Life Seed, page 26
There was no time to explain. Elias grabbed the spear again. Tristan reacted instinctively, trying to yank it back.
Elias pulled harder.
He snatched the spear out of Tristan’s hands and threw it a good distance away, where the weapon’s tip sizzled as it made contact with the ground. Then it went out.
“They won’t attack you,” Elias told Tristan, who looked absolutely speechless. Elias gestured at each of the wurl in turn. “This is Siv. This is Narev. The big guy is Vanor. Guys, this is Tristan. He’s my friend.”
Slowly, the male wurl flattened their spines against their scales. When Tristan gave no sign of wanting to attack them again, Narev was the first to approach and sniff him. Then came Siv. Vanor was the last, fixing Tristan with a steady, challenging look. For a moment, Elias was afraid Tristan would show weakness in front of the alpha wurl, but he was rewarded by Tristan’s reaction.
“What’s up?” Tristan said to Vanor.
Vanor huffed once, apparently satisfied, and stalked away in the direction of the lake. He growled, and both Narev and Siv followed.
Tristan then turned to look at Elias, his mouth slightly open in what looked like disbelief.
“Never mind my news,” he told Elias. “You have to tell me what happened here. It’s like you’re a different person!”
“What do you mean?” Elias asked, helping Tristan take off his backpack now that they were at the mouth of the cave. Elias placed it away from the firepit, just in case.
“Like that!” Tristan exclaimed.
“Huh?”
“That backpack—do you know how hard it was to carry it all the way here? And now you pick it up with one hand like it’s nothing! And—oh, by the generation ship! Elias, what happened to your eyes?”
“What do you mean?”
Tristan stepped closer, very close in fact. He was looking straight at Elias’s eyes, and Elias couldn’t help but notice Tristan’s graceful profile, the hard lines of his jaw, and the dark stubble that shadowed his cheeks.
Tristan did not appear to have romantic thoughts in mind, though. “They look different,” he said in a hushed voice. “I didn’t notice before because of the light. But now… they look like her scales.”
“What?” Now it was Elias’s turn to be confused.
“You haven’t seen? Wait. I have a mirror—wait.” Tristan rummaged around in a pouch on his utility belt and took out a multitool. Unfurling it, he selected the mirror attachment and offered it to Elias.
“What’s this about?”
“Just look,” Tristan said.
Elias took the mirror and lifted it up so he could see his face.
He nearly dropped it on the grass below.
“You really hadn’t noticed?” Tristan asked him, but Elias was too stunned to answer.
He held the mirror closer. Farther away. At an angle. It wasn’t a trick of the light—the irises in his eyes had changed into a different color. Into many different colors, in fact. They reflected the sunlight in a thousand different shades of the same iridescent interplay he had always seen on Sizzra’s scales. They were eerily beautiful, but they made him look strange. And it wasn’t the only thing that had changed. The lines of his face were more noticeable. His skin had taken on a dark tan. His hair was longer than he had ever worn it.
“I look like a different person,” Elias whispered.
“That’s what I said. What happened?”
“Tell you what,” he said to Tristan. “I’ll cook something, then we talk. About everything.”
Elias set to work and welcomed the easy flow of routine to steady him emotionally. Tristan settled nearby, taking some things out of his backpack while Elias brought out some seeds, berries, and a big portion of smoked flatfish which he had been saving for an emergency. He found comfort in the familiarity of what he was doing, even as he thought about several things at once. He was worried about Sizzra’s reaction to his defiance. He was shocked at the changes that had come upon him, and he still couldn’t believe that Tristan was here, with him, along with everything it implied. Tristan hadn’t given up on him. He had come all the way back to this place, knowing the danger. He had returned.
Elias could not have put into words why that thought gave him a warm thrill, but he smiled as he kindled a small cooking fire with his well-worn flint and steel. Once it was going nicely, he set his favorite cooking stone on top of the flames at an angle and placed the slab of fish on it so it would warm up a little.
“Wow,” Tristan said.
Elias glanced at him. “What?”
“I don’t know. Everything. Last time I saw you, I was sure you wouldn’t last a week out in the wilderness on your own. Now you’re like some kind of wild survival expert.”
“I’m not.”
“Oh yeah? What’s with the stash of food? Did you catch that fish yourself? And who taught you how to make a firepit and start a fire? The door to that cave, did you make it yourself? It looks pretty solid.”
“I’m not sure which of the questions to answer first,” Elias answered, smiling. “I propose we first eat, okay?”
“Yeah, sure. Though I even brought survival rations and everything with me. I was picturing finding you on the brink of starvation in a ditch somewhere. If at all.”
“Geez, thanks for the vote of confidence,” Elias told him, picking the heavy cooking stone out of the flames and setting it between the two of them. The tantalizing aroma of cooked fish could be perceived now, along with tiny hints of some of the herbs Elias had taken to experimenting with to give his food slightly different flavors.
“Sorry, that came out wrong. I didn’t mean it like that—is that fish? Real fish?”
“Yeah, and it’s delicious. There’s some purpleberries and velvet nuts to go with that. And I have a few yellow lily buds you’ve got to try. They’re all juicy inside and everything. Kind of sweet too.”
Tristan looked at the fish with mild alarm. “But… this isn’t meat-flavored soy concentrate. How are you eating it?”
Elias shrugged. “I don’t know. I tried it, and it didn’t make me sick, so I’ve been eating it for a while now. Narev usually brings me part of his catch. I think he thinks I’m injured or feeble or something. He’s a good guy.”
Tristan raised an eyebrow. “Okay, that was totally not weird of you to say. Or incomprehensible. I think I’m going to stick to the nuts and berries, though, if you don’t mind.”
“Sure.”
The two of them ate in silence until the last morsel of food was gone. Then Tristan took out one of the boxes he had been carrying in his backpack.
“I have a couple of cherry cakes,” he said to Elias. “Your mom…. She gave them to me. To share with you if I found you.”
Tristan opened the box and there they were, two small and slightly crushed cherry cakes with a little pink frosting on top. Elias saw a capital E on one of them, made out of sprinkles in his mother’s unmistakable style.
Out of nowhere, his eyes brimmed with tears.
“Hey,” Tristan said softly, edging a little closer. “They’re all okay back home. You have no idea how much they—how much we missed you.”
Elias accepted his cherry cake from Tristan but had to look away for a moment until he was able to control the upswell of conflicting emotions in his chest. He thought he had succeeded as he took the first bite, but the taste unleashed a barrage of warm memories and happy associations in his mind, and then he couldn’t hold back the tears anymore. He was suddenly a little boy, waiting impatiently for his mother to finish baking his birthday cake using his favorite ingredient, cherries out of Portree’s precious stash of frozen fruit. Then he was a little older, sharing his cake with Oscar so both of them could enjoy the rare luxury of having something that wasn’t made from the normal everyday rations.
He was at that Midwinter Feast last winter, a lifetime ago, so sure that only he knew what was right. Convinced that everyone else was stupid for not wanting to see the reality of the colony’s future, blind to the fact that all the adults must have already known. Like Tristan had told him, they hadn’t liked to talk about it, probably to protect their children from the awful reality they couldn’t change.
And Elias had demanded they pay attention to him, to listen to his great discoveries in Dr. Wright’s journal, spewing out everything he had learned in front of the little ones. He hadn’t even thought about what effect it would have on them. What had Oscar thought? Had he been scared to hear that he was going to starve to death in the near future? And what good had it done?
Elias finished eating, crying silently now and yet strangely happy. During his long nights of isolation, he had sometimes thought that nobody would miss him back home. The little cherry cake was a symbol that it wasn’t so. His family still loved him.
“They all miss you,” Tristan said gently, setting aside the empty cake box. “When I came back to the colony and said that I had seen you, your dad practically kidnapped me so I could tell them what had happened. We had a really long session with Director O’Rourke, your mom and dad, my dad, and the commander. I told them everything, up to the point where the wurl chased me away from the mountain. They could see I was telling the truth too. A lot of wurl appeared at the edges of the colony perimeter along with the ones that brought me there. It’s like they were being coordinated for the first time or something; they’ve set up some kind of containment around us, and they are really hostile to anyone who even looks as though he wants to leave. People were terrified. What I told them scared them even more.
“The commander especially went pale when I told her about the wurl queen. I had dozens of meetings with her and the rest of the patrol afterward, where we would draw up plans to try and defend Portree if she—”
“Sizzra,” Elias said automatically.
“Right. If Sizzra ever came. But your mom and dad didn’t even care about that. They kept asking me about you, and it was horrible to tell them that I didn’t know whether you had survived or not. I had last seen you in that cave at the top of the mountain, and I had no idea whether Sizzra had killed you or what. It was awful, not knowing. Your dad asked right away for permission to leave Portree to find you, but the director said no. I offered to go with him, but she said it was too dangerous, and it turned out she was right.
“A few days after I returned, I went to see your dad, and he told me he was going to go find you with or without permission. I said I would help, but we didn’t get very far. We hadn’t even reached the spot with the underground laboratory you discovered when more than ten juvenile wurl encircled us. Your dad tried to get past them, but he was struck by a spine—don’t worry, the wound wasn’t very deep—and it was clear we had no chance of leaving. The creatures were containing us, and after that nobody else wanted to try and leave.”
“And my mom?” Elias asked. “And Oscar?”
Tristan took a long, deep breath. “I don’t want to scare you, man, but it’s been hard on your mom. Her condition has worsened over the weeks, and she’s been going to see the doctor more often. I don’t know much else, because every time I went to visit she would tell me everything was okay, but I could tell it wasn’t. She would be talking to me, and then her eyes would go kind of far away, and she would get this look on her face…. Oscar took it better, but Sarah tells me that he’s not doing so well in school anymore. I’ve tried to talk to him a few times, but even though he’s friendly and everything, it’s like he’s not really there. I don’t know if that makes sense.
“Anyway, I took it for as long as I could, but a week ago I decided I had to try and find you. It was horrible not knowing what had happened to you, and also what had happened to Sizzra. Nobody knew whether she was going to attack us—or when. So one night I just left. I packed everything I thought I would need, everything I thought you would need, and I convinced my buddies from the patrol to set up a diversion for me while I escaped. The commander wasn’t happy about it, but when she saw I wasn’t going to back down, she agreed to help. She sent the entire Patrol to scare off some of the smaller wurl that held the perimeter close to the forest, and I made it through in the chaos. Just barely, though. Some of the wurl tried to chase me, rolling like they do, but after a few meters it was like they hit an invisible wall and they stopped. Turned around and went back to guard the perimeter.”
“Sizzra’s orders,” Elias muttered, “most likely. I wonder how long she plans on forcing them to stay around Portree like that. There isn’t much they can hunt around the colony.”
“Yeah, well, I wasn’t exactly feeling sorry for them or anything when I escaped. One of them fired a spine that sunk into a tree trunk right where my head had been. Those things can be terrifying when they want to be. After that… I retraced our steps from before, looking for signs of you. I reached the mountain and climbed the cave all the way to the top, but you weren’t there. Then I went back down to forest level and wandered aimlessly for a while. I had no idea where you’d gone, but one night as I was making camp in the forest, I saw a light coming from here. Firelight. That’s how I found you.”
Elias smiled. “Thank you, Tristan. For everything. For coming for me and for looking after my family.”
Tristan grinned bashfully, as though mildly uncomfortable at the earnest look Elias gave him. “Hey, you would’ve done the same for me.”
Elias nodded. There was no doubt in his mind. “Yeah, I would have.”
A comfortable silence followed the exchange, punctuated only by loud snorts coming from the lake, where Vanor was taking a bath. The noonday sky was a vibrant shade of blue, punctuated by fluffy white clouds every now and then. The friendly buzzing of insects came and went whenever a mild breeze blew over the valley, carrying with it the wonderful scent of a world awakening to life after being too long asleep. Elias took it all in, realizing it was somehow more beautiful today than any other time he had seen New Skye like this, and then he realized that it was because he was sharing the view with someone else.
He glanced left at Tristan and smiled at the way Tristan’s eyes roamed over the magnificent landscape, his own faint smile arrestingly beautiful.
“The world is different,” Tristan said, looking at a faraway mountain. “Everyone has noticed back home. Insects came back. The trees grow new leaves. And the flowers…. You should see the flowers, Elias. It’s like the world is coming back to life.” He then glanced at Elias, meeting his eyes. “It’s because of what you did, isn’t it? Returning the Life Seed to where it belonged.”
Elias nodded solemnly. “Yes. The world’s whole once again. We did a terrible thing when we took the Life Seed away, but now it’s safe.”
“There’s been talk… I don’t even know where to start. Back home, most people deduced that this is happening because of you. Some of them think it’s good because now we can harvest the native fruits and plants that hadn’t grown around Portree for a long time. Others think we should get the Life Seed back because the genetic laboratories have nothing to work with anymore, and our supply of the plants we need has been cut off entirely. I talked with your aunt one time, and she told me that with no new genetic material from the Life Seed, no more Terran crops will be able to be grown, so what we have is it. The native plants aren’t going to cut it in the long run, either. We can’t mass-produce them in huge farms. I was in an important meeting with the director and all the council members where a few biologists explained that the early colonists failed at creating large-scale farm plots of native plants because they won’t grow like that. They said wild plants grow just fine in whatever random place they happen to show up, but the minute you try and force them to grow in neat rows next to one another, they all die. They didn’t even know why—”
“I know why,” Elias interrupted.
“You do?”
He nodded, thoughtful. Throughout his many deep connections with the Life Seed, he had already been able to understand some of its essential nature. “The life on this planet is different. It’s all linked, all perfectly balanced. The Life Seed joins all living things together and kind of… coordinates them. It’s really hard to explain, but it’s like there’s a blueprint for what the world is, its natural state, and anything that deviates from that isn’t allowed.”
“How do you know all that?”
Elias lifted his eyebrows, smiling. “I guess it’s my turn to tell you what’s happened.”
So he did. The two of them spent the better part of the afternoon talking, with Tristan asking many questions about every little detail of Elias’s imprisonment by Sizzra, his connection to the Life Seed, the things he had learned about the male wurl, and the way he now had some of Sizzra’s ancestral memories in his own mind. The more he talked, the more amazed Tristan appeared.
“This is insane,” Tristan said, after Elias had finished explaining how Sizzra had mated and why she had wanted to kill Tristan after he had seen her secret nesting site. “I can’t believe you’ve—I mean you’ve…. Wow. Just, wow.”
“I’m going to take that as a compliment.”
“You better!” Tristan replied, smiling. Then he gave Elias an openly appraising look. “You’ve changed so much. It’s amazing.”
“Is that a good thing?”
“Yeah. I don’t think I could have gone through everything you have as easily. And you have this… I don’t know. The way you talk now, the way you move. Like you’re not scared anymore, or trying to prove you’re smarter than everyone else. You haven’t been sarcastic once since I got here, and that is a huge improvement over the old Elias.”
“Guess I should’ve stolen the Life Seed way earlier, then,” Elias said jokingly. It felt so good to talk to another person.
Tristan chuckled but then got serious all of a sudden. “What happens now, though?”
“What do you mean?”
Tristan glanced over at the Flower mountain slopes, where Sizzra had vanished. “How long is she going to make you stay here?”
“Until the Flower blooms,” Elias answered with complete certainty.
