TWELVE

The scale of it is overwhelming. The wall of forest rises with hand outstretched. Not in welcome, but a warning. As though from myth: Do not go into the dark woods. Nightmares live there.

I know that for truth.

The size of the forest is discordant, like something the human mind is not meant to contemplate. It warps my sense of space, feeling near before it is close. Monstrous, before I am anywhere close to it. The treeline fades into the atmosphere, drinking the delicate hues of the sky.

The ship is now submersible, melting through the thick ice. The water it displaces will freeze in place over it. The ability to hide is standard in scouting vessels — any vessel with reentry capabilities.

In the barren ice, we are exposed to the wind, which gouges the ice formations, barrelling through its curved passages.

For the first time, I great the world fully clothed. The wind seems to disapprove, jerking at the fabric and slipping into its openings like a cold blade.

A tightly strapped pack holds an assortment of basic gear and supplies and a wolf pup, who sleeps or hides from the cold.

We run like Olympians.

In space, size is status and rank — genetic predestination. Height is expensive, requiring greater caloric intake — you are fed more because you are worth more. You are worth more because you are fed more.

Of course, there are the sleepers or titans. These behemoths are the shock-and-awe troops that crush stubborn species. Extreme creations combine every type of genetic manipulation. The aliens we did not find but made in the dark.

I cannot say for sure, but I believe I am faster, stronger. Not faster than a titan, of course, but faster than a scout or grunt has any right to be. Perhaps this shell is some upgraded iteration, solarin 2.0 — though 2.0 is obsolete, of course. It’s just an expression.

Though I am still not as fast as It.

Yven glides like a serpent over the ice. Like the oncoming trees, her movement doesn’t make sense. Shorter stride, she yet manages to pause often and never fall behind. She follows the arcs and curves of the landscape, according to some mathematical law. It is the same law that defines her every proportion and motion.

A snake’s body plan is deceptively fast. Even seeing it, its speed of motion is confounding.

She pauses at the apex of a rise, half face a pale moon under her deep fur hood. Light traces the edge of her face, like the moon’s crescent. She is a model of scale, vanishing against the yawning forest.

Unable to bear its size, it leans over us. If it falls, it falls with the force of a mountain and crushes us. Don’t look down, and in certain conditions, don’t look up.

We run in the shade of its branches for some time, which veil the full might of the giants.

I slide down an ice slope, pushing into a run. My stride is strong. It feels like I am running in low gravity, which is impossible. The breath in my lungs is like gulping helium fusion, fuelling every part of me without effort. Even against the wind pulling us of course, we eat the ice of the basin.

The wind quiets at the lee of the forest as though the wind refuses to enter the high arches of a dark cathedral. Intricate stone lattices form between its forking branches, each as large as a massive tree.

The giant trees themselves are spaced far apart and none are close. I catch an expanse of curved bark, like a mountain face, through the stained glass window between leaves.

Yven slips into the darkening shadows, without ceremony, and is gone, becoming shadow herself.

You would not expect to see any living thing so large except in water worlds or low gravity environments. The physics of an object so tall are confounding. The root systems must be as deep and sprawling as the trees themselves. The water required is inconceivable. Yet the forest can support the smaller trees, larger than any on earth.

The sense of insignificance is like turning in space, in some asteroid garden. Or breaching a planet from orbit. The size of it cannot be appreciated from close up as one cannot appreciate the curve of the earth while standing on it. The arks of space, the metal guardians of the earth, the megaliths of deep space, are all I can compare it to.

I pry a shard of the tree with a cold hand and a gauntlet holding my knife. It gives stubborn resistance, but a shard comes away in my hand and tests its tensile strength informally. Bark, the outer layer of a tree. A normal sight for an Earther but strange relic for a black-market solarin.

I have a sudden sting of pain inside me. I have broken the tree. My act of vandalism is found out. An arboreal species will take offense to my trespass. Steel does not just come apart in splinters. One does not pry a knife into a ship and take a slice.

My vision increases in light sensitivity. It is not hard to find. She hovers in shadows, perched on a low branch that takes substance before me. In the deep cowl, her blue eyes glow, wasting faint light on her pale face and snagging the wreath of fur over her face. The semi-precious stones sway gently, a liability in the dark.

She floats to me, slow and soundless over rock and branch and fallen leaf. Her eyes swoop upwards, and her pale face catches a trickle of light through the trees that makes her glow.

Her face is a full moon in the dark; it sets my nerves aflame with a dull burning with its closeness.

Without disturbing her center, or turning, she extends an arm, and I turn at the napping sound, to find it in my hand, like a magic trick. She studies me at an angle. It is a broken thing, a demonstration of fragility. To a grub, it would be a common thing. But to me, it is like nothing I have ever seen. My hand closes over it. I hold it. “Branch.”

I catch an impermanence of blue as she animates leaves a brief trail in my vision. She rises from the ground, and adds a broken treasure, thin and crossed with veins.

I feel her eyes as I turn them over in my hand.

I thank her. “Leaf.”

“Yeaf” she repeats.

She weaves around me.

The leaf breaks apart, and spins, like a clipped ship to the ground. The ground is a quilt of wet leaves, dried and decaying.

A toadstool, a worm, and a flower are presented with equal parts reverence and curiosity. Another branch is added — a test of consistency. A spotted gecko on a leaf that is partial to the said worms. I receive these in my gauntleted hand if they are some poorly conceived attack or contain a substance that is poisonous to my body.

I have become one of the conveniences in upper levels, where marines exchange credit for selected items. Except I produce words in exchange for foraged items.

I am now the foolish and ignorant species, who will exchange land and gold for trinkets.

Yet these trinkets, hold value. They mean it is all real. I am here. This isn’t some simulation. It is a dream of millennia, realized in a day — this day. The dream of a species.

The leaves are cold and wet against my knees, the ground is cold and hard. Falling seems an expedient way to investigate the world’s surface. I take of wet leaves and crawling things beneath, no longer worrying about poisoning. I squeeze drops of precious water from leaves into the ground.

One drop — a drop in the ocean. What a strange expression.

I laugh.

Water is trapped and wasted in layers of mulch.

The first genuine smile splits my face. I throw my head back and let the laughter roll through me, letting desiccated leaves fall in clumps to the ground.

They will name this forest for me. Hells, they will name the continent for me, when I lay it at their feet. The forest is made to break, fall apart, and be crushed underfoot. It has been expecting me, then.

Laughter ebbs on smiling lips.

Enough. Enough kneeling in the dirt.

I stand and brush the leaves from camouflage pants, now wet and cold. A foolish expenditure of heat. My white T-shirt is flecked with dirt and the debris of broken leaves.

Yven hisses, and turns, peering into the dark. But her hiss lacks conviction, and she glares through shuttered eyelids that bleed blue light. She does not look so much into the dark, as much as away from me.

I walk to her with heavy feet. A twig snaps under a footfall and too late she suppresses her flinch. I take a handful of fur-trimmed leather and spin her off-center. It works better than expected and worse. She faces me, and we are uncomfortably close, her arms trapped between us. “Where are we going?”

I stare into her blank eyes. Her eyes have no pupils, or they are all pupils. This would make her seem dead, where their not so much life and movement in them. And their strange operation begs to be studied. Closer. The direction of her gaze is contained in the deepest shadows beneath the shifting reflection of their surface.

I fight the gravity of her eyes and the pull of warmth around her body. I am close for a reason. To disquiet her, to pull her off balance, and, yes, even to look into her eyes.

She understands me well enough. Her facility with language is remarkable for a primitive species. I have seen it again and again as she grasps single words and their meanings and pronunciations. Now I test the limits of her digestion with larger mouthfuls.

A direction. That is all her eye shift tells me. It is better than nothing. What is it? An attempt to distract me? I don’t think so. The direction of her home or village?

Then her hand is over mine, crushing and jerking it painfully. She is strong, but not as strong as before when we wrestled with the bone blade. I have her by the nape of her neck and she doesn’t use her full strength. Why? What does she get out of it?

But it is not enough to dislodge my gauntleted grip, and we are now more entangled than before. I use my height to keep her off balance and to neutralize an attack. She huffs, sending a spill of her black hair into the air.

My eyes narrow in intensity. “Your village?”

Her head hovers between a nod and a shake, languid and winding.

I shake her hard, and suddenly we are studying each other, in the warm halo of our breath. Inches closer and the world is turned around, like she is the forest, looming. Her lips part, her voice is a whisper. “Village?”

She understands all right. I see that in her eyes. She understands a phrase, without context. I read it in her eyes. But what did she read in mine? Her expression says…I am a curiosity. A plaything she may lose interest in.

Her smile is one-sided. It twists with unnatural alacrity. Her brow bends in a precision curve, slowly arching. My grip loosens. I have the sudden feeling that I have grabbed a snake and it has me right where it wants me — where it can latch onto my face.

It rolls out of my grip.

I give a half-smile if only to recover. “Why?”

She likes words. This one is a peace offering.

“Why?” She echoes, savoring it.

If she understands, she does not answer, but her expression is reserved for the slow in understanding. I hear the voice in my head. “Isn’t it obvious?” She seems to say.

Her gaze takes the lines upwards. I fell out of the sky, which would pique anyone’s curiosity. But the hand on my chest brings my gaze down to earth. It feels the welts on my chest gently through the fabric. The burn marks, the lightning.

A brief flash of blue and she is turned away, stiff and full of purpose. She spares a look backward. “Enough. Talk.” Each word is an island. “We. Out.”

She waivers.

“Go,” I say, in acknowledgment. “We go.”

A nod.

It is a treaty of sorts, an understanding. It says we will cooperate until we receive countervailing information. A little more give and take, a little less stubborn resistance.

And we are a go.

The wet leaves are spongy underfoot unlike the hard earth, but I follow Yven’s feet onto roots and boulders and branches. It is a forest within a forest. In the thick of it, you would not know you are standing in the shade of giants. Until you brush past a monolith of red-black bark, looming and unnatural, like the wall of a tree fortress. I factor the trees into tactical assessments and strategic resources.

Somehow the snow makes it to the ground to lay in banks, yet has the resources to burden the dark boughs of conifers.

Snow bends and blankets heavy branches, yet still manages to find its way to the ground forming broad banks of smooth snow.

I have no choice but to trust in her leadership.

Being light of foot is a function of the entire body. The softness of a footfall is the angle of the foot, its landing place, the stride, the transfer of weight, the balance. It is the understanding of the surface and terrain and how to parse any layers beneath.

Understanding this principle does not make me an expert; it is a physical skill, perfected by experience and practice.

Her greater skill is in navigation — in how she wends unerring through the tangled maze. The thick forest presents a succession of insoluble obstacles that she blurs through like we are inside a puzzle cube, that is being solved around us by giant invisible hands.

The solution is obvious: She knows the forest. But some solutions are inadequate answers. Some primitive peoples are capable of feats their descendants can never replicate. But she is something else, something more. The puzzle of the forest is not nearly as infuriating or complex as she is. Highly intelligent, for a primitive species at least, and yet wearing clothes without advanced manufacture. Carrying complex artifacts, and yet carved in bone. Human face, and exterior, but eyes that are novel in their design.

In any new skill, the progression is faster, and therefore more noticeable, at the start. Any person may attain intermediate skill, with enough practice. But to be elite in a skill requires a lifetime of dedication. This is the learning curve: a task repeated becomes simpler.

Within minutes, my footfalls are lighter, my landings more elastic. Learning is easier in this shell or perhaps it is this place — an incentive structure of some kind. Repeated movements seem to ‘lock’, something I noticed while running. The “learning curve” seems shorter and more controlled. I will need to set up skill progression in the mindspace.

But what if the curve is different here — flatter, easier?

It is more likely to think it is this shell than this world. An upgraded shell is simple enough. An upgraded world, one that has been home to advanced technological species that would be capable of such a technology?

Yet there is something about this place that is more than any other. It is a thing impossible to explain fully. It is something in the air, in the definition of the world. It is in every ochre rock and umber tree, in every frayed leaf, and especially it is in looking up into the endless winding corridors of the forest. It is more than the simple impossibility of its existence — it is in its quality of it. A falling leaf here is more extraordinary than the idea of some global mindtech interface.

The sims of old earth are restricted except for training purposes. Yet I know their capabilities through the mods. The trees on earth are a mockery of this place, a pale attempt at imitation. like every tree on earth, even in pristine forests, was somehow stunted. Their roots clipped, soil dry, water, weak and dirty.

You know it when you see it. A person is born with defective vision, yet they do not realize it until they receive ocular upgrades and they realize their vision was cheap and monotone.

Here the veil is lifted. Everything, here, is like that.

It is hyperreal. As though reality itself received an upgrade. Everything. Like this world is the truth and everything else is a lie.

And as irrational as it is to think that this world has a regulated learning curve, I feel that I am meant for it. The genetic sequence of prima Solaris was purified over long ages of costly experimentation, without hope or expectation of this world. How, then, does it feel this world is made for us? As though we have been building our fitness and capacity, just so that we might thrive here.

I feel more alive here than I have ever been. A strange proclamation for someone born yesterday, but it feels true.

It is a heady feeling. I must suppress the urge to whoop because I don't think I'll be able to control it. But I lift my face to the caress of the cold wind, and breath deeply. It is simple though, that gives deep and swelling satisfaction — inexhaustible air, unpaid, just…everywhere.

But the air is not long in my lungs.