Chapter 9 #4
And no one knows how long we have left, Iris finished internally.
He certainly didn’t. The transience of life and the ease of death did not comfort him in this moment.
No part of his training as a Vessel had prepared him for being trapped aboard a generation ship with a group of academics and a security guard, all in line to die.
No passage from scripture appeared appropriate.
No sentence. And Eli was rightfully reeling, silently, but reeling, from the complete helplessness each and every one of them sensed.
Iris was right there with him. The words that finally found him were his own.
“The Starlit teaches that our salvation will be found in the sutras,” Iris said after several false starts.
“By studying them, by reciting mantras, by tending to our duties, we will find peace and bring an end to our collective suffering. I’ve been taught this my entire life.
I was taught that there is a correct way to live, a proper order to the way things occur, a right way of seeing the world.
I will let you in on a secret, Eli. I think the Starlit is wrong. ”
Eli had been standing with his head bowed, eyes shut, and at Iris’s last words, his eyes shot open, and he glared at the monk.
“As I spent more time working away from the temple, as I spent more time in the company of others, I began to doubt the right way of things. My faith in the sutras is waning, in the ritual of it all. Eli, if I may offer a word of advice? There is no right order to things. Ordan was far too young to perish. In the few encounters we had, I did not perceive him to be a malicious man. It wasn’t fair.
No sutra, no prayer will bring us solace.
No right words will bring an end to our suffering.
The only salvation to be found will be found in each other, in the company we share, in bearing witness.
That is my piece of advice to you, Eli. Find others and keep them close. They will be your lifeboat.”
“I’m not sure what it all means but that was kind of deep,” Eli said after a few moments of silence.
Both men continued to look over Ordan’s body, safely contained in its verdant cradle.
The knuckles of Eli’s right hand were scraped and bloodied, and Iris decided it was best not to ask where the man had gone for several hours while they had prepared the body or what had transpired there.
Perhaps, like Iris, Eli was not yet ready to find solace in the company of others.
The bioluminescent mushrooms gave off just enough light to highlight the millions of glowing tendrils that punctured Ordan’s body and ran towards the floor, where they disappeared below the moss.
Mycelium formed quickly here, as did all other vegetation.
It had already run through the body and connected it to the rest of the ship, leaching nutrients and propagating through roots of the vines, the shrubs, and the trees all around the Nicaea.
Iris had returned Ordan to the One Beginning, but the mycelium would return his body to the cosmos.
Who was it that did the Light’s bidding best? Who was the essential one?
“How lovely.” Riyu’s soft voice fluttered from the doorway. “Not lovely lovely, but as far as burials go, this is pretty nice, don’t you think so?”
Eli gave a curt nod. Riyu took a few hesitant steps inside the room and inspected the mushrooms growing atop Ordan’s body.
After a few shallow sniffs, she said, “Notice how there’s almost no smell.
They’re doing such a wonderful job, so quickly, in the reuptake of the body and all its nutrients into the soil.
” Her face turned a shade of academically detached curiosity.
“I’ve never seen fungi work so quickly before.
This is truly amazing.” She knelt by the body and motioned for Iris and Eli to join her.
Only Iris budged and leaned in close, the glow of the mushrooms flooding his face blue.
“What am I looking at, Dr. Alo?”
Riyu gave him a timid smile. “You must think I’m deranged.
Getting so excited about a dead person, but normally, this stage of decomposition would take weeks.
But here, on the Nicaea, the fungi are able to move so quickly for some reason.
I’ve never seen anything like it. None of the First Earth flora I’ve encountered before has been capable of this.
” She pointed to a bundle of glowing strands that reached from Ordan’s back to the ground.
“It isn’t isolated, you see. It’s all part of a larger network running beneath all the moss and the soil around the ship. What it’s doing is rejoining it.”
Iris listened, eyes never breaking away from Riyu’s animated features.
It was true that anyone could become beautiful when they spoke of their passions.
This was Riyu’s, and in the faint glow of the fungi, her round face beamed with excitement.
Thin lines creased around the corners of her eyes as she examined the body.
Mesmerised, Iris watched her point from one glowing tendril to another, explaining the workings of the mycelium in a way that even he, as uneducated as he was, could understand.
For a moment, he was in love with the brilliant doctor, with her childlike kindness, her razor-sharp intellect, and every little crease along her face.
Then, just as quickly as the wave of affection had swept over him, it was gone, leaving behind nothing but the barren landscapes of his mind.
“The mycelium functions like the neurons in our brains, always communicating, always sharing information. All the shrubs and the vines here tap into it. It’s like a universal feed of sorts.
They use it to chat, in a way, to see if any tree needs any additional help and then send it over. It’s all quite complex, really.”
“Where does all this information flow to, Dr. Alo? Is there a central brain?”
“A mother tree. She knows all her saplings by name and location, and watches over them and ensures their survival. If even one sapling is lacking nutrients, the mother tree can send it more food. If there’s some sort of intruder endangering the ecosystem, the mother tree can instruct the shrubs to retaliate.
Nothing is alone, nothing is left to fend for itself.
” Riyu let out a long sigh, her eyes settling on Ordan’s prone form.
These were her words, as the Starlit’s mantras were Iris’s. In her own, academic way, she was saying the very thing Iris had said over each and every passenger of the Nicaea so far: You are returning to where you came from. It welcomes you. There is nothing left to be afraid of.
“This mother tree is intelligent, then?” Iris muttered half to himself.
“In ways we’re only beginning to understand. I wouldn’t worry too much, Vessel. At most, shrubs and trees will retaliate to viruses and microbes, not large organisms. They won’t be organising and marching out into battle any time soon. Although …”
Iris’s ears perked up. He briefly glanced at Riyu’s hands, which were holding a small, severed chunk of a vine.
“Is that—?”
Riyu nodded and held out the vine. “It sounded like nonsense. When you stumbled back towards us, you kept on talking about vines and how they came after you. But Ishtan said he didn’t see anything, and neither had I.
We thought you got struck on the head. We tried to reassure you, but you wouldn’t settle and …
and curiosity got the best of me. Look here. ” She pointed to the cross-section.
Iris stared at the thick bundle of fibres that stretched along the length of the vine. “I’m afraid I don’t know much about botany.”
“But you are quite familiar with human anatomy. What do the fibres look like to you?”
They looked like the inside of a snake Iris had once found after it had been half eaten by a vulture. But snakes moved independently. They were nothing but muscle and skeleton. Vines. Over centuries of isolated development, could a plant evolve enough to become a hunter?
“I’m not insisting that this proves that vines attacked you,” Riyu said. “Only that it’s strange and that it looks like nothing I’ve seen before.”
“As is everything else aboard this ship,” Eli said from above them. “Looks like both you and the Tev kid were right. There are things slithering here, but none are snakes.”
Iris was about to thank Riyu for sharing her discovery when a shrill scream cut across the damp silence.
Eli was first to bolt out the room in the direction of the cry.
By the time he reached the communal space, Iris had caught up.
The scream echoed again, and they took off running together, this time towards the corridor attached to the first airlock.
Only a few steps inside were enough to see Jesi, tethered to the wall by dozens of vines wrapped around her torso and legs.
One vine clamped across her mouth, and she bit into it with a vengeance and spat out a clump of its still-twitching flesh.
Tev was doing his best to wrestle new vines from reaching Jesi’s neck and face, but he was outnumbered.
With a single motion, the pulsar blade was in Iris’s hand, the blue glow of the nanobots reaching two inches in either direction.
He shoved Tev aside and in three cuts, freed Jesi and shoved her aside as well.
The furious vines reached for him, but Iris dodged and pushed both Jesi and Tev out the corridor.
“Seal it, now,” he called out to both engineers, but they stood frozen, still in shock from the attack. It was an inconvenient time for them to remember they were children.