Diaprepes looked down, as though he’d done something wrong. “I hear, brother.” He kept his eyes from hers.
Genevieve felt anger bristle in his defense. “It wasn’t his fault.”
“No one said it was,” Azaes bit out, turning on her with an open glare. “It isn’t even
your
fault…this time,” he ended contemptuously. She puffed up her chest to retort but he beat her by adding, “But, I admit that you need to get out, so I will give you a tour of the compound.” He glanced outside to gage the time. “There is time still before lunch, and you shouldn’t get into any trouble here.”
Anger flared up again, but she quelled it. This was an opportunity, she told herself, and she wasn’t about to lose it through her own rash reaction to his rudeness.
As Azaes briskly waved her out of the house, Diaprepes left them to go to the animal shelters beside the house. He looked dejected, but Genevieve promised to join him for lunch and he brightened a little. She thought Azaes an ogre.
“Come,” Azaes waved cursorily to her. “I have something to show you.”
She walked astride him down the hill toward the river and felt the enticing pull of the rainforest to either side of them as they walked in silence to the racket of constant buzzing, or the sudden whir of a bright insect-like bird.
Azaes followed her longing gaze and said gruffly, “You are forbidden to enter the forest. It is out of bounds.”
“Why?”
He looked as if he’d been struck and blustered, “Because the jungle is no place for the uninitiated, ignorant of its many bizarre attributes.” Then he focused narrowed eyes on her. “That aside,
you
are forbidden to enter it.” He’d emphasized
you
as though he’d delivered his edict for the forest’s safety, not hers. God! What did he think she was going to do? Pick all its forbidden fruit?
The place was heavy with the overwhelming aroma of the
vishna
flower, the flower of the
tree of love
in her incredible erotic dream, the same tree that had supposedly been kind to her when she’d plummeted over twenty meters to the ground from Zac’s gaping hole. The tree whose scent had enticed her in the
Kleitonus
Museum in Uruk.
Was the
vishna
flower some kind of aphrodisiac? Just thinking about it sent a shiver of aching desire through her. Perhaps the whole planet had aphrodisiac-like properties. Since she’d arrived it had been like entering her most sensual cyber dream. That would account for a lot of what had recently transpired. But the mystery of how she’d imagined it all so accurately in her dreams didn’t make sense. Was she psychic? She’d never had any indication prior to this. It was a puzzle she couldn’t fathom and had to put on the back burner for now, as Azaes stopped walking and requested her attention by pointing his finger to a path that led them down toward a verdant river valley. “The Vaas,” he said. “Our river of life.”
His words summoned another phrase and she glanced back at the forest to their left, feeling compelled to ask: “Those purple trees…” She trailed, an involuntary flush of heat flaming her face, as she relived memories of her incredible dream.
He glanced along with her back to the forest. “They are the most sacred part of our ecosystems,” he uttered in a voice of undisguised reverence. “We call them the
tree of love.”
Did his face color just now? Mirroring hers? She hadn’t expected him to reiterate what he’d said in her dream.
“Why?” she pressed.
He cleared his voice and averted his eyes from hers to look ahead. “It is complex. You would not understand.”
She felt anger boil up at his brusque dismissal. “Try me,” she insisted.
He must have sensed the stubborn tone in her voice because he sighed with resignation and tersely replied, “The tree serves as the fractal portal to all that is, was and will be.”
Satisfied that he’d given her the answer she required, Azaes walked on, expecting her to follow. Genevieve frowned. He hadn’t provided her with a satisfactory answer, just another puzzle, she thought, and unconsciously summoned a phrase from the Christian bible.
And out of the ground the Lord God caused to grow every tree that is pleasing to the sight and good for food, the tree of life…and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
If the
vishna
resembled anything like what it was in her dream, it was this and much, much more. Not willing to accept his vague answer, she scrambled to catch up to his long strides and pressed on, “That doesn’t explain why they are called the tree of
love
.”
He stopped suddenly and turned to her, glowering, and folded his arms over his chest. “It is only through the act of selfless love by life-long dedication to a mate that a joining with the
vishna
is possible. Marriages have been annulled through failure to join.” Then he stalked off, as if trying to lose her.
She stood for a moment, digesting what he’d said. Good God! It was the ultimate test of true love! How many marriages on Earth would have been prevented had they possessed a
vishna
to decide their fate? Hers and Dan’s?
Azaes stopped and turned. “Well, are you coming?”
She grinned and caught up to him.
They were soon where he intended to take her, at the crest of the hill with a vista of incredible beauty, of the organic community nestled in the valley below beside the large meandering river.
“No doubt you may have noticed when you were there with Diaprepes that the community and its organic environment operate symbiotically as an integrated whole.”
She could see people milling about the village, adults and children alike, all shamelessly naked. Carrying out their tasks, playing in the playgrounds, walking in pairs. It harkened to a simpler time, a time of innocence.
“Everything in our community is grown and symbiotic with us in some way,” he said. “We have co-evolved with all of nature through the
vishna
. Food, water, heat, shelter, power, all come from and are dispensed through natural things, whether they be living creatures, grown crystals or minerals with unique properties. We are not nature’s conquerors, but her partners. All that we are is through nature. Everything that we are capable of is through the
vishna
. “
It was remarkable, thought Genevieve. A society more advanced than hers whose technology consisted of a seamless and natural melding of biological and physical things. And of these the
vishna
tree appeared to play the main part. She thought of the fascinating crystal structures in the pyramid that Azaes had shown her earlier. How he’d grown them and assembled them according to a vision under the influence of the
vishna
. It was amazing. Was it that simple? This was what her mission ecologists were after, thought Genevieve, the secret to living in balance with an ecosystem. If only they’d survived to see this Eden.
Azaes regarded her for a moment. He’d caught her sad introspection. “You are not pleased with this view?”
“Oh, no! I mean, yes! It’s remarkable. And beautiful. I was just thinking of my dead crew, ecologists, who would have cherished this sight.”
“Ah,” he nodded with a gloomy smile and turned his gaze back to the hills. “Your mission.”
She thought she caught a sarcastic tone in his last words and noticed his brows furrow.
“We were hoping you could help us re-establish the balance we’d lost in our world.”
He turned on her, suddenly glaring. “Humans!” he fulminated. “First you occupy every square centimetre of your planet like a plague, then you defile it, you destroy all living things and turn your world into a refuse pile no longer usable by you or anything else. Then you build abominations to replace the life you destroyed, by using life you created but do not understand…”
He was no doubt referring to bio-nano-technology, she thought, Zac specifically.
“And now you come here to continue your legacy of robbing and pillaging in the guise of sharing.”
“No! It’s not like that. We came—”
“Uninvited,” he finished for her.
Genevieve reddened and had to acknowledge this shameful truth. “Yes,” she said, gaze dropping down because she could not face his piercing stare. “I admit we did that. But our intentions were honourable.”
“Whose intentions? Perhaps yours, Genevieve. But do you speak for the others?”
She drew in a long breath and felt her chest constrict. She thought of the arcane DAWN project and its shrouded mandate, which excluded the ship’s own captain from knowing. Where was the honour in that? She wasn’t even part of the landing party. She’d been assigned to remain in orbit with Zac. How could she speak for them? “We fully intended to contact you once we achieved orbit status on Eos,” she said. “We felt sure that you’d let a small ship and a landing party down once we were here, so to speak. But when your Epoptes attacked the ship, we were forced to land.”
As if ignoring her conciliatory explanation, he pressed on more forcefully, “I repeat, do you speak for the others?”
She recalled the vision she’d had of her crew mates wrenched one by one out of the ship as it skidded along the planet. Then, realizing the full implications, her gaze lifted and she looked directly into those forest-green eyes. “I do now.”
He raised his arms in an abrupt dismissive gesture and tersely said, “Ah!” making her flinch. She watched his face grow tight with dark thoughts. “I think you are far too naïve. That is why you were to remain behind.”
Then, without another word he spun on his heels and left her, heart pounding with flustered emotion, on the hill. He strode swiftly up the hill to the house, not even glancing back to ensure she was following. She didn’t. She remained where he’d left her, mind rolling with gloomy thoughts. Once again, something in her innocent remark had sparked an explosion of disgust from him. Why did he hate humans so much? It seemed personal, yet he’d never met a human-- until now. Azaes seemed to know something that she didn’t, which infuriated her because she suspected that it was about her mission and it was something she should have known.
Genevieve watched Azaes disappear over the hill. She turned back to the awesome scene of symbiotic life below in the valley and sighed. What was she doing here? What was
her
mission? She had to admit that she hadn’t spent much time considering her current directive, given that she was the sole remaining member of the Zeta mission, which made her its commander-in-chief by default. The reason she hadn’t, she reasoned, was partly because it was all for naught if she couldn’t get Zac up and running again. She wasn’t sure that was possible. She’d left Zac in a real mess. Zac might have blown up in the meantime. He sure was making sounds like he was heading in that direction when last she’d been there. According to Diaprepes, that was a month ago. Any number of things could have happened to Zac, including vandalism and cannibalism by the native Eosians, or its transformation and incorporation by the throbbing forest. There was also the
Chimera
, nestled in Zac’s belly and fully equipped to make it home…if it was still intact. That was looking less and less likely as she reviewed the myriad of possibilities. As for the Eosians giving her transportation out of here back home, that looked even less likely. First of all, it didn’t even look like they had the means, because they weren’t interested in ever leaving the planet, at least not for a long time. And second, they weren’t showing any kind of interest in or cooperation with her mission.
Diaprepes had said that Azaes thought the Epoptes had something in mind for her, which gave her a clue why Azaes presented such a paradox to her. What she’d mistaken as tenderness in him was his dedication and duty as a healer and his service to the will of the Epoptes. His true nature and what he genuinely felt for her showed itself in his scowls, deprecating gazes and generally belligerent behaviour toward her. As for his assertion that she came to bring about change, that was a scary thought.
Was she destined to remain here for the rest of her life at the hands of an experimenter? Possibly a lunatic and a heretic? She contemplated aborting the mission, salvaging Zac and high-tailing it out of here. But Zac was in bad shape, if not already in a million pieces. “Oh, Zac,” she whispered, absently gazing at the foreign community that was nothing but strange for her. “You may have saved me from certain death by being organic and nano-constructed. But I’m not so sure that’s the better fate of our crew.”
She scanned her surroundings and started her way back up the hill toward what she’d dubbed her “prison”, but had sadly come to know as her makeshift home. To her right was the forest that had so enticed her on their way to this viewpoint and had been expressly forbidden to her by Azaes.
As Genevieve made her way back, compulsively throwing frequent glances at the thick forest, she struck closer and closer to the forest edge. The
forbidden
forest. She found herself skirting its very edge, irresistibly drawn to the chorus of staccato sounds and sweet aromas that oozed out of the dank forest. Within a moment she’d plunged inside the steaming jungle with panting breaths.
The forest stirred with chitters and hoots at her entry. Leaves, lianas, roots and trunks seemed to embrace each other in a knotted swollen tangle on the sweating forest floor. The musky-sweet fragrance of rotting fruit mingled with the heady aromas of the powerful
vishna
flower in an intoxicating cocktail.