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Who Made The Forest?byJames B. Baker © 11/23/01
I was spewed out from Alta-space into the confines of a solar system, and I was very glad to be back in normal space where time was finite as a dimension.
I had covered vast distances at an infinite speed through Alta-space. I was here, wherever here was, to inspect a solar system I had only glimpsed in passing one time before. It had intrigued me then and it was intriguing me now. As on all of these trips I was a miniature spaceship; having two hulls surrounding me made of energy screens. The screens were as strong as steel and as rubbery as rubber. They held the vacuum at bay and blocked radiation. My inner shield held me together when traveling the void. The outer shield held in a breathable, gaseous atmosphere that also held the necessary chemicals I needed for nutrients. The screens were maintained by the physical reflexes of my body. My small beam of ESPER awareness served also as a catalytic agent with which I could reach out and elicit the necessary power from any object of matter.
I'm Clarke to my friends and we're all ESPers; users of ESP. All of my friends are back on Terra, the Earthship on which I was born as was Jade, my wife and our children. My family's back there with my friends and they're all looking out for each other, knowing that I am searching the skies of the Universe for our new home. We cannot continue observing the lockheads on Terra, for the act of observing is the application of energy. It affects the observed, and I feel it has a negative effect.
So I began to look around me at this new solar system and I was hoping this might prove to be our new home. Immediately I saw the jewel in this set of a solar system. It was a blue-green orb dead ahead of me and I spoke aloud as I am wont to do when on a journey like this alone, "I now name you Jade, for your coloration matches the color of my Jade's eyes." Jade the planet had a slow rotation and three moons. Many of the other planets had moons. There was a Jupiter-size body and more than one of the other planets had rings. I inserted my miniature spaceship, my self, into a close orbit around Jade; at which time I looked back toward Terra, back there around Sol. I located the two blue-white suns that were close together in the perspective of stellar distances, for they marked my way coming and for my return to Terra.
Jade: Close proximity enhanced its obvious beauty. I reached out with my ESPERense to taste the atmosphere. Immediately, I butted up against a palpable force, obviously a continuous stream of ESPERense, but it disappeared after leaving the planet into Alta-space. The size of the beam scared me. It seemed as though the world below was inhabited by a race of ESPERS, with each and every one of them contributing heavily to the most powerful beam of ESP I had ever encountered. I had always been considered by my friends to be the most powerful ESPER known; but here I now knew I had to be very careful and to shield my small talent.
I used my normal sight to try to see down through the watered atmosphere. As best I could see from my orbit was that there were no mountains looming and no ice caps at the poles. If it were ocean and air only as it seemed through my normal sight to be, then there could be no trees, birds nor flowers. I was aware that I was seeing dimly and I had to leave orbit to see better. I wanted to find the source of that mighty, streaming beam of ESP. I drifted lower, letting the air envelope around the planet impede my orbital-like speed. I discerned that the air was breathable, using my small beam of ESPERense. I dropped my outer shield. It was not involuntary in an atmosphere. My Terran air escaped into the air of Jade. I was slow in realizing I was below the wave of where I had thought the crest of the sea would be. The air of the planet was purer than was Terra's atmosphere. I let my body weight weigh me down aslant of my orbit, dissipating my speed almost totally. My downward drift slowly ceased as atmospheric pressure built up. There were no clouds in the atmosphere, only a white blurring like the white smog over L.A. The match of the air pressure and of my body weight had reached stasis just above the tree tops.
Yes, there were trees and I could only see the tops. Was there land below, under the white haze? The air was heavy with water, much higher in content than ever on Terra, except perhaps in a hurricane. As I said aloud again, "If there's flora, there has to be fauna and with the trees there has to be land as well." I wasn't sinking any lower. I had to do something. I activated my outer shield and compressed the air of Jade inside it. I kept my face open to the outside air. Pressing the air out between the two shields, I got rid of excess buoyancy. Inserting water gradually for its heavy weight, so that I sunk slowly on down between the boles of the giants of the forest. Ranging widely with my ESP I had to assume the forest was world wide. The tree boles were bare, except for the animate, green feelers on each bole's apex. Since there was no wind the feelers had to be self-animated, needling the air as they were, as though they were weaving invisibility.
The further I sank down the more impressive the trees became. When I again reached equilibrium I was nowhere near the base of the trees. So I tied my ESPERense to Jade's gravity field and used it like a guy-wire to pull myself on down. Participating with the planet's gravity net made me realize Jade was 1.25 of Terra's norm, that much larger and/or of heavier elements. I pulled myself on down. The tree boles loomed and loomed ever higher and ever larger.
Long ago and many times I had walked along the Russian River in Marin County, across the bay from San Francisco, California; walking beneath the foliaged redwood giants there. But the giants I now saw were truly gigantic and without foliage. They had a uniformity, one to each, and they were far higher than the Sequoias of Terra.
The boles piercing the heavens above me were trued and might have been spires of lost sailing ships on Terra; who had wended their way for a few short centuries of dominance. Some of those ships wended a way one last time to their graveyard in the Sargasso Sea. Aloud I heard myself say yet again even though the spookiness scared me, "I christen ye huge ones and I call you 'Sargassos', being the world forest of lost souls." Who knows where the souls of beings sail in that Alta-status of being after death? I've heard wails there when I was translating through. Not always, but from time to time. Thus saying I made myself sad momentarily, almost accepting this as a world-wide graveyard for a vanished or vanishing race.
The self-pity left me when I felt psychic pressure on my shields. Water spurted, serving as a hydro-kinetic buffer. It bought me a nano-second of time. I was flipped over, which protected my bare face and I looked down where I saw both the bowl-base and its foliage. Whatever sentients there were on Jade had found me. I used my mind as a translation device and beamed out of there, thereby escaping that powerful, tentative probe.
I sank into the softness of a gigantic frond, becoming lost to any inquiring probe because of the undulatory folds surrounding me. The huge leaf rippled from muscular contractions and pulsations. Carefully I probed into the living fabric of the frond. My probe penetrated through the bottom of the frond, which was structured three feet thick. It was about 50 feet long and 30 feet wide. The leaf's thickness varied with its flexing as would my arm as I used it. The pulses matched the constant beat of my heart. I traced mentally the ropy, neural conduits, but I was chary of the powerful electric impulses. Keeping my ESPERense on low register, I used a waft of a narrow tendril of thought to trace the being's spine as it reached up the spiral of the soar of the bole. The central conduit decreased as it rose, branching out to all areas of the tree. The tree was obviously both flora and fauna. I brought my thought thread back to trace below where the neural chord widened and suddenly I was awash in the mass of a mighty brain. I dropped my ESPERense probe there for I wasn't looking for anymore strenuous squeezes. I wouldn't be capable of winning any battle with even one of the giants. Yes, I decided that they were the ESPER race on Jade.
With only my five senses working at observing I felt a thrumming through my bare feet. I probed anyway and I found a great artery under me, throbbing full of a blood fluid. Human blood stayed blue until oxidized by being exposed to air, turning the fluid to red. The internal blood of the Sargasso was green, chlorophyll. I was presuming I had a broad picture of the ecology of the planet in my mind, sitting as I was on a giant heart and lung assembly, one of many of the specialized leaves attached to each of the gigantic boles. I traced the green-fluid conduit to the center of the frond, there where a giant ventricle muscle beat. Its beat matched the rhythm of my own life's core, only more powerful in the steadiness of its throb. As with the nerve pulses, the blood green was pushed to the weaving extremities at the apex of the Sargasso. The Sargassoes were ESPERS and apparently highly intelligent. Still they seemed to have reached an impasse in their evolution. They were surely the dominant life force on Jade, mostly to the exclusion of all other possible forms of life. I think this because I have not seen the totality of the world's environment. There could be other forms of life. The formidable mat formed by the overlapping of the many fronds seemed to be an impenetrable floor for the atmosphere but, I felt there was surely more. I got bold again and pushed a probe down and on down. I broke through the horizontal dam at about three hundred feet down and there was the ocean[s?]. Water? It was water. It was real and rich in mineral and sodium content. I just had to probe further and see if there was life below this formidable, horizontal dam.
Burps and burbles almost broke my concentration. I felt a deliciously cool breeziness against my skin. I was breathing pure oxygen. It tickled my nose. I sneezed. The fronds were oxygen factories, purifying the Sargasso blood. How the trees handled normal elimination processes I couldn't figure. Now that the blood purification aspect was clarified, my mind turned back to the dark ocean. The weight of the trees was an imposition that held the oceans calm, even against the gravitational pull of the three moons, even when the three moons lined up and created a formidable gravitational insertion. The dam seemed to be leak proof. The outer skin of each frond was rubbery and water could not penetrate. The air that the fronds were constantly liberating made the fronds a bit lighter than the waters of the ocean. The turn of the planet was slow, likely having been slowing over the eons from the opposing pull of the gravities of the three moons, as they rotated around Jade in the opposite direction from the spin of Jade; much like Terra's gradual slowing from the opposition of Luna's gravitational pull against Terra's turning spin. In probing below the dam I was almost sure I could feel the water pressure building, yet I had learned a long time ago that water was not compressible; but it could be forced into other forms, like gas. I didn't know about the land masses peeking above the ocean at the poles. As far as I could ascertain from my brief exploration, the ocean was dominant world wide and dominated by the Sargassoes. The closed sealing of the ocean by the living, vertical dam; with all of that Sargasso weight bearing down, should have forced the water to flood out in some fashion or to break down into its component parts if the pressure was truly great enough. I had enough knowledge in my general ken that I should have gotten the hint that there were land masses breaking the impenetrably vast world forest. Each of the Sargassoes were supported on a frond base of a two-hundred-foot circle, with each frond being 50 feet long and with each bole being 100 feet thick, thereby spaced apart enough vertically to intersperse with the leaves of the neighboring giants.
There were fish in the jet-black sea. I've never figured how this ESPERense works; but, it senses things like light or light's absence, and I deduce light's absence because the fish have no eyes. It turned out that the first 500 feet below the dam was an empty zone, just below the motiles of the nadir of that sylvan dam. As I probed on down I tried to count and to correlate. Then there came a huge school of tiny fish, wriggling their collective way upward ahead of huge bodies that were obviously herding them. The sheep-like fish entered that empty zone while the shepherd fish milled around the lower edge of the zone. The school of sheep-like fish looped over to sway back down into the occupied zones of the sea. Ropey tendrils that were tongues with sucker cups, they lashed down from the nadir of the living dam, from out of the ass-end of each of the huge Sargassoes in that immediate neighborhood. The suction-cup tendrils pulled back, with myriads of the sheep-like, tiny fish captured with each of their surges. ESPERentally I followed the recoil of the tendrils as they folded in behind rictic orifices. The huge shepherd behemoths turned downward, swimming back into the depths of the sea. It had to be a world-wide phenomenon. Each area having its own time schedule. Again the dead zone was quiet.
I might have been reckless when I broadened my perspective under there to see what I could see; but I avoided doing it in the areas of the tree brains. With the wider vision I was able to get a more comprehensive picture of life under the dam. To the extent the trees were flora, they were nourished hydroponically. To the extent they were fauna, they were meat eaters and I had to assume the meat eating was a dilettantish aspect in their diet. The sea itself surely maintained all of the trees' necessary minerals, vitamins and such for the health of the trees. What I didn't then realize was that much was extracted and very little returned by that vast forest. The bedrock on which the ocean rested was very rich in most minerals necessary for the Sargassoes' well-being, as well as for the fish there below the dam. How the fish lived and thrived without sunshine I had no idea until I deduced the presence of radiation emanating from the bedrock below the sea. I also had a partial answer to the pressure on the ocean by the weight of the forest, because there were occasional quake-like shivers in the forest floor as the water threw its considerable weight around, just a bit. And that shiver and shake by the ocean was a form of mineral mining. Some of the resistance to that myriad pressure by the ocean would cause the breaking of rock roofs over caverns or other forms of pockets of emptiness there below, in the bedrock. What did the fish eat, other than each other? That was certainly part of the solution. They certainly weren't getting any residue from any potential forest debris. I wasn't sure whether there were any purely plant life on Jade. Fish would eat fish, that was an observed fact. They were doing it right in front of my mental face. But! What did the small fish eat? It took me a long time to penetrate the clouded areas of the ocean; there about midway between the pervading dam and the bottom silt, there drifted almost microscopic forms of plant life, a plankton. At this point I assumed this was it, the sum and total of the planet's ecology.
I was totally involved mentally in the nether sea as my ESPER reflexes kept me adrift just above the surface of my frond bed. A psychic song of allure permeated into the depths of the sea, promising the delights of a Jadian paradise, pulsed forth from the Sargasso plenum. Again it was a vast school of small fish that surged upward; but different and from a different depth than had been the sheep-like fish. These jet-fish pulsed their way up and through the dead zone and right on into the Sargasso orifices. Alternately I saw ingots drop and sink in the ocean from out of those same orifices. For just a moment I wondered if the ingots could be seeds needed to replenish the Sargassoes. I could not yet be sure.
I had felt all during my forever that I was possessed of a broad and powerful ESPER range. It was being borne into me that I was locally out of my league by a factor of at least a ten to one ratio, with me being the puny one. Without my conscious concurrence my ESPERense was being drawn irresistibly into its upper range, not unlike a soprano trying for 'High C' at the Met. But her attainment would be in sound waves and mine was a mental reaching and silent. Even so it was much like a scream passing on by that classically high note and into the humanly inaudible. Slowly I became aware that the forest was now aware of me in spite of my cautious efforts. There was a vast net of ESP surrounding me, like a blanket covering on a cold winter night. This blanket was a wrapping of ESPERense. It was a bonding between and included every tree in the forest. How could one species be so dominant? I tried to estimate the different species extant on Jade and I could not. The profusion of life and its differentiation on Terra consisted of five to six million extant types of insects, mammals, fish and so on. None were so dominant...not even man. Though man was basically comfortable in his present dominance there; but he didn't have the total dominance the Sargassos seemed to effect on Jade. I spoke aloud to them and broadcast the message ESPERentally, as well, "You've limited any competition totally out of existence. Where do old trees go to die?" They heard my question and they were able to comprehend it for they answered me with a visualization. In virtuality I was streaming off-planet, a figment in that vast ESPERstream which was carrying us into Alta-space. I suppose time passed, but it certainly seemed only a nano-second and we had emerged back into normal space in another planetary system with a sun that might have been Sol. I looked in the direction of the orbit where a Terra-type planet might have been; but the orbital path seemed to be empty, sans even any asteroids. "Not So!" they replied. The stream moved us along that orbital trail and I became aware of a shimmer. It was a huge distortion of the light of the sun. We made the trip along a mental Mobius strip and suddenly we were dropping down into a planetary atmosphere. An old, physical tree had accompanied my psyche and it now dropped like a giant spear, its apex with its weaving tendrils leading the way. The waving fronds at the nether end served as both a rudder and as a parachute. We spiraled down over a continent and again over a vast forest. The stream of ESPERense guided the Sargasso giant unerringly to a pre-selected spot and the sharp end of the tree buried itself deep into the ground; its apex tendrils would now be its roots. There was a mental sigh as the Sargasso giant let go. Its fronds drooped and spread taking in gobs of sunshine.
I may have blanked out, for all I remembered was a sepulchral voice in my head with me, "This is your new home. When it is time you will find it again." When again I was aware of my surroundings I was again back in my body, still needing answers to forage a fair knowledge of Jade's ecology. It had been shown me that the Sargassopes went off planet to die, removing needed mineral wealth from the planet of Jade. The forest on the other planet was large, but, it was nowhere all-dominating as it was here on Jade. I had seen the corpses of some of the Sargasso giants as deadfalls on that other planet.
I sent my small twist of ESPERense boldly down into the nether ocean yet again. The fish in that vast ocean ranged from small to very large, each with their respective levels of ESP. Their brain capacities seemed disproportionate for the size of their bodies; that was until I determined the extra capacity was devoted to the generation of and utilization of differing levels of ESP. ESP obviously replaced the lack of light. I was a creature of light and it took me over-long to comprehend. I was using and comprehending by ESPERense so that I had to deduce the difference in their world as contrasted to mine, and mostly by correlative deduction. Living for them was by mental probing alone. The Sargassos' dead zone girded the world where the ocean and its dam were dominant and it meant death for the unwary. The siren song had died out in this area sometime ago. It would have faded out completely at about two miles down in any event. Each member of a larger species of fish cruised just at that depth, each alone, massive in their solitude. The brain pans got smaller the further down I went and I found sonar replacing ESP, with rudimentary ESP being secondary; but there I heard the mental songs of the inhabitants of the lower region, for they were not shaped by the Sargasso threat.
The forest seemed impregnable vertically and sacrosanct above the dead zone. The ocean though continued on down through varied pressure zones to the bedrock on which it rested. The zones were not what one would expect as normal because the Sargassos' manipulation of weight and counter-pressure distorted them. Between Jade's two surfaces of the ert and the inert there were those miles of ocean depth filled with fish flesh. I began again to think about those ingots dropped by the tree orifices. The food chain seemed fairly complete in my mind. I had to go deeper. I went down where the fishes' structures had adapted to meet the ever increasing pressure. Some of the fish were huge, flat and flapping leather to move their bony-ray wings, weaving a watery path in contrast to the small wisps, bags of compression that just farted along. At six miles down I found the silted surface of Jade. I found something in the rich soil. There still seemed to be a link missing to my mind. The ingots were indeed the seeds for the Sargassos, nurtured in the rich silt at the bottom of the sea. Suddenly I involuntarily burst into speech, "The pressure's building. It is a signal. The seeds burst. How are they growing without sunshine?" I was in the net of ESPERense suddenly and I could see how the Sargassoes were working. They were shutting off leaks that they usually maintained over the various oceans' surfaces as a safety device to control the pressure of the sea. As the seedlings burst from their pods, they were fronds attached to a wee twig to the side, having a bulbous lower end. They hesitated on the way up to suck nutrient from the sea, sucking in the microscopic plankton. As they undulated upward they resembled nothing so much as the rays of Terra.
Almost immediately the baby Sargassos were attacked by the schools of fartalongs, who corroded out chunks of the baby's frond. If this was an unanimous migration from the silt to the top throughout the world sea, then there were millions of the baby Sargassoes and the fish of the oceans were eating profusely. It was obvious that many of the seedlings would not make it back to the top of the ocean. The Sargasso babies began to wail a mental song of pain. I was so engrossed in the lower sea saga that I was unaware and unprepared for the rest of the story. I grappled mentally to keep my contact there below the sea. Some of the seedlings reached the dead zone and pushed on through it.
It was still and quiet when I became again aware of the frond. It was programmed to absorb anything resting on it. It was finding my shields unpalatable, and I quickly reinforced my external shield. It was well that I did for I received a mighty blow. The outer shield absorbed most of the shock of the blow as I ESPied the cause. It was a giant fish that had fallen from the sky. It lay on my frond, gasping out of water as the frond began to absorb it. I could now see the high sprout of water that had flung itself and the fish into the far sky, partly relieving the ocean's bladder. I panicked because the bole of my Sargasso was radically out of plumb as it proceeded to release its fronds from the dam's interweave. Immediately I enclosed myself inside my inner and my outer shields, taking in the necessary amount of the local atmosphere and reflexively with necessary minerals from the bosom of the sea. The forest lifted me into orbit and out of its way. My Sargasso was shot straight up and out. All of the local water pressure was behind the shot. Through the ESPERnet I experienced other shots from around the globe of Jade. At first I thought it was the water spouts that totally launched each huge spear, but on reflection I realized they had to really use teleportation out into that vast stream of ESP into the Alta-space. The water spouts released the pressure on the waters of the ocean and a bunch of the older trees were on their way to their next incarnation and the seedlings were taking their place in the vertical dam maintained by the forest. I now had an adequate picture of Jade, both of the planet and of my lovely wife of the same name; she who I was so very homesick for. I had attained my goal, I think, with the help of the beneficent forest. I believed I had found my future home and now I could go home. The trees and I said a mutual goodbye.
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