Spoken Wood Read online

  Spoken Wood

  By S. A. Barton

  Copyright 2013 S. A. Barton

  When I found it, it looked a lot like a wolf even though it very obviously wasn’t. I was out on my first day off after 30 straight days spent conducting a tree census—you’d have thought the last thing I would want to do would be walk through the woods. But that’s what I was doing, walking slowly and quietly, off the trails in soft leather moccasins, feeling the twigs and the lay of the land under my feet. I was in no hurry, enjoying the sun and the breeze, enjoying the birdsong that was bantered about over my head. Not many people take the time to walk slowly and unobtrusively enough to avoid spooking the birds, to really get close to the wary ones. I assume that’s why the thing I found didn’t notice me when I crested the little hill that overlooked it.

  It had four walking limbs, a body like a bale of tangled ivy, a headlike lump on one end and a long trailing tail on the other. It looked like someone had tried to sculpt a wolf out of a pile of cast-off dreadlocks. If the dreadlocks were made out of growing green things.

  The mental image of a wolf was intensified by the fact that it was ‘sitting’. Back limb-bundles coiled, front ones elevating the front of its body, more bundles and coils swirled and bunched around each other to form the jut of a shaggy lupine chest. Its neck was extended, a column of intertwined tendrils almost but not quite touching the deep-rifted bark of a scorched old patriarch of a sequoia. The brown-black-green wolf-dreadlock thing quivered and rustled despite the stillness of the air, evoking the sound of the fall wind shuffling brown oak leaves across my mother’s backyard in Vermont. I sat down crosslegged right where I was, in damp moss dotted with wormcast, and I watched it.

  The dreadlock-wolf thrummed and crackled softly. The heady and majestic fragrance of the sequoias deepened around me, pervading my nose, my tongue, my sinuses; it filled my head. I thought I could feel it laying heavy on my skin; I could taste it. I pinched the bridge of my nose, hard, again and again, dancing on the brink of a sneeze. The roots of my hair itched. I imagined I felt pine resin gathering on my skin, spreading like feathery crystals of frost. The scent of the forest had never been so intense, yet under it I caught whiffs of something strange, something like fungus and oranges and violets and—indescribable. Itself. Spicy.

  Gradually, I realized the spicy waft came each time the ivy wolf rustled. I sat unobserved with them, the wolf-thing and the tree, as the sun climbed down the branches from noon to near sunset, when the pressure of my full bladder finally said ‘enough’. I put out a hand and grasped the base of a yearling tree, spindly and sparse, to lever my stiff knees through their popping protests to full upright.

  The creature turned at the sound my knees made, in a way that completely broke the wolf illusion. The twisting cluster of its ‘head’ arched back from the tree it faced straight over its ‘shoulders’, elongating like a breaking wave of living vines. The dreadlocks spread wide like a parasol, showing a hint of something a deep and streaky blue at their center, like a lobed cerulean nut. Waves of scent washed over me, nutmeg and witch hazel, citrus and mushroom, soap and wet stone. The spread tendrils undulated slowly, crackling softly like moist and rotted leaf mold underfoot.

  “Are you… talking to me?” I whispered, a chill running up my spine as if I were in the presence of something truly holy.

  “Rrr… huu… rr’k’g… huu… hee?” it said back, dreadlock vines curling in on themselves, stroking each other like mating snakes to produce the sibilant tones. It was bowing itself like a violin. I spoke to it quietly for a few minutes, slowly in simple sentences, looking for another response. Halfway through my monologue the body of the creature flexed in on itself slightly, vine sliding past vine, and a small black plastic device emerged from it, grasped in a twist of three dreadlocks. It pointed the perforated face of the cellphone-like thing toward me. I hesitated, hoping it wasn’t a weapon, then continued speaking. A couple of dozen more sentences and it (the device) spoke back.

  “Randall,” it said (I had spoken my own name several times during my monologue), “please wait. I study your people; I am a scientist. I would speak with you more.” The consonants were clipped and sounded staticky. The vowels were sibilant, elongated slightly. Neither seemed an effect of the device, but instead of the one speaking the words.

  The alien in front of me turned the device toward its own ‘head’ and a rapid exchange of clicks, pops, and crackles ensued. Then it turned its attention back to the tree, resuming its production of odors. Half an hour passed, leaving me to watch the near-motionless creature communing with the entirely motionless tree. While for the hours before I had been captivated, now I found myself bored and fidgeting, resisting the temptation to draw doodles in the moss carpet with my finger.

  Finally, the alien facing the tree contorted itself and looked up. I followed suit and saw a smallish oval of visual distortion pass across the clouds above; it was subtle enough that if I had not been expecting to see something I wouldn’t have noticed it. Even as it settled nearby, transitioning from a distortion of the sky to being a distortion of the trees and leaves, it was difficult to see: it was only an edge effect like a heat mirage, and a slight convex quality to the world within its borders. A slightly irregular egg-shaped section formed itself in the side, flowing from the center toward its own borders, revealing a cozy cabin of smooth-edged, polished wooden fixtures studded with metallic controls and screens of glass or quartz. A second alien, a bit greener than the first, stood opposite the opening near the back wall. It asked me in, and I went. The doorway closed like a sphincter, and a faint elevatorlike surge told me we were rising.

  As I watched the forest drop away rapidly in the circle of one of the glass screens, I questioned the wisdom of my hasty boarding.

  Had I casually boarded a slave ship? A collection vehicle for vivisectors? The screen showed all of the Earth, and stars above the haze of atmosphere—so quickly. I had felt only a faint surge, a puny acceleration that by itself would lead me to believe that we had barely cleared the trees. Would they take me back if I asked? Did I want to ask? Despite my fear, I wanted to see what happened next. Surely whatever it was would be peaceful. No being advanced enough to build a ship like this could be other than peaceful.

  My whole life I had believed that. The more advanced and enlightened the person, the more peaceful they were. Any aliens advanced enough to reach Earth from another star must be paragons of morality.

  I had never really questioned my own assumptions. I suddenly realized that Gandhi had spun cloth by hand—while the ‘advanced’ people of the world built bigger H-bombs and formulated stickier napalm.

  I looked uneasily at my two green companions, and a new idea occurred to me.

  Maybe I wasn’t as smart as I thought I was. With a sinking feeling in my bowels I asked the question I should have asked before stepping aboard.

  “Where are we going?” The door sphinctered open with a faint crackle. The greener alien moved to my side and spoke, his ‘hackles’ coming up to my elbow, raising his eyeless shifting ‘face’ nearly to mine.

  “We are already here, in a Home-away.” Outside looked like a giant had seized a great forest in his hands, stretched the trees out like taffy and sculpted them into a vast dome. Floor, arching walls, and green sky above were trees, flowing into one another and braided together. Dead center, hanging from dark threads slender enough to dance in and out of visibility, hung a ring of a dozen coruscating globes of orangey-yellow light that illuminated the entire enclosure.

  My mind struggled with perspective. Motes moved in the distance—masses of many more aliens going about their business, whatever that was.

  The whole enclosure seemed
at least a kilometer—or two—across, the ring of light at the apex of the dome perhaps a quarter of that.

  I opened my mouth to ask how something so large had gone unseen so close to Earth, then closed it. It was camouflaged, like the ship I was in had been. How else could something so large go unseen in, guessing by what I had seen aboard the ship, low Earth orbit? Was it that close? Or that far? I realized that I knew almost nothing and could assume nothing. I had my question after all.

  “But where is Home-Away?” I asked.

  “We are still within the outer reaches of Earth’s atmosphere,” my host said. Well, I thought, at least they aren’t some kind of