LITMIR.BIZ

      Asleep in the Forest of the Tall Cats

      By Ken Brady

      People descended in gleaming metal, fire burning bright across the cloud-streaked sky. They touched down and they stayed. They built, they charted, they named names, they changed the composition of the air. They explored with sensors and unmanned aircraft. When they found the planet safe, they bred. The first child, Pietor, was a test.

      It was essentially a desert planet, and so they named it Mohave, but there were stands of trees, and places of lush vegetation, oases in the shifting red sand and baked playas. Most of these places were mapped and developed early on, all except for one.

      The Tall Forest was the one place the people never went, because it was unwelcoming, solid, impenetrable. The forest spoke of things better left alone, and those who tried to explore it never returned. Against human nature, it was not cut down or burned to the ground, but instead left alone.

      In the forest, the others watched. They knew the people’s children would someday do more. The children would explore the ground. They would change more things than just the air. They would remake everything.

      Pietor was the first, so far the only. He was brown-haired, dark-skinned. He showed no signs of deformation but a tendency toward narcolepsy. After ten years it was decided that children were safe, and the floodgates were opened. In two more years there were dozens. There would be many more children someday.

      So for twelve years the others stalked and waited, planned and prepared. Mostly they slept.

      Pietor slept too.

      *

      “Come to the forest of your dreams,” Marina says. She leans over, hands pressed flat on her thighs just above the knees. White-blond hair falls loose across her pale forehead and covers one eye, leaving one bright green iris shining, only inches from the young boy’s face. Her smile glows, teeth parted just slightly to show the pink tip of her tongue.

      “I have some things to show you, Pietor.”

      He watches her hair move in the wind. Behind her the trees bend and blur away, seeming to leap and play, to climb. The ground rumbles softly, soothingly.

      “How do you know my name?” Pietor says. “I don’t really know you.”

      Marina smiles wider, stands, then collapses cross-legged onto the ground in front of Pietor. She tosses her hair behind her, then strokes the soft, tan mossy ground in front of her.

      “You do know me,” she says.

      “Marina,” Pietor says, and he doesn’t know how he knows. It’s the same way he knows that though she may look like a young girl his age, really she is as old as anything he’s ever seen. The same way he knows the ground around him is not ground at all, but fur. Tan fur that vibrates when he strokes it. That the distant trees moving in the wind aren’t trees at all but tall cats on hind legs, stalking birds, rodents, people.

      He knows lots of things.

      He has always dreamed of Marina, of this place. Of a world beyond the colony. But each time he awakens, he remembers only parts of the dream, individual elements of this place he visits.

      “You know everything about this place,” Marina says.

      Pietor wants to believe her. He wants to know that the world around him is knowable. He wants this girl — this Marina, this world — to be his. He wants the real world to be more alive, more interesting, more real that it really is. He wants to be in a place where he feels welcome, where he fits in.

      “I want to,” Pietor says.

      “I know what you want,” she says. And she reaches out her hands, slowly, softly. He thinks maybe this time she will put her hands to his throat and squeeze until the life is gone from him. But she doesn’t. When she touches his eyelids they fall, they close.

      “I’m coming,” he says.

      “Finally,” she says. She kisses him lightly on the forehead. He feels the rush of her touch and wants to reach out to her, but instead he drifts off.

      And he wakes.

      *

      The Allen family buggy left in its wake a trail of broken green saplings, and smashed red volcanic rock turned to dust beneath titanium roller tracks. Nearer to the forest the underbrush flourished. The mingled fumes of burning alcohol and disc coal followed the buggy down into the valley and toward the band of hardwood forest the colony’s sensors could not penetrate.

      Twelve-year-old Pietor Allen brushed his brown hair away from his eyes. He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. They were too big and slipped down again. The lenses were made here, but his mom had brought the frames from Earth to fit him when he was older; the frames had once belonged to Pietor’s grandfather, and his mom told him he would have to grow into them, that they were his grandfather’s. Pietor put up with the big glasses because they were a tie to a planet he had never visited.

      He had often wondered whether he would have felt normal on Earth, or just as much of an outcast. He had always felt a little abnormal. On Mohave he was an experiment, and he knew it. The focus of studies to see if he would be a normal kid, if he would have problems because he was born on an alien planet. And he was always treated less like a person and more like a test subject, even by his parents. But now that there were more children — little, cute children — even that minimal amount of attention had subsided. Now he was just the kid who fell asleep at inopportune times.

      He pushed the glasses up again and watched out the rear window as the red dust drifted and seemed to hang in the air. The gravity of Mohave was only slightly less than that of Earth — hardly enough to notice when walking — but it affected the little things, and the dust settled as if in slow motion upon the rough pathway the buggy made through the underbrush.

      His parents were in the front of the buggy. Xavier checked their course on a map while Leticia operated the controls. They whispered back and forth about what they might find, what the forest would look like.

      Night descended in sheets, skeins of dark greys and browns and finally black until the only thing Pietor could see were the blinking lights of the company colony, miles off, just shy of the horizon.

      “How long, Dad?” Pietor asked.

      Xavier, never looking up from the map, said, “Soon, Pietor. We’ll let you know.”

      “I think we’re close,” Pietor said.

      Xavier looked up then, and turned. Leticia looked too.

      “How would you know?” Xavier said.

      Pietor looked at his mother and father, not sure if he should say. They had never believed him before, so he had no reason to think they would now.

      “It’s just like in my dreams,” he said. “This place feels close.”

      Xavier shook his head and focused his attention back on the map.

      “Pietor,” Leticia said, “you know that those are just dreams. This is the real world, and dreams are nothing but your imagination acting up. You’ll need to learn to tell fantasy from reality if you want to survive in the real world.”

      Pietor looked away, out the back window.

      “My dreams are better than this,” he said, mostly to himself.

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