Spoken Wood Read online

technological demigods. I had been afraid they were about to tell me we were in orbit around their home planet.

  By now, the aliens had stepped out of the small craft that had carried us to Home-Away, leaving me alone in it. Were they trusting, or just trusting it was impossible for me to steal or damage the craft? I stepped out with them.

  “What now?” I asked.

  “Now you will help us. You will view maps and identify the major centers for murdering trees, transporting their corpses, and desecrating the remains.”

  “Whoa!” I blurted in shock, “is your translator working right?”

  Both aliens turned to face me, tendrils undulating eerily. An intense aroma of green apples and moldy hay gusted into my face and I sneezed three times fast. The aliens’ tendrils reared back.

  “Whoa!” I said again, hands up like a teller in a bank robbery. “That was just a sneeze. An involuntary reaction to a sudden strong smell, pollen, dust particles, things like that.”

  “The translator is working correctly,” my alien said after a pause. What terms do you think were mistranslated?”

  “How about murder?”

  “Wrongful taking of life.”

  “Corpses?”

  “The bodies of dead individuals.”

  “Desecration?”

  “Disrespectful treatment of the bodies of dead individuals.”

  “But those terms are for people, not…” I stopped. Not for plants. But I was speaking to—it looked like—intelligent plants.

  “Down there on Earth,” I asked softly, “were you really talking to that tree? Talking with it? It was answering you thoughtfully like we answer each other?”

  “Yes. They think very slowly. It takes patience. But they are highly intelligent.”

  “But they’re just…” there it was again. Just plants. Everyone knows they don’t think or feel. They have no brains. They can’t experience anything or communicate.

  Except apparently they could. After a long pause, I tried again.

  “We didn’t know,” I said, trying to keep the incredulity out of my voice. “How could we? Look, I don’t want to be rude, but are you sure?”

  “We have investigated thoroughly over several twenties of years in remote regions. We only ventured close to the population center you found us near because we were seeking the information we now ask you for.”

  “Did you ever think of telling us? And why would you not already know if you’ve been studying us for so long?”

  “It is impossible that you did not know. And study of you is a small side project with few resources. I am the only one conducting that study. We, as a group, were studying them.”

  “Why are you so sure we didn’t know? We didn’t know.” My voice rose in desperation. “How do they talk? With those odors, those smells? Our noses aren’t sensitive at all. Is it possible that you don’t understand that? What if I told you I thought it was impossible that you misunderstood the fact that we don’t communicate with odors at all? We communicate with sounds, and a little with gestures. Are you going to do violence to us without stopping to investigate that?” I was shouting, the alien backing away as I advanced. With my final word I jabbed a finger hard into the strange foliage of the alien and its tendrils melted away under it, its entire body twisting and shifting. I stopped, drew a deep breath scented with ammonia and chives. From the base of the alien’s ‘neck’ a small, glassy lens protruded toward me, motionless, extending a couple of centimeters in my direction. A weapon? A recording device? I wondered how long it had been there. I took a step back and the two aliens began to rustle their foliage energetically. Wafts of burning charcoal, cloves, pineapple, and approaching rain charged the air. It stretched on… and on… and on. My feet started to hurt and I began to shift from side to side uneasily. My head began to ache with the kaleidoscope of smells constantly shifting in the air.

  “Well?” I finally asked. They twitched, a full-body leaf rustle. They’d forgotten I was there.

  “A dilemma. Your arguments expose a carelessness in our methods, but do not change the fact that the slaughter of trees is unacceptable. Yet to change our course based on speaking to one single organism is also careless. So we must broaden our knowledge, and seek another path to help the trees. This will require time. It also requires your continued presence here, and because your actions are unpredictable to us: phut.”

  When it said phut, it didn’t really say phut. Something inside of the tangle of its body expelled a burst of air, and a needle, or a seed, shot out from within the vines and sank into the flesh of my shoulder leaving a tiny tear in my shirt and a spot of blood.

  “Hey!” I shouted in a shocked falsetto, smacking my hand over the wound for a second, unwelcome burst of pain. A wave of dizziness washed over me and I sat down.

  Half an hour later, the aliens long gone, I brushed my hand idly over the soft green moss emerging from the follicles over my entire body. Hair fell onto the ground around me, from my scalp, my eyebrows, my arms and legs. Replaced by green. I was too… not weak. Too tranquilized to move enough to stand and walk. Already, I could feel the meanings of the rich, deep aromas around me teasing the edges of my perception. Soon, I would understand what they were saying. I wondered if I’d still be human when that happened.

  Beneath me, the ground seemed to dip and sway, as if the previously stable habitat were swaying with the rolls of a stormy sea.

  Phut phut phut phut phut, the constant sound from somewhere far below. Like a heavy rain falling. I wondered how many seeds this one craft could hold, and how many craft circled the world.

  I wondered what the people would do when they could smell the woods speaking.

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