Chapter Eleven Sadie
Eleven
Sadie
The other humans made slow progress as they prodded their restrained tree monster through the woods toward the river. We made even slower progress behind them, trying to fade into the underbrush, allowing them to get ahead so they wouldn’t hear us creeping along.
When they were far enough ahead that I was sure I wouldn’t be heard, I turned to the others and whispered, “Did you see that thing? It was—”
“Don’t tell me it was awesome,” Arturo said. “It attacked us!”
Okay. Fine. But not telling him didn’t make it less so. “Did it?” I asked. “It didn’t really hit you that hard. Maybe it was just, you know, poking you.”
“Poking me?” Arturo said. “It punched me in the shoulder!”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Haven’t you ever seen a new critter, like a squirrel or a rat, and just…poked it to see what it felt like? Maybe it was doing that.”
“I’m glad that wasn’t your first reaction to meeting me,” Suki said.
“Of course not,” I said. “You’re a person.”
“I’m a person!” Arturo said.
“Okay, sure. But maybe the tree didn’t know that!”
“I like this idea,” Nedd said. “Tree monsters that go around poking people for fun. Sign me up.”
“To be fair,” Suki said, “I’m not sure we have evidence that the tree wasn’t a person.”
“What I’m still trying to figure out,” Nedd said, easing his way between two trees, “is where Sadie found a squirrel and got close enough to poke it.”
“There were lots of them in the Yeongian caverns,” I said. “They escaped from one of the animal preserves, I think. They like to eat our crops. And they’re very pokable, if you can get them to hold still.”
Oh scud. I was still trying to find my place in this flight, and now I was outing myself as that weird girl who pokes squirrels.
“The weird one” was not a role I aspired to.
It wasn’t exactly a title that would stop the flight from underestimating me.
Though, if I didn’t do anything to distinguish myself, maybe they were just… estimating me.
“Have you all forgotten that we were just attacked by a tree?” Arturo said again.
“I don’t think we’re at much risk to forget,” Alanik said, peering over a shrub in the direction the monster had been taken. I could still see its highest branches poking through the net, but not much else.
“And it was awesome,” I added. “There, I said it.”
Now I was going to get in trouble for talking too much. I waited for Arturo to lecture me, but he sighed. “How many of these trees do you think have faces? It isn’t…all of them, is it?”
Oh scud. I hadn’t thought about that, but weaving through the trees suddenly seemed a lot more dangerous.
“I doubt the planet could sustain that many mobile organisms,” Suki said. “There must be millions of trees in these woods, and large organisms that move require more energy than those that don’t.”
“Still,” Arturo said, “since the tree that moved was indistinguishable from the others, we have to assume that any one of them could be a creature and not a plant.”
“Or a plant creature,” I said. “Do you think they photosynthesize? If they do photosynthesize, then they all could be walking tree monsters, couldn’t they? Suki, do your lore books talk about this?”
“They will when I am finished with my research here,” Suki said. “I am taking copious notes.”
At least she was using her body to shield the light from her tablet screen so it wouldn’t show through the mesh. If anyone noticed her writing and sketching, her presence would be difficult to explain.
We followed the humans until the glimmer of the river shone through the trees ahead. The humans stopped when they cleared the tree line, shouting to each other, though our pins were too far away to catch the exact words for translation.
“Let’s move downriver a bit,” Arturo said, “so we can watch from a distance. Have Hoid put up our disguises again. Can he match our jumpsuits to their clothing?”
“Clothing!” Hoid chirped from inside Alanik’s backpack, and a moment later we were all wearing carbon copies of the loose cotton clothes the humans wore.
Arturo cringed. “We should vary them a little. We can adjust after we get a better look.” He led us through the woods to the left, down to the river, about eighty meters downstream from the group of humans. We broke through the tree line and the fullness of the river came into view.
The river was wide—we could have fit several starfighters across without touching wings. On Detritus we watered our vat-grown crops from underground lakes, so I’d seen some large bodies of water before, but the canals that piped water from the lakes to the vat beds were nothing compared to this.
Branches tangled along the edge of the river, twining around each other like fingers knotting themselves together for support.
The lowest branches were fifteen meters above the surface of the water, though they grew lower and more densely over the bank, jutting down and burying themselves in the soil, as if the tree didn’t distinguish between branches and roots.
The sun hadn’t moved in the sky since I’d glimpsed this landscape from the canopy, giving the impression that time here was frozen.
Upriver, the humans used their long hooks and spearlike prods to urge the tree creature onto a large, rectangular craft anchored on the side of the river.
On it was an enormous cage, big enough to fit the entire tree creature.
“See if you can add some nuance to our clothing,” Arturo said to Hoid, and our outfits began to subtly shift, the colors and cuts varying slightly from those worn by the barge workers, so we wouldn’t look like we’d stolen their clothing.
A motorboat headed in the direction of the city honked a horn at the people on the barge but didn’t pay us a bit of attention, which had to be a good sign.
“Any way to know how deep that water is?” Arturo asked.
“We could poke it with a stick,” Nedd said. “I hear that’s Sadie’s specialty.”
“That could work,” Suki said through the mesh of Arturo’s pack. “Not every piece of knowledge needs to be gained with advanced technology. Why use sonar when a stick will do?”
“It might need to be a long stick,” I said. “But this forest is sure full of those.”
“Can anyone swim?” Suki asked.
“I can,” I said.
Arturo and Nedd both nodded, but Gilaf shook his head and Alanik just eyed the river nervously. They came from a planet without lakes or rivers; they supplied all their drinking water from condensation on their city-sized trees or from atmospheric generators.
“We shouldn’t swim in it anyway,” Arturo said. “I don’t want any of us picking up parasites.”
“I’d rather ride on a boat,” I said. “These are the best boats I’ve ever seen.”
“I assume they’re the only boats you’ve ever seen,” Alanik said.
“Not true,” I said. “We had little dinghies for the reservoir caverns at home. And these are about a million times cooler than those!”
“I know the boats she’s talking about,” Nedd said. “They aren’t a lot of competition.”
The humans continued to prod at the tree creature, which was jabbing its leg-branches at the cage and reaching toward the humans.
There were more of them now, all wearing sturdy boots, trousers, and loose, woven ponchos that fell to their knees and were tied around their waists with a belt.
They dodged the limbs of the creature as they finished loading it into the cage, and their barge began to float downstream.
“If it passes us,” Arturo said, “just walk upstream like we’re supposed to be here.”
The barge didn’t pass us, though. A spray of water erupted, and another tree creature rose out of the water in front of the barge. It was shorter and stubbier, as if most of its branches had broken off.
No, I realized. They’d been trimmed. The tree was covered in flat circles as if its branches had been cut off with a saw. Instead of turning on us, the tree moved its lower, rootlike protrusions to march upstream. The boat, tied to the creature with ropes, traveled behind it.
They’d…domesticated it? I wondered if this was a different species, or if cutting the branches off made it more docile. It looked…painful. I hoped these creatures didn’t have nerves in their branches, but I couldn’t imagine how they could not.
The barge plodded slowly upriver with the tree creature pulling it, and we followed, keeping it in sight but staying far enough back to avoid drawing attention.
Several ships passed, most with motors, but one drifted downriver at the speed of the current with a pruned tree creature in a cage on the back.
I imagined they’d prod the creature out of the cage and use it to travel back upstream again when the time came.
Soon after, we reached the first of the farms, areas where the forest had been cleared away and spiky plants were cultivated in rows, with large metal apparatuses rigged to draw water from the river and spray it over the fields.
“Anyone know what they’re growing?” I asked.
“Pineapple,” Suki piped up. “A species of fruit native to Old Earth.”
“Another plant brought here by humans, then,” Gilaf said. “At least this one didn’t take over the planet.”
“It also doesn’t seem to want to kill us,” Nedd said, looking over the pineapple field.
Gilaf squinted over his shoulder into the low sunlight. “Shouldn’t it be hotter here, if the sun is always shining?”
Arturo led the way forward, wiping some sweat off his brow. “I think it is hotter here.”
“But hotter even than this,” Gilaf said.
“Maybe the debris field blocks some of the sunlight?” Nedd suggested.
“Or the atmosphere does,” Suki offered.
“That’s supposed to be a red dwarf star,” Arturo said. “Shouldn’t it give off red light?”
“That’s a misconception,” Suki said. Walking behind Arturo, I could look right at her through the pack’s mesh, though I couldn’t see her.
“Red dwarfs give off mostly red light. But because the full spectrum of light is present, it appears white to our eyes. The light from Evershore’s sun appears white as well, though the color it emits most strongly is green, similar to your sun on Old Earth. ”