Horizon Storms - Kevin J. Anderson [237]
“Beneto…are you in there?” Celli said, her eyes sparkling, but she was afraid to come closer. She had heard old stories about human simulacra made out of clay. What was the word? A golem! The worldforest had shaped and grown some sort of golem that looked exactly like her lost green priest brother.
The wooden figure took another tottering step forward, and stopped, bathed in a shaft of sunlight that shone through the interlocked branches overhead.
Celli hurried forward, forgetting her caution. She used her hands to brush away the flaking bark that still clung to the wooden man’s chest like an old skin from a larva that had not completed its first molting. When she at last stared at the polished wood grain of the artificial man, she saw that the facial shape was indeed identical to Beneto’s, though his body was smooth and streamlined, asexual and without blemishes.
“Oh, Beneto! Can you speak? Talk to me!”
The tree golem swiveled its head and looked at her with wood-grain eyes. It seemed to be struggling.
“Don’t you remember me? I’m Celli, your little sister.”
Finally, the lips cracked open, as if the worldforest had just finished forming the Beneto golem’s mouth. Inside, a perfect set of wood-chip teeth showed themselves as his hard lips formed a smile. It coughed, expanded its chest, then inhaled to fill the lunglike hollow spaces in its body core. A whistling sound came out, then a harsher noise. Finally, the sounds became words.
“Celli…of course.”
His speech had the familiar timbre of her brother’s voice, but it also had a hollow, echoing quality that reminded her of the woodwind flutes her grandparents made for small children.
“Celli. I remembered you every day…as I grew. I watched each time you came to visit.”
“Is that…really you, Beneto? Or does it just look like you? All the green priests said that you died when the hydrogues attacked. Everyone on Corvus Landing was wiped out.”
The wooden man looked at her, and his expression became troubled. “The worldforest fashioned me. At the moment of my death, I was connected to the trees. I poured my every thought, my every memory, through telink into the worldforest. It was as if I stored my…soul there within the great mind of the trees. And now the forest has brought me back. I am a living synthesis, halfway between tree and man. I am…needed for the war.”
Celli threw her arms around him, feeling the solidity of wood, but also the warmth and glow of living human flesh. “Whatever you are, I’m glad you’re here. It’s better than having no brother at all. Do you…do you know that Reynald was also killed?”
“The worldforest cannot forget a moment of the attack on Theroc,” the Beneto golem said. “We felt every single death, whether of tree or of man or woman. Even those who weren’t green priests…still, we saw them, we witnessed their pain, mourned them. We remember.”
Celli took his wooden hand and pulled him to the edge of the thicket. “I have to show you to our parents. Sarein has come back too, from Earth. Everyone will be so glad to see you.”
Beneto grew steadier on his feet as he took one step after another. Now the fallen branches in the collapsed barricade sprang out of their way, as if the wooden golem himself exerted a kind of force to clear a path. Celli bounded ahead, skipping and excited, urging him to hurry.
When they finally emerged from the dense thicket into the open clearings of the worldforest, Beneto came to a halt as if his feet had taken root again. He swayed in place, drinking in the details of the devastation with eyes that were close to human. The wood-grain whorls of his irises shifted as his facsimile pupils widened, even though as part of the worldforest he intimately knew exactly what had happened. His expression sagged into a deep sadness. “I have returned not a moment too soon.”
Celli stopped beside him and held his hand. He flexed his wooden fingers, as if trying to feel her touch, and she tugged on his wooden arm again to urge him along. “Come on, Beneto. We have to tell everybody. It’s about time the Therons