room remained within. Even then, flyers and scramblers darted over the grazer’s heads to settle upon their backs or threaded through a forest of shifting limbs to pack themselves in the spaces between. The largest creatures pressed to the center of the wood, congregating at the banks of the small streams that flowed from the springs that gushed from the living rock of the encircling hills.
The fire swept down upon the habitat, then reeled backwards, driven to the ground by the gelid blast of four back-tilted thrusters. Mother Xenia laid the icon of the Burning Bush upon Third Parcel’s battered thorax, folded her ryassa into a fire-broom, and laid into the trickle of flames beneath the habitat that remained. Yellow Meadow released construction drones to scoop water from the stream beds and douse the blaze that had begun to eat the little forest.
Nearly half the forest had succumbed before the last embers were quenched, and all things stood in the silence of a bitter haze of smoke and steam. A soft wind stirred the pale ashes until all looked as if it had been covered in snow.
By ones and twos the animals exited the smoke-blackened habitat and shuttle. With furtive glances, they picked their way to the ground into what was left of the forest. The grazers broke into smaller herds, some loping in one direction, some in the other. It might be days yet before they found new grazing. The fire still burned on either side as far as one could see, but it died at the edge of the desert, starved of fuel.
The danger gone, the construction drones erected a small pavilion on a shaded hillock that overlooked the central stream. They then shaped the soil beneath it into a shallow bowl that they sprayed full of bedding foam. Three naked Gom, far too ample to walk themselves, floated out of the habitat on Gom hover-chairs. The ash, stirred by their passage, stuck to their glistening bodies. Yellow Meadow hurried behind them, trailed by a food cart. They paid no attention to Mother Xenia keeping vigil beside Third Parcel, whose internal injuries were grave. With an effort, Third Parcel laid his badly bruised esophageal trunk on her lap and with his lips made one of the few signs she knew: Water.
“You are such a cliche, my sweet. I’ll be right back.”
She staggered to her feet and glared in disbelief at the Gom preparing to plant themselves on this world without her clearance, and without the least care for one of their own who lay at death’s door.
“Holy Mother, help me. I want to strangle them.”
She limped up the gangway of the habitat to its ample food lockers. Water pouch in hand, she returned to Third Parcel to find the little mother crouched at his side, packing a half dozen small white ovules into the Gom’s maw. Something caught in Mother Xenia’s throat, and she crossed herself. One by one, Third Parcel swallowed the little mother’s gifts, crushing them so that their rich milk flowed freely down his trunk. Mother Xenia opened the water pouch and settled it upon the trunk’s prehensile lips.
Two medic-droids joined the nun as she tried her best to bandage the torn flesh of Third Parcel with strips torn from the hem of her inner cassock. Her outer cassock was a charred ruin fit only for recycling.
“It’s about time,” she said as the droids salved, injected, braced, and ultimately moved Third Parcel to a hover-gurney.
Instead of taking the injured Gom into the medical bay of the habitat, they proceeded to the newly erected pavilion by the stream. She followed, and, to her comfort, the little mother joined her.
The three obese Gom sat side-by-side in the depression, flesh pressed against glistening flesh. Their aspect appeared dull, the usual vibrant colors of their optical carapaces muted to a uniform grey. Yellow Meadow was occupied feeding them tidbits when not spraying them with a fine mist of oil. Mother Xenia saw the black whorls spinning through his carapace. That strange scent permeated the hillock.
“Who are you?” Mother Xenia cried out. “Tell me!”
No reply came other than the small chirps and chitterings from what remained of the canopy. The only other sounds were the purling of flowing water and the shuffling feet of Yellow Meadow tending to the brood-couch. It was then that she noticed the medic-droids wiping the feathers away from Third Parcel’s battered flesh. They had induced a molt. With the help of Yellow Meadow, they eased Third Parcel onto the couch and leveraged the dying Gom into a cleft between two of the brooders. Then she understood the Goms’ initial inattention. To save Third Parcel’s life required its loss.
Over the next few hours, the Gom would dissolve into each other and form a pupae. In a few months’ time, six to seven new Gom would emerge, each having a portion of the mind and memories of its brood pod. During those months, Yellow Meadow would guard them or die trying. Churning Brook doubtless remained in the habitat’s medical bay and, once recovered, would assist as well.
Something bumped at her ankles. It was the little mother bearing a reed in her mouth. The creature extended the reed towards Mother Xenia. The nun started upon discovering a string of glyphs etched into its thin rind. She patted the creature’s head, oblivious to its receptivity to being petted.
She tapped Yellow Meadow several times before the black whorls receded. The Gom moved as if waking from a dream, tocking hesitantly.
“What? Oh. Yes, Beloved Mother?”
“Are you well?
“Still a bit shaken, so many strange thoughts… flashes of memory that are not mine.”
“What do you make of this?” She handed him the reed and pointed out the glyphs.
“Cold Mountain writing. Very old. School fardel. Third Parcel’s interest. Not mine.”
“But can you read it?”
“Yes, but it makes no sense. ‘Pink buds sleep beside the stream. Only the strongest wind will wake them.’ Poem stuff. Not practical.”
The black whorls returned, and Yellow Meadow continued his misting. The strange scent clustered palpably for a moment near the pavilion before it was dispersed by a light, bitter breeze off the still smoldering grasslands.
Mother Xenia trudged back to the shuttle and washed herself in its spartan shower. She tossed her ruined garments into the refurb bin, where a bevy of nanites would remake them. She could not sign off on this world. Another mind was at work here. The Gom would have to keep searching as soon as the supply ship showed up three or so years from now. It would be heartbreaking to uproot them. It might have been better for them, perhaps, if they had asked forgiveness and not permission.
They had been so earnest, so eager in calling her out of retirement when there were no planetary validation agents available in the sector for another couple of years. Her license was still in force, and she had not been long tonsured. Her skete, Holy Myrrhbearers, was on a world often visited by the Gom, and she had worked with them before to settle other worlds. The Gom’s donation had been very generous. Everything had seemed so providential. Now she must tell them, “No.”
When she woke the next morning, the habitat’s tender-droids were already at work clearing debris and laying out the environs of the settlement which was to grow from the habitat. Yellow Meadow was busy examining the thickness and pliability of the pupal envelope. His esophageal trunk strained to the limits to see the top. When Mother Xenia approached, Yellow Meadow stood down and met her as she drew back the weather flap of the pavilion.
“Greetings, Beloved Mother, I hope you are rest…”
Mother Xenia cut him off, “Forgive me for interrupting. I cannot sign off on this world. Someone or something sentient, native to this place, remains. You cannot colonize without their invitation—and we don’t yet even know who they are.”
“No decision needed for a long while yet. Much can change.”
Yellow Meadow said nothing more, but the black whorls returned to his ocular carapace. A light stirring of the breeze concentrated the strange scent so particular to this alien wood. The whorls in Yellow Meadow's ocular carapace pulsed and deepened. For a moment, it seemed as if it were not the Gom regarding her, but someone else.
Mother Xenia excused herself and followed a trail that led deeper into the wood. Once out of sight, from an inner pocket she drew forth a long woolen loop sectioned by a hundred knots, which she passed one by one through her fingers. “Kyrie Eleison,” she said again and again, knot by knot, breath by breath. Two centuries of counting prayers found her standing beside a broad pool fed by one of the wood’s three springs. The churned up soil and multiple animal droppings suggested that at least some of the herd had refreshed themselves here. Flying spiders skittered over the macerated earth and stole little balls of mud from iridescent beetles before darting away.
The click-clock-tock of Gom chanting just beyond the stream broke her reverie. She waded across the cool water to find Churning Brook trailing bandages from every limb. A large plaster covered a portion of his ocular carapace… his entirely black ocular carapace. He was carving old glyphs into the leathery bark of a fallen tree.
Forty silent ordered scars
Laid stroke upon looping stroke
The stylus cuts cleanly
And peels a curling ribbon
From between these two, once one
The broad wholeness now riven
Divided like parted lips
That speak and say, “Remember.”
How peculiar. She could not read ancient Gom glyphs. So, how could she now? A breeze rustled her veil and the glyphs returned to blocks of meaningless lines and squiggles. Very peculiar. Yet another mystery to ponder.
“Lord, have mercy,” she rasped, clearing her throat and crossing herself.
One of Churning Brook’s sub-ocular tentacles rolled into a counterclockwise spiral and then reversed itself. It was a limb sign for appreciation/gratitude.
Mother Xenia laid a hand to her throat and said, “Who are you?”
Churning Brook’s esophageal trunk reoriented upon the nun and hovered a mere handbreadth from her face. Gom feeding eyes needed to be close to see.
"Beloved Mother. We are two, sometimes three. Soon many. It is a new thing.”
Mother Xenia made the sign of the cross, fingertips together in invocation of the Holy Trinity.
“Release Churning Brook. I adjure you.”
“I cannot so long as this one breathes.”
“I adjure you by the sign of Christ’s Holy Cross.”
“Burn the wood, and We…I… will die for long and long. Perhaps forever.”
“Who are you?”
“How do We answer, O nonephemeral?”
“What? All that lives is contingent. All is ephemeral before God, the Uncreated. But you know this. Depart, foul spirit.”
“Fair. Not spirit. What is spirit? Wait. Oh. Not spirit. Maybe, like spirit. Ephemer…” The black faded from Churning Brook’s optical carapace. It was replaced with the dull colors of a Gom under sedation. Mother Xenia summoned the two medical droids to escort Churning Brook back to the habitat.
When Mother Xenia returned, a light wind rippled the few spared patches of grass. The little mother dug for grubs. Her kits dug beside her, trying to understand what she found so interesting beneath the grass’s tangled roots. They all ignored Mother Xenia.
Yellow Meadow, wearing a breather, called from the gangway of the habitat, his limb sign indicating urgency. As she drew near, she noticed all the black whorls had vanished. The Gom sealed the door behind her as well as all exterior ports.
"I am frightened,” Yellow Meadow said as he led her to the medical bay. “I have reviewed visual logs.” The Gom’s own image appeared on the display above the life support console. Black whorls spun in its ocular carapace. “I did not know this thing. My memories have grown odd, fragmented between what I know of myself and what I could not know, nor possibly remember. I have seen the sea that once covered that grassland, Beloved Mother. The saltiness of its drying wind still burns when I think of it.”
“I’ve felt it myself,” she said. “Strange insinuations, impossible little bits of knowledge about this place. Tiny things, but nothing like what you describe. Whatever it is, Gom seem more susceptible to it than humans, or at least this human.”
“That is my concern. We are open to this thing.” Yellow Meadow wrapped its trunk around its ocular carapace and rocked on its three pinniped feet. “O Unoriginate, the brood. Beloved Mother, help us.”
“You are a proper pudding, aren’t you? We are all the help we’re going to get for a long while, so pull yourself together.”
Mother Xenia brought up an overhead view of the small wood and its neighboring geography. She noticed a set of recent files and flicked one of them open. For a moment her jaw hung slack. A city template overlay the area topography. It was full of parks and streams and domed gardens, extending a full kilometer on either side.
“The creation stamp says this is your work, Yellow Meadow. It is only a few hours old. You should have been in a sleep cycle then. Were you?”
Yellow Meadow called up the interior surveillance feed and entered the overlay’s creation stamp. It showed himself and Churning Brook at the engineering resource table busily planning a city. Other feeds from the same time sample showed the cargo hatch sealed and only bio-shielded ventilation ports open. There were no notifications of unexpected visitors of any sort, not so much as a midge.
“I am sorry to say, it appears I was not.”
“It does answer a question, though,” said Mother Xenia. “I don’t think whatever it is wants us to leave.”
“We’ll be beasts of burden,” said Yellow Meadow.
“Maybe. Maybe not. We need to make contact. Real contact.” Mother Xenia eased herself into a chair. “Oh, my bones.”
“Then we may stay?”
“It seems so,” she said, gesturing to the unbuilt city. “I think I can sign off once we are better acquainted with your co-designer.”
“We do not wish to impose.”
Mother Xenia crossed herself and smiled.
“Trust in the Unoriginate. We are stuck, all of us, for a few years. Yay or nay, my approval is meaningless until a supply ship visits. So, let's get to know this new creature who wants to be, shall we say, civilized.”
“How do we do this, Beloved Mother?”
Yellow Meadow made a gesture indicative of futility.
“Not you. Me. One good whiff, and you are compromised. I am going to tend the brood pavilion this evening. You and Churning Brook are going to stay inside with the vents sealed. I will attempt contact.”
“We are in danger, a danger that may warrant a lethal response.” Yellow Meadow summoned a medical analysis display. “This entity may be a marginal influence on you, but it can utterly subvert Gom physiology. We cannot stay locked inside indefinitely. We cannot permit the brood to be compromised—if it has not been compromised already. I will not be made a beast to serve this thing. The medic-drones are collecting air samples for analysis. If we can defeat its chemistry, we can defeat it before it owns us, foot and feather.”
Mother Xenia nodded, but schooled her face so as not to betray her revulsion at Yellow Meadow’s intent.
“It may not come to that. I will try something less finitive.”
She gathered a few provisions, packed them on a service drone, and exited the habitat.
She found the little mother inside the pavilion feeding on small arthropodic analogs stuck in the mucilaginous film that covered the brood. The scent was present, but not strongly so. Ventilation fans kept the air circulating. Mother Xenia withdrew an icon from an inner pocket of her work vest and mounted it above a cross brace to the east. St. Mammas of Caesarea sat astride a lion’s back, his calm gaze settling upon the brood below.
“You know what I need of you, my dear Mammas.”
Mother Xenia crossed herself and began spraying the brood pupae with a thin oil. In a few more days, it would feel like thick, soft leather. This would be her third brood of homesteading Gom to assist.
She watched as the little mother groomed herself while her kits tried getting the hang of solid food. They were already devouring the milk casings. The evening breeze shifted, and the scent grew stronger.
Drowsy, Mother Xenia settled herself on a folding chair she had brought for herself.
“I know what you are doing,” she mumbled as sleep overcame her.
The little mother stared at the nun intently before clambering into her lap. She churred for her kits, who climbed up to nestle in the warm fur of her underbelly.
Mother Xenia startled. Her hand stroked the breast of the little mother, her fingers occasionally brushing a kit that raised its head. The long, curling claws of the little mother rested upon Mother Xenia’s other wrist that drooped across the creature’s side. Those claws could rip through the bark of a fallen tree. A human wrist presented no obstacle. Mother Xenia glanced around the brood pavilion. The evening sky was bathed in moonlight. All the surrounding trees and grasses were glazed in a surreal silver-blue.
“That is the color of the night sky of the Gom home world. The moons here will not rise for hours yet. Who are you?”
The little mother rolled upright in the nun’s lap, bracing against her chest, and gazed into her eyes. It said:
“Talker of the Ash Strewn Evening. You have a mind like the other minds, but not like them either. What is it to be many minds? So many things this one remembers that have never been remembered before... places that are not, but must be, unliving vessels that shimmer between the stars. So old—so long you live, like the trees, yet not forever. We are as a breath to you. Even so, your petal falls and fades away.”
“Yes, we die, usually after many years,” Mother Xenia said.
“Like the beasts.”
“Like the beasts.”
“You are an unnumbered many. We are one and only one for ages, from long before the glittering sea fled away. We were great then, a memory that covered half the world. We are great no longer. Only this garden of memory remains. In the other minds, those you call Gom, We are great again. So much to know, to apply. We will not perish—not soon, though all that is will not be, and that which is not will come to be. That is the way of things.”
“Yes, it is. The Gom, the other minds, are afraid of you. They fear they will be lost to your control.”
“Fear? Like beasts who become prey?”
“Yes, they fear to be preyed upon—by you.”
“We had not considered that. Perhaps they are right to fear. Their minds, though deep, are very like the minds of beasts. We bond with ease. In them We are greater than We have ever been. One mind of many minds. It is a new thing. Their minds are too open, too alike, not like yours. It cannot be otherwise unless We cease to be. We are what We are.”
“No, this is a dream, a perception without substance. This little creature I hold is not the real one. She waits with her kits outside the dream.”
“Yes and no. She is part of us, as are these growing here in this.” In the dream state, the brood chrysalis of Gom pupae shimmered into focus. “You are sometimes accessible, sometimes not. It is very strange being of two minds. Long ago, when We wafted wide, perhaps We were many minds, yet one, but not now, not in any song that remains. We will learn again.”
“I cannot permit this.”
Mother Xenia struggled to wakefulness and came to with a snort. The little mother sleeping in her lap looked up but lay her head down once more. The nun gave a command to the circulating fans, which spun to maximum, scattering the scent. The little mother snuggled closer and, with her claws, drew Mother Xenia’s arms tight about her and her kits.
DECISIONS AND INDECISIONS
From that day forward, Mother Xenia never left her shuttle without a breather. She sent drones flitting throughout the wood, taking air samples, which she had the habitat’s environmental array parse to the limits of its technology. Over the next several days, it identified the strange scent, deconstructed it, and assigned the origins of its component compounds to a variety of environmental factors. It was a cocktail of native odors that were the result of everything from microbial metabolism in the soil to territorial markers, and hundreds of other olfactorily perceived substances in between—an environmental perfume.
Within a particular range of proportions and concentrations, the scent exhibited another quality: neuro-reactive connectivity.
Mother Xenia opened a channel to Yellow Meadow, who had sequestered himself in the habitat.
“What did you make of that last workup I sent you?”
“Its implications frighten me, Beloved Mother. It suggests mind without body, invasive, parasitical.”
“Or symbiotic,” said Mother Xenia, trying to put a friendlier face on it. “But my question is how could such a mind live with any continuity? A stiff breeze wipes it out. It would always be starting over, like an infant reborn, a blank slate, only to vanish in a passing rain. And another thing, how does it perceive? A brain without a body is deaf, dumb and blind. It has no perception of anything but its own thoughts.”
“Do not do this now, Beloved Mother. You know already the answers to your questions. This is your game. I do not wish to play. I am frightened. Outside, I risk ceasing to be myself, even inside, I risk it if I do not maintain positive pressure and keep the atmospheric scrubbers engaged. Beyond that, I fear for the brood, how this thing will corrupt them as they form. Just tell me what you suspect and do not make me guess.”
“Poor child, of course. Forgive me? This is my theory. The mind ameliorates its transitory nature through the creatures of this wood, at least those with sufficiently robust neural capacity. It borrows their senses in concert and stores its memories in them. And what happens when this mind vanishes and a new one forms?”
“A dance of delirium, Beloved Mother?”
“You have to be the snarkiest Gom I’ve ever encountered.” Mother Xenia could see Yellow Meadow’s mounting frustration in the barely constrained writhing of his sub-ocular tentacles. “Not exactly. A new mind would have access to all the memories of all the other minds before it, going back who knows how long. It could be tens of thousands of years old, maybe more. A vertical culture of one.”
“The animals here do not live thousands of years. All die. Some sick. Some eaten. How does its memory persist so long?”
“It’s just a guess. Maybe they are constantly moved to new hosts. Maybe there are other long-term means to store memory... maybe not. I’m speculating. It persists for many years, no doubt.”
“That explains the gardens,” said Yellow Meadow, as it brought up an overlay of all the long-dead ruins along the edges of the desert. “Everything appears organic, yet its development is universally directed. Every tree, every burrow exists in a harmony, a placement and proportion that supports the mind. Thank you, Beloved Mother, I understand what must be done.”
“And just what do you understand?” asked the nun.
“If we are to live, this wood must be destroyed. There are many living places on this world. The loss of this one will not injure it.”
“It will injure the mind. It will die, perhaps never to reform anywhere, at any time. Even if it did reconstitute eventually, all the old memories would be gone with the scattering and death of its creatures. A whole culture would be extinguished. I cannot sign off on that.”
“Then we die, or worse than die. You condemn us to be mental pack animals to this thing. Give a better choice, Beloved Mother.”
She closed the connection and opened a new one to Churning Brook. It was mid-morning, and the injured Gom was supposed to remain in proximity to the medical bay. The locator beacon of its com-bud indicated that Churning Brook was instead deep in the woods along the back wall beyond the springs. The locator indicated that the Gom could be found in a stand of giant canes like bamboo but of broader base and more constrained height. Mother Xenia put on a breather and powered up a hover-sled. She’d had her fill of walking for a few days.
Mother Xenia found the missing Gom carving poems in old glyphs upon the sides of the great cane. His ocular carapace was as black as a portal looking out upon deep space. He took no notice of her. Her heads up translated the glyphs as she read here and there. One attributed to Bright Sunlit Noon spoke about a chick that hung by a single claw from its nest, dangling between life and death. Comet at Dusk speculated on the spinning stars in the sky, recounting how much they changed over time... a long memory. Stillness Full of Birdsong told about a path between the springs and the mounded burrows of some tiny creature she did not know that once lived on the charred margins of the forest.
“We need to talk,” she said, taking off the breather.
The Gom kept writing until he had filled the cane, then moved to the next. Mother Xenia scanned the glyphs and read.
A stranger traveled to the wood
So small it was, she wandered long
For many days she sought her friends
Lost between warm flowing water
And the cold blast of freezing wind
Life dies like a sinking ember
Never still, passing like the stream
A cold night sighs and We are gone.
We, First Iteration
Of Two Beneath the Teal Canes
Mother Xenia wanted to choose her words carefully. She slipped a long loop of woolen beads from her belt. Each knot consisted of nine interlocking crosses, a hundred knotted beads in all. As she pulled each knot through her fingers, she filled the corresponding breath with a Kyrie elision. For ten centuries of knots she followed Churning Brook as he etched verse after verse with a laser stylus.
At long last, a swirl of color returned to the Gom’s ocular carapace, though small eddies of black remained. With his feeding eyes, Churning Brook examined a couple of his nearest creations.
“We are at an impasse, are we not, Beloved Mother? We, the Gom, need a place to live. We, the dweller in the wood, wants security, wants to learn, to know so much of that which we do, and it does not. We, the Gom, fear to be enslaved. You, the human, the mediator, want a just resolution for all, which is in question because We, the dweller in the wood, lives in union with all the minds of the wood, and cannot live otherwise. If We say, ‘Dwell with us,’ the Gom say, ‘We will be made beasts of burden.’ They are not entirely wrong. We are what We are.”
Mother Xenia slipped her prayer rope back into her belt.
“We saved your wood, likely your very existence.”
“It would not have been endangered if you had not come to Us first.”
“Good point. But surely, there was bound to be a fire one day. Had we not been here, how would you have survived that calamity?”
“There have been many fires. It would have taken much, but not all. We would survive.”
“Could there not come a fire so great that too much would be lost to recover from?”
“It has not happened yet, but it could. Let it be as the Unephemeral deigns.”
“The Unephemeral?”
Mother Xenia moved a little closer. She had a sedative hypo concealed beneath her ryassa, just in case.
“The One Who Is, the Noncontingent.”
“We call that One God.” Mother Xenia crossed herself. “Kyrie Eleison.”
'“Lord, have mercy.’ The Gom knows its meaning.” Churning Brook struck a pose stereotypical of a Gom in deep thought. “Is this what you call praying?”
“Yes. It is a short prayer. I do not wish to say the wrong thing, to be understood in ways hurtful to our needs. I ask for mercy.”
“Does the Unephemeral listen to you?”
“That is my hope.”
“But you do not know.”
“Not always, not often. Not until there has been time to reflect. Sometimes, not even then.”
“It is the same with us. The Gom seem more sure. What is to be done?”
“Prayer seems a good enough place to start.”
Mother Xenia laid her hand upon Churning Brook’s side. A sub-optical tentacle coiled around the aged hand and patted it with its terminal digits.
“I am still here, Beloved Mother, if that is your fear,” said Churning Brook. “Many minds at once is a new thing for the dweller in the wood. It is overwhelming to deal with more than one or two of us at a time. Distracting.” Churning Brook gestured for Mother Xenia’s recorder and began scanning his work of the past few hours. “This intrigues the dweller. It watches but does not control.”
“How do I know that what you say is true? How do I know that any of you exposed to the dweller, as you put it, don’t just become his puppets for the duration?”
A distant rumble of thunder sounded above the grassy plain. She turned momentarily to listen and gauge its direction.
“It will sweep our wood,” said Churning Brook, who pointed to the canopy of cane leaves above. “Flyers see from on high. The winds push the rain our way. Even at the edge of the desert We get a little rain. Wait with Us till it comes, and ask your questions again.”
“I didn’t bring an umbrella.”
“What is umbrella?”
“Noodle your…” she paused to choose an inoffensive word, “your helper. The definition is there.”
They walked for a while among the scriven cane. The dweller through Churning Brook shared bon mots from the stories that underlie each poem. Some were hundreds, if not thousands, of years old. Others had been created by the current iteration of the dweller just an hour or two before. The Dangling Flyer Chick recalled an incident observed in the calm following a violent thunderstorm four hundred years prior. When it could hang on no longer, it dropped, and in fear flung out its wings, and to its great surprise glided safely to the ground.
“The dweller that coalesced after the storm did that. The chick wasn’t old enough to fly, but it had the right instincts and just enough strength in its wings to slow its descent. To live, it had to surrender to the Unephemeral.”
“It wasn’t the Unephemeral who saved it. It was the dweller... you from long ago,” said Mother Xenia.
“Was it not? What if the dweller was not fully aware in that moment? What if the dweller had no more concern for it than a falling pebble from the cliff face? What if the storm had come before the chick was strong enough to glide when instructed?”
“You are driving at something... Dweller? Churning Brook? Which am I talking to?”
“Both,” answered Churning Brook.
Then the rains fell, and hard gusts drove through the canes. The binding scent fell away, and the small black whorls receded from Churning Brook’s ocular carapace.
“We spoke the truth to your questions, Beloved Mother. It is strange to be mind in mind. I cannot say I like it, but neither do I fear it the way Yellow Meadow does. The history of this dweller is so deep. It is a whole culture, a civilization expressed one individual at a time. And such history. No wars. No deceits. No manipulations. Just new joy at being alive, cataloging the beauty of tiny moments across hundreds of years. Speculations about life, about the Uncontingent. Even ancient poems concerning mathematics and geometry. It lives in the wonder of each passing moment, for the existence of each iteration is so brief. Is it not sin to not share our lives with the dweller, to help?”
“It has managed to limp along well enough,” said Mother Xenia. “I’ve seen indications among the poems that this iteration has a history approaching seven or eight thousand years. It witnessed the dying of the sea where there are only grasslands now. My people still lived in mud huts and hunted naked in the jungles that long ago.” Mother Xenia paused. “Do we have to continue this conversation in the rain? I’m drenched, as are you.”
They picked their way back towards the habitat, taking shelter beneath leafy umbels here and there when the downpour was especially fierce. It seemed the rain was absorbed by the ground with unexpected rapidity, emptying puddles almost as quickly as they formed. Churning Brook explained how the whole of the forest floor had been prepared over long years to channel any excess water deep into the aquifers, which were tapped to keep the forest healthy and growing.
By the time they reached the brood pavilion, the rain had slackened. Once inside, they boosted the fans. The hide of the brood pupae was hardening, but months still remained before emergence.
Mother Xenia tested the pupae’s hardness, patting it, listening to it as if it were some giant watermelon she would know was ripe when it thumped just so.
“Give it a couple more days to thicken, and we could move the lot of us. Take it aboard the habitat and resettle at some less interesting locale.”
“I am much better than I was, but not that well.” Churning Brook coiled his tentacles in a sign that indicated humor. “Lifting that would tear loose every suture in my body.”
“The service droids could do that.” Mother Xenia retrieved a misting device and began spraying. “Try again.”
“All of us hang by a claw, Beloved Mother. We cannot hang indefinitely. Each of our choices means death for someone. If we move, we only delay. To stay on this world is to be under the sway of the dweller in the wood, if not now, then eventually, when others find this place again. Or, we could destroy it—we have the resources, but we would end a unique civilization that, as you say, is far older than your own. Then again, we could leave, relocate just long enough to be rescued, and go where? How would you convince the newly emerged who will be rooted on this new world to abandon it and live nameless? You know how land-bound and territorial we are. It takes years for us to mature enough to be able to go elsewhere. What rescue ship would wait?”
“Good points,” said Mother Xenia, “but I have a responsibility. I must protect you, and I must protect the dweller in the wood. If I let you stay, all that you love about the dweller’s mind will be endangered. You said it lives in the joy of the moment because its life is so brief. How can it stay that way with you around? With the technology we possess, we could build secure environments that could just about stand up to a meteor strike. It would never dissipate in a rainstorm or in a gust on a blustery day. It would not live moment to moment anymore, and that would change the dweller in ways we cannot foresee.”
Churning Brook took the misting device from the nun to reach the higher places she could not.
“That will happen regardless, Beloved Mother. It has seen our minds. It already knows what can be even if it does not yet know how it can be. That will be learned, whether gleaned from us or through trial and error. Do you know it already started planning how to use some of our terraforming knowledge to expand the grove, maybe even create new ones? Did you see the poem at the springs?”
“I missed that one,’’ Mother Xenia said, taking a seat and retrieving her prayer rope, letting a knot slip between her thumb and forefinger with each breath.
“It is carved in the basin in a spiral about the seep. It anticipates the flowing mind that must have lived centuries past. That is where the dweller’s mind is whole in one place and whole in another, but broken for a time between by the elements before flowing back together again, either as the same or differing iterations.”
The nun and the Gom talked for hours, trading their thoughts and speculations, the paths open to them and the paths closed. By the time the sun hung low above the horizon and they had turned their discussion to what they should prepare for the evening meal, there came an insistent scratching at the entry flap of the brood pavilion. Mother Xenia opened it to see the little mother, who darted in between her feet and pawed at her calf to be lifted up. The nun reached down to pick her up and nearly dropped the little mother when the lifeless body of one of her kits fell free.
“Mother of God! What’s happening?” She pulled open the door to see the outside air full of a thin, yellowish mist. “Get a breather on. Now!” She helped Churning Brook into a breather from the supply locker as best she could while one-handed. She covered the little mother with her mantle and hurried to the habitat. All the access ramps had been withdrawn, so she ran instead to her shuttle. Churning Brook waddled close behind. When they were inside, she sealed the door and purged the atmosphere. She settled the little mother on a bunk that folded down from an alcove. Two kits remained, but one looked weak and sluggish.
Churning Brook ensconced himself at the shuttle’s command interface and called up analysis on real-time atmospheric samples. The answer flashed almost before he had completed his inquiry. The mist was a short-duration zoecide, a genomically modifiable poison meant to repel dangerous and aggressive life forms, both vegetative and animal. The authorization stamp belonged to Yellow Meadow. The Gom transferred the data to the medical unit, where Mother Xenia prepared an antidote that was not too strong for the kits to endure.
She squeezed the medicine a drop at a time onto the little creature’s mouth. It didn’t like the medicine but drank just to clear the stuff away. The little mother kept pulling Mother Xenia’s hand back so she could see that her baby still lived. Nervous churring brought little response from the kit, and the little mother licked the antidote from its face, receiving her own dose incrementally as Mother Xenia kept the drops falling until she was satisfied both kits had enough in their systems to throw off the worst effects of Yellow Meadow’s handiwork.
Mother Xenia did not need the translators to understand the shouting match that erupted between Churning Brook and Yellow Meadow. It sounded like two marimbas colliding at terminal velocity. While they argued, she opened access to the terraforming module and ordered two crop sprayers filled with the antidote, directing the ag-drones to spray the forest. It took three refills and most of the night to cover what remained of the wood after the fire. She could do no more until the fabrication unit resupplied the shuttle’s primary chemical stores. That would take a couple of days.
When morning came, she heard only silence, no trill of insect, no song of bird. The once celadon grass drooped in browning clumps. Most of the trees stood bare, their discolored leaves a wilted carpet upon the forest floor. The only scent in the air was the char of the fire and something thin and chemical. Mother Xenia cried and could not stop crying. Churning Brook shuffled between the naked trees, stricken and speechless.
The habitat stood open, its broad ramp extended, its hangar doors open to the morning air. Yellow Meadow was not within, though Churning Brook and Mother Xenia searched for the Gom in every compartment the habitat possessed. His locator beacon lay in a small alcove in his quarters. The little mother did not follow but only sniffed the ground, then retreated to a dark corner within the shuttle.
By the morning of the third day, there was still no sign of Yellow Meadow. The air stank of decay, like feces and rotting spinach. The fans and filters kept the worst of it from the brood couch. Mother Xenia, the little mother, and Churning Brook retired to the habitat and its clean air and clean water and sterile silence. They changed the security codes and made sure Yellow Meadow had access to nothing more than would allow him to breathe, eat, and sleep. Another rain passed through in the heat of the afternoon, and that cleared the outside air enough to make it endurable for a while. They sent out survey drones to assess the extent of the destruction. All was dead or dying but for a few scattered trees or clumps of brush and a thin margin that hugged the back wall of what was once the forest.
It was among a scrim of living canes closest to the embankment beyond the springs that Mother Xenia found Yellow Meadow. His optical carapace was black as obsidian.
“This one is mine,” said the voice of Yellow Meadow. Even through the translator, Mother Xenia could discern the deep agony of the dweller in the wood. “It’s all gone! Centuries, all gone. My memories vanished. I reach for what I know I once knew, and it is not there. What have you done? Do not bother to tell me. I know.”
“I am so sorry.” The nun fell to her knees. “There is nothing I can say. We are horrified. Forgive us.”
“What are your feelings to... We... I? Where are the songs of yesterday? I read them there on the canes where my being no longer extends... and I do not remember. All We are clings to bellysliders and little leapers and burrowers beneath the stone... a dying vine here, a wilted creeper there... and this... this Gom that I claim as my memory. I am forgetting who We were as I speak, and you want me to forgive.”
Another voice spoke from behind Mother Xenia.
“I’ve sent out drones to take scans and soil samples. We could not save much of what the poison touched. It did not penetrate very deeply, however. Many of the larger roots still live. The forest will grow again in time. With patience, much can be saved.” It was Churning Brook, his breather abandoned at his feet.
“How generous,” said Yellow Meadow’s voice. “One day We will be almost whole. Yes, creatures will return. New flowers will grow. We will start again, as We must. From this one I know how long We lived in this place, but Our memories died out there in this one’s poison. This Gom will not die until the forest is new, and then I will visit upon this one every torment I can imagine until it is no more. We will make a new song each morning to make memory of its suffering until, in mindless agony, it expires like a broken beast alone in the grass.”
“No,” said Churning Brook. “That is not the way of the Unephemeral.”
“What is this Unephemeral?” The dweller took a moment to rummage through Yellow Meadow’s memories. “This is meaningless. What do We know of that which endures without ending? We all perish, some quicker, some slower, or so it seems to me... Us. There is no Us... I am the first iteration since this dying. How many millions have We been, all lost?”
Mother Xenia began crying again, dabbing at her tears with her prayer rope.
“Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy…”
Something broken groaned in Yellow Meadow’s voice.
“Where is our mercy? Where is our retribution for all that is gone forever?”
“Me,” said Churning Brook. “Take me. Let Yellow Meadow go. You wrote those songs there on the cane through me. All those memories and many more are in my mind. Let me help you reclaim at least a little. Let Us remake this forest, extend it across the continent in time, like in the ancient days.”
Churning Brook stepped out of the dead leaves and into the living margin, where the binding scent clung to being. His ocular carapace went black as color swirled anew in the carapace of Yellow Meadow, who scurried, tentacles writhing, in fear to hide behind Mother Xenia. Yellow Meadow picked up Churning Brook’s dropped breather and wrapped it into place.
“Here, let me help you adjust that, poor thing,” said Mother Xenia, who reached for the breather’s stays. Instead, she ripped it off and shoved Yellow Meadow back into the binding scent. “Keep him, Dweller. I am no priest, but I can assure you this one’s penance is to do your bidding until the high flyers build new nests in the canopy again. Just be sure to give him time to help tend the brood couch—and meals. They both know the schedule.”
“Beloved Mother?” said Churning Brook, its carapace a roiling interchange of color and whorls of black.
“Yes, child. This means I am signing off. An invitation was extended, in a manner of speaking. It was accepted, by you, with the risks known. This world is suitable. I will transmit the official documents as soon as I return to the shuttle—and a few years hence, if I am spared, I will take my leave and go home to my little skete and enjoy a nice long penance for being so direct with Yellow Meadow. In the meantime, as soon as the brood emerges, I want to build a little chapel up there at the edge of the desert, where I can see you all.”
Buds of color blossomed on Yellow Meadow’s carapace, then winked out. Its tentacles quivered.
“I know you are afraid, Yellow Meadow. You have every reason to be.” Mother Xenia pointed to the stark, barren wood. “You did that, and in some measure you must atone. Accept this, child. The dweller will not hate you forever. Nor will you fear it forever. Trust in God’s mercy. It will be well. All things will be well.”
EPILOGUE
The setting sun cast long shadows that flowed down from the desert and across a vast expanse of woodland, much of it reclaimed from the grasslands and sustained by small lakes fed from deep aquifers. Flyers screeched and tumbled above the canopy, feeding on clouds of rising insects. Seven Gom and a human conversed around a grave marked with a three-barred cross. Beside it rose a squat stone chapel with a sod roof sprinkled with flowers of red, yellow, and some that seemed white in one light and lavender in another. Two of the Gom wore long black copes, and from time to time, they caressed the rough top of the grave marker.
These were iterations who shared Yellow Meadow, Third Parcel, and Churning Brook as ancestors, the ones in whom the life and memories of those ancestors burned brightest. The human was a priest-monk come to tonsure the two Gom in black. They had decided to follow the path of Mother Xenia.
The priest-monk surveyed the spreading forest and the scattered villages along its periphery, the steep-sloped embankment that separated the desert above from the grasslands that replaced a long-vanished sea. Terraces ran on either side for a dozen kilometers like a giant’s stair. Silver threads of water moved in canals sunk into the terrace lips, nourishing hundreds of kinds of crops native to a dozen worlds, including this one.
“So you named this planet ‘Xenia’, after her,” said the priest-monk.
“We did,” said one of the Gom in black. “It seemed fitting.”
“What does... it... think about the name?” asked the priest-monk, nodding towards the wood below.
“It made Us promise to build it a spaceship one day before it would agree."
“That forest in a spaceship? Was it joking?”
“No Father, We do not think so.”
About the Author
Robert Hegwood is a retired educator from Southern Mississippi and a subdeacon in the Orthodox Church. He graduated with Honors in Creative Writing from William Carey College decades ago and writes mainly in the genres of Science Fiction and Fantasy, or fusions between the two. His fiction is grounded in following out strange ideas to explore their implications for a story and for their world should they be true. You can find some of these stories on his Substack, The Carouspell. Besides writing, Robert enjoys learning about wild foods and medicines, gardening exotic (read “impractical for his hardiness zone”) fruits and vegetables, and serving as needed in his local Orthodox parish. He shares his rural home with his son, three dogs, a cat, and the occasional visiting possum.
 | A guest post by
|