Майкл Бишоп - The Final Frontier - Stories of Exploring Space, Colonizing the Universe, and First Contact

As I float by the porthole, I can see them all so clearly. Their faces tender and animated, as I turn from the raised platform into the doorway of the shuttle, turn once more to look for the last time at my people and my world, to breathe the forest-scented air. There is the wide, woven roof of the kinhouse, and the vines running up the brown walls, the gourds ripening green to gold. Here I had played and climbed, looked at the stars, dreamed and wept. There is the gleam of the river, the pier, the boats waiting on the water. Dwarfing them all, the great, shaggy forest, trees like spires, trees like umbrellas, reaching leafy arms into the sky, taller than the tallest kinhouse. I think: when I rise up, I will see again the Devtaru, the one closest to us anyhow, greater than any tree that exists or can be dreamed. The Devtaru has shared its secret with us, and because of that I will fly beyond the moon. As I rise I will speak my gratitude to it, to all the world for having formed me, made me into myself. And so I did.

The devtaru is not a tree. It is perhaps what a tree would dream of, if a tree could dream.

The first one I ever saw lies two days away from my kinhouse. In my thirteenth year, some of us trekked through the forest with Visith, one of my aunts, who has been a sister of the forest most of her life. On the way we learned plant lore, and we practiced the art of offering kinship to the beings of the forest.

“Kinship isn’t friendship,” my aunt said. “Don’t go doing stupid things like putting your hand into a tree-bear’s nest, or poking around inside an occupied bee-apple. Learn to sit still in a clear space, and let the creatures observe you, as you observe them.”

We did a lot of sitting still. It was difficult at first but I got the idea of it quicker than the others. The forest whispered around me—sunlight dappled the ground. A wind-around approached me, its tendrils aquiver, looking for something to climb. I nudged it away with my toe—it was kin, but I didn’t want it taking advantage of my stillness. I sensed that I was being watched: a moon-eye monkey, which meant we were close to the devtaru. It was up in a tree, the white rings around its eyes giving it an expression of permanent astonishment. My heart thundered with excitement as the little creature peered out from its leafy shelter. But it was only after two days of seeing and being seen that the moon-eye came out into plain sight. A day later it took an apple-rind from me. After that the moon-eyes were everywhere, moving above me over the trees, chattering to each other and glancing at me from time to time. Then I could walk about without them hiding. I had made kinship!

Parin was in trouble for being too impatient, trying to climb up to a moon-eye’s nest before it was appropriate to do so. The other two hadn’t yet obtained the knack of it and needed to practice stillness without fidgeting or falling asleep. We lingered in that place until their impatience gave way to resignation, and they broke through. We got a congratulatory lecture from Visith.

“A kinship is a relationship that is based on the assumption that each person, human or otherwise, has a right to exist, and a right to agency,” she intoned. “This means that to live truly in the world we must constantly adjust to other beings, as they adjust to us. We must minimize and repair any harm that we do. Kinship goes all the way from friendship to enmity—and if a particular being does not desire it, why, we must leave it alone, leave the area. Thus through constant practice throughout our lives we begin to be ready with the final kinship—the one we make with death.”

We looked at each other and shivered.

“You are a long way from that,” Visith said sardonically, then smiled a rare smile. “But you’ve taken the first step. Come, let us keep going.”

So the journey to the devtaru took several days, and when we were standing at its edge we didn’t even know it.

The ground changing should have been our first clue. The forest floor was dotted with undergrowth, but here we found that great roots as thick as a person reared out of the ground and back again, forming a fascinating tangle of steps and crevices that invited climbing. The trees had changed too—the canopy above seemed to be knit together, and trunks dropped down and joined the roots, making a three-dimensional maze.

Visith didn’t let us go into the tangle. Instead we made camp and practiced stillness between meals and washing, and took walks along the perimeter of the maze. After two days of this, during which our impatience gave way to resignation, and then, finally, the open, accepting, alertness of mind that births the possibility of kinship—Parin pointed at the tangle.

“It’s a devtaru! And we didn’t even know it!”

It was indeed. The enormous central trunk was deep inside the forest of secondary trunks, likely several hours journey. The roots went deeper down than any other organism on the planet. To see a devtaru in its entirety, one has to be airborne, or on a far away hill.

Under the canopy, the moon-eyes led us over the maze of roots and trunks. We found shelter in the crook of a giant root, underneath which flowed a clear stream of water. The bark against which I laid my head was a thin skin that glowed faintly in the darkness, pulsing in response to my presence. To make kinship with a devtaru is extraordinarily difficult—Visith is one of the few who has succeeded, and it took her nearly twenty years.

“Tomorrow we will go to a place I know, where the devtaru was fruiting moon-pods last I came,” she told us. “If the devtaru wishes, perhaps we will see a launch!”

I had seen the usual fruiting pods of a devtaru during our journey inside it, but never the legendary moon-pods. This devtaru was too young to make anything but small, empty moon-pods, but it would be a sight worth seeing. My heart was full. I wanted so much to be kin to such a being! Like Moon-woman, whose story Parin began to tell in the soft darkness.

There was a girl once, who sat in stillness seeking kinship with a devtaru for a hundred years. Potter-ants built a dwelling around her, and wind-arounds made a green tangle around that, so no rain or wind could trouble her. Flitters brought her crystals of sap and placed them between her lips so she knew neither hunger or thirst. She saw the devtaru and its beings, and it observed her with its thousand eyes, and at last they made kinship.

She lived within its forest, among its roots and trunks, and learned its moods and sensed its large, slow thoughts. She became familiar with the creatures who lived in its shelter, the moon-eyes and the dream-flitters, and the floating glow-worms, and the angler-birds with their lures of light. Then one day a moon-eye led her to a place within the devtaru forest where she found a large pod attached to the top of a trunk. The pod was just about as tall as she was and just about as wide in the middle, and it was covered over with a shimmering patina, so that she had to blink to make sure it was actually there. It pointed away from her toward the moon in the sky as though it yearned to break free, and it quivered gently as though caught in a breeze, although no breeze blew. The trunk glowed and patterns formed and dissolved on its surface, and the girl knew she had to climb right up to the pod.

And she did. She found that the pod’s lips weren’t closed as yet, and inside it was empty of seed. Within it there were little creatures, buzzwings and a grumpworm or two, and some leafy, mossy debris. She felt a great shudder from the trunk so climbed down hastily, just in time, because the trunk contracted, and the pod shot with a great noise into the sky. As it did, the trunk split and the girl fell down.

She walked for days through the forest and at last found the pod. It lay in a clump of bushes, already half-covered by leaves and branches from a storm. It made her wonder why the devtaru had bothered to send an empty pod into the air at all.