World-Trees of the Calidan System

by Rohinton Daruwala

On Calida Prime, the canopies run

continent wide in places, the

planet a blue-faced lion turning

its green-maned head in slow majesty.

On Calida one, close to their sun,

the trees are sparser, iron-barked

with shining mercury-veined leaves.

Every day the trees melt into boiling

puddles and each night freeze back into

the same exact shape, always holding

each others' branches.

Trees of every description decorate

each inhabited Calidan world.

But true strangeness always runs

earth-deep. Below the soil the roots

of every tree is linked to a hundred

others that pulse and flash like synapses.

Classifying the linked tree system of

the seven Calidan worlds is always

a religious choice. Your options are:

an oh-so-clever communication system,

a sentient being as old and wise as

an Oregonion fungi, or last of all

believe the unblinking orange eyes and

smiling cat-mouths of the Calidans -

The Trees came first and then birthed

reptile, mammal, bird and even Calidus Sapiens

to tend to them, to learn and perhaps grow

into greater consciousness.

The Calidans do worship their trees as

a single mighty entity, but individually

followers may belong to a single tree and

there are temples of old dry wood

built for single yellowed leaves.

And how do the Calidans view us?

They look at our balding planet,

with its psychotic stripped-bare forests

and think that the Trees on our planet

are an entity that has long ago

grown mad in its infinite loneliness,

that it created and threw us out

among the stars as a last desperate

attempt to find a consciousness it

could speak its slow slow speech to.

The Calidans gift us baskets of

leaves, flowers and fruits and ask

us to deliver them to our Trees -

a message that in this endless

spinning galaxy of cold cold soil

they are neither alone nor unloved.