The Tree Remembers:
Chapter 04

  Sparks fly from somewhere to Kathryn’s left overhead as Kathryn made her way across the floor of the research and development lab at the Bobbin embassy in the Twin City capital of Haven.  Despite her hopes and the best efforts of some in her government, it had been difficult to get the public to buy in to there being any presence of Bobbins on Haven, so they’d had to remain for the most part within the walls of their embassy.  They’d started out occupying and renovating a relatively modest building not too far from the senate building, but given their need to create a small city for themselves they’d moved a little further out where more space was available, but still in relatively close proximity to the downtown core where the rest of the government buildings were.

  There was a tension between the need for their security and the obvious wish to project a sense of openness and friendship.  While there had never been any sort of outright attack or other kind of incident, there had been grumblings, vague threats picked up by the security services which warranted a more elevated defence posture.  Kathryn had served with the man who was now responsible for the security of the Bobbin embassy, and had heard him complain on several occasions about his hands being tied in his attempts at keeping the facility safe.

  There were no high walls or barbed wire around the place, but though relatively discrete there were a lot of cameras monitoring outside the facility, and a lot of security inside the doors making sure nobody who wasn’t supposed to be there could get in.  The discretion allowed people to ignore the heightened security if they were inclined to, but Kathryn was not.  She made herself watch some of the more repugnant media on her feeds with abject racism and hostility towards the Bobbins.

  It was easy to understand of course.  With beings so overtly alien would have been difficult to avoid triggering human being’s inherent xenophobia at the sight of them.  It could be difficult avoiding such with just a different enough skin colour in another human after all.  There was something unnerving about these strange bug like creature which stood on three limbs with three offset arms that even Kathryn still had trouble avoiding the creeps from sometimes.  It was strange how a being with its physiology built on triplicates, not just arms and legs, but their three black eyes on articulating stalks which projected above their head which each independently looked around.

  As she caught sight of Bill working on something with Felix, she held up her hand to them, and Bill’s rear facing eye stalk noticed her and the arm closest to her waved its three black taloned hand at her while the rest of him remained focused on what Felix was showing him.  Thinking about it now, for a moment she continued to just see how alien he was, the black, greasy looking fur covering his body which was thick and coarse almost to the point of giving the impression of quills more than fur.  His mouth was currently faced away from her (blessedly there was only one), but it was just as disconcerting the way it was a round sphincter like opening with three small fuzzy black taloned mandibles spaced evenly around he hole from the bottom and above to the left and right.

  But most of the time to Kathryn, when her reptilian brain wasn’t acting up at the sight of him, he was just her friend Bill.  Not a ‘he’ so much given they were an asexually reproducing species, but it had become the convention to refer to them as he or she interchangeably.  Some just struck you as a he while others a she, and the same Bobbin could strike as a he to one human and a she to another, so the pronouns were used interchangeably for them.  Not having any cultural conception of gender at all, the Bobbins themselves didn’t seem to care how they were addressed one way or the other, but it felt weirdly disrespectful to call them its, so referring to them as such had become a kind of slur which sadly was much more acceptable than Kathryn liked.  

  That was the thing though.  Katryn had observed that the speciesism was somewhat borderline there was a degree of casual prejudice which was acceptable in polite company, using ‘it’ to refer to them, openly talking about how they creeped people out, how they were happy to have them stay within the walls of the embassy.  Otherizing and alienating them was perfectly acceptable in public discourse while calls for violence or expulsion of them was not.  It was openly discussed for sure as Kathryn had made herself observe, but doing so made one seem distasteful to polite society.  She wondered to what degree it was genuinely considered beyond the pale as opposed to a mere discomfort with calls for violence or forceful action of any kind to a subdued, otherwise generally peaceful population.

  And as much as she hated that there was so much animosity out there and did what she could to help integrate the Bobbins, she certainly understood.  There was hardly anyone on Haven, Roma, or Earth who hadn’t been touched by the Bobbin War, as it had come to be known amongst humans.  The title was both fair and not fair.  Fair in the sense that it was the Bobbin’s war and not theirs, but unfair in the sense that it gave the impression that it was a war between the Bobbins and the humans.

  Between the obliteration of Kobol, and the loss of human service personnel from all human worlds in the armada that was lost at The Battle of the Central Plexus, pretty much everyone knew and had lost at least one person they loved or at least knew.  Humans could be dumb, and understandably unwilling to be nuanced in the face of that kind of loss.  But Kathryn had been there.  He had known the reality of the situation, understood that it was a Bobbin civil war that she had stumbled humanity into.  She also understood that if she hadn’t, the Link connected faction of Bobbins would have won.  The friendly unLinked Bobbins would have fled to another galaxy or been defeated without the unexpected contact with humans and access to their anti-matter weapons.  If it had gone down that way, the Link Bobbins would have inevitably come across humans, deemed them a threat for having anit-matter systems, and wiped them out immediately without giving it a second thought.

  The absolutely damning thing, the thing that was so hard to live with and had ultimately driven her to therapy, was that as many times as she’d played it out in her mind, she couldn’t figure any way it could have turned out any better, only worse.  The least bad possible outcome she could  imagine involved the genocide of her ex-husband’s world, and reeling trying to figure some other way it could have gone broke her in some way and drove her out of the service.

  She came up behind Bill and Felix and put her arms around both of them, still trying to desensitize herself to how unnerving it was to touch her alien friend.  “Hey boys, what are we working on”

  “Compact planetary rift,” Bill said though his mirror ball as he stepped back and put a talon to his mouth in thought.

  Bobbins used their whole broad bulled shaped body to resonate the sounds they made to communicate with each other, which made the sounds too low frequency for humans to hear and understand.  Hearing too many of them communicating too much with each other all at once made humans nauseous from how it struck their inner ear, but it was something one could develop a tolerance to.  As a result, when having to interact with humans, they were accompanied by a floating sphere with a mirrored surface which translated for them, as well as indicate their emotional expression by shifting its colour.  Interpreting what emotions different colours meant had become autonomic for Kathryn to the point she hardly noticed she was having to anymore.

  At present there was no colour to the mirrored surface and Bill seemed just stuck on the problem.

  “It’s still just the energy capacitance we can’t figure a way around,” Felix observed with some exasperation, hardly seeming to notice Kathyn’s presence.  “We can make it work at this scale, but figuring out how to channel and build up that much energy on such a small scale just seems impossible, let alone safe in a civilian area for public use like we’d ultimately like to get to…  Oh hey Kat, what’s up?”

  “Oh just checking in.  Retirement gets boring pretty quick when you’ve had the career I have.  You’re trying to open a rift on a planet’s surface?”  

  Rift technology was developed independently by both the Koboli and long ago the Bobbins.  By redirecting inconceivable amounts of solar energy down onto a single point, a specialized purple crystal could be induced to explode into a rift in space and open a portal to another complementary crystal around another star.  It was miraculous and reliable, but could only be accomplished so far in close proximity to a star, which took time to schlep back and forth to.

  “Yeah,” Felix answered, “but as you can imagine the power requirements are… astronomical.”  He chuckled to himself upon realizing he’d used the figurative colloquialism literally.

  “I still think it’s possible,” Bill insisted, “if we embed shards of rift crystal in a ring like configuration, and allow them to build up charge, we could design it in such a way that when they reached criticality, they would focus their energy inwards towards the centre of the ring and have a compounding resonance effect.”

  “It sounds like you’re talking about the way shape charges need to be configured in a nuclear bomb,” Felix observed.

  “Yes, exactly!” Bill responded with a transient flash of purple across his mirror ball.

  “Doesn’t sound very safe,” Kathrn observed.  

  Felix waved away the concern.  “Just gotta make it work first, then we can make it safe.”

  Kathryn shook her head at the reckless attitude, but she knew this was how things worked.

  “When we have a practical design, we would of course build and test it first on an uninhabited planet,” Bill assured her.

  “You’d need a better name than ‘Compact planetary rift’ though,” Kathryn noted.  “Planetary Rift?” she suggested.

  “With a design like this it will look more like a gateway than a rift,” Felix observed, looking back towards the circular blueprint of the design Bill was mocking up in with shadow matter out of the table they were working at.  Much of Bobbin technology from their mirror ball to the hull and functional systems of their ships was based on what they called shadow matter, a material that could be manipulated at the atomic level into whatever shape or function they desired, and controllable by their Link interface.  Their enemy in The Bobbin War became enslaved to the Link when they left it on permanently and all became drones of a hive mind, but other Bobbins still safely used it for communication and interacting with their technology.  

  Good or bad, the Link was incompatible with human brains, and they hadn’t found an easy way to adapt it, so one of the many things being researched at this facility was designing from scratch a human version of the link.  It was a kind of technology the people who had originally settled Haven had had, something they called a Brainchip, and it was a hurdle when she’d originally boarded the ancient New Horizon generational starship after centuries, that most of its systems were designed to be operated by brainchip first and clumsier manual controls existed only as emergency backup systems.

  “A gateway between stars then?” Bill asked.

  “Sure,” Kathryn nodded, “a Starga—”

  Kathryn was interrupted by every input to her nervous system being pinned to maximum all at once.  All she could hear was the painful ringing in her ears, all she could see what the blinding white of her temporarily blinded eyes.

  The pain was intense enough that she wasn’t afforded the luxury of thought let alone panic.  She reeled and stumbled, her arms desperately reaching out for something to steady herself against as muffled sounds started penetrating the ringing in her ears.  It was screams of pain, cries of panic and confusion.  Every iota of space her senses gave her as she recovered, was assumed by her military training attempting to click on and take control of her understanding and behaviour.

  She started to be able to see shapes, and then those shapes took on some definition.  She saw oscillating light coming from several direction and struggled to recognize them as flashing emergency beacons, which she then noticed them matching up with a repeatedly blaring alarm penetrating the madness in her ears once she was aware of it.

  Kathryn, she remembered.  Felix.  Embassy.  Bill.  Her brain gradually became capable of understanding more and more sophisticated concepts as it successfully rebooted after crashing.  She looked around and saw Felix laying on the floor, the yellow warning light repeatedly washing over his motionless body.  She turned and saw Bill scurrying around barking orders at other Bobbins and became aware of the nauseating tones of their frenzied communication amongst each other.

  Looking the other direction, she became aware of the giant ragged hole in the nearest wall of the large open space they were in, and after that felt the pain.  She looked down at her body trying to identify the source, and saw the half a dozen foreign object embedded in her body up from above her knees up to her chest.  She became aware of how deafening the alarms were as her ears stopped ringing so much, but aside from awareness of the warmth of the blood running down her right leg, it was the last thing she was aware of before losing consciousness.

   

  Kathryn had had some bad hangovers in her life; the really bad kind where your mouth is desertified from being left open, the soft palate and back of her throat shredded from snoring, her head unable to think of anything but the thickly throbbing pain of her headache until it gradually became able to start to piece together who she was, what had happened last night, and dread where she had wound up passing out, usually not in her bed.  It had been a while since she’d been so reckless, but she remembered it felt like refried death.

  The way her brain started whirring well before she had the nerve to open her eyes and confirm her worst suspicions, that was how she felt now.  It was the feeling of coming out of sedation, similar to the feeling of gradually recovering from passing out hard after borderline alcohol poisoning.  Your consciousness didn’t wake up in the right order.

  She was immediately aware of the pain, if not yet able to consider it.  It wasn’t sharp, but her whole side ached with tenderness.  Her head hurt more.  Not quite the throbbing headache of a hangover, but like she’d gotten punched in the head too many times, something she could recognize from her ill-advised brief dalliance with boxing at the academy.  After her autonomic surveying of her pains, she started to piece together who she was and where she might be and dared to open her eyes with a squint at the bright lights in the room.

  It looked like a hospital room she surmised, as she worked at widening her eyes against the lights.  She became aware there were people in the room, then felt her hand being held.

  “Patricia…” she weakly muttered as she smiled with a sense of relief and safety.

  “Kathryn!” Patricia excitedly exclaimed.  “Oh thank Mol…”

  “Nothing to do with it, but I appreciate the sentiment,” Margaret chuckled as Kathryn became aware that she along with Molly and her ex-husband Jaren were also in the room with her.

  “What happened?” Kathryn asked.  She considered trying to sit up, but something about the pain she was feeling staying still made it ill advised.

  “The embassy was attacked,” Jaren answered.

  “By who?”

  “We don’t know,” he answered.  “Terrorists,” he surmised with a shrug.

  “We’re just glad you’re okay,” Patricia said, squeezing her hand.

  “Am I” Kathryn asked, gently running her hands along the bandages up and down her right side.

  “You were hit by shrapnel and debris from the blast,” Jaren explained, “in addition to a pretty nasty concussion.”  

  Jaren was one of those people who accumulated degrees.  In contrast with Kathryn’s own more humble origins, Jaren had been high born.  It was something that otherwise would have made her dislike him, but he had worked hard to distinguish himself regardless of his privilege, and in addition to the several science degrees he held when she’d met him, he’d also bothered to get a medical degree somewhere in there as well.

  “Six to be precise, from your thigh up to your chest.  You were lucky though, no major organs damaged.  With Bobbin tissue regeneration you should be fully recovered in a few days.”

  Kathryn held out her hand for Molly, and the girl sat down on her bed and took it.  Her concern for her mother’s well-being left feeling her more engaged with her than she’d been since before her abduction, and while it sucked to have required being injured, it was still nice.

  “Several Bobbins died,” he answered dispassionately.  “You were the only one with serious injuries.”

  Jaren had struggled with his feelings about the Bobbins.  As an intelligent person, he was aware that not all Bobbins were responsible for the obliteration of his civilization, but as a mammal he still felt the need to blame someone or something for his loss.  It was easier to let it go with Bobbins with whom he’d fought against the Link forces than with those who had fought on the other side, but the Bobbins themselves no longer making the distinction and blaming the influence of the Link instead of any individual Bobbin made it hard for him to tamp down a hatred for all of them.

  “Is Felix okay?”

  “Yes,” Jaren answered.  “Pretty bad concussion himself, but he’s recuperating well in an adjacent room.

  “Bill okay?” she asked.

  “Bill’s fine, Kat.” Jaren assured her.  “I don’t think you knew any of the ones who were killed.”

  Bill was the only Bobbin Jaren would ever be tempted to refer to as a friend or care about their wellbeing.  That’s how it often worked.  Jaren was a fairly progressive guy as far as Koboli society had gone, but he’d still been formed in a fairly conservative society and could be instinctively xenophobic.  It’s easy to feel this way or that about a whole group when you don’t know any members of it.  Almost all of the remaining Koboli had an understandable hatred of all Bobbins, but having gotten to know Bill during the war was a wedge in his mind that held open a door which allowed in some ‘not all Bobbins’ light to a place that otherwise would want to just write them all off.  The conservative mind defaulted to a lack of empathy until personal experience developed it for one group or another.

  “Hey everyone, can I talk shop with Jaren privately for a minute?”

  “I really think you should just try to rest,” Patricia urged.

  “Come on Pat, you know I won’t be able to rest until I know what I need to.”

  Patricia frowned, but understood.  She rose and ushered Margaret and Maggie out of the room, leaving only Kathryn and Jaren.

  “How bad is it really?”

  “The damage?  I mean they blew a pretty big hole right through the dam wall of the main research hangar.”

  “I mean politically.  What’s going on out there, what’s the response?”

  Jaren sat down in the chair to her right and leaned back, lacing his fingers across his chest.  Time had been good to him, but it was hit and miss.  The youthful carefree sense about him and kept him looking young far longer than he had any right to, had been stolen by the war, and had been replaced by a severity which left long frown lines across his forehead.  His hair was still thick, but starting to become more salt than pepper, another sign of aging accelerated by the stresses of the war.

  Their marriage had still been pretty good before the war, and despite there being cracks which were widened to chasms by their experiences during that time, if it hadn’t happened they’d probably still be together.  He had once been so full of optimism and implacable positivity, a welcome counterpoint to her often hardheaded pragmatism.  He’d been a dreamer, an optimist, he’d looked for the good in people.  And though it was hard to blame him for it, losing his world had robbed him of that, and things couldn’t be the same between them afterwards.

  It wasn’t just that thought, encountering the Bobbins had revealed a side of him she couldn’t unsee.  She’d always sensed a pride in him over being Koboli, wrapped up in ways which were hard to tease out with a strand of aristocratic prideful snootiness which to his credit he actively tried to suppress.  But when stressed to his limit, she saw laid bare how xenophobic he was, what a cultural chauvinist he was underneath his façade, and she was just left wondering how she could have failed to really see that in him for so long.  Maybe it didn’t matter until it rose to the surface, maybe it was easy to pretend wasn’t there given how much else she loved about him.  Once she’d seen it thought, once it had been stripped naked and exposed the way it had, she couldn’t be with him anymore, even if he’d tightened it up again as much as he could.  He just wasn’t the man she married anymore.

  “It’s… complicated,” he finally answered, “as you might imagine.  The government has of course vehemently condemned the attack, but there are members of both parties who are doing the ‘it shouldn’t have happened, but it wouldn’t have happened if they weren’t here presenting a target’ song and dance.”

  Kathryn was conflicted.  It was good that no members of the senate had openly supported the attacks but at the same time it would have surprised her if any had.  In their position, hedging the way Jaren described was enough, and was as close as expressing support as they could get away with politically.

  “What has the public reaction been like?” she asked.

  Jaren sighed, seemingly exhausted with his existence.  “Well, I mean nobody likes anything blowing up in the middle of downtown in the middle of the day, tends to turn people against whoever’s doing it.”

  “But?”

  “But it’s polarizing.  Most people seem to range from it was unconscionable and unjustified to it was a bad idea, but there’s a small vocal faction who are cheering it on.  They’re being careful to colour within the lines in what they say, but what they mean is pretty clear.  Some far right commentators are flirting with comms regulations but so far staying within the lines.  To be honest it’s pretty scary out there.  Nothing like this has ever happened before and nobody knows what happens now.”

  “How are the Bobbins reacting?”

  “The Bobbins are…” Jaren ruminated, “to their credit have responded as well as anybody could have hoped.  They issued a statement which said that they are cooperating fully with the investigation and reiterated that their embassy facility continues to exist only at the invitation of the Haven government, and that they will abide by any judgments or requests made by their hosts.”

  “How are they feeling about it really?”

  “I haven’t spoken with any personally,” Jaren dispassionately answered.

  “Right.  Thanks for coming Jaren, I really appreciate it.”

  Jaren shrugged.  “Of course.”  

  There was an awkward silence.

  “I should get going,” Jaren said.  ‘Before we start talking’, being the unspoken but understood second part of the sentiment.  The divorce hadn’t been Jaren’s idea and she’s pretty sure he would have been happy to carry on together even after everything.  Part of his conservative inclinations perhaps.

  “How have you been?” she asked, immediately regretting it.

  Jaren chuckled.  “Fine Kat, I’ve been fine.  We’re making good progress with the rebuild on Kobol, but it’s slow going.  It’s not the gleaming capital city it once was, but we’ve built up a pretty respectable settlement for the survivors.  We got there once, we’ll get there again,” he shrugged.  It was an echo of his once implacable optimism which she was happy to see not extinguished entirely in him.  It was good for a person to have a star, something to devote themselves to.  She reflected on it for a moment with regards to her own situation.

  “I’m glad it’s going well.  Oh, by the way, I should run it past you first, I’m planning on going with Felix on a research expedition to study the Squiddies.”

  “Fun,” Jaren offered ambivalently, clearly wondering where he factored into it.

  “Maggie’s been so… well you know.  I’m planning on bringing her along, force some one on one bonding time, try to reconnect with her.”

  Jaren raised an eyebrow in that way he always did when was dubious about something she’d said but didn’t want to come right out and say it.

  “That’s… an idea, yeah.”

  “You don’t approve?”

  “It’s not that I don’t approve, I just… I don’t know.  I don’t know what could get through to her at this point.  I guess it’s better than doing nothing.  Maybe afterwards we can ship her to Kobol to stay with me for a while working on building up the settlement.  Might be good for her to work on building something and similarly give us a chance to reconnect.”

  Kathryn felt a stab of panic at the idea of letting her daughter disappear to another star system for an unknown amount of time, but she bit her lip.  It was a fair thing for him to suggest given that Maggie had stayed on Haven with her since the divorce and they’d been able to see each other so infrequently since.

  “I’m sure we could work something out,” was all she could bring herself to say in the moment.  “Alright then, well thanks.  Could you send Maggie in on your way out so I can break it to her?”

  Jaren chuckled.  “Sure.  Good luck,” he offered with a smile, knowing how thrilled Maggie would be about the trip.

  Maggie had never been an outdoorsy type.  She had an artist’s spirit, and though she hadn’t done much of anything since her abduction, before it she’d been quite a prolific young graphic artist and writer, and was quite talented.  They’d been looking at different creative arts secondary education institutions she could go to before it all went down.  Still, she had of her own volition volunteered to come along on that fateful expedition to the new star system their first drone rift building ship had opened up after it’s long transit there the hard way.  She’d said if she wanted to be a writer she needed to experience things to write about.  Kathryn hoped that spirit was still buried in there somewhere.

  “Mom,” Maggie offered as she came, taking her hand as she sat down to the left of her mother.  “Feeling any better?”

  “Well you know, still kind of like a pin cushion but what are you gonna do.”

  Maggie gave a half smile, which was more than Kathryn could usually get out of her these days.

  “So look, Maggie…”  Kathryn quickly scanned for good ways to bring it up but couldn’t find any that were better than any others.  “Before this happened, I was going to tell you about a trip I was planning on taking with Felix.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah, he’s accompanying Taj on a research expedition to study the Squiddies and I’m going to join them.  Been feeling kind of stir crazy since retiring, you know?”

  “Okay…” Maggie said, probably wondering where she fit into it.

  “…And I thought it would be nice if you came along with us.”

  Maggie withdrew her hand and sat back in the chair, staring blankly at her mother.  

  “I know you were never super outdoors-y, but you did used to like trying new things, and—”

  “How could you ask me to do that, you, you know how I’m, how I’m struggling here!  I’m barely keeping it together without going on some fucking field trip!”

  “First of all, fair enough, but watch your fucking tone,” she cautioned her.  She would often curse while chastising her for cursing.  It was a little in joke, but a touch more serious in this instance.  She immediately recognized it as unhelpful, but after almost two years she’d grown sick of walking on eggshells around the girl and treating her like she was made of glass.  Whatever she’d been though, she was her parents’ daughter.  She was made of stronger stuff than most and would have to figure out how to toughen up at some point.

  Maggie sighed dramatically and rolled her eyes as she crossed her arms, but Kathryn’s light snapping at her prevented her from saying anything else right away.

  “Look, I’m sorry to put it to you this way, but it’s been decided.  You’re coming with us.  Mother’s prerogative.  You can hate me and mope the whole trip if you want, but you’re coming.”

  “This isn’t fair,” Maggie meekly offered.

  “What is?” Kathryn answered.  “You don’t talk to me.  You don’t do anything.  More often than not I just see you staring out the window at nothing.  I’ve tried every other way I can think of to get through to you.  I’m out of other ideas, tell me Maggs, what else can I do?”

  Maggie just burned hateful contempt at her mother for a few moments before getting up and leaving, yelling “I hate you!” on her way out, something she’d never said before, let alone yell in anger.

  Kathryn just stared up at the ceiling and sighed as a few moments later Patricia and Margaret re-entered the room.

  “Took it well, did she?” Margaret chuckled.

  “She’ll get over it,” Patricia offered.  “I still think it’s a good idea to bring her.”

  “You two want to come along?” Kathryn asked.  “I could sure use the support.”

  Patricia looked back and forth between Margaret and her wife a few times.  “Um, I don’t know, I… I’d like to, but I think Maggie already resents me, do you really think it would be more helpful for me to be there than it would be counterproductive?”

  “I don’t know…” Kathryn admitted as she took Patricia’s hand and looked up at the ceiling.  “But you’re my wife, and I love you, and I don’t want to miss you that long.  She needs to learn how to deal with all of that too.”

  “Okay,” Patricia hesitantly assented.  “If you want me to come, I’d be happy to.”

  “Besides,” Margaret scoffed.  “I’d bet on this one keeping everyone alive out there before anyone else you might bring with you.”

  Patricia smiled up at Margaret for a moment before turning her knowing smile back toward Kathryn, scrunching her face and shrugging with feigned innocence with the playful suggestion she had no idea what the old simulant might be referring to.