The Last of the Old Gods by AdmirableMonster  

Science Officer’s Log, Old Calendar Reckoning 3263.45. It is not easy to access Andúnië now.  The route has grown even more dangerous since the renaming of the first moon of Armenelos.  Fortunately, Chief Security Officer Lantalanén is an excellent shuttle pilot, as I am not.  Rather than chancing that the port authorities would recognize our anonymous craft as belonging to the rapidly-diminishing Fleet, we approached the planet in moonshadow, slipped through the planetary shield grid during a routine maintenance sweep, and set down a few miles outside the city in which our target was situated.  We did not bring our Fleet uniforms, but approached the Sleeping Garden in civilian clothing.  Neither Lieutenant Lantalanén nor I was much pleased with the elaborate dresses we were provided, albeit for different reasons, but needs must.

As I understand it, the Garden used to be a tourist attraction and a time-keeping device as well as a place of worship.  Now, of course, it is abandoned, closed off behind an imperial force field.  I could have disrupted it with a Fourier analysis-informed inversion pulse, but it would have taken more time than simply testing the handful of datacodes the Verië received during Tar-Míriel’s latest transmission.  We flickered the field and slipped inside.

It was in low-power mode.  The lights were dim and the halls were empty.  Our tricorders detected no life signs other than the arthropods and rodents infesting the walls.  It had been hastily evacuated, perhaps: greying, dusty posters on the walls proclaimed the dates and times of theatrical shows.  

I had not known what to expect—scans from low orbit revealed the external structure of the building but we could not engage high-frequency mode without risking detection, so we could not penetrate deeply into the shield.  However, once we had entered, we found a number of old stands helpfully overflowing with maps.  Several of them had been knocked over, spilling their contents onto the floor in a drift of paper.

Of the two of us, I have more facility with written Quenya in the middle-archaic style, so Lieutenant Lantalanén held the white beam of her torch steady over my shoulder while I decoded.  It was less difficult than I had expected, which in retrospect makes sense, since it would have been intended to direct a large number of multicultural tourists, not all of whom would have been totally at-ease with the local language.  The garden turned out to be in the center of the complex, while around the outside there were, variously, two theaters, a cafeteria, and a small off-shoot hydroponics garden that seemed to be described as being also populated by a number of exotic species.  

We started with the hydroponics to make sure that there were no creatures in need of rescue, but it was empty save for the seregon, which had escaped from its containment, strangled all the rest of the plants, and rooted in every stray swathe of dust and dirt.

“What’s that?” Lieutenant Lantalanén asked me.  “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“They call it seregon, which means ‘stone’s blood,’” I replied.  “It originates from the Amon Rudh asteroid.  It was thought that it somehow subsisted on stone for a long time until it was discovered that it is in fact a mycoheterotroph.  I suspect some nutrient conduits in the walls burst, fungi moved in, and then the seregon seeded on top of them or with them.”

At Lieutenant Lantalanén’s blank look, I explained farther.  “It has no chlorophyll.  It does not subsist on sunlight, but on byproducts produced by fungi, which, in turn, often gather their nutrients from decaying organic matter.”

“Ah.”  She nodded.  “That’s why the color—”

“White stems and crimson flowers,” I agreed.  “Very striking.  People say it looks like blood, though I think it’s too red. I’ll take a sample, but we should be cautious—it’s quite invasive.”

[ Sample logged at 20:35 local time, which time synchronization to the Vérië indicates to be 20:32, OCR 3263.45, both based on the rotation of Andúnië about Meneltarma ]

After the sample was secured, we made our way to what was indicated as the entrance into the main garden.  The metal housing of the glass sliding door was rusted shut, and the glass had shattered but not been entirely removed, so we ducked beneath pointed shards to enter, our boots crunching on the broken remainder as we did so.

Inside it was dark and close.  We switched on our torches again, sweeping the white beams of light across rows upon rows of sleek dark leaves, tightly furled.  At the touch of the light, we watched as they began slowly to unfurl, but this behavior only occurred in the wake of the torches.  If we returned the torch beams to a place they had previously passed, we found that the plants had returned to their resting state, but they immediately began to unfurl again, just as they had before, the same motion repeated in response to the same stimulus.

“This is eerie,” Lieutenant Lantalanén commented.

“It’s nothing more than a response to a stimulus,” I pointed out.  “Perhaps you need more training on what is and is not important for security personnel to pay attention to?”

She stared at me, then raised a very dangerous eyebrow.  I dropped my gaze quickly.

“Perhaps you need more training in interpersonal communication,” she replied coolly.  As this was rather probable, I did not respond.  I took out my tricorder again and began to take a series of readings.  I requested Lieutenant Lantalanén’s assistance in clicking the torch on and off in a series of patterns of increasing frequency and then in a pattern of spatial frequencies.  

[ Data packet attached at 21:07 local time, which time synchronization to the Vérië indicates to be 21:04, OCR 3263.45, both based on the rotation of Andúnië about Meneltarma. Packet contains time series data of 10,000 time-points and 15,000 spatial grid locations. Data logged: temperature, humidity, velocity, light intensity in the radio, microwave, infra-red, red, visual, blue, ultraviolet, X-ray bands.  Automatic data analysis notes a sharp spike in light levels and motion after 7562 timesteps.  Anomaly detection suggests data review for possible instrument malfunction. ]

The instruments did not malfunction.  After we had been performing field tests and scanning for about seven minutes, the light levels in the room suddenly rose sharply.  The garden seemed to be filled with daylight, white and welcoming, the kind of light I remembered from my days living on a planet, not a starship.  The ceiling, which had been dark, lit up with the clear blue of diffuse sky radiation beneath an atmosphere.  Near the center, where the sun might be found at noon for a small latitude, a pinpoint hole lit up like a round, white flame.  The material of the ceiling had been etched around it into an almond-shaped oval with an inscribed circle suggestive of a human eye.  In such a visual analogy, the too-bright light would have been the pupil.

“What the hell?” said Lieutenant Lantalanén, though, to her credit, she restrained herself from pulling out her firearm, which would have been singularly useless against the environmental phenomenon.

“The Sleeping Garden,” I said, looking around at all the rapidly-uncurling plants.  “It’s waking up.”  They had not unfolded completely under the light of the torch, I realized, but they did now.  Each blossom was made up of four to six petals, most of them pink- or red-colored, with a splotch of dark brown or black in the center, surrounding the stamens.  The petals overlapped one another, drooping at first as they rapidly unfolded themselves, but filling out.  

Later genetic analysis of sample data taken at the site confirmed what I suspected at the time: that the flowers were an undocumented species of the genus fumellar, displaying a kind of nastic movement not previously documented in any related species.  

(“What does that mean?” Lieutenant Lantalanén wanted to know, reading over my shoulder.)

(“Nastic movements are motions of plants that are not tied to plant growth but to sudden changes in pressure nodules in key locations,” I explained.  “This would be considered photonasty, as a response to increased light, but they also appear to display nyctinasty—folding back up in the darkness.) The whole garden was utterly transformed.  Despite the broken glass on the floor, the dust, the bodies of small insects here and there, it felt, suddenly, like a meadow, open beneath the summer sky.  Since the sundering of the fleet, my primary experience with such things has been our holographic technology, and it never gets the smells quite right.  The hydroponics bay smells of life, but it’s a dusty old cargo-hold.  The Sleeping Garden—well, that was quite magical.

It only lasted about seven minutes, long enough for the movement of the celestial body overhead to render its alignment with the evident telescopic apparatus imperfect.  Lieutenant Lantalanén turned away from me.  She was, perhaps, trying to conceal certain emotions.  As the sunlight faded, we stood together in the darkness, our breathing loud in that empty space, thinking of the glory that had just gone out of it.  We are very different people, but it did not matter.  I find it difficult to feel human connections, but I felt one then, and I am confident in saying that she did as well, because she reached out and squeezed my hand, just once.

We stayed for a time, collecting samples.  I examined the positioning of the tiny peephole in the ceiling, but it was not until we returned to the ship that I was able to confirm that the star that had triggered the garden’s response was definitively Gimilnitîr as she traced her path upward across the eastern sky.  I am not a religious man myself, and I do not believe in the gods, but I must accept that the ones who created the garden, the waking of the flowers dedicated to that old lost god the Lord in Black—as my mother would have called him—in response to the lady’s rising certainly knew how to create an awe-inspiring experience.

[ Initial run of data analysis completed. Logging off. ]

Leave a Comment