Sworl's Garden
by Scott Blake
Copyright 2025 Scott Blake
All rights reserved.
Cover art by Azany
Chapter 1: Swarming Season
On a cold night at the start of the swarming season, a burning mountain fell from the sky. The bright light woke me up even though I was deep in my nest. It was like it was suddenly the middle of the day, and that mountain was now the sun. It slowed until it hung in the air for a few breaths, then with a boom it fell.
I was scared. The elders had warned me about many dangers, but they had never told me of anything like this. I froze up like a growler without a burrow, barely able to breathe and ready to bolt at the slightest movement.
But as the chirping of the climbers in the trees returned and the light of the burning mountain faded into darkness, I calmed down. I was a gardener now and no longer a learner. I would face this new problem bravely. When the day came, I would figure out whether this falling mountain made a good addition to my territory. I hoped it would. I thought it had looked very big in the air and if I had to hide it with trees they would take a long time to grow.
My territory was called Gentle Far Coast. It was very remote and not as fertile as other territories, but I took a lot of pride in it. I had many interesting caves and beaches with shells and I wanted the elders to think I did a good job with it. So I spent much time lying in the darkness and thinking about how to fix the problem, even though I knew very little about it.
Dawn came. I stretched myself from tail to snout then stepped outside with my basket held firmly in my grabbers. If I did not tidy up every morning, the area around my roost would collect dead leaves, and that would encourage munchers to roll inside and eat all of my bedding. It was not pleasant to share a nest with munchers.
Some roosts did not have this problem, but my roost was surrounded by a grove of pink-bloom trees. They looked nice but they also dropped leaves every day during the swarming season. I always thought about removing them, but I was still too young to change such an important part of my territory. And what would I grow in their place? I had no idea.
Some of the fallen leaves were still alive, and these I carefully put back on their trees. The dead ones went into my basket to serve as fresh bedding. A few leaf piles were trying to plant themselves, so I dug them up and ate them as a snack before they could grow. Their leaves tasted bland, another drawback of pink-bloom trees.
The next step in my daily routine was to check up on the munchers and sniff out whether any had gotten stuck. But I froze again when I saw a glimmer of something white in the distance where the mountain had fallen. It had not just been a bad dream, it was real.
I ran in tight little circles and stared at the glimmer. Why had it not gone away? I was just a young gardener. What was I supposed to do about a mountain falling from the sky? The elders obviously knew, but if I had to abandon my territory to ask them, I would probably never hold a territory again.
I had three neighbours. The furthest was Redspot, a veteran who lived half a dayrun away. His territory was lush with gumtrees and rich in fat growlers. He was an excellent gardener, who had grown his land from barren scrub into an enviable garden. Redspot would know what to do. But I did not want to waste his time with my silly questions.
Mottled lived a quarter of a dayrun away, but I do not think he liked me very much. Like Redspot, he had been given his barren and unpromising territory to punish him for something. But unlike Redspot he had little talent for gardening. His territory remained in the same sad shape he had gained it in. He was also easily angered. Last time I had tried to give him a shell, he took it as an insult and nearly bit my tail off.
That left Sunrise. Like me, he was a young gardener given his territory as a trial. He was very polite but everyone thought he was strange and not the best gardener. His territory was overrun with hungry munchers and growlers. He was terrible at hunting, and if a terror came by he would not even make it bleed before it ate him.
There would be no shame in asking him about the mountain from the sky. Maybe he had heard a lesson from the elders that I had somehow missed. I caught a growler as a gift, then ran over to his territory with it in my grabbers.
Most seasons there was a little pond on the border between his territory and mine. That was the place the border shrubs smelled strongest. I dropped the dead growler on Sunrise's side of the border and called for him. Then I called again, in case he did not hear it the first time, which given Sunrise I thought was pretty likely.
I was about to call a third time when I finally spotted him running towards me. Sunrise was well-named, as the yellow pattern around his head made him look like a living sunrise. He was big and well-muscled, attractively patterned, and his tail was long and capped with nimble grabbers. Scouts would have visited him often if he were not so strange.
We stared at each other for many breaths and sniffed the air, but the border bushes did their job and neither of us fell into rage. If Sunrise was even capable of that. He daintily picked up the growler I had gifted him and took a token bite before setting it aside.
"Hello, Sworl. Did you see the thing in the sky last night?"
"Hello, Sunrise. Yes, it fell in my territory."
Sunrise bobbed his head and puffed. He was very interested. I kept a casual footing and acted like I was in no hurry.
"I just wanted to make sure," I said, "That you knew what to do when such things fell from the sky. In case it fell in your territory next time."
His eyes darted around and he turned in a slow circle.
"No," he finally said. "What is it? What do you do?"
A good gardener would have taken a lot longer to be sure he had no idea what to do. That was the difference between me and Sunrise. I had thought about it all night and found I knew nothing, and he had only thought for ten breaths.
"I am not an elder, I cannot explain as well as they can," I said. I turned my head and puffed in amusement. "Why not ask Redspot the next time you see him? And you can try remembering his explanation and telling it to me, and I will tell you if you remembered it right."
Sunrise almost leaned over the border bush in excitement.
"That is a good idea, Sworl! But he will want to know everything about this thing that fell from the sky. What should I tell him it looks like?"
My mouth hung open stupidly. I suddenly took a long drink from the pond to gather my thoughts.
"Well, I am still examining it," I said. "It is very complicated and I do not want to describe it wrong. I will tell you what it looks like some other time. How is your gumtree terrace going?"
"It is very hard. I keep trying to bring it red soil like you said, but the munchers will not leave it alone."
"You have too many munchers. They have eaten all the good leaves already."
I told Sunrise this every time I saw him, but he never listened. Sunrise was weird, and he treated his munchers like they were little hatchlings and did not kill them even when there were too many. After giving him a few more pieces of advice, I left.
I busied myself with chores for the rest of the day. By the time the sun was going down, I still did not want to visit the white mountain. Instead I set out to hunt down a few growlers for dinner. I knew where my growlers nested, and now that their mating season was over I could safely eat the males. I left one that tried to attack me alone (Redspot had said that fierceness was fashionable in growlers now) and gobbled down two others.
On the way back to my roost for the night, I ran into my pouncer. She was a fine specimen with sharp claws and a pure black coat. While she usually nested in my territory, she roamed over to Sunrise to help with his growler problem. I gave her a good chase, and she escaped from me fairly.
The sun set and I settled down into my nest. Darkness crept over the land.
Except...
Cold dread ran down my neck as I stared. There were little glowing pinpricks of light where the white mountain had landed. They looked like yellow stars but on the ground instead of in the sky. It looked very very wrong and I shrieked in rage.
The sun setting was the proper time for darkness, and stars belonged in the sky. These new stars on the ground were wrong. They confused night and day. They would drive the leaves to madness, maybe even drive me to madness. I forced myself to look away and retreated into the depths of my roost where I could not see them.
But the next day I knew I had to do something. I could not put it off any longer. Ignoring the scattered leaves from the pink-blooming trees, I ran through my territory towards where the white mountain had fallen. Weaving through the trees surrounding it, I finally saw it up close.
It was actually more like a huge white tree than a mountain, five times my length thick and many times higher. Most of it was smooth, except for a few knobs in the wood. There was a large mouth on one side, with gray lips and a little tongue leading from it down into the soil.
The white tree had luckily fallen in a barren clearing, but even still the ground around it was burned black from its fall. It was not a terrible spot for it to be. I did wish it was closer to my rock piles instead of the sea, so you could not see it from my roost. But nothing else was growing in this spot right now, because in the thawing season there was sometimes a stream that ran through here and carried all the good soil away.
There were smaller and very thin saplings that stood on three-toed roots around the big white tree. It was the tops of these that were glowing with unnatural light. Little black roots from their bottom led back to the big cylinder.
I thought for a while as I looked at everything. I concluded that these white trees lived in the sky, but this one had fallen down. The lights were its fruit. Maybe when we looked up at night, they were the stars that we saw.
When I was a hatchling, I had asked the elders what the stars were. But they had dipped their tails sadly and said that nobody knew. But now I knew! And I was the first to know it. I got excited and ran around the stars, knocking some of them over.
This upset the creatures that lived inside the white tree.
One had come out of the tree's mouth, which had yawned wide to let it out. It was so strange I did not think it was a creature at first. It was only a little smaller than a pouncer, white like its tree, and had a big featureless eye instead of a face. Like most creatures it stood on two legs, but this one did not have a tail behind it to balance. Instead it had two tails awkwardly sprouting from its short neck. There were crude grabbers at the end of these tails, and they held a black stick with glowing light parts between them.
I moved closer to sniff it when it made some sort of loud whirring noise at me. Something very hot leaped from the stick and bit into the side of my leg; a second hot thing followed it but missed me and sizzled into a tree. I was scared and ran away as fast as I could.
I ran straight back to my roost. My left leg hurt a lot and there was a hole in my thigh. It was a clean hole, and it only bled grey and not purple, but it still hurt a lot. I laid down and licked my wound and whined softly like a weak hatchling.
The white tree was not so bad. I think if I snuffed out its light-fruits regularly it might become a welcome addition to my territory. It was interesting and I had not seen it before and others might find it interesting too. Maybe the whole caravan would come to see it.
But the creatures that lived in the white tree were bad. They were weird and they bit very hard. I did not know if they were good to eat or not, but they were too dangerous. One way or another they would have to go.
What was the best way to get rid of them? I did not know. How many were there? I did not know. There was a lot that I did not know, and all of the thinking made my eyelids twitch.
I thought that the big white tree was surely dying after it caught on fire and fell from the sky. After all if it could live on the ground, why had nobody seen one before? So the white tree would die, then the white creatures that lived in it would die too. So if I just waited, the problem would take care of itself.
The tree's fruits shone all through the long and painful night. I ignored them.
I spent the next day resting. I was going to fall behind on my gardening, but that was fine. It took a long time for a territory to get as full of growlers and munchers as Sunrise's was. And the various bushes and trees I cared for would not suddenly die in my absence.
Instead I busied myself by practicing reading. There was a rocky cave near my roost that I could limp to. When the sunlight shone through holes in the roof, I could read walls on which Very Purple had painted poetry. Very Purple had lived here before me for many years and he had written a lot.
I was a good reader back when I was a learner, and every time the caravan moved my mother took us to see the local painted caves. Someday I would write my own poetry, and it would be so good that everyone would read it too.
But for today I just pondered what Very Purple had written. Most of this particular wall was taken up by his version of the tale of Three Stripes, a gardener who fought off sixteen enemies to protect his territory. Four of the enemies were just other gardeners, but the rest included fantastic creatures like a giant tunneler, or a muncher that could swallow a gardener whole. My favorite part was when he defeated the terrors. Three Stripes had grown a border bush so noxious that even the terrors could not stand it, and planted it by the sea where the terrors lived so they could never come onto land.
Of course there was no such bush. But even though much of my territory was surrounded by the sea, I did not have much to fear. The elders said the terrors did not like land very much, and would only come in times of great hunger. They feared us almost as much as we feared them. If they came I would summon the caravan and we would destroy them.
I spent hours daydreaming in the cave. Maybe I could write a new poem for the wall, about Sworl and the time he killed the white creatures from the sky. They would bite me fiercely but I would overcome them with my great speed and strength. Or I could grow a special bush of my own.
The lights shined again that night. They seemed even brighter now.
The next day my left leg still hurt. I gathered healing roots from a patch near the roost, crushed them in my grabbers, then slathered them over my wound. I hoped I did it right, as if I did not then I might grow sick.
The swarming season was ending, and now the leaves were swarming around their home trees and waiting to die. They would be easy to catch and taste best now, but I did not feel up to it. Instead I daydreamed more.
Of the fifty or so territories in our caravan, Gentle Far Coast was the most remote. It was a large territory most of a dayrun long, but thin in width and tapering to a point at the sea. I only had three neighbours and all the terrors that lived in the ocean for company.
If I did a good job managing it, in a few years I might get a better territory when someone else died or retired to the caravan. I would like somewhere that did not require so much work, where I could spend lazy days talking to friendly neighbours. I would very much like somewhere the caravan visited more often.
But now the stupid white tree had landed, with its stupid white creatures, and nobody would think they improved my territory because they bit very hard. A climber started calling up in a tree branch. I threw rocks at it until it shut up.
Around midday I heard a distant call. It sounded like Redspot! I stomped the ground in frustration. I could not ignore him, but he was half a dayrun away and my leg hurt. I barked back a call to let him know I was far away and busy, and he gave me the short call that meant he expected me tomorrow.
I had to be there. He was Redspot.
I started walking, favoring my bad leg with a limp. It was going to be a long walk, but at least I could garden as I went. Down from the roost, I walked towards the forest. It was a busy season for munchers, and they were out in force sucking up leaves.
Munchers were one big stomach with teeth and they were not very smart at all, but usually they got along fine by rolling around. Sometimes one fell into a crevice and could not get out, and then they would start to stink. If the wind was right, I could smell them from a eighth of a dayrun away.
On my way to Redspot's territory I smelled five. Three I rescued by pulling them out and rolling them on their way, and two I ate. The stomach bag tastes awful, but there's a little bit of tasty meat around their head. In some territories, they have munchers that have big heads and little stomach bags. Here it was the other way around.
My other task along the way was weeding. Every swarming season new saplings would start to grow from clumps of old leaves. It was easiest to stomp out the saplings of the wrong type or in a bad soil while they were small. I was trying to get rid of the tangy-smelling trees with red wood and grow more of the breeze-smelling trees with purple wood, but there were so many new saplings every swarming season that I could not fix them all. Most would die on their own anyway.
I stopped for the night in a travel roost. It was barely more than a raised mound of dirt with a crater in the middle, and the leaf bedding had long blown away. But at least from this distance I could not see the lights from the white tree. I slept peacefully.
The next morning, my leg was feeling better. The healing roots were good and had done their job, and I easily made it to my border with Redspot. His territory always looked much better than mine. He had planted a healthy layer of underfoot longleaves with dew-catchers between them, and a nicely spaced canopy of gumtrees to provide shade. On my side was just a random assortment of trees and whatever else happened to grow.
I did not know how Redspot had time to garden it all! His territory was just as big as mine, but he managed his skillfully while I was constantly overwhelmed just trying to do the basics. Redspot was truly a great gardener.
Rather than waste any of his time by summoning him first, I waited at the border for a quarter of a dayrun. When he stepped out of the treeline, he seemed surprised to see me already there.
Redspot was taller and longer than me by a fifth, and his neck and thighs bulged with hard muscle. There were scars down his flank and on his muzzle from all of the fights he had been in. His skin was patterned mostly in black, with two large red spots on either side of him. When he spoke, his timbre was deep and sounded very wise.
"Hello, Sworl."
"Hello, Redspot."
I bared my neck in submission. Even if the border bush was not there, there was no chance I would rage against someone so clearly my better. He waved me up with his grabber and examined me critically, his eyes falling on my leg.
"How did you get such a wound?"
"A strange critter bit me from afar. I did not expect it to attack and it bit deep."
"And you do not know its name?"
I hung my head in shame. There was no sense in hiding the truth from someone so wise.
"No, Redspot. This creature came with the tree that fell from the sky into my territory. I do not know what it is."
"Sunrise mentioned something about that. What does this tree look like?"
"It is a very big tree with smooth white wood. I think all of its leaves burned away when it fell, but it still has fruits that make light at night like stars. A creature came out of it and bit me from afar. Redspot, do you know what it is called?"
Redspot considered, angling his head to the side so his grabbers could stroke his muzzle thoughtfully.
"It is not a story our caravan tells. I have heard stories from afar, and some have spoken of seaweed that fell from the sky and stranger things. But not trees, or lights, or critters that live in them."
I whined a little in front of the great Redspot like an idiot hatchling. If he did not know what it was, then nobody would. Redspot leaned his muzzle over the border bush and puffed his hot breath at me.
"Courage, Sworl. We gardeners can conquer even the terrors. Once there were no stories to tell us anything, until we learned and made them."
"Yes, Redspot. What should I do?"
"Watch it. Learn about this tree and its critters. But first, tell me all you have seen. I will send word back to the caravan. They may know more."
I told him everything as well as I could tell it. But I had only seen the critter that bit me for a moment. And it was such a strange sight that I had trouble describing it. In the end I sketched a drawing in the dirt. It was awful, because I am not good at drawing.
"Call them sizzlers for now," Redspot said. "If they spit burning fire, that is more notable than their giant eye. And do not worry if they ruin your territory. You can not be blamed for things that fall from the sky."
I bowed so deeply in thanks that my head nearly touched the dirt. Redspot said he did not need such a display, for he was just a gardener and not an elder of the caravan, but I had seen his territory and I knew he was the greatest gardener in the whole world.
Redspot also gave me some news from the other territories. I learned that the caravan had been unable to coax the stomper herds away from their usual path. This failure was blamed on Whitehead, who had refused to clear his territory of the sweet ferns that stompers loved.
Eyelegs had announced that shoots of the ruddy sweet gumtree had grown well, so sometime within our lives all territories would have a shoot. It was exciting to think about. One day, every gumtree might be a ruddy sweet gumtree that had come from Eyelegs's territory. I had not tasted any of its gum yet, but all who had agreed that it was very good.
Feeling better, I returned home. The sun was going down and I should have gone straight to my nest, but instead I found myself walking towards the white tree. Some great courage had flowed from Redspot to me, and even though there would soon be no light to see by I walked. I almost tripped over roots many times, but the lights of the white tree guided me and I was very curious.
I crept closer, hiding as much in darkness as I could. The star fruits were shining brightly, casting an eerie yellow light over the clearing. Dead leaves crunched underfoot. I made sure to keep the trunk of a tree between me and the lights.
I saw that from the white tree a new much shorter branch had grown. The branch was oddly shaped, all straight lines and sharp corners. Sizzlers were carrying smaller things of the same sharp-corner shape from the mouth of the white tree into the new branch.
Were the sizzlers feeding the new branch? Or were they already building a nest within it? I watched well into the night without making any sense of it. I had hoped the tree and its inhabitants would die, but if they were instead growing what would I do? How large would this tree grow? How much of my territory would be ruined if I did not cull it now?
But Redspot had said to watch, and my leg still throbbed with pain.
So I watched. I got a good look at the sizzlers, and they were exactly as strange as I had thought. They had no mouths, though sometimes they made soft and fast sounds to each other.
Most of what the sizzlers carried went into the new branch, but some things were piled outside. They fit on top of each other very neatly due to their strange shape. This was interesting and I studied it carefully in case it was important.
One of the sizzlers broke open one of the shapes they carried! They pulled out little organs from it one by one and placed them on a small branch that was very flat and thin but held in the air by little root legs. Instead of then eating the little organs, the sizzler moved them around and poked at them and they made light or sounds.
The sizzlers' neck-mounted grabbers seemed to be very effective. A sizzler could pick up two separate organs at once with its dual tails. And I counted at least five grabbers on each tail. A runner only had two grabbers at the end of our one tail. Although of course they were much better grabbers than the stubby ones sizzlers had, and our tails were also much longer and more flexible. The sizzlers seemed only able to bend their tails at certain points, like they were actually legs. But they were not legs; the two sizzler legs ended in featureless knobs instead of three toes.
I watched them well into the night before I got tired. It was too dark to make my way back to the roost, so I stumbled blindly away from the lights until I found a bush big enough to hide in. It would be a very cold night and the leaves would bite at me, but I would survive.
It took a while to fall asleep. I kept thinking about how I could exterminate the sizzlers. I assumed they lived in a hole inside the white tree, and I knew I would not fit through the hole's mouth. They had the black sticks that hurt a lot, but only a few of those I had watched carried them. I had no idea what they ate, or if I could starve them out. Maybe I could block up the entrance to their tree with mud?
Growlers would usually stay inside their nests and growl if they thought a gardener was nearby. But they would always eventually forget and poke their heads out, so you could snap them up one by one if you were patient because they never learned. Maybe sizzlers would be the same way. Or I could figure out what food they liked and lure them into an ambush. They moved slowly enough that they would not be able to bite me if I got them by surprise.
I thought back to what Redspot had said as I drifted asleep. I was a gardener, and we could conquer even terrors! So, I reasoned, how much trouble could these tiny creatures from the sky be?
Chapter 2: Freezing Season
It was yellowbug season, but instead of vigilantly patrolling my territory for hives I was watching sizzlers. Sometimes I could get very close to them without being detected, and sometimes they saw me immediately from far away. When they noticed me they would make shrieking sounds and point their neck grabbers until I disappeared deeper into the trees. A lot more of them started to carry black sticks.
I was beginning to learn the proper ways to avoid detection. If I did not move much and I was not near their yellow lights, they almost never saw me. Despite having such a huge eye they were not very perceptive, although they often heard me moving if I was not careful about stepping on dead leaves.
While I watched, they created four more strangely shaped branches around the white tree. It turned out there was another mouth in the tree that only appeared sometimes, and they coaxed a huge creature out of it. It was as tall as I was, with a single large grabber on its front-facing tail. It sort of oozed along the ground like a muncher did, but it was not round, it was shaped with sharp corners.
This creature was scary. It could cut down a tree in the span of a breath with teeth at the end of its grabber. Then it could use that same grabber to make the ground flat, rolling along and scooping up dirt to move away. Finally, when it had a big flat space to work with, it started oozing grayish sap from its grabber and layering it up until it built a new branch as tall as it was.
I debated what to call it. Was it a leveler? An oozer? Would there need to be some new word for the way it moved? I went with leveler for the moment, but I knew that might not be its real name.
When it was done the leveler oozed right back into the tree, so I did not get a chance to look at it more closely. I stopped spying on the sizzlers and could not spy again for many days, because yellowbug season was coming to an end and I had much work to do.
While I hunted down yellowbug nests, more creatures began coming out of the white tree. They were odd fruit-shaped bugs about half the size of my head that hung in the air with a loud buzzing sound. I could not call them buzzers, because there were already buzzers, so I called them whitebugs even though they were not always white.
They were also a bit like giant yellowbugs. But they had four wings that buzzed in circles instead of up and down. And instead of eating everything, they just looked with the many mismatched eyes on their face. Occasionally a little tongue would shoot out of their mouth and bite whatever they were interested in.
I knew this because a whitebug had bitten me! It hurt a little bit, but I managed to grab the stupid thing out of the air and smash it against the ground. It kept trying to fly away, so I stepped on it until it died.
When it stopped making strange sounds, I inspected it more closely. Its skin was smooth and hard and broke apart like bark. Its insides were completely dry and did not smell like food, but some of its organs were very pretty. There was a green thing studded with little shiny bits that I liked enough to put in my trophy room. I buried the rest because after several days it still was not rotting.
The whitebugs avoided me after that, but I still found dead ones from time to time. They upset the trees, whose leaves heard them buzzing like yellowbugs and tried to smother them. Then when the leaves had jammed into the whitebug's wings, it could not fly and fell down. They would make strange noises on the ground for up to a day before finally dying. I buried many of them.
Some of the whitebugs flew all the way to my neighbours. Sunrise was extremely excited about them. He said that if you talked to the whitebugs enough, sometimes they made sounds back. And if you kept them in strong sunlight, it took them much longer to die.
Redspot was much more practical about it, and like me he simply let them fly around and die and then buried them. Mottled reacted to them the same way he did to everything- by going into a furious rage and screaming at the border until I came over to see him.
I did not like Mottled very much. He was one of the biggest and strongest gardeners I had ever met, and whenever I caught a sniff of him he smelled like danger and rage. Instead of sharing wise gardening tips like Redspot did, he only ever said mean things to me when we talked.
His coat was a mottled grey-brown. He was not very interesting to look at.
"If you can not control the bugs in your territory, why are you even here? I have seen hatchlings with more gardening sense than you. Ever since you took over from Very Purple, I have watched Gentle Far Coast become ugly and barren."
I kept a respectful distance from the border. His jaws flashed with countless sharp teeth and drool, and he leaned unnervingly far over the border bush into my territory. I tried to look nonthreatening.
"The whitebugs are dying out. There are fewer every day. If you just wait-"
"If I just wait!"
I recoiled back. Mottled had rudely interrupted me like I was a hatchling talking nonsense. He was always like this, trying to provoke a fight, and I had to be careful not to get angry because he would win.
"I have seen these bugs before, and maybe if a hatchling like you had paid attention to your elders, you would know you should have gotten rid of them right at the start! Now it is an infestation."
I really doubted he had seen anything like them before, but I did not correct him, only submissively bowing my head. He did not calm down.
"You better make sure nothing else crosses over the border, or I will walk right into your territory and take care of the problem for you. Do you hear me, hatchling?"
I left as soon as politeness allowed. I believed his threat to cross the border. But what could I do about the whitebugs except hope they died out? They often flew very high up in the air now, out of range of the trees and certainly out of range of anything I could throw at them. And for all I knew, Sunrise was trying to breed them! And if he was, I was afraid for Sunrise, because Mottled would sneak past Redspot just to tear him apart.
On my way back to the roost, I discovered yet another new worry. The sizzlers themselves had started venturing away from their nest. Four of them marched together, two armed with their biting black sticks. Some kind of smaller creature like the one that had built the branches followed them, although this one did not have a grabber. The sizzlers were collecting the gum from one of my gumtrees, and pouring it into the creature's top.
I was outraged. Even from a distance I could tell that they were damaging the gumtree to get at the sap. Plus, it was clear that these sizzlers intended to eat all of my food. I snuck up on them and waited for the right moment to strike.
But then the strangest thing happened. The noises that the sizzlers made got louder and two of them started flapping their grabbers at each other. Suddenly one of the sizzlers reached up to their one enormous eye and took it off.
Underneath the eye was a grotesque smaller face. It was a little pink colored, with two brown eyes very close together. A small ridge stuck up in the middle, with two nostrils very close together at the bottom. The face was hideously flat, with barely any snout. When the sizzler opened its mouth, it had tiny blunt little teeth. String moss grew from the top of its head, and smaller patches were around its eyes and mouth, as if it had died already and was being overgrown.
I felt sick and immediately ran away. When they removed their big eye, sizzlers were extremely ugly creatures that would make hatchlings start whining. Plus, if they had a mouth below their eye, they would not die off like leaves even if their tree died. They would eat for themselves, although I did not see how they could eat anything with such pathetic teeth and no muzzle.
After a few tenths of the day hiding, I went back to the gumtree. The sizzlers were gone, although a very bad scent lingered in the air. The gumtree was torn open and sucked dry, but I thought it might live so long as the sizzlers did not come back. I carefully sealed its wounds with mud.
I spent six days avoiding the sizzlers. The whitebugs stopped coming out, but the sizzlers left their footprints all over my territory. They drained half a pond, and caught some of my growlers, and one of them stepped on a muncher and left a long trail of slime. My gumtrees were under constant assault. If it kept up I might have to beg Sunrise for food by the end of the freezing season.
No yellowbugs came this year, which was a relief. Sunrise told me that my pouncer was nesting in his territory now. It had probably smelled the sizzlers and decided to move. That made me sad. I would not have anything to chase, and I could not even catch it and force it to warm my roost in the coming cold nights.
One day while I was looking for a stuck muncher, I ran across a lone sizzler in the forest. It was smaller than they usually were, and did not have a black stick. I followed it. Something was wrong with it. It seemed lost, and was calling out constantly.
Usually a sizzler seemed to know exactly which direction its nest was at all times, and they moved purposefully to wherever they wanted to go. This one was far from its nest, and moving further away. Maybe it had been exiled or was sick.
The opportunity was too good to pass up. I had heard a lot of the noises the sizzlers made, and I could almost make them too. I made a call that sounded a little bit like one of the adult sizzlers. The small one reacted immediately, running towards me through the brush. Then it found me looking down at it and made a relatively loud screaming noise and tried to run away.
Sizzlers were not fast creatures. I had seen faster munchers. And this one was even slower because it was so small. I tested it, running a circle around it and appearing right in front of it. After doing this a few times it seemed to realize it was not fast enough to escape, so it started trying to hide.
It was really bad at hiding. I pretended not to see it and walked right by, then when it thought I had gone and started walking away I would creep up behind it until it finally noticed me and started running again.
I spent a full quarter of a day toying with it, slowly leading it further away from its nest and towards my roost. Then it got tired and stopped running away from me. I walked up and gently picked up the sizzler in my jaws. It found the energy to struggle again, but its grabbers were weak and did not hurt no matter how much it tried to hit my snout.
I probably could have eaten it whole if I wanted to. But it did not smell very appealing. Sniffing closely I realized that the sizzler was dabbed in sticky sweet gum, but beneath that it smelled very rotten. I was angry because I knew that it had been stealing the gum from my trees.
I bit down on it until something cracked, then I flung it down and watched it flail and slowly die.
Now it was time to figure out how sizzlers worked! Using my jaws, I pried the big eye off of its head. Looking at it closely, I realized it was more of a swimming eyelid than an eye. You could see through it like ice in a pond, but it was even clearer than that, although it made whatever you were looking at darker. When it cracked in my jaws, the eyelid shattered into sharp little pieces. I kept some of the big pieces for my roost. It was a neat material.
I gently probed the real face with a grabber. It had two smaller eyes very close together and an extremely short snout. I licked it, but the taste was so bad that I had to interrupt my dissection to run to the nearest pond and wash out my mouth.
The carapace below its head was soft but tough. I teased this apart with my teeth then slowly pried it off with my grabbers. Below was another layer of tasteless carapace, this one even softer and colored a bright pink. It was covered in little flowerbug-like spots and I would have been proud if that pattern was on my skin. I carefully removed this carapace and set it aside. It would have a prominent spot in my trophy room.
The final layer I think was the sizzler's actual skin and was not meant to come off. It stank and tasted awful, so I left it alone. When I finished removing all of its tasteless carapace, I stepped back to examine it.
It had no interesting patterns. The real skin was easy to puncture with a claw, and spurted red blood when squeezed. I could not find what other color of blood it had. The sizzler's feet actually had five toes underneath its carapace, but they were very short and I doubt they could grab anything. The innermost toe was big and fat, and the toes got smaller towards the outside.
The sizzler smelled awful, it looked wrong, it was slow, and most of all it was strange. I did not like it much.
I buried the body so it would not stink. Maybe I should have shown Redspot first, but the thought of carrying that thing all the way to the border made me feel sick. Anyway, I had a lot more sizzlers to kill and next time I would bring him an intact one so he could open it up himself.
I found the muncher I had originally been looking for after that. It was just lodged between two rocks. I plucked it out and set it on its way. Compared to sizzlers, it was nice to deal with a resident that was both useful and posed easy problems.
Just in case the smell of sizzler lingered on me, I spent the rest of the day bathing in my favorite pond. This was a gentle blue-green hole carved into a cliff overlooking the coast. In stormy seas, the waves would splash just high enough to keep the pond topped up. The ocean water kept it relatively clean except for a few stray sea crawlers (tasty!), while the sun heated it to a nice temperature. There was even a spot where I could sit down and rest my head on a well-placed rock while my body stayed in the water.
When the water was still enough and the sun was angled right, I could also see my reflection in the pond. I was a pretty handsome young gardener. I did not have the impressive head colors of Sunrise, but my sworls were an attractive blue on my dark green coat. My snout was long, my learner chubbiness was giving way to respectable muscles, and my eyes were still the bright yellow that my mother had told me was very handsome.
I missed her. I missed the whole caravan, all of the hatchlings and learners and scouts and elders. I had been here for two years already, and I only really had Sunrise to talk to. Most territories had around six neighbours, and I only had three, and Redspot was far away.
Gentle Far Coast was a lonely territory. Very Purple had spent all of his years scribbling on the cave walls until he fell down a hole and died. If I was lucky, someone else would die and I could have their territory instead of being stuck here like him. If not, maybe I would someday fall down a hole and die too.
I stared out to sea and watched the clouds fly by. Then I trotted back to my roost and went to sleep.
Yellowbug season ended, and hardening season came and passed, and soon it was the beginning of the very long freezing season. The sizzlers stopped leaving their nest. The white tree had extended some kind of very long root all the way to the sea, which I guess is how it was getting its water. The sizzlers did not suck up any more of my ponds or crack open any more of my gum trees. The white tree even stopped shining brightly at night, though if you got close enough there were still eerie lights. I tried to forget about it.
Sunrise complained that his last whitebug had finally died. I felt bad for him. He was almost as lonely as I was. But not as much. He had Redspot and Eyelegs and Blackstripes and me so he had four neighbours, while I had only three and one of them was Mottled. I told him that the caravan might come our way next year and then he would not be lonely.
Freezing season came. The sun was not as warm and did not stay in the sky as long, and the streams and ponds all froze. It was very cold all the time, but I had gathered lots of dead leaves for my nest and buried myself in them. There were all sorts of things a diligent gardener could still do in freezing season, but most of the time I did not want to go outside.
When I did I would wander over to the nearby caves and read more of Very Purple's poems. The caves were not as cold as outside, and for freezing season Very Purple had written happy poems about the sun and chasing pouncers for me to read.
On a warmer day I would wander around the forest and try to find where the munchers had ended up. They always tried to hide before they froze solid but they were not very good at it. Munchers were not good at many things. Sometimes I picked up frozen munchers and moved them somewhere new. I wondered if they noticed when they thawed.
On one such day, I stumbled across another lone sizzler. This one had lost its white outer carapace and big eye entirely and instead had a thick blue bush of moss around its head to keep it warm. I think it was also a younger sizzler, though it was larger than the one I had killed.
I wondered what it was doing out here. This one did not seem lost, and it was not calling for help. Like the other one it stopped moving when I approached it, but this one did not start screaming as I walked up to it.
When I leaned in to sniff it, the sizzler put its grabber on top of my snout. I waited to see what it would do, and it started rubbing my snout. It felt kind of nice, but I did not want it rubbing its smell off on me so I pulled my head back and walked away.
Why did I not kill that sizzler too? I should have, but it did not have a black stick and it did not run away, so I felt no urge to chase and bite it. Plus I was afraid I would not be able to bury it in the frozen ground, and it would lay there stinking until thaw.
Only a few days later, I ran into the same sizzler again! At least, I think it was the same one. It had the sense to have one of the black sticks with it this time, and I waited to see if it would try to bite me. It did not, so I let it watch while I uprooted some saplings. It was harder to uproot saplings in the freezing season, but there were also no leaves to attack you.
The sizzler watched me for a while, then tried uprooting a small sapling of its own. It had chosen a sapling I would have kept, but I was interested so I let it work, even though it clearly had no idea what it was doing. Finally it cut the sapling free with a claw carried in its grabber.
I reasoned that sizzlers might be almost as smart as pouncers, so maybe they could be trained too. And pouncers were always trained with food. I left the clearing to dig a nearby climber out of its tree, carefully killing it with a shake of my head. Then I returned to the sizzler and dropped the dead climber at its feet.
It inspected the morsel carefully, but did not eat it. I snapped it up from the ground and swallowed, then stalked off to a nearby gum tree. The gum had frozen but I could still scrape off a bit of it, which I brought back to the sizzler. It did not eat that either! I had no idea what the sizzler ate, so I could not train it.
The sizzler took a bright silver thing from its carapace, and using its grabbers it removed the silver to reveal a brown thing. Then it took a bite out of the brown thing and bit it carefully while watching me. It held out the food and I snatched it with my grabbers, which startled it.
The food looked like brown muddy soil, but it smelled like nothing I had ever smelled before. Not terrible, but not like food either. I carefully tasted it with my tongue. And then I threw up.
Whatever these things ate, it was clearly poison. The sizzler made some kind of weird chirp while I threw up the climber I had just eaten and the gum I had eaten earlier and the leaf mulch I had eaten yesterday. I ran off to go back to sleep before I could throw up even more.
As the days got colder, I ran into that same sizzler more often. I would sometimes find it waiting for me by the slow-freezing pond I usually drank from. It liked to watch me as I went about my work, although I did not get much work done. This freezing season was one of the coldest I had ever lived through, and I always fled back to the warmth of my roost not long after going outside.
I still spied on the rest of the sizzlers sometimes. They did not leave their white tree except to go between the branches, which gave me plenty of time to poke around. I found out that the tree itself was warm to touch in winter. The whole area around it was clear of frost.
If the white tree came from the sky, then it would have been closer to the sun, where it would be very hot. So the tree must not be used to the cold. But it was also big enough that it could take a long time to die, like a giant gumtree whose leaves had abandoned it. I still thought I could wait for my problem to solve itself.
Like the tree, the sizzlers were also very warm. The one I was starting to think of as mine was hot to the touch. I had to be careful because of how fragile it was, but sometimes I could wrap my tail around it and steal some of its heat. It was a bit skittish at first, but after a while it no longer seemed to mind.
I decided to keep it. And I liked it enough that I wanted to name it, although to me it looked nearly the same as any other sizzler. I knew that gardeners sometimes named their pouncers even though pouncers all look the same, so I gave it the pouncer name Lunge, even though it was not a pouncer.
I guessed that Lunge was a male sizzler. Sizzlers varied in size, but they tended to be either larger male or smaller female sizzlers, like gardeners and scouts. The smaller sizzlers had longer moss on top of their heads, while the larger ones had shorter head moss but could have moss growing around their mouths. Lunge had short head moss and little shadows of moss around his mouth, so he was male.
"You are now Lunge," I told him. He looked back with his too-close eyes and made some soft sizzler sounds. I was proud of my new pet, even if it was ugly and slow. Maybe this was how Sunrise felt about his whitebugs.
One day Sunrise called for me while I was with Lunge, so I decided to bring him along. I had picked him up a few times before and while Lunge squirmed a lot, it did not seem to hurt him. And besides, he was really slow and it would take forever to reach the border if he walked. So I carried him there.
"Hello, Sworl," Sunrise said.
"Hello, Sunrise," I said back. I held up Lunge for him to see, and Sunrise recoiled and let out a warning shriek.
"This is my sizzler. I named him Lunge."
"It is very interesting," Sunrise said when he recovered, struggling to look at his hideous and deformed face.
"Look, he talks!" I held my face up to him. "Hello, Lunge!"
My well-trained sizzler let out a squeak that almost sounded like "hello" and then started coughing.
"I thought you said these were dangerous?"
"He does not bite. See? He does not have his biting claw."
I watched as disgust and curiosity battled in Sunrise. Finally, he leaned over the border bush and took a sniff.
"You do not have to be polite," I said. "I know he is ugly and smells awful."
"Oh, good. I also think he is ugly and smells awful."
I put the sizzler down and we watched it walk up to Sunrise and hold out his grabber.
"He wants to rub your snout and make mouth noises at you," I said.
"Why?"
"I do not know."
Sunrise obediently leaned his head down enough that Lunge could rub it.
"It is very warm," Sunrise said. He actually seemed to be enjoying the rubbing. Even stranger, he seemed to like sniffing Lunge's scent. After a long time with his eyes closed, he looked up at me. "Are there more? Can I have one?"
"Maybe. I think this one is sick, because he does not run away from me. The rest of them try to avoid me, and they do not come outside in the freezing season like Lunge."
"What if I took him for a few days?"
I flicked my tail. "I do not know, he goes back to his tree every night. And I have not figured out what to feed him yet."
"You could have your pouncer back in his place."
"I do not know what will happen if Lunge does not go back to his nest, Sunrise."
"Just try it then! I think he will be fine. And then you can give me a sizzler, and I bet Eyelegs would like one too. You might get one of his new gumtrees that way."
The idea of getting a new sweet gumtree was very tempting, although I think Sunrise was a little too optimistic. The sizzlers had no real use except as a novelty. They were otherwise very smelly and strange looking. Perhaps if their carapaces were removable, they could be harvested for decoration? The flowerbug pattern I had taken off the one I had killed was still very pretty and had not rotted away.
"I will try. But if Lunge wants to go back to his nest I will not stop him."
Sunrise was so overjoyed that he nearly forgot why he had summoned me in the first place. He had brought the corpse of his last whitebug and gave it over to me.
"I thought maybe if you took it back to its tree, it might get better."
"But it has been dead for seasons."
Sunrise wagged his tail and bared his neck in a pathetic display of begging, like he was a little hatchling.
"Fine."
"Its name is Batterylow."
Both Lunge and I reacted with similar puzzlement at the strange sound Sunrise had made.
"That is not a name," I said.
"That is its name," Sunrise said. "That is the sound it always used to make."
Rather than argue all day, I politely bobbed my head and picked up Batterylow. Unfortunately I also needed to carry Lunge back. I quickly discovered he did not like the idea of me holding him in my jaws, but I could get him to hold Batterylow while I carried him in my grabbers.
I ran back to my roost. Lunge had not actually been here before, and I was not eager to show it off. In the freezing season the pinkblossoms that framed the mound looked ominous and dead, like the ribcage of some gigantic terror. All of the decorative ponds were frozen over too.
It was getting dark so I took Lunge straight inside and into the nest chamber. He was a little apprehensive because usually I returned him to somewhere near his nest by now.
I did not block him from leaving as the sun went down, and he stayed. I settled into my leaf mound bed and watched him fumble with the corpse of Batterylow. When he pressed it the right way, one of its tongues would stick out and you could collect it. But instead of eating the tongue, Lunge put it into his carapace.
The sun went down and the cold intensified. Lunge kept looking towards the entrance like he wanted to leave, but he did not leave. He produced a light from something in his grabbers. I hissed at him until the unnatural light went away.
I fell asleep. At some point during the long and cold night, Lunge added his warmth to mine and it was nice even if he was a little hot. I dreamed I was in my mother's nest again, with her warm body wrapping around me and my siblings.
The day came and the warmth was gone. I smelled awful and so did the nest, but I had smelled enough of sizzler that it did not bother me too much. I just hoped the smell would go away.
I found Lunge exploring my roost. My roost was not the biggest, but it was sturdy with roots put into the walls to give it strength. I showed him the other nesting rooms and my gum storage, and then I took him to the top of the roost to show him my trophy room.
Lunge probably did not understand what was beautiful and what was not. But I was proud of the seashells and rocks that generations of my kind had collected and brought here. Lunge did not seem to care, but he immediately went to the pink flowerbug-pattern carapace that was in the place of honor. I do not think he liked it very much, because he slowly backed out of the room with eyes fixed on me the whole time.
Outside, I watched him run away at a pretty respectable speed for a sizzler. That was the last I saw of Lunge for a while.
Chapter 3: Thaw Season
The cold was gone! And now it was my favorite season, when all of the snow and ice started to melt and the rains came down hard. It was the time of year when all of the ponds would be full and I could dig canals to new ponds if I wanted, or I could just watch all of the water flowing everywhere. The trees were beginning to grow new leaves as fast as they could, and little growler pups were venturing outside their nests for the first time.
As if to make up for not doing its job all last season, the sun was warm and kind and went all the way to the top of the sky, making the day long. There was plenty of time to do my gardening and then laze about. This was a gentle and kind season.
I played a little trick on the sizzlers, just to see what they would do. There was a stream near their tree that eventually ran off into the sea, and the geography was just right that when I dug a little diversion it flowed right at their white tree instead. This was not hard to do, and some years the stream wanted to go there anyway.
They did not seem to like all the mud and water outside their nest. So they brought the giant leveler out the next day, and it dug a new canal so the stream did not flow near their tree. I was impressed that they knew how to do that. How would they know how water worked if they had come from the sky? I knew there was water in the sky like rain and clouds, but were there rivers and streams in the sky too?
None of the sizzlers had their white carapaces or their giant eyes now. Instead they had a variety of soft carapaces, some of them in dazzling colors but most just grey. They usually kept their ugly faces uncovered, and I studied them from a distance until I could tell them apart. Sizzlers ranged from a light pink to a dark brown. Their head-moss could be black or brown or yellow or red or sometimes blue. Their eyes could be green or blue or purple or brown. Most sizzlers were tall enough to come up to just under my lower jaw, but some were a little taller or shorter. They were all very thin though, so they were much smaller than their height would suggest.
I saw Lunge sometimes while I was spying. But he never strayed far from the nest, and there was something different about him. I think he opened his mouth and flashed his tiny little teeth less, and he moved a little slower, and he did not seem curious like he had been before but was hunched over. I wondered if he was sick.
The more I watched the more I thought that all of the sizzlers seemed a little sick. I wondered if their tree was finally dying. It looked exactly the same as it had the first day, but it could be rotting from the inside like a big scattertree I had once seen that had looked fine but later it exploded into many pieces.
They still were not very good at noticing me. They only caught me spying on them once when I got too close, and they immediately started spitting their sizzling bites my way. Fortunately none of them hit. My leg still hurt sometimes from last time.
The whitebugs never returned. I left Batterylow outside the white tree for Sunrise and the sizzlers took it inside, but it never flew out again. Instead, teams of sizzlers went out from their tree four at a time. And they were carried by this strange white thing that could fly! It was the biggest flying thing I had ever seen, even bigger than a windleaf. And it was fast, too. It could fly faster than I could run.
It carried the sizzlers all over the place. When they got out, the sizzlers took little bites out of plants and rocks. And they flew into my neighbours' territories too, and even further. Mottled said there were complaints all over the territories and that this was my fault for not taking care of them at their nest, but Mottled was just angry because they never tried landing in his territory because it was so ugly and barren.
Anyway, the sizzlers and their flying thing were harmless if they were left alone. But not everyone had the sense to leave them alone. Redspot told me that Waterskin attacked a group of sizzlers and got bit pretty bad. He managed to kill a couple of them, but when he ate them he was vomiting for days and became very sick.
I thought Waterskin had been very stupid. I had not eaten one because it smelled and tasted so bad, so I did not become sick. But even as a hatchling Waterskin had always eaten everything and he had finally found something he could not stomach.
When Mottled summoned me I was very afraid because I thought he might take the excuse to be angry at me. He might finally snap and cross into my territory. I had never been in a real fight before, and against Mottled I would surely lose. So I came late and shivering to the border, since I was not ready to face my death.
Mottled was there, but there was another too! I recognized Very Violet immediately and could not help but rush to the border in excitement. She was about the same age as me. When we were learners together I had always thought she was clever. And now she was beautiful too.
It had been years since I had seen a scout. They say that once a gardener becomes an adult and leaves the caravan, he cannot again see scouts the same way, and to my shock it was true. My eyes were drawn to the strength in her thighs, the meatiness of her tail, and most of all how beautiful and deep her coat's color was.
Even through the border bush, I could smell her. It made me squirm in excitement.
But Mottled was still there. And he was stealing Very Violet from me! I growled, lowering my head and planting my feet. He was bigger than me, but I suddenly knew he was old and I could defeat him if I struck first. My tail fanned back-
Very Violet hit me me on the snout with something that hurt a lot. I shook my head and stepped back. She was holding a spear in her grabbers, as scouts always did.
"None of that," she said.
Mottled was shaking his head from side to side and puffing, barely able to contain his amusement.
"Look at the little lovestruck hatchling. He sees a scout for ten seconds and he is ready to fight me!"
Very Violet hit him with the spear too.
"You were once young too, Mottled. But maybe not once handsome."
Mottled fumed while Very Violet stepped over the border bush and into my territory. My territory! I looked around nervously at the bushes and the trees. It was not ready to receive a scout yet. I had so much to do, and she was not going to like it, and why was a scout from the caravan here so early?
Had she said I was handsome?
"Hello Sworl," she said. "Do not worry, I am not here to judge you. The elders are curious about the sizzler's tree so they wanted me to draw it for them."
I had no words, only incoherent shrieks. But Very Violet seemed used to that, and gently poked me to start moving towards my roost. Her smell was very nice, and her skin was even more violet than I remembered. I stumbled a few times because I forgot to watch where I was walking. Whenever I got too close to her, she lightly hit me with her spear.
She stopped in front of a crooked red tree.
"Have you been very distracted by the white tree?"
I tackled the tree and viciously tore it out for her. She took a deep breath and slowly puffed it out as she watched. She must have thought I was very handsome and strong. I walked closer to her.
"This is not personal, Sworl."
She hit me with her spear. That hurt. Then she hit me again. I growled and lunged at the spear with my teeth, but she lifted it out of the way and hit me underneath the chin. When I recovered I furiously charged at her, but she stepped out of the way and hit me with the spear. I tripped into a tree and she hit me lightly but mercilessly again and again until I whined for her to stop.
"That was the flat end, Sworl. Come at me again and you get the sharp end. Understand?"
I bared my neck to her in submission. Shame slowly replaced my lust.
"I am sorry that I did that," I finally said. "It has been a long time since I have seen a scout."
"That is alright, I have seen worse."
We walked to the roost while she said nice things about the trees we passed, although I could tell she did not really mean them. Finally we came to the roost, surrounded by the pinkblossom trees with newly sprouting leaves.
"I have always loved these," Very Violet said. "It is a shame this is not their season."
"I love them as well," I said.
She stopped when she noticed the white gleam of the white tree in the distance, and stared a while. Then she started walking towards it, but I quickly ran around to get in her way.
"Let me show you the roost first."
Very Violet tilted her head at me. I stepped back in case she was going to hit me with the spear for being in her way, but she was looking at my roost.
"You have not changed it?"
"Not yet."
"Then I have seen it. I have been to Gentle Far Coast many times."
"Really?"
"Yes. Very Purple was my father, and I visited often."
That made sense, but part of me also deflated. There was not anything here I could impress her with. She would have seen everything already. There was little chance I could get close without being hit by her spear.
"You have not seen everything," I said. "There are some new treasures I got from the sizzlers. You could look at those. It is a bad time to look at the white tree right now anyway. All of the sizzlers will be out and they will notice us and try to bite us. If you go early in the morning they will not be awake yet."
"If you think so," she said. She brushed past me on her way into the roost and my nose followed her inside. This roost was built traditionally, so the trophy room was at the top. Walls with holes in them let the sunlight through for viewing at good times near dusk and dawn, while keeping out rain and lost leaves. Very Purple had found many interesting shells in his long tenure, but the best part in my opinion was all of the weird rocks he had found from his time deep in the painted caves. Some of them glittered, and one was shaped just like a muncher, and he even found part of a lurker skeleton.
But Very Violet was not interested in these. Her eye was caught by my new additions.
"This is a sizzler carapace," I said. "The small ones sometimes have very colorful carapaces. See how soft it is?"
"The flowerbugs are so detailed," Very Violet said. I inched closer while she was preoccupied with wonder. "But what flowerbug are they?"
"It must be mimicking one from the sky," I said.
"It is a shame that no flowerbugs fell from the sky then."
We moved on to a green thing studded with silver and black.
"This is the bone of a batterylow," I said.
"A what?"
"Sunrise named them after the sound they make. He said it sounded just like that: batterylow. They used to fly out from the nest but they are all dead now."
"Yes, Mottled showed me his. But he called them sky buzzers because they buzzed very loudly in flight. Its insides are very pretty."
Stupid me. I thought the bone might impress her, but Mottled had ruined everything again. Still, I knew many other impressive things.
"See the shape? It is shaped the same as the branches of the white tree. Many things from the sky are shaped like that."
Very Violet gently brushed me back with her spear.
"Yes, that is called a square. In the caravan we sometimes draw squares. When it has depth, it is called a box."
"You know so much," I said. I moved to the fractured big eye I had taken from the small sizzler. "But look at this! It is the eye of a sizzler."
She dropped her spear for a moment to pick up and wonder at the eye. It shined a little at the edges and darkened what light passed through it, but you could see through it like it was ice. But it was not cold and did not melt like ice.
I took advantage of her lapse to brush up to her, almost touching. She was surely breathing in my scent just as I was breathing in hers. But the eye's distraction cut both ways, and she played with it in the sunlight and ignored my advances.
"The flying creature the sizzlers ride in also has eyes like that," I said.
"It seems the sizzlers have many beautiful things to harvest."
"Yes," I said. I leaned in a little closer-
The spear hit my snout and I staggered back. Very Violet seemed quite amused.
"I am not here to mate with you, Sworl. But I hit you lightly this time because I know how lonely this territory is. If you want to impress me, go out and catch a growler for eating."
Never have I hunted a growler with such skill or speed before. I returned almost as soon as I left and gave it to her. She politely ate half and gave me the rest, then we ate some stored gum and settled into one of the nest rooms.
I asked her stupid questions about the caravan beyond numbering, and she told me the small gossip that had not made it all the way out here. My mother was well, and my two sisters were well, but my younger brother was still sick and small and might be culled if he did not grow stronger before he reached adulthood.
"That is too bad," I said. "Spikes is very clever and he would make a good gardener."
"Yes, he is more clever than you. That is why we feed him so much even though he is sick."
We talked about other things. The big news of the year was the ruddy sweet gumtree that Eyelegs had grown, and apparently many disagreed whether it was actually better. Sunrise had not heard disagreement about its good flavor from Eyelegs himself, so I had not heard it either.
Very Violet thought it was better, but that both regular and ruddy sweet gumtrees had their place. Sweet gum could be eaten alone in the freezing season, and then regular gum could be eaten with fresh food in other times.
"Only scouts have such impractical opinions about food," I said. "And that is because you do not have to grow the trees you eat."
She puffed amusement. I think she did find me smart and handsome even though she hit me with the spear. When sleep came, she slept in the same nest as me and sometimes our grabbers brushed against each other.
The next day we went out early to spy on the white tree. Very Violet studied it with her sharp eyes while I pointed out all the things I knew.
"The sizzlers all wake up when the white tree makes a particular sound. It should make that sound when the sun is about two sixteenths higher. Sometimes some of them will be awake anyway, but they will usually be in one of the squares."
"Boxes."
"Yes. You can tell they are not in them right now because the boxes do not have light. Except that one, which always has light."
"Those squares on the boxes, they look like the eye you showed me."
I nodded. Some of the boxes had grown see-through squares by now. She stood up out of our hidden spying grove and walked straight towards the box with glowing lights.
"What are you doing?" I hissed behind her. "If the sizzlers see you they will bite you!"
"But you said they are not awake, and I want to see."
She walked up to the square and stuck her head against it flat so her left eye could look inside. I hesitated and stood guard, ready to bolt if sizzlers started swarming out of the entrance.
"There are plants inside," Very Violet said. "In little boxes. And there are stars in the ceiling over them."
I grudgingly looked myself, and she was right. The inside of the box branch was hollow and I could see green-looking plants growing in neatly ordered boxes. It was very interesting, but as my eye adjusted to the dark view through the window I noticed something else.
"There is a sizzler inside watching us," I said.
"Oh! I see it now. Do they really look like that?"
"Yes," I said. "We should leave before they come out and bite us."
"You said they could remove their eye-things, right? Maybe we could remove this eye-thing on the box and look inside."
We poked at the see-through square, but I could not figure out how it was supposed to come off. And I had a better idea that would surely impress Very Violet. I led her to the little mouth that the sizzlers went into the building from.
I had watched the sizzlers open these mouths many times. When the mouth did not open just because they walked near it, they would make angry sounds and then push a sequence of little squares next to the square mouth. (I was glad that Very Violet had taught me this word, because many sizzler things were squares and boxes.)
I pushed them all, and the mouth did not open. I imitated some of the angry sounds the sizzlers made and then pushed them all again, and this time the mouth did open. Neither of us could fit through that little mouth, but Very Violet stuck her head inside and looked around. The sizzler inside made a screaming sound like a frightened climber.
"We should go," I said. Very Violet withdrew her head. She was gently carrying a little box with a plant in it in her mouth. The two of us ran away before the sizzlers could start biting, then at a distance we stopped and examined our prize.
It was a green plant that was all soft like a bush. Its soil smelled strange and so did the plant, but it did not smell bad. The leaves were the strangest part. They only had one leg that clung to the plant, and I could not find their eyes or bodies. Their wings were very broad but fused together. No matter how much Very Violet gently poked them, they did not wake up and try to escape.
"This must be a star plant," I said. "It grows in starlight. But when the white tree fell out of the sky, the sizzlers broke up its light fruits and put them in the box branch so they could grow more star plants for food."
"That is very dumb of them. There are many good plants already growing here."
We very carefully dug out the soil from the plant to see its roots. This was hard, because it was a very small plant, so we had to find sticks to use first. The roots were thin, and led down to small egg-shaped fruits. The whole plant was like soilfruit, but we could not get the soilfruit to wake up either, even if we gently bit it.
They tasted awful.
While we were examining, the flying box came and hovered nearby. We must have really upset the tree this time, and I wondered if the flying box could bite. But instead it landed and five sizzlers got out. All of them had the black sticks, but Very Violet was not afraid enough to run away and I did not want to leave her. I looked at the sizzlers more closely to see if they looked like they wanted to bite.
One of them was Lunge! I was excited and pointed him out to Very Violet.
"That is my pet sizzler. I have not seen him much since the freezing season."
"The small one?"
The sizzlers kept a distance and played with a box with lights on it while making many of their soft sounds. I could tell that Lunge still remembered me, but he seemed to be afraid of me for some reason.
"Hello!" the box the sizzlers had said. We were both very surprised. I was even more surprised because its voice sounded exactly like Sunrise.
"Hello box," Very Violet said back.
"I would like the plant back," the box said.
We looked between each other, but the speaking box had asked politely and we had already looked at the plant. I hastily put it back into its box with its soil and put it on the ground between us, but Lunge did not walk over to take it until I was all the way back by Very Violet's side.
"I did not know boxes could speak," Very Violet said.
"I did not either."
The sizzlers seemed to be getting angry at each other as we watched. I think some of them wanted to leave with the box, but the others did not want to leave yet. They even shoved each other with their neck-tails! Eventually two of them seemed to decide to stay behind with the speaking box, but Lunge and the others went back into the flying box.
"Lunge," I called. "Come back."
He moved more quickly into the flying box and soon it had left.
"I am sorry your pet left you," Very Violet said. "Maybe it will come back next freezing season."
The two remaining sizzlers watched us very intently and poked at their speaking box.
"Hello," the box said in Sunrise's voice.
"Hello box," I said back.
"Do you understand what I am saying?"
"Yes."
"Every time the sizzlers make their sounds, the box talks," Very Violet said. "And every time we talk, the box makes their sounds."
The two sizzlers looked excited.
"Yes," the box said. "You are very smart."
"Why do you sound like Sunrise?" I asked. Their response took a little longer to come back.
"We did not know how to talk. But we listened to him talk."
"You should not have listened to Sunrise," Very Violet said. "He is strange."
"He is not that strange," I said.
"All say he is very strange," Very Violet said. She was right, but I did not like the way she said it.
"But he is very smart too," I said. Very Violet let the topic drop at that.
One of the sizzlers took the box and pointed to himself with a neck-tail.
"I am Rollo." The box spoke his name with sizzler sounds, which were almost like real words but not. Rollo was a male sizzler with sharp face moss below his mouth. He pointed at the other sizzler, who was a female with red hair moss and a golden band around it. The band had a shiny blue rock in its center. "And this is Lema. Who are you?"
"If they learned how to speak from Sunrise, they must have learned their names wrong," Very Violet said.
"Maybe they do not have real names, only sizzler names. They all look the same anyway, so they have names like pouncers that do not mean anything."
I could tell this disturbed Very Violet. Not everybody liked giving pouncers names. Mine was Very Purples' and did not have one.
She angled her grabber to point at her skin.
"I am Very Violet. Because I am very violet."
She pointed at the biggest sworl across my back. "And this is Sworl, because of his sworl."
"We are happy to meet you," the box said. "I do not know how well we speak, but we wanted to tell our story."
We both perked up. A story from a sizzler!
"We come from a place that is very far away from here. We are called numans."
"What does it mean to numans?" Very Violet asked.
The sizzlers debated between themselves without speaking from the box.
"We are called numans," they said again.
"Very well."
"We were running across the sky when there was a very big fight in our roost. Our elders were very angry. They sent us down here in our white tree to punish us, because they thought we could not live in these territories. We have been very busy trying to find things to eat."
"There is much food here," I said. "It is a good territory."
"Your food does not taste good to us. We have looked for good food everywhere. We are trying to figure out how to grow the plants that grow where we come from and we were very upset when you took one."
I felt insulted that my territory's food was not good enough for these star creatures. It was good enough for the munchers and growlers. I thought I was doing a good job, and obviously the sizzlers were wrong.
"You are growing plants wrong," I said. "You do not put your plants in sunlight. So they do not grow. That is how plants work on the ground."
"No, the sun is not the same where we come from. The air is also not the same where we come from. When we first came here we could not breathe the air, but we have become the air breathing to have by making helical writing into blood with tiny munchers-"
The box cut off, and the sizzlers could not seem to get it to speak what they wanted to say. I knew why. The way the box began its sentences often meant they had to end a certain way. But the box began to say its sentences before the sizzlers had finished telling it what to say, so its beginning could not be correct for its end. Then the box got confused and started saying nonsense like a hatchling and could not become right.
I thought this was because they learned too much from Sunrise. Sunrise was fond of speaking in sentences that started off meaning one thing and ended up meaning a different thing, yet were still correct. I thought it was usually bad poetry and bad speaking, but he enjoyed making games out of his words.
"We can breathe the air now. But some of us do not think we can grow our own plants here. Some of us are still looking for the plants that live here and would be good food for us. But when we go out to find them, you attack us."
"Why did you not just tell us not to eat you?"
Rollo and Lema seemed excited at this, the same way Lunge had looked when he had finally caught a climber on his own.
"Some of us thought we should not build the box that lets us talk to you, and instead focus on making our plants grow."
"I can try to tell the others not to attack you on my way back home," Very Violet said. "But many think you are dangerous because you hurt Waterskin."
"We are very sad that Waterskin was hurt. But he killed two of us."
"He is a good hunter," Very Violet said. "And you are very small prey."
Lema seemed afraid for a moment. I do not think she liked that Very Violet had shown off all of her sharp teeth just then.
"But you are not tasty," I said. "So there is no reason to hunt you."
"Yes, we are not good food for you- the way we are food is not- Also, you are not good food."
"You are too slow to chase as well," I said. "And you break very easily."
"We should leave now. Our box is tired. But we would like to talk more later."
"Very well."
We watched the two numans and their box that spoke in Sunrise's voice slowly walk away in the direction of their nest. The whole time we were sitting and talking to them, I had been slowly inching closer to Very Violet. Now I was close enough to press my neck into hers and hold down her tail with my grabbers. It was so romantically done that despite her duties she did not struggle very much, and we sat together and basked in the warm sunlight.
"Talking to sizzlers is exhausting," she murmured. "They speak like hatchlings who think they are as clever as elders."
She gently bit my muzzle when I tried to reply.
"No more talking for now."
After our rest, she helped me catch up on my gardening. There was no shortage of stuck munchers and crooked trees and bad saplings in thaw season. Life had returned from the cold and was making the most of it.
She showed me some of the techniques she had learned in the caravan. Some were useful, like the pretty call she made that the climbers imitated and then took as their own. But overall I think she had learned too much from elders. Scouts did not work the same garden every season, so while they knew a lot from the caravan's travels they did not know gardener skills like how to grow things that looked nice but did not take too much effort to keep nice.
She wanted to stop by the painted caves where her father had spent most of his life. Instead of me showing her around, she showed me! There were whole passages I did not know about. Apparently Very Purple had even painted in some of the dark parts of the cave using just the smell of his paint. Of course we could not read this work, but Very Violet showed me that it was there by the faint scent that was still on the wall. I wonder what poems he had written that he knew nobody would ever read?
When the sun had only a quarter of the sky left, Very Violet and I went to the border and I called for Sunrise. He came quickly like he always did. I noted with jealousy how Very Violet stared at his golden skin and his strong muscles.
He stared back at her too for a moment. I waited for him to forget himself and try to cross the border like I had, but he did not.
"Hello, Sworl," he said in a voice exactly like the speaking box.
"Hello, Sunrise. This is Very Violet."
"Hello, Very Violet."
She was at a loss for words. Ambling up to the border, she swayed her tail and puffed her scent over at him. He seemed unaffected.
It was true, Sunrise was very strange.
"The sizzlers stole your voice," I said. "Now they talk to us."
"Oh! What do they say?"
"They fell from the sky and are trying to find good food, and they do not like when we eat them."
"Did you ask them about Batterylow?"
"No, I will ask them when I see them again."
Sunrise had many questions, and we could not answer most of them. I ended up promising to ask the sizzlers about many things, from why their carapaces kept falling off to whether their flying box could carry a gardener too. And in return, Very Violet told Sunrise to spread the news that the sizzlers could talk and were just trying to find good food and did not want to be eaten.
"You are so lucky Sworl," Sunrise said. "I wish I had your territory."
And he was right! If the sizzlers had not come, then Very Violet would not have come either. But they had, and now she had a reason to stay here and learn about them, and at the same time I could win her love.
Chapter 4: Howling Season
Very Violet left the next morning. She said that she wanted to report back to the caravan and would be back soon, but it was obvious that despite sleeping next to me during the night she had rejected me. Maybe Sunrise had stolen her love with his bright colors, which always looked more like a weak Sunset to me anyway.
I hope she never comes back. I did not like her.
Thaw season is short, and ends whenever all of the ice has melted. The next season is howling season, which is basically the same time of year except that sometimes gardeners would sing to each other at night. Sunrise was very good at singing, and I bet that was why Very Violet had left me for him. Well, I would show her! I made my own howls, and while they were not very good yet, one day they would be. When everyone knew how to sing them she would come back and be my mate.
I was too sad to leave the roost that day. Instead I tried to think up a new sad howl. But that was hard because I was not in the mood for singing either. So I mostly just sat around.
The sizzlers came looking for me. They did not have their flying box today so Rollo and Lema and Lunge and the talking box all came to my roost. I got the chance to examine them more closely. Rollo was a male sizzler with light brown skin and dark head-moss, who for some reason smelled better than other sizzlers. Lema was a female sizzler with pinkish-yellow skin and long red head-moss. The pretty blue thing circling the top of her head made it easy to tell which sizzler was Lema. They both wore white carapaces.
Lunge was still Lunge. I got the sense he did not like me now, and had only come to guide the others here. He stood around far away while the other sizzlers were bold enough to walk right in to my roost.
I gently but firmly picked them up and put them outside, since I did not want to deal with their smells right now. They did not try to enter again.
"Hello Sworl," the box said. But it was really Rollo saying it. "Where is Very Violet?"
"I do not know where she is," I said. "I hope she is far away."
I explained to the sizzlers that she was a bad scout who had lead me on and hurt my feelings, and while she said she was going back to the caravan I was sure she just wanted to be with Sunrise or maybe Mottled.
Then I had to explain why both of them were bad neighbours and why they would make bad mates. Mottled because he was mean and angry all the time, and Sunrise because he would never let his hatchlings be culled even if they were weak.
"You kill your own hatchlings?" Lema asked.
"What a strange question," I said. "Do sizzlers not?"
"No. Never."
"Maybe you would have enough food if you did?"
This suggestion seemed to upset Lema a lot. Rollo had to take over the speaking box while Lema had to suddenly clean her eyes with her hands.
"We numans only have a few hatchlings and we love them very much. Some people suggested that we kill our hatchlings because there is not enough food for them and they will suffer a lot. Lema has two hatchlings and loves them very much, which is why we are working very hard to find good food."
I understood by now that the sizzlers said our words but meant different things. The sizzlers might call their young hatchlings, but they were not. So if they did not properly cull their young, that was okay because they were not really hatchlings. And when they said they loved their young, they did not really love them, because they would cull the weak if they loved them. Instead they felt some other thing that their speaking box thought was close enough.
If I corrected their words, they would need new words and that would take a long time. So I did not correct them and we moved on.
"We brought some of our food so you could taste it and see if you recognized it."
"Very well."
They had another box with them, and inside the box were many tiny samples trapped in the see-through stuff. The sizzlers called it glass. I asked if I could keep some and they let me have five whole crystals of the stuff for my trophy room!
In return I spent a lot of time rubbing my tongue against disgusting things and making sure not to swallow. Very little of it tasted familiar. There was ocean water and red soil, and many bad rotting tastes to make me vomit. Actually most of it was bad rotting taste that made me vomit. The sizzlers seemed disappointed as the tests wore on, but there were still a lot of tiny samples to get through.
"Does Lunge not like me?" I asked. He had been leaning against a tree the whole time with his two tails folded over each other, pretending to ignore us.
"His name is Jaku," Rollo said. I could not make that sound very well, so I decided to continue calling him Lunge. "You killed his sister."
"I did?"
Lunge looked our way to stare at me.
"You have her carapace."
"Oh! Yes, I killed her."
The sizzlers waited like they were expecting me to say more.
"She was very easy to kill?"
That was not what they wanted. I was getting better at telling when they were happy or sad. Their little mouths would move up or down and the flesh over their eyes would sag or stretch. Here the mouths and eyes were very down.
"In our caravan, killing is against the rules. How would you feel if we killed your sister?"
I thought about it. It did not seem very likely to happen, and anyway they did not say which sister. The younger one was weaker but I liked her more, while the older one was strong and fast. In either case, the answer was clear.
"I would feel very sad."
"Well, Jaku feels very sad."
"Does he want to kill me in revenge?"
"Maybe, but he is not going to. It might help if you said you were sorry."
I looked over at Lunge.
"Why would I be sorry?" I said.
Whatever he said back was not translated by the box, but it sounded angry. He held both tails towards me with one of the grabbers up on each and then walked off into the woods.
"Let us get back to work," Lema said.
I tasted more samples. But I was still upset about Lunge. Very Violet had left me, and my pouncer had left me, and now Lunge had left me too.
"I could give Lunge his sister back," I said.
"What?"
"I buried her so she would not stink. But she did not become rotten when I checked her later so maybe she is not really dead."
Rollo said it might help and that I could lead them to the body later. We went through a lot more samples first. Finally, we found something.
"This tastes like sand-digger eggs."
The two of them checked the sample, then talked between themselves very quickly. Lema seemed excited, but Rollo was not. The box hesitantly started to say a few words before giving up. They eventually agreed on what they wanted it to say.
"Where do we find sand-digger eggs?"
"They come to the beaches here and lay their eggs."
"When?"
"In sand-digger season, of course."
"How many days away is that?"
"Many."
"How many?"
"Many."
"How high can you count?"
"All the way up to the end of numbers," I said. "But it is more days away than sixteen."
This upset the sizzlers. It seemed they had not known that numbers ended. But they wanted to hear about the sand-diggers first.
"The sand-diggers live in the sea and they come just before swarming season to lay their eggs, which hatch in four days and become little sand-diggers that live on the beach. Their eggs taste horrible like this so that nothing eats them."
My mother had told me not to eat the sand-digger eggs, but I had been a young hatchling at the time and I was very hungry. I had not forgotten how bad it tasted.
"Do the sand-diggers taste like this too?"
"No, they are very tasty. But they are hard to catch because they dig down if they hear you coming."
Lema had a lot of strange questions about sand-diggers now, like where they lived in the sea and how large their eggs were and whether any did not hatch. I did not know how to answer, but I offered to take them to the beach where the sand-diggers would come when it was sand-digger season and not howling season.
They agreed, but first Rollo thought it was important to tell me about numbers.
"There are numbers that are bigger than sixteen," he said. "What would happen if you had sixteen rocks and gained a new rock?"
"Then you would have many rocks."
"But if I told you I had sixteen rocks and gained a new rock, and Lema had sixteen rocks and gained two new rocks, who would have more rocks?"
"You would both have many rocks."
I wondered if the sizzlers were stupid. Even a hatchling knew that once a number became too big, you had many. Rollo was very stubborn though and he made Lema help him gather many rocks. Then he made two piles of sixteen rocks, one on my left and one on my right. He added one rock to the left and two to the right.
"Which pile has more rocks?"
I brushed my grabber against the pile to the right.
"How many rocks does each pile have?"
"Many."
"How many more rocks does the pile on the right have?"
"One."
"What if there was a number for the pile on the left and a different number for the pile on the right?"
"There is not."
"Could I say the one on the left is sixteen and one, and the one on the right is sixteen and two?"
"Yes, but then you would have four piles."
This went on for a while. Eventually Rollo explained to me that sizzlers did not actually have numbers bigger than nine (and were not interested in learning them), but had invented a clever way of counting things beyond that in case they later became numbers. They would say something was the same as five piles of ten piles of ten rocks, and four piles of ten rocks, and three rocks, and no matter how big the pile of rocks got they could have a new way to say it while using the same words.
It was interesting, but I did not see why the sizzlers would need so many rocks and also need to count them so exactly. Maybe the caravan would find a use for their system. They could say the caravan had three groups of sixteen and ten runners in it. Too bad Very Violet was a bad scout who had left too early, or she would have learned this too.
There was still enough day left to go to the beach, but sizzlers were slow without their flying box. I offered to carry them there but Rollo and Lema wanted to instead sit on my back and grab my neck as long as I did not go too fast. I held the speaking box in my grabbers, because it did not care if I was grabbing it or not. And it also did not scream when I went too fast.
We ran into Lunge on the way back, but he did not want to go to the beach and did not even want to sit on my back on the way to his roost. I told him that a pouncer might kill him if he was walking alone, and that although Sunrise had mine it might come back. He agreed to get on my back.
We went to their white tree first. Some sizzlers were already outside it and seemed very surprised to see me. Once I had put the speaking box and Rollo and Lema and Lunge on the ground, they started talking at each other very excitedly and pointing at me.
More sizzlers came outside. I watched closely. It seemed like some of the sizzlers were angry at Rollo and Lema. Some of the sizzlers had black sticks and I started to worry they would bite me. But then I started to think that they would bite each other instead.
I wish I knew what they were saying, but the speaking box was quiet. Could I learn what they were saying? Would Rollo teach me the same way he had taught me how they counted? He had seemed eager to teach me and happy when I learned.
But Rollo was busy shoving and yelling. I tried to figure it out myself. Sizzler sounds were usually quiet and they spoke so fast they sometimes had to stop speaking and wait for a new thing to say. Their words were separate but often flowed together because they were spoken so fast. It was hard to tell where one word ended and another began.
There were sounds they made often, like ummmm and uhhhh which were their favorites. These words could be said at any time. Then there were very common words like the or and. I tried to figure out what words they were speaking now which they did not use very often. My best guess was that they were arguing about vitamin.
Before they could fight, another group of sizzlers came out of a box-branch. They were grouped around one particular sizzler, who everyone looked towards. She held up her arms and spoke loudly (for a sizzler) so all could hear. Was this one of their elders? She did not look bigger or otherwise different to me, but all of them listened as she too began to talk about vitamin. I noticed she gestured very dramatically with her neck-tails while she talked, which all sizzlers did sometimes but this one did much more.
I wanted to ask if we were still going to the beach. But someone had carried the speaking box away, which made Lema upset. And I was a little bored by how long this was taking. My thoughts were turning back to Very Violet, which made me angry. And I had spent a lot of time with the sizzlers today.
In the middle of the long elder-sizzlers speech, I stood up and walked away.
When I got back to my roost I could still smell Very Violet. And her smell made me furious. In truth I knew what was happening, as the elders had warned me. She was the first scout I had met since I had become an adult, and my need for her was more powerful than my wits. Often many scouts would be sent to a young gardener at once to distract him until his mind returned, but circumstances were so strange that I had only gotten Very Violet.
And clearly she had been beginning to fall to her own need for me. I knew it was her duty to hit me with the spear and reject my advances, but she had never hit very hard. She had liked when I sat close to her and twined my grabber with hers. It was clear we were meant for each other. Why then had she run away?
She had said she was going back to the caravan to relay what she had learned. But I realized that could not really be it. Someone else must have stolen her away from me. And there was only one other gardener that we had seen. I remembered in a flash the way she had stared at him. Sunrise, my neighbour of two years. And now my enemy.
I decided it was time for Sunrise to get what was coming to him. Anger pounded in my steps as I ran to the border. There besides the pond, I howled until he showed. I saw him clearly for the first time. A little bigger than me, a little handsomer, a dangerous rival who I would have to defeat.
"Where is she?" I said.
"Hello, Sworl," Sunrise said. "If you mean Very Violet, she did not stay long."
I growled and thumped my tail into the ground. He had stolen her from me.
"Are you alright?" Sunrise said. He backed away from the border bush. But not fast enough. I sprang forward, my powerful jaws flashing and my tail held high to strike. I barreled right past the bush. Its thorns scraped my legs but I barely slowed as I rammed into Sunrise, toppling him to the ground. My jaws went for his throat but his tail blindsided me, and I stumbled to the side and got a face full of border bush.
The smell knocked some sense into me as I struggled to my feet. I realized I was on the wrong side. This was not my territory. But I still had an enemy- no. I shoved my face into the border bush with every ounce of my strength and breathed deep until I returned to my senses.
I had attacked Sunrise! I let out a shriek of dismay and quickly stepped back over the bush into my territory. Then I looked back to see if he was okay.
He was afraid, but not hurt. He cowered behind the pond so I could not spring at him. We stared at each other for many breaths, taking each more slowly than the last.
"I am sorry I did that," I said. "I thought you had taken Very Violet from me."
Sunrise shook his tail.
"It is okay, Sworl. It was very bad of her to leave you like that. But I did not think you would be so upset! You only met her two days ago."
I sat on my haunches and whined.
"I know. I still wish she was here," I said. "It felt right. And then she left. Do you think it is because I am ugly?"
"No, Sworl. You are very handsome. If I were a scout I would not leave you."
"I think I loved her."
"She was very beautiful."
I sat and rested while Sunrise looked concerned. He straightened up the border bush I had plowed through and sniffed it thoroughly to make sure it was okay, then sniffed to see if I had left any scent on his side. I think I did because he lingered in one spot, but he did not fall into rage. He was very polite. When he was done, we talked more.
"Did you ask the sizzlers about Batterylow?" he said.
"No, they were fighting each other. I will ask when they stop."
"I would very much like to see Batterylow again, even if it was still dead. And I found another one to give them too."
I had been a bad neighbour to Sunrise, and I felt like I needed to make it up to him. But how? I could not promise the sizzlers would give Batterylow back, and there seemed to be no other whitebugs. And I knew that Sunrise very much liked talking, but he had not talked to a sizzler like I had. Lunge would not come with me anymore. Would Rollo or Lema agree to come all the way out here for no reason? It would be so much easier if Sunrise could simply go to them.
"I have an idea," I said. "I have gone into your territory."
"I forgive you," Sunrise said.
"By the rules, can you not go into my territory now?"
Sunrise shook his tail and backed away from the border.
"I would never do that, Sworl! You are a good neighbour."
"I thought maybe tomorrow you could go and ask the sizzlers yourself and see the white tree while I stay in my roost. I know you have always wanted to see it because you ask so many questions. Maybe they will let you have a pet sizzler."
Horror and need warred in Sunrise's tail.
"That is not what the rules mean," he said. "I can not spend a whole day in your territory just because you stepped into mine."
"But I will not smell you all the way from my roost."
"What if Eyelegs calls for me? Or Blackstripes?"
"Just say that I kept you busy."
He had a lot more objections, but in the end he agreed to it. Despite his strangeness, Sunrise was a good neighbour and I hoped a scout would never come between us again. To make sure I would not think of Very Violet again, I picked up a muncher on my way home and trapped it in my roost so it stank horribly and I could not smell anything else.
Then I went back to check on the sizzlers. Fewer of them were outside their nest now. I did not see Rollo or Lema or Lunge but there were other sizzlers and they seemed interested in me. They brought out the speaking box.
"Hello, we would like to show you something."
"Very well."
The something was inside one of their branch boxes, and the sizzlers seemed very excited to show me. I walked over and marveled as a very big mouth appeared in it, the upper lip opening very wide. There were lots and lots of boxes inside, and I knew sizzlers liked boxes. Maybe this was like a trophy room for them?
They wanted me to go inside the box. I had never been inside a box before, so I stepped in to look around and I pretended to be very impressed. Then I was hit by a sudden pain and I fell over and I could not move except my legs and tail were moving on their own and I accidentally bit my own tongue and it hurt.
The pain continued and then it stopped and I laid on the ground because I was very tired. And the mouth of the box closed and I was afraid because I knew the sizzlers had tricked me. Now they would eat me. But I could not fight back, because something was keeping my legs and my tail from moving and I could not move my head either.
There were many sizzlers now and they covered my eyes with some kind of darkness so I could not see but I could hear them and I waited miserably for my death.
The elders said that when people were going to be killed in a fight, our words and our thoughts abandoned us first. This was true. I did not think for a long time. I thrashed as hard as I could and I howled in rage and the pain came back sometimes and then eventually I was too tired to fight.
It was taking a very long time for the sizzlers to kill me. I realized they had bitten me a few times and it hurt but it did not hurt that much. But I was uncomfortable because I had been lying on my right side and could not turn over. I do not know how much time had passed, but the sizzlers seemed to have lost interest in eating me for the moment and it was quiet.
I was thinking about the tale of Three Stripes. In one version I had heard, Three Stripes was dragged back by the terrors to their roost under the sea so that they could eat him later. But Three Stripes was very clever and had grown a reed that could turn water into air which he hid in his mouth, and when the terrors returned he ambushed them and killed them all.
The elders and scouts of the caravan did not like that version as much. They preferred to tell the version where he had grown the border bush to keep the terrors out. I asked my mother why, and she said that even a great gardener could not fight a terror alone and if it had dragged you out to its sea roost you were dead.
I had not grown reeds that could do amazing things. I did not have anything hidden in my mouth. Like a stupid hatchling, I had walked right into the sizzler's lair. I had thought they were harmless and interesting but I had forgotten that they could bite very hard. And now I was dead.
When we die, the munchers and leaves eat our flesh. They grow from us, and then in turn growlers eat them and runners eat growlers. So our bodies only die for a little while. But nothing ate the sizzlers because they tasted horrible and they did not rot, so when they ate me my body would be dead forever.
At least the elders would tell my story after I died. But in it I would be Sworl the idiot, who trusted the sizzlers and walked right into their jaws. I would be a cautionary tale for learners, and I felt sad that I would be remembered for that and not for the songs and poems I could have written.
The tale of Sworl the idiot would be an often-told tale. Even hatchlings would learn that not everything that speaks can be trusted.
I could only see darkness, so I fell asleep. I woke up to feel something rubbing my snout. I think it was Lunge. He was also speaking to me in a very quiet voice. I was afraid that he was going to eat me now in revenge for his sister, but he did not sound angry. I was happy he was there, even though he smelled bad. And the rubbing was nice.
He gave me some water, which was good because I was thirsty but it was also a strange for him to do. I would not carry a growler to drink before I ate it. But they had bitten me only a little since they trapped me here. Maybe they would eat me so slowly that I would never die, only heal and be hurt again and again. A gardener would never do something so cruel to its prey, but these sizzlers were capable of anything.
I fell asleep again.
Chapter 5: Exile
I woke up late from a vague dream to find all of the vat kids lined up and waiting for my inspection. Eerily still, they waited like deactivated robots for me to start their day. I considered going back to bed, but they'd already been waiting for twenty minutes.
We were on the lander's C floor, among rows of bunk bedding lining the circular outside wall. At night me and 20 other kids slept here, and in the day it was converted into makeshift storage. Everything in the lander was cramped and multipurpose, a far cry from our ship's spaciousness or the wide vistas of home.
I pretended to inspect the row of vat kids. I still wasn't sure what I was looking for and I didn't find it.
"Same assignments as yesterday," I said. I waved them on and they filed out.
The day started at the store room two levels down. Breakfast. Everyone got bland meal granola to eat, and every day a little less of it. The bio experts said that soon we'd have our first potato crop that wasn't poisonous, but they'd said that last month too. I was sick of meal granola but I was too hungry not to eat my share.
After breakfast, I had the whole rest of the day ahead of me. If I was one of the vat kids, I would've had enough knowledge flashed into my skull to be useful at something. But mom was one of the ship's principal investors, so I was management. That meant I didn't know anything technical, but that I'd had a real childhood on Surgos before we left. Including real emotions and real things happening to me.
Somehow, that qualified me to boss people around. Sila said that without management the workers would get distracted and off track, but everytime I checked in on someone they were busy working as hard as they could and there wasn't any way for me to help. Something about the impending threat of death was better at motivating people than I was.
Our ramshackle lander had limited supplies and was poorly prepared for an alien planet. At any moment our reactor might break down, or our genemods could revert, or the air circulators would get clogged up with "leaves". I could only watch as people scrambled to stop all of that from happening every day.
And those were only the side problems. Our main problem was that we were going to starve to death.
We didn't have any dispensers, just a dwindling supply of emergency rations. These kept us alive, but sooner or later they'd run out. Biochem was working on growing potatoes, which were lumpy brown rocks that grew beneath the soil. The process was the same as for growing trees, but theoretically you could eat the end result, even without running it through a dispenser first.
But they hadn't managed to get it right yet. They were having trouble remixing the alien soil into something the plants could use, and all of the growing so far had to happen in our "greenhouse" because the potatoes needed grow lights. And I'd watched some pretty strong arguments over whether production could ramp up to feed all of us even if they grew an edible potato.
The impression I got was that those were all solvable problems though. The real issue was that there were nutrients not in potatoes, ones that we didn't know how to synthesize and would die without. Unless we could find a source for those, eating potatoes would just be prolonging the inevitable.
I'd been in the meetings but all of this was still way too technical for me, so I just tried to stay out of the way. I tried to learn what I could, but there was no way I'd match the biochemists we had that had their brains programmed with knowledge for decades. So there was nothing for me to do, and every day I was bored out of my mind waiting around.
I used to waste time outside. We'd landed on a world outside of numan space which we'd started calling "Exile". It had a weird but surprisingly familiar ecosphere and our lander was surrounded by forest. Over the winter I'd explored it all.
These days I didn't go outside anymore. Instead I hung out with Iggy. He was sixteen, a year younger than me, and the closest thing I had to a friend here. His parents were middle management who'd somehow gotten away with only sending Iggy down on the lander.
The problem with Iggy was that despite being genetically as perfect as anyone else, Iggy was an idiot. We hung out in an unused backroom of the greenhouse without a single screen to entertain ourselves with (all of the compute was always being used for something or other). So until it drove me homicidal, I had to put up with raw and unfiltered Iggy.
"Do you think Zilla would date me?" Iggy said. Like me, Iggy was blandly handsome and tall, the end result of precise numan genetic engineering that had made everyone perfect. His shining blonde hair wasn't carefully sculpted by a stylizer anymore, but then again neither was mine.
"No. She's vat, she doesn't know what a relationship is," I said. I was tossing a broken converter coil up in the air and catching it again. It had a nice, solid weight to it.
"I could steal some rations and sweeten the deal for her."
"Dude," I said. All the electronics in the lander were spying for my mother and our glorious leader, Sila Nufrenten-Trask. Punishment for trying to steal rations would be swift and harsh. Even for Iggy. Maybe even for me.
"You're no fun today, Jaku. I bet you're still thinking about your dino boyfriend."
"Slop off, dude."
"Hey, did you tell it to eat your sister so you could have her rations?"
I threw the converter coil hard enough to shut him up. Truth is, I was thinking about Sworl. Midol and his cronies had zapped him and trussed him up in a staging bay for their experiments, which was causing a lot of drama.
Rollo was furious. He'd been a contact ambassador for the Siltarchs before the mutiny, and he had this whole noble explorer ideal going on, where it was our sacred numan duty to befriend and teach the dinos. Most people thought that would be a pointless waste of time given that we were literally all going to die, but he'd persisted and even proved they had a language.
The whole project had somehow become political. And since I was the only one who regularly encountered Sworl and had Sila's ear, I'd been caught in it. Some people like Midol thought it was a waste of time. Others like Lema thought the dinos could accelerate our search for compatible biology on Exile. The field teams mostly wanted to shoot the stupid things so they wouldn't have to watch their backs all the time.
After two members of a survey team were killed and I found out that Sworl had killed my sister Bavilla, opinion had shifted towards thinking of them as pests. Rollo had kept working on his translator and even made peaceful contact, but Midol had enough support to turn that into capturing Sworl. Now he was arguing that the giant carnivore could be used as a blood source for biomedical experiments.
Less than a hundred people and we were doing our best to recreate the intrigue and jostling of Surgos.
It should have been simple for me to pick a side. Iggy wasn't wrong. Sworl had killed my sister, and Rollo's translator had only proved he wasn't even sorry about it. To him we were just funny talking snacks.
We never even found Bavilla's body. Maybe Sworl plucked off her dress like a candy wrapper and ate her whole. In some ways it served her right. She was exactly the kind of brat who'd run off in the woods alone just for the attention, and at the same time enough of a ditz to actually get lost. I don't know why her suit navigation had failed, but she shouldn't have wandered so far in the first place until she'd learned the forest like I had.
"Are you listening at all? You're really not here today are you?"
My eyes flicked up at Iggy and I shrugged.
"Yea, I don't know."
"Who cares about the dino?"
"I don't."
But I kind of did even after what he'd done. Right now they were doing crazy medical tests on Sworl, and he had no idea what was going on. They'd kill him sooner or later. Then they'd just get a new specimen, maybe that yellow one that lived nearby. It seemed like a shitty thing to do to the natives.
And I'd hung out with Sworl for months. We couldn't talk to each other, but he'd tolerated my presence. I watched him work when I ran into him, and sometimes he even carried me along or tried to show me things. Sworl was legitimately better company than Iggy. I didn't exactly want him dead.
Iggy kept needling me the whole morning. By the time lunch hit (more rations), I was pretty fed up with him. I decided to ditch him for the day and bother everyone else.
First I checked up on Nina. She was working the industrial printer on B floor, squatting next to an opened cable box and waving at it skeptically with an oval-shaped scanner. Deep in concentration, she gave me a small nod and I watched as each cable was subjected to a series of gravelly beeps from the scanner. Some of the beeps she frowned at, and others she accepted with a shrug.
Finally, she found what she was looking for and forcefully yanked out a green-striped cable from the box.
"Resealant maintenance tube," she said. "We're out of resealant so we're just going to print without it."
"Is that bad?"
"Reduces the lifespan of the printer, but," she ended with a shrug. "You need something?"
"No. Just watching."
She flashed me a grin half full of missing teeth. Probably augmented teeth that'd been reused for something else.
"That means you're here to gossip, no? Picked a good day for it."
"As long as it's not more politics."
She laughed and mussed up my hair. Undignified since I was technically her superior, but nobody else was around. On the ship Nina had showed me some pretty cool sims in between cryo-suspensions, so I kind of owed her.
Talking to me might be the only real break she got today. So I listened while she went over all the petty dramas of the lander. Who got to work in the buildings instead of the cramped lander, whose workstation was shunted down to the sleeping floors, whether Tersa would be getting clearance for a new expedition or if the last batch of C8 balancers would go to the biolabs or the chemists. She knew my involvement well enough to guess that I didn't want to talk about today's dino drama.
I eventually let her get back to work and wandered over to the workshop building, pausing in the outside air for a moment to stare at the tree line. Nothing was out there watching today. I hurried indoors.
Workshop was where we tried to make the supplies we had somehow stretch into the things we needed. The industrial printer had limited stock, so any redundant tech was salvaged here and welded into something new. Half the crew without relevant specialties worked here, and while it was important it didn't have the same sheen of heroism as biochem. This was where most of the vat kids went, to turn their hands into robot arms for our AI planning software as it mashed together stray components like puzzle pieces.
It wasn't intellectually demanding work. I could've done it, and I felt a little guilty that I didn't. I could blame Sila for not allowing it, but I was actually glad. Spending all day in here would make me go insane. Still, assembly work had its triumphs.
When the AI planners were more sane, they'd managed to build our only shuttle by cannibalizing the lander's engines. It was parked on the roof now, an ugly metal box with tiny front windows.
The bio crews used it to sample fauna, and the chem crews used it for mining. Neither had panned out so now it just sat there, too valuable to be scrapped but not actually valuable enough to use. I was explicitly not allowed to take it for a joyride.
Besides assembly, everyone "miscellaneous" worked in the workshop. There was a maze of tiny cubes ringing the central work area. I found Rollo's cube and unlatched the door, swinging it open. There was barely enough room for me to peer over his shoulder at his work screen, and he couldn't even turn to look back at me without some fancy maneuvering.
Rollo was biologically around 40, but objectively he was older than that. He was a veteran spacer who'd spent nearly a century in stasis between the stars on trade missions. I wasn't even sure he was from Surgos. He was weird, but interesting. Less tunnel-brained than most of the crew.
I glanced over his screen. All inscrutable numbers. I was as much of a genetically-optimal genius as anyone else, but it made zero sense to me.
"It's the translation software," Rollo said. "I'm tuning it."
"Are you going to fix the buffering?"
He nodded, and pointed out various clusters of numbers and meaningless words as if they meant anything to me.
"It's a semantics issue. The AI is eager to translate, but a Nulang sentence is less predictable than a runner's, and they don't have any speech disfluencies like we do. So it needs to know your full sentence to even start translating into runner-speech. But it's already slow enough to talk to them, so the delay hurts. I need more training data."
Everyone called them 'dinos' except Rollo. He insisted that 'runners' was what they called themselves and thus their proper name.
"We have a specimen you could ask," I said. He twitched.
"I don't find interrogation under torture ethical."
"I didn't hear about the torture," I said.
"Well, you will. There's a meeting in a few hours."
I checked my personal screen and groaned. It was on my schedule now. Two whole hours, and I had to attend.
"Have you seen him?" Rollo asked. "You should."
"Not for long. I didn't want to interrupt the research," I said.
"The torture."
"I'll get to it after the meeting," I said. I sighed. "Well, carry on."
Rollo twisted his head back to stare at me. A little too intently. I smiled weakly, then backed out of the cubicle and walked past the toiling vat kids to the exit.
Out of the workshop I paused, staring at the biochem building where Sworl would be held, until I turned around and walked away into the forest.
It was clear overhead, with a purple sun in the violet sky. Trees gently swayed in the wind, their leaves pushing each other aside to grab a patch of sunlight. I heard something singing a plaintive melody.
When we'd first gotten here, our eyes weren't adapted to the weaker light and we couldn't breathe the air. Outside was death, a gloomy place with savage monsters lurking in the shadows. But we'd had enough standard genemods to reprogram ourselves. Enough to breathe the air and see by the light, so we could go outside and enjoy the outdoors.
Nobody but me had much time for that. Nature wasn't high priority, so I felt like I was the lone explorer for the whole planet, outside of rushed survey missions. A few months back, I'd spent every day out here uncovering its mysteries.
Then I'd found out what had really happened to Bavilla.
I didn't go too far from the lander anymore, which was for the best. It was dangerous out here even for me. There weren't any navigational satellites, and tracking signals bounced off underground cave systems in weird ways. Most of the suits had dead reckoning systems, but they could get confused like Bavilla's must have.
And there was the wildlife too. The biggest creatures I'd seen were furtive knee-high things that ran away when they spotted you and hideous blobs of greenish goo that slowly oozed around. All of the trees had grasshopper-like insects instead of leaves, and if you disturbed them they'd swarm and bite you, but otherwise they left you alone. There were worse things back on Surgos.
But if you spent too long out here, sooner or later you'd run into the really dangerous wildlife. Like my sister and I had. But where Sworl had killed her, he'd ignored and then tolerated me. Why?
I wandered further away from base. Over 'winter' I'd watched Sworl go about his work. Now with the snow gone I could see the effects. He'd cleared away most of the undergrowth before it could take root. The trees he'd left alone were planted in orderly patterns. Corridors of trees suggested paths, where the dirt had been smoothed and slightly raised.
All of the 'gumtrees' had been given special attention. They were surrounded by concentric circles of regular trees. Over the winter, Sworl had bitten through and rammed down all the dead trees surrounding the gumtrees, and left new saplings to grow in their place. He was very protective of the gumtrees, and growled a warning if I ever approached one.
I'd seen Sworl dig a stream once. Later he'd used that same stream to flood the area around the lander, although I didn't tell anyone it was him. I wondered if it was still there. After ten minutes of walking, I found it. It looked exactly like any stream of water you might find on Surgos, or Mendus, or probably even Earth. Biochem said the water could make you sick, but I'd drunk it plenty of times and it was fine.
I tried skipping stones. This was something the ancients used to do, but I couldn't get it to work. Maybe the stones here were wrong, or maybe I just wasn't good enough. I was pondering where I could get flatter stones when I heard footfalls.
Fast but heavy. Something huge pounding the soil. Branches brushed aside, their leaves buzzing in muted protest. A heavy sniffing intake of air.
I'd never seen a actual dino before. They were one of the animals that hadn't made it off Earth and to the colonies, and probably for good reason. I'd seen the sims. They were giant feathered lizards with too many teeth and tiny arms. They walked on two legs, but they stood hunched over so that their long chest balanced their heavy tail.
"Runners" kind of looked like that. But unlike Earth dinos, they had scaly skin and no feathers. They had no arms at all. Their tails were thin and long, but they forked at the end into two pincers like a crab's claw. They were almost as big as a mjork, but much more thinly built.
The one that walked out of the treeline was four meters tall and ten meters long. His head probably weighed more than I did, and could snap me up in a single bite. It moved with a casual speed that suggested escape was impossible.
For a split second I thought it was Sworl, but the coloration was all wrong. This one was bright yellow around his head, darkening to a shiny black on the rest of his body. I'd met him before, when Sworl had shown me off like I was one of his prized rocks.
Rollo had said his name was Sunrise. He was the one that Rollo had gotten the language corpus from, although I hadn't heard how. But Rollo also said that gardeners never left their territories.
So what the hell was Sunrise doing here? My heart pounded when he dipped his huge head down to look at me, but I didn't try to run. I knew there wasn't a point. These things were crazy fast. And anyway, I think they were actually more likely to eat you if you ran.
Sunrise warbled at me. They're very loud when they talk, and they speak slowly. I had no translator, so I had no idea what he was saying and no way to respond. If Sunrise had learned about what happened to Sworl and was here for some kind of revenge- I was dead meat.
I stared into his huge red eyes and tried not to move. He stared back. Then his tail wrapped around his head and his grabbers gently dropped something metal into my hands. It was one of our broken scouting drones, but I had no idea why he was giving it to me.
Sunrise pranced off afterwards. I say pranced because it really did seem like he was doing little skips as he went. I turned and ran back to base the moment he was out of sight, my heart thudding like an autocannon.
Unceremoniously I went back to the warehouse and dumped the drone onto Rollo's desk. He handed it back at me, annoyed.
"Scrap goes on the central table. You know this."
I shut the cubicle's little door behind me.
"Yeah, well, why the slop did Sunrise just give me this?"
Rollo seemed confused. "The runner? You went all the way to Sunrise? In the shuttle?"
"No, he was here. At base."
"Huh," was all Rollo could say. "Huh. I'll ask Lema if she has any idea."
"Or: you give me your translator and I ask Sunrise."
"I'm afraid Midol has confiscated it for the time being."
I leaned over him and cleared away some scrap from his desk to reveal a fist-sized box on his desk with a velcro strap around it.
"Am I that obvious?" Rollo said. I nodded and snatched up his new prototype translator.
"I'm going to want that back when you're done," he said. "And aren't you attending the meeting in ten minutes?"
I groaned. Sila would definitely notice if I wasn't there. I stuffed the translator into a pocket and joined Rollo in walking over to the lander. We went up the central elevator to the top floor. Nominally the lander's control center, it'd been converted into something between an executive office and a meeting room. This was where the plasma guns were kept in a locked safe, and few were privileged enough to come up here.
Midol was already there. He was one of our best biologists, but he was also a real asshole. All of the genetic talent, none of the social graces. But the biologists respected him, and Sila needed the biologists, so he was something like their leader.
Tersa was slouched in a swivel chair, plasma rifle casually across her lap. She was head of security, and while she seemed to be napping she was probably using one of her augments to look through the landers' cameras.
Sila herself only appeared last, emerging from her private office to sit at our cramped table. She glanced imperiously between the four of us, then got up and poured herself a drink while we waited. Finally, power play over, she began.
"This meeting is a courtesy only," Sila said. "Rollo has expressed concerns about Midol's recent capture of a native specimen, and some of the crew share them. I hoped we could reach a consensus about our best path forward. Midol, do you have your preliminary report?"
"Yes," he said. He called up a screen and paged through his notes. "The subject is healthy and vigorous. We believe it is a young adult. We believe we can sustainably extract up to 5 liters of blood per day for our assays, possibly more if we can figure out a biocompatible substitute."
"Might I mention that the subject is a person and has a name?" Rollo said.
"We will get to your ethical concerns," Sila said. "Midol, you mentioned this was grey-type blood?"
"I did. This species appears to use two distinct types of blood, with the grey-type being lower oxygenation and in a separate circulatory system from the purple-type blood. For our purposes, the grey-type is more plentiful and relevant."
"So you have a wealth of material. Is any of it useful?"
"We have not yet analyzed all of the compounds and cells," Midol said. Rollo pounced.
"That means no. It's a distraction. My husband wasn't invited to this meeting- I assume out of respect for his time- but he's pointed out to me that the machines we're wasting on Sworl could be profitably repurposed to our pure chemistry efforts."
Rollo was married to Torv, one of our chief chemists and firmly in the pure-chemistry camp of solving our nutritional problem. I didn't follow the politics but I knew that the chemists were out of favor after some recent failure, with some of their resources being given to the biochemists.
"This is true," Sila said. "But we've barely had the specimen for a day."
"Exile is fundamentally an alien planet," Rollo said. "Life here has no common ancestry with us. We know they're closer to us in general design than the Siltarchs, but that doesn't mean we're going to do anything but confuse ourselves trying to backengineer something useful from them. Meanwhile, we know Earth chemistry, and we just have to make it work."
"Without a working chemical synthesizer, life here is the best we've got," Midol said. "Besides, there's clearly a great deal of convergence between us and native species. They have many macrostructures with recognizable parallels to our own."
"The degrees of freedom in the macrostructure are much more limited than in the chemical-"
Sila and I shared a look. Technical crew could spend the whole day arguing about theories and priors and never get anything done. Keeping things on track so we actually accomplished our mission- that was the investor's job.
There was a lot I didn't like about my mom. She'd structured her whole life like an investment portfolio, checking off the boxes of children and career and starship. But I couldn't deny that she tended to make things happen.
"Let's table this discussion," Sila said. "I don't understand the arguments but I understand the two of you disagree and I expect we need more data to determine who's right."
"What about the ethical argument? Do you need more data that medical experimentation on sentients is wrong? I remind you, we set out on a mission of peaceful trade with alien life."
He was right about our mission. Although obviously, things hadn't gone according to plan. In fact they'd gone pretty far off the rails.
Our ship the Nth Wind had been halfway through its 16 year journey to the Siltarch's Grand Bazaar when we learned that the Mendus colonies had declared war. That meant that if the Siltarchs thought Surgos was too close to Mendus for their liking, they'd blow us up the moment we arrived.
The whole crew was woken up and briefed. Captain Feix was adamant that we weren't turning around. A lot of people thought that was suicide, my mom included. As principal investor, Sila tried to get Feix declared unfit for duty and have herself elected Captain. And she won the procedural vote, but Feix had a backdoor and kept control of the systems, including all the robots.
It would've looked bad to just execute us, so he rounded us all up and jettisoned us off at a nearby planet, a world the Siltarchs had only designated "Not Important" and we named "Exile".
Captain Feix hadn't left us nearly enough for a proper colony or even an outpost, so we were scrambling full-time to make up for the lack. It could be a decade before a ship showed up to take us home, and we desperately needed food in the meantime.
Which led us right back to our dilemma. Was it ethical to torture Sworl if it meant saving all of our lives? The logic of an investor would inexorably say "yes".
And so Sila shrugged aside Rollo's question on ethics.
"I trust Midol is conducting his research as humanely as possible. I expect preliminary results within a week. You are all dismissed. Jaku, my office."
I groaned. Time for another lecture. While the others filed out, I followed mom into her private office. It was a cozy little room. She'd had one of the local trees carved into a crude but functional desk and there were no shortage of screens with scrolling displays and soothing wallpapers.
"You seemed unusually interested in that meeting," she said. "I doubt it's because you're gaining a taste for office politics. Are you upset?"
"No? Why would I be upset?"
She steepled her hands and studied the microexpressions on my face. I looked sullenly back and slouched into my chair.
"Do you agree with Rollo? That we're committing unjustified ethical trespass?"
I shrugged. "That monster ate Bavilla. In case you forgot."
"I did not forget," Sila said. "And well done on the attempt to dodge my question, but I would like an answer."
"Fine. Maybe I do think it's wrong. So what? It's necessary."
"Uncertainty is the bedrock of all moral complications. Is it necessary?"
She drummed her fingers on the table, then pulled up some personnel management software and walked me through the diagrams. I'd seen this before. All of the crew personalities had been charted and distilled to simulations and run through a stress program modeled on our current situation. The output dictated who would be put on work assignments with who and how closely they'd work together. That would hopefully control what friendship groups formed and could then solidify into political factions. The predicted social life of the ship was all there in Sila's half-sentient management AIs.
It was supposed to let her defuse conflict and retain control. But the system wasn't perfect, especially not under these conditions. She pointed out the bio and the chem clusters, the two major factions tackling the food problem. Technical experts had slowly ossified into two camps, one favoring a biological approach to food production and the other hoping for purer chemistry.
"We need all of these people pulling together. I never authorized capturing that dinosaur, Midol just did it. And he took resources from Torv to do it. If he can show results, his people get the edge. But that doesn't mean it's actually the best path forward. If it's a dead-end, he'll hide the truth because his pride is on the line."
She looked at me expectantly, and I thought.
"So in a week, he's going to report a breakthrough," I said. "Whether he has one or not. And Torv will dispute it, whether it's bullslop or not. And you won't know who's right. And then what?"
Sila gave me a thin smile.
"We'll have to figure that out, won't we? For now I'd like you to take a look at the social sim. See if you can find any way to get everyone back on the same page."
I groaned. I hated working with these things.
"Do I have to? You probably already have a solution in mind."
"No," she said, and for a moment she seemed like she was sinking into the table. "Not yet."
Chapter 6: Escape
They kept Sworl in the staging bay while they worked on him over the next week. I visited every night, but it was hard to stomach the sight of him tied down and studded with syringes. I couldn't risk talking to him with the prototype translator so I just stroked his neck and said soothing words until the lab techs got fed up and kicked me out.
Every day I wandered the woods with Rollo's translator, looking for Sunrise. But I never found him again.
"Why do you keep looking?" Rollo asked on the fourth day, when I came by for the translator.
"He wanted something."
"So? In a week he'll just be specimen number two."
I bit my lip. I could tell he was trying to probe my sympathies, but not whether he had something in mind.
"I could warn him to stay away. Tell him what happened to Sworl."
"A noble ideal. But whatever drove Sunrise to come here, I doubt he's coming back, unless you make him."
"How?"
He brought up a sound file on his computer and played it. A warbling high-pitched howl that shook the walls with inaudible undertones and probably annoyed the hell out of Rollo's neighbours.
"That's one of the calls Sworl made, I think one specifically for Sunrise. The sound travels a long way in this atmosphere, and the translator's speaker should be loud enough."
"Thanks," I said. I paused on my way out. "You know, they could use that call. If they wanted to trap Sunrise too."
"And is that what you want?"
I left him and went out into the woods, a fair distance from the base. Then I played the call, once every five minutes, and waited.
It took an hour for Sunrise to show up. He seemed exhausted, his long tongue panting out of his mouth as his chest heaved doubletime to draw in air. He seemed confused and looked around for Sworl, but his head swiveled instantly to fixate on me when I started the call and stopped it a moment later.
For a minute he just caught his breath and stared at me. Then he began to warble.
"Hello Lunge!"
"Hello, uhm, Sunrise. My name is Jaku actually," I said. And I waited for the box to translate that into warbles just like his with the plain word "Jaku" at the end.
Sunrise's head bobbed slightly as he absorbed this. He seemed fascinated by my new translator unit.
"Jagu," he said in a copy of my voice. Not quite right, and something about the way he said it unnerved me.
"Nevermind, just say Lunge," I said.
"Very well. Did the white tree heal Batterylow?"
The artificial way he said that last word sounded familiar. But I had no idea what he meant. The translator tended to be pretty literal about what the runners said to us, while taking creative liberties with what we said to them. 'White tree' was what they called our lander, but I had no idea what Sunrise meant by Batterylow. Unless…
"Wait, you mean our drones?"
"Yes! The sky buzzers. Mine is named Batterylow. Sworl gave it back to the white tree because maybe it would get better and talk again. But if it did not get better I would still like it back."
We'd had recon drones when we first landed, but they kept being attacked by leaves or losing radio contact or being smashed by angry gardeners or whatever. I think they were all scrap now, and I had no idea what Sunrise wanted with it.
"Now isn't a great time for that," I said.
I figured out what dino disappointment looked like. Sunrise's tail flopped down, his head sunk below his spine, and his lower jaw quivered.
"But uh, I'll… ask someone to look into it?"
Sunrise ran around in little circles of joy. I backed away before I got trampled. While he calmed down, I thought carefully about what to say.
"Cela's light, I hope the translator is up to this. Okay, listen carefully. I wanted to tell you that Sworl has been captured by the other numans."
Sunrise didn't react as I thought- he tilted his head and brought his tail forward. Confusion, I think. I wish Rollo had thought to make a body language translator too.
"Did you understand what I said?"
"I am just wondering why they would want to mate with Sworl. He is not a scout."
"Mate? No, they- they want to experiment on him."
"It will not work," Sunrise said. "He is not a scout."
"I- slop it man, whatever. I just thought you should know."
"Thank you for telling me. You are a good sizzler. I will free Sworl from the bad sizzlers," Sunrise said. "Sizzler" is what they always called us. Rollo said they named everything after the most important thing it did. In this case, we were defined by our jury-rigged plasma guns.
"Wait, you can't just go in there. You'll get captured too."
"Then I will be captured with Sworl and that will not be too bad."
I couldn't imagine Sunrise prancing over to the lander and not getting shot to ribbons. He'd already started to walk away, so I had to run after him.
"Wait, you stupid yellow idiot! They'll kill you!"
Sunrise turned back to me and let out a string of heartfelt warbling, gesturing dramatically with his tail for emphasis.
"Sworl is a good neighbour and I like him very much and even if he goes into rage and kills me I still want to rescue him. I know that you are Sworl's neighbour too but that you are also a sizzler and maybe you can not help and that is fine."
"I want to help," I said. And I realized I wasn't just saying that to stall Sunrise. I actually did. "But we can't do this without a plan."
"That is very wise," Sunrise said. "What is your plan?"
"Let me think for a moment."
It was pretty hard to think with Sunrise's huge head looming over me. His breath smelled like moist peppermint, and my bones vibrated when he warbled. The translator didn't think he was saying anything. He was just humming. As gently as I could, I reached up and pushed the tip of his snout away so I had space to think.
How could I rescue Sworl, the bio team's most prized asset, right from the cargo bay where they were keeping him? I could get in there easily enough, but there would always be people at work around me. I could get a plasma gun (Sila insisted I take one when I left the base) and then… what, try to hold half the crew at gunpoint while rescuing a shuttle-sized dino?
Could I secretly untie him and then he'd bust his own way free? I doubted it. He looked weaker every time I visited him. Cela's light, maybe I was too late and he was already dying.
The investor part of me said this was a stupid plan and I should just let Sworl die and Sunrise get shot. The rest of me wanted to make it work.
"Come back tomorrow," I finally said. "I'll tell you the plan then."
"Very well. Goodbye Lunge!"
With that he pounded off back into the trees, and I was stuck figuring out what to do. I thought about it while I walked back, but I couldn't see any clear solutions. I walked to Rollo's cube and handed him back his translator. Seconds later, I realized it would have logged everything I'd said to Sunrise, and that Rollo would definitely review the logs.
"I take it from your face that it worked," Rollo said. "What did he want?"
"He wants to rescue Sworl. And he's going to get himself killed doing it."
"And?"
Rollo turned around as much as he could to look at me. I sighed and slumped against the cheap door.
"I told him I'd figure out a plan by tomorrow."
"Really."
"Yea. I don't know what to do, Rollo."
"Why not just shoot him?"
"No. I'm going to help him."
"And how do you plan to get past Midol and all of his cronies?"
"I don't know, okay?"
Rollo seemed to find this whole situation funny, so I glared at him.
"I thought you cared about Sworl getting free."
"I do, of course. But I would never go behind Sila's back."
I visibly rolled my eyes at that. His sense of humor could be very dry.
"Hmm," Rollo said. "Get me a C7 anode from the table outside."
It was an odd request, better suited to one of the vat kids than me. But I sensed it was an excuse for him to think for a minute so I obliged and went to the central work tables. There was a dizzying sea of components. I ended up having to ask one of the vat kids sorting them to find me the anode, but I took it back to Rollo myself. He put it on his desk and steepled his hands.
"I may have the solution to your problem. You see, Lena and I are planning an unauthorized extended shuttle expedition."
"Unauthorized?"
"Our research interests have diverged from our assignments. We will be taking our rations and leaving in the shuttle."
My breath caught in my throat, and my voice came out in a hushed whisper.
"But that's treason."
"Yes. Incidentally, so is conspiring to sabotage our research program by liberating its specimens."
"You can't get away with it. The shuttle takes Sila's authcodes as override. And the ration locker is impenetrable."
"I've made arrangements."
I stared at him and wondered what arrangements he, a linguistic and cultural expert, could possibly have made. He didn't elaborate.
"I'm Sila's son. Why are you telling me this?"
He spread his hands in a shrug. However cool he was trying to play this, I could see the adrenaline making them shake.
"I suppose I have faith in your morality. Where everyone else sees Sworl as an animal, you're the only one who knows him as a person. We're on the same side."
"Okay. So how does your treason help mine?"
"When Lena and I steal the shuttle, what will Sila do?"
I thought of how furious mom would look the moment she learned.
"Assuming you get away? She'll summon everyone to the lander and lock them in there until she figures out how you did it and who else was helping you. And then- oh. I get it."
While everyone was in the lander, nobody would be with Sworl in the biochem building. I'd have all the time I needed to bust him out.
"Tomorrow is as good a day for our expedition to begin as any, if that suits you and Sunrise," Rollo said. "Earlier will of course be better for Sworl. Midol has been prioritizing results over longevity."
"I noticed," I said. I thought of how slow Sworl's breathing had looked just this morning when I'd checked.
"You're welcome to join us on our expedition when you've escaped," Rollo said. "Whether or not you've succeeded in freeing him."
"You're running off into the wilderness to what, study the runners?"
"More or less."
"But you'll starve eventually. Sila won't give you any potatoes."
He chuckled. "You don't honestly believe they're going to succeed on the food front, do you?"
"I don't know. They all say it's possible. Your husband, doesn't he-"
"I knew Captain Feix better than everyone, Jaku. Captain Feix was not a merciful man. He wouldn't have left us with any possibility of survival."
"But he couldn't have known. He didn't have any special knowledge about Exile or its biology."
"I'm surprised Sila didn't tell you. Feix had me buy a full report from the Siltarchs en route. They were very thorough, although of course they ultimately had little interest in this planet."
"So…"
"Within a few years at most, we will all be very dead no matter what Sila does. Would you rather spend that time in here, or out there?"
I didn't believe Rollo at first, but he was quite happy to show me proof. He had the full translated report, with all of the deep bio-analysis that would take us years to replicate. I was furious. I didn't understand it all, but I understood enough.
And if Rollo had it, and Feix had it, then Sila had it too.
"Why wouldn't she tell me? Tell anyone?"
"Suppose she did."
Then order would break down. People would hoard rations. They'd kill each other out of desperation. And most importantly of all, Sila wouldn't be in control.
As long as they had hope and a sense of purpose they would work tirelessly and pointlessly until they starved. I thought back to the personnel simulator she wanted me to work on. She cared more about the base's harmony than on whether Midol or Torv were right.
"You didn't tell anyone? Not even Torv?"
"I'm sworn to secrecy," Rollo said. "And in some ways, I believe Sila is right. I don't know how Torv would cope without a purpose. I suppose you could go tell everyone now if you wanted. But maybe you should run that through your little people simulator first."
I didn't need to.
When I checked up on Sworl that night, my eyes lingered on the restraints. My hands buzzed with anticipation. They'd added a new row of needles to his flank, and tomorrow I would rip them out. Nobody else needed to die for a lie.
I was furious all that night and the next day, blowing off Iggy and even blowing up at Nina when she tried to ask me what was wrong. It was easier to be angry than to be anxious. Around the middle of the day I couldn't take it anymore, and I stormed over to Rollo and grabbed the translator. He only caught my gaze for an extra moment, then went back to his work like it was a normal day.
Sunrise must've been nearby, because I barely started Sworl's recorded call when he showed up.
"Hello Lunge! I am ready for the plan that will rescue Sworl."
"About that. I'm going to rescue him, I just have a few questions. Like won't you two attack each other if you get too close? Maybe you shouldn't be here."
Sunrise made a distressed little circle, spinning and whipping his tail.
"I would never attack Sworl but if he attacked me then I am faster than him so I would simply run away."
I had no idea whether that was true or not. Sunrise was about the same size as Sworl, maybe a little bigger. But just from the way they moved I felt like Sworl was a lot more dangerous. Sunrise pranced and did little circles, Sworl stalked like he was about to pounce.
"Okay. Then just wait here, and I'll uh, signal you if I need you."
"But I should be closer to the white tree in case you need me!"
"Fine. Just don't be seen."
Sunrise nodded his very conspicuous yellow head and I sighed. It was a good thing nobody had time to watch the treeline anyway.
We walked back to the lander. When we got close, Sunrise made a small warble and stopped. He was staring in amazement in the direction of the lander, which I could barely make out at this distance and through all the trees. I guess his eyes were much bigger than mine.
"Stay," I said. Sunrise shuffled in place.
I walked back and slipped into the biomechanics building. Most of this building had all the crazy chemical flasks and bacteria mats and whatever. Technical staff were hard at work here, working way too hard to do more than shoo me when I got in their way. Near the side was the walled-off staging bay where they kept Sworl.
It was my bad luck that Midol himself was waiting outside. He was one of our best biochemists, but he was also a real asshole. All of the genetic talent, none of the social graces. But the bio team respected him, and Sila "needed" the bio team, so he was something like their leader.
"Leave. We're busy," he said gruffly.
"Yea, and I'm checking up on your progress."
"In an official capacity?" he said. "No, I thought not."
Midol had something like fifty pounds of muscle and half a foot of height on me, all genetically augmented. Everyone was supposed to get equal rations so his muscles should've been withering away, but the rumor was the biochemical team got a bit more than fair share. I held up my hands in surrender as he loomed.
"Hm. I suppose you might be useful in explaining our work to Sila," he said, "Let me show you."
"That's not necessary. I don't want to waste your time."
"You already have."
Caught in the excuse, I followed him into the staging bay. It was a mess of tools and machines centered around a slowly breathing shape. Sworl.
"We're making good progress," Midol said. Syringes were plunged into Sworl's flank, slowly pumping fluids in and out to an array of little beakers and analysis machines.
"In needle count?"
He pointed out a syringe in Sworl's chest, and one embedded in his leg.
"This is their gray blood, and this is their purple blood. The purple blood is richer in oxygen carriers and circulates mainly to the legs and head, while the gray blood is used everywhere else. Separate closed circulatory systems with interchange organs."
"Cool," I said. I didn't even have to pretend to be interested, he didn't care.
"We can extract quite a lot of the gray blood every day with no ill effects. Some of the oxygen carriers are analogous to hemoglobin, so we can directly distill an augment for our own blood with it."
"Really? I thought there wasn't much biocompatibility or whatever."
"You listen to Rollo too much," Midol said.
"What about the uh, what's it called? The vitamin we needed?"
"We need a lot of vitamins. But you might mean B12. The chemosynthesis for that will be difficult. There's not a lot of cobalt on this planet, so it's not clear the natives even use cobalamins. Normally we'd have bacteria or a chemprogram for this already, but circumstances being as they are..."
While Midol droned on, I pulled up my screen and shot off a message to Rollo asking about the translator's battery level. That was my code for "I'm in position". He messaged me back something about recharge rates, which meant our plan was on. The whole time Midol didn't stop talking at me.
It was rude to ask, but I was pretty sure Midol was a vat kid. Vat kids were supposed to develop into real people eventually. But some just remained hollow facades for their knowledge forever, little better than a tuned AI agent. He kept talking for twenty whole minutes, until eventually he noticed some flaw in a test array and completely forgot I existed. Then I pretended to be busy inspecting equipment, and the rest of the staff assumed I was supposed to be there.
What I was really looking for were ways to get Sworl out of his restraints. Maybe I should have figured that out before messaging Rollo, but I was anxious so I was making mistakes. And unfortunately, Rollo moved fast.
Almost every console and screen went ballistic at once. Red modals popped up on every screen accompanied by blaring alarm beeps. Then Sila's voice.
"All personnel, return immediately to the lander unless otherwise notified. I repeat, all personnel, return immediately to the lander."
Midol left with an annoyed grunt, and everyone else dropped whatever they were doing to follow. As soon as they were gone I sprung into action. First, I casually walked over to the one camera the staging bay had and turned it to face the wall. Then I pushed an equipment cart up against the door and locked its wheels. Hopefully it would hold if someone came back.
I approached Sworl, who was very securely strapped down lying on his right side, and I untied the giant band of cloth that served as his blindfold. His massive yellow eye opened and pinned on me, though it soon lost focus. I flicked on the translator.
"Stay calm," I said. "I'm going to free you, but then you have to listen to me so we can get out."
I figured there was a good chance that if I untied him he'd just eat me. I gave him some water yesterday (that you had to do that had somehow slipped Midol's mind) and I wasn't sure if they'd even tried to feed him, so he might be hungry. I suddenly wished I'd gotten some of the tree sap they liked to eat, or caught one of those squirrel-snake things or something. Too late for that.
First I had to disconnect all the needles they'd jabbed into him. Most were superficial and could just be pulled out, but some had an internal release. Doing it right took me a couple of minutes. Sworl bled from the needle wounds and some of that blood was purple, which Midol had implied was bad, but it didn't look like too much blood. I hoped he'd live.
There'd been an alarm playing on Sila's announcement, and I realized it had stopped. So the alarm I was hearing was actually a different alarm, set off by me disconnecting everything. I started to panic. Of course there were monitors for Sworl's status, and now Midol probably knew something was going on. I fumbled with the straps one by one, starting from the tail and working my way to the head.
At last, he was free. I shoved at him until he realized that too. Sworl rose to his feet. He seemed unsteady and unsure, his eyes moving slowly and his tail bracing against a wall for support. They'd taken a lot of blood from him. I didn't know if he would have enough strength to get out of here.
Our final obstacle was the staging bay door. It was corrugated and designed to slide up and onto the roof of the staging bay, a primitive but effective design. But while the button for it accepted my credentials with a green beep, after a jolting shudder the door still refused to move.
I pressed the button another five times to no success. The problem was that the door was bolted with a big cheap-looking padlock, connecting a welded ring in the ground with a welded ring on the door. I tried to scan my credentials on the padlock, but it didn't even beep. Whatever Midol had done, it wasn't the usual system.
Cutting it would require a blowtorch or a plasma cutter or something. I hadn't seen any in the staging bay, and I didn't have the time to leave and try to find one.
"I can't get the door open," I explained to Sworl. He stood there, dazed and confused. I wondered what "door" even translated as. Did they have doors? Whether or not they did, Sworl showed no signs of action.
Could I get him to bite through the padlock? Probably not. It was solid steel. But the rest of the door wasn't built to be sturdy, it was built to be as cheap on our iron reserves as possible.
"Sworl, try slamming into this, right here."
He made a moaning warble. The translator's light flashed, but it couldn't decode any coherent meaning from it. Worse, it was loud enough that someone must've heard.
"Okay, okay, shut up. I'll figure something out."
I don't know whether I would've, but fortunately I didn't have to. Sworl moaned again, and the translator barely had time to decide it meant "Help" before something slammed into the door and crumpled it. The metal buckled with a wrenching screech. And then Sunrise was stepping through, pushing the remains of the door out of the way. If I'd been standing in the wrong place, I'd probably be dead.
"Hello, Sworl! I am sorry that I am here when you are also here but Lunge told me that-"
Sunrise was longwinded and we didn't have the time, but I couldn't get the translator to interrupt him no matter what I said. That just wasn't "culturally polite" according to Rollo. I frantically motioned for us to leave while he warbled on and on, but Sunrise didn't understand my body language and Sworl was too out of it.
"-you were being mated by the sizzlers, and I see he meant to say that they were eating you, and I thought that maybe I could help so when I heard you calling so I-"
This really was getting desperate. I found a flask of what I hoped was water and threw it at Sunrise's head. My first throw missed (he was pretty tall), but I nailed him on the second. He jumped back as water splashed over him and made a shriek of surprise, which stopped him from talking and let the translator interject.
"We have to go now," I said.
Sunrise stepped out first, and Sworl followed him with a bit of coaxing. Nobody else was outside and the lander door was shut tight. But I knew I would be on camera, and I knew Sila would be watching.
"Let's go," I said. Sunrise retreated to a safe distance from Sworl, who slowly staggered towards the treeline. Even like this he was fast, so I only had a few agonized seconds to look back at what I was leaving behind. Then I ran.
Chapter 7: Purple Blood
It was pretty hard to keep up, so after a few minutes Sunrise took pity and snatched me up. Each of the pincers at the end of his tail was as big as my chest and ended in a squishy sort of pad. He held me horizontally with one pincer on either side and my head dangled four meters off the ground. As disorienting as it was, it was still better than the time Sworl had tried to carry me in his jaws.
"I am very sorry to see you like this Sworl," Sunrise said as we walked. "You will need lots of rest and good growlers to eat to get your strength back. But it is a little good also because you are too weak to attack me!"
"Shouldn't you attack him too?" I said. "How does that work exactly?"
"I know I am not as strong as Sworl and I am wrongly in his territory and so I will not get angry. He also smells very bad right now like you do and does not smell threatening."
We stopped at a cluster of gumtrees. Their bark kind of looked like an orange and they smelled like a cross between burnt sugar and industrial lubricant. When Sunrise carefully punctured the bark with his teeth, it started leaking red sap which Sworl eagerly lapped up.
I got Sunrise to put me down. My heart was still hammering hard, but the adrenaline was starting to fade and get replaced by bleak realization. I was stuck out here maybe forever. Unless Rollo had made it out, and then he might come pick me up, assuming he could find me. And assuming he didn't plan to let me starve to death instead.
At least I had giant carnivorous dinos for company.
"Whatever happened to the purple one anyway?" I asked.
Sworl paused in his lapping to give an annoyed snort.
"She was very bad."
That didn't really answer my question, but I was just glad Sworl could still talk.
When he finished drinking, we set off again. I taught Sunrise the vertical way to carry me, which still felt ridiculous but at least didn't make me dizzy. Sworl was still moving much slower than usual, but we set a good pace.
By the looks of it we were going to Sworl's mound. It was pretty far from the lander, but still close enough that Sila might mount an expedition on foot if she was feeling particularly vengeful.
"I'm not sure it's safe at your mound. The other numans might try to capture Sworl again there- I think they know where it is."
Sworl whipped his head around and bared his teeth at me. He had a lot of very sharp teeth. Sunrise pulled me back.
"I will eat them if they come. No matter how many black sticks they bring."
"But they could come when you're asleep."
"But there will be no light when we sleep," Sunrise said.
I waited. Sunrise bobbed his tail and almost dropped me while he thought, which would have really sucked.
"Oh, will they make light?"
"Yes, they can make light. But Rollo took their shuttle, so they can't walk very far from the lander. So if we go a bit further away, we should be safe."
"Rollo is also a sizzler," Sworl said.
Now I just had to explain numan politics to two talking dinos.
"Rollo and Lema and, I guess I didn't agree with what the other numans did. And we think we're all going to die anyway, so we wanted to see your world instead of living in the lander. We can't go back anymore."
There was a long pause while the translator finished saying that, and a longer pause afterwards. We arrived at Sworl's mound. It was a huge pile of dirt in the middle of some trees with pinkish-leaves, with neat circular ponds nearby. It didn't look that technically sophisticated, but the size of it was pretty impressive. It looked way oversized for just Sworl to live in.
Sunrise gently put me down face first in the dirt. We'd work on that later.
"Sworl," he said, "Maybe Lunge is right and you should not stay here. But I was thinking since I spent so long in your territory, you could come to mine and rest for a while. And maybe you would get used to my scent and not fight me. And when Very Violet comes back we could explain what has happened."
Sworl defiantly raised his head high even as he leaned against the wall of his dirt mound for support.
"This is my territory," he said.
Sunrise looked to me for help. I was surprised at how clear the body language on that was. But I had too many questions to know how to help. What was Sworl feeling right now? Fear of the numans who had captured and almost "eaten" him? Humiliation that he'd been overcome by creatures as small as us? Pride in his patch of land, or duty to keep tending to it? Or was he just tired and didn't want to walk any further?
What did it mean for him to stay in Sunrise's territory? How dangerous was it really that he'd attack Sunrise? Was this scheme 'legal' in whatever culture they had? And why did I get the feeling that Sunrise had his own motives for inviting Sworl over?
Whatever. Everything was crazy and I just had to wing it.
"Why don't we just rest somewhere nearby for today? They won't be very good at finding us in the dark, you guys don't show up too well on thermal."
"What?" Sunrise said. Right, they wouldn't know what thermal is, and the translator had probably said something convoluted instead.
"Nevermind. I just mean we can figure out what to do tomorrow. Rollo should be looking for us from the air once he's ready."
"That is a good plan," Sunrise said.
Reluctantly, Sworl nodded. And he led us a few kilometers away to a much less impressive mound of dirt that was more like a large burrow, where he staggered inside and collapsed.
"How hurt is he really?" I asked Sunrise. I knew Sworl would overhear if he was still conscious, but runner speech was loud and I wasn't sure how they whispered or if I could make the translator whisper.
"Oh! I thought you would know. How do sizzlers digest their prey?"
"Uh. They took a lot of blood out of him."
"Yes, that is called blood," Sunrise said. "Did it take any blood?"
Cela's slopping light. I poked at the translator but it had the same incomprehensible and locked-down UI as the old one. I wish Rollo had given it an interface where I could tell what I was saying to them. Fancy auto-learning AI and it couldn't even admit when it didn't know what word to use.
"Look. They took a lot of the gray blood out of Sworl and some of the purple blood. If there's a third type then I don't know it."
"I think he will live then. I do not see any more bleeding. But he should rest, and eat many fat growlers. I will go catch them."
Sunrise left. I took twenty minutes to carve a big arrow into the dirt outside in case Rollo came by in the air. He was supposed to look for the dinos to find me, but one was underground and the other wasn't with me. Then I went into the burrow to check on Sworl.
He was breathing slowly. I laid my hand on his flank and brushed it. His skin felt rough and lukewarm. Up close I could see little eyespots in the sworl pattern on his side, like they were stars in a spiral galaxy. It looked cool.
There was nothing to do but wait. I was getting hungry again, but I was used to that by now. And stupid me, I forgot to steal a screen or something when I left. So I just sat there on the dirt floor of the burrow and let my mind wander and slowly, time passed.
Sunrise came by a few times and tossed in a mauled "growler". These looked like knee-high brown dinos, but their muzzles were short and blunt and their tails were flat digging spades instead of pincers. True to their name, they made a loud and angry growling sound.
Sworl was asleep for the first one, which freaked me out because the growler was not dead. Its two legs were broken but it was very menacingly wiggling towards me and growling like a rocket engine. I kept backing away from it, and it kept stubbornly chasing me with its jaw snapping.
After a few minutes, I noticed Sworl actually was awake and watching.
"Are you going to eat it or what?" I said.
He made a noncommittal warble.
"Slopping piece of- fine."
I'd pretty much never done a violent thing in my life before. But I'd been in plenty of macho sims before, shooting and wrestling and the like. It's just that in real life I wasn't a steroid-infused muscle machine, I was a gangly teenager whose muscles had wasted away.
Still, it was barely bigger than most updogs. I could take it.
When it got close enough, I tried kicking it in the face. My boot was sturdy and thickly padded (finally, a plus point for colonist wear!) so I figured I could do some damage. And I would've if I hadn't missed- the growler saw my very telegraphed backswing and bobbed its head to the side, then whipped its jaws at my outstretched leg and clamped down.
I screamed in pain and rage and tried to shake it off, but its grip was good so I ended up bashing it into the ground. When it was finally dazed enough to let go, I grabbed it firmly from behind. Its broken legs kicked and its tail and head both squirmed, but I had one hand on its neck and looped my arm around the body so it couldn't do anything but growl very loudly and smack me with its tail.
I marched it over to Sworl, who I swear looked amused.
"Can you just eat it already?"
He opened his mouth wide and ever so gently gripped the growler by the head. I let go. He whipped his head to the side once to kill it, then tossed the growler up and gulped it down. There wasn't any chewing or gore, so it wasn't as disgusting as I thought it would be.
I checked and found my leg wasn't bleeding. The growler's teeth weren't sharp enough to penetrate, another point in favor of colonist wear. It still kind of hurt though and it might've left a bruise.
"You are not very dangerous," Sworl said.
"Go slop yourself."
The translator refused to translate that, but I think Sworl got the message.
The next growler didn't even have its legs broken. I grabbed it while it was still dazed from being tossed and twisted its neck as sharply as I could. That accomplished absolutely nothing, as apparently its neck was very flexible. The growler growled and squirmed in my hands, but I didn't want to give it over to Sworl yet. I'd show him I was dangerous.
I maneuvered one foot to hold it down and put my other foot on its neck. Then I stomped down on its skull hard enough to break it. When it stopped spasming, I tossed it over to Sworl with a smug grin.
The third thing Sunrise brought was one of the freaky gelatinous blobs with a face on it. Its giant stomach was a transparent green, showing off all the leaves it had eaten and trapped inside.
"Wait, do you really eat these things?"
"Yes. Munchers are delicious."
The "muncher" didn't seem distressed or even very alarmed. It slowly rolled around the burrow's floor like a squishy beach ball, occasionally bumping into a rock and continuing in a different direction. It had two unmoving eyes above a huge mouth set in a perpetual smile, which opened wide when it found dead leaves to eat.
"I'm not picking that thing up just to feed you," I said.
Sworl picked the muncher up in his tail, and then swung it in my direction. I backed up.
"What is wrong with my muncher?" he said. "It is good and healthy."
"It's like a living ball of puke."
"Thank you," Sworl said. "But Redspot has better munchers."
"Never met him."
Sworl tore off part of the muncher with his mouth and swallowed it, tossing the rest outside the burrow with a good throw.
"Redspot is a great gardener. You have not seen a garden until you have seen his. I hope one day I will become a gardener as great as him."
"How old are you, anyway?"
"I have been a gardener for two years," he said.
"How many years old are you in total?"
"A strange question. Many."
Rollo had warned me about this in one of his long gushing rants, but I couldn't resist.
"How many?"
"Many."
"How many?"
He turned his head to look at me, but it was his tail that vibrated to show his annoyance.
"Sixteen years as a hatchling, sixteen years as a learner, two years as a gardener."
The years here were about half as long as our years (which even on Surgos or in space were still based on the year of Earth). So he'd be about 17 years old. But if you followed the pattern, he would spend 16 of his Exile years as an adult and maybe 16 Exile years as an "elder", so he was pretty much middle-aged already. That was pretty sad, only living 32 Earth-years. The ancients on Earth only lived like 80, and most people agreed they never really got to experience life before they withered away from old age. Still, his life expectancy was longer than mine at the moment.
"You don't mind me asking stupid questions, do you?" I said. "I know you're tired. I can shut up. I'm just bored."
"I am weak, but your questions do not bother me. But I will ask my own questions too."
"Okay," I said. I waited patiently while Sworl thought. Thinking and speaking both took a long time for dinos. If I were a vat kid I wouldn't have been able to withstand the excruciating lack of stimulus, but my real childhood experience had included plenty of boredom. Thanks mom.
"How old are you?" he said.
"I am about the same age you are. Many and one. But I am still what you'd call a learner."
"Yes, I thought you looked small for a sizzler."
It was a little surprising that he could tell. I was only a tenth meter short of the two meter standard for men, although a lot less built obviously. My genotype was lean, because my mom said she liked it and heavy muscles weren't important anyway. Plenty of other guys had the same genotype. I could've gotten steroid boosters if I wanted to.
"My turn to ask," I said. "What's with you and Sunrise? Rollo said you guys weren't supposed to mix territories or you'll fight. But, I mean, I don't know, he seemed kind of eager for it."
When the question finished translating, Sworl looked away.
"He is a good neighbour. What we are doing is… not how things are supposed to be."
That was the first time I'd heard the translator add a telling pause to a sentence. The actual warbling had sounded pretty continuous to me.
"Two gardeners are supposed to keep separate. But it is not only the urge to fight that keeps us apart. That can be overcome. There is also the rule of the caravan."
"Oh man, you're breaking dino law? Are the dino police going to send us to dino prison?"
Sworl's head lowered until it was level with mine.
"Does your box speak wrongly, or are you mocking me?"
My heart pounded. Very good reminder that if Sworl got too pissed off, he could kill me pretty much instantly. And this seemed like a touchy subject for him. Just my luck that the translator had figured out how to translate my flippant tone.
"No, no. I was just curious."
His head pulled back. It was starting to get dark in the burrow, but while his head was in shadow his twin yellow eyes almost glowed as they bored into me.
"The rules of my people are many and must be memorized by every learner. They say Sunrise and I cannot be in the same territory, but in a strange time like this we may do what we think is best. I'm grateful he is caring for me."
"Got it."
He lowered his head and closed his eyes. I sat there and fiddled with the translator, but Rollo had locked nearly all the settings behind his credentials. At least it had a night light, although if I tried to use it Sworl would probably growl at me again. They really didn't like lights.
"I'm sorry that I killed your sister," he said suddenly. I sighed.
"Really? Now you're sorry about it?"
"Yes."
I was supposed to appreciate that he'd made the gesture, but I didn't really want to think about it. I'd lost Bavilla. I'd probably never see my mom again either.
"Why now?"
"I was thinking a lot while I was being eaten about how much I did not enjoy it. And I realized your sister also did not enjoy it."
"Sworl, nothing enjoys being eaten."
"I see."
The light was fading, and Sworl seemed to fall asleep. Sunrise came back with one final growler, but he let it go rather than wake Sworl up. He paused at the burrow's entrance and stood awkwardly for a few minutes before slowly creeping in. He laid down on the other side of the burrow.
It got dark and cold fast. A day here was about 18 hours, seven of which were night. Temperatures plummeted quickly in the night, although the burrow shielded us from the worst of it. When the day's adrenaline wore off and I started getting tired, I laid down next to Sworl. He hadn't rolled over and crushed me to death last time I did this, so it was probably fine. He curled his tail around me and I used one of his grabbers as a pillow.
When I woke up the next day, Sunrise was lying next to Sworl too, with his tail lightly touching my legs. Sunrise was wide awake, but Sworl was deep in sleep and shivering. I flipped on the translator, which had about 60% of its battery left. It had an atomic battery which wouldn't run out and solar cladding for extra juice, but that would restore about 5% battery a day at best. If I wanted to consistently talk to the runners and not just be carted around as a pet I needed to find Rollo.
I untangled myself from the grabbers wrapped around me. Or tried, anyway- Sworl gave me a bit of trouble and wouldn't let go, whining softly in his sleep. Sunrise helped me pry my way free.
Then I walked outside. The weak sunlight felt good, but the skies were clear of any circling shuttles. Sunrise joined me, his yellow head shining.
"Is he going to be okay?" I said.
"I do not know," Sunrise said. "It would be very bad if he was not going to be okay but he got worse overnight and I do not know why and he smells sick."
"Lema is a xenobiologist, she might be able to help if we can find her."
"But how will we find her? She is small like you."
"The plan was that she and Rollo would fly overhead and find Sworl, and I'd be with him. If they made it out."
"But Sworl is too weak to go outside!"
"Yea. So I think we have to improvise. If you carry me around, they might see me."
Sunrise picked me up with his tail, lifting me six meters into the air sideways again. I felt like I was slipping, and he briefly let me go to readjust his grip.
"Please don't pick me up without asking."
"Very well."
He put me down, face first in the dirt, and waited expectantly.
"Just put me on your back, okay? If you don't go too fast I won't fall off."
"But that is weird. What if you fall?"
"I'll be fine."
It would probably hurt a lot, but my bones had the standard polymer reinforcement that my dignity did not.
"But Sworl said that the sizzler he caught was very soft and easy to bre-"
I switched off the translator until he stopped warbling. He seemed to notice I wasn't listening, but still finished his sentence anyway.
"You can pick me up now."
Sunrise picked me up, then ran around fairly fast. He didn't actually seem to know where he was going, but that was fine. I directed him to go towards hills and other places where he'd be easy to spot.
Just as I was beginning to think I'd never see another numan again, I saw the shuttle zooming across the sky. I waved it down furiously, and after hovering for a minute it landed down next to us.
I felt bad that Rollo had stolen the shuttle for a moment. Losing it would be a huge blow to the lander's morale. I would've felt worse but Rollo had confirmed that the xenobiology was a waste of time. Without the shuttle, the pure chemistry teams would get more focus and maybe they'd figure something out, despite Captain Feix.
At least that was a convenient way to rationalize me not being the bad guy. For our purposes, the boxy and hacked-together craft would be home for the rest of our short lives.
Sunrise put me down as Rollo stepped out. I caught a glimpse of Lema somewhere in the shuttle behind him, but not her two children.
"What happened to Sworl?" Rollo said.
"He got out, but he's sick. Probably from all the slop they did to him. Do you think Lema could…?"
Rollo grimaced and started to say something, but stopped and ran over to wave Sunrise away from the shuttle.
"Stop poking it!"
"I am sorry. I was very curious. What is its name?"
"It doesn't have one," Rollo said. "It's just a shuttle."
"I will call it Swoop."
"It's not-"
I jabbed Rollo and switched the translator off for a moment. "Let him have his fun."
"I don't want this dino babying the shuttle like he did the recon drone. It's not a toy."
That gave me an idea. Lema wasn't the only thing I'd glimpsed in the shuttle. I walked inside and rooted around, pulling out a recon drone from the pile of scrap Rollo had taken with him.
"Jaku, that's not a toy."
"Yea, but you were slopping with him for months through these things weren't you? Making it speak to him so he'd try to teach it language."
Rollo looked a little sheepish at being called out on that.
"I think he's earned it," I said.
"Fine. I had no idea you were so sentimental. Keep him away from the shuttle while I fix the drone."
I waved hello at Lema, but she was red-eyed and looked on the verge of sobbing. Probably from the lack of her children. Rather than deal with that, I ducked outside to entertain Sunrise. I explained all the exterior parts of the shuttle to him. He was very curious, but I doubted he could understand much.
"How does it eat?" he said. He didn't seem to accept that it wasn't a living creature.
"It's got a miniaturized fission generator on it. Like it ate a really really really good meal once and it never has to eat again."
"I would like to eat such a meal. It must be very delicious."
Rollo finally brought out the revamped drone. Sunrise instantly snapped to attention, fixating on it.
"Battery high," it said as he switched it on. "Drone ready."
The noise Sunrise made was untranslateable, but he snatched it from Rollo's hands at lightning speed and gently stroked it as he began making various cooing sounds. Sunrise pranced in sheer excitement.
"That is one happy xeno," Rollo said.
"You gotta admit, they're a lot cuter than the Siltarchs," I said. Rollo gave me a neutral look and shrugged.
"Yea."
We watched Sunrise play with the drone, throwing it up in the air and lightly catching it as if he could teach it to fly.
"I've been kind of wondering. You were our top expert on the Bazaar. You really think they're going to blow up the ship?"
"Guaranteed."
"Slop. And you told Feix that?"
"I don't know if he believed me. Or if he did, but he didn't care. It doesn't matter now. Come on, let's see if we can cheer up Lema."
"What happened?"
"Arlo and Arla wouldn't come."
Vat kids. Lema probably only met them when they were around 9, when their developmental optimality was assured and she'd started getting the maternal hormone supplements to fall deeply in love with them. But while the vat kids were still being programmed, they hadn't had the supplements to fall in love with Lema. And the lander hadn't had supplies to start the treatment, so they'd cooly evaluated her irrational choice to commit treason and rejected it with barely a thought.
Not that having real children necessarily led to more loyalty. My own mother would be furious and maybe even worried right now. I tried not to think about that.
I sat on a passenger bench and waited while Rollo spoke low words of comfort to Lema. What was I supposed to say? That Arlo and Arla were bland soulless robots? She loved them anyway.
There was a water filter jammed into the wall. I drank deep and ate some of the small mound of rations we'd stolen. Some of those rations were doubtless Arlo and Arla's, but now they would prolong my life just a little bit longer. Outside, Sunrise was still cooing at his drone.
Eventually Lema calmed down enough to start asking questions about her new patient.
"I have most of the reports Midol sent," she said. "He did take a lot of blood, but he wasn't trying to kill Sworl. It's possible runners follow different rules for blood loss. But you said he was eating and coherent enough to talk to yesterday?"
"Yea, he seemed fine. But he got worse overnight."
"Hm. I'll need to take his vitals."
We followed Sunrise back to the burrow with the shuttle. I wouldn't've been able to find it, but Sunrise had a good spatial memory. Sworl was still inside, slowly breathing with eyes shut.
"Sworl grew many good herbs here but I do not think they will help because he does not have big wounds and is not coughing up black stuff, he just seems very tired. A scout from the caravan would know more because they usually visit when a gardener is sick. Should I call for one? It might take them a few days to arrive."
"Redspot," Sworl said. His warbling sounded weak. "Seek Redspot."
"Redspot is very wise, but he is not an elder," Sunrise said. "And it would be faster to tell Eyelegs to pass on the news."
Sworl's eye shot open to glare at Sunrise, which shut him up.
"I will seek Redspot," he said. He left quickly.
"I didn't know you were awake," Lema said. "I'm going to measure you and try to see how you're doing. This won't hurt."
Sworl hummed weakly, and Lema cautiously approached him probed him for his vitals.
"His temperature is a bit low. Get me a heating pad from the shuttle. I think his pulse is steady, but it's slopping hard to measure with these instruments. We don't have the analysis equipment to do bloodwork, not that I'd know what it meant. I'm going to guess he'd do better if we got more food in him."
"Sunrise was feeding him yesterday," I said. "But I don't know how he kept finding the growlers. I never see them until a gardener pulls them out of some hole."
"The oceans here teem with life," Rollo said. "The shuttle has a net for sample catching, although I wasn't there when they used it."
"Can they eat fish?" Lema said. "We haven't actually seen a gardener ever go fishing."
"They eat the sea turtles, don't they?"
"Hmm," Lema said. She took the translator and brought it closer to Sworl. He didn't have any visible ears, so she just put it near his head. "Sworl, can you eat fish?"
She had to gently stroke his head and repeat the question a few times until he finally said something.
"Terrors," Sworl said. "Do not go."
"What?" Rollo said. He picked up the translator and tapped at it, scrolling through its logs with a frown. "Hm. ''Do not go' was pretty clear. But I'm not sure 'terrors' is the right translation. It's got the root stem for fear but it's not syntactically correct."
"Your translator makes a lot of stupid shit up," I said.
"I'm aware," he said with a glare. "Second option, they eat the tree sap from the 'gum trees'. We can find those pretty easily from the air."
Sworl didn't object to that (if he was still conscious), so while Lema stayed behind to set up the heater, Rollo and I took off in the shuttle to look the gum trees.
Like all trees on this planet, they looked somewhat familiar. Their orange wood trunks and branches seemed almost normal. But the leaves on this planet gave me the creeps. Each leaf resembled a tiny insect with broad wings, and they tended to slowly move throughout the day so they always clustered facing the sun. If you agitated the tree too much, the leaves would swarm and "bite" at you with little needles.
Gum trees in particular had huge fist-sized leaves that were tinted a bit orange too, and big stabbing needles on the front of them. Their leaves would attack neighbouring trees, seizing the smaller leaves and dragging them back to be digested by the mother tree. Sworl sometimes grabbed a tailful of leaves from other trees and fed them right into a gumtree's canopy. When fed well, they filled up with sap.
We flew over the forest, looking for a big cluster of them. It was hard because the real base of a gum tree was usually shorter than surrounding trees and hidden beneath the canopy. Their leaves didn't rely on sunshine as much and when they needed it they could just occupy a victim's branches instead.
"By the way," Rollo said. "I've got a genemod for you. Sila canned this one because nobody was supposed to spend too much time outside, but it should prevent your skin from getting issues."
I recognized the injector. We'd all had genemod to breathe the air and see in the sunlight here already, but our selection was pretty limited thanks to Feix.
"Don't need it. I didn't have any issues when I went outside in the winter."
Rollo shrugged, then injected me anyway.
"Ow! Cela's tits dude, I just said I didn't need it."
"Better safe than sorry."
I punched him and resumed looking for our target. We found a decent grove and set down, far enough away to not send any leaves into a frenzy. When I'd watched Sworl or Sunrise feed from these trees, they'd gently bitten into the bark and then lapped it up, finally sealing the wound with smushed leaves. The numan way was to use a plasma cutter to torch through the wood, run screaming back to the shuttle as the leaves descended in a furious mass, and then sheepishly come back with a bucket when they'd calmed down.
We bled the trees dry, filling a whole storage chest with sticky red liquid. Sworl would probably be furious that we'd killed his trees, but this was to save his life so I didn't feel too bad.
Something in the treeline rustled. I briefly saw some leaves pushed aside.
"Hey Rollo, I think I found a growler," I said. "If it's outside its burrow, I can kill it with the plasma cutter."
"Where?"
I pointed out the trees. Rollo carefully snuck around the side while I closed in. I was already imagining how surprised Sworl would be that I, the "not very dangerous" sizzler, had caught and killed a growler on my own.
I gently pushed aside a branch, and that's when a huge shape came streaking down from above and knocked me flat on my back. I caught a glimpse of two black eyes peering down at me from a jet black head surrounded by a halo of horns. Clawed feet pinned my arm down when I tried to shield my face. The creature leaned down and sniffed at me, then suddenly was gone.
I got up, shaken. Rollo came running over.
"What happened?"
"It wasn't a growler."
"What was it?"
"Well, it pounced me. I'd say a pouncer."
Rollo seemed unduly excited while I checked my stomach. The claws hadn't gone through my tough colonist-weave shirt- I was really beginning to appreciate this outfit, however bland it was.
"We've never actually seen a pouncer before! They're one of this planet's most elusive creatures. What did it look like?"
"Like it was deciding whether it wanted to eat me."
"But-"
"Let's just go, okay?"
I picked up my useless plasma cutter and went back to the shuttle. If not for the fact that I smelled horrible, I would be dead by now. I retreated to a chair instead of helping Rollo tie down the storage chest. Rollo was annoyed, and then awkward when he saw I was too shaken up to help.
We flew back to the burrow. Sworl had nearly wrapped himself around the heating pad while Lema was puzzling over a screen. She was trying to look productive, but by her puffy eyes I think she'd been crying again.
Now we just had the problem of getting Sworl to eat the stuff. Too bad Sunrise had left. It wasn't easy feeding Sworl when his head was as big as my whole body and he was too out of it to help. While Rollo held up his upper muzzle with both hands, I tilted buckets of sap down his throat. Whenever he thrashed or coughed even slightly, Rollo lost his grip and the bucket had a good chance of spattering all over us. Better than holding too tightly though. None of us really wanted to be caught in his daggerlike teeth.
We only got a few buckets down before Sworl rolled over, tucking his head into the wall and preventing any further feeding. I hoped that was enough.
"We've done what we can for now," Rollo said. "I'm going to wash up and work on the translator."
Meanwhile, I grabbed a screen and sat up against Sworl's haunch. We weren't on the lander's net, but Rollo had a pretty good archive on the shuttle. Numanity's finest entertainments and knowledge were just a few clicks away, and there wasn't a parental filter to stop me from playing games until I got mindlock.
But after a few hours I got bored. The games weren't as good without a full sim or functional AI to play against. I hovered behind Rollo and watched him work. The translator was kind of interesting since I had to use it so much, although I still couldn't make much sense out of the specialist interface Rollo programmed it with. I did figure out how to pull up the logs of everything it had ever heard or said.
"Do they really just call everything a box? Are you going to make it not sound like Sunrise? Why doesn't it ever use contractions?"
Rollo sighed.
"The point is to translate as close to what they're really saying into English as possible, Jaku. If you try to make the translations more natural sounding, this technology puts in a lot of numan meanings and context that's not really there. For example, their speech is very regular and formal. As you noted they don't use contractions. They could probably skip half of what they say and still be understood, they just don't. If we put in contractions that aren't there, it would be implicitly applying our pragmatic and lazy culture of speaking."
I stopped him and pointed out a line in the logs, around when Sworl had apologized to me.
"There, Sworl said 'I'm' right there. Contraction."
Rollo frowned.
"That's… he was sick and delirious."
"You said the translator was pretty smart AI. How do you know it's not smarter than you? Maybe he really was talking informally to me there."
"There's not an entirely new mode of speech just for apologizing," Rollo said. "The translator was just picking up on the informal context and, again, inferred something that's not there."
"Okay, but the AI is at least as good at inferring context as we are. And you know, I think Sworl really kind of was being informal with me there."
"That's for you the user to carefully interpret and infer, it shouldn't be embedded in the translation so you're never even aware of the assumption. Trust me. If you let the AI infer meanings with Siltarchs, they would sound like they were your best friend right up until they fleeced you of everything you owned."
"But runners aren't Siltarchs, they're pretty straightforward right? Sworl has never even tried to mislead me."
Rollo was now actively massaging his forehead. He turned to make it harder for me to see his screen.
"Go look up the Fotonori debates, Jaku. I'm not going to relitigate the academic literature with you."
He sounded just like any adult when you questioned their precious expertise. Lema didn't seem like she'd welcome my questions either, so I scoffed and went back to leaning against Sworl. I was feeling kind of tired (maybe from the genemod), so I took a nap.
I woke up when Sunrise returned. He was still carrying his drone curled up tight in his tail, but his grip seemed tighter and maybe more anxious.
"Hello sizzlers," he said.
"Hello Sunrise," Rollo said back.
"I have talked to Redspot and maybe he is wise like Sworl says he is. He says that for Sworl to get better he must drink my blood."
"Drink blood?" Lema said. "That could provide the nutrients needed to make new blood. But if we're not careful we'd just end up with two anemic patients."
"I do not like seeing blood and I very much do not like seeing blood that is mine," the four meter tall flesh-eating dino said. I snorted.
"Okay. I've got a few syringes that should do the trick. Just look away, Sunrise."
Lema had apparently come prepared with some of the huge-needled syringes that Midol had been using on Sworl. Sunrise didn't like seeing them very much, but we got him to look away and distracted him with Batterylow while she drew blood from his flank.
"Guessing volume is hard here. We'll aim for a third of what Midol took out. Shouldn't be enough to make Sunrise feel much more than lightheaded, might be enough to save Sworl."
The sticky gray blood was dumped from the syringe into a bucket. Sunrise used his two grabbers to bring Sworl's head over and pry his jaw open with surprising dexterity. Not much more coaxing was required, as it turned out that Sworl seemed to like the taste of blood and eagerly lapped up the bucket. We gave him two more buckets for good measure.
"All we can do is wait now," Lema said. "I think I'll turn in for the night."
"It's going to be a little cramped, but there's enough room for you to sleep on the shuttle too," Rollo said to me.
"Nah. Sworl makes a good pillow."
"Suit yourself."
As the sun went down, Sworl did seem to be breathing a little easier. I was glad.
Chapter 8: The Scout
Sworl recovered swiftly. After two days he was walking and working on his plants again. I tried to convince him he was still in danger, but he wouldn't listen. Sunrise had to ask Sworl for help with his own territory for him to agree to leave. I think that despite acting brave, Sworl was relieved to go.
We settled with Sunrise about 40 kilometers away. Like Sworl's lands it bordered the sea, but only on one side instead of being almost surrounded by it. The forests seemed a lot lusher, almost like a jungle in places.
Sunrise apologized about this. Gardeners thought that having too many plants was messy. They preferred cultivating land with fewer places for their prey to hide, and with clear pathways for ease of travel. Sworl said that too many plants and prey animals could lead to a collapse that would keep the land barren for years, but Lema was skeptical.
Sunrise's roost was an island in the middle of a knee-deep lake, which was convenient for drinking and keeping the oozebag munchers out, but not so convenient if you were a numan who didn't like getting cold and wet. It looked as big as Sworl's from the outside, but it was even larger inside because it was built over a small cave that extended some ways down. It had its own collection of shiny rocks that Sunrise showed off to us, plus half a dozen crashed drones he'd patiently rescued and failed to nurse back to health.
There was enough space for the shuttle to park on the island's beach. Lema set up a tent for her biolab, while Rollo took over the shuttle for his own work. They both spent a lot of time pestering Sunrise with questions. Fortunately he didn't seem to mind, and he only asked for payment in stories. We had plenty of those, although not all of them could be easily translated to be about dinos.
Meanwhile, I was helping Sworl. According to him there were way too many munchers and growlers around, so we set out on a crusade to cull them. Sworl sniffed out the growlers. Then if he couldn't catch them before they darted into a burrow, I shot a few rounds of plasma fire down the hole. The munchers meanwhile made no particular effort to avoid their fate.
The days rolled by. No work, no studying, no worries. We were still doomed, but Rollo and Lema weren't too concerned and I tried not to think about it.
I did miss some of the people back at the lander. Now that he wasn't constantly pushing my buttons, I think I almost missed Iggy. And Nina wasn't so bad for a maintenance engineer. She'd always had a corny joke and a smile when I saw her. And maybe, somehow, I even missed my mom.
But I wasn't alone here. Rollo wasn't very good at being sociable, but he let me bother him about his translating work since most of the time I was the biggest user. Lema was stretched taut over the loss of her children, but she was still warm and kind. I thought they were decent people.
And the more I got to know the dinos, the more I thought they were decent people too. Sworl was proud and diligent. He took his job seriously and knew all the gardening rules, but he was still open to listening to my ideas. He felt like he had no idea what he was doing, but to me at least he seemed to know a lot.
Sunrise was less focused, but he was also very curious. And he could be shockingly perceptive sometimes. Rollo said Sunrise knew more about fixing the scout drones than he did, and I wasn't sure whether or not he was joking.
You still couldn't get too comfortable around either of them. If they forgot you were there, they could squash you flat or hit you with their tail just by accident. Whenever I moved too quickly, their heads would whip around to stare at me like I was their next meal. Sworl even started reflexively chasing me once when I ran too fast.
The size difference was the hardest part to work around. I sometimes felt like I was a pet. Sunrise was especially bad at suddenly picking me up without warning and carrying me around, but Sworl did it too if he got bored with waiting for me to catch up. It didn't help when Sunrise mentioned that Lunge was a common name for their pet pouncers. I wondered whether Sworl really did think of me as a pet, and I was too afraid to ask because he might just say yes.
Every night I went out and watched the stars. They were just as mesmerizing on Exile as they were on Surgos. Gardeners usually went to sleep as soon as the sun went down, but one night I convinced Sworl to stay up and watch them with me.
"I have not done this since I was a hatchling," Sworl said. "Which light did you fall from?"
I had to figure that out with the help of a screen, but I finally pointed out Cela to him. It wasn't the brightest star, and from here it was almost occluded by other stars.
"I miss home," I said. "I'll never see it again."
"That is very sad. What is it like?"
"Surgos? We live in glass cities that float above the jungle. There are billions of people, but the way it's built you always feel like you're alone."
"Why would you want to feel alone?"
I'd been taught all about Surgos's design philosophy, its encounter personalization and community-building through partitioned shared space and all the other buzzwords. But I tried to explain to Sworl how otherwise there were so many numans that you had to ignore them, how people became unimportant just because of the sheer number of them.
"I do not understand," he said, and I was kind of happy he didn't.
Our week of peace was soon shattered. Sworl and I were out hunting growlers when he stopped and cocked his head. I think I heard it too, and if not I felt it. It sounded like a distant howl.
"I think that is Redspot," Sworl said. "His border with Sunrise is very far. We should go."
He ran off with me on his back. I spent two hours clinging for dear life while he rocketed through the forest. By the time we stopped he was panting desperately for breath, and my fingers hurt from the strain of holding on.
We stopped next to hedges taller than I was. These were what the gardeners planted to mark their borders. Unusually for Exile, their leaves were actually anchored to their branches. If you got near them, they aimed the bulbous end of their body at you and squirted little clouds of stink.
Another dino approached. He was huge, a meter taller than Sworl and bulging with hard muscle. His coat was brownish-black, with two reddish-brown spots on either side. I was still riding Sworl, who almost threw me off with how suddenly he dipped low and started softly whining.
So, this was the great Redspot I'd heard so much about. Whenever I'd asked Sworl about gardening over the past week, he'd find a way to bring up advice he'd heard from the great Redspot. Now in his presence, Sworl vibrated with awe.
"Hello Sunrise," Redspot said. His warbling sounded deeper than Sworl or Sunrise. The translator gave him a very dignified voice.
"Hello Redspot," Sworl said. "I am actually Sworl."
"Strange. I called for Sunrise."
"I am sorry," Sworl said. "I am sure he is also coming."
"I see."
Redspot's great head leaned over the border bush and his red eyes stared at me. I stared back and tried not to look afraid.
"This is my sizzler, Lunge," Sworl said.
"Why is it on your back?"
"Because being carried sucks," I said. Redspot's head jerked back slightly in surprise.
"Hello, Lunge," Redspot said.
"Hi."
He seemed taken aback by that and returned his attention to Sworl.
"Sunrise told me about your arrangement, so I thought you might show up. That is why I told Very Violet to wait behind, so you would not overreact."
Sworl stiffened.
"That is fine. I do not need to see Very Violet. Sunrise can deal with her if he wants to."
Redspot turned his head and puffed in amusement.
"Do not be petty, Sworl. Scouts come and go and will always tempt gardeners. If she has wronged you, act like you are indifferent to her. That will hurt her most."
I didn't have much experience with women, and the dinos were an entirely different species on top of that. But Redspot's advice sounded wise to me. And since it was the great Redspot giving it, Sworl had no choice but to agree. He did his best to look bored while Very Violet approached, barely even glancing her way.
She was, in fact, very violet. Gardeners sometimes used tools, like Sworl's basket or a shovel-like log Sunrise used for digging, but scouts carried a huge spear with them at all times. Sworl said they used it to hit gardeners who got too close.
"Hello, Sworl," Very Violet said.
"Hello, Very Violet," Sworl said. Their ritual greeting concluded, Sworl immediately turned back to Redspot while Very Violet cleared the border bush in one alarmingly high jump. She strutted closer while Sworl found an interesting rock to sniff.
"I see you are in Sunrise's territory. The elders will not be happy to hear this."
"The sizzlers became too dangerous. And Sunrise has allowed it. We have not fought."
Very Violet spared a glance at me. I didn't like the look in her eyes.
"Where is Sunrise?"
"He is coming."
"I see him now," Redspot said. "Unfortunately, he has his sky buzzer again."
We waited while Sunrise ran up. Sworl continued to try to ignore Very Violet, who was wafting a musky odor with her tail so pungent even I could smell it.
"Hello Very Violet! Hello Redspot! Hello Sworl! Hello Lunge!"
"Hello, Sunrise."
"Hello, Sunrise."
"Hello, Sunrise."
"Hi."
Just saying "hi" again seemed to deeply annoy Very Violet and confuse Redspot, but Sworl and Sunrise were both used to my weirdness by now. Maybe eventually it'd catch on and they'd start doing it themselves. I heard their caravan had fifty or more dinos in it, and they must spend an awful lot of time greeting each other.
"Let us get moving," Very Violet said. "There is a lot to do."
We started back after saying goodbye to Redspot. Very Violet kept accidentally swerving into Sworl, who puffed derisively and pushed her away. I started to feel like maybe I was in danger, and she might "accidentally" collide with Sworl and crush me into paste.
"Why have you brought your sizzler?" she asked. "Are they not dangerous?"
"Lunge is not dangerous," Sworl said. "He is very loyal and saved me from death."
"If they are not dangerous, why have you not removed them from your territory yet?"
"It is my territory. Do not question me."
Very Violet kept swerving into Sworl, whose tail was starting to lash with anger. She bumped him particularly hard and I almost fell. Something huge suddenly gripped me and plucked me off his back. It was Sunrise, who placed me on his back instead. I shot him a grateful look while he doubled back to pick up Batterylow from where he'd set it down.
"You would not have heard, but Waterskin is dead," Very Violet said.
"I am very sad to hear that."
"If the sizzlers were cleared out sooner, then Waterskin would not be dead. Redspot has said how Sunrise rescued you. You also almost died because of them."
Sworl bared his teeth at her.
"You saw how big their white tree was," he said. "And that they are clever creatures with the power to speak. You have not seen how fierce their bite is. It is better to wait for them to die."
"The sizzlers claim they are dying, but nothing seems wrong with your pet."
Unfortunately that was true. I wasn't visibly dying, and I actually felt pretty good since I could eat our bland rations as quickly or as slowly as I liked. Rollo and Lema didn't seem to care about strict rationing, and I was ravenous. I figured it was better to live two months well fed than four months starving, and anyway the rations were starting to taste weird so they might've been going bad.
"Lick me," I said. Very Violet ignored me, so I went on. "See how I taste. The way I taste to you is how your food tastes to me. Then I can show you how much of my food is left until I starve."
"It is not much food," Sunrise said. "It makes me very sad. Soon Rollo and his stories will be gone."
Caught in a rhetorical bind, Very Violet agreed to lick me. Sunrise held me out like a lollipop and her huge purple tongue lightly slathered over me. It was disgusting. But I got the satisfaction of seeing Very Violet immediately throw up afterwards while I wiped her saliva off.
"This is not proof," she eventually managed to say between heaves. "And I am only a messenger. Since you failed to end it, the caravan is coming to root out the problem."
Both Sworl and Sunrise stopped in their tracks.
"The caravan is coming? Here?" Sunrise said.
"But the problem is not urgent!" Sworl said. "The sizzlers cannot threaten other gardeners with their flying box, because Rollo has it now. The caravan does not need to come."
"Nevertheless, the caravan is coming," Very Violet said. "I scout for it."
"But my territory is not ready," Sunrise said. "I have not been a good gardener!"
"That's slopping suicide," I said. "Sila will just shoot all of you."
"Lunge is right," Sworl said. "Being bitten by a sizzler hurts very much."
"You are only afraid because you are slow and cowardly," Very Violet said.
I understood almost as soon as Sunrise did; Very Violet had gone too far. Runners were very proud of their speed and bravery. Sworl snapped towards her with a sudden burst of speed. She'd been half-expecting this and moved her spear to block it, but Sworl had been fully expecting that, and when the swing missed he caught the spear in his teeth and ripped it away. Then he was upon Very Violet, a flurry of snapping teeth and smashing tails. Very Violet recovered and managed to avoid Sworl's lunge for her neck, but he barreled into her with a charge that sent both of them sprawling and snapping.
Sunrise quailed. He walked in dizzying circles at a safe distance and made a high whine. I had the plasma gun on me, but putting holes in either of them while they were locked in melee and Sunrise was turning too fast for me to aim didn't seem like a good idea. I frantically tried to think of some way to stop the fight, but before I could it was over. Sworl had pinned Very Violet beneath him.
I'm not really an expert in xeno anatomy, but it did strike me as an intimate pin.
"Do something," I hissed at Sunrise. He finally picked up Very Violet's spear and slapped both Sworl and Very Violet with it. Eventually they separated, both looking sheepish and out of breath. Grey blood dripped where their teeth had scored each others' flanks.
"I expected better from both of you," Sunrise said. "Sworl, what would Redspot think? And Very Violet, you have been rude to and rubbing against Sworl this whole time!"
"You are not allowed to wield that spear," Very Violet said. The translator made her sound sullen. Sunrise tossed her the spear and she gripped it, looking like she might burst into violence again at any moment.
Instead all of us silently made the rest of the trip back to Sunrise's roost. Rollo came out to appraise the new arrival, and I switched off the translator to fill him in.
"Sworl attacked Very Violet, but I think she was trying to provoke him. I'm not sure how much of a love-hate thing they've got going on."
"Looks like hate right now to me," Rollo said. The two were licking their wounds (literally) and glaring at each other from a distance. "See how their tails are tilted up? That's a threat display."
"I know," I said. "I've watched them as much as you have."
"Ah, now you're on edge too!"
Rollo was irritatingly cheerful, and his mood only improved when I told him about the caravan.
"That sounds like a dream come true. We'll get to see the nucleus of their society. Directly observe their leaders!"
"Right before they all get gunned down?"
"I'm sure they can be convinced against confronting the lander."
"You're thinking like a Siltarch expert again. These are dinos, they don't always think logically."
Rollo rolled his eyes and went back to his work inside the shuttle. I checked up on Sworl. His wounds didn't look that bad.
"So, what was that about?"
"Very Violet is very bad. She has come back just to mock me."
"Okay," I said.
"First she tries to act like she is interested in me and then she leaves and then she comes back and she mocks me and rubs her scent in my snout and makes me lose control of myself. She is very bad."
"Women, right?"
"Yes! It is good that all the females live in the caravan so only one gardener has to deal with them at a time."
I sat next to him and patted his flank reassuringly, and he took the opportunity to rest his head on my lap. It was extremely heavy, but it did let me stroke him along the back of his skull, which he seemed to like. Nevermind that my legs were going numb, or that his grabbers were perfectly capable of reaching this spot on their own.
"So, correct me if I'm wrong, but lone scouts like her aren't supposed to have relationships with gardeners like you anyway. The elders will decide if and when they want a scout to mate with a gardener."
"Yes. That is why it is very bad that she is being so beautiful and attractive."
Rollo thought that gardener society, probably across most of the planet but at least in the island chain we were on, functioned under a matriarchical breeding scheme. While the males were spread out, the females were concentrated in a nomadic "caravan". This allowed them to control their population while keeping the males from constantly fighting over territory, food, and mates.
The caravan had to send out scouts at times, usually to make sure that a territory they were headed towards could actually support fifty times as many dinos for a few weeks. But if the scouts were to freely breed with gardeners away from the caravan, then the scheme would collapse.
So in a sense, Very Violet was in fact being very bad. But by numan standards she was also being very romantic, defying her elders for a spontaneous true love. My sympathy was curbed by my suspicion that she wanted to bite me in half, but I still wanted what was best for Sworl. Whatever that was.
"Why not just do what Redspot said and ignore her?"
"It is very hard."
In fact it proved to be a nightmare. For the next month, the gardeners were constantly busy doing everything they could to fix Sunrise's territory and bring it up to Very Violet's exacting standards. Sworl and Very Violet alternated between fighting and cuddling each other, while Sunrise seemed jealous when he wasn't exploding with worry.
I had a lot of time to stare at a screen. At one point I would've killed to play screen games all day, but now I was just bored. I even got bored enough to do some educational modules, selected by the AI for likely relevance to my future. Farming, zookeeping, maintenance, 'life optimism'. I don't think it realized I didn't have a future.
I was looking for something to do when Rollo finally cued me in on his new project. The three of us huddled into the shuttle and squeezed around its main screen. Rollo had to clean up a bunch of stray tools and Lema smelled uncomfortably like dirt, but I'd been wearing the same pair of clothes since we left the lander with only the pond to wash in, so I couldn't complain.
"We've had first contact, and now it's time for second. Lema?"
"Right," she said. She'd been slowly getting over her loss by burying herself in work, doing a comprehensive genetic catalog of local life. And recently, Batterylow had been flying over the sea doing aerial surveys, which Rollo assured me would be entirely safe and not leave Sunrise devastated by it crashing into the ocean.
She brought up videos of dark shapes swimming under the water. Even enhanced there wasn't much to look at.
"The runners are descended from semi-aquatic lifeforms, which is how they got to this island. You can see some remnants of that heritage in their body plan- their tail probably used to act like a paddle, and there's webbing between their toes. But some of their closest relatives still live primarily in the sea. The runners call them 'terrors'. They may achieve some level of sapience, like dolphins on Earth or ugannu on Mendus, or they could be fully sentient in their own right."
I folded my arms.
"And you want to contact them too."
"That's our hope," Rollo said.
"And you've already decided to do it."
"Jaku…"
"There's three of us and you're only telling me now. Like you're my boss or something. I'm the only investor here, aren't I? You never even asked me what I thought about it."
The adults traded meaningful glances.
"Of course we value your thoughts," Lema said.
"I think it's slopping stupid. You don't know shit about the runners already. All you did was ask Sunrise questions for a week. I'm not a renowned xeno expert but I'm pretty sure that's not enough. And with these terrors, you don't have a language corpus falling into your lap. And they live underwater! You don't have any equipment for that."
"Those are all good points," Rollo said. "To start with, we think they're semiaquatic, so we should be able to interact with them once we find their beaching sites."
"But you haven't even found one, have you? Did you forget we're going to be slopping dead when our rations run out?"
The adults again traded meaningful glances.
"Future generations will build upon our work," Rollo said placidly. "The Siltarchs didn't mention the terrors in their reports at all, out of either ignorance or disinterest. A followup expedition is more likely to happen if we can confirm two independent sapient species."
"Oh, it's about your personal legacy," I said.
"Jaku, calm down."
"I'm perfectly calm. You're wasting your time."
"I understand that you might feel that way," Lema said. "We're still in the early stages, so there's plenty of time to think about it if you decide you want to help."
"It sounds like you don't need me at all."
I stormed off.
Rollo and Lema treated me like a kid, Sworl and Sunrise treated me like a pet, and I was pissed off. I hated feeling useless. I couldn't stand being cooped up in the roost anymore, just waiting around. I waded through the lake.
If I'd stopped to think, I would have realized leaving the roost was a really stupid idea for two reasons. First, Sworl's pouncer. Sunrise called it Lurk, and that was basically what it did. Lurk in a tree somewhere, waiting for something to pass by so it could pounce like a giant cat. It'd already pounced on me once, and maybe the second time it wouldn't let me go.
The second was that even more dangerous things lurked out here, ones that actively wanted to kill me. I hadn't gone very far into the trees when I noticed I was being followed. A huge shape brushing through the trees, but surprisingly quiet. It wasn't Sworl, and it wasn't Sunrise.
I didn't have the translator on me, but I suspected I wouldn't need it. An icy fear hammered my heart. I saw her as just a distant shape in foliage, but I could already tell by the way she moved. She was hunting.
There was no possible way for me to outrun a dino. Hiding wasn't much of an option either. The chase wasn't on quite yet; she didn't know I knew, so I had maybe a couple of minutes before the attack came.
I needed options. I needed options desperately. All I had on me was a screen, so I thought up a slapdash plan using that. I programmed it with whispered words, trying to keep my voice steady. Then, while passing by a tree, I dropped it and kept walking.
She was getting closer, a shadow slinking between trees while my back was turned. Small mercies, I'd timed the delay well. She was passing near it when the screen started playing a recording of Sworl's warbling at max volume.
I used the confusion to gain a little distance, not daring to look behind me to see if it was enough. Then I climbed the nearest tree like my life depended on it.
The leaves looked weird from a distance, but the bark gave good handholds. I'd never climbed a tree except in sims, but an overpowering surge of adrenaline turned my hands into iron vices. My boots had excellent grip too, probably yet another benefit of colonist wear.
By the time I heard the thump of heavy footsteps, I was comfortably halfway up the tree. If I went any higher, the leaves might swarm me. I looked down, and Very Violet looked up. She was uncomfortably tall, but I think I was too high for her to reach, even with her long tail. She tested that theory, holding up her spear at the end of her tail, and I scrabbled a few meters higher and got a few angry bugs biting me for my trouble.
That seemed to give her an idea. She swung her spear into the tree with a thick crack, jarring it and stirring its leaves to life. I ducked my head into my coat as a wave of leaves fell down, swarming and biting where they could. Wherever they bit that wasn't covered by my clothes, it hurt a lot- the exposed top of my head, or my hands, or digging into the crevice between my coat and pants. But if I panicked, I'd fall, and if I fell, I'd die. So I stayed as still as possible.
Sooner than I thought, the leaves ignored me. And repeated blows from Very Violet's spear failed to get them to bite me again. So she took to ramming the tree with her body, trying to topple it. But I'd picked the biggest tree I could find in anticipation of that, so while every slam shook it, the trunk held.
She started digging, setting her spear aside to scoop up dirt with her tail. Maybe she was trying to uproot it. Rather than let her slowly undermine the tree, I resorted to the oldest numan trick in the book. I snapped off a sizable branch from just above me and I threw it at her.
It didn't draw blood or anything, but the hit stunned her for a moment. I threw another branch, which went wide, and a third one which made her yelp in annoyance. I wish I had something heftier, but there wasn't much else up here to throw. The leaves had gathered in a tight ball at the top of the tree (maybe instinctually anticipating a topple), and the tree didn't produce fruits or anything like that. But it did have a lot of branches.
Annoyed, Very Violet tried tossing rocks back up at me. But I had the high ground, and her tail couldn't throw anywhere near as accurately or fast as I could. And she was so focused on trying to hit me that she didn't even notice what was running up behind her.
Sworl slammed into Very Violet at an immense speed, knocking her clear off the ground and into a tree. She barely had time to react before his jaws clamped around her throat. Struggle as she might, he didn't let go until she was softly mewling for mercy.
I didn't have the translator, so I don't know what he said to her. But it was the angriest warble I'd ever heard, followed up by a genuine roar that vibrated my bones. Very Violet scrabbled to her feet and limped off, apparently too afraid to go back for her spear.
Sworl held out his grabbers, and I slid down the tree and into them. He eyed me. I think he was concerned about all the blood I was leaking, but it looked worse than it was. He brought me back to the roost. Lema rushed out from her tent with a medkit and fussed over me.
"What happened?" she asked.
"Very Violet tried to kill me. But I'm fine. Can you get the translator?"
I had to insist a few more times, but she eventually stopped bandaging me to fetch it.
"Thank you," I said to Sworl.
"I told Very Violet to leave or I'll kill her. She may return with the caravan, but I won't let her near you then either."
I nodded. Lema sprayed a bit of gel on each of my many leaf bites.
"Lucky that you're immune to the venom," she said.
"Yes," Sworl said. "Why did you climb a death tree?"
"I wasn't really thinking about the tree," I said.
Sworl watched very attentively while Lema finished up.
"I'll be fine," I said. But he refused to leave, even when Lema went back into the shuttle.
"I should have known she would do something like this," Sworl said. "She was very jealous of you and Sunrise because I paid more attention to you. It is not well known, but scouts can become as love-mad as gardeners. But she also did not accept that sizzlers were not all bad, even though I told her you saved my life."
"I guess we're even."
"It was very impressive that you got away from her," Sworl said. "I did not know sizzlers were also climbers. Why have you never climbed a tree before?"
"I didn't need to. And the leaves suck."
"It is very strange that the leaves did not bite you more."
"Sure feels like they bit me a lot," I said.
He brought his head close and sniffed.
"Maybe it is because you smell better," he said. "You smell like Rollo and Lema now."
"What?"
"It is not a bad smell like you had before. You smell like a climber, but also like a daybloom. The leaves would like it."
Personally I thought I stunk. I'd had to bathe in the lake and wash my clothes in plain water. So why would Sworl think I suddenly went from smelling revolting to smelling nice?
"Lick me," I said. Sworl balked.
"I would rather not."
"Just do it."
He tentatively gave me a light lick with his purple tongue.
"You taste like rotten climber," he said. But he didn't start immediately throwing up like Very Violet had a month back. And that was weird. Our biology basically had nothing in common, so to Sworl I should taste like random awful chemicals, if anything at all.
Lema might have an explanation. But then…
"What did you mean, that I smell like Rollo and Lema now? How long have they smelled like this?"
"Lema smelled bad when she came to my roost to make me taste things, but she smelled good when I was sick. Rollo always smelled like you do now."
"And have you smelled other sizzlers?"
"Yes, but I do not know what names they have."
"Just describe them."
"There was your sister who smelled and tasted bad."
Okay, I walked into that one. But this was important, so I waved for him to continue.
"There was the sizzler who was eating me. He was male and smelled bad."
Midol, probably.
"All of the sizzlers I snuck up on while I was spying smelled bad."
"Does Sunrise agree about this?"
"We can ask him. I should tell him about Very Violet anyway."
I plugged my ears just in time as Sworl lifted his snout to the sky and made a loud baying call. Ten minutes later, Sunrise showed up. I watched his body language while Sworl explained about Very Violet. Sunrise seemed relieved she'd left based on how his tail loosened, although he kept glancing back at me, I think to check if I was really okay.
He agreed with Sworl about my smell. So I went inside and asked Lema about it, interrupting her microscope work. And I watched her body language closely.
"That's interesting," she said. "But I think it's just a side effect of the genemod. Rollo gave you that right?"
She looked back into the microscope, avoiding eye contact. But her note-typing was tense and distracted.
"He did. But why would it make us smell good?"
"Not my expertise. You'd have to ask him."
"But xenobiochemistry is your expertise."
"I wasn't involved in that project. Look, I'm busy. Unless you're bleeding again, I need to concentrate."
"It seems kind of shitty though, doesn't it? If we smell good, there's a much bigger chance something will eat us."
"Jaku, go away."
I was starting to think she was hiding something.
Chapter 9: The Terrors
The caravan had reached Redspot's territory, where it would stay for a few days before coming to Sunrise and then eventually to Sworl. Batterylow had taken intimidating surveillance footage of an entire horde of dinos, some even hauling wheeled carts behind their tails. Rollo was very excited.
"The caravan is their central social unit. That's where we'll find all their technology and culture. We can finally do some actual xenology."
The actual locals were somewhat less enthusiastic.
"It is very very bad," Sunrise said to me. "Very very bad. I am not ready. They might take away my territory because I am a bad gardener. Or they might find me another territory which would be very sad because I could not talk to Sworl or Redspot or Eyelegs or Blackstripes or you. I like Pink Tripper Patch and I do not want to leave."
"They are not coming to judge you," Sworl said. But for days Sunrise remained frantic. He never seemed to stop walking in circles.
For Rollo and Lema, the caravan's arrival meant they needed to rush their latest project through befor it arrived. The shuttle was gone half the day, flying over the sea and trying to find out where the terrors might beach themselves. When I told Sworl where the "flying box" was going every day, he had a panic attack of his own. Every morning, he made sure I wasn't on the shuttle when it left.
"I told Rollo how the terrors are. But he did not listen. They will drag him into the sea and eat him."
"Sure. But he thinks they can talk too, so he has a duty to contact them."
"They can talk," Sworl said. "But only to lie and trick you."
"Have you ever seen one before?"
Sworl reluctantly shook his head. He'd picked up that habit from hanging out with me, and I'd sometimes seen him shaking or nodding his head at Sunrise. With his huge snout it was a whole affair and it would've been faster for him to just warble "no", but admittedly it was endearing.
"Redspot has seen many terrors and Redspot says they are all bad, and Redspot is very wise."
I knew better than to argue with the great Redspot.
One day Rollo finally found them. When the shuttle returned that afternoon, I went in to watch the camera feed.
The shuttle approached a lonely black rock in the sea. A higher peak on one side shielded the rest from waves, while a flatter beach gently dipped into the ocean. And on that beach were terrors.
They were sleek black creatures. Instead of grabbers they had forked blades on their tails, and instead of legs they had huge flippers. I thought they might bounce along like seals, but on land they dragged themselves along like determined turtles. There was definitely a resemblance to runners in their long snouts and huge eyes, but instead of colorful coats and bright eyes they were uniformly black.
In the footage, every single one of them had been watching the shuttle. Something about that unsettled me, but it wasn't fair to judge them on that. Of course they'd watch a mysterious flying object on a planet where nothing bigger than an insect flew.
I was still upset about the project, so I yawned and feigned disinterest.
"Great, you found them. Now what?"
"Well, we try contact," Rollo said. "There's various universal strategies, but Sworl said they understand runner-speech. I don't see where they'd get the cross-cultural contact for that, but it could be true. We'll bring them a food gift and see how it goes."
"That's your whole plan?"
"I'm going to try to get a genetic sample as well," Lema said. By now she'd recovered from the loss of her children, or maybe just coped by throwing herself into work- the phenotype of a good employee. "We should be able to prove an evolutionary relationship to runners."
"Me, I wouldn't get too close to those things."
"Very cautious for someone who hangs out with Sworl," Lema said.
"Yea, but he's not… evil," I said. It sounded stupid, but that was all I can think of when I saw the terrors.
"We thought the Siltarchs were evil because of how they looked, you know," Rollo said. "It's learning that makes peace possible, and learning goes both ways. You'll understand when you're older."
"I'm not going to live that long," I said. "Remember?"
Awkward silence followed that uncomfortable reminder. I let it fester, demonstratively helping myself to a bar from the dwindling pile of rations. Then I had a thought.
"Maybe I should hold onto the rations, in case you two don't come back."
"Actually… we could use you on the mission," Lema said. "How do you feel about piloting the shuttle? Just in case the autopilot glitches again while we're off."
I'd piloted shuttles before, but only in sims. And the autopilot glitch was fixed by now, so they didn't really need me. But it was nice of them to invite me, and actually I wanted to go. Sila would say that giving me the fake job meant they were inviting me along to give my aegis while keeping me subordinate. I didn't care. I just wanted some excitement.
Not too much. I wasn't about to leave the shuttle and get eaten. I'd spent enough time around dinos to realize just how effortlessly they could kill you, and while I trusted Sworl I didn't trust "terrors".
"Sworl's going to hate this."
"Don't tell him," Lema said. "We'll only be gone for the day. And he's busy attacking the plants anyway, isn't he?"
"Gardening," I said.
"I'll have to get Sunrise to explain that to me again," she said. "I still don't understand what they're trying to accomplish."
Lema hated what the dinos did to their territories. She thought they were turning vibrant ecosystems into poorly-run farms. We left Rollo in the shuttle to prep while Lema retreated to her tent. Sworl and Sunrise hadn't returned from their work yet, so I followed her and got her talking about it again.
"They've killed off most of the megafauna on this island, except for a few managed species like 'stompers'. So I haven't been able to see much of a natural ecosystem beyond the trophic level of simple carnivores. The sea should be much more ecologically robust, but we don't have the specialist equipment to probe it. That's why I want to open a dialogue with the terrors. We could even trade for samples."
She gestured to the samples she'd been able to collect. Or actually, convince Sworl to collect, since Sunrise refused to help. It wasn't many. A preserved growler, goop that might've once been a muncher, two climbers with their climbing horns broken off, and all of the duller sand-digger shells we'd found. Sworl kept the pretty ones for himself.
"It's an entire biosphere with a distinct evolutionary path. Convergent in many ways, but distinct. And this is all we have besides plants."
"We've found dozens of worlds like this, haven't we?"
"All of them bursting with life! Life we can't find on this island. The terrors could show us an untouched underwater world."
"Sworl and Sunrise are both convinced the terrors are evil," I said. She laughed.
"Evil, how quaint. I suppose they would feel that way. A runner swimming between islands would be easy prey. But if it's true that terrors can speak their language, it's likely they've had productive relations in the past. The idea that they can't be reasoned must be a recent superstition."
I wasn't convinced. Gardeners weren't very superstitious. In fact they were usually pretty literal. Rollo had tried to get creation myths out of Sunrise, but he'd always just said "we don't know how the world was created", and when he'd recounted the mythical tale of Three Stripes, Sunrise had freely admitted it was just a good story and probably wasn't true.
So that Sworl and Sunrise (and even Very Violet) had firmly agreed that terrors were pure evil put me on edge. Maybe it was just a blood feud between the species, but Rollo's plan was to speak runner at them. If they treated us like runners, it'd go badly.
"I guess we'll find out," I said.
I didn't tell Sworl what we planned that night, and I said nothing the next morning when he and Sunrise ran off to "lick the guzzler bushes clean", whatever that meant.
I spent a few hours following computer guides to do maintenance on the shuttle. Despite being cobbled-together, it was holding up pretty well. The AIs had done a good job designing it from scavenged lander parts. We didn't have the replacement parts the maintenance plan recommended, but it still flew and I figured we'd be dead before it really started to break down.
I took the pilot seat while Rollo hovered over my shoulder in case I messed up. But it was pretty hard to mess up flying this thing. I just pulled us straight up until the island was a strip of red-orange color spread out below.
"You're a little high," Rollo said.
"Do you want them to see us coming?"
"Yes," he said.
"And if they scatter?"
"We try again later. I don't want to surprise them."
I lowered the shuttle until we were flying above the blue-purple sea, dodging between scattered outcrops of black rock. Most of Exile was ocean, and much of that ocean was dead. But near the many island shores there was life. We shot past blooms of color swirling in the water like spilled paint, and our shadow scattered shoals of iridescent fish.
The shuttle wasn't that fast so it took us an hour of flight to get there. We went past a few smaller islands on the way, and I thought I saw a runner glancing up at us. Sunrise had said that the closest islands were "starving places", too small to support a full caravan. A few runners lived on them, but they were solitary and aggressive. According to him, they would eventually die off.
In retrospect, it was pretty lucky that we landed on an island that happened to support a full society.
We'd set out a few hours before noon. Lema thought the terrors came out of the water to bask in sunlight and socialize, so our best chance of catching them was at mid-day. We hovered over a shoal of fish (or something sufficiently fish-like) and hauled up a few netfuls for our gift. The fish stank, but almost in a good way. It was a strange smell.
"How do you know they eat these?" I said.
"We don't," Lema said.
Half an hour of more flying, and we found two dozen terrors resting on the island. I shivered when they again all turned to look directly at the shuttle.
"What do you want me to do?"
"Just set us down on that overhang up there, and keep the shuttle ready."
"You're really going out to meet them in person?"
"From a respectful distance," Rollo said. "We've clocked them on land and a light jog should keep us out of reach if anything goes wrong."
We touched down on the upper part of the island. I watched from the shuttle's cameras as the Rollo and Lema took a box of fish out to make first contact. Sims always showed first contact as a glamorous and solemn event, but here it smelled like salt and fish and chemical oil. While Lema struggled to get the box's smart wheels to work right on the slippery rock, Rollo was trying to mimic the shuffle that gardeners sometimes did when they wanted to appear harmless, bobing his head low and weaving an indirect path.
They looked stupid, but they had the terrors' full attention. About a quarter of them immediately dove into the sea, but the rest were staring. Those on the fringes slowly fanned out to form a ring. The shuttle picked up some of their high frequency chatter, a cacophony of inaudible sound recorded as jagged sine waves on the shuttle's screens. I heard it as a ringing in my ears.
When Rollo and Lema were close enough, they opened the storage container and upended it to pour out a pile of flopping fish. Then they backed off to see what would happen.
At first, nothing. There was silence as the terrors stared. Eventually one of the biggest terrors slowly dragged his way over to it and inspected the fish, but he did not eat.
Undeterred, Rollo launched into a speech, rendered by his translator into the runners' warbling. Now the terrors seemed to listen intently.
Meanwhile the ring around Rollo and Lema was slowly growing more complete. Perhaps they were all trying to get a good look. Or maybe they were cutting off escape. The more Rollo and Lema backed off, the less aggressive they were at completing the ring, though I noticed they never quite stopped inching forward.
I don't know what Rollo said, because the shuttle couldn't pick up the translator at this distance. And I don't know what the terrors said in return, but I heard their rendition of gardener-speech and even without a translator I knew it sounded wrong. Their warbles were strained and unnatural.
Rollo took a break to tune his translator while the terrors patiently waited. He probably wanted it to render what they were saying in a neutral tone, instead of in the creepy way an updog imitated numan speech when it was plotting.
They'd stopped closing the ring, leaving the appearance of an open line of escape back to the shuttle. I was trying to puzzle out why, because it seemed coordinated and intentional. Were they protecting their young behind the ring? Or plotting something else? I kept a nervous eye on all the cameras to make sure they weren't sneaking up on me too.
Despite my paranoia, the contact seemed to be going well. One of the terrors began eating the fish. It sucked them up one by one into its vast mouth like it was sampling an appetizer tray. Rollo seemed engrossed in whatever questions he was asking them, and they must've given convincing replies.
But as the minutes wore on, I noticed the terrors were slowly closing their ring again. Slowly, patiently. Intentionally making sure to move only when both Rollo and Lema were distracted. Was I just imagining it? The shuttle had a loudspeaker- if I announced danger, would Rollo hate me for ruining his first contact over a hunch?
Lema wanted her genetic sample. I saw her bring out the syringe, but she still had enough sense not to walk up to one. But the terrors were happy to resolve her hesitation, as a small pup of theirs came closer to meet her. It was barely bigger than me, but looked weak and almost cute, the way it flopped ineffectually. Lema cautiously let it approach. She pet it and it squirmed with happiness.
While she was preparing her needle for a sample, the trap was sprung.
The pup whipped its tail faster than the eye could see, stabbing Lema right in the leg. She screamed and tried to stumble back, but it lunged forward and clamped its jaws on her wounded leg. The ring was closing now, the terrors a malevolent wall of black. Rollo unslung his plasma rifle and shot the pup until its midsection had melted into gory plasma, but even in death it clamped down on Lema. She screamed as she was swallowed up in the ring of terrors, huge mouths jostling for the honor of eating her alive.
Now Rollo was running back towards the shuttle. But a pair of terrors burst out of the sea at surprising speed and blocked off the final portion of the ring. He opened up full auto with the plasma rifle, but there was only so much the improvised weapon could do against the massive walls of blubber. They died, but their sizzling corpses continued blocking his path.
I'd been mesmerized by watching it all unfold, but terrors were coming out of the sea and moving towards the shuttle too. I hastily hit the button to liftoff, and floated the shuttle over to Rollo. He was shooting from the center of a dwindling ring, and I maneuvered on top of him. There wasn't any time for a landing. I threw out the fishing net and accelerated upwards the moment he caught hold of it.
Circling in the air a dozen meters above, I set the shuttle to maintain position and then hauled up Rollo, my arms straining. He collapsed onto the shuttle floor. The translator on his wrist was still working. I was right about the neutral tone.
"Die. Die. Die. Die. Die."
He switched it off. I looked down for signs of Lema. I only saw her blood staining gaping black mouths, and her severed hair and tiara lying on the sand.
I nearly vomited. But instead I closed the hatch and set the autopilot for the mainland. The island dwindled to a speck as we sped over the water.
Something was breaking in Rollo, emotions playing across his face like fissures in a pane of glass about to shatter. He was staring at the translator, probably reviewing where his translation had gone wrong. I didn't care. I wanted answers.
"They ate her, Rollo."
"I know."
"No. Cut the fucking shit, Rollo. They ate her."
"What do you want me to say?"
I wound up and punched him in the stomach as hard as I could. He doubled over and wiped spittle from his mouth.
"I want you to tell me the truth. Because that shouldn't be possible."
"She knew the risks. She died- she died doing what she loved-"
"That genemod you gave us wasn't just for skin, was it? We smell good and we taste good now too. What did you do, Rollo?"
His eyes were hollow and red.
"Generalized numan to Exile biocompatibility adaptation. You're welcome."
"That-"
I backed up a step.
"That doesn't make any sense. We don't have those."
"Sila didn't," Rollo said.
"You- what? What are you talking about?"
He smiled.
"We're not going to starve, Jaku. We're going to live long and full lives here. We might even live long enough to see the second expedition."
Rollo continued while I slumped against a wall and stared at him.
"Feix gave me three injectors. I never betrayed him, but I wanted this- to be here, to discover these creatures. So he let me go, but he gave me three. And he said, 'If you want to save them, save them.' And you know what? I didn't. The thought of this planet crawling with numans like Sila sickens me. So I used them all. On myself, on Lema, and on you. Not enough for her children, so she- I made sure they wouldn't come."
"You could save them," I said. "Everyone at the lander."
"You think I haven't made sacrifices? My own husband was there. But I couldn't- I couldn't, he'd figure out the biochemistry somehow. He was too good. You don't know shit, Jaku, and you're also the only person who ever actually looked around them and cared about this planet. That's why."
"You could save my mother," I said, throat dry. I stared at him and he couldn't quite meet my eyes.
"I don't want to. And it's too late now."
I scrambled to a storage compartment and brought out my plasma gun. Rollo had lost his getting off the beach, so he watched passively as I aimed it at him.
"What will that accomplish, Jaku?"
My hands shook. He'd lied to me for so long, and for what? We sat there in silence as the shuttle hummed over the water, my finger hovering on and off the trigger.
"Why shouldn't I?"
Rollo shrugged, and started explaining like it was a math problem.
"It would be irrational. You'd be alone and without my expertise."
"I could go back to the lander."
"And you'd watch them all die. It's too late to reverse engineer the genemod for them, especially without another dose. Lema's death will make this much harder for us, but the two of us can carry on."
"Carry on what, your studies?"
"Certainly. You could even get credit. I expect a ship to come by within ten years, then you can return to Surgos. You'll inherit your mother's investments." He smirked. "Maybe you'll even fund me."
I wondered if there was a setting on the plasma gun low enough to just hurt Rollo, maybe a lot. He spread his hands.
"Or you could have nothing to do with me, if you wanted. But give it some time, Jaku, and I think you'll see that I'm right."
"You're letting them all die, for no reason!"
"How well do you know your mother, really?"
I kept the gun trained on him as he turned to a nearby screen and pulled up a recording. Taken during a meeting on the executive level. Sila was there, as were Midol, security chief Tersa, and Rollo's husband Torv. The camera was one of Sila's, mounted in the ceiling.
"How did you get this?" I said.
"I asked. Shh."
"Assume we figure out the nutritional problem," Sila said on the screen. "How habitable is this planet?"
"Fairly," Torv said. "The solar radiation is a bit weak, but otherwise there shouldn't be any long-term issues."
"Tersa, mineral outlook?"
"I doubt we'll exhaust the surface level deposits while we're here."
"I want the long-term," Tersa said. "Suppose a large colony."
"What? Uh, shouldn't be an issue. There'd be plenty in the asteroid belt if there were shortages. Why?"
"It's a habitable planet, halfway to the Bazaar," Sila said. "We're being forced to run a colonial proof of concept, and I'm an investor."
"You're very optimistic," Torv said. "Survival isn't going to be easy. And the natives-"
"Not legally a problem," Sila said with a dismissive wave of her hand. "They can be put somewhere."
Rollo cut the recording there. I wondered if he'd cut it there for me to see exactly what he wanted and nothing more. But I also knew that Sila probably had considered it. She might just have seen this as an opportunity to turn her failed trade expedition into a successful colonial expedition.
"Even without her, someone else might try eventually. But it'll be harder for them, because by then we'll have fully documented the runners and their culture. I took no joy in this, believe me Jaku, but it was necessary."
I didn't have a response, but I kept the plasma gun the whole way back. When we landed, I took the gun and the translator and fled out the shuttle towards the roost. It was late afternoon, and climbers were calling to each other from the treetops.
As I leaned against the mud wall of the roost, Sworl came running from the treeline towards me. I froze for a moment in fear, but he came to a stop before he ran me over and quickly lowered his head to sniff at me.
"It was very bad that you left to see the terrors and you did not tell me," Sworl said. "I would have come with you and fought them off."
"Yea, thanks, they were… a lot."
He carefully sat down next to me. I saw Sunrise off in the trees, looking our way before darting off with his mouth full of plants.
"What is wrong with your eyes?" Sworl said.
I looked back. He was wholly focused on me. And by the way his tail whipped back and forth, I could tell he was anxious.
"I'm crying. It's a numan thing."
I wiped away my tears and stifled a few sobs.
"Lema is dead," I said. "The terrors ripped her to pieces."
"I am very sorry to hear that," Sworl said. "She was a good sizzler who healed me when I was sick."
"I didn't even know her that well," I said. "Now she's gone. Just like that."
"It is a bad way to die, to be eaten by a terror and feed their evil."
"Yea."
I clenched my fists, sorrow swinging into rage again.
"They were lying to me. I figured out why I smell different. It's because Rollo had a compat genemod all along. But he could've given it to everyone else at the lander, they could've figured out how to replicate it or something. How could he just- consign everyone to death?"
"I do not understand," Sworl said. With how long the translations were becoming and how furious I was, he could barely get a word in. Talking over each other just wasn't something gardeners did, and I was too angry to stop.
"Yea! I don't get it either! He just straight up injected me with it. Never even told me. Everything we were working for, and he had it all along. But everyone else wasn't good enough for him. He had this bullslop about stopping a colony and saving the planet, saving you, but I think he just wanted all the credit. And- and it's like he's made me complicit in their deaths. I'll be eating roast climber while they starve."
Sworl waited very patiently for the translator to stop speaking.
"I am happy you will not starve to death," Sworl said. "What food can you eat now?"
I thought about the prospect of Sworl bringing a live animal for me to eat raw, and I wasn't tempted. Not yet.
"Maybe the gum?"
Sworl picked me up with his tail and carried me. I didn't have the energy to resist and he didn't go very far, just to the stand of gum trees near Sunrise's roost. He gently scored the bark with his teeth, and I cupped my hands as sticky sap began to flow. It smelled sweet. I was surprised to find it tasted pretty much like honey now. Before it had smelled rank, but now it was probably the most delicious thing I'd eaten in a long time.
I ate until the sap hardened and stopped flowing. My hands and face were both thoroughly sticky, and there wasn't anything to clean them with. Sworl found my predicament amusing, and eventually I convinced him to carry me back to the roost's lake, where I could wash it off.
He took the opportunity to wash himself too, rolling around in the water and getting me thoroughly wet. I splashed at him in revenge, but he could splash a lot more water at me with his tail. At that point a swim seemed nice, so I took off my clothes and floated in the water. Thankfully, the translator was waterproof, so I could keep it around my wrist and as long as the speaker itself wasn't underwater it worked.
"Do you ever swim?" I said. Sworl had sat down in the water, but it was barely deep enough to cover his tail when he laid it flat. He nodded.
"There is a very nice pool in my territory. I will take you there some day."
I smiled. "That sounds nice."
Chapter 10: Caravan Season
Caravan season is not really a season, but when the caravan comes a gardener will always forget what season it is anyway. This was my first time being visited by the caravan and I was very excited, because it had been a long time since I had seen it.
I was sitting next to Lunge in Sunrise's roost pond. I did not exactly understand what had happened, but Lunge was still very upset. Lunge and Rollo and Lema had flown out to sea on their flying box to find terrors and then they found them and Lema had been eaten. I was glad it was Lema that had been eaten and not Lunge, although I had liked her shiny red head thing a lot.
There was also something about Rollo not sharing his genes with the white tree and that was why they could not eat food before. I did not understand this but I understood that Rollo had done a bad thing and had broken the laws of his people. I would have to ask Lunge to explain it all again when he was less upset.
My eyes darted to the trees. Very soon Sunrise ran out of them, his tail waving in panic.
"The caravan is coming," he said. "I am not ready! They have been in Redspot's territory and now they will be in mine and they will see how bad it is."
"You have done what you can," I said. And then to get him to stop worrying, I suddenly splashed him with my tail. He shrieked in surprise and outrage. But soon he joined us in the pond to splash back at me. I think it was Lunge who got most of the water, and he had to swim away until we stopped.
I tried to think of something very wise to say to Sunrise that would make him stop being so afraid. But I could not, so I just said what I really thought even if it was not well-spoken.
"You should not worry what the caravan thinks," I said. "They do not know everything. There are more things that are true than there are rules they can teach. If you ask the great Redspot he will agree, and his garden is the best in the land even though he does not think only about rules like Very Violet."
Sunrise was quiet at this.
"Yes, who cares what they think?" Lunge said as he floated by. "I think your garden is nice, Sunrise. I like that you still have a lot of growlers and munchers around. You can always hear the climbers singing too."
"Thank you," Sunrise said.
He still held his tail with worry. I think when Sunrise was a hatchling he had only barely survived being culled, and maybe he still worried the caravan would take back their decision and kill him, but that was not a thing they could do. They could take back his territory, but I did not think that was likely because Waterskin was suddenly dead and there would not be enough good gardeners for all the territories.
I told Sunrise all of this, but it was very hard to make him not afraid.
Half an hour later, the first of the caravan started to arrive. We were still by the pool when a trio of hatchlings ran up. I was worried they might try to eat Lunge, and I circled him with my tail. The biggest was only a head taller than Lunge, and the smallest came up to his chest, so I do not think they would have succeeded and if they tried I would eat them instead. They still darted around and tried to look.
Unfortunately the hatchlings were very talkative and Lunge's talking box did not know to ignore them.
"What is that?"
"That is an ugly growler!"
"Can I eat it? Let me eat it!"
"These are hatchlings," I said. "Do not mind them."
But I do not know if Lunge understood because his talking box was having a difficult time keeping up. The hatchlings were not polite and talked constantly. I swatted a few away and when they realized I would not let them close to Lunge, they soon lost interest and ran off.
That was when Spikes appeared! He looked like me but smaller, with my handsome dark green coat. But instead of blue sworls, he had blue spikey streaks.
"Hello, Sworl. Hello, Sunrise."
I splashed through the pond and ran up to him. I slammed him gently and he slammed me back. I sniffed his familiar smell deeply as he sniffed mine, then we rubbed our snouts against each other. Our grabbers twined into each other and fought for a good grip.
"You look bigger," I said. "I am glad."
"I am not much bigger. Or you are bigger too!"
"Come sit with us. Is the rest of the caravan close?"
"Yes, they should come soon. But I came first to see you."
We went into the pond.
"This is my brother Spikes," I said. "Spikes, this is Lunge the sizzler."
Spikes came over and sniffed at Lunge politely. Lunge held out one of his grabbers for him and he politely sniffed at the freakish five-grabber neck tail.
"Is it true he came from the sky?" Spikes said.
"Yes," Lunge said.
Spikes was surprised that he talked, but he must have heard about the talking sizzlers because he was not too surprised.
"You do not look dangerous," he said.
"If you runners keep saying that I am going to get my sizzling stick and start biting."
I pestered Spikes for news. So much had happened in the caravan that I had not heard of! There was Very Black who had eaten some of Zigzag's hatchlings and most of the caravan thought this was badly done of him, and Many Colors had found a rock that was shaped just like a growler, and Shiny Blue had grown border bushes into a maze which was very popular among the learners but not yet tall enough to be a challenge for adults.
While Spikes was taking a break from telling me news to find a gum tree, Lunge asked me a question.
"Is something wrong with Spikes?"
This was upsetting because even Lunge could tell that Spikes was sick. He smelled a little bit sour and sometimes his speech was slurred and it made me very nervous because I wanted him to become a gardener like me. He was very smart and I hoped the elders would realize he was smart enough that he should live even though he was weak.
Very soon I forgot about this though because everyone else started arriving! There were many learners and scouts and elders and hatchlings. My mother Midnight Blue came and so did my sisters Zigzags and Leafy. I proudly showed Lunge off to them and they were very curious because he was very weird and ugly looking and despite being so small he could speak very well. Some of the hatchlings seemed jealous because he spoke better than they did.
Then the carts were brought up, and I marveled at all of the shiny treasures in them. There was the growler-shaped rock and shiny seashells and a very big claw that nobody knew what it was from and all of the poems that were written on little bits of soft rock instead of cave walls.
Lunge seemed even more interested in the carts than I was. He was very impressed by the written poems and the cart wheels, and said he did not know that runners made such things and he did not understand how we could do it with only two grabbers on one tail. I think this was because his own grabbers were very bad and stiff like toes so he needed ten of them instead of just two. And I think also he was impressed by the built things because sizzlers were very bad at gardening and did not understand that planting and landscaping were much more important than the carts, which were for fun.
Sunrise's neighbours came, because when the caravan visited you could leave your territory if it was next to it. Redspot was there, along with Eyelegs and Blackstripes. Those two were Sunrise's neighbours and not mine and it was nice to see them but I was more excited to see Redspot and so was Spikes.
The caravan was very exciting, but after two years of loneliness it felt like a lot all at once. And I was worried that even though everyone knew that Lunge was not to be eaten, one of the hatchlings would try to eat him, because hatchlings often did not listen. Lunge also did not ignore them as he was supposed to. He even stroked a small one with his grabbers and said it was attractively harmless! I did not know there was such a thing.
Reluctantly I left Lunge under Sunrise's supervision so that I could go hunting with Midnight Blue. But when we had gotten away from the roost, I found out it was not really hunting that she wanted but talk.
"The other elders are very concerned about the sizzlers," she said. "And I was very upset to hear that you were almost eaten."
I turned my head away and lowered my tail. "I do not want to talk about that."
She watched me carefully and I busied myself with sniffing at a tree for the scent of growler.
"When you are an elder, you will always be afraid for the caravan. A garden can fail and that is bad but it is not death. But if the caravan fails, then our whole island will die."
She gently laid her head on my neck like she had when I was only a learner. I shrugged her off because I was a real gardener now.
"The sizzlers will not hurt us now if they are left alone. Lunge has promised this and I trust him."
We caught the trail of a growler, which was not hard because even after all of my hard work there were still too many. With my mother downwind, I slowly approached from upwind until the growler smelled me and panicked. It ran as fast as it could on its two stubby legs towards its burrow, but Midnight Blue was standing very still above it and when it had reached the entrance she reached down and chomped it up. Then she spoke again for a long time.
"Remember that we have tales of many islands and many caravans. We have rules because every important rule is made after a caravan is destroyed without it. We tend the saplings so the forest does not grow too fast and become empty the next year. We cull the hatchlings so that there are not too many runners to live together in peace. We watch the sea so we know when the terrors are hungry."
"I know the rules," I said. "I am not a learner."
"But you do not know the fear that makes us keep them," she said. "We have been safe before. But these sizzlers are a new thing and a strange thing and maybe a dangerous thing. I have heard what Very Violet has said, and I have heard some of what you have said that has been passed back to the caravan. And I am afraid."
And she said this so well, with such a quivering of her tail and an alertness in her eyes that I believed her and I was afraid too. I told her everything about the sizzlers that I knew, even a little about when they were eating me.
"I will share this with the other elders and we will call a council to decide what to do," Midnight Blue said. "You will be there, and so will Lunge."
"Very well," I said. But I felt as if I should have said more to make her less afraid. The sizzlers were not all evil like terrors were, and I did not want to fight them.
Midnight Blue helped me catch a growler of my own, and then we returned to the caravan. After a number of questions and some wandering, I found Sunrise crouching behind a rock.
"Where is Lunge?"
"He said he wanted to talk to Rollo," Sunrise said.
"That will make him upset," I said. "Why are you hiding behind this rock?"
"I am not hiding!"
"Why not come to the pond with me then?"
"...I am hiding."
I stared at him in silence, and then he sighed. That is where you breathe out very hard to show that you do not want to say something but will. Lunge did that all the time, and Sunrise liked copying what he did, even though Lunge only did these things because his tails were very inflexible and could not show his emotions.
"I am hiding from my mother."
"Why?"
"I do not think she is happy with my gardening."
I knew Yellowneck from when I was a learner, but only as a mean scout to avoid. She was very strict about lessons and would sometimes bite learners who got something wrong. At that moment, I realized that while all the other learners had just avoided her, she was Sunrise's mother and he could not. This made me feel very bad for him.
"You can not avoid her all of the time," I said. "She will find you before you go to sleep."
This did not seem to make Sunrise less afraid.
"I have an idea," I said. "I will find her with you and if she says your gardening is bad I will disagree."
It took more coaxing, but eventually the two of us went to search for Yellowneck. She looked very much like Sunrise, in that her neck was yellow and her body was black. I thought about all the times I had run away from her as a learner. Some of the other learners had thought she was secretly a big pouncer and that she ate hatchlings when nobody was looking.
I wondered if she had accidentally eaten all of Sunrise's siblings and then only had him left to make a learner. But that was a bad thought. Sunrise was a strong gardener and he became a learner because he deserved it.
"It is very rude that you have taken this long to welcome me," she said to Sunrise. Sunrise cowered, but I nudged him forward with my snout.
"Hello Yellowneck," he said.
"All of my hard work teaching you and I see you did not learn anything," she said. "It is like a muncher is tending this territory and not a runner."
"I am very sorry," Sunrise said. I jabbed him in the haunch with my grabber.
"Sunrise is very sorry that you are blind to how good a job he did," I said.
She glanced my way and tried to glare down at us like she had so many times when we were small.
There was only one problem with that. Despite her age, both Sunrise and I were actually a little bit bigger than her now.
"You are not a gardener of great reputation yourself, Sworl," she said. I bared my front teeth at her.
"Sunrise and I face problems no gardener has ever dealt with before," I said. "We do not need advice from someone who has only memorized old rules."
"Perhaps it is you who has misled my son," she said. "I cannot fault him for having bad neighbours."
I was about to snap at her, but to my surprise Sunrise stepped in, pushing her back with a snarl and a crack of his tail that surprised both of us.
"Sworl is a good neighbour, and I will not hear such things said about him!"
Yellowneck stepped back, and looked between us for a long moment.
"Very well. I respect that," she said. Sunrise seemed surprised, so she positioned her tail with grabbers twined in apology and elaborated.
"I am only afraid for my son because he is my only hatchling and I do not want him to fail. The whole caravan can see his territory is not as well-kept as it could be."
"Yes," Sunrise said with some hesitation. It was true and we could not deny that, but I feared she was preparing a new trap.
"But it is also not as bad as I feared it would be. And I know that is not all Sunrise's doing."
I said nothing.
"You are neighbours with Mottled?" Yellowneck said. It was an odd question but I nodded, and then said yes when I realized she would not know what nodding meant.
"He is a good gardener. But he has made all of his neighbours hate him. And so they do not help him, and he does not learn from them, and his territory is poor."
She looked at Sunrise.
"I am not proud of your gardening, but I am proud that you have made many loyal neighbours. Redspot, Eyelegs, and Blackstripes all think highly of you as well. I hope that will be enough."
Sunrise did not seem to know how to respond to her praise, and I did not know what to make of it either. But the tension was defused. While Sunrise and Yellowneck began to twine their necks against each other, I wandered off.
When the caravan comes, the ground around a roost can be trampled by many feet and if the ground is soft it is hard not to step in footprints. A good host would try to sweep some of the footprints away with their tail as they walked. Sunrise had been too anxious to remember to do this, so I did some sweeping myself while making sure nobody saw me do it.
Then I saw a very alarming sight! Lunge was surrounded by hatchlings. I quickly ran over before they could try to eat him, and they scattered into the trees at my approach. Fortunately Lunge did not seem harmed. He even seemed to be "laughing", which is a sound sizzlers make instead of flicking their tails when they are amused.
"I was fine Sworl," he said. "They are very cute."
"You should not pay attention to hatchlings," I said. The hatchlings chittered around us, still interested in Lunge even though I was protecting him.
"I was teaching them confusing questions," he said.
Sometimes I found that if I just stared at Lunge he would keep talking. I did it in this case too because I did not know what to say.
"What does everyone have that nobody can lose?"
"I do not understand your question," I said. "Is that why it is confusing?"
"You are supposed to think of something you could say that would answer my confusing question."
"Bones!" one of the hatchlings said.
"You could lose some of your bones. What if your tail got cut off?"
All of the hatchlings shrank back in horror. I took a few steps back myself.
"Sorry," Lunge said. "Keep thinking though."
The good thing about this "confusing question" was that it occupied the hatchlings, who argued among each other so that I could talk to Lunge.
"Where is Rollo?" I said. "He seemed very excited about the caravan and I have not seem him outside the flying box."
Lunge shook his head. "He's watching through his sky bugs. He does not think it is important to meet runners himself."
While Lunge was talking even to the hatchlings, Rollo was not to be found. I actually thought that made Lunge the strange sizzler, because Rollo was like the others who hid inside their nests and only came out when they had to.
While I was thinking about this, one of the smaller hatchlings snuck past me and pounced on Lunge. But it did not bite, and Lunge instead pet it like he sometimes tried to pet me, only much more successfully because this one was only slightly taller than him.
"It is a name," the hatchling said. "Everyone has one and they can not ever lose it."
"Well, Sworl? Is that true?"
"That is not true. If you swam to another island and there was already somebody with your name you would not have your name anymore and would need a new name."
The hatchling made a disappointed tail droop.
"What is your name?" Lunge said.
"I do not have a name. I am not an everyone!"
Lunge did not seem to like that.
"If you did have a name, it would be Pinkspots though, right?"
"I would be Whitespots."
I felt a sudden apprehension and pushed the hatchling away.
"Do not name the hatchlings," I said.
"I would never give Pinkspots a name."
I growled at Lunge. It was a very serious rule to not give a hatchling a name, and even though he was a sizzler it would be bad. It was true that hatchlings sometimes used fake names among each other- I was called Snaptail before I had a name- but it was bad for a runner to call them by any name.
This was a good rule, because when I was a hatchling I had many friends and most of them were dead. If they had real names I might have remembered them and been sad. But it was hard to explain this to Lunge. I do not think he knew much sadness before he fell from the stars.
After a while the hatchlings forgot about Lunge's confusing question. Now they were trying to mimic the strange and totally vertical way he walked without a tail and trying to get Lunge to race them, which led to them being excited about how slow he was. Even when they waddled totally vertical like he did the hatchlings were faster.
I was growing frustrated with the hatchlings and their talking, but Lunge wanted to stay and I didn't want to leave him alone with them. And once the hatchlings figured this out, they became very clever because they could use me for the real thing they were after: food.
"I'm feeling a little hungry," Lunge said. "Why don't we go catch a growler, Sworl?"
"I have never seen you eat a growler," I said. He waved his neck-tails in indifference. I stared at the pink-white hatchling whose plan this doubtlessly was, and they shrank back a bit.
"Very well," I said. "We will catch a growler."
Usually Lunge would ride me, but this time he seemed to want to ride the pink-white hatchling, which was very funny because he seemed very large riding on their back. If the hatchling ran off and then ate Lunge while I was focused on the growlers, I figured he would deserve it.
We ran off into Sunrise's forest. Despite all the work we had done killing growlers for when the caravan came, there were still very many and it was not hard to find them. By now we had six hatchlings with us, and every time I caught a growler or Lunge shot one they would descend on it in a frenzy and eat it up.
"Are you hatchlings always this hungry?" Lunge said. The pink-white hatchling answered.
"Yes! We are not big enough for gum trees and there are not many growlers in other places. But there are very many here! Sunrise is a bad gardener!"
"Bad, bad, bad," all the other hatchlings chanted.
I made sure to keep one growler's corpse high up in my jaws so none of the hatchlings could reach it. This I gave to Lunge, while my tail whipped around to keep the hatchlings away.
"You said you were hungry," I said. Lunge looked like he was not hungry, but by looming over him and showing off my very bloody teeth I got him to eat a little bit of the growler. But he did not seem interested in much more than that, so I let the hatchlings have the rest.
We returned to the roost as the sun was starting to go down. It was strange to see Sunrise's roost full of runners, instead of nearly empty as it usually was. Lunge felt afraid that we would accidentally crush him in the night, so for once he went to the flying box to sleep even though he did not seem to want to. I found Midnight Blue and buried my head under her tail like I had done when I was a learner, and I slept.
Chapter 11: The White Tree
It was dark inside the shuttle, lit only by the backlights on a dozen screens. Each was playing different camera footage. Rollo stared between them, barely acknowledging my entry.
"Isn't it fascinating? Like a swarm of elephant sized locusts. Their territories are all designed to be stripped bare and still recover."
"Yea, Lema loved studying that."
He gave me a look.
"Blame me if you like, but Lema knew the risks, and it was her project too."
"Whatever. Why were you in here the whole day? I thought you'd be meeting the locals."
"All in good time. I'm studying their social structures."
He froze some of the camera images and pointed out particular dinos with his fingers.
"These are their elders, usually also the largest specimens. The females are the keepers of knowledge and stories- they instruct and guide the scouts, who in turn teach the learners. The elder males, I suppose you could say they've 'retired' from gardening and mainly provide extra workforce. Look. Here's Sunrise on the overhead. This elder, the one with the messy red and green stripes, I bet they call him Eyesore- he's showing Sunrise something about this particular tree. The roots? No… the soil?"
I glanced at a monitor that showed Sworl, and if you squinted enough you could see me next to him. Good to know Rollo had been spying on me. But I'd forgotten how huge the runners were and how helpless I looked on camera. Maybe Rollo was too afraid to get near them again after what had happened with the terrors. Still, we had problems that couldn't be solved from in here.
"Rollo, the caravan is days away from attacking the lander at best. We have to convince them it's a bad idea. I know you don't care if your fellow numans die, but if the runners get slagged you'll have nothing to study."
"I do care," he said, still not looking at me.
"Their 'council' is meeting me and Sworl tomorrow. You should come."
"Hmm," was all he said.
If Sila was here, she'd drill into him until she debugged his surprising lack of interest. I didn't have that kind of energy, so I changed the subject.
"You're not even paying attention to me."
He was looking at zoomed-in shots of the tablet carts.
"You can go look at those in person, you know. They're real, Rollo, not just on your screen."
"I'm tempted," he said. "What I can't figure out is what the social role of writing is for them. The females clearly tolerate it because it's useful, but it also undermines their central role as lore keepers. So what do they find important enough to write down that can't be transmitted orally? Moreover, both Sworl and Sunrise said they knew how to write, but refused to do it without special locations or materials. So it's not just a female activity, but important enough to teach all of them."
"Maybe they just enjoy it, Rollo. Sworl said he wanted to be a poet."
"They have a culture and society which is far more advanced than their technology. I think this group might be an offshoot of a larger civilization that collapsed."
"I'm tired," I said. I cleared out one of the benches and threw a blanket over my head. "Try not to make too much noise."
Rollo turned back to his screens in disinterest.
I slept poorly, my dreams one continuous nightmare. I was trapped in the lander and starving to death, or I was helplessly crawling away while terrors advanced with slavering jaws, or I was running desperately in the forest but it wasn't Very Violet chasing me- it was Sworl. But the worst nightmare, and the one that stuck with me when I woke up, was just a vague certainty that I was completely alone.
I don't know if Rollo even slept that night, but he was still staring at his screens in the morning. And I couldn't even feel angry at him, then. Without a word I left the shuttle.
Sworl and Sunrise turned out to be comparatively late sleepers. I dodged a dozen inquisitive dinos to get inside the roost and find Sworl, then I poked him with a stick until he woke up, took the stick from me, and went back to sleep.
His mother came by an hour later and stepped on his tail until he woke up.
"We will assemble the council soon," she said. She dragged Sworl to a clearing and told us to wait while she found the others.
"Do not worry Lunge," Sworl said. "The council is very wise. Except for Zigzag. But Redspot is coming and he is wise enough for all of them."
An elder named "Pinkfoot" was the first to actually arrive, but she ignored us and immediately took a nap. Half an hour later, "Grayspot" and "Zigzag" showed up together, the two of them deep in discussion about whether flashers used to be more numerous in their youths or whether it was simply a bad year for them.
Eventually Midnight Blue returned with Redspot. If I was reading tail expressions correctly, the other council members were uneasy with his presence. None of them openly questioned it though. "Cloudy Sky" and "Very Black" and "Greentail" completed the council sometime later, a total of eight very large dinos assembled in a rough circle with Sworl and I in the center.
After a meandering discussion about whether or not it would rain soon, the council began its actual business. First they took turns walking up and sniffing me, then they rendered their verdict.
"Why would you want to keep this sizzler as a pet? It is very small and ugly," Very Black said.
"It is not my pet," Sworl said. "It is my neighbour."
"It is a rule that when a buzzer swarm arrives, we do not take one for a pet," Very Black said. She flashed her many teeth with a snarl. "We destroy the whole swarm before it becomes dangerous. Waterskin is dead because you did not destroy the sizzlers, and now the caravan must fix your mistake."
Sworl seemed tense. I didn't know what kind of punishment the council could mete out for failure, but I hoped it wasn't harsh. Fortunately Redspot came to his defense.
"It is not a buzzer," Redspot said. "A buzzer will attack even if left alone. Waterskin attacked the sizzlers and they fought back and he was hurt. That is like a stomper. I saw many sizzlers and I left them alone and they did not attack."
"It is too small to be a stomper," Zigzag said. He looked between the others to gauge their opinions. "How can it be dangerous? I think Waterskin hurt himself."
While that would be useful for the council to believe if we were only defending Sworl's actions, we had the whole caravan to protect. I held up my plasma gun, and with a nod from Sworl I fired a burning glob of plasma at a nearby tree. We'd picked out the tree beforehand for being particularly dry and dead, so it burst into flames easily. Most of the elders stood up and backed off in fright at this demonstration.
"There's a hundred sizzlers in the lander," I said. My speech seemed to startle some of the elders even more, even though I'd been walking around and talking all of yesterday. "And all of you are pretty easy to hit. Don't attack."
There were only five or six plasma guns and we'd taken two in the shuttle, so this was a bit of a bluster. But Sila was resourceful and driven and if the dinos caused any problems, they'd be wiped out one way or another.
"It spits very hot fire!" Zigzag said. He was closest to the tree, and moved all the way to the other side of the circle.
"That is more reason to destroy the nest," Very Black said. "If they are so dangerous and they spread, it would be bad."
"The white tree is not planted in the correct soil," Redspot said. "I am told it belongs in the sky and that here it withers. Is that true Sworl?"
"The white tree may be dead already. I have not seen it change after it grew its first branches."
"Then surely the sizzlers cannot spread. There are no other white trees."
"But this one does not live in the white tree," Midnight Blue said. She kept her gaze on her son. "It lives with Sworl. And the other one lives in the flying box. And Sworl has not been in his territory for some time because he was afraid of the sizzlers. What if the sizzlers can spread?"
"For the love of Cela, we're not bugs," I said. "That's not how it works."
"It speaks like a terror," Very Black said. "Its words are only to fool us. We cannot trust it."
Sworl's grabber tried to gently pull me back a little bit, maybe in case Very Black did something rash. But I'm not sure Sworl could save me if she did- Very Black was the second largest here after Redspot. And I resisted being pulled back because I wasn't going to put up with this slop.
"I am nothing like a terror," I said. "A terror would've shot you already. We're people, the same as you. We don't want violence. We only want to return to the sky, but we can't. My people are sick and will die by next freezing season. But until then we bite very hard. Don't throw away your lives fighting us."
Gardeners never talked over each other. So I discovered that when they were in a furor, they snapped their teeth and growled at each other until whoever wanted to speak next won, which turned into a square-off between Redspot and Very Black. Through posturing I couldn't follow, the right to speak somehow went to Midnight Blue instead.
"The council will think on this," she said. "But for now we should send scouts to see the this white tree again. Sworl should go with them, as it is his territory."
Nobody objected, so the circle began to disperse. Me and my plasma gun were given a wide berth. Midnight Blue approached Sworl, and briefly caressed him with her grabbers before turning to inspect me more closely.
"Is it true you think of this creature as your neighbour, Sworl?"
"Yes," he said. I briefly locked eyes with him, and he gave me a nod.
"It is small, and not like us."
"Lunge is good," Sworl said. Midnight Blue lingered for a moment to stare at me, and then left with a flick of her tail. The trial was over, but Sworl still seemed agitated and I could guess why.
"I'm guessing you don't want to go back," I said.
"I didn't like being eaten," he said. He slumped down onto the ground, and I started rubbing his snout.
"I doubt they'll catch you again. And… if you bring me, maybe I can figure out how to solve this."
"You do not want to go back either," Sworl said. He was completely right of course.
"Yea. I- we betrayed them, taking the shuttle. And Rollo betrayed everyone. I don't know what I should do. If they dissect me, if they squeeze my tissues for blood, maybe they can all live."
"I don't want you to be eaten," Sworl said. "That would be very sad."
"Would you do it? If everyone in your caravan were at stake?"
He thought about this for a long time, and I never got an answer because Very Violet showed up, slinking her way out of the trees. Sworl growled and I checked my plasma gun, but she wasn't being aggressive. Just present.
"Hello Sworl," she said. She didn't get an answer so she continued. "Wavy Red and I are going to the white tree now, if you want to come. But you do not need to."
"Now?" I said. When Sworl did not answer her, she was forced to acknowledge that I spoke.
"Yes. All we need to do is see that it is still there, and then tomorrow the caravan can clear it out."
"I will go," Sworl said. "And Lunge will also come."
Very Violet really seemed like she wanted to object, but she knew she was on thin ice. So she simply led us to Wavy Red, another scout with an interesting pattern of shifting red hues all over her. I wouldn't have called it wavy so much as patchwork, but I wasn't sure gardener color range exactly matched mine even after all the genemods. They grabbed their scouting spears from a cart, and we were off.
We weren't in a hurry. Sworl walked as far away from Very Violet as he could, and she didn't dare come closer. Meanwhile Wavy Red turned out to be fairly chatty, and talked mostly about her dreams.
"And then I was facing off against the stomper, but I was very rapidly becoming small until I was only a hatchling again, and the stomper was then a growler but with the face of Greentail. And she told me that I was the third fastest scout in the caravan and I was very proud, but then there was this very big rock-"
She just went on and on, once again revealing the flaw in the runners' overly polite customs because nobody could interrupt her. It took an hour for her to describe her very complicated dream in detail, and I wondered whether Wavy Red actually remembered all of this or if she was just making it up. I tried to switch off the translator after ten minutes, but Sworl objected with a flick of his tail. Apparently I had to suffer too.
When she finally finished warbling, the silence came as a shock.
"That was very interesting," Very Violet said politely. "I dreamed about sand-digger eggs. What about you, Sworl?"
"I was being poked with a stick."
We stopped for refreshments at a gum tree stand. This time I used a knife to gently stab into the bark, and I was rewarded with slightly less of a mess.
"Why do you carry your teeth outside of your mouth?" Wavy Red said. I showed her my actual teeth, and she leaned in close to examine them.
"I collect teeth," she said. "Yours are both flat and sharp and are so close they are touching. It is not a type of teeth I have seen before. Can I have some of yours?"
"No. I don't grow new ones."
This prompted a lot of questions. I had to explain that I also didn't lose or break teeth very often, that some of the teeth were for chewing and some for cutting, that if something was too big for my mouth I'd cut it up with my hands before eating it, and so on. Eventually Wavy Red was asking about other animals too.
One of Rollo's rules was not to show screens off to the dinos, because it'd be "cultural contamination" or something. But I didn't care about Rollo or his rules anymore. So I pulled up images of animals for Wavy Red to look at, and soon Sworl and Very Violet's heads were also jammed together staring at my handheld screen. They liked the color patterns on birds, but the idea of true flying animals was strange to them. Most mammals were "very dull looking", but Sworl liked the spots on cheetahs and Very Violet wanted to eat a giraffe.
I tried showing them pictures of Surgos, but they couldn't believe anything that big could float in the sky. And they thought the terraforming zone below looked untidy compared to the parks above.
"That's the point," I said. "We missed seeing the wildness. But we can't live there, or it wouldn't be wild."
This idea seemed to trouble Sworl the most, and he soon called for us to move on. We crossed into his territory, which looked approximately no different for his long absence. But when we passed a sapling, Sworl would sometimes pause to rip it up.
Slowly the surroundings started to become a bit more familiar, until suddenly we were there. We stared through the trees, though there wasn't much to see. Just the lander and the temporary buildings around it.
"Let me go first," I said. "I can talk to them."
"No," Very Violet said. "He wants to warn them."
Sworl swung his head over to her.
"Are you a coward, Very Violet? I thought you said it would make no difference if they knew we were coming or not."
"They could scatter if they were warned, and be more work to track down."
"Are you afraid you cannot hunt them, since Lunge bested you?"
Very Violet was silent. Sworl put me down, and I walked forwards a few steps.
"If I don't come back, then… it was an honor to be your 'neighbour'."
Sworl startled at this and suddenly moved to block my path.
"If you won't come back, then you can't go."
"This is something I have to do. I don't want to see any of you get hurt."
Sworl shook his head in an emphatic no.
"Now he does not want the sizzler to go," Very Violet said.
All of this turned out to be moot, because Wavy Red had already wandered over for a closer look while we were talking. We rushed after her as she stepped out of the treeline and peered at the buildings.
"This is a very interesting tree," she said. "It is the biggest tree I have ever seen, although not the tallest."
"Get back here!" I yelled. Any moment someone could burst out of a building and start putting holes in her, which would ruin our chances of a peaceful resolution. I was left outside the greenhouse building while Sworl and Very Violet dragged Wavy Red back into the treeline.
I waited for five minutes for someone to come out and greet me, but nobody came. I looked in through the greenhouse window and it was empty. All the lights were on, and I could see rows of leafy shoots in their growing boxes. The door's access code had been changed, so I moved over to the biolab building. It didn't have any windows, and someone had repaired the bay door that Sunrise had broken through.
Sworl cautiously joined me, though he refused to get too close to the biomechanics building and the door that had swallowed him whole.
"Where are all the other sizzlers?"
"I don't know," I said. "They might all be in the lander."
I went up to the lander door and banged on it, yelling for someone to come out, but nobody came. I knew that with everyone in there the lander would be cramped, but maybe they'd put people into hibernation to save on food and the research crew was too busy to notice someone at the door.
They wouldn't abandon the biomechanics building and its equipment, though. I cautiously approached Sworl and pointed to its cargo bay door. The same door where he'd been "eaten", but also the easiest way in.
"Could you bust that down?"
I knew it was hopeless even before I finished asking. Sworl wasn't going back in there. But he did relay my request to Very Violet, who was more than happy to obliterate it with a swing of her spear.
The cargo bay's interior had been rearranged since the last time I was here. All of the medical equipment for working on dinos was gone, replaced with culturing vats and centrifuges. Lines of blinking lights flashed standby yellow, while locked screens scrolled across stunning Surgos landscapes.
I checked out the rest of the building. Empty, and in the same standby state. I didn't get it. If they'd refocused their efforts inside the lander, why wouldn't they cut power to the outer buildings? Were some of these experiments still running?
Just to check, I found a workstation and tried to enter my credentials. Unrecognized, obviously. They'd shut us out the moment we left. On a whim, I tried Lema's and Rollo's credentials too.
We didn't have bioauth on Exile, so access was controlled by "passwords", which were little phrases that you had to memorize. Sila had sent out constant announcements about password safety, because nobody thought twice about lending theirs to a coworker or writing their password down next to their workstation. Rollo and Lema hadn't listened to those. It'd been easy to hang over their shoulder and watch them enter their passwords. Lema's was "mypassword123" (which was almost mine too), and Rollo had chosen "sandinthedesert", which he had explained was part of a Siltarch saying.
Lema was locked out like me. But Rollo was not. I could log into his account and I could pull up the comm software just fine. In fact, a notice in the top left informed me I was in admin mode.
My hand froze over the input bar as I realized what that meant. Not only did Rollo have a compatibility genemod, he'd had a backdoor into the lander systems this whole time. Stealing the shuttle and breaking into the rations would've been no problem at all for him. He could spy on anything he wanted.
It took me five minutes to figure out how to manually unlock the lander doors, since the AI voice interface had gone insane and was in a refusal loop. I went back outside to see the three dinos watching while wisps of yellow gas spilled out of the lander's open main door.
"It smells very bad," Wavy Red said. And my own nose agreed. Even from a distance it watered my eyes.
"I don't know what that is," I said. Maybe they'd figured out a genemod that required a different type of breathable atmosphere? That would explain why everyone would've abandoned the open-air outer buildings to huddle in the bunker, and wouldn't come out.
"It is dying. We should finish it off," Very Violet said.
"Go ahead and try," I said. I logged into my screen using Rollo's credentials and wirelessly closed the door to stop atmospheric leakage. Meanwhile Very Violet was viciously swinging her spear at the lander's walls to no effect. After a few swings the spear snapped, and in frustration she slammed into the lander with her bulk.
Dinos did have a sense of humor, but their tell was playful tail flicking instead of audible laughter. So I could tell that Sworl found her struggle hilarious, and I found it worth a chuckle too. She wasn't going to put a dent in five feet of solid blast ceramic. All her grand ideas of breaking the lander would amount to absolutely nothing except leaving her sprawling in the dirt.
While she did that, I struggled with the manual UI for the lander's software. It was impossible to go ten seconds without running into some kind of glitch. I'd try to open a screen I wanted and it'd crash, or I'd do something and the screen would show a loading bar forever. This software was supposed to be genuine hardcoding and not AI, so I wondered if something important had broken.
The ventilation system read normal operations, which supported the replaced atmosphere theory. It looked like the life support was back on, but with a sulfuric gas mix.
I peeked into the ship comms. The last notice was an emergency recall of all personnel to the lander last night, but no details were listed as to why. I used my admin powers to skim through peoples' mailboxes, and nobody had sent anything after that. There must've been a critical software failure. Maybe one of the AIs had brought the system down with it when it went crazy. The only thing I could get to work was the loudspeaker.
"Testing," I said. My voice echoed from the lander. Very Violet jumped back and hissed. "Testing. Can, uh, someone come to the main door? We need to talk."
"It is speaking at us," Wavy Red said. "What did it say?"
"That was Lunge talking," Sworl said. "His voice became very big. I think he wanted someone to go somewhere so he could talk to them."
The translator hadn't picked up on what I'd said into the loudspeaker, so how did he know what I'd said?
"I am trying to learn how sizzlers talk," Sworl said. He looked proud at my reaction, with his head held high and grabbers splayed wide. "You say your words to the box and it says our words to us. They mean the same thing."
"That's impressive," I said. And I meant it. Numans almost never bothered learning another language, and if they had to talk to a Mendusian or a Siltarch they used a translator. I'd heard as much of Sworl's language as he had of mine, and all I really knew was how to say hello and when they sounded happy or mad.
Nobody responded to my loudspeaker announcement. I was starting to suspect why. I opened the ventilation system again and had it cycle from sulfur to Exile's atmosphere. It only took five minutes, then I opened the lander door and no yellow gas spilled out.
"I'm going inside," I said. "I'll be back out soon."
Through the door and there I was again, inside the sickeningly dull metal confines of the lander. I barely made it ten steps without stumbling on the first corpse. Nina, the maintenance engineer, her eyes bulging out her head, sprawled in an agonized pose on the floor. Nina had been something like a friend, almost. And there she was, dead on the floor.
All of the doors on the lander were locked by admin override. Behind every one, corpses. They'd been gassed to death. I knew most of these people at least a little, when they and I were both out of cryosleep at the same time. It hurt to open every door. I could barely see straight, but I stumbled onwards and upwards.
The lander was eight levels tall. Each level was roughly circular with rooms that fanned out around the central elevator. Something compelled me to visit every floor. Since the air systems were on the first floor, every higher floor had just a little bit more warning time. On A floor people died wherever they happened to be. B floor was mostly occupied by the industrial printer that had made most of our stuff from scrap, but some poor soul had just enough time to climb inside an airtight fabber. They'd suffocated over hours instead of moments. I didn't look at their face to see who it was.
C floor was children's bunks. All of the vat kids had returned to their bunks for the personnel recall. Many looked peaceful and almost asleep, except for the blood streaming from their eyes. I could tell Iggy had gone out hard from his agonized pose. I walked past my own empty bunk with a shudder.
D and E floor were adult bunks, converted into workspace during the day. They'd had enough time up here to barricade the vents, but it hadn't helped. Shilo had tried to take a plasma gun to the walls and had only succeeded in burning himself to death, leaving the wall spotless. Midol was slumped over a table strewn with beakers, strands of his hair floating in chemical dishes. Working up to the end, no doubt.
F floor was the reactor and compute. The reactor was still humming, and unless something broke it'd be working fine for another thousand years. I found Sami crumpled precariously on top of a server rack, trying to breathe in good air from the ceiling.
G floor was where Sila's control center was. My hand quivered over the unlock button as I stood outside the door. I knew what I'd find. I didn't know if I was ready to find it. She wasn't the best mom, but she was my mom. She'd sculpted my life, and in her own rigid way she'd loved Bavilla and me. I could even see her rebellion against Captain Feix being about us, about our safety, and not just her need to be in control.
I slumped against the door and cried. I just couldn't. I wasn't ready. She was dead. Everyone on this planet was dead, except for me.
And Rollo.
I fled down the elevator and out of the lander. It suddenly felt like I was the one suffocating, and even being outside in the purple sunlight I couldn't breathe. The dinos watched me, but I didn't explain. This wasn't something they could understand. I screamed in agony at the sky until my voice was raw. I couldn't hear whatever the translator was trying to say.
Eventually, Wavy Red and Very Violet both left. Sworl sat down next to me and just waited while I came apart. I kept thinking about smug Rollo, holding the cards the whole time, deciding it was too inconvenient for people to live. How all of his high principles just made him more cold-hearted than Sila could ever be.
The sun slowly arced across the sky.
"There is a poem that was written by Very Purple in my caves," Sworl suddenly said. "It can only be seen on a certain day in Howling Season, when the light hits the cave just right. And I have never seen how it ends, only how it begins. And it begins very sadly. I thought Very Purple must have also been very sad, because the poem was about all of the bad things that had happened to him. And because of this I thought he must have wanted to fall down the cave and die. But when I asked Very Violet, she said that Very Purple was not sad. She said he was happy. So I think the poem must end happy, even if it starts off with bad things."
I sighed.
"I'm fine, Sworl. You don't have to cheer me up. I'm just…" I trailed off, causing the translator to give an upset beep.
"I know we are very different. But I want to help, Jaku."
I smiled weakly. "Stick to Lunge. It's very unnerving when you do that."
"Very well. I am sad that your tree is dead," Sworl said. "Maybe we could plant a new one?"
"That's… no, that's not what happened. It's not the lander. It's everyone else that's dead. Rollo killed them. He made the air bad and he made it so nobody could escape. I just… I just didn't think he was capable of that. That anyone was capable of that."
Not even Captain Feix had been that cold-blooded. Rollo had done his dirty work for him. Rollo had held the cure and everyones' lives in his hands. And the moment the lander had posed an inconvenience to his work, he'd choked it to death.
"Sometimes a person will lose their thinking," Sworl said. "They become violent like a terror. They no longer speak, only growl and bite. We do not know why. But we know when this happens they must be killed."
I shook my head. "He's not insane. He had reasons, maybe even good ones. But he killed real people for them."
I wiped at my eyes.
"You are not violent," Sworl said. "I saw you struggle to kill even a growler. When I wronged you by killing your sister, you did not try to hurt me. You will not kill Rollo, even though he has killed all of your people."
"No," I said. I stared at the dirt. "But I don't know how I can live with him either."
"I understand," Sworl said. "I will come back for you."
My brow furrowed as the translator finished. I looked up, and Sworl was walking towards the treeline with his tail held high. I realized what he meant. But I froze up. And by the time I shouted for him to stop, he was gone.
Chapter 12: Many Seasons
It was good to be back in my territory. Although Sunrise had been very nice while I had stayed with him, I was always worrying about whether my ponds would dry up or whether my gum trees would start rotting. There was a lot of work to be done.
Despite the white tree being dead, the caravan still visited. I think the elders were very impressed by its corpse and all of the strange branches it had. The things that the sizzlers made were very popular for being so strange and so shiny, and many were taken for display. I asked Jaku if this bothered him, but he just shook his head and looked sad.
I was very worried about Jaku and how sad he was. He spent a lot of time staring at the glowing things he called screens and I did not know if that was good or bad. He made the screen show him his home and other sizzlers, and this seemed to make him more sad.
All of the adults and learners were too big to go inside the white tree, but many hatchlings went in. It was like a cave that grew into the air, filled with boxes and lit by tiny stars in the ceiling. The hatchlings said many strange things about it, but all agreed that many sizzlers had died in there and none remained alive. So Jaku was the last of his kind.
The caravan stayed a long time, but when interest in the white tree died out and my gum trees no longer had sap it left. I did not want to follow it to Mottled's territory, because I did not like Mottled and I did not want to leave Jaku. So I said goodbye to my mother and my sisters and my brother and soon I was sad like Jaku, because I would not see them again for many years.
Gardeners always feel a deep loneliness when the caravan leaves. And maybe that is why Sunrise still came over to my territory, even though he was not supposed to. I did not mind. I would never rage against Sunrise again after he had given his blood to save my life.
And Redspot had trusted me with a great secret: many gardeners who were good neighbours visited each others' territories, even though they were not supposed to. Many rules were like that, and sometimes you did not have to listen to them if you were wise and truly knew better.
Sunrise had another motivation for coming too. Jaku said that Batterylow thought using an AI. No matter how many times he explained it, I did not understand what an AI was. But apparently the white tree had many powerful AIs in it that no longer had a use, which he could use to make Batterylow learn and think with. And so Sunrise would come over to talk to Jaku about this AI. This was good, because Jaku did better when he was busy.
As the seasons passed, Jaku grew less sad. He had not gone back to the lander or the shuttle for a long time, but one day in the hot season he asked for my help. One by one, he brought out the corpses of his fellow sizzlers from the lander. This took a long time and he seemed to struggle under their weight, but once they were out of the lander I could grab the small sizzler corpses and put them in a line.
Sizzlers corpses smelled terrible but they did not seem to rot away even after all this time. Jaku said that there were very tiny creatures that ate corpses and made them rot, but they did not know how to eat sizzler corpses. But there was also a way that the corpses themselves would rot on their own, it was just a slow way that made them mushy.
"I do not know whether the thoughts of the sizzler are still in the corpse," Jaku said. I was getting better at understanding what Jaku really said without the translator every day, so I knew that he had actually said something complicated I did not know and the translator tried to tell me something simple that was the same. That is why I did not tell him that corpses did not have any thoughts, because he was very smart and would know that.
"Not very many thoughts could survive rotting," he said. "But if someday more sizzlers came then maybe they could learn the thoughts and put them into a new body. I do not know."
"Will more sizzlers come?"
Jaku looked up at the sky and I looked too. It was a clear sky. Anything could have been up there, because it was very big.
"The white tree is screaming very loudly for help, but other sizzlers are very far away. They may want to come learn about runners themselves but it will take a long time."
Once we had all of the corpses, we buried them. I found a spot where the soil was dry year-round. Jaku helped me set up a thin wall of rocks that came up to my knees, which were held together by a rocky paste that Jaku's screen taught him how to make.
This wall was shaped like a box, which was a very important shape for sizzlers. All of the corpses were buried inside a box-shaped hole inside the box-shaped wall. For each corpse, Jaku said a few nice things about the sizzler it had been while I lowered the corpse into its hole and buried it.
Jaku wanted his sister buried here, so I had to remember where I had buried her the first time and dig her up. Then we had to find another sizzler carapace so she could be buried wearing it, since I had taken off the one she had had. Finally, after Jaku squeezed the corpse with his neck-grabbers (this was called a hug and sometimes he gave me a hug too) I buried it.
When we buried his mother, he did not have very many nice things to say about her. But he did cry very hard while I buried her, which I think surprised even him.
The only part of Rollo's corpse that was not eaten was a neck-grabber that one of the hatchlings had run off with. I asked the caravan whether anyone had seen it, but we never found it. I bet it was in somebody's special collection. Anyway, we buried an empty wooden box and pretended it was Rollo. We did the same for Lema too.
Doing all of this took a long time, but it seemed to make Jaku less sad so I think it was worth it.
"If you die, should I bury you too?" I said. He nodded, and showed me the open spot next to his sister. The next day I covered that with rocks so he would not be tempted to bury himself there.
After that I was less worried about Jaku. He built a box out of dead trees like a mini-roost for himself, and he was always busy with projects in there. He had his own little garden where he grew the sky plants that he called potatoes, and he combined these with gum sap and climber meat and then ate it. This was called cooking, and he was very enthusiastic about it although I did not see the point.
Part of cooking was purposefully starting a small fire. Instead of using it to cull plants or force their leaves to fly away, he set meat on fire and waited until it was only a little burned to eat it. I ate some of the meat made this way, and it was an interesting flavor but not something I would waste good meat on. I told this technique to Redspot, and the gossip went down the chain. It turned out some runners liked meat burned this way and others did not. Over the years I would hear constantly about cooking meat and gum and sand-digger eggs and hatchlings and all the other things runners tried.
The most popular thing was to burn buzzers, which made them pleasant to eat. But buzzers were a rare pest, and some gardeners wanted to eat burned buzzer more often. It was Eyelegs who was accused of trying to grow tame buzzers just to eat them. The caravan was torn between praising his idea and threatening to burn and eat him instead.
"Sizzler ideas are very strange," I said to Jaku. "But some of them are good. Can you teach me more?"
He looked very thoughtful about this.
"I do not know if it is a good idea. If you learn too much you might start making your own white trees and crashing on other planets too."
"But why is that bad?"
The first thing that Jaku explained to me was how many bad things could come from knowing too much. He said that numans were once humans and were all controlled by a government which was like a very foolish council of elders, and the different governments made them fight each other. But with all of their clever weapons like the sizzling sticks, it was very easy for the humans to kill each other. And sometimes they killed entire worlds with asteroids, which were very big rocks that they pushed out of the sky. That was what happened to the world that humans had come from.
Numans were from Surgos though and had decided to be different. They were much less violent and more interested in knowing things. And that was why they could handle knowing so many things without destroying each other.
"But you did destroy each other," I said. And Jaku did not want to talk about that. So I later asked him whether he thought our people were more like humans or numans.
"I do not know," he said. "That is something Rollo would have wanted to find out."
Personally I did not understand why someone would want to destroy their world when they could build a nice garden instead. But this question bothered me, so I later asked Redspot what he thought. Redspot had once travelled very far across the ocean and had seen many islands.
"We fight each other like sizzlers too," he said. His tail lowered in shame. "We should not learn dangerous things. We are like terrors in many ways. We have so many rules because we are bad."
It shook me deeply to hear the great Redspot say this. So I did not ask about learning from Jaku again, and I hoped that knowing about cooking would not make us destroy each other.
Many good years passed, with good growing seasons and gentle freezing seasons. I grew stronger and bigger and even Mottled respected me. I learned many things about being a gardener. All of the things they told me as a learner were true, but experience made me understand them. Jaku grew as well. Although he was not much bigger, now moss grew on his muzzle as well as his head, which he was proud of.
There was sad news too. My brother Spikes grew sick and was culled. I was sad about this, although I should have been happy that the caravan was stronger now. It made me so sad that I begged Jaku to let me bury an empty crate for him alongside the other sizzlers, and he let me. I felt better.
Sunrise turned out to be a good parent for Batterylow, although Jaku had warned about the limits of AI. Batterylow was very polite and could hold interesting conversations, although I agreed with Jaku that it seemed a little too enthusiastic most of the time. One day Batterylow told Sunrise that it wanted to see the whole world, and Sunrise decided to let it go. Jaku said it had flown to an entirely new island and talked to the gardeners there, but after a few days one of them had panicked and bitten it to pieces.
He did not think this was a big deal, since he could retrieve the thoughts of an AI and put them into another identical-looking drone. But Sunrise said it would not be Batterylow. And although Sunrise was very sad about it, Batterylow had lived a good life and would be remembered in stories that Sunrise would tell.
I felt this was a good thing, and that Sunrise could finally move on from his obsession. But he simply gained a new one. The caravan had mated him with some scouts, and he became very fond of the hatchlings that resulted. His favorite had a yellow neck just like him, but an interesting pattern of wavy yellow lines down its sides too and shiny red eyes.
This favorite had gotten "lost" visiting his territory and "eaten by a pouncer". But Sunrise had actually chosen to raise this hatchling himself until it was older and had a better chance of surviving in the caravan. This was very against the rules, but Sunrise was a good neighbour and I pretended not to notice.
Not noticing was difficult because Jaku loved this little hatchling and gave it as much attention and food as it wanted. Since both Sunrise and I refused to name it (I was glad Sunrise had at least that much sense), Jaku called it Barko. I do not know why, but he seemed to find this very funny. I thought that since Barko was not a person's name, the hatchling could keep it.
I had hatchlings of my own. I wondered if it was coincidence that the caravan thought to make Very Violet my mate, and I almost refused. But she had changed over the years and had become much less aggressive and mean. She did not even object to seeing Sunrise and Barko in my territory. I made her promise not to try to eat Jaku again, and she even managed a polite conversation with him. And a little spark of my old love of her remained, so we did make hatchlings. They had swirling coats of violet and blue.
She did not bring them to visit. And I did not grow attached, so I was happy when I later learned that almost all had died, because that meant one had survived. That one became a learner and was called Violet Sworl, since I was already Sworl.
Gardeners are not supposed to care about their children. Some only see them when the caravan visits. But despite that, I was very proud of Violet Sworl. I wondered if my father Blue Spot was proud of me, but he lived on the other end of the island so I did not know.
One day Violet Sworl would become a full scout and then maybe she could visit me. I looked forward to it.
Jaku said that a sizzler would live with their parents until they wanted to leave. A sizzler could have one parent, or two parents, or many parents and they would love them always. But there were some sizzlers who had no parents, and they were not loved except by the government. He said that Rollo had been such a sizzler and maybe that was why he had been so cruel.
I wondered if all our people were cruel because their parents were not supposed to love them. When I saw how much Sunrise loved Barko, I felt it was good even though it was against the rules. When Barko rejoined the caravan and grew up, he became Sunset, which some elders were upset about because of elder reasons I did not pay attention to.
The future seemed very happy for me. I was becoming respected and would one day be a good elder. My territory was thriving, both because of my skill and because of some interesting ideas Jaku had about fertilization. I had a good relationship with my neighbours. Sunrise was the best neighbour I could have wanted, and Redspot gave me much of his wisdom before he finally retired. It had taken many years, but eventually I had even earned the respect of Mottled and I traded him shells for soil fruits. (I learned that he loved the sea and was sad because he did not have any coast.) Violet Sworl was growing big and was said to be a very fast and smart scout.
But sadness came again. One day Jaku took me back to the lander and went inside. He looked very serious when he came out, which you could tell because his lips could go up or down and when they were down he was serious.
"The sky will fall again soon," he said. But he really said a ship was coming. I sat down so my head could be closer to his and he patted my snout, which was a thing that he liked to do, although for some reason he did not like it when I tried to pat his head back.
"Is that good?"
"It will carry me away from here," he said.
"Then I will stop it."
He smiled, which was when his lips went up and he showed his teeth. It was meant to be friendly and not aggressive, I think because it showed how small and flat his teeth were.
"Sworl, you have been a good friend all these years. But my place is not here, it is among my kind. I must go."
"Very well. When will you come back?"
"You won't live to see it," he said. I pulled my head back, and his grabber trailed off into the air.
"This is very sad," I said. And I wanted to selfishly tell him not to go, but I was a gardener and gardeners are meant to be alone. But Jaku was not a gardener. He was a sizzler, and he belonged on Surgos with its big hives and dead-leafed trees.
He just nodded. There was water leaking from his eyes, but this was crying and it only meant he was sad. And the both of us were sad, but I still took Jaku down to the sweet gum grove and we herded the leaves together. I still curled my tail tightly around him that night even though I was thinking of how cold my roost would be without him.
"When will the ship come?" I said the next morning.
"Four days."
I found Sunrise warming himself on a rock and told him the bad news. Like me, he was very sad. And he now remembered a million things he wanted to ask Jaku. Jaku had to promise to leave behind an AI that would answer questions for him, since Sunrise wanted to learn about physics and biology and other things although I did not know if that was a good idea.
I had many days with Jaku before, but now I could count each day I had left. On the first day, we went into the painted caves. We had been here before over the years, but this time Jaku wanted to take pictures of all the things that Very Purple and I had written. That way, even sizzlers very far away would be able to read my poems. We wandered through the caves using the strange sizzler lights, and we read both the poems that were not in season and even the poems that never received any light. We even found the place where Very Purple had fallen and died.
His bones were still there even though all of the flesh was gone. I did not like seeing his bones there, but Jaku climbed down and took pictures of them, and he even took a bone from the ribcage. He said that the ship that would come for him would want one.
On the second day, Jaku wanted pictures of many places in my territory. We went to the pond by the coast, and my grove of sweet gum trees, and he took more pictures of my roost. Then we went over to Sunrise and took pictures over there. He took pictures of me and Sunrise together, and of the shuttle which had not moved since Rollo had died. I think Jaku was worried he would forget what everything looked like when he was gone, which is why he needed so many.
The third day held a surprise. Sunset had escaped the caravan again and come to visit when he had heard that Jaku was leaving, and he had a very strange request. He was a learner of three years, so he was like a much smaller version of Sunrise, but he was very smart for a learner and also very friendly. I had to pry him off me with my grabber, and Jaku complained that Sunset was way too big to still be trying to pounce on him.
The strangest thing about Sunset was that he spoke Nulang, and he spoke so well that Jaku did not complain about how he sounded. When he spoke like this, the translator would become confused and say his words again in runner words as if he was a sizzler.
"I heard you were going back to Surgos," he said. "I wanna go to Surgos."
"You can't," Jaku said.
"Why not?"
Jaku explained that Sunset could not eat food on Surgos and would not be happy there because it would take too long for him to go there and come back, and the ship might not be able to make him sleep like it did to Jaku. But Sunset was very stubborn and wanted to go anyway.
And he had a response to every reason Jaku could think of for him not to go. Somehow Sunset had found out that the ship was actually full of Siltarchs and not sizzlers, which Jaku had not told me. I did not know what a Siltarch was, except that Rollo had known a lot about them. Sunset said that the ship would be big because Siltarchs were even bigger than runners were, so there would be enough space for him. And they would know how to feed him, and would be happy to take him.
That was when Jaku got very angry and said that Sunset had stolen one of his screens and used it to talk to the ship. As I said, Sunset was very clever and had learned how to use little sticks to poke at the screens. But he did not like seeing Jaku angry at him, and he whined and backed down from the much smaller sizzler who was yelling at him. I thought this was funny. There were bad words that Jaku only said that he was upset, and he said many of them now. The translator never told me what the bad words meant.
"Why is it bad that Sunset has talked to the Siltarchs?" I said.
"They are like terrors. They use words to lure you closer."
"Then you should not go on their ship either," I said.
And Jaku, still frustrated, explained that the Siltarchs were pretending to be very sorry about destroying the ship that had left Jaku behind here in the first place. So they were going to take him back to Surgos as an apology. But if they took Sunset with them too, it would be for profit, which was like eating someone alive but pretending not to.
Sunset disagreed that this would be bad, and I could not tell who was right. But Sunset had already made an agreement with the Siltarchs so Jaku could not prevent him from going. Jaku asked me to stop Sunset instead.
"I could kill him," I said. Jaku looked horrified, and I shook my tail in amusement.
"There is no rule that would stop him from going," I said. "If it is what he wants to do, then he should do it. He is only a learner, it will not be a great loss to the caravan."
"What would Sunrise think?" Jaku said. And this made me afraid, because Sunrise would not be happy at all. Sunset reluctantly agreed that we should tell his father, so we went out to look for him. By this time I knew Sunrise very well, and because the day was good and both moons were in the sky I found him by the beach sculpting roosts out of the sand.
This was a silly thing to do because the water would soon come and wash whatever he built away, but Sunrise didn't mind. And Sunset loved sand roosts too, and Jaku and I liked swimming in the ocean when it was not a season for terrors. So instead of telling Sunrise right away, we spent hours on the beach playing around.
I will always remember how happy that day was. All of us roared in triumph when the sand roost that Sunrise and Sunset had built together withstood the first big wave. Jaku caught a squealer in the sea and he showed us its beautiful shell, but none of us were brave enough to eat it so we let it go instead. We watched the clouds and tried to say what they looked like.
When night was near and we finally told him that Sunset would leave, Sunrise laid down and looked away and would not say anything. And I knew what he felt, because I felt that way about Jaku leaving. We left Sunrise and Sunset together and went home.
On the fourth day, Jaku gave me a picture he had made of all of us at the beach together. I put it in a special place in my trophy room. When I am dead, I hope whoever next lives in my territory will keep it there forever.
I gave Jaku something to remember me by too. I had worked very hard on it, and Sunset had helped. It was a poem in Nulang, written onto clay. It read:
You fell from the sky, and then I didn't know you;
Now I'll howl at the sky that has taken you back.
There is a cold place in my nest where you once were;
And a warm place in my heart where you still remain.
I was not sure why Jaku would be in either of my hearts since that is where all of my blood is, but Sunset had told me this was a good sizzler thing to say in a sad poem. I also made up a howl that went with the poem. It was a very sad howl and it became popular in the caravan. I sometimes heard it in howling season from afar and I always thought of Jaku and wondered where he was.
The ship came suddenly in the middle of the fourth day. It was like a tangled mass of black seaweed that fell out of the sky like rain and smothered everything. Little black tendrils writhed and twisted around me, with lights on the ends like eyes. I could not tell what was Siltarch and what was ship.
It did not stay long. Jaku hugged my neck as tightly as his tiny body could and then he and Sunset and the graveyard and the whole lander were swallowed up by tendrils. And then the seaweed was falling upwards. It disappeared into the sky and was gone.
I am old now, and I have become wise from my long years. I have had many children, grown to hatchling and learner and gardener and scout. But I do not want to become an elder and return to the caravan just yet. I still have Sunrise and now I have two new neighbours, both young gardeners. I tell them everything I know and hope they will learn like I did.
Sometimes though, I do not think they believe me when I tell them the story of Jaku and the white tree. It is a very strange tale. A gardener must learn about plants and soil and water and seasons, and it is strange to be told also that there are people in the sky and they are not like us but they can be neighbours too.
I tell them this story anyway so that they are ready. Though I will not live to see it, someday Jaku will return.
