from Strangler Sproose, forthcoming
Duc Montaine fell asleep in the tree. When he woke up, he was the tree. His family thought he was dead, so they tried to kill him, but by then it was too late. But that’s not how this story begins. It begins long before Duc was even born. After the collapse of the United States and the suicide of the British Commonwealths, the North American Union was forged between the anvil of Chinese Foreclosure and the hammer of their Orbital Ballistic Program. Three generations later President Christopher Fu Hsing launched the American Seed Foundation.
After centuries in interstellar darkness, Nannie Fleet Three entered its destination cluster and began casting about for planets to seed. Fleet Three still maintained tenuous radio contact with sister fleets, sent off in disparate directions from Mother Earth toward other likely star clusters. The different fleets couldn’t help each other; they were light years too distant, but the planners at American Seed opined that additional information would always be useful to the descendants, at least, of their precious cargo. Many Nannies were lost to interstellar accidents – rogue meteoroid strikes, bursts of radiant energy from variable stars, mechanical failure. Their frozen cargo died, never quickening.
After decades of investigation, Nannie Three B began her approach to her chosen world. Its name, Missouri, had been preselected for her by the master programmers of the Foundation, so as not to duplicate the names of other possible habitable worlds in her cluster. The naming of other things, and indeed, of her children, was to be determined by a random number generator. Bearing in mind that there is no such thing as a “random number generator,” Nannie’s program was to be seeded by observed celestial phenomena, the time of selection, ambient temperature and atmospheric pressure, wind velocity, and other factors programmed for appropriate “randomness.” It worked well enough.
Because the master programmers of the ASF wished to preserve and disseminate American culture, the naming of locations and the first children was to be influenced by certain American novelists, whose significance were given various weights depending on the biases of the programmers themselves, and their relevance to the selected world name. As a consequence of the Missouri bias, the first generation of children included Beccie Thatjer, Nigger Djim, Ree Dollie, Hamilton Felics, Talja al Ghul, Huc Finn, and Uaioming Gnott.
Still cradling her babies in their high-temperature superconducting polymer cells, Nannie floated down on a pillar of fire.
The slumbering sedge patiently awaited the stir that might signal the delivery of breakfast, and, if she were lucky, an especially delicious feral flyer. Somehow, this morning, the sun seemed fuller, deeper, more vibrant, and sweet — until it was too much, as if lightning had struck the ground. As the fire touched her fronds, ionic pulses raced along her dendritic tendrils and she withered in anguish, sucking moisture back into her root ball before it could be lost to the heat. As the invader settled into its throne of flame, her upper vegetation reduced to ash and vapor, she retreated to the safety of her sub-apical cortex, but the mud was too tight, and the pain seared into her core as the wet hissed out of her pores and she died as Nannie touched down.
As Nannie settled to earth, plumes of steam rose about her, expunging the alien sky, obscuring the newly won sun, and shrouding the scorched ground.