At the gravesite, Chappalar’s family had already planted the roots of a snake-belly palm. It was a native Demoth tree and lightning fast-growing under the right conditions. In tropical jungles, a snake-belly would seed itself at the base of another tree, then climb that tree’s exterior in a solid sheath, like a snake swallowing the host tree trunk from the ground up. With enough water and sunlight, a snake-belly could sprout up a hand’s breadth every day — just a reed-thin shell around the host, letting the inner trunk sustain all the weight. Typical parasite behavior. Once in place, the snake-belly would digest the host trunk it had swallowed, little by little creating wood of its own from the outside in… till after a few decades, the host was fully consumed, leaving only a snake-belly with a solid wood core.
Down south, snake-bellies could grow around other snake-bellies, growing around their swallowed-up hosts. In the Pistolet Museum, they had a stump showing five separate snake-bellies in concentric rings round a toothpick core of original raspfeather.
In the Bonaventure Cemetery, we’d soon have a single snake-belly round a core of Chappalar.
They’d wrapped his body in a shroud of froth white silk. Half a dozen Oolom mourners had turned white themselves, though they stood on light green moss… the phenomenon of sympathetic transference, taking on someone else’s color in moments of heart-deep emotion. I wished I could go white with them, to show Chappalar/his family/myself that I truly felt the grief. But I stayed lumpishly Faye-colored as the pallbearers eased the body onto a wooden support stand atop the snake-belly roots.
A single Oolom child toddled forward and splashed soupy brown juice on the plant at Chappalar’s feet. Jupkur whispered that the liquid was fertilizer, laced with a mix of growth hormones. In a week, the tree would have swallowed Chappalar up to the ankles. By fall, the whole corpse would be wrapped in a snake-belly sheath. In thirty years give or take, my friend Chappalar, the man who died saving my life, would be entirely absorbed by the tree.
Even his bones. Ooloms have such precious lightweight bones.
Around us, no ornamental landscaping, no headstones, no crypts — just a forest of snake-belly palms, each one the height of a person.
By the end of the burial service, every Oolom was sympathetic white… all but Master Tic. That irked me: a peevish indignation on Chappalar’s behalf. I’d turn white if I could; why didn’t Tic?
To be fair, it wasn’t Tic’s fault: Oolom color changes aren’t consciously controlled. For Tic to turn white, he’d have to be overcome with grief — not likely, considering he’d never even met Chappalar. Tic had come to the funeral out of courtesy, showing polite respect… who could ask more?
I could. Seething-steaming-indignant.
Whenever I go to a funeral, there’s always something that makes me furious.
Ooloms don’t do tea and sympathy after a funeral. Instead, Chappalar’s family and the Oolom proctors glided off to the cemetery chapel, where (Jupkur said), "We’ll pray for just hours and hours. The priests’ major source of income is selling knee pads."
Jupkur hated to speak seriously about anything; but he wasn’t the only Oolom who turned jokily offhanded when the subject of religion came up. Ooloms didn’t talk to humans about what they believed — none of them did. Maybe that was an article of their faith, keeping mum in front of outsiders. An article of all their faiths, I should say… because whatever their religion was, it had three major denominations, plus various splinter groups. Each sect identified itself by a gobbledygook name that no one ever translated into English.
Secretive bunch, those Ooloms.
So the Ooloms went off by themselves, leaving me to walk home alone. A couple hours on foot through the countryside. Of course, the other human proctors offered me rides; but I hadn’t trekked through open tundra in years, and the quiet of it suddenly called to me. Being out among the trees, breathing the wet smell of spring, I’d been grabbed by a bubbly heartache for girlhood — for times long ago in Sallysweet River, where you could follow the Bullet tracks five minutes out of town and feel all alone on the planet.
Solitude. The rustle of trees. The pip-pip of crawler-birds slinking over the forest floor.
Just me.
Just me and my link-seed.
Okay. I can almost hear you groaning, Where’s your head, woman? Three days ago some slip-wit tried to kill you, and now you want to isolate yourself in an empty forest?
Good point.
I could make up excuses. I could put on the blather, how Demoth was a peaceful planet where assassinations didn’t happen… not often, anyway. Women didn’t need armed escorts to spend a therapeutic afternoon walking through the woods. What happened three days earlier was a fluke, the once-in-a-lifetime act of a crazed fanatic who’d soon be caught by the cops.
I could surely lie to you. But damn my link-seed, I couldn’t lie to myself.
Here’s the thing: deep down, I wanted to give the killer another shot. To see what would happen. It was another freckles-and-scalpel thing.
So I walked alone. Just to see.
I avoided the road — the woods were dry enough for walking, both the carpet-moss parts and the spots where yellow-grass could get a foothold. (Yellow-grass always grows close to water. Seen from a flying skimmer, every lake and river on Great St. Caspian has a lemon-colored fringe, like fatty buildup on the wall of an artery… but the yellow stretch fades to the frost green of carpet moss the farther you go into deep forest.)
I didn’t fret about getting lost — I could track myself by the sun. And come evening, there’d be the lights of the city to spot by the glow. This was a tundra forest… not thick stands of timber blocking the sky, but individual bluebarrel trees, well separated from each other. Any seed that rooted too close to an existing tree just wouldn’t grow. Wouldn’t get enough light, wouldn’t get enough nutrition from the gaunt soil.
In my mood, that seemed like a metaphor for something.
I dawdled away the afternoon. Nothing to see but stunted bluebarrel trees and lumpy-bumpy moss interrupted by the occasional upthrust of stone.
In one slab of rock, I found a house-sized rectangle cut straight into the stone. At one time it must have been two stories deep, though now it was three-quarters full of dirt and weeds. A leftover from pre-Oolom settlements some three thousand years old. Demoth never evolved intelligent species of its own, but aliens from the League had visited now and then in the past — setting up outposts for a while, then moving on when they lost interest in our poky little planet.
Great St. Caspian had hosted thousands of such visitors; their householes were everywhere, mostly filled in and earthed over now, with whatever had spilled into them during the past three millennia. The aliens dug mines and tunnels too. In Sallysweet River we used to play "Archaeologists Bold," excavating the nearby holes to find rusty metal junk of all shapes and sizes. We’d badger our parents to call the Heritage Board, convinced that we’d dug up priceless alien artifacts… but nothing ever came of it. The board had long ago surveyed a handful of sites and found nothing of interest. Nothing worthy of publication in a good academic journal. So now the Heritage Board ignored the ruins — dismissed anyone who wasted time snooping about in them.
Mistake. The Vigil would never have allowed such book-blinkered sloppiness. But the Heritage Board answered to the Technocracy, not local government, so it was beyond our scrutiny.
Mistake, mistake, mistake.
Sunset was coming on purple and peach when a skimmer flew over my head. It wasn’t the first I’d heard in the day, but the others were distant hums tracking the ocean coast or the Bullet tracks to the interior — probably families off on an outing, playing hooky now that the thaw had come. This new skimmer was sailing straight over the treetops of barren forest… and it had Outward Fleet insignia painted on its side.