DIAMANN AND THE PILLARS OF TIME
Scene 43
I may be the first human to stand here. It beats facing the usual death by bureaucracy.
I put my hand on the bark of the gigantic tree and look upward for light. The bark's serrations nearly gash my palm. The dimness shows only shades of umber and brown, russet and charcoal, occasionally streaked with dull bluish scribbles of the fungals that trace humid striations in the bark. The fungals add a ripe dry sweetness to the lignin-laced air.
Everywhere is tree. Monstrous trunks pillar far upward to high boughs heavy with interlocking branches – these trees make nets of long, tangled twigs to catch their own leaf-debris, hungry tendrils sucking like roots in the humid air above and around me. The nets shroud the forest floor in near-blind dark. No sound, except for a faint hiss that seems to come from all around me, echoing near and far in the shade.
If I were not here, I would be dead. I'll be dead anyway when they know where I've gone – it's death to enter these great woods from the scarps and arroyos of the South Fall towering north from where I stand. A little genetic test of the debris invisibly aggregating on and in me, and they'll know. So: death sub one or death sub two – which do I choose? At least this will be a more-interesting death, not like the fake trial, the long parade of liars, and the endless waiting in a City cell thousands of feet deep in rock for the always-hungry recyclers.
For murder, I would have been exiled. For a few words spoken, I will be sentenced to die.
More than eight thousand years ago these same trees stood here while a few human explorers timidly poked at the forest's fringes. Now the trees are so great in girth that ten or twelve tall men, their arms outstretched, couldn't reach a ring around even the least of them. There are no younger trees here, not unless they are seeded and growing somewhere high in the knotted canopy, maybe in some lightning-hollowed stub of one of these monsters, their roots cannibalizing one of their wounded ancestors. No, 'tree' is not a word I would use to describe this thing bulking beside me. 'Tower' or 'buttress' would still be inadequate.
A shower of white slurry rattles to the earth a few strides away. Some creature far up in the canopy, I suppose, shedding the debris from its last meal.
We pillaged all the natural parts of this planet except this – what stopped us here in Sirathen? Wood from these trees could have built entire above-ground cities across all of Tarnus, and it wouldn’t make a dent in these great forests of Sirathen reaching up to the South Fall. The Fall’s three-kilometer-vertical wall of rock soars to where Muathen, our northern land, begins.
My gut coils, complains about its emptiness. I have only the food and water I carried when I staggered in here from the Muathen river crevasse – what do I do now? The trackers will be waiting for me if I retrace my path. I can only hide in here until I can find an unwatched path back out north and thread my way up the next river, if I can find one, back to Muathen.
Trunk to trunk, pillar to pillar, I move slowly, counting: ten paces, twenty, thirty, over ground burled with cobbles of roots writhing like tormented bodies from the black mold between each tree and its nearest neighbor. Tiny pinpricks of light shine above me, stars hinting at a sunlit sky somewhere far out of reach. The gentle slope down to my right tells me that the southward drainage leads that way, away from the South Fall.
A soft splash – I step in water. This rivulet will lead me south, deeper into the continental Sirathen forest. I move on across the stream and continue, keeping the upslope on my left. I try to keep some sense of my starting point.
# # #
Hours have passed. I stop, sensing the fading of day, and sit down with my back to a tall buttressing root rising from the earth into some giant scabbed trunk. I am lost. My food pack is small, and I unwrap some tuber and eat it, no brew to unstick it from my throat. The water bottle brings a little relief.
The darkness deepens, and I tilt my head back. The hiss is softer now, as if it is linked somehow with the light of the sun. The sound makes me nod with sleep, once, twice; I think about standing up but then I realize: where would I go? Sleep seems a good idea, so I find a softer place in the moldy soil and settle on my side, curled up, my head resting on my arm and my small bundle of food. Maybe morning will show me east and west in the stars of the leaf-gaps. I fall asleep.