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It was Miro's turn with Planter. Late--after midnight. Not that he could sit by him and hold his hand. Inside the cleanroom, Miro had to wear a suit, not to keep contamination out, but to keep the descolada virus he carried inside himself from getting to Planter.
If I just cracked my
suit a little bit, thought Miro, I could save his life.
In the absence of the descolada, the breakdown of Planter's body was rapid and devastating. They all knew that the descolada had messed with the pequenino reproductive cycle, giving the pequeninos their third life as trees, but until now it hadn't been clear how much of their daily life depended on the descolada. Whoever designed this virus was a coldhearted monster of efficiency. Without the descolada's daily, hourly, minutely intervention, cells began to become sluggish, the production of vital energy-storing molecules stopped, and--what they feared most--the synapses of the brain fired less rapidly. Planter was rigged with tubes and electrodes, and he lay inside several scanning fields, so that from the outside Ela and her pequenino assistants could monitor every aspect of his dying. In addition, there were tissue samples every hour or so around the clock. His pain was so great that when he slept at all, the taking of tissue samples didn't wake him. And yet through all this--the pain, the quasi-stroke that was afflicting his brain--Planter remained doggedly lucid. As if he were determined by sheer force of will to prove that even without the descolada, a pequenino could be intelligent. Planter wasn't doing this for science, of course. He was doing it for dignity.
The real researchers couldn't spare time to take a shift as the inside worker, wearing the suit and just sitting there, watching him, talking to him. Only people like Miro, and Jakt's and Valentine's children--Syfte, Lars, Ro, Varsam--and the strange quiet woman Plikt; people who had no other urgent duties to attend to, who were patient enough to endure the waiting and young enough to handle their duties with precision--only such people were given shifts. They might have added a fellow pequenino to the shift, but all the brothers who knew enough about human technologies to do the job right were part of Ela's or Ouanda's teams, and had too much work to do. Of all those who spent time inside the cleanroom with him, taking tissue samples, feeding him, changing bottles, cleaning him up, only Miro had known pequeninos well enough to communicate with them. Miro could speak to him in Brothers' Language. That had to be of some comfort to him, even if they were virtual strangers, Planter having been born after Miro left Lusitania on his thirty-year voyage.
Planter was not asleep. His eyes were half-open, looking at nothing, but Miro knew from the movement of his lips that he was speaking. Reciting to himself passages from some of the epics of his tribe. Sometimes he chanted sections of the tribal genealogy. When he first started doing this, Ela had worried that he was becoming delirious. But he insisted that he was doing it to test his memory. To make sure that in losing the descolada he wasn't losing his tribe--which would be the same as losing himself.
Right now, as Miro turned up the volume inside his suit, he could hear Planter telling the story of some terrible war with the forest of Skysplitter, the "tree who called thunder." There was a digression in the middle of the war-story that told how Skysplitter got his name. This part of the tale sounded very old and mythic, a magical story about a brother who carried little mothers to the place where the sky fell open and the stars tumbled through onto the ground. Though Miro had been lost in his own thoughts about the day's discoveries--the origin of Jane, Grego's and Olhado's idea of travel-by-wish--for some reason he found himself paying close attention to the words that Planter was saying. And as the story ended, Miro had to interrupt.
"How old is that story?"
"Old," whispered Planter. "You were listening?"
"To the last part of it." It was all right to talk to Planter at length. Either he didn't grow impatient with the slowness of Miro's speech--after all, Planter wasn't going anywhere--or his own cognitive processes had slowed to match Miro's halting pace. Either way, Planter let Miro finish his own sentences, and answered him as if he had been listening carefully. "Did I understand you to say that this Skysplitter carried little mothers with him?"
"That's right," whispered Planter.
"But he wasn't going to the fathertree."
"No. He just had little mothers on his carries. I learned this story years ago. Before I did any human science."
"You know what it sounds like to me? That the story might come from a time when you didn't carry little mothers to the fathertree. When the little mothers didn't lick their sustenance from the sappy inside of the mothertree. Instead they hung from the carries on the male's abdomen until the infants matured enough to burst out and take their mothers' place at the teat."
"That's why I chanted it for you," said Planter. "I was trying to think of how it might have been, if we were intelligent before the descolada came. And finally I remembered that part in the story of Skysplitter's War."
"He went to the place where the sky broke open."
"The descolada got here somehow, didn't it?"
"How old is that story?"
"Skysplitter's War was twenty-nine generations ago. Our own forest isn't that old. But we carried songs and stories with us from our father-forest."
"The part of the story about the sky and the stars, that could be a lot older, though, couldn't it?"
"Very old. The fathertree Skysplitter died long ago. He might have been very old even when the war took place."
"Do you think it might be possible that this is a memory of the pequenino who first discovered the descolada? That it was brought here by a starship, and that what he saw was some kind of reentry vehicle?"
"That's why I chanted it."
"If that's true, then you were definitely intelligent before the coming of the descolada."
"All gone now," said Planter.
"What's all gone? I don't understand."
"Our genes of that time. Can't even guess what the descolada took away from us and threw out."
It was true. Each descolada virus might contain within itself the complete genetic code for every native life form on Lusitania, but that was only the genetic code as it was now, in its descolada-controlled state. What the code was before the descolada came could never be reconstructed or restored.
"Still," said Miro. "It's intriguing. To think that you already had language and songs and stories before the virus." And then, though he knew he shouldn't, he added, "Perhaps that makes it unnecessary for you to try to prove the independence of pequenino intelligence."
"Another attempt to save the piggy," said Planter.
