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Jabe’s pups whispered that a Chosen One would be here, more like hissed that message.
“The choosing is mutual,” Lani reminded them, again. She pulled the pool noodle between the metal frame of the canopy and the sheet. “Explain it to the child gently, and simply. Make sure they know all the options that we can offer them, and that they can think up new ones themselves. Support them even if they decide to stay with their human family. Especially if they decide to stay with their human family.” The right conditions to grow a contented, happy child were so much more of a rarity than such ought to be—not much rarer among human Earthlings than the people of Gallifrey, Lani had to admit, but there were atrocities of war less viscerally painful to hear about than what some of the Chosen Ones had suffered. At the hands of their nominal caretakers. At peacetime. On this planet.
Thinking of our potential students as Chosen Ones. Now I’m doing it. Lani stepped down from the chair and glanced around the repurposed parking lot. A few other participants of the bazaar had arrived, unfolded their tables, and set out their wares. Shrinky Dink bookmarks. Scrimshaw clam and oyster shells. Terracotta wind chimes shaped, and threaded together as like falling leaves. Refrigerator magnets of ambigrams, or holograms, or Celtic knots, or famous old oil paintings. Block-weave cross stitching in the shapes of Tetris blocks, accompanied by the lettering of wry quotes: ‘If you fit in, you disappear’, that sort of thing. Pendants, like one of a tiny polymer clay hand clutching a kidney bean made of glass, or another pendant of an orange flame with the heart of a human skull, or still another crenellated tower framed by thorny vines and roses; a red apple, a howling wolf’s silhouette, two swans black and white and whorled together like a yinyang.
Lani’s table displayed small plants: bonsai in their trays, cacti and succulents in their pots; the whiskery air plants on wedges of coconut husk, or in glass sphere terrariums hung from the canopy frame, or directly on the table with their roots exposed and nothing to hold them steady. That’s why they were called air plants: they would wither if their roots were immersed in earth, and rot if they were watered too regularly.
A few of the pups hummed, “No rain would fall and trouble you, if only you would wish…”
There was something sly about the suggestion. Jabe had told her that complexity comes with age to the Cheem. Pups as young as that were of such simple consciousness that each one would be a single and pure idea, every action merely consequential response. Initiative is impossible. If they have erred—as at least one casualty in the case of Jasmine Pierce had shown—it was the management of them that was bad, or an accident of miseducation, or they had been propagated from a Tree of bad character. They themselves could not be bad, even if they seemed the obvious active agents in a situation that elder Cheem considered tragic. Cheem pups were a force of nature themselves, like doldrums in the ocean or avalanches in the mountains. Just because they could communicate, did not mean that they could think or will anything in the slightest. They were too simple, too pure for that.
So Jabe had told her, and Jabe as the ambassador of Cheem must know the Cheem best. It stood to reason that everything the ambassador professed was perfectly accurate and true. Lani didn’t believe it one bit. Even if each single pup were a pure single idea—they gravitated towards each other, and worked together. Connexions made a whole more than the sum of the parts. A wish was a sophisticated idea, jargon that only Cheem pups and human children seemed to understand by intuition. Lani was too old for wishes, and it was a peril to ask them of the fae. “Whether the weather be damp, or whether the weather be hot…We’ll weather the weather, whatever the weather, whether we like it or not.”
The hissing dwindled into perplexed silence. Reciting rhyming verses often had that effect on them.
“You know what you know,” Lani said to them, leaning over the table and into the pineapple spikes of the ionanthas. “I know what I know. And I know lifehacks involving pool noodles.” She went to dust off the chair, then pulled it up to her booth table and took a seat. She looked up to find that the lemonade vendor in the booth across from hers—if the torso-sized manual industrial juicer on that table was any indication—staring at her with a frown.
Lani smiled and waved, called, “It helps the plants grow, to talk to them! Carbon dioxide!”
The lemonade vendor, a wiry white man and almost hoary-headed, pursed his lips and jabbed his finger in the direction of his throat, then at her. He flattened his fingers and moved them across the front of his neck, swiftly, twice.
“Good for sore throats! What you make! Yeah!” Lani agreed, loudly. She mimed squeezing a lemon—two halves of one in each hand, but the open parts facing outwards because she had never made lemonade herself before—and then drinking a glass of it, from a straw. Also mimed.
The lemonade vendor stared on in frustration and disgust. Lani clasped her hands atop the table and smiled, vacantly. The earth turned. Wisps of clouds drifted across the bright blue sky. Birds sang in the playground trees next to the parking lot. The rainstick vendor a couple of booths to Lani’s left turned one of the large ones over, to an exclamation of delight from the first customer of the day. Gravel rushed over gravel and nails in the bamboo tunnel, not at all like fine sand slipping silkily through the cinch of an hourglass. The deep and slow song of a storm reverberated in the open air, making the sunlight feel chill. Lani clasped her hands more tightly, to try to stop them from trembling. Under the big tarp, an acoustic band of five teenagers switched on their mics. ‘Test, one two three’ boomed in the air.
Still frowning, the lemonade vendor quickly packed up his juicer and his several crates of lemons onto his trolley, and left the bazaar.
The pups began to hiss again. “He hates you. He had half a mind to make our mission difficult.”
When he was out of sight, Lani let her smile fade. “He doesn’t know what we’re here for. He doesn’t know anything about us.” She added, “So whatever he’d wanted to do…would have made staying here to meet the child, to let them know about where they came from, difficult. Th-That’s different than having a mind to do exactly that thing.”
“What is the difference?”
“It doesn’t matter what was in his mind. It’s what he does. And he didn’t do what he half wanted to. He went away. That’s what he did. We’re all right now.” She stroked the pine needles of a nearby bonsai, feeling the supple filaments tickle the palm of her hand. “We’re all right. We’re on track. We’re all right. It’s gonna be all all all right…”
“Talking to the plants?”
Lani had a customer, now: A heavyset, beautiful swarthy woman with a bald head, all swathed in blue tie-dye patterns.
“It helps them grow,” Lani chirped, her voice breaking. “The carbon dioxide.”
“Even the trees, you want to keep them tiny dontcha?” The woman pointed. “Those are plum blossoms on that one.”
“That’s right!”
“Do they turn into tiny plums, like cherry-sized ones?”
A teardrop escaped one of Lani’s eyes, then another. She was breathing too hard to answer.
The customer noticed and backed away, nervous. “If you need a moment, I can come back later—” And she tottered away.
The strumming of guitar chords filled the air, between the crackling screech of feedback. The singer heard it and continued. The screech-crackle didn’t get better.
Lani scooped a Tillandsia fuchsii gracilis (previously Tillandsia fuchsii argentea, colloquially 'pincushion air plant') in both her hands, and sighed as she held it up. She’d managed to remind its physical coding that anthocyanins were a thing, and it blushed twilight blue-purple gradating to green. The very tips of the needles were turning an early morning sky blue. “How do you even know what hatred is?”
The filaments waved as the pups whispered through it. “In the hearts of our Chosen Ones, from the heart of who has taken them over. ‘If it weren’t for you, I would live the life that I want. You should be exactly the way I want you to be, but you defy my desires. If it weren’t for you, I would not be obliged or bonded to somebody I do not want in my life. You have need when I am busy and tired. All this must be punished. I cannot be punished for punishing you, so I will take the opportunity to punish for the sake of punishing. I can do anything to you that I want, because you are small and soft, and I love that about you. I love you too much to try to understand what you say.’ Is that not hatred? That one who bears the stolen gold, did not seed you and yet desires that you do not live—that you do not exist, even as an idea.”
“You took that personally?”
“He is a thread in the warp and weft of a shared dream.”
Lani smiled again, but meant it this time. “You’re trying to say it in a way that I can understand, and I appreciate that. What are these dreams you talk about?”
A glowing light ran down her wrists from the plant, and before her eyes her skin had turned into bark.
The voices of the pups continued, “Too many of the Chosen Ones, when we first meet them, have hate for themselves. It pulses with their hearts and courses through their veins. It came from a world they do not belong. It went from heart to heart, not the talk that the humans say it is, but from waking dream to waking dream in the spaces between spaces. We deepen our roots and sip it from them, before we take them away and away and away…”
The parking lot had disappeared, the noise of it muffled by the scene that blossomed before Lani’s eyes. She felt convinced that this was the Gardens of Lazuline, but had never seen it this magnificent before: towering trees flaring into splendid undergrowth and canopy, embellished by ferns, vines, and bursts of vivid colors from all the flowers and fruits. It was lushly unkempt, wild and deep, like a bubbling green cauldron of life. Her bones were stones, her flesh was loam, and every nerve and capillary pulsed with belonging. She was pleased with the sky for its lights and its darknesses, and pleased with the mists and the rains, and pleased to be rooted for there was nowhere else she needed to be—and never anything else she needed to do, but to be. “You’re synchronizing our neurosensory biochemical impulse patterns,” Lani said, “Giving me all this in something like a waking daydream—but like a night dream, because I’m not going to easily snap out of it when I need to.”
The rainforest around Lani remained, but the associated fulfillment adjusted itself from ‘overwhelming’ to ‘pending whelm’. The pups responded, “We could not help it, at first. This is how we communicate with each other.”
“I don’t mind. This is interesting.” Lani turned her mind’s eye around. “Ancestral memories, a hint of fantastical extrapolation. Of course. The neurosensory biochemical impulse patterns were partly inherited from your parent plants, and partly coded epigenetics from every generation through to the most recent moment of this one. Those who aren’t Cheem don’t often get to know what you can do without synchronizing like this, and then you take in epigenetics from whoever you have successfully and compatibly synchronized with. Even other Cheem don’t know what Cheem in their own daydream forest are up to…” Or else they wouldn’t have told me that their pups were too simple, even working together. Instead she finished, “…because you match your memory to a feeling of one of mine, the Earth forest ancestors, the Trees of Cheem, the Gardens of Lazuline. You’re trying to tell me a word that they all have in common, or one that you mean and that I would understand.”
“There is healing, here, that lasts into protection. You shall not fear. The contagion of hatred will be gone from you.”
“You sip it out with your roots, you said. Do you know what to do with it after?”
The pups didn’t answer.
We must not look at goblin men, we must not buy their fruits, Lani thinks, and stops the thought there. Jabe might have been right about one thing: It’s not the pups’ fault if it’s the pups’ nature. “You are so like the fair folk, aren’t you? Whisking people away to dream realms, deciding when someone deserves to vomit poisonous spiders or precious jewels. You honor every word to the letter of an agreement, because you understand that much. You know what strings to pull in every connection you have to your whole world, to make a wish come true—make it rain, build a wall made out of wind, strangle people with petals. There’s a twist to every wish you grant, isn’t there. All that horrible, violent hatred—flowed from the human world, polluted your forest, threatened to do the same with the seeds that Gallifreyans scattered into your territory…and you keep our children safe from it by swallowing that hatred yourself, like venom from a platypus spur.”
“And then it is gone.”
“You don’t know what to do with it, to make sure that it’s gone or at least that it’s changed—that you’ve changed it. Whatever ‘it’ is, comes out every other way. It’s a mistake a lot of people make, but I know better—not so much that I can accomplish everything you offered me, all by myself, at nobody else’s expense…but I’ve got try for that, because it’s mine. So, if you please, let me go.”
She felt her arms turn from bark into skin again. The roots, like molten gold tears, thinned and faded. Lani gently set the ball of soft, leafy needles back on the booth table. With a faery, hand in hand—for the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
*
The bazaar became more crowded, and noisy. That first customer did come back, and bought the bonsai plum tree without caring by then whether or not it would fruit, because it was enough that it would cute. Another customer became very interested in an attempted bonsai kopyor coconut palm, which was taller than Lani even without being set in a giant planter and would probably grow to be as tall as an uncultivated coconut palm. That customer bought it anyway, and Lani let them. She sold out all the aloe vera.
An unforeseen total eclipse of the sun may have been linked to the appearance of a new plant on Lani’s booth table, potted and all, that seemed to be a hybrid of a pitcher plant and a Venus flytrap. Jabe’s pups did not like the newcomer one bit, so Lani gave it free to the next person who mentioned in earshot that it was their birthday (after giving fair warning to the beneficiary that the plant was certainly carnivorous, and possibly sentient.)
“It’s my birthday, too,” said a much smaller and younger customer, who couldn’t help but try really hard to listen in and follow Lani back to her booth. “Today I’m eight.”
Lani looked around. “Did you come in with anyone?”
“My parents,” said the eight-year-old, “Took me here to celebrate. I didn’t tell them that I wanted any celebration, or to go to the market to celebrate. I lost them as soon as I could. I don’t mean yup-hem-ist-i-lackly, that I lost them. They’re alive, I just wish...”
Lani nodded, and listened, quashing the impulse to tell this child to be careful what they wished for.
The child crossed their arms and said, “Grarrgh, never mind!”
This customer had learned the word ‘euphemistically’ from reading, and never heard it in conversation. They would be very careful to say what they mean, even if their parents obviously never did. “You get a free plant because it’s your birthday. Would you like me to walk you to the event organizers’ information booth, so your parents can find you when it’s time to go home?”
She let the child pick which one they wanted. It was one of the air plants, because it had a face like a goblin. The kid wanted to stay at the booth to pet and talk to their nifty new plant, learn everything about everything there, and tell it to the passing customers. Lani wished she’d thought of having a booth assistant that day before having to use the portable public restrooms there (unisex; probably one of the earlier offenses against that one lemonade vendor that primed him to walk out on the event) and have a drink (the whole day was arid and warm, and a cucumber-kiwi shake was just the thing…for Lani, that is. The customer-turned-booth-assistant wanted a chili pepper hot chocolate but made cold by adding ice to it—with a side of cream cheese filled churros—and there just so happened to be a booth that sold that exact thing, so Lani got that too.)
After the vendors had packed up, the crowds thinned out, the live bands had been replaced by a recording of Semisonic’s 'Closing Time', the tired parents found Lani’s booth. These parents mustered up enough energy to profusely apologize for foisting the care of such an ungrateful hellchild on a complete stranger. They let the kid keep the air plant because Lani was right there.
They’d throw it away later, Lani felt convinced of that like a looped thread drawn tight to a knot. Maybe these parents wouldn’t shout or hit, but they’d do small mean things that pointedly and purposely inconvenienced their kid, between pointedly and purposely ignoring their kid, to show that they wouldn’t stand for that behavior. If left to their own devices, in twelve years the parents would bring this incident up with as much raw emotion and injustice to them as today, to convince their adult child of being inherently selfish for not pursuing the career tract that the parents had told everyone that their child would. The goblins—that is, the pups, who didn’t seem to mind being called goblins either—would be raring to strike them down dead with lightning, or suck the warmth from them so that their corpses would remain ice as constant as stone statues in the heat of desert summers, or grow thorny vines from their stomachs before that happened. They wouldn’t: the child would have to wish something like it, and loving an authority with such subtly (or overtly) poisonous 'shortcomings' is a mistake that a lot of people make.
But you never know, Lani thought later as she watered the plants in her garden with a spray-mister. The pincushion air plant that she’d reminded into blushing indigo and blue, had seemed to bore of its gradient phase and had returned to a comfortable green. It hung from a perfectly spherical glass globe of Lani’s apartment, glinting in the sunlight that glanced off the skyscraper across the street.