Legend of Earth
Chapter 3: Inside the Nemectes

It only took another couple of hours to reach the burned glen. Clouds had been traversing the sky all morning, dark blue-gray rain clouds watered the horizon while white fluffy clouds alternately hid and revealed the sun for the travelers. Upon reaching Mrrl’s glen, the canopy opened-up and light filtered through thinner tree branches and fewer leaves. Without speaking, the adventurers led their hover homebase around the perimeter of the glen, following the older, bigger trees. Amper watched the canopy of leaves until with a jolt of familiarity he recognized the crescent-moon leaves of a particularly thick, solid tree. There was evidence of old burning on the glen side of the trunk.

“This is Merle,” Amper stopped and gestured.

Mygs looked. “It’s a huge tree. This is one of the entities? A nemectis you spoke to last night?”

Amper nodded, approaching the tree. “Yes. Hey, Merle,” he greeted, putting his hand on the trunk. After a couple seconds he huffed a laugh because he was waiting for it to thump “hello.”

“How should we do this?” Mygs guided the homebase to a flat spot and anchored it. “Intermittent scan, six hours?”

“No, definitely an x-ray wrap. Twenty-four hours. We’ll be sure to capture everything with that.”

Mygs tapped-in the command on his arm and loaded the x-ray duration, shaking his head. “This is a tree. We’re doing a full-day wrap scan on a tree. What has our legendary Earth come to? Why do I feel that we’re wasting our time?”

“This is our only lead, Mygs,” Amper took out the one-inch belt that would emit a virtual x-ray over a four-foot-high section of the tree. “The wrap will cover the tree starting from three feet above the ground, scanning the four feet above that.” He entered the measurements of the tree, and the scan began.

“Okay,” Mygs watched his dermiscreen for a moment to be sure the scan had begun recording. “Lets initiate homebase.” He sighed and shrugged at Amper. Amper nodded, brows raised as though to say, “and now we wait.” He found a spot for the campfire while Mygs reported their pause in schedule for research on possible life-forms. The details of the research were not sent to the orbiting ship, but would be recorded in personal logs, and reviewed later if need be.

After the busyness of putting up camp, a fire was struck and the two men arranged a sitting-log to match the sitting-rock by the fire. They sat with instant coffee and set an aluminum-wrapped meal on the fire to cook. Mygs sat across from Mrrl while Amper sat sideways to the tree. He saw Mygs glance up at the great trunk repeatedly.

“So,” Amper ventured. “I’ve been trying to think, and now maybe I can get you to help me come up with it – what the tree thump is. Any ideas?”

He sipped his coffee and shook the foil over the heat. Mygs didn’t say anything for a moment, and Amp almost stated the theory he’d come up with but Mygs spoke first.

“Maybe it’s like a gulp.” He kept staring at Mrrl. “Maybe it’s swallowing or actively ingesting nutrients. I could feel the insides move like that.”

Amper nodded. “Good thought. Hadn’t thought of that.” He stared into the fire. “I wondered whether it was a hiccup. Like an anomaly that happens in the tree’s flow, a catch of some sort.”

“Mmph.” Mygs looked over at Amper, then to the fire. “Just as likely.”

Amper nodded, his thoughts roaming through possibilities.

“Amp?” Mygs said quietly, pausing then.

Amper darted a look at his friend. Mygs very rarely spoke so gently and hesitantly. “Yeah.”

“Do you remember in history class in secondary – we learned about the Gideon423 asteroid? It passed Persevere the year before we were born?”

“…No, I don’t recall.” Amper really didn’t remember.

“The only reason we studied it is because it was the closest asteroid ever to pass us. There were high winds on Persevere during the day it took to go by, and we even got spores and dust off of it, pods of gel. Scientists determined that the Gideon was a chunk of what used to be a planet.”

“Huh.” Amper didn’t say much. He didn’t want to dispel his colleague’s urge to speak freely. Mygs almost never shared his thoughts without being asked. What caused him to suddenly wax verbose?

“Then we learned that we used some of the cast-off from it to grow some trees and moss on Persevere. Some of it was really nutrient-rich, and the trees gave-off a sort of nut that couldn’t be eaten for nutrition, but was used for healing headaches. The gel has been kept in the science lab, not able to be duplicated. But it inspired the manufacturing of impermeable cryoskin. Nothing much more than that. We went on to talk about the planet Sophica the next day, in the Aunika Galaxy.”

“-The nearest planet in the nearest galaxy to Persevere.”

“Right. We had to write a paper on an astrological ‘nearest’ thing that next week. Anyhow –“ Mygs waved away the tangent. “The Gideon423 passed on the downstream side of the Biocurrent. That’s how the spores got on the Persevere, the dust … who knows what else.” He muttered the end, and shook his head, looking at the ground between his feet. Then he laughed weakly. Amper thought he was going to say more, but Mygs stayed quiet.

Amper nodded. “That’s how the Biocurrent takes care of us. Sending us blessings.” He watched his friend carefully, wondering. Mygs’ dad had been a scientist on Persevere, so if anyone remembers little things like the Gideon, Mygs would. But when Mygs didn’t say anything, Amper watched the fire. And waited. Then spoke again. “Mygs? Something going on?”

Mygs was squeezing his eyes with his hand, then put down his coffee and rubbed his face with both hands, avoiding Amper’s gaze.

“I was just thinking.” He finally looked straight at Amper, back to his usual attention. “The nemectes don’t talk to me, Amp. They live on Earth, probably somehow related to the life energy that humans had. They do talk to you – descendant of humans from Earth, lineage of the aide to the first mate of the E.S.S. Breakaway. But they don’t talk to me, I don’t get the dreams. So I have to consider the secret my Dad always kept. That I found out when I was sixteen.” He dropped his gaze and stared at the fire again.

Amper felt his jowls tingle. Something was about to happen. “What secret?” Shhah had said Mygs wasn’t human, does his friend know already? “What are you saying, Mygs?”

Mygs kept staring at the fire, his breath quickening and deepening as he tried keeping his emotions in check. “I was sixteen when I wanted to use my dad’s cobbleprod, and the keycard to the utility closet was in his den. I went in, found the key, and tripped over the garbage can and dropped it. It fell between the wall and desk, and when I reached for it, I found a filepeg taped to the side of the desk.” Amper listened, glancing at Mygs only infrequently since he didn’t seem to want that connection for this intimate confession. “I took it, hardly thinking twice at all. I forgot the cobbleprod, went to my room, locked the door, docked the filepeg and read it.” He paused again, but not for long. Amper sensed that if Mygs didn’t just surge ahead with this story, he might think too hard and not tell it.

“It was about the Gideon423. Spores, dust, the usual. It looked like he’d been in charge of cataloguing differences in our atmosphere while the asteroid went by, and analyzing the debris filters in our dome each hour while it was in our current. It all sounded familiar from what we learned in school, but then I saw the words bioorganic life form. I didn’t remember anything about that from our lessons about Gideon. I followed his notes on it, and he’d decided to not let his superiors know he’d found it. He realized it was a type of bio-fertilizer and had taken one of his wife’s eggs to see whether it would create a creature. It began growing in the dish, and when he saw that it could possibly live, he put it back into mom for incubation. I guess I – I was in a sort of pliable egg.”

Amper couldn’t speak, for the shock. He didn’t realize he hadn’t moved at all during the story, but when he did look up at his friend, he felt like it was for the first time in hours. Mygs’ eyes were glistening in the firelight.

“They arranged for a home birth, with only my dad attending. I came out and pushed my shell open, and Dad said it was like I was stretching it out in order to wear it. It sort of shrunk around me. It ended up becoming my skin. Remember when I had that bad acne in secondary? And none of the usual salicylic acids or peroxides did anything? Dad made a mixture with the dust and nuts off of Gideon. That’s what helped the most – things from my original world. My world.” Mygs shook his head. “My world,” he repeated. “Persevere isn’t where I come from, Amp. And so neither is Earth. That’s why the nemectes don’t talk to me.”

“Mygsolith.” Amper finally said, piecing it together. “I thought he named you after that researcher, and the building – the Mygsolith Tower of Biocurrent Theory and Research. But he named you after the Mygsolith filter – where he found you?”

Mygs nodded.

The two were quiet, though Mygs managed to sigh deeply and sit up, breaking the spell of heavy divulgence. He’d just unloaded something he had carried for half his lifetime. Something he’d kept from his best friend. Amper thought back to when they were sixteen and remembered that Mygs became standoffish then, separated from the other friends. They’d had a huge fight once, and Mygs tried to stop being Amp’s friend.

“I thought it was because you didn’t like me back then,” Amper said. “When we were seventeen and had that fight over what our plans for the future were. I couldn’t understand why you wanted to be in a lab rather than out in the stars.” He looked at Mygs, who met his gaze and nodded. “You were trying to separate from the humans. You realized you weren’t one.”

“I was devastated. My dad had done tests with me repeatedly, disguising them as games sometimes, to see whether my mind worked differently. I hadn’t known until then. I felt that he and Mom had been lying to me all my life, and by association I was lying to you about who I was. I didn’t want to tell you, and felt guilty lying to you, so thought I should just un-friend you. Then I wouldn’t feel so guilty.”

“I wouldn’t let you,” Amper’s brows furrowed, remembering. He’d followed Mygs to the low-walks – the streets nearest the center of Persevere, where the five original ships were sequestered. Mygs was angry to see him, and Amper had insisted that he wasn’t going to go back up unless Mygs went with him. They were the closest of friends, Amper had decided to make a career of replaceing out which star was Earth, and he didn’t want to do it without Mygs. They spent the night down there while Amper proved he wasn’t going to leave, and they got in trouble when they returned, but they did both return, and their friendship was sealed.

“You wouldn’t let me.” Mygs smiled. “And here we are. This – Earth – it was my dream while we were kids. Then it turns out it’s not my origin. But it’s the place that my best friend’s lineage came from. So I’m more than happy to have found it with you, Ampersand.”

Amper pressed a smile through his lips so that his chin wouldn’t tremble. He hadn’t felt this close to Mygs since that day in the low-walks. Mygs had done all of this for him, it wasn’t Mygs’ dream any more.

“So, we found Earth,” Amper nodded. “We’ll need a new goal.” He looked squarely at Mygs. “Do you think we could back-track Gideon423’s trajectory and replace out where it came from?”

“Dad had already begun that,” Mygs sighed again. “Then he got sick. I think it’s worth researching and exploring. I know where he keeps the file.” He smiled.

“Stuck to the side of his desk?” Amper grinned.

They laughed and shifted in a release of tension, Amper offering more coffee, and Mygs suggesting tea instead. They sat at the fire, and Amper asked about the tests that Mygs’ dad had him do. Mygs said the only thing that seemed different about him, not related to any tests and not something he mentioned to his father, is that he always knew where to replace something. Lost watch – it’s behind the couch. Misplaced phone – under the trans in front of the house. Mom suddenly has only one earring on – it’s on 6th and Mortimer next to the postal slot behind a discarded carton of moonberry polycream.

“At least it’s a good difference,” Amper smiled. “Not something physically odd or that diminishes your intelligence.”

The tea calmed them, they checked the x-ray one more time, and each retreated to their cot for the night. Mygs fell asleep quickly, emotionally exhausted from the confession. Amper, however, had to take a sleep aid again, knowing his body would acclimate to it if he did it too often. With only a little trouble, he finally drifted into darkness.

This time he didn’t meet Shhah and her fellow nemectes.

He dreamed of the low-walk with Mygs when they were seventeen. But instead of the conversation they had with Amper trying to convince Mygs that he wouldn’t be happy sitting in a lab, and that Amper wouldn’t become an drifternaut without him, they were talking about the future.

“We’ll be sitting on Earth, and will have found life forms there!” Young Mygs was saying. “They could tell us what happened to make everyone go – none of this guess-work we’ve done for centuries.”

“Right, but…” Amper shrugged. “What if we’d be better off not knowing?”

“How! What answer could we possibly hear that we’d wish we hadn’t found out!” Mygs gestured excitedly. Amper noted, as he watched his dream, that their personalities seemed to have switched. Mygs was saying everything with Amper’s normal attitude, while Amper, in the dream, was dubious just like Mygs had always been.

“Like, ‘the atmosphere makes your respiratory system incapable of leaving again once you’ve landed,’ or something like that.”

“That’s crazy, Amp. They’d have all kinds of answers for us –“

Amper put up a hand when he heard something in the corridor. “Shhah!” he whispered to keep Mygs quiet, but the name of his nemectis friend appeared. His seventeen-year-old self didn’t seem to notice. “Someone’s coming!”

Before they could hide, light from around the corner darkened when a figure emerged. A gurgling, whispering sound with the ticking of alien communication grew louder and the silhouette of sharp claws could be seen in the little bit of remaining light.

“What is it! –“ Mygs yelled as another appeared behind the first.

Amper’s seventeen-year-old self knew it was his parents from the planet off of which Gideon423 had broken.

But wait, not his parents…

Amper woke up with a start. What was that about? The talk with Mygs must have really affected him. It was Mygs who was from Gideon, not Amper. The idea of being from another planet really sat heavily on him, but the idea must have been heavier on Mygs, as well as keeping it a secret, and for so many years! The sympathy of one friend for another is deep enough to affect dreams, and Amper knew that even as adult drifternauts, the two would always be close like brothers. Still affected by the sleep aids, he quickly sank back into a dark, deep, dreamless sleep.

“I was just about to wake you up,” Mygs said, looking from the large physique of Mrrl to greet Amper as he walked out of the homebase. Mygs had his arm up in the familiar way of checking his dermiscreen. “Look at this –“ Amper walked over to the tented “porch” of the homebase where the full-sized screen pad was sitting on a table cot. “It’s the x-ray wrap. It caught movement during the night.”

He touched and swiped parts of the screen until the vectype of the x-ray came up. He fast-forwarded the feed to 2:53am and played it. The tree seemed to have a huge knot in the middle of the trunk.

“Does it hold liquid?” Amper asked. “Look- the bark is so thick that –“

“Hold on,” Mygs said, holding up a finger. “Wait for it –“

Amper watched, and in the space of just over a second, the knot expanded and contracted, the wood around it compressing to make room for that second. A mass of wood grain that fed into the knot from the bottom showed flow movement for about a finger-width toward the knot. Another mass of wood grain at the top of the knot showed flow from it toward the branches in the same amount. The knot was pumping something through the tree!

“Its – a heart!” Amper whispered, amazed.

“Yeah,“ Mygs replied with the catch of a laugh. “Like a human! Heck – like me, even!”

“You’re part human,” Amper smiled. “You are allowed to have a heart.”

“And apparently so is this tree.” Mygs allowed a satisfied smile, and spoke with a sigh.

“This nemectis,” Amper corrected. “nemectis Mrrl, meet Gideonite Mygsolith. Mygs, this is Mrrl.”

“Nice to meet you, Mrrl,” Mygs said quietly, staring into the branches of crescent-moon leaves. He was a non-human meeting another non-human. The moment was one he would never forget. Slowly, he returned from his reverie and got back to business. “Well – we have to stay for another night while we wait the rest of twenty-four hours on the x-ray wrap. I’ll alert Command that we’ll explore the area for more specimens, and we’ll take x-ray shots of more plants and rocks to examine for possible heart-knots and other humanoid attributes.”

“Forever the scientist,” Amper stated, “I’ll eat something and we’ll go.”

Mygs asked about any dreams of Shhah or Mrrl, and Amper simply said no. He didn’t describe the dream he did have. He blamed emotional stress and sleep aids for the lack of dreams. The men did their exploring, experiencing some rain and a breeze. Amper took it in blissfully, and scanned the horizon for dark clouds that would indicate a storm. Without an increase in weather, and with some new scans and samples, they returned to the homebase for the evening meal.

The twenty-four hour x-ray indicated one more “heartbeat” close to four in the afternoon. They examined the images for any signs of lungs or brain, but couldn’t replace anything obvious. They were tired from the wind and hiking, and went to bed early so they could wake with the dawn and continue their circumference.

“Mrrl mentioned ‘Gideonite.’” Shhah stated that night.

“Yes,” Amper was surprised that Mrrl understood spoken language.

“We don’t know language, we understand feeling. You don’t hear me saying the language that comes with what you said to Mrrl, you feel me relaying what he felt when you addressed him yesterday about your friend.”

“Wow. This is still strange to me.”

“You’re doing well.” Shhah’s tendril edges turned green, but remained mostly orange. “What about your friend?”

“He told me, just last night, that he knew why he wasn’t getting dreams of communication. He is from a planet that broke apart, and his bioorganic remains were cast-off onto our space city when the section of planet he was on passed by. A scientist found the remains and cultured it to become part-human. The asteroid was called Gideon423 by our astronomers, and that’s all we know about it. He isn’t all human.”

“An asteroid. You’re lucky it didn’t hit you.”

“We’re in a biocurrent. It’s naturally conducive to keeping life going, not destroying it. We experience near-misses all the time. We aren’t even afraid we’ll be hit by anything that would kill us.”

“We’re not so lucky,” Shhah turned brown and blue. “The fire in Mrrl’s glen – it was started by lightning that came from a storm that was in the all-encompassing cloud created by an asteroid that hit us seven years ago.”

“Where did it hit Earth?”

“The site of the impact is a blackbird’s fifty-day flight warmward and sunrise from here.”

“Warmward?”

“In the direction that becomes warmer rather than the direction that becomes colder.”

Amper quickly realized that the four directions, and measurements of kilometers from the human days of Earth, were no longer in use by the nemectes.

“So between the sunrise and the warmer lands. Seven years ago?”

“Yes. And although Mrrl was disturbed by the commotion of being a part of this experiment, he says he is grateful to be able to help. Is Mygs convinced?”

“He is. I think he has to let it settle-in a bit so he’s used to the idea of intelligent, emoting trees, and we have to finish our circumference of the area. You’ve been a great help, and give Mrrl my gratitude.”

“So, do you know whether more humans will come?”

“Eventually.” Amper’s light-smoke suddenly became brown and purple.

“What is it?” Shhah also became darker. Gray with a tinge of orange.

“I remember what the legends said about how humans treated trees before we left Earth so long ago. I really hope that doesn’t happen again.”

“Oh, we have horror stories about the past…” Shhah began to retreat, the area lightening with dawn and her leaves twirling with anxiety. “It’s time to go! I will talk to you soon, Amper!”

She disappeared into the horizon of smoke and light.