Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

soft warning chime.
    The ship shot away from Earth. The planet dwindled, becoming a
sparking blue bauble over which a black-winged insect crawled.
     
    Callisto joined the community of foragers.
    Dwelling where the forest met the beach, the people ate the grass,
and sometimes leaves from the lower branches, even loose flaps of
bark. The people were wary, solitary. She didn’t learn their names -
if they had any - nor gained a clear impression of their faces, their
sexes. She wasn’t even sure how many of them there were here. Not
many, she thought.
    Callisto found herself eating incessantly. With every mouthful she
took she felt herself grow, subtly, in some invisible direction - the
opposite to the diminution she had suffered when she lost her hand to
the burning power of the sea. There was nothing to drink - no fluid
save the oily black ink of the ocean, and she wasn’t tempted to try
that. But it didn’t seem to matter.
    Callisto was not without curiosity. She explored, fitfully.
    The beach curved away, in either direction. Perhaps this was an
island, poking out of the looming black ocean. There was no bedrock,
not as far as she could dig. Only the drifting, uniform dust.
    Tiring of Asgard’s cold company, she plucked up her courage and
walked away from the beach, towards the forest.
    There were structures in the dust: crude tubes and trails, like
the markings of worms or crabs. The grass emerged, somehow,
coalescing from looser dust formations. The grass grew sparsely on
the open beach, but at the fringe of the forest it gathered in dense
clumps.
    Deeper inside the forest’s gathering darkness the grass grew
longer yet, plaiting itself into ropy vine-like plants. And deeper
still she saw things like trees looming tall, plaited in turn out of
the vines. Thus the trees weren’t really ’trees’ but tangles of ropy
vines. And everything was connected to everything else.
    She pushed deeper into the forest. Away from the lapping of the
sea and the wordless rustle of the foraging people at the forest
fringe, it grew dark, quiet. Grass ropes wrapped around her legs,
tugging, yielding with reluctance as she passed. This was a drab,
still, lifeless place, she thought. In a forest like this there ought
to be texture: movement, noise, scent. So, anyhow, her flawed
memories dimly protested.
    She came to a particularly immense tree. It was a tangle of grassy
ropes, melding above her head into a more substantial whole that rose
above the surrounding vegetative mass and into the light of the sky.
But a low mist lay heavily, obscuring her view of the tree’s upper
branches.
    She felt curiosity spark. What could she see if she climbed above
the mist?
    She placed her hand on the knotted-up lower trunk, then one foot,
and then the other. The stuff of the tree was hard and cold.
    At first the climbing was easy, the components of the ’trunk’
loosely separated. She found a way to lodge her bad arm in gaps in
the trunk so she could release her left hand briefly, and grab for a
new handhold before she fell back. But as she climbed higher the ropy
sub-trunks grew ever more tangled.
    High above her the trunk soared upwards, daunting, disappearing
into the mist. When she looked down, she saw how the ’roots’ of this
great structure dispersed over the forest floor, branching into
narrower trees and vine-thin creepers and at last clumps of grass,
melting into the underlying dust. She felt unexpectedly exhilarated
by this small adventure -
    There was a snarl, of greed and anger. It came from just above her
head. She quailed, slipped. She finished up dangling by her one
hand.
    She looked up.
    It was human. Or, it might once have been human. It must have been
four, five times her size. It was naked, and it clung to the tree
above her, upside down, so that a broad face leered, predator’s eyes
fixed on her. Its limbs were cylinders of muscle, its chest and
bulging belly massive, weighty. And it was male: an erection poked
crudely between its legs. She hadn’t been able to see it for the
mist, until she had almost climbed into it.
    It thrust its mouth at her, hissing. She could smell blood on its
breath.
    She screamed and lost her grip.
    She fell, sliding down the trunk. She scrabbled for purchase with
her feet and her one good hand. She slammed repeatedly against the
trunk, and when she hit the ground the wind was knocked out of
her.
    Above her, the beast receded, still staring into her eyes.
    Ignoring the aches of battered