But I had a purpose, and could not rest for long. When the next bright dimmed, I spread myself out along this new piece of the tree-floor, to absorb the moisture in the wind; there was more of it, here, but as I was about to collect myself to rise again something new and unique came through the forest, treading upon the tree-floor, breaking through my substance with its weight.
They were creatures such as I had never seen before, with two footlike things to travel on, and the only animals that I had ever known with only two footlike things were feathered. These animals were not feathered in the same way, though perhaps they were feathered, because they seemed to be wearing dead leaves of some sort upon their flesh. There were some of them, I couldn’t tell, more than two, then another two, but it was difficult for me to sort them out.
They stopped in the middle of the blanket I had spread of myself to catch the moisture and made sounds to one another. One reached down into the tree-floor and lifted in its branch or paw or claw a piece of me—they had four footlike things, then, even if they only used two of them to travel—and, in contact with warm flesh uncovered by the dead leaves or the tangled hairs the nesters use or whatever it was that they were covered with, I tasted moisture.
It was moisture with mineral salts, and I was greedy for it, and sucked it all up as quickly as I could. It wasn’t all there was. There was more moisture. There was so much moisture, juicy, warm, bursting with nutrients, and I couldn’t get to it through the rind of the creature; what was I going to do?
The one who had lifted the portion of me dropped me from the height to the tree-floor once more, but another came down to the tree-floor as the first one dropped me, putting its other footlike things into the tree-floor where I could harvest the moisture and the minerals on its skin. I wanted through its rind. I was near frantic with desire, so much moisture there, the aware one would feed from this for an entire warm-cold as I had with the smaller beast. What could I do?
I fruited. It was my only chance to get closer, to get in. I could smell the moisture when they made their noises to each other, and they had breathing-places that were similar to the other warm animals I knew. If I could only reach… I fruited, then and there, in front of the creature, and thrust my spoor as hard as I could up toward its body, aiming for its mouth and nostrils. It wasn’t a full fruiting, no, of course, only a small process, I hadn’t had the time to do a better job of it; the creature fell into the tree-floor heavily, making sharp movements with its body, but I was in.
Oh, it was heaven. Moisture, minerals, salts, nourishment—preprocessed nourishment, the rarest of treats, flesh bursting with the moisture that the aware one needed for survival—but it had been only a small fruiting, simple, and when the creature expelled me from its body too little of me remained behind to make an effective use of the resources.
The creatures withdrew across the tree-floor in the direction from which they had come, but now I knew that some of the wonderful juiciness in the wind came from the creatures. And I knew what to do next. For several dayblinks I traveled after the creatures, resting during the brights, feeding in the darks, sure of my purpose.
In the dark of the fourth dayblink since I had seen the creatures for the first time they came back. I smelled them coming in the wind; I sank into the tree-floor where I stood and spread myself, carefully, seeing myself shining in the night with the blue-white glow of the aware one, and concentrated my energies to fruit. There was only one creature who came, though. That was a disappointment; I wanted at least two, one to have and one to send ahead, but I could make use of this one, I could experiment.
Hesitantly, the creature came, pausing at the edge of my glow-field. I increased my bioluminescence in the place where I was nearest to being ready to extrude a fruiting body; it came closer, it put itself down into the tree-floor, its mouth and nose and eyes were so near that I could have reached out and had them then and there but I wanted in through the rind. Carefully, I formed a fruiting body, a much bigger fruiting body this time, and made it like something that a warm-blooded chewing animal likes to hunt and hide and eat, so that it might look familiar and appetizing.
The creature reached out for the fruiting body, plucked it from my substance, put it in its mouth where it dissolved into the pith and filament I needed to propagate my substance throughout its body. I waited. There was nothing. The fruit failed. The moisture in the creature’s mouth, was it too unfriendly to my fruit?
The creature lay down in the tree-floor, then, and was quiet.
I scouted it carefully, wondering what was going on, trying to understand what was happening. The creature had not stopped breathing; I made a net over its face to capture its moisture, so that it would not go to waste. I tried to comprehend the dead leaf covering, the hair covering, sending my processes into every aperture I could find; just as I was about to give up hope… I found it.
The creature’s rind was broken in several places, not large places, and most of the breaks had a shield over them so that I could sense the aperture but not get to it; but some of them were still building their shields, new breaks perhaps, and I could get in.
Oh. I cannot describe the wonder of the experience. I had only been inside a dead thing ever before; this one was still alive. Its body did things when it recognized that I was other than itself, so I took its chemistry, I borrowed its moisture, I adjusted my processes until its body could no longer tell that I was not the same as it was; and then I learned and fed and fed and learned, and when the dayblink came I covered it up with leaf-Utter and mold and continued to learn and feed as it lay on the tree-floor. It breathed quietly and slowly for the entire bright before it died.
It would have been too much for me to process, but with the strength I gained from the nourishment and moisture it provided I sent substance back across the tree-floor floor where I had walked and traveled; that absorbed substantial excess nourishment, and when I touched the skirts of the aware one in the place of my origin—the aware one fed through me with the hunger of the almost desiccated.
I hadn’t understood how close the aware one had been to discontinuity. It troubled me; but I was more pleased than troubled, because I was there, I was entirely the consumer of this wonderfully succulent creature, and I was the one who had saved the aware one from discontinuity. I was the one. I am of the aware one, but there were parts of the aware one that were not me, and I hadn’t truly understood that before then.
The aware one wanted more. Needed more. From the first taste of the moisture I sent back I knew the thirst of my siblings, the seeking along my path. When the bright dimmed, I could feel the drawing from me quicken; I was first, but many were coming. It was frightening, because I wasn’t ready to fruit and didn’t want to be absorbed in the aware one. This was my accomplishment, the acquisition of nourishment; I didn’t want to stop there and be content, because this one had come from the direction of the wet wind, and there had been more of them.
I gathered up the leaves that the animal had used to cover itself. I gathered up the nourishment that I had not fully absorbed, I arranged it in its original pattern, I stood up in the manner of the creature and walked into the wet wind. There was something so rich and promising in that breeze that I could hardly grasp it, more nourishment than seemed to be possible.
When the bright came, I sank back into the tree-floor to rest and feed. Creatures came through the forest, many twos and twos and twos of them, but I kept quiet and fed from the hard long and bony parts of the one I already had. I made an error in judgment; I used too much, drunk with moisture and replete with food. The hard bony parts would no longer support the weight of the water in my substance when I stood up to walk, but crumbled.