In a bag I plaited with blades of grass I placed the children of the fireblades. When full, the bag was very heavy. I searched my side of the scarlet circle surrounding my mother. In the circle of the fireblades there were thin places filled only with the old and battered. There I clawed the soil. There I placed the children. There I spat the water I gathered and discharged the fertile remains of the things I ate. I waited for the tiny green tips of the children to show themselves above the soil.
My guard was interrupted as a fireblade said, “Your sister is gone! Your sister is gone, the children of the other side with her! There is a break in the wall!”
I shut out the wails of the fireblades until all I could hear were the creatures of flesh and slime within the circle. Crawlers near the tree, fliers buzzing in the light shafts, munchers eating the dead. There was nothing strange.
I crept to the base of my mother’s trunk, listened carefully, and began the journey around her. I climbed her small roots, walked around her large ones, jumped the cracks she had made in the boulders her roots had split. All the while I searched and listened for my sister.
With my back to my mother, the first light came now over my right. I stood atop one of my mother’s roots and looked into the distance where the circle of fireblades stood. As the fireblades on my side had said, there was a break in the wall. As I approached it, the fireblades on either side wailed, “Tree child, tree child! You must bed the children in the gap. You must, else your mother dies!”
“I have none. All of my children are in the soil. What happened to my sister?”
“Creatures, they came,” said another blade. “Strange creatures of flesh and stench: strange flesh; stranger stenches. They cut through us here. We called to your sister and she tried to stop them, but they cut her down as well. Your mother they cut with a strange thing. When they left our circle they took the piece of your mother, your sister, and the severed fireblades with them.”
“Where did they kill her?” I asked.
“Where you are standing,” answered a third.
I stepped back and examined the ground, searching first for the children of the fireblades. Finding none of them, I searched for shreds, a drop of fluid, some part of my sister. I found drops of her fluid gathered in the cup of a leaf. I touched it, felt it, became it, my mind released to enter the being of each cell, the thing of it, the reality of their worlds.
I saw what she had seen. I saw the strange creatures of flesh, smelled their stench. Upright walkers, curious large heads capped with fur and covered with dead plant fibers. The sounds they made were their talk, and my sister had absorbed their talk.
They had approached the wall of fireblades.
“Use the chem proof gloves to touch them. The leaf excretes an acid that can eat through your hand in a second. Look at the burn on my arm from yesterday.” The one pulled up a covering and showed a limb to the other. The skin on the limb was light tan save for the burn. There it was deep red and pale yellow. The one nodded at my mother’s crown. “They protect the tree.”
“Look at the size of it, Tasha. That trunk must be a hundred meters or more around.”
“More, Curt. The flyby put the tops in this stand at just under eight hundred meters.”
“Can you find some blown down branches? If that wood is commercial, we’re going to be set for life.”
“Nothing on the ground. I’m guessing anything dead that lands down here isn’t around very long.”
“Look, I want to get to the tree to get a core sample. Let’s lose some of these acid plants and make a path.”
“I’m pretty sure that’d expose the tree to damage from something outside the ring. Maybe some of those jawed ground crawlers we picked up yesterday. They’re wood eaters.”
“It’s just one tree, Tasha. On survey we saw hundreds of millions of them.”
And they brought out a strange appendage that severed the fireblades at the ground. As the first creature began cutting, the second one watched. My sister turned to fluid, flowed between the blades, and came up behind the two creatures, picking their minds for their terrors. As my sister rose from the fluid, the second creature cried, “Whoa, Jesus!” The creature pulled a thing from its belt, aimed it at my sister, and sent a bolt of cold blue lightning through her. She fell.
“My god! My god, what’s that? Curt?” asked the creature with the cutter.
The other bent over my sister’s still twitching form. “It looks like a cross between a human and a dragon. Look. Fingers, legs. Human feet, but scales. Look at those bat wings. It’s some bizarre kind of gargoyle.”
The human called Tasha took something from its belt, held it over my sister, and said, “Vegetable fibers. This is a plant.”
They both stood in silence for a moment, then the one called Tasha said, “We’ll bring it back with us. I bet this is what cares for the acid plants. Keep your piece out just in case there’re more of them.” Then the creature resumed cutting through the wall of fireblades. The image dimmed. The image died. My sister was dead.
The creatures had my sister’s body. That meant they had to have the children for the other side of the circle, as well. Already the slime creatures who gnaw were sniffing at the opening in the fireblades. It would only take one of them to bore into my mother and lay its eggs. After that the eggs would hatch and soon the great tree would come crashing down to the forest floor where its remains would soon be devoured.
The gnawing creatures did not cross the stumps of the blades. They still put out their deadly fluid. But soon, no more than a day or two, they would become dry and harmless. I walked through the gap, crushed two of the gnawing creatures, and faced the fireblades.
“Bend across the gap,” I told them. “It is all you can do until I return with the children.”
It was the only time I ever ventured beyond the ring of fireblades, but there was no time for wonder. I searched the ground, the leaves, and branches for signs, absorbed the information they had, and followed.
Mists caressed the tree mosses as I found the two creatures. It was deep into the night, the sounds of the forest hushed. They were in a strange metal shelter. I became as the mist and seeped into the cracks to watch and to listen.
The one called Tasha was reclining beneath sleek coverings of soft metal fibers. The one called Curt was bending over a thing which appeared to make pictures on another thing before him. The picture was of my mother’s sign.
“Tasha,” the one said. “Wake up and look at this.”
“What?” Tasha looked at the picture, her eyes widening. “What a beautiful grain.”
“This wood has everything. Beauty, strength, dense cell matrix, but lighter than pine. It cuts like basswood, smells better than cedar, and the tests I’ve done so far peg it as more rot resistant than cypress.”
“How old is it?”
“I don’t know. You’d need a core twenty-five meters long to get near the center. The core I got was only two meters. Anyway, I count around a hundred rings every three centimeters or so. If that ratio holds true throughout the stick …” He began poking another thing with one of his fingers.