1. The Tree of Life
Moonlight dappled through leaves onto Tree’s sensitive, spongy bark. Taking in the silvery light by simple eyes nestled in Tree’s porous bark, it noticed a movement it the forest. It searched the shadows, but it could not see very far. The forest calmed to chirping insects and a soft breeze that caressed its waxy leaves. Tree was not a tree but a sentient creature. It had traveled to this planet as a seed nestled in a pouch of an interstellar basilisk. Its species co-evolved with the basilisk to generate life on suitable planets.
Tree rested. The basilisk was getting heavier and had leaned too much on one branch. The basilisk, Auror was out hunting, and Tree took this time to draw in carbon to repair a limb that had a fractur. Auror was usually sensitive to Trees distress, but she had been distracted lately. Auror’s belly bulged with dragon spawn. She was ready to mate, and this planet was almost fully inoculated. It was time to send out the call into the galaxy for the dragons to come.
Tree sensed a movement through widespread shallow roots - bipedal footsteps of the human gardeners. They were supposed to be sleeping. Tree heard heavy thuds of rocks through its fern-like ears that curled out from under its limbs. The activity was in the shadows of the surrounding bush, just beyond Tree’s ability to see. This was not right. Tree would have to tell Auror about this when she got back.
Tree sensed two humanoids approaching. It curled in its hearing frons, feeling vulnerable without basilisk. A man’s hand touched its spongy bark. Tree tensed, hardening its bark, closing its pores to protect its eyes. Then the probing hand reached up to a low hanging branch. The human wrapped its fingers around a twig and snapped it back, breaking them. Pain shot through Tree as the twig was twisted to dislocate Tree’s fibrous nerves and veins. Tree let out a sonic pulse through the air and ground, calling the basilisk. Another hand of a woman touched its branch and again broke it. Excruciating twisting and twisting to sever Tree’s fibrous tissue made Tree quiver and scream in high-frequency waves.
A roar broke the silent night and a heavy pulse of wings thudded closer as Auror came flying from above. She dove defensively into Tree’s branches. Tree strained to hold up the hard landing of Auror’s long coils. Back and forth the basilisk lunged and hissed defending Tree. Wings beat the air, knocking leaves from their stems. Precious gene impregnated fruit fell to the ground. Tree’s roots griped hard into the earth, its bark clenched tight to hold up the basilisk. A rock came flying and hit Tree in the trunk, bashing some of its eyes. Then another stone sailed up and crashed through its top branches snaping twigs.
The gardeners were fighting Auror! This was a trespass of the sacred trust of geneses. The ones-with-hands were supposed to tend, not fight. Auror thrust its long body from Tree’s crown, lurching towards the male, her jaws snapping. Tree’s wounded cracked limb couldn’t bear the weight and with a strong thrust from Auror’s body, it broke. Auror fell from tree, her weight breaking a main branch. As the branch fell to the ground, the fibrous nerves and veins of its inner bark made Tree’s skin-bark peel away from the side of its trunk. From the gaping wound oozed clear blood. Tree hissed and twisted with pain.
Tree peered with its many eyes to see its symbiotic mate being bashed by rocks. The male human threw rocks to at her head, killing Auror. Tree psychically sensed Auror suffer blow after blow to the head. Auror’s breathing became shallow. Tree released leaves and flowers that rained down on Auror as she made one last sound, a long high-pitched wail used to call the dragons from deep space. Tree could feel through its roots Auror’s heart beating erratically. Tree’s roots clenched the earth in pure terror when Auror’s heart stopped. The basilisk, Tree’s companion, and defender was dead. Tree trembled and wept through its porous bark, for not only was Auror dead, but so was the pathway to geneses.
Tree sap ran thick on the earth. It was an immortal being faced now with death. A female human approached and took hold of Tree’s broken branch. Her hands tugged hard on the damaged branch breaking another piece off. The audacity of the servants! Killing those they were to serve and now picking pieces off as if they had a right to the blood of genesis! Tree had numerous memories stored from the unbroken chain of geneses trees. There had been calamity – fires, strange diseases, lack of enough diversity, exploding stars but never -never had a gardener killed their makers.
Despondent, Tree welcomed death. There was no point in going on. Its wound was too large to heal, and without Auror’s stored chromosomes for geneses, its life was of no use. Two other ones-with-hands came. There was yelling as the two females fought with the male and female. The killers left with shouts and crying. A gently hand touched Tree’s wound. Tree clenched its pores closed not trusting these stupid creatures. They were killers, destroyers of genesis. But the woman’s hand was soothing. Tree opened its tiny black eyes to see it was the Danu and Lilith gardener. They tried to help, by pushing up the pealed bark to seal it back together. Tree pulsed with agony as its skin was tugged and pushed. The nerves were twisted and ripped. It knew it was beyond repair. It would die and this planet would never see the biodiversity that could have been. Weak from pain and defeat, Tree sagged and dropped its remaining fruit.
The women began to sing the song of planting that Auror had taught them. They sang it soft and slow, so that it became a song of mourning. A surge of pride within Tree pushed away the pain. It was a Geneses Tree, known for immortality and creating life. Clearing its thinking, Tree recalled a lineage memory. There had been Geneses Trees that had turned into basilisks to be a mate with the lone dragon when no other dragons came. Yes, that’s what must be done. It could make another body. Deep in its core, Tree hurried to find the stored chromosomes and create dragon cells. They divided quickly and Tree formed a heart that began to beat. But then Tree felt a touch of the woman as she leaned her head against bark, and a human tear soaked through - a tear with female hormones. Tree paused. The pheromones from the woman triggered another genetic selection. The need to reproduce took over, and the dividing cells selected a human male.
Tree’s life was draining from its wound. It abandoned its upper branches, pouring all its life force from its damaged form into the new body. Tree’s roots recoiled from the earth and its spongy bark darkened and dried as its life seeped into its new skin and bone.
Suddenly, it needed to breathe, not through porous bark and leaves but from its newly formed nose. New lungs craved air. Layers of bark lay over its face smothering its mouth. Its skin separated, peeling off from the inner cambium. Its emerging form pushed with arms and legs against the shell of its old body, breaking through, splitting blackened bark. Gasping to take a breath of air, it stumbled out of the shell of its broken trunk and stood for the first time as a man.
He blinked. The colors of the world washed over his new eyes with such pleasure; it was like his eyes were bathing in sweet nectar. Held by wonder, he didn’t take note of the two women, kneeling, staring at him. He forced himself to focus on them. They were not the ones who had killed Auror, but ones-with-hands were not to be trusted. He looked at his own new body. He had hands. What had it done!
The two women were young, but at the age to procreate. The dark skinned one stared with her mouth open. The other with colorful hair stood up and her head tilted as she examined him. She smelled sweet with hormones of fertility. This female could be his mate for genesis.
He walked unsteadily towards her. He stopped before her. Her eyes wide with wonder, she reached out to him, lightly touching him on his chest, then running her hand down his arm. He felt her drink him in like water through roots. Her breathing quickened with excitement. As he looked into her eyes, he was drawn into her like crossing branches entangling. Her cheeks flushed with heat, and she looked away to the other female.
The dark one spoke, “What is he?”
“I don’t know but he is beautiful.”
“He needs something to cover his…his body.”
The two women gathered leaves and strung them to make a covering that they hung from Tree’s midriff. The cool leaves felt good against his newly formed light green skin. He listened to the sounds they made from their mouths and throat and paid attention to what they were feeling when they spoke to try to understand language. He knew their names the one with hair full of color like the sun was called Danu the other with hair the color of shadows was called Lilith.
As the clouds turned the sky into many hues of light, Tree stood transfixed by all the color. Danu’s tugged his hand and he followed her through the thick jungle. She laid down in a pile of dry moss and drew him down next to her. She lay on her side facing him and placed her arm on his shoulder. They lay close to each other sharing each other’s breath. He lay like a rigid log as she slid her leg over him. She pushed her body next to his and he felt like he should join with her but had no idea how. He leaned into her, and she let out a hum of pleasure. He wanted to wrap her like a vine, pressing himself into her, but his arms were awkward. He fumbled, putting his arms around her as her hair got stuck under one of his arms. They shifted, and he didn’t know where to put his limbs, and then his elbow bumped her chin. Frustrated with trying to figure out his new body and how to touch her, he rolled onto his back and took a breath. This was all too new, too strange. She put her hand on his chest and nuzzled her cheek into his neck. This contact was satisfying, and they rested this way, content with the contact they had figured out.
Eventually, Danu’s breath became slow, steady sighs. He glanced down at her. Danu’s eyes were closed, and she appeared to be in deep rest. He didn’t know how to do that.
As a tree, he had used the night to drink in nutrients and breathe deeply. He glanced up at the fern above his head. He wanted to rest like a plant rested, taking in the moist night air. He reached up, the fronds were soft and cool to the touch. He sorrowfully thought of Auror, of how she had brought all of these plant seeds. And Tree, the creator of all the animals, had been like a mother with life coming through his body. Even though Auror had carried the DNA chains within glands under her scales, she needed the Genesis Tree to assemble them into embryonic seeds that developed inside Tree’s fruit. He was part of a sacred symbiotic trinity of Dragon, Genesis Tree, and human gardeners. All three needed each other to thrive and spread throughout the universe; the basilisk for interstellar flight, the Tree for genesis, and the humans as workers to tend the garden. But now, it was all broken. There would never be the full actualization of Genesis. It would be just a world of humans and whatever life forms had been developed and released so far. The planet was now limited, and the true garden would never come to be.
He did not want to be a man. He was trapped. But he was not sealed to this body. He let go of it, as his consciousness became fluid. His mind released his form and reached out to the fern. He entered its thin, curved body, and lost himself in the delicate branches. Here, he rested in the green stillness of a plant.
Morning dew settled refreshingly on his fern body. He wished to stay a fern, but he sensed Danu stir. She opened her eyes and looked for him. He was more than a fern and even more than a man, but a man’s body would have to do as he pulled himself from the sun-sensitive plant to become a human again. The morning’s clear light was no longer soaking into a body of leaves but now glared into his eyes. Danu touched his arm as if he were not really there and asked him questions he could not answer. He blinked in the stark light, turned away from her, and looked at the green fern to caress its soft fronds.
Danu cooed to him softly and slid her hand over his neck. Her breath was fragrant and warm against his face as she muttered to him. He was just starting to understand what she meant as she spoke. Her eyes the color of leaves, looked closely at his lips. She wanted to put her mouth to his. He let her, and she formed her lips to his in a soft, moist embrace. He touched her smooth skin. Danu’s body was fleshy. There was a delight in the mingling of warm skin like when the basilisk rubbed her scaly body into his bark. It reminded him of the ecstasy of absorbing the liquid genetic soup from her pouches and creating fruit. He knew that pressing bodies together led to creation but exactly how this body functioned for reproduction was unknown to him.
Lilith’s voice trailed over the bushes. Danu sat up, smiled at him, and stood to straighten her rough, woven dress. She walked along the trail through the understory of plants to the clearing of his old body. He followed her but stopped when he saw Lilith prying at Auror’s dead body. He could barely watch. A heavy sadness weighed upon him and made him feel like he was wilting. How long could he play this charade for the humans? Forever? The magnitude of his transformation sank in.
He slumped down into the cycads to have his fellow plants around him. Hopelessness shrouded his mind. Being a man forever was daunting. His whole being had been made for genesis, but now he was stuck as a human male. Had he been careless when making this body? At least he should have been female so he could form another life. As the Genesis Tree, his ability to generate creatures gave his life meaning. He glanced over to his old, broken body, split and brittle. He would never feel the chromosomes coursing through his blood and the thrill of embedding them into seed, again.
The gardeners called to him, naming him Greenman. They wanted him to help them move Auror’s body. He reluctantly went over to his dead mate’s body. They pointed to the underside of Auror. Lilith was trying to open the dragon’s egg sac, but Auror was lying on it. Auror’s girth came to above the woman’s waist, but he stood a head taller. With their coaxing, he put his shoulder into the stiff corpse and pushed, rocking the large scaly mass back and forth until the momentum turned the corpse, and Auror’s body rolled, crashing over into the brush. A swell of desperate loss swept over him as he blankly stared at the carcass of iridescent scales of his beloved companion.
The one named Lilith roughly pried open the budging blue scale. It cracked open. She pried with a stick of his old body. The bubble-like scale folded back, and dragon eggs spill out. He watched them drop to the ground. They would never come to anything; so many new planets would never see the beauty of life. Lilith picked one up and sniffed it.
He watched with a hollowed heart as Lilith turned the basilisk’s egg around in her hand. Slowly a glimmer of a plan to regain genesis formed in his mind. The humans were only one part of the trinity of genesis - Dragon, Tree, and servants, but perhaps they could carry on the process of genesis. It may not be a dragon garden, but it still could be a garden- a human garden. Life, in whatever form it took, was still genesis. He looked back at his splintered trunk. Perhaps, his old body’s bark still had power, and if it was placed on a female body… it could be enlivened again to create life. He watched Lilith as she examined the dragon egg. This human had language and curiosity, but she would need to have the intelligence of a basilisk to balance the power of genesis. A wry smile lifted the hopelessness from his face as he said to Lilith, “Eat it.”
