Orchard

Nobody slept.

The night never went properly black. The sky went blue, and then a deeper blue, and then it stayed there. At what should have been the middle of the night Ellis could still make out the tree line as a flat dark edge against it. Nobody knew why that was either. It went on the list, which was getting long.

By morning the animal was gone.

They had come for it in the dark. The residents, with something that made almost no noise at all. They took the whole carcass and left the grass pressed flat in the shape of where it had been. Ellis had heard some of it happening. He had not got up.

They had not touched the nine.

That was what the cohort talked about all morning, in the low flat voices of people who have not slept. The residents had come out in the night for their animal. They had walked past nine dead people in the dark, and around them, and had not touched them. Nobody could work out whether that was contempt or manners or a third thing with no word for it.

It was Kai who said the obvious thing in the end: nobody had asked them to.

They buried them at the edge of the field after that, badly, because the most capable people alive had arrived on another planet without one shovel between them. Vera stood at the end of it and did not say anything, which from her was loud.

Ellis went to the trees a little after that.

He did not announce it and he did not experience it as a decision. He stood up at some point in the morning, and then he was walking. By the time he understood he was going the whole way he was four hundred yards out, and turning around seemed sillier than continuing.

Kai caught up with him inside a minute.

"Yeah," Kai said, when Ellis looked over at him.

That was the entire conversation for a while.

The trees did not get closer for a long time.

That was the first thing wrong with them, and it took Ellis most of the walk to understand what was happening. He had put the tree line at four hundred yards from the beginning, and he had been wrong. He had been wrong in the specific way a person is wrong when there is nothing to be right against.

There was no house next to the trees. No road, no wall, no person. Nothing of a known size stood anywhere near them, so his eye had done what an eye does, which is guess. It had guessed using the only tree it had ever met.

They walked for forty minutes.

"I keep thinking we're nearly there," Kai said, somewhere in the middle of it. He did not sound out of breath. "I've been thinking that for half an hour."

"So have I."

"That's not a thing that happens to me."

The grass changed under them twice. First to something finer and darker, then to a low flat plant that was not grass at all and gave slightly underfoot, like moss on a roof.

Up close they were not strange. He had not expected that.

They were trees. They had bark, gray-brown and split into plates the size of doors, and the plates had lichen on them. There were dead branches on the ground the size of telephone poles, gone soft with rot. There were roots standing out of the ground higher than Ellis was tall. It smelled like a wet forest smells, which is to say like a wet forest at home.

He stood at the base of one and put his hand on it.

The trunk went away from him in both directions and did not appear to curve. He walked along it and kept walking and it took him a while to be sure he had come back to where he started.

Then he looked up, and kept looking up. The trunk went into a green ceiling so far above him that birds — or something like birds — crossed it in silence, too high to hear.

It was not a weird tree. It was a tree, and it was enormous, and there was no reason for it that anybody had offered.

"Okay," Kai said quietly, from somewhere behind him. "Okay. Yeah."

There were other trees underneath, and those were the size trees are supposed to be.

They stood in rows. Somebody had planted them, a long time ago and on purpose, in the shade of the enormous ones. They had fruit on them, dark purple and about the size of a fist, hanging in clusters. The ground under the rows had been kept clear. There was a wooden crate at the end of one row with nothing in it.

So it was an orchard. Ellis had not expected the name to be literal.

Something was moving between the rows, and he took it for a bird until it stopped.

It stopped in the air. Not hovering the way a hummingbird hovers, with the whole body working — it simply stopped, and stayed there, about six feet off the ground, and then went sideways without turning first. It was the size of a sparrow and a dull green and it did not have wings that Ellis could see.

He watched it do it again.

Nothing that lived in a place where things fell got to move like that. He did not know what that meant, but he knew it was a different kind of wrong from the trees. The trees were too big. This was not from here at all.

"You came a long way," the woman said, behind them.

Ellis had not heard her arrive. She was in the same brown work clothes with the sleeves pushed back, and the long-handled tool was over one shoulder. Her face was doing the same polite unreadable thing it had done across four hundred yards of grass the day before.

She spoke English. It had not occurred to Ellis to wonder about that, and it did not occur to him now.

"You're the one from yesterday," he said.

"Yes." She set the tool down against a crate. "You are all still standing in the field."

"Nobody's told us to do anything else."

She took that in the way a person takes in a piece of information about weather somewhere else. Then she told them her name. It was three sounds, and none of them were quite the sounds Ellis would have used, and by the time he tried to say it back it had already come apart in his head.

He asked her to say it again. She did. It went the same way.

"It's fine," she said, and it plainly was.

Kai got there first, because Kai would.

"What you did yesterday," he said. "To the animal. How long does it take to learn that?"

She looked at him. It was the first time her face had done anything Ellis could read, and what it did was mild confusion.

"Learn it," she said.

"Whatever that was. Getting there. Getting there that fast."

"It came into the orchard three times last winter." She said it patiently, as somebody explaining that the bus is usually late. "My son does it. He is eleven."

Neither of them said anything.

"They are not dangerous," she said, and then something crossed her face, and she looked out at the field, at the flattened grass and the low mound at the edge of it. "They are not dangerous to us. I am sorry. I did not think about that until now."

And that was the worst of it, Ellis thought, and she had not meant a word of it unkindly. She had come out to a field, dealt with an animal that had killed nine people, and gone back to work. It had cost her about as much as taking a wasp out of a kitchen. Her eleven-year-old could have done it. She had needed a day to notice that anything unusual had happened at all.

So Ellis asked her about the trees.

He pointed up, because there was no other way to indicate a thing that size, and he asked why they were so tall.

She followed his hand. She looked at the trees for a while — properly, trying to see them fresh because a guest had asked.

"Tall," she said.

"They're taller than anything where we're from. By a lot."

"Then your trees are short," she said.

She was not being clever. Ellis could hear that she was not. She had turned the question over, found nothing on the other side of it, and handed it back.

He tried once more. He pointed at the green thing that stopped in the air, and asked whether it had always been here.

"It lives in the orchard," she said.

"But is it from here? Originally."

She thought about that, and he watched her not have anywhere to put it. Not refusing him. Not hiding anything. There was simply no shelf in her for the question. Her people had been handed every single thing the universe had to offer, two hundred years ago. She could not tell him which of the things living in her own orchard had come with the gift.

They had been handed everything, and had stopped asking anything, and had not noticed either.

And the answer existed. That was what got him, standing at the foot of a tree that had no business being that size, in a field where nobody had asked. The trees were that tall for a reason. The reason was here, in this place, doing it to everything at once — to the trees and the animal and the air and probably the light. It was doing it right now, to him, while he stood in it.

Nobody on this world was going to tell him what it was.

He was going to have to work it out himself.

They walked back in the afternoon. It took as long going the other way.

About halfway across, Ellis stopped.

Something had changed. Not in the field — the field was the same, the grass and the flat blue sky and the cohort ahead of them like spilled rice. Something in him had moved, the way you know a room behind you has emptied without turning around.

He stood still and waited to find out what it was.

He did not find out. There was nothing to look at and no number anywhere and no voice offering to explain. There was only the fact of it: something about him was not what it had been that morning.

"You good?" Kai said.

"I don't know," Ellis said, which was accurate.

He started walking again. Behind him the trees went up into their own weather, doing what they had been doing for a very long time, for a reason.