Enchanted Forests by Katharine Kerr Page A

were
    ourselves.

    Our knowledge made us wonder, and speculate upon our own
    nature, proposing theory after theory. Perhaps our ancestor seed
    fell from the sky, carried by some great wind from a distant land
    so far the Green only whispers dreams of it. Perhaps the light-
    ning struck our ancestral soil with some magical cousin of the
    hated Fire. Perhaps the fungus that feeds our roots went through

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    Connie Hirach

    a shift of its nature, linking plant body and root body and wood
    body together as never before. Perhaps all of these, or perhaps
    none: the result the same. We live, remember, dream together
    here on our slopes, beneath the sun and the rains.

    Once we would have added, "as we always have." Yet that is
    not true. Changes have come to us, changes we fought or wel-
    comed, changes we have even initiated. It is this lesson we pass
    to those who will come after us, as the individual members of
    our self germinate, mature and die in their stages. For it is the re-
    membering that we pass on.

    When still the Green whispered of the great glaciers retreating,
    we were young, and unpracticed in our togethemess. We were
    still new, learning to use the senses we had been bom with: the
    feel of the sun's heat upon our green body, the patterns of light
    and dark as sunbright filtered onto our ground, the fee! of limb
    and branch and root, separating out body from member body, yel
    conscious of the whole. We grew in our capacity to feel, to co-
    ordinate, to sense.

    But what we sensed did not please us. For the first time, we
    noticed the depredations of the fleshbeasts that infested us, that
    were not of the Green. Before, when green body was destroyed
    or root body disturbed or wood come crashing to the ground, we
    had no more apprehension of its wrongness than when the Sun
    disappeared into the darkness of night every day.

    Now we knew differently, that these happenstances were not
    random acts or laws of nature. And perhaps for the first time, at
    least in our long remembering, we felt emotion. We learned ha-
    tred.

    Oh, how we resented those robbers, meditated long on their
    evil, inventing new concepts as we thought on them and their
    depredations. And in our long resentment, we came to under-
    stand that we could no longer be passive with these interlopers,
    not as we were passive beneath the sun that gave us life, and the
    sky that gave us the rain. We must take action against the
    fleshbeasts, a campaign to save our very being.

    For long seasons we trained ourselves, forcing our Mind to
    evolve and strengthen. An infestation of Tinybiters, winging
    from branch to branch, consuming leaf and tender bark? We
    learned to poison our sap, to make our green body taste unpleas-
    ant. Did we feel too many Gnawers clambering over our
    branches, eating our fruit before it could germinate? We learned
    to weaken connective tissue in our wood body, to drop branches,
    limbs, that the Gnawers clung to. We learned to set springy traps

    VIRIDESCENCE              67

    with our roots, to suddenly ensnare the fleshy ones and drag
    them under, entomb them where they could feed our fungus.

    We were fierce warriors against the beasts; they did not pass
    our boundaries without punishment. Our space became filled
    with peace, filled with healthy growing, till we could support no
    new members throughout our boundaries. Vines grew on our
    tronks, airplants sprouted from our branches, and we ruled su-
    preme in our demesne, but for one thing.

    Yes, for all our learning, our many accomplishments, we could
    not protect ourselves from the Fire. Decades would pass in
    growth and peaceful dreaming, and then a dry season would
    come. We could conserve our sap down in our roots, increase the
    wax that coated our leaves, spread our upper branches wide to
    protect our lower, younger selves from a sun turned savage. But
    the dryness, bad enough of itself, could bring the Fire.

    Always, we could feel it coming, as the Green cried