The Speaker for the Trees (10 page)

She sighed.

Today she was
just tired.

The newscaster
became steadily more frantic as he related the newest reports. His tie was
loose and the top of his shirt unbuttoned far enough to reveal the white
undershirt beneath. A flurry of information scurried along the bottom of the
screen in a thin bar while maps popped up, highlighted by dark red blotches
like a spreading sunburn, followed by a reporter standing in an urban area
while sirens wailed in the background.

... have
just learned the President and his cabinet are unaccounted for in what appears
to be a mass abduction. There have been no ransoms issued, and no countries or
terrorist groups have claimed responsibil...

The picture
flattened to a line and went silent in mid sentence, and Anna set the remote on
the coffee table and lay back on the couch. Something dramatic was taking
place, something global and extraordinary. It was possible this was the sort of
world-changing event everyone would remember and later ask one another
Where
were you when...?
Yet Anna found herself strangely indifferent. Maybe
because she knew no matter what happened her answer would be
Alone
.

* * *

Hedge stared in
silence at the giant, blue globe through the observation window at the bow of
the craft, fascinated by the deceptive calm. Clouds wrapped slowly around it
like soapy film while below, tiny and unseen, countless organisms doddered
hither and thither across the surface, placid and unaware they were being
watched.

In one hand he
held a potted plant, though not so much a plant as a weed, which remained
silent and dumb so no one would suspect its true nature.

Several other
humanoid plants were on this ship, including John Elm, and the thousands of
other ships encircling the planet, awaiting Hedge's word to start the process
of extraction. To bring this entire civilization to an end. It was tragic to
think humanity could never improve upon the works and accomplishments it had
achieved thus far, and the thought filled Hedge with grief.

"Hedge?"
asked John.

They had been
here for several minutes, waiting for his order to commence. Not that other
plants were unsettled by delay. Plants lived their entire lifespans without
shifting positions, their existence gradually expended in idleness. But John
was a motile plant such as Hedge, and waiting made him restless. There was no
purpose in hesitation. Everything was in place, ready to begin. Everything but
Hedge.

As Hedge
watched the planet he raised a hand between it and himself, obscuring the whole
thing, which seemed profound since he knew the planet was many hundreds of
millions times larger than his hand. It was a simple matter of perspective. For
some reason he suddenly remembered his trips with Anna to the small white
building she called church, where she, Hedge, and perhaps forty other locals
sat in an open room on very uncomfortable benches that made his back ache and
his butt sore while one person stood at the far end of the chamber and
pontificated in a loud and dramatic voice about the life of still another
person whose father had created everything. Why so much attention was paid to
the son of this great man, Hedge had no idea, as the one who created everything
seemed far more noteworthy, and Anna frequently had to prevent Hedge from
raising his hand and asking what she deemed
Impertinent Questions
. They
called the father of this man, who wasn't really a man at all, but a creature
of limitless power, God.

God reputedly
knew everything, saw everything, was everywhere and was capable of everything
within and without imagination because he had created everything and could thus
shape it to his will—an elaborate human version of the Plant of Ultimate
Knowing. Yet this God never displayed His powers in any conspicuous fashion as
the great Plant had by advising the Council, and Hedge could not detect the
presence of an omnipotent force watching over him and everything else. It was
strange that he'd never heard of this God until he'd come to live amongst the
humans. How was it they knew about Him and no one else did? Why did God choose
to reveal Himself to these people? Why did so many refer to this God as a He,
rather than She, It, or something else altogether, deigning to relate to this
supreme being in their own terms? Like the Plant of Ultimate Knowing, everyone
knew of God, but no one knew anything about him.

God was
puzzling, elusive, exhausting, and scarcely believable.

Yet standing
before the window looking down upon the planet where he knew none could see
him, Hedge had a faint sense of familiarity with this God. For some reason
being here, unseen, with plans for saving this race from what equated to
annihilation, he understood how it might be possible for an entity with power
over Hedge to be watching him from a similar position inside their own starship
just outside the globe of the cosmos, obscuring the whole thing by passing a
hand before his face, perhaps guiding Hedge away from disaster with deft and
subtle alterations to his universe.

The thought
boggled him as he gazed down at the planet.

Somewhere among
the billions of these people, faintly aware or completely oblivious of the fate
hanging over them, was a single human in a farmhouse. Hedge wondered what Anna
was doing right now, wondered if she would notice when they came for her.
Wondered if she even realized he'd left, or cared that he'd yet to return.
Somewhere down there she busied herself with fewer chores, having just one
person to trouble with, and perhaps found herself happier for it.

Hedge suffered
a sudden rush of ridiculousness.

Maybe he could
hurry to the planet and join her. The abduction would continue, but perhaps he
could be taken with the humans and placed in storage as well. It didn't much
matter to him that he would be in storage. Time would stop for him and all of
humanity, and resume, if ever, when they were released. It wouldn't be so bad.
He would be awake with Anna for a little while, and even should they never be
revived, he would be in the place where he felt most comfortable, most useful,
most... well, loved.

John Elm stood
nearby, a constant, disconcerting presence. He watched Hedge with a look of
perplexity and extreme curiosity, as if he were trying to figure out the puzzle
of Hedge's facial expressions, trying to guess what Hedge was thinking and why
these thoughts appeared to trouble him so. He would stare at Hedge, then stare
at the weed Hedge had been toting around with him since returning from the
garden of the Plant of Ultimate Knowing.

Was John an
agent sent by the Council of Plants to watch Hedge? The more Hedge thought
about it, the more likely it seemed.

John had asked
him about visiting the Plant of Ultimate Knowing, why he had gone, and Hedge
replied that he wanted to know how best to accomplish this task, which was more
or less the truth.

John could not
possibly guess the weed's significance. It simply wasn't remarkable enough to
meet the expectations historical propaganda had created, but certainly John was
bright enough to suspect something because no one else bothered carrying around
a potted weed. He must suspect something, though he didn't know what, because
John continued staring relentlessly with pinched and puzzled eyes.

Hedge turned to
avoid his gaze.

A red blip on
the console beside Hedge indicated the humans had detected them. There was no
more time to delay.

Hedge let out a
long breath of air and looked back to the plants awaiting his command.

"Okay,"
said Hedge. "Let's begin."

* * *

A knock at the
door jerked Anna out of a half daze. She stood groggily and moved through the
kitchen, brushing past the table where smears of grease remained from the
broken toaster, wondering Why should I bother? She asked herself this same
question twice more before she reached the door, at which point she decided it
would be rude not to answer.

When she opened
the door a tall, pale man stood in the opening. He was dressed in black and
wore sunglasses so dark she couldn’t see the outline of his eyes behind them.
He wore an extremely large, but crooked smile, as though he were both very
excited and very uncertain about being on the porch. His hands were at his
waist and in them was a toaster.

“You have one,
too,” Anna remarked.

The visitor
seemed momentarily alarmed, as though she’d discovered a secret he’d meant to
keep to himself.

“It’s just a
toaster,” he said.

“Yes,” said
Anna. “I know. Can I help you?”

“I think so,”
said the visitor.

He appeared
distracted, looking over his shoulder toward one side of the porch then the
other as if he expected someone to arrive.

“Who are you?”
asked Anna.

“My name is Mr.
Visitor,” said Mr. Visitor. He seemed very pleased by his name. “I’m looking
for Mr. Hedge.”

Anna scowled.

“He’s in New
Jersey,” she said, and closed the door.

Anna could see
Mr. Visitor’s silhouette through the drapes over the door’s window, and she
waited for him to leave so she could skulk back to the couch, but he remained
motionless for some time. In fact, it was a while before he made any movement
at all. A minute passed before she saw his shoulders sink, then he turned away
from the door, took a few steps, and vanished.

For an instant
her curiosity flared and she thought about opening the door to confirm he was
still there and hadn’t disappeared in a puff of smoke. But she was overcome by
a strong feeling of lethargy and a feeling that it didn’t really matter, so she
returned to the couch and lay down.

At the same
time, the world around, people began to disappear.

* * *

At first no one
seemed to notice. One person would not show up to a job interview or a dentist
appointment. Then another would leave for the lavatory or for lunch or to
investigate a noise in another room and not come back. A few scattered
incidents, like the opening scenes in a horror film but without the mutilated
bodies and psychopathic murderers. It wasn't until people of prominence began
to go missing that anyone really took notice.

News programs
began spreading reports of disappearing officials, then ended abruptly when the
reporters went missing. Law enforcement agents commenced investigations only to
vanish themselves.

There were a
lot of them. Several billion to be more precise. They were frantic when at last
they realized something mysterious and methodical and strange was going on, but
those who could do something or spread information were taken amongst the
first, so news traveled slowly, and ultimately there was nothing to be done.
Well planned, well executed.

All told, the
extraction took slightly over six hours. The condensing of human civilization,
gathering the abducted from all the ships into a single container, a thin glass
beaker, took two minutes. The trip back to planet Plant took as long as it
would have taken to toast a single slice of bread.

They were asleep
now. Preserved, compacted, all of the mechanisms required to keep them living
and unconscious were tiny enough to fit within the confines of a small vial.
Along with the lot of humanity. And the vial was small enough to fit within an
inside jacket pocket. And Hedge, formidable and round, was just small enough to
fit within such a jacket.

As the
designated Commander of the Abduction of Humanity fleet, it was Hedge’s
responsibility to take their condensed species to the Records Vault for
indefinite storage. There they would remain, alongside samples of dinosaur and
dodo, sperm whale and brine shrimp, and countless other species from their
world and others, until humanity was deemed ready to be reintroduced into the
social fabric of the universe or if the plants found some use for them. To
date, no species placed in storage had ever been revived.

Hedge made his
way through the chest-high hedges on his way to the great spire where the
records of countless other species were kept. He passed other plants in silence,
each with their own urgent errands. It was sunny today, and breezy enough to
blow away the mugginess. Bright and pleasant as some of the nicest days Hedge
had spent with humanity. It seemed as though he would complete this mission
without the slightest interruption. This was, to Hedge, a great relief.

"Hello,
Hedge."

The voice was
familiar, and when Hedge looked to the side there was John Elm, tall and
imposing, striding alongside him.

"Hello,
John."

Hedge tried to
walk faster, worried John would begin asking him about what he was thinking and
planning, but doing so with such a round body made him tired and John had no
trouble keeping pace.

"Where is
your weed, Hedge?" he asked.

"What
weed?"

John was
undeterred.

"The weed
you've been carrying around with you. The one you brought back from the garden.
The one you took on the ship. The one you were whispering to during the
abduction. That weed."

"Oh,"
said Hedge. John had been watching more closely than Hedge suspected. "I
don't have it any more. I took it back. It was just a weed."

They were fast
approaching the empty swath around the spire and Hedge puffed with the effort
as he tried to keep up a rapid pace. He could not outrun John, but he could
shorten the encounter if he could get to the vault before John asked too many
difficult questions.

"I
see," said John. "I guess you're going to the records vault, then.
You have the vial with you right now?"

"Yes,"
Hedge puffed. "To both."

John made a few
gurgling noises in his throat as though two phrases were fighting for dominance
and only the victor would emerge.