INTO GREENWOOD JIM GRIMSLEY One TO VISIT THE DIRIJHI one leaves coastal Jarutan by putter to travel to one of the towns near the forest where they staff a trade mission; there are no roads in Greenwood, only waterways, so one must find a boat that travels one of these routes, in my case the River Silas. One heads into the part of Aramen that the Hormling have, by treaty, excluded from settlement in order not to crowd the forest preserve. The Dirijhi no longer grow all the way to the sea as they used to, stopping about a hundred standard land units north of the coast. They never grew on the rest of Aramen, according to what we have learned since we gave them symbionts and began to communicate. Nowadays, Aramenians live in settlements and farms right up to the edge of the Dirijhi preserve. Before en­tering the forest, I stayed the night in the last village along Silas, at the place where the river emerges from the canopy, a town called Dembut where a lot of early Hormling colonists settled. Though they don’t call themselves Hormling any more, except in terms of ancestry, and they have no loyalty to Senal or the Mage. They’re Aramenian these days, they’ll tell you so stoutly, and most of them are for independence, though they keep quiet about it. I had arrived on Aramen during one of the quiet times, when the colonial assembly and the colony’s Prin administrators were getting along with some degree of harmony. I was returning from a decade-long trip to Paska, another Mage colony inside the Cluster, three years’ passage each way on the Hormling Conveyance. On Paska, the independence movement was foundering, as ours was. Like my organization, People for a Free Aramen, the Paskan movement had achieved a certain ceiling of success and been stalled ever since. Their group was twenty-odd years old, ours about twice that. Forty thousand subscriber members and enough com­mitted workers to stage a decent rally every few months. Internal arguments about what mix of sedition and pres­sure could be used to convince the Mage and the Prin that allowing us self government was a good idea. I learned what I could from four years with the Free Paska Coalition, but I was glad to come home again, though somewhat discouraged, after so long an absence, to find that the colonial administration seemed more entrenched than ever. I think we could beat the Hormling, take the planet from them, but I’m not sure about the Prin. Whatever explanation you believe for the powers they exercise, we all know from experience that those powers are very real. They are the key that holds the Hormling empire together. We have seen time and again under the Prin that it is possible to make people happy even when they are not free. The Prin are good at creating contentment, complacency. All over the southern continent the rains fall regularly on the farms, the crops grow, the industries run smoothly, machinery functions, the ships and aircraft land and take off on time. Aramen is the end of the Conveyance line because the gate to Senal is here, and therefore our world is very important to the Mage. On Aramen, the Prin do their jobs carefully, everything works well, nobody goes hungry, sick people get treat­ment, crime is kept low, smuggling and the black market are marginal, and nearly every crime is justly punished, since nobody can fool a Prin. Hard to fight that. Hard, sometimes, to justify it even to myself, that I think we should be free of their rule. The northern continent, Ajhevan, is a different story from the south. The Prin do not administer the weather here, or adjust the growing season, by virtue of the fact that the Dirijhi are a protected species, and this conti­nent is under Dirijhi jurisdiction. The trees have made it clear to the Mage, through the symbionts, that the Prin are not welcome to come to Ajhevan. For some reason none of us have ever understood, the Mage prefers that the Dirijhi be left alone and gives them what they want. So Ajhevan belongs to them, and we humans who live here are truly free, except for Hormling taxes, in a way that nearly no one else can claim. Because we don’t have the Prin here to read our minds whether we like it or not, to look over our shoulders and meddle in our af­fairs. But even my friends in Ajhevan have become resigned to the notion that independence will only come a long time from now. Since my return, I noticed that some of the people inside the movement had begun to speak in the same terms. What we needed, what we had always needed, was an ally. I had hoped to find something like that on Paska. But then, a few days after I returned, a letter arrived from my brother Binam asking me to visit him in Greenwood. The trees don’t care for outsiders, though they make a lot of money running tours into the forest. They rarely grant anyone permission to stay in Dirijhi country for any length of time. But my brother was a symbiont, and I had not seen him since the change. I’d been asking him to allow me to visit for years, to spend time with him but also to sound him out about what the trees might think of independence. All of us with ties to the Dirijhi were making the same request. After many years of re­fusal, Binam had suddenly agreed. So I was on my way. The Dirijhi permit only a certain kind of flat-bottomed boat to travel up-river under the canopy, so I spent the afternoon in Dembut trying to line up trans­portation. The river guides are all licensed, and there was actually a symbiont on duty to check my pass in the outpost station; the Dirijhi hire human staff to deal with the tourist traffic, though the sym was clearly in charge. He or she must have been melded to one of the nearer trees, though even then it’s an effort for a sym to be apart from the tree for any length of time. I knew that much from Binam, who sent me letters, written ones on paper, from time to time; the only scripted letters I ever got in my life. This sym had a pinched look in the face, eyes of that iridescent silver that is the result of the tree-feeding, the pupils small in the light, though they could dilate completely in the dark, enabling the sym to see as if the world were in full noon. Binam would look like that, I reminded myself. He would still be my brother, but he would be changed. Once I cleared my papers and booked passage on one of the riverboats, I found a hotel room for the night. I was tempted to think of the place as primitive or backward, since we were so far from what I had come to think of as civilization, but Dembut had every conve­nience you could ask for. Uplinks to the whole Hormling data mass, entertainment parlors that were 4D capable, clean VR stalls, good restaurants. The Dirijhi don’t like big power matrices, so everything on Ajhevan runs on portable fusion generators; cold boxes, they’re called, and for a village the size of Dembut, about a dozen were required to power the town. Hormling technology, like nearly everything that works in the Cluster. This and much other interesting information was piped to the screen in my hotel room, the loop playing as I keyed the door and entered. I muted the sound and threw my bag onto the little bed. I bought a girl for the night. Her name was Tira and she had a brother who was a symbiont, too. Ajhevanoi are pretty free sexually, and prostitution is considered a nice way to make some extra money, especially in a tourist town, as Dembut is, so there are a lot of people registered with the agencies. People in Ajhevan are not usually hung up about lesbians, though now and then you still get a feeling that they don’t know altogether what to make of us in the smaller towns, so I was ap­prehensive. Tira was a free spirit, though, and we had a nice dinner and went to the room and she gave me a massage and I returned the favor and then we wrapped round each other and got serious for a while. She had no problem with lesbians, clearly, and I felt worlds better when we were done. We talked about our brothers and I asked if she had seen hers since he made the change. She saw him often, she said; to be near him, she had taken up her trade in Dembut—her trade being rune-reading for tourists in the market, the sex was a sideline. She liked the forest, she liked her brother, she liked the difference since he underwent the change, she had thought about becoming a sym herself. “Beats having to work for a living,” she said. In the morning, I met the riverboat on time and waited impatiently to be underway. Today the river sta­tion was staffed by two different syms, one who had been a man and the other who had been a woman. The bioengineering that gets done on a symbiont starts with neutering, but sometimes you could tell which had been which. The eyes, though, were so difficult to read. I kept trying to place them in Binam’s face. We got underway in the eighth marking. My fellow passengers were tourists, a family from Feidre and two couples from New Charnos, southerners, all of them. They were curious about Ajhevan, so I answered their questions politely, while the pilot was busy. I was born here and grew up here, first on a group farm and then in a girls’ commune. After my parents sold my brother to the sym recruiters, I petitioned the Magistrate’s Court for a separation and was granted it, and lived in the commune after that. To be fair, which I don’t always like to be, that’s my way of looking at what happened. My parents didn’t exactly sell my brother, at least, not against his will. Binam had been begging to join the symbionts since he was eight years old and got lost in Greenwood; and my parents were swayed by the bounty and by what Binam wanted, so fervently, and gave permission. I never forgave them for allowing him to make that choice himself, so young, only twelve. Especially since they were paid enough money to sell the algae farm we worked, that they had come to hate. After I divorced them, they bought a big house in Byutiban, on the southern continent, and both went to work in the Prin administration. We reconciled later, though I never did anything to lift the court decision. By then, even if I had forgiven them for selling Binam, I’d never have understood why they went to work for the Hormling. My boat penetrated into the canopy along a string of Dirijhi cities, according to the pilot, an Erejhen who gave his name as Kirith, though since he was Erejhen that was not likely to be his real name. He pointed out how to spot a city: the trees grew closer and denser, the undergrowth was more strictly regulated, the appearance was formal. There was even a foliage pattern along the river, shrubs grown and maintained in a certain se­quence by the tree through a complex process that only a fully mature Dirijh could undertake before symbionts. Nowadays, the symbionts work under the direction of the trees to cultivate the Shimmering Garden, which is the name the Dirijhi give to Greenwood. Overhead, in the cities, the trees intertwine upper tier branches in one of seven patterns, sometimes a mix of all seven in a large city, like the capital. In the branches now and then we would see a sym, but only once that whole day did we see one on the ground. One of the couples asked if Kirith knew any of the names of the cities, and he answered that the Dirijhi had no spoken language and the symbionts never attempted to trans-literate the speech that passed between sym and host. The only words the syms ever gave us are the name they use for the tree people, “Dirijhi,” coined from a word for tree in one of the old languages of Senal, and the name for the forest, “Shimmering Garden.” We were headed for the Dirijhi capital, near the center of the forest. There I would transfer to another flatboat that would carry me along one of the water-channels leading west into the interior, where Binam and his tree lived. We were passing tourist boats all morning as they stopped along the shore, places where the Dirijhi had agreed to allow walking tours for a stiff fee. The tour spots changed from time to time to give the riverfront trees a respite. Since the trees migrate toward the closest river or canal over the course of their extremely long lifetimes, the oldest, longest-lived trees end up along the shore and die there; though trees occasionally refuse to make the migration and many die in the interior before getting all the way to the shore. They migrate slowly, by setting roots carefully and deliberately in one direc­tion and shifting themselves by manipulating the com­pression and tension of wood in the main bole, and can move as much a full standard unit in about a standard century, about seventy years Aramenian. It takes a person about a half a day to walk that distance; it took the symbionts to tell us the trees could move at all. The trees along the river nearly hypnotized me. A lot of them were dead and decaying, since they were the oldest; but their gardens were still maintained by syms in the neighboring trees. The living trees give off all kinds of scents, according to Binam’s letters, the patterns changing with the religious and social calendar, and the effect can be ecstatic. We were getting the tourist spray along the Silas, but even that was heavenly. Some of the Dirijh rise as tall as a thirty story building, if you’ve ever seen one of those. They are massive creatures with a central trunk or bole and a series of buttress roots rising to support a huge upper canopy. The central bole becomes massive and the buttress roots rise up as far as the lowest branches. All the branching occurs from the central trunk, and these massive branches sometimes drop additional prop roots to the ground for support, till a single Dirijh can look like a small forest. The trees can climb four hundred stades high even in Aramen’s 5-percent higher-than-standard gravity, where nobody ex­pected to find the tallest trees in the known stars. Standard years and standard gravities refer to the year and the total gravitic force of Senal, the Mage world. The standard is necessary since there are so many worlds to deal with in the Cluster, all slightly or very different from one another in physical characteristics. I can admit that and still get a little riled that the standard is Senal. Why not a mean year, a mean day, a mean gravity? My parents think that’s a silly argument, that it doesn’t make any difference. That’s no reason to com­mit acts of sedition, to work for a rebellion, they say. But I disagree. I moved for a while to the southern continent, to Avitran, after I got through school in the women’s com­mune. Trained as a gene-splicer in Genetech, working in a clean lab creating one or another of the seventeen hundred legal variants from standard DNA that define the human race as we know it, three hundred years since the Hormling and their partners the Erejhen began to spread through the local stars, and nearly thirty thousand years since the Hormling themselves arrived on Senal, sent there from Earth to find the Mage, as theQonsQuilian claims. I believe the three-hundred-year proposition, I don’t know about the rest. I know I don’t believe in Earth. Two We slept on the boat, while it continued upriver on sat­ellite guidance. Firesprays flying overhead, now and then a bit of the moon peeping through the canopy. Some of the Dirijh fold their leaves at night to bring moonlight down to the Shimmering Garden. Aramen’s tiny moon Kep orbits the planet in a geosynchronous loop and is always in the sky over Ajhevan; sometimes you can see its ghost in the day. The southern continent Byutiban, on the opposite side of the planet, never sees that moon at all, though Aramen has a larger, red moon, Sith, that orbits farther out, and it goes through phases and appears in all parts of Aramen. Because the boats are wide enough to accommodate even a tall person lying across them, there was plenty of room for us to sleep, and we spread out bedding after we ate our dinner packet. No question of our sleeping ashore; tourists aren’t allowed that option at any price. I had bought a sleeping roll in Dembut, and the guide showed me how to get into it. Fairly comfortable, given the motion of the river. The boat was tight and dry; the Dirijhi wouldn’t have let it run the river if it weren’t. Peaceful to think that the boat would continue on its placid voyage while I dreamed. Overnight, we passed through one of the Dirijh cities where the channels cross; out in the center at the junc­tion grew a single Dirijh, one of the conifers, gorgeous and nearly symmetrical, rising right up out of the water, its roots immense, earth filtered out of the river clinging to them, glistening in the moonlight. We sailed around it. The guide woke me up to see; he had understood my interest, knew my brother was a sym. It never hurts for a guide to know a sym, or a relative of one. “You ever see anything like that?” Kirith asked. “No. We used to come to Greenwood when I was a kid, but never this far north.” “You grew up here?” “Yes.” “You like it?” I laughed. “Yes. Very much.” He nodded. Handsome, like most of the Erejhen I’ve met. He was one of the dark-skinned ones, colored like coffee, with deep, dark eyes. “This reminds me of home, this place.” “Where?” “Irion,” he said, “near the forest where the Mage comes from.” I laughed. “No, really. Where do you come from?” He tilted his head. “You don’t believe me?” “I don’t believe you come from Irion. All you Erejhen say you come from there, but most of you were born here, just like me.” His jaw set in a line. “I come from there,” he said, and he turned away, offended. All day the next day, we traveled north. This was summer in the northern hemisphere, very hot in most places, but we were perfectly cool, riding along the wa­ter in the deep shade. We came to the Dirijh capital, and I got off the boat onto a floating platform and hired a space in a channel-boat going east. Not a single word from Kirith after our conversation the night before. Maybe he was from Irion, but it’s true they all claim to come from there, you have to ask. I’m not a follower of the Irion cult, I know as much as I need to about the place; the Prin are trained there, which is reason enough for me to distrust the rest of the Erejhen, too. The channel-boat was ready to leave, mine was the last space to be sold, and we were underway as soon as I showed my papers, which were actual physical docu­ments, fairly stained and tired by that time. I got a look at the trees of the central city, which is probably the better way to describe the way this city functions than to call it a capital. Greenwood is defined by rivers and channels that divide the forest in a rough grid, sometimes skewed but very clearly organized. The rivers flow north to south and channels flow east-west. The sym­bionts say the Dirijhi grew that way deliberately, cre­ating the watershed to make the water run where they wanted, first defining the rivers and then dividing for the channels. The grid functioned as irrigation and fire protection for Greenwood long before it served as a highway for trade, tourists, and sym business. The cen­tral city lay at the junction of the Silas, the central river, and the central channel, which the guides have named the Isar, after a river in Irion. A day and a half east, I got off at the junction of the Isar Channel with the River Os. From there, I would travel inland by truss. The syms have domesticated some of the animal species, including the truss, an oversized bird that has only vestigial wings but has thighs pow­erful enough to carry two people, in baskets slung over the truss’s back, one on each side. In my case, in the other basket was the sym who owned the truss. The ride was indescribable, I thought I would break bones with all the jolting and bouncing around, but the bird could move. Leaves slapped at my forehead as we headed out of the city into rural Greenwood, the part of the forest nobody sees unless she knows a sym. Binam’s tree was a youngster and lived pretty far out. All of Greenwood is cut through with creeks and canals to bring water into the interior, and we could have nav­igated on those except the Dirijhi don’t like the waters to be disturbed so close to their roots. The brain case is in the root crown, where it developed out of specialized root tissue that provided the trees with gravity percep­tion. The older trees along the main watercourses can take the commotion of the boats, because they have to, but everybody travels by truss or by foot in the interior. My companion in the balancing basket was another kind of guide, hired to lead people like me to the proper tree. Those guides are all syms, who charge a high price for time away from the host. Binam had arranged the guide and the truss, since there was no way for me to do it. The sym kept quiet on the trip, to conserve energy. With this one, I couldn’t tell whether the original had been a man or a woman, and that made me uncomfort­able. I watched the undergrowth, smelled the most amazing perfumes, caught flashes of sunlight overhead. The change in the Shimmering Garden as we left the cities was marked. Different shrubs grew, and vines climbed some of the trees and then cascaded from tree to tree, spectacular festoons of flowers hanging down from the boughs. The truss paths were moss or something that looked like clover, and along either side of the path were flowering bushes, low growing trees, and other kinds of growth that the Dirijhi encourage. No more sense of formality; each tree tended its garden as it wished, and some of them were wildly overgrown, the central trunks nearly hidden behind green walls, screened overhead by the low-growing canopy where it was impossible to distinguish one tree from another. No one can travel safely here without a guide, though the occasional renegade or stray tourist has tried. Many of the plants are toxic to humans, and some of the poisons kill by contact; the truss paths avoid those, but most people on their own wouldn’t know the difference before they were dead. The truss had a musty smell, but no bugs I could see. Their owners keep them clean, no easy task with a bird. Dun-colored feathers. A mottled pattern of brown and dull green feathers on the back of the neck, that I grew to know far better than I wished. We traveled through the night, and I even dozed oc­casionally, my head collapsed onto the woven carry-all strap, truss feathers tickling my nose. We were only allowed to stop at certain oases, mostly in public mead­ows that the Dirijhi cultivate to open up the canopy to the sky. A place where a Dirijhi dies is left fallow for a long time, while the body decomposes, and we stopped at one of those as well. I was glad we were passing through the open spaces at night, since the Aramenian sun can be murder that time of year in the north; in fact, I hadn’t dressed quite warmly enough for the night, and the rest of my clothes were bouncing up and down in the luggage tied to the truss’s back. I had learned so much from Binam’s letters, nothing I saw seemed entirely foreign to me. He wrote me often in the early years when he was working as a guide, when he was fascinated by what he was learning, by the trees he was meeting, by everything in Greenwood. I was fas­cinated too, once I was living in the girls’ compound and studying genome manipulation, safely out of reach of my parents and the sym recruiters. The notion that my brother had changed himself from an animal to something that was hybrid between animal and plant, to read about the changes he had gone through, astonished me. The subject is neutered, put into stasis, immune system completely disabled. The body is then suspended in a high-protein bath and infected with a first-stage virus that eventually reaches every cell, attacking the DNA itself, replicating parts of the viral DNA onto the human genome. Changes begin. The digestive system withers, becomes vestigial, and one day is gone. The heart shrinks and the circulatory system withdraws to the musculature and the skeleton; the lungs shrink and split. At this stage, a second virus is introduced, and this one initiates another series of changes. The protein bath is sweetened with sugars like the ones the trees make. Chloroplasts replace the mitochondria in all the dermal tissues, and the dermal tissues change, the venaceous structure becomes disconnected from the blood supply. A layer of flexible xylem and phloem grows under the new dermis, forming a new circulatory system for water, oxygen, and nutrients. This system is based on the Dir­ijhi’s own structure, but is more flexible than in the Dir­ijhi themselves. The skin develops stomata for release of moisture and exhale of gasses, and comes to resemble a soft leaf in texture. Part of the lungs are used to com­press air for speech and the rest of the lungs become a focus for xylem and phloem tissue. The blood filters through both, receiving nutrients and oxygen for the body’s animal components, the muscles and skeleton, nerves and brain. The body photosynthesizes, but sup­plements its diet by feeding from the host through the palms, the bottom of the feet, the anus, and the mouth. The sym can slow its heart to a crawl and still function, which it does in the winter if its tree becomes dormant. The result is a hybrid that can communicate with its hosts and still speak to the rest of us too, a creature that is neither plant nor animal but something of both, and still legally human, according to Hormling biological law. The whole process takes three years Aramenian from neutering to the time the sym is shipped into Greenwood to meet its tree. I had studied the process in school and worked with sym techs in Avitran and Jarutan, I had seen boys and girls come in for the meta­morphosis as human beings and leave, three years later, as something else. But when I saw Binam at the base of his tree, waiting for me as if he had known when the truss would arrive, that was when it hit me, what a staggering change it was. It was summer, and he had been out in the sun. Head to toe, he was mottled from green to gold, the chloro­plasts in full bloom along his skin. He was shaped like my brother, he had the bones of my brother’s face. He stepped forward to lift me out of the basket as my guide unlashed my luggage and dropped it onto the moss. We stood looking at each other, and his face was so much the same, but his eyes were milky white. “You look so different,” he said, and I realized he was poring over me with the same intensity. “All grown up.” “You look different, too,” I said. He laughed, touched the top of his head. “I was hop­ing you brought some cubes of what I used to look like,” he said, “I’ve nearly forgotten.” “I did. I brought pictures of Serith and Kael, too.” These were our parents, though I never used the terms “mom” and “dad.” I had brought the one bag he had said I was permit­ted and he let me carry it. Even before I left for Paska, his letters had become infrequent, and sometimes his tone seemed more distant than not. He had told me in a rare recent letter that he’d gotten to the point where he didn’t like to use his remaining human muscles so much any more, because that stirred up his human heartbeat, and he found the sensation disquieting. In motion, he appeared to move as little as possible. He walked with a sense that he was gliding over the carpet of marsh-grass and moss, up the knots of the lower tree roots. “This is my tree,” he said, and I looked up and up. We were on a rise of land, a canal beyond some high shrubs; rocky ground, though the soil was deep and moist. The tree was young, slender compared to its neighbors, but the central bole was already as wide as a small house. We were standing at the perimeter where the outer ring of buttress roots rise up from the ground, soaring to support the lowest branch. The buttress was as thick as my waist. One of the huge main branches had dropped a prop root that was now home for a flow­ering vine with a sweet, unearthly smell. The branches soaring out and the bole soaring up were at the point of reaching the canopy, and already the upper leaves of the Dirijh were brushing the undersides of the branches of its nearest neighbors. Light fell in startling showers, bars of gold. Beyond the Dirijh on one side was a break in the canopy, and in the center of the meadow was what remained of a decaying tree, covered with vine and fringed with meadow grass but too huge still for anything to disguise. “Amazing,” I said. “He’s a very special tree, they’ve been breeding for him a long time.” He had told me this before, in his letters. “I’m the only sym he’s ever had. He’s a little unsettled that you’re here.” “Really?” “The trees think of us as their own. They don’t like to be reminded of when they were without us.” I knew him when he smiled like that, and I was glad that the thought of his tree made him smile. Though there was something discomforting in the thought of the possessiveness of a tree. “But he’s glad you’ve come. He tells me so.” “He?” “He has male and female flowers, but the female flowers are sterile.” “To avoid self-pollination?” Binam shrugged. “It’s what he wants.” We were inside the ring of buttress roots, near the main bole. “He can reverse all that and bloom with sterile male flowers and fertile female flowers if he wants, or he can have both. But for now, he’s a he.” He tugged on something, pulled it out of the growth around the buttress. “We wove this for you. My friends and I.” A ladder woven of supple vine. Binam climbed di­rectly up the bark, using the bark fissures for hand and footholds. I slung the bag over my shoulder and started up the rope ladder, but now that Binam was using his muscles, he was much faster than me, and knew his tree well enough that he moved by instinct, or so it appeared. He streamed up the bark to the first branching, and then led me along the branch to a flattened outgrowth overhung with a thick canopy of leaves. The syms call this kind of growth a dis, the standard Ajhevan word for sitting room. The Dirijhi learned to make the dis for the comfort of the symbionts. Filling the dis were carvings, some for practical uses like sitting, one the height of a table. A variety of tones and weights of wood, including what looked like cork. All grown out of the main wood of the dis. “I don’t live down here,” Binam said, “this is for our guests. I live up higher. But I think you should have this dis, lower to the ground.” “Thanks.” I set my bag on the branch, noted the fine pattern of the bark. Along part of the bark; moss was growing, and an ancillary tree had wrapped its roots round the branch and rooted into the moss and whatever organic matter was under it; this tree was flowering, a scent like vanilla. The flower was yellow with deep, rich, golden-to-brown tones in the corona. “Are you the carver?” “Yes. Do you like them?” “Very much.” I ran my hands along the back of the nearer chair, the smooth polish of the wood. “We do them together, the tree and I,” Binam said. “That’s part of the game. He throws the wood out of a branch or sends it up from the ground and I work it and polish it. I even polish with leaves he gives me,” he was pausing, trying to think of a way to say in words what rarely had to be put into words at all, “leaves like sandpaper. He buds them and they flush and dry and I use them for the polish.” He was beaming. My little brother. We watched each other, and suddenly I could read those strange eyes for a moment. I went to him and embraced him and he leaned against me, and the texture of his skin was cool and tough, the body beneath firm and spongy, so that I could not read from his shoulders or back whether he was really tense or frightened, as I had thought from what I read in his eyes. “It’s been such a long time. I hardly know what to say.” “I must seem very strange to you.” I shook my head and held him against me. “You seem very familiar. You’re my brother.” Three We got through those first uncomfortable moments when my mere presence in front of him made him feel as though he had become a freak. He looked me over head to toe, ran his hands down my arms, in my hair. He had lost the thick brown hair I remembered, his head was that mottled leaf color, covered with soft plant hairs, stiff and sticky when I touched them. “I had forgotten what my body used to look like,” he said, laying his fingers against my skin. We had been looking at the picture cubes, one of them taken on the trip to Greenwood when Binam got lost. “You’re so warm. I like your skin.” “I like yours, too,” I said, touching his neck, the smooth cool outer dermis, tender as a new leaf. “I’m cool. I’ve been vented today, and I’m taking in moisture.” “Vented?” “I let out air through stomae in my skin. I like to let it build up and do it all at once.” Looking above. “We’re in the hot part of summer. I share the heat of the tree.” “You help it cool off that way?” “No,” he shook his head. “It’s only to share. The tree likes the heat on its top leaves, they have a very tough cuticle, and we make a lot of energy that way. I share the heat so I’ll know what it’s like. Just to share it. That’s all.” “Does the tree have a name?” “Yes. A string of proteins about four hundred mol­ecules long.” He was smiling again, comfortable. “It would translate to something like, ‘Bright-in-the-Light.’ But that’s a very quick way of saying it. The trees don’t trust anything that’s too quick.” I shook my head in some amazement. “It’s hard to comprehend. When they talk, what’s the speech like?” “Nothing like speech,” he said. “More like a series of very specific flavors. I’m afraid it would seem quite slow to you.” “What about to you?” “Time is different, according to where I am. Now, for instance, I feel as if I’m blurting things out to you in a rush. If you weren’t here, I’d most likely be higher in the tree, sitting still, listening to the day, and time would pass very slowly. I don’t have a time when I talk to the tree, because the tree is always there, in my head. That’s part of the link that gets made when you meld. But if I want to talk to another tree, if we do, since we generally do everything at the same time, we listen to the linked root. The trees have a communicating root they send out, they’re all networked, and if there’s some conver­sation going on in the link, maybe we join it, or if there’s not, we send out a hello to the neighbors to find out who’s in the mood to talk.” I liked his face when he talked. He reminded me of the stories of people who lived in fairy-tale forests, old tales that had come to Aramen with the Hormling, most likely, about elves and fairies and whatnot. A people who lived in a wild forest with some kind of connection to the land that a modern person could not hope to attain. What the Erejhen sometimes claim for themselves, though I have seen precious little evidence. I could picture Binam as an elf out of fairyland, and I wondered if that were better than to call him a symbiont in my head. A name that implied he was dependent on something else, that he had only an incomplete identity on his own. “You’re a symbiont, too,” he said. “There’s no shame in it.” But here, for the first time, was an expression that I could easily read: discomfort. “You can tell what I’m thinking?” I asked. “The tree can. When you’re as close as this.” “How?” He shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s not something I can do.” Smiling in a teasing way. “If it makes you nervous, I can tell him not to share any of it with me.” “I’ll keep that in mind,” I said. “What do you mean, I’m a symbiont?” “You think of yourself as one thing. But your body is millions of things, millions of living creatures all joined in some way, and conscious in some way. You couldn’t survive without the bacteria in your gut, the mitochondria in your cells. You’re an assemblage, you just don’t think about it.” “All right, I get the point.” I added, “I’ll try not to think of anything I don’t want to talk about.” “If you do, the tree will know anyway. That you don’t want to talk about it.” The sun was going down by then. I was sore from bouncing against the truss, had hardly slept all night. I yawned and Binam said, “I never even asked about the trip.” “Do you ever ride the trusses?” “Not in years, since I was a guide. But I remember.” “The trees should consider a nice bio-engineered replacement animal with a smoother ride.” He laughed. Good to hear that he could still make the sound. “That will never happen. Unless the trees learn how to bio-engineer for themselves. The trees think the Hormling charge too much money for the transformation.” “The Hormling would charge for air if they could figure out how to license lungs,” I said, repeating a joke that was current in Feidre fifteen years ago, but which my brother had never heard. He cocked his head. “Well, in my case, they have licensed the lungs, and the skin, and most of the rest.” Sunlight fading. He would leave me to eat and rest, see me in the morning. No need to rush the visit. Come sundown, he would get sluggish anyway, so he wanted to climb to his bed. I didn’t ask where that was. As he said, we had time. I kissed him on the cheek, though. We had been affectionate and close, when we were kids, not like some brothers and sisters. He climbed up the tree, limber as anything, moving quickly into shadow. Four I spread out my sleeping bag, pulled up the night netting over my face, lay there for a while and opened flaps some more to let the air circulate. I had chosen the far edge of the dis, where the leaf cover grew sparse; I could see a piece of the night sky where the canopy had bro­ken, where the dead Dirijh lay slowly decomposing. So close to the Cluster, all I could see were her golden stars, so many beautiful yellow suns, and if I let my eyes go just out of focus, it was as if I were in space, staring into the huge hollow between them, the matrix of burn­ing stars and me hanging in space, orbiting somewhere over Aramen near the white moon. Maybe it was inevitable that I would dream about being a child with Binam, in the days when we lived on the algae farm with our parents. There are many styles of family on Aramen, but ours was still one of the com­mon ones, easy and adaptable on a planet that still felt like a frontier at times: a man and a woman with a life contract, having children together and raising them. Our parents had settled at the edge of the East Ajhevan wetlands, a country called Asukarns, New Karns, because early on it reminded somebody of a place on Senal. We were only a couple of hours, trip by putter to the edge of the Dirijhi preserve, and our parents used to take us there, till Binam began to get obsessed with the trees. I dreamed of one of those trips, when we were camp­ing on the bank of a creek, looking into the deep green gloom on the other side. We were within the posted lim­its of the camp ground but I wondered if the symbionts were watching us from the closer trees, to make sure we stayed on our side. Binam wanted to cross the creek but Mom repeated the story of little Inzl and Kraytl, who vanished into the forest leaving a trail of bread crumbs behind them, so they could find their way out again. But the tree roots ate the bread and the trees themselves conspired to confuse little Inzl and Kraytl, and they were imprisoned by an evil tree and almost eaten themselves before their good parents found them. We were the right age for the story at the time, and, in my dream, I was terrified all over again, and, in the way of dreams, we were no longer listening to the story but inside it, and I found myself wandering deeper into the forest with Binam’s hand in mine and my parents nowhere to be seen. Binam clutched a sack of bread and looked up at the trees with terror glazing his eyes . . . . I had never thought of myself as Kraytl when I was hearing the story on my mother’s knee, my brother beside her on the bedroll. I had never thought of Binam as Inzl or the two of us as orphans, but here were we both, sleeping in a tree in Greenwood. When I woke, something with wings was sitting on a branch looking at me, and I wondered what it found so interesting, but when I looked again, the shadow had vanished. White moonlight outlined everything, while the red moon was a thin crescent. The air was as mild as when I fell asleep, though it must have been early morning by then; the canopy holds heat in at night as efficiently as it holds heat out during the day. Some low breeze stirred. I felt restless and got out of the bedroll, walked around the dis, listened. Choruses of insects, night birds, reptiles, a host of voices swelled in the air around me, eerie, a symphony. The Dirijhi are true to their nature as plants and have remained a part of the wild, but have at the same time learned to manipulate many parts of nature. It seemed awesome to me, now that I was here among them, these huge dark shapes in the night, lis­tening as I was to this chorus of animal voices, won­dering what part was wild and what part was the trees. I could think to myself, these are frog songs, and grasshoppers, and crickets, and lizards, and birds, and feel as if I knew what I was hearing. But for Binam, what were these sounds to him? What news was passing all around me, my senses dull to it? I sang a song under my breath, along with all the rest. Silly, half tuneless, something from the girls’ com­mune. Sliding into my sleeping roll again, remembering that the tree would know what I had been thinking, that I had wakened with a winged monster hovering over me, that I had felt lost and wondered where I was. Five Binam knelt over me, finger to his lips. Early. He ges­tured, up, with a finger, would I come up? It was plain I was to make no sound, so I nodded, slid out of the sleeping roll still wearing my clothes. He climbed, and I followed as best I could. By watch­ing him, I saw the handholds and toeholds he used in the places where the distance between the branches was too great, but these places were few, thankfully, and we mounted through the leafy levels of Binam’s tree to the sky. To the east was the gash in the canopy where the old tree had fallen, where the sunrise now played itself out in a thousand shades of crimson, azure, violet, against a backdrop of clouds. We could not climb higher and the tree was not yet so tall that I could see along the top of the forest, but I was close enough. “Remember when I got lost?” Binam said. “And the sym found you in the top of a tree, just sitting there?” He nodded. Smiling with an expression I could rec­ognize as peaceful. “I come here every morning. It’s my favorite place.” He sat there, the picture of contentment. But I remembered the feeling of distance in his letters. “Are you still happy here?” I asked, looking him in those white eyes. He made a sound that was supposed to be laughter, though he sounded out of practice. “You don’t waste time with small talk, even in the morning, do you?” “Small talk. What an idea.” He was peeling some layer of tissue off the back of one of his hands. Flaky bits of leaf drifting down on currents of air. For all the world like a boy on a riverbank picking at a callus, or at the dead skin on his fin­gertips. “I’m dry,” he said, “I need to swim.” “Well?” I asked. He was distant, hardly hearing my voice. His eyes so pale, the pupils so tiny, he could have been looking in any direction at all, or in none. For a moment, I thought he wanted to answer, and then it didn’t seem important any more. We sat for a long time in the cool lifting breeze, the heat of the distant sun beginning to strip the clouds away. Light fell on Binam, bringing out the rich greens and softer-colored variations along his skin, and he closed his eyes and sat there. “I can’t tell you what a sweet feeling this is.” “The sunlight?” “Yes. On my chloroplasts.” He licked his lips, though the moisture looked more like sap than saliva. “I can feel it in every nerve.” “It must be nice.” He nodded. “This is the best time of day for it. Later, it’s too hot; I can’t take so much of the sun, not like the tree.” “Is this something you need?” He nodded again. “I don’t know the science for it, I can’t tell you why. But I need a certain amount of sunlight to keep my skin growing. The outer part dies off when the new inner tissue ripens, this time of year.” I had brought a calorie bar with me, my breakfast, which I pulled out of my coveralls and unwrapped. “Breakfast,” Binam said. “That’s the word. This is where I come to have breakfast.” “A nice place for it.” The bar, essentially tasteless, went down quite handily. “The tree is somewhat repulsed by that,” Binam said. “Chewing and eating. It’s very animal. “I am an animal.” He had closed his eyes again, murmured, “Yes, he knows you are.” “And you?” “Sometimes there’s still too much animal in me,” he answered. “Is that your opinion, or the tree’s?” “Both.” A silence. I let the obvious questions suspend themselves. He was welcome to his opinions, after all. “You don’t talk much, do you?” “Talk? Me and the tree?” “No. In words, like right now, I mean. You couldn’t remember the word for breakfast.” He shrugged. That gesture came quite naturally. “I don’t get much practice.” “What about your neighbors?” “If we’re close to our hosts, we don’t really need to talk.” “You read each other’s minds?” He nodded. “I guess that’s the easiest way to think of it.” “Is it better than talking?” “It’s nothing like talking. There’s no way to compare it.” His smile, for a moment, familiar, the way his eyes were shaped, familiar, my little brother from thirty years ago. “I like talking, as a matter of fact, right now. I forget you have to decide to do it, then you have to decide what to say. You can hide things when you talk. I’ll miss it when you’re gone.” He stirred, reaching down with a foot, and just at that moment a cloud blanked out his moment of sunlight. “But I really want to swim.” “Can I come, too?” He led me down to the dis and I stripped out of my coveralls. When we were on the ground he led me to a place where steps descended into the water. I followed him, taking off the rest of my clothes by the edge of the canal. “It’s clean,” he said, easing into the liquid with hardly a ripple. “You don’t have to worry about what’s in the water.” It felt wonderful to slip into the silky liquid, to glide along the surface beside this moon-faced creature. We floated lazily in the early light, a hint of mist along the canal. Near the woody knee of one of Binam’s neighbors, we stopped and headed back again. I swam close to Binam to hear the sound he was making, a low vocali­zation deep in the throat, like the purr of a cat. “I love to drink,” he said, turning on his back to float. “This does feel wonderful.” “You can’t imagine how wonderful, if you’re part leaf.” I laughed. “You do this every morning?” “Yes.” We were ashore now, seating ourselves on the lower step, still mostly immersed. “It’s one of the things I can do that the tree envies. Though he shares it.” “Shares?” “Through the link.” Silence, then. I was looking up at the Dirijh, trying to see the tree as Binam saw it, a living mind, a partner. I had been waiting to ask a certain question, and felt it was a good time. “Why did you change your mind and decide to let me visit you, this time? You always seemed so certain it was a bad idea.” He slid up from the water, dripping onto the stones. “I didn’t change my mind.” “You still think it’s a bad idea?” He looked at me. Nothing recognizable, at that mo­ment, in his face. “I don’t mean to make you uncom­fortable. I know you’re my sister, but that was a long time ago, longer to me than it seems to you, even. Time isn’t the same for me and you. So I didn’t really want you to come. But now I’m glad you’re here.” “Well, thanks. I guess.” He shrugged again. The gesture this time appeared less natural. “I can only tell you the truth, Kitra.” A chorus of birds, eerie calling high in the trees. Some of it sounded rehearsed, as if it were a piece of music some bird was performing. “Are you upset?” Binam asked. “No.” I looked my brother square in the face. “I didn’t simply want to come to see you, either, Binam.” “Then I expect we’re approaching the same point from different places. There’s an elegant way the trees have of saying that, but I can’t put it in words.” “What do you mean, we’re approaching the same point?” “You came to talk to the trees about independence,” Binam said. “I’m right, I know I am. Because that’s why they want to talk to you.” Just then, in that eerie quiet, pandemonium of a kind. Something fell out of a tree across the canal, followed by a chorus of birds and animals, a sound as if every leaf on every tree were shaking, and Binam leapt to his feet in alarm. “Oh, no,” he said, watching something moving on the ground; he looked sickened, as if he were nauseous; then he said to me, “Stay here, please,” and slipped into the water and swam across. From other trees in the vicinity, other syms were de­scending, altogether invisible before, then suddenly in sight, maybe a dozen. What had fallen from the tree was another sym, and when it stood (I could not tell what sex it had been) I was horrified; the poor creature looked flayed, as if it had been beaten, or worse, partly eaten, and the syms were picking something off it with their fingers, the injured sym shaking, a green fluid oozing down its face, chest, legs; not a sound coming out of it, or them. The healthy syms surrounded the sick one and picked what I guess were insects out of its ravaged skin, the injured one standing and shaking, some of the others helping to support it, and when they were done, they checked the injured one again head to foot and then laid it on the ground, cleaned the soles of the feet. One of the syms, not Binam, brought a large piece of vine and be­gan to squeeze milky fluid out of it, which Binam took onto his palms and rubbed gently over the injured one. This took a while. I watched. At first without any self-consciousness, then, noticing that some of the syms were looking my way, I began to feel as if I were in­truding and drew back from the bank of the canal. When it was clear that Binam would be busy for a while, I climbed to the dis and made myself tea, using the micro-cup in my kit. When the wait stretched beyond a full marking, I took out a portable reader and scanned some of the downloads I’d brought, items from the various nexus publications I tried to keep up with. A lot of technology is forbidden in Greenwood; for instance, I couldn’t do a portable VR intract or immerse myself in one of the total-music wave stations; none of the technologies we use to feed data directly into our own neural circuitry functions in Greenwood, so I was reading for the first time in years, scanning printed words with my eyes. The whole time, I was aware of commotion, activity on the ground across the canal. A pair of trusses arrived at a certain point, bearing more syms from farther off, I guess. Everyone sat around in a circle beneath the tree involved, and the injured sym sat with them. I suppose this was some kind of meeting. I was aware of it, trying not to spy. When the circle dissolved and the trusses disap­peared, Binam returned to his tree. He climbed to the dis, shoulders slumped, visibly distracted, shaken, though his eyes were so very difficult to read. I was sitting on one of the upraised pieces of wood on the dis, looking out over the clearing. He sat with me for a while, put his hand in mine, the same shy gesture as when he was eight, the texture of his skin tough and resinous, cool. “I’m sorry that took so long,” he said. “What happened?” He shook his head. “Tell me.” “I don’t want to.” He looked up at the canopy, the bright slivers of sky beyond the leaves. Breathless, and due to the physiological alterations, he appeared to be breathing with only the top half of his chest. “I need to climb higher for a while. When I come down, we’ll talk again. Do you mind?” “No. Whatever you need to do.” He nodded. He truly was shaken, I could see it now. He climbed into the leaves, disappearing. Six When I was eleven and Binam was eight, Serith and Kael took us on a picnic to wild country near Starns, the border village where the River Moses emerges from the forest. We got up early and rode the boat into Greenwood to the first Dirijhi city up the river, a treat for us, my birthday coming up, and Binam old enough to join the local scout troop, wearing his new scout hat with his first pin on it, I forget for what. I was too old for scouts now, in my opinion, but watching him in the boat with that hat, his bright face, brown hair tangled over his jug ears, I envied him a little, and wished I had not gotten to be so old. He was talking to the guide, his usual shyness gone, leaning forward to look through the plexiglass bubble at the forest around us. “Do they talk to you?” he was asking. “No, son. What’s your name?” “Binam.” “No, Binam, the trees don’t talk to me. They each have a special person who belongs to them, and that’s who they talk to.” “Why don’t they talk to anybody else?” “We can’t hear them,” Kael threw in from her seat, nervous at Binam’s need for attention. “Leave the pilot alone, dear.” The pilot turned and smiled at us. The boat was not nearly full that morning; we were awake early for the excursion. She was Erejhen, the pilot, a redhead, one of those genetic types that still recurs in their population but only rarely in the rest of us; the Erejhen can’t breed with anyone else. “He’s no bother. He likes the trees, that’s all.” “I like them very much,” Binam amended. “Come and sit down,” Serith said, his voice mild, the kind of voice that tells you you really needn’t listen. “I want to stand here.” “Well, then you can help me keep an eye on the river.” The Erejhen woman looked him over. “Watch out for floating logs and branches and whatnot.” Binam nodded emphatically and folded his arms. “But I mostly need to watch the trees.” “Go ahead, that’s a good thing to do, too.” “I think the trees would talk to me,” he said, very seriously. “They used to talk to me,” the pilot answered, “not these trees here but the ones on my home.” “Where’s that?” “A long way from here.” “Another planet?” She nodded. Binam’s eyes got big. For a long time he had thought that every planet was somehow part of Ajhevan, he hadn’t even understood the idea of Aramen, of the world we lived on; when it finally dawned on him that there were a lot of other places besides this one, he’d been very disturbed and quiet for a while. “Don’t ask which one,” the pilot said, “I won’t tell you.” “Why not?” “Because I won’t.” “What’s your name?” “Efen,” she answered, and I remembered it, because it was the first time I heard an Erejhen woman given any name other than Kirstin. “Did you really talk to trees before?” “Oh yes. I swear. There’s nothing like it.” Serith and Kael hadn’t the money for a walking tour so we rode another boat back to Starns; Efen was head­ing all the way up to the northernmost stop before she came back. We changed boats on one of the floating landings and Binam waved at her as she sailed away. At the end of our picnic, we noticed that Binam was missing. He had been straying farther and farther from the spread of food Serith had brought, he being the cook in our family, Kael not very good at it. We were within sight of Greenwood, and figured that Binam had been unable to resist exploring, so Kael and I went after him while Serith packed up the food and picnic gear. Into Greenwood ourselves, along the riverbank, without a guide, shouting for Binam, who never answered. Ner­vous, because we were not supposed to go into the forest on foot, everyone knew it, and even though we were only on the riverbank, we were afraid. We looked for a while, then went back. Kael and Serith stood at the put­ter stop not knowing what to do, looking at one another oddly. I remember how frightened I was to see my par­ents so confused. Serith reported Binam missing to the human clerk at the park station, who grew concerned when Kael added that she thought Binam had probably strayed into Greenwood. We stayed in a hotel in Starns overnight, when we were supposed to be traveling back to the farm. In the morning, there was still no word at first, until a putter arrived at the hotel with Binam in it, along with a hu­man escort; one of the local syms had found him sitting in a Dirijh near the river. He had climbed nearly to the top. The Dirijh had sent word to the nearest sym to come and get him. A long and tiring adventure. We stayed one more night in Starns; I think Serith was too nervous to travel. In bed beside Binam, I asked him what it was like to spend the night in the tree. Did it speak to him? “Yes,” he said, though we both knew he was lying, and exploded into giggles the next instant. I have a cube taken at that picnic. Serith sits with his back to the camera, attempting to look up at the multifocus, moving restlessly instead and mostly look­ing at the ground; Kael is eating, pickled egg after pickled egg, along with strips of raw sea urchin, and cups of seaweed made into a puree; I am entranced in some music broadcast by whatever group I was in love with at the time, sitting with my shirt off in the sun; Binam stands behind us, looking into the forest, restlessly turning to the camera, and at the end of the cube segment he walks away altogether, so I picture that as the mo­ment when the tree first called him, when he first felt the urge to answer. After that, whenever he came out of a simulation with advertisements or when he saw some printed poster for the sym recruiters around Asukarns Village, he would tell Serith or Kael or both that he wanted to be a sym, he wanted to be sold to a tree. Given the size of the bounty, it was not long before our parents began to listen. Seven Binam rejoined me near sunset, but was distracted, not altogether present. Twice he climbed to the ground and crossed the canal, I suppose to check on his neighbor. We talked only a little. I showed him some cubes from my last visit to Serith and Kael. “They’re talking about getting out of their contract, you know. Do you ever hear from them?” “Once in a while,” Binam answered. “Serith writes. Kael sends a birthday card.” “She’s very fat now. None of her doctors can figure out why. Fat blockers don’t work on her. And you remember how she eats.” “You should re-engineer her.” “She’s too superstitious for that.” “They’re getting out of the contract? They won’t be married any more?” I nodded. “In about a year, they say. When some of their investments come to term. They’re already talking to lawyers. It’s very friendly; I think they’re just tired of each other.” “Serith’s young.” “He’s only eighty. Kael’s over a hundred.” “She sent me an invitation to her century party.” “I was on Paska,” I said. “I haven’t seen them since I got back.” He was looking off into space. As we talked, he seemed to come into focus better. “Why did you go?” “To learn about the independence movement there. We’re trying to study each other, all the groups who’re trying to do the same thing we are, to share informa­tion.” Through the following exchange, at times it seemed to me that he was listening to someone else, someone speaking slowly, so that at first I simply guessed the tree was paying close attention. “Do the Hormling know about your group?” “Yes. Of course. It’s perfectly legal to express the opinions that we do.” “So you do this work out in the open?” “Most of it.” He absorbed this for a while. I was priming the micro-cup for tea. “Why do you want independence? What is freedom to you?” I laughed. “I don’t know. Maybe I just don’t like having my mind read by the Prin.” That might have been the wrong thing to say at the time. I studied Binam, who made no move or change of expression. “You mean, you don’t like their control.” “Not just the Prin, the Hormling. Their economy. Their Conveyance, that nobody can compete with. Their billions and billions of emigrants through that damned gate.” “But it seems to us that the Prin and the Hormling make everything possible that happens in your world.” Binam was nodding his head, maybe unconsciously; the movement appeared to have no meaning. “Some of these thoughts come from the link root. Some of the trees have been waiting to talk to you about your ideas.” So this was some kind of a meeting, and this being in front of me was more than Binam, at the moment. I acknowledged what he said, but answered his first state­ment. “The only thing the Prin and the Hormling make possible is each other. The Prin prop up the Hormling, who proceed to turn everything into a product and every place into a market.” “But this whole world is full of people who came from the Hormling world.” “That was three hundred years ago. None of us here is anything but Aramenian, any more.” He was listening again. After a while, saying, “We agree the Hormling are an intrusion. We do not care for the Prin.” I waited. Stunned, to be so close to what I had come for. “What would independence offer the Dirijhi?” Binam asked. “Would you try to rule us? Or would you respect our authority, as the Prin do?” “Beg pardon?” “Aramen belongs to the Dirijhi,” Binam said. “Even the Hormling admit as much. But we cannot control our world. When the Mage made the gate, we had no way to fight, we had to accept her presence. But now things are different.” Because of the syms. I began to understand. “Do the Dirijhi want all of us to leave?” He shook his head emphatically. “No, there would be no use in that. We can’t grow in the south, we have no use for that place.” “Why not?” Concern. A long silence. “Do you know anything about what makes us awaken?” “As much as I could find out. The brain grows in the root crown when the roots are infected with a specific fungus, and a micorhiza is formed. The root tips swell and the interior cells begin to generate neural proteins; the root crown reacts by developing new growth cells to make a case to protect the new tissue.” He smiled. “You have studied us.” Eerie, this white-eyed creature, supposedly kin to me, speaking as if there were a hundred of him. “There’s not a lot out there to read. But I looked.” “Then tell me the rest,” he said. During all the following, he seemed curiously com­placent, as if it pleased him no end that I had studied the biology of the trees. “The basal meristem grows two kinds of tissue, new xylem on one side and brain case on the other. The new xylem stays local to the base of the bole but connects to the primary xylem that runs up the bole, that forms every year in spring around the old dead tissue from previous years. The fungal brain forms hormone and protein chains in the new xylem and these start to climb up the primary xylem as water rises in the tree.” “That’s good,” he said. “When is the brain ripe?” He meant when was it awake, I guessed. “When the xylem has at least one looped chain of proteins and hor­mones going all the way to the top and back down to the bottom, for sending and receiving messages. When the structures are all in place and the brain begins to receive energy from some of the leaves, it awakens and becomes aware. When the brain can feel the sun.” “And the water and the earth,” Binam said. “The con­sciousness is stretched by all three of those.” “So what does this have to do with freedom?” “The trees.” For a moment, Binam only. Tired, taking a breath. Blankness superseding, as if it were water ris­ing through him. “Our birth is very complex, and we struggled to make every tree awaken when we had no hands. We want you to understand that life is possible for us only as a partnership with you. We cannot do without the syms, now that we have them. They are our hands and our feet.” Speaking of himself and all the rest in the third person. “Also that we will never have any use for any other place than this one, this continent, because the fungus that helps us awaken grows only here.” “Did the Dirijhi try to colonize the south themselves at some point?” “Many, many times,” Binam said. “The Hormling have tried to propagate us in the southern country, too, through experimentation that we allowed, but they failed the same as we. The fungus grows only here, on this continent. It is as dependent on this place as we are on it, and now we are dependent on the syms as well. So that on Aramen there will always be room for hu­mans and for the Dirijhi, but not for the Prin or for the Hormling gate. If you agree and we work together.” “You want to close the gate?” I asked. “We want to control it.” Shallow, half-chested breaths. “So do you.” “But what about the Mage?” “We believe she won’t say no to us. If we’re wrong, we have other means.” “But she’s the only one who can make the gate.” “We aren’t concerned with how it’s made. We’re con­cerned only that we are half the gate, whether we make it or not. And this fact should be respected, and our wishes on our world should be respected.” “You want to get rid of the Prin?” “We prefer not to say all we want, this first talking.” Binam shivering, licking his lips, that curious tongue, like a tender shoot. “We only want to propose that we talk, and think for a while, and talk more. Though at the moment, this one is tired and needs rest.” So Binam swooned, his head swung loosely for a moment, and some change in him, of posture or ex­pression, told me he was only himself and the meeting was over. He gazed at me and blinked. “I can only do so much of that. We should have had more syms here.” “Maybe we talked enough,” I said. “You were here, listening, weren’t you?” He nodded. “It’s like being at the back of the room when a meeting goes on. Though there’s the other layer of it, the fact that the trees are struggling to keep up, to digest what you say and answer as fast as they can. They take turns, answering and responding. So you’re not al­ways talking to the same tree.” I shook my head. Dappled sunlight on the dis, on my hands and legs and feet. “But, anyway, it’s good news, that they want to help.” He nodded. But he was looking at the surface of the canal and said nothing else. Eight A few days passed, more conversations took place, the last with three other syms to do the channeling, and that one was a long conversation, in which we developed a proposal for working together that I could carry back, in memory alone, to my companions in Jarutan. The trees wished for the moment that no word of their pos­sible support for our movement should become public. I felt more suspicious of them after they made that stip­ulation, realizing that the Dirijhi are cautious, will move forward only very slowly, one deliberate step at a time, and only to further their own agenda; still, it was not my place to rush them or to make a decision about them, and so I listened and agreed to the one thing they wanted to plan, that some group of people return to Greenwood at some point in the near future to continue this talking, as they called it. Though the near future to the Dirijhi could mean any time in the next decade. They had been waiting for three hundred years already. No reason to act in haste. In all this excitement, with the pure adrenaline of the talk, the growing awareness I had of the intelligence of these beings, and a feeling of luck that it was me who was to be their delegate; in all this I forgot about the sym who had fallen from the tree that first morning, the horrible wounds on its dermis. But the morning I was to leave, as Binam and I were swimming, just before my ride was due, I saw the sym climbing down from the tree to sit with its feet in the water, and on impulse, maybe because I was feeling confident and welcome, even a bit cocky, I swam across the canal and pulled myself up beside the creature. “Hello,” I said, “are you better?” “Better?” It did look better—he did, the bone structure appeared vestigially male to me. The wounds on the dermis were brown-edged, new green tissue growing beneath. “I saw you the day you fell. When you were hurt.” “I never fell,” he said. Binam swam up beside us, tapped me on the knee. Not even glancing at his neighbor. “You should come home now. Your truss will be here soon. Leave Itek alone.” “I was only talking,” I said. Itek had risen from the canal and hurried away, dis­appearing up the tree trunk. Binam was watching him. “I told you to come home,” he said to me, and swam away. “What did I do?” I asked, on the other shore, dripping near one of the buttress roots, being careful to stay clear of the tree’s cranial vents. I was drying myself, dressing, my kit packed and leaning against the buttress. “He was embarrassed.” “But I only asked if he was feeling better, that’s all.” “Now his tree will be angry.” “What? Why?” When he looked at me, for a moment there was only Binam in him, nothing else; it was as if I were seeing him as he would have been, had he never been re-engineered. He was frightened and angry, and said, in a hiss, “Freedom. What freedom doyou need?” “Binam. I don’t understand.” Suddenly he was speaking very rapidly, his half-chest pumping. “What freedom do you promise Itek? Can you free him from his tree?” “Why?” “You saw him. He was nearly eaten alive.” I was suddenly stunned. What he was telling me. In a rush, I understood. Breathless, a sound in the underbrush farther down the canal, my truss, come to take me home. “The tree did that?” “We’re their property,” he spat. “Why shouldn’t they do whatever they like?” “Binam. Baby.” “Don’t—” He drew away from me. “Your truss is com­ing.” “I didn’t know.” He was gasping now, looking up at the tree. “Come with me.” Though I knew better. He never answered. The truss pulled up nearby, the rider astride its back for the moment, legs under the stump-wings. “Binam—” The truss-rider asked if I was ready to leave and Binam drew back, frightened. “Good-bye,” he said, moisture leaking from his eyes. “I’ll come back.” He nodded his head. “Binam. I swear.” “Go,” he hissed, gesturing, turning away. The truss rider, sensing disturbance, decided not to linger. I could think of nothing at all to say and only hung onto that basket as it began to bounce. I was trying to look backward, to watch him to the last moment. Instead, I saw Itek across the canal, staggering down from his tree again, and, chilled, I turned away. Most genetic alterations can be reversed; the long process that makes a tree-sym can’t be. The meld that binds a sym to a tree is for life, with no release. Both these decisions were made by the Hormling and the Dir­ijhi long ago. The sym, once sold to a tree, is unable to feed itself or even to be apart from its host tree for very long. Unable even to change hosts. These are well known facts, though the language used to describe the relationship is rarely as blunt as to call a sym a slave. I had never thought about what kind of life the trees al­lowed. One thinks of the sym as a fresh-faced cherub living in paradise, the image of the sym recruitment poster, as facile as that. So I headed home. Seeing Binam’s face. Nine Surely I was not the first person to witness this kind of event among the syms. But when I looked in the Hormling data mass, there was nothing to be found about protections for the syms, nothing about abuses on the part of the trees, nothing about the legal rela­tionship at all. No documentation in the public domain, nothing in the harder-to-access private data, though this was easy enough to explain, in part. The Hormling stat system doesn’t extend to Greenwood. Nothing from the syms has ever been uploaded. The few people who visit Greenwood either record little about the experience or else the files are purged of any references unflattering to the trees; everything in the public database supports the same myth of Greenwood as paradise. Even in Binam’s letters, when I read them again on the boat, not a hint. But I could see his face, hear the dread in his voice. I worked part of this out on the crossing boat, head­ing toward the central city, though I had to wait to get to Dembut for access to the data mass. My pilot on the first leg of the trip was the usual brown-haired brown-eyed Aramenian, but when I changed boats to head south, the pilot was Erejhen, and by luck, the boat was half empty. In the night, late, I shared the remains of some whiskey in my bag, never once touched while I was with Binam, and the Erejhen grew relaxed and voluble, to the point that she leaned toward me, her big hand squeezing my shoulder. “My real name’s Trisvin. You can call me that.” “Your real name’s not Kristen, or whatever you told me?” “No. We never give our real names, not at first, it’s bad luck.” “Where do you come from?” “Irion.” “No, really. Where do you come from?” “I was born in Jarutan. But my parents come from Irion.” “Sure they did.” She laughed, grabbing the whiskey bottle from me. “Everybody has to come from somewhere. Where do you come from?” I told her. I told her why I was visiting, that my brother was a sym; that’s all I said. She looked at me for a long time. “I’m glad nobody can do that to me.” The same genetic difference that prevents the Erejhen from cross-breeding with the Hormling makes them ineligible for most re-engineering, too. “Do what? Make you into a sym?” She nodded. “I like the trees, don’t get me wrong. But I wouldn’t want to belong to one.” Language I had heard, and not heard, all my life. Ten In Dembut, I looked up Tira, who had given me her ac­cess for the return journey, and we met for a drink in a vid parlor. I asked her, point blank, if she had ever seen her brother mistreated. She blinked, and looked at me. “What do you mean?” I described Itek, and what I had seen. She shook her head. Something vehement in it. “I never saw anything at all like that.” Not a bright girl, I was taxing her. But I wanted to tell her. To ask, first,Didyouknowthetreesdothingstopunishthesyms?Infesttheirskinwithparasites,refusetofeedthem,burntheminthesun,altertheirchemistriestomakethemdocile ; I had begun to imagine all sorts of possibilities.Didyouknowyourbrothermightfeellikeaslave? But over us, beyond the walls of glass, was the shadow of Greenwood, and I bit my tongue, not certain whom to trust. “Ask him if he’s happy, sometime,” I told her. We paid for the drinks and parted, though we’d planned to stay the night together. It would be easy to forget the look on Binam’s face, to ignore his voice,whatfreedomdoyouneed? To let this go and continue to negotiate with the Dirijhi. It’s clear to me that with their support, our movement could have the leverage to bring self-government here. But days ago in my dream, Binam held my hand and dropped the bread crumbs one by one, so maybe we would be found again, when we were children and lost; only a dream, but he’s still my brother. Tomorrow, when I wake up, after copying this recording and sending it to the organization I work with, People for a Free Aramen, I’m booking passage on public putter to Jarutan, where I’ll buy a plane ticket to Byu­tiban. I’ll decide what to do next when I get there. Knowing something now that won’t let go of me. The issue is still freedom, but not mine. I am face to face with the facts, and they frighten me, because they tell me that my whole life has been based on wrong assumptions. Webelieveshewon’tsaynotous.Ifwe’rewrong,wehaveothermeans. Something hidden in the forest, something that only begins with this issue, the way the syms are treated; something is hidden there because it’s the only place in the known worlds where the Prin don’t come. Maybe that’s too big a thought, maybe I’m only being dramatic. Maybe it’s only that I know, much as I have chafed in their presence, that the Prin would learn what was happening to the syms if they were allowed on Ajhevan. So is that the only reason to keep them out, or is there more? Beyond the river, they are brooding, the dark shapes of trees against the night sky. I watch for a long time, remembering years ago, when my father sat me down at our kitchen table and told me that Binam was gone for good. Later, I would miss Binam, become angry about his “enrollment,” as they called it; later, I would raise all kinds of questions about what my parents had done; later, I would only call my father by his name, but that night when he sat back, having explained everything, a chill ran through me. “Are you going to sell me, too?” I asked. “It’s a bounty, we didn’t sell him,” Kael waving her thick hand at me. “Are you?” I asked Serith. “No,” he said, but could not meet my eye. “Why don’t you go to bed?” It was a long time before I believed him. Looking at the trees now, I feel that same chill, as if the recruiter is at the door with the contract. I lie awake long into the night, as I did that first night, as if I am still waiting for my own disappearance. When I sleep, I dream I am being lowered into the tank of liquid to begin the transfor­mation, the virus already in my blood, my breasts van­ishing, my vagina drying to a flake, but I wake up whole, if covered with sweat, since for me it is only a dream.