The year the trees woke was a bad one. There were ideological purges and political trials and fresh violence every few weeks. In early summer, before all the trouble started, the Central Committee sent me north to investigate a curious murder in San Joaquín del Monte.
San Joaquín was a tiny town a couple of hours north of Guadalajara, in what had been the state of Jalisco. That’s hill country up there. In that season, the road cut through miles of twisting, rippling rows of young corn. Agromechs, the old bipedal kind, littered the landscape, dusty and mostly idle. Occasionally, one would sway and stand and then walk a patrol, I suppose looking for weeds or whatever else they did between sowing and reaping. I hated that we kept those machines. They had no sense of shame, no need to groom, standing caked in dirt and grime. What creature doesn’t groom?
The town wasn’t a town in any real sense, of course, and by then was completely deserted. The only official resident was the priest who’d reported the body, so I loped over to a little church just off the main square as soon as I was dropped off. Back then I would get an urge—a tingle in my spine, really—whenever I crossed big open spaces. An instinctual desire for trees, for something to jump into. I remember that feeling but the tingle is gone, burnished away.
The church had a thick wooden door, sun-beaten to grey. Faded tassels hung on an old cork board on the adobe wall, above a broken electronic display panel turned flowerpot. I knocked so long I began to wonder if maybe I should instead look for the priest’s house. I was starting to feel foolish for just walking over to the first church I saw when the door opened with a weak little moan and out came the priest. All five feet of human, unkempt salt and pepper hair, the coffee skin of his ancestors wrapped into a frown.
“Sí? How can I help you?” he asked me. You don’t hear that singsong mountain Spanish anymore. Polite, clipped, worn down by bad news.
“Buen día, padre. I’m Kal Ix Tab. I am here about the… incident.” I could tell he didn’t like me.
“I know,” he stared at me. Obviously, his eyes said, waiting for an excuse to close the door.
“You are Father Horacio Díaz?”
He nodded.
“Well, camarada,” I knew that was a mistake the instant I said it. “Padre,” I started again, “I’m going to ask you some questions. Then I’d like to see the body. Is it here?”
“Of course not.” Venom. “I left it at the finca. I haven’t touched anything, like I was told.”
“In this heat?” I asked, queuing my wrist strap to start recording audio and vital signs.
“He’d been lying there for days when Diego found him. What difference would twelve more hours make?”
“All right,” I resisted the temptation to shift my weight back and settle in for a long conversation in the sun. I was sure he wouldn’t understand the posture. “Maybe you can start by telling me what you know.”
“Less than you, I’m sure. I told your Committee everything I know.”
“Tell me again, please.”
He sneezed, hard and loud, then again, finally pulling an old handkerchief from his back pocket. “Allergies. I don’t suppose you have allergies?”
I smiled. Maybe a little too much like a grimace.
“So the deceased was named Dionisio?”
“Dionisio Flores, yes,” he replied, still wiping his nose. He was looking past me, looking around the square, searching for something.
“Parishioner?”
“What?”
“Was he a member of your church?”
“Of course not.”
“How did you know him?”
“He was the only one left over from the old days. Him and Gisela.”
“His wife? Gisela Flores? Did you know them well?”
“Not really. Well, a bit. Until Alvaro left, we would play conquian. Gisela convinced us to do it years ago, looked up the rules.”
“Conquian?”
“It’s an old card game. Nobody even played it in my time,” he shrugged. “It was nice, I suppose.”
“Who’s Alvaro?”
“Oh, an old truck driver. Settled here on his land when he retired.”
“Died?”
“I think so, yes, but not here. He died in the capital, gave up after the last blight and went to live with his daughter, I think.”
“So, it’s just been you and the Flores’ out here since Alvaro left? When was that?”
“Five years ago or so,” he paused, looking out again over the plaza. “Gisela died this past autumn. After that, I didn’t see Dionisio at all.”
“How did she die?”
“Don’t you have all this in your records?”
“I do, yes. How did Gisela die, padre?”
“Old age.”
“Old…”
“Broken heart!” came a squawk from above. A blackbird the size of a sheep dog perched on the lip of the adobe wall, head cocked so he could look down. I hadn’t heard any wings flapping.
“You must be Diego,” I asked, backing up, shielding my eyes from the sun.
“And you must be trouble from the south,” cackled a reply.
“A bit harsh, don’t you think?” I asked.
“Nice name. Kal Ix Tab. Whom are you here for?” He hopped along the wall to be more directly above me.
“You speak Tzeltal,” I observed.
“Why wouldn’t I?” the blackbird cawed back, hopping to and fro.
“It’s not in your records,” I replied, matter-of-factly. His hopping stopped. We stared at each other.
“She died of a broken heart. Gisele,” he said finally.
“How do you know that?” I asked.
“Diego practically lived with them,” the priest volunteered.
“I did not,” cawed Diego, “I watched over them. They were old and… I owed them much.”
“How long have you lived here?” I asked.
“I was made Overseer of the property ten years ago. There were a handful more humans back then, as Horacio said,” he replied.
“So you manage the fields and the agromechs? Do you live nearby?” I asked.
“My nest is west of here, on a height overlooking the town,” Diego replied, “Why don’t I take you to the finca and you can ask me questions you already know the answers to along the way? Horacio is tired and it’s almost his siesta time.”
“Bien,” I replied. I hadn’t expected to see the Overseer so soon. “Lead on, I’ll follow. Padre, you’ll be here later so I can follow up?”
“Sí, sí, of course,” Horacio yawned.
“What fancy ride brought you in from Túumben Tikal? Flew in?” Diego cawed. Beyond the handful of collapsed adobe houses, a dusty road stretched north between dry, woody hills. Healthy, leafy elms with good branches stretched away in a neat row on the right side of the road, so the going was faster than I had expected.
“I’m fairly certain you saw me jump off that autorig,” I replied, settling into a natural rhythm and relishing the pace. Diego flew lazily over the road to my left.
Diego cawed back in an unsettling mimicry of human laughter. “Maybe, then, no more questions we know answers to, eh?”
“Fair,” I replied, “Why don’t you start.” Another strange caw. He’d lived with humans a long time.
“Why’d they send you?” he asked. I let that go unanswered for a while, as I swung along.
“You mean why didn’t they send a human?” I replied. Diego banked and dropped onto a branch ahead of me, eye cocked and steady. I hung still and stared back.
“I suppose they thought this would be easier for everyone,” I eventually said.
“Because I’m here?” he asked.
“Partially, yes. The only human in any direction for fifty miles is that priest back there. Frankly, I was surprised to read he was still here. The Committee thought sending a human might cause friction.” I swayed on the branch, looking at him. “But now I’m not so sure. Where’d you learn to laugh like that?”
“Like what?” he cawed indignantly.
“Like a human,” I said calmly.
“Please!” he squawked loudly, then hopped noisily onto a branch above me. “I have no interest in a lecture on the evils of humanity.”
“I didn’t mean it that way. But you’re obviously comfortable with them. I’ve met tz’ikb’uuls who would sooner peck their own eyes out than imitate humans,” I started moving again. He followed, sulking along.
“The elms are lovely,” I started again, “I didn’t think they grew this strong so far from the cloud forests. Are they yours?”
“They were Gisele’s. I watch over them now, so, yes, I suppose they’re in my care,” he cawed twice suddenly, then dropped onto a branch ahead so he could stare me down again. “To be clear, I’m not claiming they belong to me.”
I didn’t bother to pause, swinging past him. “Look, Diego. You and I need to trust each other a bit. I’m not here to cause trouble. I certainly wasn’t wondering if an old tz’ikb’uul Overseer suddenly decided he owned property. I just need to take a look at Dionisio, try to understand how he died. From what the priest told us – and I have a strong suspicion you helped him craft the message – Dionisio was attacked. We can’t just ignore something like that. Any violence against humans, no matter how small, is anathema. And this is a murder, or so it would seem. It surprises me that we’re still playing games.”
I let him run his beak on that for a while, picking up the pace, howling now and then for fun. Twelve hours on a perch cabin in an autorig dulls one’s senses and I needed the exercise.
“How close are we?” I finally asked, a bit too loudly.
“We’re almost there. The little road to the finca is marked by two cypresses,” he replied. We swung along in silence until the two trees came into view. I scrambled up one of them to get a clear view of the land. A little side road cut east about half a mile into a shallow valley, flanked by the late afternoon Jalisco foothills, olive-green scrub dotting the umber landscape. The little finca itself was at the far end, past fields of corn and beans and surprisingly broad, leafy greens. To the west, away from the finca, the land flattened out and emptied. No fields or agromechs, just scrub and manzanita swaying in the hot, languid air. Reflexively, I faced south, back across the path we had taken.
“Somewhere out there, far beyond those thermals, must be the cloud forests of your youth, eh?” Diego cawed softly. He had dropped in beside me on the cypress.
“Yes. You’ve been there?” I asked him, curious why a blackfeather would know or care about my homeland.
“I hope to. Gisele spoke of it all the time. She’d lived there, before Dionisio. Before the Problems.”
“Really?” Now this was intriguing. “She grew up there?”
“I don’t know. Gisele never talked about the time before. I think she hid out there when things were really bad, before coming here.”
“That’s surprising. Things were worse among the humans out there than they were in the cities. The viruses destroyed them in their over-crowded nests, but down south, where I’m from, they savaged each other horribly. She would’ve had to avoid all sorts of trouble. Was she on her own?”
“I told you, Gisele never spoke of any of that. She only spoke of her life with Dionisio.”
“Wait. You call her Gisele.”
“What?”
“Gisele. The name on the report is Gisela.” I turned to look at him. “Diego, I believe you speak English.” Diego sat still, right eye cocked to the west.
“Yes, they spoke English,” he said softly, after a time. “I never asked why. He called her Gisele, that’s how I learned her name.”
“You never thought to ask?” I turned to him. My stomach began to swirl. Butterflies in the stomach: another sensation I remember but have forgotten.
“Why would I? They were good people. Took care of this place for miles around. Taught me most of what I know.”
“Ah, Diego,” I sighed. “I had hoped this would be quick. You better take me to the body.” I pivoted around, swinging down the cypress. It was when I was about to swing off the tree that I saw the distant, bright green mound, in a field south of the house. I held on. My stomach lurched.
“What’s that? Growing out of the corn field. It must be ten meters across and half as high in the middle!” I howled.
“The local miracle, jefa,” cawed Diego, to my left. “I wondered when you’d notice. It started growing this spring. Dionisio would not let me near it.”
“Are those giant ixim?”
“Elote, my dear. Up here it’s called elote,” he replied gleefully.
“Ixim, elote, maize, corn. Call it what you like. The mound is enormous. This wasn’t in the report.”
“What would I have reported? That Dionisio had a green thumb?” Just then my stomach wisely decided it was time to set things right. I took my time. Diego must’ve felt the same; he followed suit. Then we both hopped off the tree and made our way to the old house.
I’ve never been anywhere that so clearly wanted me gone. Looking back, I can remember all the minor things that were off-putting at the Finca Flores. Even taken together, it doesn’t sound like much, but from the moment I started loping towards the house, everything felt wrong. A cloud of tiny birds lifted from the oaks on the far ridge and wheeled over us, chirping and crying and swooping in great abrupt motions. There was a heaviness in the air, too. A misty soup of pollen and leaf-smell and must, warmed in the afternoon sun, clawing its way down my throat. I tell you this truly but you’ll be tempted to shrug it off as the typical dread of human houses. Even at that age, I’d been to the D.F. twice and once to Old San Diego. I’d lived – briefly – in those concrete and asphalt tombs, worked with the haunted-eyed and the sick, smelt their charnel foods. That was gloom and loss.
This place was flourishing. The fields were thick with growth, the path to the house barely visible. Fat yellow insects swarmed around us, curious and loud and large enough to annoy Diego as he sailed ahead, to wait on the old porch. The enormous green elote mound loomed to my right, a tower of rippled shadow in the slanting light.
“Dionisio is just inside, to the right, in the kitchen,” cawed a subdued Diego, his eye alternating between me and the giant corn stalks. “It is, well… a bit gruesome.” I swung on to the rail next to him, looked out over honey-tinted fields.
“That’s no local miracle, Diego,” I said flatly. The insects buzzed past us, drifting in and out of the house.
“You won’t have much light left if you don’t start soon.” he said, dropping to the floor and then hopping slowly, reverently, across the threshold.
The front door was propped open with a chair. Red clay floor, adobe walls, simple wooden furniture. Windows completely broken. Curiously, I saw no shards. No dirt or stains. It was as if someone lived there still.
“I keep the place,” said Diego, reading my thoughts, continuing through a low archway on the right. “This way.”
What was left of Dionisio was slumped over the kitchen table, arms outstretched as if hugging the wood. His head was missing. Liters of blood had spread across the table and floor and congealed. The walls and the cupboards were oddly clean. The striped yellow and black insects buzzed respectfully at the broken windows, fat motes of shadow in the dense light. I’d prepared myself for the stench of the bloated dead but the kitchen carried lemon and jasmine instead.
“Did you touch him?” I asked Diego, who’d flown up to perch above a cupboard.
“No,” he replied, then croaked softly, “I was afraid the blood might seep out of the room, but it didn’t.”
“It’s time you told me what you saw, in your own words.” I jumped onto the back of a clean chair and swept my arm over the body, queuing my strap to start collecting data, spectroscopy, images. All of it would be reconstructed later.
“Yes,” he replied hoarsely, unfurling his wings above me. He loomed large in that fading light. The Awakened are always larger than their little cousins. “Gisele died in late autumn, just after harvest. She passed on a few days after the Day of the Dead. Winter was difficult. He was angry all the time.”
“Mourning?” I probed.
“Yes, mourning, of course. His generation mated for life. At least that’s what they told me,” Diego paused, as if remembering something.
I shrugged. “Go on.”
“Once spring came, his rages lessened. Dionisio spent most days outside, in his favorite chair, staring out over the fields. In the last few months, he took to walking over to the mound in the late afternoon and spending time with the elote. I’d go with him sometimes. He never went earlier in the day because he said the elote was growing then and he didn’t want to bother it.”
“So he planted that thing out there?”
“I don’t think so. He seemed surprised when it appeared in late winter,” he replied. “And he was strictly against Intercession. They both were. You know, they once apologized to me for my Awakening?”
“They sound like old anarcho-primitivsts,” I muttered, gingerly stepping from chair to counter, to give the strap a different angle.
“Something like that, yes. They felt that all Awakenings were horrible crimes which stole away our innocence. If they drank enough, of an evening, I could get them to talk.”
“You enjoyed that time with them?”
“Yes. Very much,” he replied softly. “They taught me many things.”
“Like what?”
“You were asking about what happened.”
“I was, yes.”
“That day, Dionisio returned from his walk through the fields around sunset. I had not gone with him. He’d been asking me to count bunting nests in the hills overlooking the house. The birds have done very well this spring, great numbers of them have been making homes in the trees.”
“How did you know that he went for a walk?”
“Because I came back as he was coming into the house. We decided to enjoy the waning light. I perched right there under that oak and he sat in his chair. You can see it, through the window,” he hopped down from the cupboard and stood on the open sill, looking out.
“Did he seem worried about anything? Then or before? Did he confide in you?” I prodded him. “You can see how this crime is perplexing.”
“Yes, of course. As you say, there isn’t another human except Padre Horacio anywhere near here. No one could come here unnoticed. And the wounds…” he trailed off. He hadn’t mentioned wounds before. Before I could ask, he went on. “Dionisio was not himself after Gisele died. He went about his habitual tasks all winter – all completely irrelevant, of course. He asked me to track the usual things: trees, animals, weather, water table, and a thousand more. I’d been doing that for years. But he was different somehow, more insistent.”
“Understandable. His life-mate had died.” I had stopped scanning and simply sat there, focusing on Diego who was increasingly lost in the gathering shadow.
“Yes, of course. He started speaking of strange things. Of his desire for children. They never had any. Of his love for ants. Of corn. It became our habit for him to talk and for me to listen. He would sit under the tree and tell me something I’d never heard before. It was as if he were re-visiting old friends.”
“Or passing them on to you. He was preparing to die. That is also how we do it. We tell stories,” I said.
“Perhaps. But he wasn’t growing frail or despondent. On the contrary, he gave me more tasks than usual. Some took me far afield. And it is true that this spring has been phenomenal. The wasps, the birds, the fields, the corn you saw…”
“The birds…” I interrupted unwittingly, drawn into the tale.
“Yes, that’s right. Incredible numbers of them. Mercifully, none bigger than me.” He croaked what I took for a scoff. “And flowers, so many flowers.”
“I noticed the pollen. Your Padre Horacio didn’t seem very happy,” I observed.
“He isn’t. Poor man,” Diego paused a little while in the gloom, very still. Somewhere outside, metal things chimed in the breeze.
“Did Dionisio expect any trouble? Someone from his younger days, maybe?” A risk. Diego sensed it, cocked his head, and turned to me.
“Odd question. Why would any of that matter?” he asked.
“You’ve grown attached to them, haven’t you?” I asked, parrying. He didn’t move. The silence stretched as light failed. I lost. “Dionisio moved in violent circles in his youth,” I said. “I wondered if maybe that all caught up to him.”
Diego relaxed, turned to look out over the shrouded oak.
“Ah, that,” he replied. “He told me once he never regretted any of the things he did. But he never mentioned anyone or anything like what you’re implying.”
“Really? Think,” I pressed. “He never mentioned anyone?”
“No. Gisele, of course, but he always talked about her. That afternoon, he just talked about roots and corn. ‘Diego,’ he told me, ‘El maiz es sabio. It’s roots go down five or six feet and spread wide, mixing with other roots. That mound, for instance, must have enormous roots that go even deeper and wider than that. Think of it. Millions upon millions of tiny roots, all forming connections beneath the earth. Talking to each other.’ And so on. I let him talk for a long time. Then, when it was dark, he asked me to fly north, to the Rio Pardo. That’s about ten miles. He asked me to fly to the river and see what things came to the water before midnight.”
“An odd request,” I asked.
“A bit eccentric, but he asked those things a lot and I humored him. I learned so much from listening, I expected he would teach me something from whatever I saw. So I went. I left him in the chair, in that darkness. Never said a word.”
“So you flew back later that night?”
“Yes, but not when I had planned. About an hour before the moon was overhead.” My strap quietly informed me that would’ve been just before midnight. “I heard an immense riot of birds. Thousands of them, crying in the night, in the direction of the finca. They must’ve flown all around the place for miles, throwing up a ruckus. Not one animal had come to drink at the river, so I thought perhaps a large predator was stalking the hills north of here. I flew back.”
“And you saw nothing out there?”
“No. By the time I flew back, the birds had all quieted down. The place was very still. I could see very well because of the moon. As soon as I came over the hills, I saw the broken windows.” Outside, evening had finally fallen over the finca and a wind had picked up, setting the corn fields to whispering.
“So you flew in and saw him?” I asked.
“No. Not at first. I flew in wide circles, taking it all in. I can’t explain why. The whole finca felt wrong, somehow. The birds were back in their trees but they stirred and called to each other. There was a wind over the place,” he swiveled his head towards the window again, “and the corn and the trees groaned and rustled mightily. Everything was moving. My eye would dart towards some fleeting shadow, but I saw nothing. I swear to you. Not a single mouse skittered across the grass. Until I came in.”
“Someone was in here?” That detail was not in the report. Padre Horacio’s message matched Diego’s tale fairly accurately thus far.
“The wasps,” he cawed, so shrill that I thought he was calling out. “Honey wasps. Everywhere. He was as you see him now. Blood still fresh, of course, and large shards of glass everywhere. And everywhere honey wasps.” So Diego had cleaned up the window glass.
“Wasps? Is that what was in here earlier? Wouldn’t it have been too cold?” I asked.
“Yes, honey wasps. We don’t have bees here. The room was warm. Warm and moist. There were several pots on the stove, filled with water. The oven was on. And the fireplace in the other room was blazing. It was very warm inside, even with the windows broken in and the wind stirring up things,” he added, hopping on the counter in a nervous little dance.
“The wasps were in the kitchen? Is there a nest nearby? In the walls?” I raised my strap and set it to scan the walls around us.
“Don’t bother, the walls are stone. There are many, many nests this season but none near the house. The closest is across the field to the north, in the oaks. There are dozens up there,” he stopped hopping and looked at me curiously. “What does your strap say?” he asked, head tilted, in a mocking sing-song. The strap confirmed solid walls. I ignored him.
“Dionisio told me once that we would turn out no better than them. That we’d learn all their ways of being ugly. ‘Words,’ he said, ‘Words are contagious. Our words will infect your minds, long after we’re gone.'”
“Diego, what were the wasps doing?” I asked. He was skirting dangerously close to subversive speech. The strap was recording.
“See for yourself. Ask your strap what it found on the body,” he cawed loudly, raising his wings almost defensively. I did. Multiple large stings over what remained of his neck and upper chest. Systemic inflammation. Swelling, localized bruising, contusions.
“The wasps killed him? Then where’s his head?” I asked.
“Maybe the strap knows,” he answered petulantly.
“Diego, enough. Our technology didn’t kill your friend. I’m here to find out who did. Can you tell me what else you remember? Where are the glass shards from the windows?”
“I took them out. I couldn’t bear to see the place like that. They’re in a pile out back behind the house. I reported all that. Big shards, blood and feathers on all of them.”
“Blood and feathers? Except for the broken windows, none of that was in Padre Horacio’s message to us,” I snapped. “Who broke the windows?”
Diego stared at me silently sideways. It was getting harder to see him in the darkness.
“The birds? The birds you heard from the hills?” I asked. He sat immobile. “You know my strap will tell me if that’s bird blood on the windows.”
“You see now why I was careful with what Horacio wrote?” he finally croaked, slowly.
I sighed; dangerous territory. Reflexively, I rotated my neck and stretched my jaw open wide. I heard Diego skitter around on the cupboard above me.
“Relax, black feather,” I dropped into the kitchen sink, feeling the evening breeze through the open window. “Did you check any of the birds, afterwards?”
“Yes,” came the reply. “Nothing. I checked very carefully.”
“Could they be hiding or acting stupid?”
“No. I’ve lived here a long time, I know them all.”
“But you said there are many more this season.”
“More, yes, but none Awakened. I’m sure of it. For one, they’d be larger, like me. For another, it would be almost impossible to hide it. There would be changes in behavior. You know all of this.”
“Yes, I do. But this looks very bad.” I paused, then abruptly switched my strap off. “It’s too far south, Diego. If there is even a chance that northerners are causing trouble here, I need to report it.”
Diego dropped suddenly onto the counter next to me in a constrained swoop.
“But you’ll burn this place down! You’ll sterilize it!” he cawed loudly.
“Of course not! Who told you such nonsense? We don’t kill our brothers and sisters, Diego! That’s what they do!” I stood up straight, coming level with him. “These humans, kind though they may have been, filled your head with nonsense. We need to bring technicians down here, to look for Awakened. And experienced trackers, to look for human-sign. None of our brothers and sisters could have done something like this. Only humans kill this way. Only northerners. For revenge or avarice. Or maybe they were just passing through and thought to punish an old traitor. There’s no way to know without bringing in experts.”
“What about me?” he asked. I realized of a sudden that night had fallen truly now. Diego loomed next to me, an inky blue blackness of feathers rustling slightly in the night air.
“What about you?” I replied, growing wary.
“You suspect me,” he said flatly. Was there menace in his voice or only fear?
“I do,” I said finally, releasing tension in a sudden realization. “But if you are somehow confused, I doubt you are stupid enough to kill me. That would guarantee what you are afraid of. Help us figure this out. No one is asking you to leave this place.” Silence and shadow and time.
“It’s too late to go back,” he said suddenly, swaying on the counter. “There’s nowhere to stay in San Joaquín. You should sleep here. I can keep watch outside in case something shows up.” He was right, of course.
“All right. I’ll sleep on top of that big old armoire I saw in the main room.” I nodded. “In the morning, maybe we take one more look around outside and then I’ll head back south to see what’s to be done.”
Diego flew out the kitchen window, after promising to keep a watch over the house and return in the morning. Loping into the main room, I tucked myself into the small space between the top of the oak armoire and the ceiling, naively thinking the height would dispel the aversion I felt inside human houses. I was wrong. Sleep did not come easily. I spent some time reviewing the data on the strap and glancing over the latest news: fresh accusations of subversion; failing communes in the far south; an opinion piece on which human words to allow into the lexicon of revolution. It all felt oddly distant. It was when I turned my attention away from the strap that I noticed a carving in the wood: “G. Hessler, 12/10/41.” Hessler hadn’t been in any records we’d found associated with the property. On a hunch, I entered “Gisela / Gisele Hessler” into the strap for the AI to queue a search and thumbed restlessly at the old wood for a while. Someone had carved the name long ago and forgotten it. Human things always had marks of ownership. Possession and control. During my apprenticeship in San Diego, I’d seen two human males quarrel over who “owned” the best spot on a balcony overlooking a fight pit. Neither did, of course, but the argument came to blows anyway. Before we could intervene, one human had thrown the other over the edge and down to his death. And so it was, everywhere. It was in that fugue of sad memories and dilapidated ruins that I wrapped my tail around me and drifted off to sleep, to be possessed by a nightmare in which thousands of humans drifted through endless stacks of yellowing paper, ripping them into tiny pieces and sighing as they did. Shrip, shrip, shrip, chirped their tiny naked hands as they destroyed their languages and histories. Shrip, shrip, sigh…
I woke in the dark, unsure of the time. The steady, distant ripping sounds persisted, born from somewhere in the darkness around me. I craned my neck, glanced down to the main room. Pitch black. And yet, no, something moved across the smooth, hard floor. I tensed and slowly thumbed my strap to throw infrared into my visual cortex. The floor lit up with streams of tiny bodies moving in neat lines from left to right. Ants! Thousands upon thousands of them, in files that came and went between the kitchen archway and a closed door to my right. The streams moved in a wide arc to avoid the armoire I was on. I watched carefully, zooming in, examining them. They were large, each the size of a fat maize kernel. From the kitchen to the door, they streamed in orderly fashion but on the way back they carried things: shreds of paper and tiny bits of plastic or metal. Rarely, a small group carried a piece too big for one ant. The sound from my dreams was coming from behind the closed door. I moved a hand through the air, testing if the ants below noticed me at all. They did not. Unfurling from my sleeping position and instructing my strap to record, I reached up and swung deftly across the roof beams towards the door. The ants avoided the vertical surfaces completely, so when I reached it, I braced my left foot against the wall while holding a roof beam with my right arm and reached down with my right foot, turning the knob slowly. Stairs, down into the earth. Neat columns of ants cascaded down the steps in the infrared and disappeared under a formidable metal door at the bottom. Switching to low light input, I could make out the almost-faded words “Agrizyme Corporation Model AGRM-2” stenciled at a strange angle across the top. Whoever made this had scavenged defunct farm robots for the metal. My problem at that moment was the lack of a handhold: the ceiling inside the stairwell was perfectly smooth, no lights or beams. There were simple wooden handrails but they looked precarious. I stood paralyzed with indecision until the sound of wings outside startled me. I checked the time on my strap. Two hours until dawn. I moved to perch on the outer edge of the upper door. From there, I toed the edge of the nearest stairway handrail, gripped it firmly with my foot and shifted my weight from one leg to the other. As my arms released the door and gripped the rail, I let the door go with my other foot and wrapped my tail to stabilize me. In this way, I walked gingerly down to the metal door. Up close, the sound behind the door was a sibilant hiss interspersed with tiny crackles and pops. I queued the strap to amplify and filter, searching for the sounds of breathing or flapping or walking. Beneath the crackling from my dreams was a different sound: a softer, undulating whisper. Minutes passed. I felt the lever with my foot, tested it gently. Cold metal. My strap confirmed the door was no warmer than the stairwell. I turned the lever and pulled slowly. The door opened soundlessly.
Through the gap I could see a spacious room with earthen walls and a hard-packed clay floor littered with small mounds of detritus. An acid smell wafted out, tickling my nose, threatening to make me sneeze. In the infrared, the ants formed mounds over the detritus, crawling over small pieces of machinery and odds and ends of different materials. It was obvious now that the sound I’d heard above was the result of all those infinitesimal mandibles shredding the contents of the room. I’d never seen anything like it. For how many nights had ants come down here and disassembled things, turning them into so much sand and bits? It did not take me long to notice that the river of ants was actually a loop: ants entered, flowed towards the rear of the room, swarmed up the back wall, then returned, mounding the debris, tearing pieces off, finally heading back up the stairs. I gripped the frame of the door above me, released the rails and hung, inspecting the ceiling of the room. Wooden beams were built into the earthen ceiling above, providing a primitive support. I gripped the knurled and rough-cut edges of a beam and swung into a hanging position inside the room. From there, I pointed the strap sensors at the back wall.
I had to fuse the infrared and low light feeds and spend several minutes making sense of what I saw. At first glance, the rear wall was a tangled plane of roots, most no larger than my fingers, braided and woven together into a mat. Ants moved into and out of this mat and streamed over long, dangling clumps of thinner roots which hung like beards in several places. With some image filtering, it became obvious that the root system was very deep and that the ants disappeared into thousands of tiny tunnels too small to inspect from where I was. Even more remarkable, some of the beard-like roots appeared to be swaying! It was impossible to tell if the motion was caused by the hair-like fibers or the ants that streamed over them, but I realized, with a growing horror, that the barely audible whisper that lay behind the ant-sound came from those wispy masses.
Hanging from one arm, my strap collecting data, the blow from behind took me by surprise. I lost my grip and was thrown violently to the ground, barreling into a pile of scraps and shards and angry ants. As my breath was crushed out, I felt air rush by above my head and heard the sound of feathered wings.
“You see!?” came Diego’s croak, ragged and loud. “She will never relent! I told you being honest was a mistake!” He screeched and cawed as he flew around the room.
Ants streamed over me, biting and tearing at my fur. I sprung up, ignoring the pain in my wrenched shoulder as I swatted as many insects as I could, looking for the door. Diego swept in low and dove for my face, claws unfurled and wings drawn wide. I ducked and reached out to tear at his wings, but he banked fast and pulled up towards the rear of the room.
“Stop!” I howled reflexively, hopping and swatting and looking for a way through the gathering masses of ants. A hissing rose from the back of the room, an ocean of sound too thin and fast for my ears. The ants, of a mass, retreated and Diego abruptly swerved and dropped onto a bent metal bar near the root mats.
“But she’ll bring others!” he cried out, enormous wings outstretched. The whispers rose and fell like waves crashing against a shore of glass. “They’re no better than humans!” he shouted to the tangled mass. “All they want is to control! I was a fool!” He reared and launched himself back into the air. Drifts of ants gathered around me, churning in a slow cadence. The whisper was suddenly a whistle and I could see the roots in the back thrashing violently, spewing ants over the floor.
“I know all of that!” the blackbird cawed, swerving to land on another pile of scrap. He folded his wings and cocked his eye at me. “Gisele says you understand what you see without being told. She says you can go, if you want.” Behind me, crinkling sounds told me the ants were parting. I stared at the roots in the back, swaying and curling as ants fell and others replaced them. The urge to howl and flee was almost overwhelming.
“Diego is right, others will come,” I told the wall suddenly. I don’t know what possessed me to speak instead of run. The tangled mass appeared to calm slightly, the grind of glass became again a low whisper. For whose ears were these sounds intended for, I wondered?
“Gisele says it doesn’t matter. She and Dionisio fertilized their children days ago and the birds have been spreading the new seed far and wide. It won’t matter if your Committee sends people to burn everything down.” Diego then paused, hopped once in place. He hopped around several times before croaking mournfully, “They both knew they might not live beyond next winter, even if you had not come.” I glanced back and, indeed, the ants had parted all the way up the stairs, streaming along the flanks of the stairway. I started to back slowly towards the door.
“Where is Gisele, Diego?” I asked, my mind refusing to accept a dawning dread. “Did she kill Dionisio? What are you doing here? What is this place?” More whispers.
“Home. Laboratory. A labor of hope,” relayed Diego. “A way forward past the endless cycles of death and misery.”
I reached the door, prepared for the ants to drive over me once again if I misspoke.
“Gisele says you would be welcome, next season when everything is set.” Diego’s speech was clipped and anguished. “There is no pain, she says. The wasp venom numbs everything. You’ll go to sleep to wake with the spring sun. You’ll grow and live in a thousand new ways as your mind opens beneath the earth.” My insides seized as the words came, terror driving an icy spike up my spine. I howled. Howled over and over, my mind fruitlessly trying to grasp what I heard. I swung my arms over my head, to dispel the madness.
“The… the corn?” I finally hooted, unable to ask more. The whispers washed over me, almost a caress.
“La madre del maize. Sí. She was the first, then Dionisio. Soon, others will join. Her sisters will awaken, then their woody cousins.” I howled and howled and ran from that place, up the stairs and through that dark room now alive with all manner of things, into the light of a westering sickle moon and a wind which made the far-off maize creak.
“Kal Ix Tab!” came Diego’s voice from inside the house. “Gisele says they are all down here with her, under the earth. The mam were always here, waiting! They were just sleeping in old bones!”
I ran and ran, south. I leapt and swung wherever I could and put as much distance between me and San Joaquín as I could before I collapsed. I woke under a bramble, my mouth full of dust, when the sun was high. My strap was prompting, delivering the result of the search from the night before.
…No records of any human with the name Gisele Hessler found within any Coalition Batab Registry.
…4 records with name match found in the Reconstituted United States Archives at Túumben Tikal, listed below:
Gisele Hessler
395 South Bonita St.
Los Cerritos, CA 94531
Expired 10 December 2039
DOB: 10 December 2006Hessler, G.; Flores, D.; Tian. W., “Chemical signaling and encoding in rhizosphere ecologies,” Technical Report, February 2037, Agrizyme Corporation, Deep Valley Drive, San Francisco, CA.
Flores, D.; Hessler, G., “Genetic modification of the root system of maize,” Technical Report, March 2039, Agrizyme Corporation, Deep Valley Drive, San Francisco, CA.
Hessler, G.; Flores, D.; Tian, W., “Encoding memory and perception with chemical signaling networks,” Technical Report, July 2040, Agrizyme Corporation, Deep Valley Drive, San Francisco, CA.
The next year, the trees Awakened.
| Martín Merino (he/him) is just getting started! His work also appeared in The Dread Machine. You can find him on Twitter @MartinM83832607. |  |