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.