The Speaker for the Trees

For
Laura, Graham, and Symmetry

Table of Contents

Prelude

1.
     
Sign

2.
     
Mr.
Visitor

3.
     
Background
First, Then a Toaster

4.
     
A
Very Handy Device

5.
     
Planet
Plant

6.
     
The
Chamber of the Council of Plants

7.
     
Forked

8.
     
In
the Garden of the Plant of Ultimate Knowing

9.
     
Abduction

10.
 
A Brief Visit

11.
 
A New Garden

12.
 
Awakening

We
humans look rather different from a tree. Without a doubt we perceive the world
differently than a tree does. But down deep, at the molecular heart of life,
the trees and we are essentially identical.

—Carl
Sagan

At the center
of a round table was a bonsai plant in a shallow but wide pot—a miniature tree
twisted into place and deformed like an over-tightened screw. Two people sat on
opposite sides of the table, each watching the other while the plant watched
them both in mute fascination, listening. The plant was only dimly aware of the
world around it, its thoughts tiny and fleeting, centered mostly around a
childlike want for light or water, but the bonsai knew the woman was named Anna
and the man was named Hedge.

The bonsai was
not smart when compared to most plants, content just to
be
rather than
to
be something
, but it seemed clear to the bonsai that Hedge had as
much in common with the bonsai as he did with the woman, and that struck the
bonsai as peculiar. This peculiarity was a source of endless curiosity for the
bonsai, for it made the plant wonder what Hedge was doing here, how he could
seem to be one thing and yet be another, and what the purpose of his strangeness
might be.

There were
things a bonsai could never hope to fathom, like simple arithmetic or crossword
puzzles, but it took great pleasure in knowing it was in the presence of
something remarkable, some unspoken profundity that no one else could detect,
but the bonsai could feel. It was the electric tension of anticipation, those
heightened moments in a normal person's day before they are interrupted by the
unexpected shock of an amazing discovery that leaves them changed forever.

So the bonsai
listened, and watched, sensing the gathering storm and waiting for the bolt to
strike.

Hedge was fat.

His round,
sagging body stretched a short-sleeved shirt with faint yellow stains in the
armpits, and his skin, which had a faintly greenish tint, was dark and peeled
on the back of his neck and the top of his head from spending long hours under
the sun. Fat and bald, but not slobbery and sloppy. Hedge could be best
described, in most respects, as ordinary.

The perfect
disguise.

No one
suspected he was a plant sent to the planet by the legendary Plant of Ultimate
Knowing to observe humanity and, if necessary, protect them from one of
countless interstellar perils, such as bursts of interstellar radiation,
drifting planetoids, invading space armies, or appearances by the infamous
Visitors. No one he told took him seriously.

Of the many
perils, the peril of Visitors was utmost. Visitors were a mysterious species
who wandered the cosmos, spreading destruction wherever they set foot. They had
been here before, in fact, hundreds of millions of years ago. Soon after the
planet suffered a catastrophic rhinoplasty at the hands of a comet that altered
the planetary ecosystem, shifting the balance of dominance from reptiles to
mammals. But these appearances were rare. As best as Hedge could tell, the
greatest threat to humanity was a persistent volatile nature it had yet to
outgrow.

For the moment,
Hedge’s only mission was to remain hidden. A mission could change at any
moment, but this one had remained the same for 20 years.

Hedge regarded
the plate before him with resignation. It was empty with exception to a small,
triangular pork chop, but it seemed a larger task for one who had labored on
several offerings already. He took a breath, straining the buttons on his
shirtfront, then let it out in a long, quiet sigh.

Across the
small kitchen table sat Hedge's round, unthreatening earth wife, Anna. It
pleased him to know she was highly symmetrical. After all, it was in symmetry
that humans found beauty, and to know that she was beautiful gave him a very
human sense of pride and accomplishment in having something other humans
desired.

She stared back
at him with a furrowed brow and pressed lips. Her eyes flicked from his face to
his unmoving hands clenched around the flatware, to the plate, and back again.
He knew she was worrying that his ulcers were boiling or that he didn't enjoy
the pork chops. These worries were, of course, completely ridiculous.

Ulcers were an
impossibility since Hedge processed light into energy and had no stomach.
Whether he liked the pork chops or not was irrelevant because he had no taste
buds and stored food in an empty vacuole for later disposal. So he stared back
at her, absorbing the expression and tracing her face with his eyes. People
appreciated that. Paying attention. They also appreciated the opportunity to
express their concerns, so Hedge indulged her in typical human fashion.

"What?"
he asked in a nasal tone tinged with annoyance.

He forked a bit
of pork chop, pulled it off with his teeth and felt it tumble down his neck
tube and drop into the heap of bits in his bulging middle part.

"Something
is the matter," she said, her forehead creased. "You seem... I don’t
know. Strange."

For all their
simplicity, humans could be remarkably perceptive, though they didn't know it
most of the time, and their ability to thrust straight through deception and
see to the heart of truth was often lost with childhood. By adulthood humans
had trained themselves to be coy and manipulative in response to the coy and manipulative
society in which they lived, which led them to believe that everyone was trying
to be as coy and manipulative as themselves and were uncertain about what was
true and what was not. Beyond their few flashes of clarity, everything became a
muddle of colliding doubts.

Hedge wiped a
wadded napkin across his chin.

"Well,"
he began.

He'd explained
this before. Each time the same response. A roll of her eyes, a grimace, and a
shrug. Why did he bother indulging her? It may have been love, but from his
studies he knew other humans felt a strong upwelling of sensation when they
loved. A swelling of chemicals such as oxytosine and vasopressin in the brain
and blood that Hedge did not experience because he had xylem and phloem tissues
that moved fluids through a decentralized and essentially brainless body. There
was no primary nerve cluster where all thoughts gathered. There were no
hormones that gushed from a pituitary gland to elate him, make his heart beat
faster, and rush them through his circulatory system to touch the outermost
reaches of his inner spaces. Only nutrients ferrying through his body to
prevent the tissue from becoming dry, dark, and dead.

"I'm not
really from this planet, but I'm here to protect it. For the plants. No one
expects trouble, but if there were something cataclysmic, a transdimensional
war whose proximity jeopardized this planet for example, you should be safe
with me, earth wife." He paused, allowing her to consider, and took
another bite. "You know," he added around a mouthful of pork chop,
"I don't even have a stomach."

She blinked,
mouth falling crookedly ajar. Then, as expected, her eyes screwed in a quick
circle. She stood, pushed in the chair, and lifted her plate.

"You think
everything is a joke," she said.

She didn't
suspect anything. No one did. With exception to Scud Peabody, but he was a
genius.

As far as Anna
was concerned they had met at a squaredance in Topeka. They talked long into
the night. She invited him to dinner and he enjoyed her pork chops. Two months
later they were married. Hedge took a loan, bought a house on a wide plot. He
tended beehives and they didn't sting him. She made pork chops. He ate them. It
was love. That was their story.

A history that
had been penciled onto the tablet of her memory during her abduction. They did
this every so often, rewrote a bit of someone's past, usually when they wanted
to insert an operative into the social fabric of a community. A human cohort,
they had found, lent much to the deception.

At the moment
her back was to him, ponderous backside swaying arhythmically as she bent over
the sink and scrubbed at the stubborn stains of a coffee mug. She was better
this way. Hidden from a violent past, abusive parents. She'd been unhappy,
wandering through a forest in the rain when they found her, bruised and
bleeding inside, afraid to go back home. It was easier to scribble over
memories a person didn't want to remember, so they searched for these
people—the abused and neglected. They repaired her insides, repaired her
sundered mind. Now those memories were gone.

Hedge looked to
his plate, the wide slab of meat staring back at him in all its enormity, and
felt the uncomfortable weight of too many chunks already inside him. Once, in a
similar predicament, he had regurgitated the pork chops onto the table in a
warm stew of ragged chunks, but that had made Anna cry. He had yet to find an
equally effective manner of emptying himself since, but the sight of Anna in tears
flooded him with a sense of wrongness.

There was a
bonsai plant in the center of the table, a solemn and tiny tree that always
seemed to be watching him. Even now he felt it was staring at him, waiting for
him to make a decision. So he lifted the plate, stretched his face around the
porcelain while she wasn't looking, and dumped everything into his gullet. The
stretching heaviness in his middle became unbearable. He needed to purge.

The chair
scrubbed across the floor when he stood.

"I'm
walking," he said, then added an appreciative belch in afterthought.
"Uuurp."

Earth wife Anna
fluttered her fingers above a shoulder and Hedge passed through the living room
and out the front door of their two-story farmhouse. The house stood inside a
white rail fence Hedge had constructed, beside a wooden barn whose weathered
boards were turning gray, and a corn field beyond.

She would find
the empty plate and be happy. Then she would curl in bed beside him, read a few
pages of a dull story and fall asleep. She would do the same if she were angry,
but she would not enjoy the story, would not drop off to sleep. Her mind would
flutter and despair and wake up harried. It took him a great long while to
realize the reason for this was that she loved him. It took still longer to
realize she wanted him to love her in return. And one of the larger parts of
love involved consuming pork chops.

His midsection
burbled angrily.

Love was
invariably harder some times than others.

The screen door
whined and smacked shut behind him as Hedge lumbered across the porch and down
the steps, walked beside the bed of dipped, snoozing flowers that traced the
house and crunched across the gravel drive on the way to the barn.

It was a cool
night, with gentle breezes that knocked solitary, ringing notes from the porch
wind chime. A full moon stared down at everything with an expression of
permanent awe, bright enough that Hedge could see the swooping black boomerangs
of bats as they swung back and forth over the small pond behind the house. Bees
droned dully in their hives, fat and sated by a hard day's work.

Hedge
unfastened his pants and let them slide to his ankles, knees bent with his back
against the shrub-ringed barn, feeling the weight inside him shift as he
prepared to empty his vacuole behind a bush in an act many humans referred to
as "taking a dump" where the raccoons would find it. It was a
confusing tangle of words since he wasn't taking, but giving. There was
scarcely enough room to take any more. Then a flash of light silhouetted him,
pants down, against the side of the barn. Long enough to draw his attention
from the current process.

It came from
the cornfield.

"Hedgelford
Bran Johnston!" cried the earth wife from the kitchen window. Her tone was
raking and furious, a tone used in conjunction with his full name only when
deadly serious—a frightful state that sometimes rattled even Hedge, which was
strange because humans were largely undangerous when compared to the
evolutionary paths other creatures had taken. Notably, the Fire-tailed Xiz, which
could detach and launch exploding parts of its body at prey, attackers, and its
own insubordinate children. "Get your pants up, this
instant
!"