The Speaker for the Trees (5 page)

They remained
still, moving only when the great chamber doors swung ponderously apart,
allowing one agent to exit while another was accepted, then ground together
again with a regal boom. Though he strained and stretched whenever the doors
opened there were far too many plants between Hedge and the chamber to see
inside.

Hedge felt
himself sinking into the dirt as he waited. On planet Plant there were no
asphalt roads or cement causeways that led from one place to another, remained
solid in rain, and gave the traveler a sense of direction and purpose based on
a belief that all they need do to meet their goal was follow the path to its
end. On planet Plant there was simply dirt because plants needed little else.
Plants didn’t move often, settling in one spot and remaining there, unchanged,
for the majority of their existence. The whole of planet Plant, except where
administrative structures stood and the great garden where the Plant of
Ultimate Knowing resided, was covered by soft dirt mixed with dead leaves, wood
chips, and decaying organic material. It smelled like old cabbage and squeezed
between his toes and underneath the nails.

Planet Plant,
Hedge thought, jaws clattering, toes flexing in the muck, was disgusting.

One might have
expected planet Plant to be a glorious and verdant environment, the pinnacle of
plant civilization, full of color and aroma, but that was not the case. Not by
human standards, who lavished their capitals with adornments and whose rulers
historically surrounded themselves with fineries that suited their notions of
paradise—gardens and temples and statues and monuments and sports arenas—so
other civilizations might look upon them with awed and envious eyes, and
secretly wish they could share in the wonders of such a kingdom.

On planet Plant
plants had no time to cultivate beauty. No time for plants to stop and simply
grow as they did on the human planet. No time to celebrate their achievements
by making their planet wonderful. Planet Plant was largely brown, and from far
above had the appearance of a very old, worn penny.

Hedge shivered
and shook, wringing a few drops of water from his heavy flannel shirt.

Every so often
a series of thin black devices like toadstools rose from the sod, gurgled and
burped hollowly, then sent out a thick mist of cold water. The chill water kept
the dirt moist, serving as a medium through which nutrients could travel.

Clothing, Hedge
observed, worked just like dirt, soaking up water and holding it in place so
nutrients could move from here to there within the cotton fibers. Of course,
clothing didn't need nutrients or water. Clothing didn’t have growing parts
like leaves or fruit. What clothing did was become clingy and unpleasant when
filled with water, and water was cold, which made Hedge’s teeth chatter.
Clothing wasn’t to blame. It was just obeying a law of physics Hedge didn’t
understand.

A human, on the
other hand, knew better.

Humans always
made coincidences and random misfortune out to be clever conspiracies. They not
only gave inanimate objects the ability to reason and act, fascinated by the
fantastic possibility that everything was imbued with a spirit and motivation,
but often made the assumption that these inanimate objects were aware of their
detrimental effect on the world around them, and worst of all, they were doing
these things on purpose.

Anna had once
stubbed her toe on the staircase as she carried laundry to their bedroom and
fell forward in a heap. She cursed and writhed, clutching her foot as the
clothing unfolded itself and slouched back down the staircase, then pounded on
the carpeted steps as if punishing them for tripping her.

So it was
strange, Hedge noted, that he was standing here, wet and uncomfortable, trying
in very human fashion to guess what purpose his clothing had for soaking up
water, and contemplating the possibility that it was just trying to be mean.
Which was, of course, ridiculous.

Other agents
who decided the wet clothing was a burden had simply removed it.

Hedge sighed,
shifting in the disgusting dirt. He wanted desperately to rinse his feet and
don a pair of shoes. That, too, struck him as strange.

He was a plant,
so it made perfect sense to be standing in enriched dirt, soaking up nutrients
of a potency that did not exist on the human planet. It should have been
gloriously intoxicating. Yet this felt strange, maybe because it had been so
long since he'd done it. He felt unusual doing this rather than the inefficient
human means of nutrient uptake to which he’d grown accustomed. Even though much
of what he took in through his mouth was placed in a storage vacuole for later
disposal, there was a kind of pleasure in the act of eating, of feeling the
textures of certain food and savoring their aroma. Many humans took great
pleasure in eating, which was undoubtedly why so many of them grew to be very
cumbersome and large.

Tentatively,
Hedge bent and scooped up a handful of the cold, wet sod and put it in his
mouth. He chewed.

Grainy, bitter,
and foul. Hedge spat it out. Several plants regarded him with annoyance at the
sound and the plant ahead of him turned again, raised a finger to her lips,
then turned back. Hedge wiped his face and tried to avoid their gazes. He
couldn’t look down. Dirt was disgusting. So all that remained was up.

The night was
thick and starry, the tiny white dots packed tightly against one another. The
more he stared, the more he saw. Gradually he became aware of dimmer stars
hovering beyond the more dominant ones, then still dimmer ones behind those as
if he were peeling back layer after layer until he would at last reach the
magnificent center of a great and profound onion.

Humanity called
it space. Outer space. That's exactly what space was. The empty distance
between objects. It was nothing. Yet it was a palpable nothing because it
prevented those things that wanted to be together from being so.

The slow groan
of the great doors parting drew his attention away from the sky and Hedge saw a
familiar face enter the lobby, eyes downcast. Broad across the chest with a
square face and thick, caterpillar eyebrows. Still dressed in the red and black
flannel shirt he'd been wearing days before. Seeing someone he recognized
helped Hedge feel more at ease.

"I saw you
on the television a few days ago," said Hedge as the figure came close.

John Elm
stopped and looked at Hedge, eyes glazed, face twisted by lingering confusion.

"Yeah,"
he answered distantly. Then, after a moment of thought added, "Yeah."

"Almost
told them everything, eh?"

Hedge chuckled
to himself, recalling how close they had come to disaster.

"Guess
so," John replied. He puffed his cheeks and exhaled. "Don't much
matter now, though, what bein' they're gonna destroy the place."

“Oh, really?”

For an instant
Hedge didn't understand. Destroy the ShopMart selling the toasters? The parking
lot where John had been interviewed? None of that made any sense. A moment
passed before Hedge realized John was telling him, with an air of mild disappointment,
that the Council intended to destroy the entire planet.

“Yeah,” said
John. “Really.”

Hedge
controlled himself. There was no need for alarm. This was a ruling issued by
the Council of Plants, and thus a ruling that need not be questioned. But
inside he could feel something winding up. Hedge became fidgety and restless,
and his eyes darted here and there—at the listless agents around him, at the
great doors from which issued a sense of complete indifference, at the space
overhead in which planet Plant bobbed and rolled like an empty barrel, drifting
out with the tide as the universe expanded and taking him further from the
place he'd called home for twenty years.

His mind spun
aimlessly, images of the place he remembered sweeping up and away so quickly he
could only register a sense of desperation and loss. Impossible. Inexplicable.
This was far worse than he suspected. In fact, he could think of no way to make
the situation any more dismal.

As if in
response, a black rod extended from the ground beside him, gurgled, and sent
out a shower of chill water.

"Th-th-th-is
is t-t-t-terrible," Hedge mumbled through chattering teeth. His gaze was
intense but empty. All he could see was Anna's open and innocent expression as
it gazed up into the sky, fascinated as the first rainbow waves of beautiful
ruin fell upon humanity.

"Too
bad," John agreed. He puffed at the water running down his face, then wiped
at it with his hand. "Kinda liked it there. Oh well." He shrugged,
began to shuffle away, then stopped. He came back to Hedge, whose astonishment
was absolute. "Say," he added. "Did you have trouble with the
safety valve phrase? My earth children insisted they didn't have an uncle
Edwin."

It was bright
inside the chamber of the Council of Plants. Not blinding, but a brightness
that squeezed shadows to faint pencil lines. Hedge stood on the central
platform at the base of the chamber where hundreds of plants looked down on him
from tiered levels that rose to the acme of the pyramid. Those who stood where
Hedge stood now often had the uncomfortable sense of being a germ looking up
the shaft of a great microscope.

The council
members looking down on him took in every detail, from his muddy, drenched
clothing, to his fat, almost hairless body. Had Hedge been looking at them, he
might have picked out the details of the council members as well. Some were as
large as rainforest trees with wide canopies and trunks encased in thick
stockings of knitted ivy cords while others appeared to be no more than stooped
flower stalks topped by a few feathery petals.

But Hedge did
not look around. Nor did he speak, or respond to questions, or make any outward
motion. Instead, he stood before the Council, jaw canted and open, stunned
speechless. Not by the impressive chamber or by the weight of so many eyes upon
him. These things teetered at the rear of his mind, small and distant, waving frantically
for fear of falling overboard and being lost in the wake of other thoughts.

Hedge didn't
see the council plants. He'd already forgotten where he was. Forgotten his
responsibilities to his species. His mind had been set adrift by the
information given him by John Elm. Thinking of Anna and Scud and the bees and
the squeaky hinge on the screen door and the disturbing hum-brrzap! of the bug
lamp keeping him up at night and where to fit more pork chops and the
mortifying thought that very soon all these trivialities would soon be rendered
irrelevant.

He was so lost
in thought that he didn't hear the Council's questions until they addressed him
a third time.

"Agent
Hedge!"

Hedge jolted.
He was back in the chamber, dripping, feet caked with mud, shivering. The great
majority of plants in this chamber lacked eyes, but it was clear their
attention was focused upon him. Hedge blinked, wondering how long he’d been
standing there.

“Yes?”

"I am
pleased to have your attention,” said a plant on the lowest tier. The plant was
a gathering of long, mossy tendrils that draped over an ivory tabletop
encircling the room. “My name is Chairplant Gulliver Stingfruit. I would like
you to describe your observations of humanity. What do you make of them?”

A metal bar
protruded before the plant, which Hedge supposed amplified the plant’s voice
and carried it through the chamber. While many plants could develop vocal
cords, lungs, and various apparatuses to shape passing air into discernable
sounds, many plants chose to remain true to their origins since all of plant
society was based upon maintaining the
status quo
. Plants were rooted to
the ground, immobile and, barring seasonal alterations, unchanging. Nothing
required change, unless something strayed from the pattern plants had
established, and then only to return it to the pattern. Which was why humanity
had first come under scrutiny. They were a species of numerous social and
political constants, such as discord and war, but were nevertheless constantly
in flux so far as their technology and ambition was concerned.

The Council was
silent, patiently awaiting his response.

His mouth
opened. It wasn't until Hedge resigned himself to speak that he realized he
wasn't sure what to say. Had he done his job? Had he observed humanity as he
was supposed to? The majority of the time he'd spent working on various
household chores, speaking with Scud Peabody at the diner, and watching the
television with Anna. He should have been probing and infiltrating and
discovering the dirty dark secrets which humanity kept buried in shoeboxes
under the flowers and great vaults deep within their insidious institutions.
Unfortunately, he’d never gotten around to it.

"Humans
are very, ah, busy," Hedge began. He shivered. "With various
projects. Space travel, thermodynamics, fission reactions, physics,
horticulture. I, for example, cultivated an agricultural domain that produced
food and other wares for carbon dioxide producing organisms, thus promoting the
continuation of the life cycle on..."

"We are not
interested in your activities and efforts to impersonate humans, agent
Hedge," another plant interjected, "but the activities of the humans
you observed. We do not deign to be human, we only emulate them to lull them
into a false sense of security and thus learn their true nature. What are their
ambitions? How do they plan to achieve them? Do they have any long-range plans
for their race? Do those plans extend beyond their own planet? Are they
benevolent or malevolent? Do they seek knowledge or dominion?"

Hedge cleared
his throat.

"To be a
better human is to better understand them, don't you think?"