Susurrus on Mars by Hal Duncan

Author:Hal Duncan [Duncan, Hal]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lethe Press
Published: 2017-11-16T16:00:00+00:00

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RESOUNDING THE CLOMP of fleshling feet and shifting furniture upon her patchwork panels, bouncing back their voices in the emptying room she floors, Pitys can’t help but think back fondly on the old days of Arcadia, of mountain heights, ravines, and shepherds calling out to hear their echoes in the hills she cloaked as the pine tree, Pinus pinea, or sturdier still in her Stone Pine form, and tall and proud, growing some twelve to twenty metres high, and even over twenty-five sometimes.

The shifts of life, she thinks. She’s sure of all her kind she senses shift most keenly. Senses? Undergoes more like. She lives shift, not as sharply as the fleshlings tromping in and out the master bedsuite of the Massinger abode, shuffling with weights between them, dropping a clatter or thump of something now and then, and cursing or being cursed for it—Rot and bones, Puk! Give that here!—no, not that sharply, but more keen than many a tree. She displays it as she grows.

In youth? Ah, in youth she is a bushy globe and, for her first five to ten years, bears leaves that mark her juvenile, growing as little singletons, blue-green and glaucous, a mere snip of two to four centimetres long, quite different from the adult leaves that start to sprout amidst these from the fourth or fifth year on, five times the length—sometimes as much as thirty centimetres long, indeed, albeit those are quite exceptional—mid-green and growing bundled into twos. By her tenth year, roughly speaking, though she might still sprout some juvenile leaves in regrowth after injury, a broken shoot or whatnot, just to show that she still can, those mature leaves have usurped the juvenile entirely, and she’ll spread a wide umbrella canopy from her thick trunk with its thick bark, red-brown, carved by deep fissures into broad vertical plates. In full maturity she sports a broad and flat crown forty to sixty metres wide.

She doesn’t rush all shifts, of course. It takes three years, a longer stint than any other pine requires, for her broad ovoid cones to reach maturity at eight to fifteen centimetres long. Within these cones, pine nuts or piñones, pinhões or pinoli, her seeds are large, two centimetres long, pale brown beneath the powdery black coat that rubs off to a gentle thumb. The crude four to eight millimetre wing on each is like to fall off on its own, but then it’s largely ineffective for dispersal by Susurrus anyway, so her seeds are animal-dispersed—mainly by the azure-winged magpie once upon a time, but these days mostly by the fleshlings who, it seems, find her a useful wood for furniture or floors. Like the floor of this townhouse apartment, which is bare now, bedsuite hollowed by the fleshlings, one of whom crouches to stroke her, bless him, calls a question that soon gets its answer in a fumbling of armfuls in through the doorway, followed shortly by grand flappings that spread out the dustsheets, lay them softly down now, to protect her.

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