7
Thara Wen
The forest was different, and she was different when she came out of the wilderness and made her way back to the colony village. What had once been a blur of green and a tangle of branches and leaves, Thara Wen now saw as a mosaic of individual items—insects, twigs, specks of pollen, fallen leaves. Everything in perfect clarity and detail, everything connected. And the trees—the worldtrees—were a giant sentient mind, half slumbering, a network of roots and trees covering Theroc, interlinked with more connections than all the neurons in a human brain.
The forest had always been like that, but the human settlers here had never noticed. It was Thara who had changed, and she had matured far beyond her years. She could see it all now.
As she walked through the dense thickets, the underbrush seemed to move out of her way. Needing no trail, Thara glided along with the sunlight dappling her beautiful green skin. The color seemed natural to her now, a symbol of her connection to the forest.
She stepped out of the thick forest and into the main clearing where the settlement buildings had been erected. Some of the homes were prefab colony buildings dropped down from the Caillié supplies, while other buildings were constructed from local materials. One entire complex consisted of hollowed out chambers in the gigantic fungus conglomerations that grew like coral reefs from the worldtree trunks.
At the edge of the thick foliage, Thara paused in silence to watch the people in the village, some of them working, others looking concerned. They were familiar faces to her. She remem-bered them; she had known them all her life, both aboard the Caillié and here on Theroc.
But now she saw more.
She spotted Sam Roper. Two strong young men were holding him by the arms while he struggled. Roper was indignant, lashing out, cursing.
The elected village leader, Norris Brovnik, stood with his arms crossed over his shirt, skeptical. As he argued with Sam Roper, Brovnik looked up and was the first to notice her standing there.
Then others cried out. “It’s Thara Wen! She’s alive after all.”
Roper struggled against the two young men holding him. “Let me go! See, she’s alive—I didn’t do anything to her.”
Norris Brovnik shook his head. “Hold him. I still want some answers.”
The dense trees masked her with greenish shadows, but when Thara stepped into the clearing, they could see that she was completely hairless, that her skin was green … that her entire demeanor had changed. She walked forward, amid many gasps of astonishment.
“What happened to her?”
Thara stretched out her hands to greet them all, but they seemed afraid to touch her.
The village leader ran his eyes up and down her body, amazed at the green skin. “You just vanished, Thara. We are relieved to see you safe—we’ve been searching for days.”
This surprised her. “Days?” Was that how long she had been immersed in the tree mind?
“We thought Roper had done something to you. Can you tell us what happened?”
She looked down, opened and closed her fingers, then traced a fingertip along her forearm. “Something marvelous. I don’t understand it myself, but the trees, the forest … the worldforest is more than you see. It’s more than just alive. It is awake and aware, intelligent, full of experiences, anything that has ever happened on this planet. Memories from thousands of years, and from yesterday.”
Roper looked up, his eyes shining. She stepped closer to him, not at all intimidated, and it was his turn to cringe away, but the two men continued to hold him. She was not afraid now—not of him, not of anything; she had no intention of running away. Her voice was calm, and she felt the strength of the world-forest inside her.
“I know what Sam Roper tried to do to me.” She stared at him. He opened and closed his mouth, but no words came out. “But not just to me. Through the eyes of the forest I also saw what he did to his other victims. The trees saw. The trees remember.”
“You’re lying! Look at her—she’s obviously contaminated somehow. She’s not thinking straight.”
Thara ignored the man’s outburst and looked calmly at Norris Brovnik. “Roper has an uncontrollable temper. We’ve all seen that. But he also plans, and stalks, and kills—then manages to cover his tracks. I don’t think he understands the reasons himself.”
“You have no proof!” Roper said.
Thara turned her back on him and instead looked at the other villagers. “Over the years, we know that some colonists vanished into the forest. There are hazards here on Theroc, without question. Some did die from accidents or predators … and sometimes the predator was Sam Roper himself.” She paused. “I can show you where three bodies are hidden.” She turned to skewer him with her gaze. “I can even recite their last words just before he killed them.”
Roper let out a laugh that sounded like an unoiled hinge. “Do you see how insane this is?”
“The forest sees everything,” Thara said. “And it forgets nothing.”
Though the skies were growing dark, she led the excavation team through the forest along paths only she could see. They carried illuminating globes, shovels, and machetes, though they did not need to cut any branches out of their way. The forest cooperated with them.
With his wrists bound behind him, Sam Roper stumbled along, dragging his feet, trying to slow down the progress.
Thara guided the group unerringly to a small depression ringed by dead bushes. Roper suddenly looked pale in the harsh light of the illuminating globes.
“Gina Chadhar and Antonia Steiner,” Thara said. “It was six months ago. They disappeared on the same day.” She stopped and pointed to the depression. “Dig there.”
Some of the adults in the group gasped or moaned. Gina’s parents were among the party, and Antonia’s brother had come as well. Thara said nothing else, just stood in silent accusation as the men used their shovels to clear away the brush, the dirt. The light shone down into the depression.
The diggers did not take long to find the bones. Two skulls, a pair of rib cages … two bodies dumped into the same shallow grave, and the lush forest growth had quickly erased all sign.
Though Thara already knew every detail of what had happened, now she heard the sounds of grief, the sobs of lost hope, the angry curses. Sam Roper was sweating, but he made no comment.
Norris Brovnik clenched and unclenched his fists. The muscles on his jaw rippled as he struggled to control himself. Even as Thara saw all the details of this tragic tableau, she was aware of the rest of the forest, the night insects, the giant birdlike moths that flew above the canopy, the twilight-blooming orchids.
Brovnik looked at the exposed skeletons in the grave and whispered to Thara. “You said you knew of three victims? You’d better show us the other one.”
When they dug up the third skeleton an hour’s walk from the first graves, no one was surprised that Thara was right. Roper accused Thara of killing the victims, hiding the bodies, and now was framing him, but nobody believed him for a moment. He muttered angry comments that few people could understand, as if cursing at voices inside himself. His captors threw him to the ground in disgust, like garbage.
The village leader stood above him and pronounced a prompt sentence in a flat, impartial voice, as sad as it was angry. “Sam Roper, never has such a crime been committed on Theroc. When we came to this new world, we believed it was a fresh start. We had every reason to hope. We had everything we could want … but apparently we brought our demons as well.”
The other people muttered, nodding. Thara remained silent.
Brovnik continued, “We’ve all read the library records. We know that such crimes were common enough on old Earth, and it seems we cannot escape them, even here.” Now the village leader looked smaller, as if he wanted to be anywhere else, making any other kind of decision. Their colony on Theroc had thrived for five years. This was the worst thing that had happen-ed under his leadership.
“We’ve not yet established a way to punish atrocities such as these. We never needed it before.” His voice became so quiet that even Thara could barely hear him. “I was foolish to hope it would never happen.”
Thara realized what she had to say, and her own voice was loud. She knew what this man had tried to do to her, what he had done to those other women. Even though fleeing from him had accidentally resulted in her wondrous transformation, she could not forgive him, nor could she allow Roper to harm anyone else.
“Leader Brovnik, take him to the top of the trees at dawn. The worldforest will know what to do.”
At sunrise, the humidity in the air acted like a veil of tiny magnifying lenses that caused the air to shimmer. Mist rose from the lush canopy as the dense forest began to awaken.
Thara Wen climbed to the highest branches along with a contingent of colonists. Some people remained back in the village, not wanting to see, but others felt compelled to watch.
Sam Roper, stripped naked, was bound wrists and ankles, crouching on an exposed branch under the open sky. He kept muttering a mantra of “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” It didn’t matter whether or not anyone accepted his apology; the villagers had made up their minds. He struggled against the cords that bound him to the branch, but he could go nowhere. Sweat poured down his face. His brown hair tangled over his eyes. “I’m sorry … I’m sorry.”
Thara, Brovnik, and their companions watched from a high branch, but with little pleasure. The buzz of insects filled the air, drowning out the fainter rustling of worldtree fronds. A flock of languid rose-colored moths flapped by, their wingspans more than two meters across. They circled the bound human figure curiously, then beat their wings, moving slowly away.
Suddenly, a wide, angular shadow splashed across the treetops. A large creature dove downward. The moths scattered in panic.
Sam Roper looked up and stared at the creature coming toward him.
Thara observed through her own eyes and through the senses of the forest. The most fearsome creature on Theroc—an enormous carnivorous insect with two sets of segmented wings, chitin-armored legs and body, glassy faceted eyes like a huge dragonfly that had been twisted through a nightmare machine. The few colonists who had ever seen one called it a wyvern.
Roper said in a whisper heard only by the forest, and in Thara’s head, “Sorry,” before the wyvern grasped him with pincered forelegs, tore him free of the bindings and snapped the branch in the process, then pierced him with spearlike mandibles.
Taking its prey, the wyvern flew off, snaking a long proboscis around the blood oozing from Roper’s torn skin. In distaste, the creature tore him apart and discarded his broken body into the forest below.
Thara watched as the tiny figure plummeted into the trees. “Apparently, wyverns do not like the flavor of human flesh,” she said without a hint of sarcasm.
Norris Brovnik shook his head and turned away.