The Land of Broken Roads

Ready to resume his task, Dirt walked briskly to the nearest tree root and knelt where it met the ground. No reason to go all the way to the trunk, right? All of this was tree.

He turned his gaze to its thoughts before he reached out and touched it, though. Its mind was large and slow, just like all the rest. The mind of a tree too tall to measure wasn’t a small thing. There was no mistaking it for all the ferns crowding the ground.

Simply watching for a while, he saw it forming ideas and sharing them with the others, ideas that he couldn’t understand, from an alien world he couldn’t perceive. It had so many senses, and they were all so different. Socks’ mind had thoughts about smells that he couldn’t understand, but there were also pictures and words and feelings in there. There was enough that they could understand each other. And maybe Dirt had things in his mind that Socks found strange. He’d have to ask.

But the tree was something else entirely. There were no pictures because it didn’t have eyes, nor words because it had no ears. Dirt thought about the map of tree names Father had given him, grateful it all sprang easily to memory. How many of them were there? Ten, and ten, and ten, and… maybe fifty or so? Sixty?

Dirt felt a sudden chill as it occurred to him that Father must have done something to make him able to remember it all. Had it taken Father any effort at all, or was he simply so mighty that whatever he wanted simply happened? The memory of that sky-defying ancient wolf standing over him brought up a bone-deep dread that he had to push from his mind.

Best not to disappoint Father by not getting back in time, after all. Best to focus on this.

He watched the tree’s thoughts for a while longer, hoping to learn something useful. Anything. Dirt squatted there until his knees got sore, and then he turned around and sat on the root. It didn’t matter which way he was facing, after all.

But shortly after he sat, he saw something new in the tree’s mind. It knew he was there, felt him sitting on it. It was just a minor thought, something so small and quick that if he hadn’t been watching he might not have noticed it.

Dirt stood and ran all the way up the root to the trunk, stomping his feet heavily as he went. And sure enough, not long afterward the tree’s mind registered the motion, or at least the rhythm and the change.

The tree’s mind became the tiniest bit clearer to him. The sensation that felt like this was from him, standing here on the trunk. It had several aspects, just like his idea of a grub—the feeling of it in his hand, its softness and how it wiggled, the hunger he might have, or the smell of the soil he dug it out of.

The tree sensed him, although it didn’t seem to care much or take any serious notice. It didn’t see the shape of footprints or anything like that. But it felt him. That sensation wasn’t touch, not as he understood it, but it was not unlike touch.

Dirt stomped around, dancing, then lay down and spread his arms and legs to touch as much of it as possible. He watched as the tree’s awareness of him followed shortly after and found that the sensation of him was centered on a particular area of the tree’s self. The tree didn’t understand the world of up and down and forward and back, but it knew its own parts.

He rolled onto his back and stared upward into the canopy while he watched its mind. The dappled patterns of sunlight in the leaves seemed so much more colorful now that he knew what the sun was. It was still there, shining bright and hot, but the trees kept him cool and safe.

A gentle wind shook the leaves, so far above him that he couldn’t see them individually. Waves of motion tracked its progress across the sky as it blew from horizon to horizon, causing sparkles of light where the sun peeked through for the briefest instant.

The tree registered the shaking of its leaves and a rush of sensation too large for Dirt to handle pulsed through its mind. Leaves! All those things, all those… so many parts that all perceived the world, countless of them, each slightly different, like ten thousand fingers or noses or ears.

And beneath it all, a quiet, subtle emotion—pleasure. The tree was happy.

That thought startled Dirt so much he had to sit up. Trees could be happy? Trees could be happy. Happy, happy. The idea itself was shaped wrong for his mind, almost. He had to shake it and give it a smack to get it to go in.

Trees were people. He’d suspected when he caught Home dreaming. He’d believed it in the abstract. But now he knew for certain: not just simple minds, but aware and awake and real. He stared up again with awe, measuring again with his eyes just how tall the tree was, how old it must be. For ages unknowable it had been here, thinking and being alive and being a person.

And there were so many! As far as he could see, so many the wind and sun were turned away from this whole forest. Everything was always cool and still, everything quiet, even when invaders like goblins or gryphons came.

They probably talked all day long with each other, in their way. Always connected, always together, standing with friends who never moved or left. Never alone, never lost. No wonder they were happy.

A spurt of bitter envy almost made him get up and leave and just try his luck finding his way without any more talking. He scowled and let it simmer, but there was a pit of darkness there that would swallow him if he let it. He shied away and came to his senses.

The correct thing to do was to learn the minds and ways of trees and be their friend, too. Then he’d never be alone.

He lay back down and calmed his mind, watching the slow, scintillating rhythm of the tree’s mind.

“What do I say to you?” he said aloud, tapping his fingertips on the smooth bark. It would have to be something primal and deep, something below any words.

Well, why not start with the thing he wanted? Dirt slowed his mind as much as he could, then sent the tree the first name at the top of Father’s map, along with the idea of a question.

No sooner was it sent than he worried that the tree might know how to speak with its mind and crush him by accident. Mother and Father had minds that powerful, but they knew to be gentle with a little tiny human. What would a tree know?

But no such thing happened. Instead, the tree’s mind filled with a flurry of activity as its thought turned on ideas and senses that remained unknowable to him, at least for now. And if he looked very, very closely, under it all were base emotions and simple ideas, ideas so simple that any mind at all could understand them. Confusion, surprise, curiosity.

He sent the tree’s own sensation of Dirt laying on its root. He coupled it with what he hoped might work as a greeting—happiness, eagerness, curiosity. Then he asked again, giving the first name at the top of Father’s map.

The tree’s mind was slow, but that had only made him underestimate it. The tree took no time at all to realize what was happening. It stripped away most of the incomprehensible senses and ideas from a portion of its mind and laid bare the idea, ‘Not me.’

Then it sent a rush of communication to its fellows, though too large and complicated for him to follow. Dirt couldn’t guess what mouth it used to speak, but he could see the tree’s enthusiasm at this new marvel and knew it was being shared.

Dirt grinned to himself, thinking what it must be like for them. Imagine if he was walking along and a fern said, “Excuse me, are you Dirt?”

He turned his thoughts to the other trees nearby, although near was a relative term. It would take him several minutes to walk between them even if he hurried. They had all picked up on it, it seemed, since he saw flashes of the sensation he left on the root echoed in each of their minds.

Dirt sent one last thought before he walked back down the root. Gratitude, which felt a lot like love now that he thought about it.

He sped through the ferns to the next one, which only had two roots above the ground, then did the same thing. He lay on the closer root, although not so far up to save time, and waited until it registered his presence. Then he sent the greeting and question, and waited. It only took a moment for the answer to come. No. Not this one either. But on the tail of the answer came the simple idea of a question, all by itself.

What?

Dirt pondered for a moment. Or maybe it was Why, or even How? The tree must have figured out that only simple communication would work.

He sent an image of himself laying on the bark, coupled with the tree’s own sensation of him being there. The tree recoiled in confusion, and Dirt realized that had been a mistake. It had no idea of space, or of how anything looked. That had been just alien to the tree as its thoughts were to him. But oh well. It was too late now.

Dirt followed it with a second image, the final name on Father’s map, which he assumed was Home. He associated it with desire, desperate and sad. Searching.

The tree stayed confused, chatting in its ponderous way with its fellows.

He moved on picking another tree mostly at random and heading over. This one had several large black spots partway up that looked like old bruises, and as he got closer, he discovered it was ready for him. Dirt’s mental sight of the minds around him still had no direction and couldn’t tell him where anything was, but as he got closer to a mind the size of the trees, he found he could tell which one it was from how it glowed brighter than the rest.

It was ready for him because it was already saying ‘Not me’, before he even got there. He sent what he hoped was gratitude and picked another one.

All the trees were saying ‘Not me’ now, having cleared out a portion of their minds where he could see it—all except for one. Not that it did him much good. The next two weren’t it, or the third, and by then he was ready for a small rest. He sat down and disappeared beneath the ferns.

The trees around him felt alive, invigorated. Their minds were all in frantic motion, or at least as frantic as they got. It was still slow to him, but that might be unfair because the size and complexity of their thoughts were far beyond his. They kept holding questions in their thoughts for him, knowing or guessing that he was watching.

What is this? What is this? they seemed to be asking, but about concepts or sensations he didn’t understand. He could just imagine it—maybe they had marveled any time he walked up one of their roots during the days he’d been alive, unable to guess what it meant.

It must be like being touched in the dark when you thought you were alone. Well, hopefully not that scary.

His legs might be tired but this was all too interesting to stay sitting. Dirt stood again and jogged toward the next tree, and this one was it. This one had its name in place of the Not me all the others were saying.

Dirt lay on its root and greeted it. He asked the simple question, using the next name on the map. The tree held a reply in its mind, one which he mostly couldn’t understand other than that it implied a connection to a part of itself, that after a bit of pondering, Dirt realized was a root. The tree was telling him where to go! He just had to figure out which root it was. He circled the tree, touching each root in turn until the tree said Yes, and showed him the second name again.

Looking where that root was pointing, he ran the whole distance, excited to find out if it really worked. And he knew it did before he got there, because as the next tree’s mind grew in his mental sight, he saw it saying Yes, along with its name.

From there he made it past fifteen more trees before he finally collapsed from exhaustion and waited for nightfall. By this time the trees had figured out what he was doing, but they couldn’t tell how he was doing it or what he was. They had no concept of motion, which made sense, since they had no concept of space, either. And why would they, if they couldn’t move? Their leaves blew in the wind, but it’s not like they did it on purpose. Time they understood, and connection, but it seemed that was where the overlap between his perspective and theirs ended.

It reminded him of when Mother pulled him apart, separating him into all those layers—his flesh, his body of energy, his dream self, and several more he couldn’t fathom, with his bare being at the very core. He existed in other worlds that he couldn’t perceive or understand, and so did the trees.

Still, there was something beautiful about how they spoke with each other. There was a rhythm to it, a pulse, not unlike the sound that came up from the ground when he slept beneath Home. But that was just a noise, and this was rich with thought.

Sometimes they held thoughts for him and hoped for an answer, but his most common reply was simple confusion.

Darkness filled the forest and the trees quieted down as well, their minds becoming still and calm. Dirt guessed they were falling asleep and after uprooting enough ferns to cover himself with for the night, he followed them into the dream.

That night, something touched him in the dark.