---

Forever the Forest

by Simone Heller

It is known that the Rootless are only ever leaving. Always moving on, never embracing soil long enough for connection. A life tumbled and tossed, and if it touches ours, it is only by chance, and ill chance more often than not.

But you came, in a tumble and a glorious blaze, by intention and by ill chance.

The night of your arrival was almost my undoing. You rode an incandescent gust tearing into our rows, escorted by a rain of hot metal. The ground rippled once with your impact, outward and onward, quicker than the fungal network could warn us. When the air stilled and the Conversation erupted in bursts of pain! and fire!, no-one knew what had crashed down on us. We sucked moisture from the deep, made the lesser plants close their ranks and smother the flames, and we calmed the Conversation with memories of renewal and regrowth.

You had plummeted from the sky, the fungal network relayed, as the filament reached out again to take hold of the large swath of churned and scorched soil, of everything that lay fallen and ready to decompose. Our rootscape expanded anew, tasting the damage and the altered lay of the land. But one blank spot persisted.

One fragment had not shattered, tumbling over and over until it had come to rest next to me, its edge nicking a branch. Neither root nor spore found purchase there. And no matter how far and wide the Conversation was carried, this sealed structure remained unknown. It was deemed to be not of our soil. And as it lay inert, it was deemed to be not of our interest, either. We would claim it, sooner or later, either encapsulating and burying it as a curiosity in our rootscape, or it would yield after all, as everything yielded, to rain and root and frost and fungus.

It cracked open on its own soon enough, right there within my reach. My sap-quenching stillness spread through the Conversation until the whole forest seemed to pause.

Something fell out, toppling to the ground as if caught in a storm with no grove-kin. It just lay there, thumping fear and exhaustion against the soil in the way of the Rootless.

My excitement for the unknown–a Rootless from the sky!, with neither nest nor burrow known to tree or spore–surged as the filament flashed agitation at its alienness: not of our soil.

I felt delight. The quickening of survival rushed through my sapwood, and, deeper even, curiosity sprouted. I reached. With leaves rustling welcome, with a fragrance of earthy solidity, I reached.

And you came.

You lifted yourself up, stumbling forward until you crashed into me. I was able to sense your strangeness, a limb first to catch your fall, then your weight against me, sliding down along my base, where it stayed, almost motionless except for small, arrhythmic quivers.

You were big for a Rootless, but still fragile, and possibly damaged from your violent arrival. I wanted to help and fed the Conversation with my findings: your size, your mass, the desperate grasp of your initial touch.

My excitement was met with polite disinterest. To my grove-kin and my sap-kin, the Rootless were nothing but a nuisance; pests at worst, inconsequential bearers of gifts to seal alliances, found dynasties and end wars at best, and always good for erratic behavior.

But I knew better. There was a pattern in their wayward bustling, and a purpose to their actions, thoughtless as they might seem. We believed they didn’t reach toward the sun, but you had fallen from the sky, and how much closer could one get? I wanted to know about the reaching and the falling, about the origin of your vagrant ways. So, as the strange quivers against my trunk became more infrequent, I decided to keep you.

---

You were restless, a flurry of action lacking the patience to feel how the sun fueled regrowth in the field of debris. Saplings were selected to settle on the fire-primed earth, while you darted in and out of the structure that had encapsulated you, scattering and silencing the smaller Rootless with a resounding boom each time you sealed your enclosure anew.

Your distress entered our water and our soil, and the surrounding kin promised each other: Soon it will wander off to distant groves. They gracefully ignored my attempts to woo you to stay.

Next to your enclosure, under the outmost reaches of my canopy, you started to dig in the soil. You were relentless, like a root trying to render an unwanted rock to gravel, with a piece of debris, a dead branch, with your bare limbs until the filament tasted blood.

I would have helped, if I had understood.

You went inside and hauled out a body, similar to yours in all but minor differences in weight and build. And another, and another, placing them in the hole one by one. You stayed at their side, more rooted than your kind is usually known for. When you moved again, first you sprinkled upturned soil on the bodies, a well-considered offering to the filament. Next came the tiniest droplets of salty water, and last you showered them with a hum you created on a thing you held, its vibrations softly tinkling like warm raindrops on my leaves.

Slowly, as we tasted your offering, I observed more. The filament did not discriminate, and my grove-kin wanted to know if you carried new kinds of parasites we would have to synthesize toxins against.

We learned about the metabolism of the bodies in the ground, their hormones, the dozens of fractures in their bones which let us observe their density and the processes in their marrow. Faintly, ever so faintly, I found traces of unknown soil, and they sent my thoughts spiraling out toward my spirit-kin in the Conversation, those few and far-away trees sharing my scholarly interests.

But I knew something else, too. You had to be lonely. It was your kin who had joined our soil, and while the wound in the forest caused by your fall was mending, the wound in you was gaping open. All I could offer was to enrich my fruit with the substances you needed, to provide shelter and shade–things anyone with a shoot of kindness would do for a lost Rootless. But never the murmur of the Conversation and the promise of regrowth, never the echoes of trees who had struck root here since the plates of the earth first ground against each other, forever the forest.

You took my fruit, and you lived through your wound, collecting nourishment, water, dead wood for your own ritual of fire, so different and minuscule compared to our roaring spectacles of burning and resettling. You wore paths through the underbrush until your presence felt like a map imprinted on the land even when you were hidden in your enclosure.

When dusk wove through the canopy, you often rested at my side and brought the thing that vibrates under your hands. It felt like rain tinkling on my leaves, with a deeper rhythm more akin to your thumping blood than our steady flow of sap. Its harmonics resonated deep in my heartwood, even if they were not meant for me.

Or maybe they were? I was eager to find out what they implied either way. There was so much I wanted to ask, about your enclosure, your journey, the piece of fabric you fixed on one of my limbs first thing every morning, and so much I wanted to be asked! Had you noticed the ferns I cultivated in the crooks of my branches, some from spores usually found beyond the Great Irrigation Channel? I had collected forty-nine sensations of extra-fuzzy Rootless creeping along my leaves, never shared with my kin, but maybe you would appreciate them.

At night, when you were inside and the Conversation was a dreamlike murmur, I tried to imagine where you came from. Was it a place shaped by forest, too, and did its eternal whisper mingle with your tinkling, there? Or did you hail from stranger lands? I stayed alert, contemplating the cool blackness of the skies we all reach into, the faint movements of light up there, as if a sun-dappled stream ran through the vastness.

Far-away suns, my spirit-kin said, when their replies travelled back to me, not worth wilting away for during the nights. One sun was enough to reach for.

These were the maps I lived by, the distant suns wandering the skies, and you forging a path through the forest. Both patterns were strange to me, uprooted, unhinged. But the other scholars claimed the suns were reliable in their revolutions, always coming back. And so were you.

You took such great care to adorn me with your piece of fabric every day, and you sought my support, drawn by your own kind of gravitropism. You would lean on me, the frenetic rhythm of your pulse relaxing when I passed my solidity on to you. Any injuries caused by your arrival were healing nicely, leaving only a stiffened ridge of tissue, thick like sanitizing woundwood, rendering your gait slightly uneven. Our world had welcomed you with a fall, but I tried to catch you, best I could.

You began to tinker on your enclosure in amiable tranquility, and I enjoyed the companionship growing between us. Such delicate structures you handled, even my grove-kin considered you something like our sculptors of rock and ravine. They would marvel even more when you revealed what you were building.

It had to be something big. You spent more and more time inside, and dull echoes vibrated along the hull. You gathered the devices you had attached to me and some others to sound us out to the core with electrical impulses, and I imagined you, like me, couldn’t wait to grow a deeper connection. What if you built something to help us understand each other better? I was ready to do my part and make it work.

Then one day the piece of wreckage finally yielded. It would have been long before you noticed, just a hairline crack in its base, enough for the filament to squeeze in and thrive in the recesses you never touched, taste what was hidden inside. It was a steady trickle of discoveries as the filament swept over planes of materials so smooth it could not enter, intricate lattice and fiber structures, dancing electric impulses.

Impatience is for the Rootless, my grove-kin admonished when I kept nudging. We will be here to inspect this structure long after it has moved on.

I learned you spent most of your time in front of a flickering wall of light to let vibrations and shifting luminance wash over you in an endless repetitive pattern that held no clue to anything I wanted to know. It was irrelevant. It was not what you had prepared to bring us closer together.

Your great work stood in the center of the chamber. An upright, stilted capsule that would have fitted you just so. First, I thought it was some kind of new shelter you built. A pod, a nest, a home. It wasn’t the marvelous structure I had envisioned, but we would find other ways to connect, and I felt a surge of joy anyway. To me it looked like settling.

I should have known better because you never once slept in it, and even a muddleshoot such as I shouldn’t have forgotten what pods were for.

But it took until the filament explored the whole shape of your enclosure to see what it was. What you were trying to do.

Like a flower waiting to bloom, the canopy of the chamber was hinged to fold back and open up to the sky, and the capsule inside ready to pop out. To carry away its precious cargo to a far-away sun.

All this time, you had been preparing to leave.

---

It was always going to leave, but we are here, my grove-kin murmured, while my sap-kin sent soothing sugars to my roots when I went silent in the Conversation instead of enthusiastically accounting for your every move. We are rooted, and you are passers-by, and it was as if we were living on two different worlds, even if you hadn’t yet left.

I had thought we wanted to lean on each other and learn from each other. Someone who crossed the sun-dappled river of the sky, who braved it despite the chance of falling into the darkness, someone who left their own soil behind, had to be a scholar like me. And here you were, on a new world, a world that had reached out to you with a supportive branch, with a rootscape steeped in aeons of growing. I had thought you were as curious as I was, and I had been wrong.

Very rarely, you took the time to bring your humming thing to me, and I noticed some of its harmonics were missing, its vibrations diminished. You let its tinkling patter across the clearing anyway. But I knew it had never been for me, and it hurt.

It hurt so much that I only noticed you hurt, too, when you didn’t come out anymore and the forest began to erase your paths from my maps. You still hung your piece of fabric on my branch every morning, but it felt limp and crumpled, not like something to display as proudly as I had.

Others might have assumed you were eagerly preparing for the moment the petals of your canopy would open. But I knew your light touch when you discovered a delicious new fruit, the spring in your step when you climbed sturdy branches to face the wind rustling over the rise and fall of the forest for the first time. Now you stomped across the clearing. Kicked your enclosure, repeatedly, and there was no eager impatience in your movements, just desperation.
And no-one to soothe you in a way you could understand, when sweet sugars did not suffice, when you needed to dissipate your hurt into the all-enduring forest. No single being should have to bear such pain.

I probed again, observing your earlier efforts more closely. I found the scaffolding you had built, the broken and bent tools you had used for gaining leverage, the scratch marks on the tightly closed petals of your metal flower. I felt the weight of each petal, so much more than you, and the way the impact had bent them in shapes that would prevent their elegant opening motion. You had tried your best to pry and cut and scrape. But your flower was never going to bloom.

And I understood how the sky must have closed up to you, completely out of reach beyond your locked canopy. How the other suns became an empty dream and you felt stuck, robbed of your vagrant nature, bound to a life grounded and confined instead of tumbled and tossed.

One sun has always been enough, my grove-kin assured me when I emitted your pain. And maybe I could try and convince us both. There were things for us to explore, strange and far reaches of the rootscape like a whisper in the background of the Conversation. But it was not what you needed, not now, as you kept facing your wall of light, almost rooted in whatever echoes and memories it was evoking in you.

You needed the comfort I was granted continuously by the forest.

So I primed the filament once more for the vibrations you let wash over you in front of your wall, filtering out the higher frequencies clearly produced by you and others like you in this repeating sequence, and focused on the background rhythm. It was nothing I had ever experienced, but I could almost feel the soothing force of its steady roll. I sent it out to my spirit-kin, and word travelled far and wide in the Conversation, favors were called in to cross borders, and when replies trickled back, they came from strange kin who had ventured out onto uninhabitable ground. We know, we share, this is the ebb and flow surging around our stilted roots, they said, the sea, the unconquerable sea, do you feel the sharp nip of salt?

I wanted to feel the salt, and everything else with it, and I wanted to break it down into its molecules and understand it. For I knew you cherished this experience above anything else, and I could give it to you the way we used to give the comfort of rain on our leaves to our drought-land neighbors. I called in more favors and recruited my long-suffering grove-kin to find trace elements to accumulate in my sapwood for synthesizing something this forest had never known.

You were abandoning your flower and yourself within it, not even coming out to hang your fabric anymore. The electrical pulses stilled one after the other, and you stopped scraping off the mosses claiming the ground. Life exploded, and still it felt lifeless after you draped covers over the finer structures and disabled your wall of light.

When you finally stepped out, I was prepared. You didn’t know what I had released into the air, but you stumbled right into it, every leaf of mine exuding this strange sea smell, so different from the earthiness of our grove. It hung in the air, briny, fresh, ready to embrace you. And I felt you swaying there, expanding while you breathed in, drinking it into every pore, this promise you were not alone.

It wasn’t the rhythm and the light your wall had shown you, but as you were drawn back to a shore even the strange stilt-rooted kin couldn’t imagine, you knew it.

And you knew me.

You came to gently pull down a twig and press my leaves against your face, breathing deeply. You let your calloused fingers whisper over my skin, a new map immediately engrained in my mind. You walked around me in wonder, never breaking touch, your steps transmitting the lightness of climbing high and probing deep, the bounce of discovery. When you stayed the whole night instead of going back to your enclosure to rest, I felt I had become more than solidity, more than a monument guarding your dead kin. We scholars know the Rootless’ connection to the world is often not by touch, but rather your perception of light. And even as you were touching me now, what I felt was seen.

After that, you began wandering the grove again. You didn’t try and pry open your flower anymore, and you didn’t even return to the inside of your enclosure but once. You walked around cautiously then, not to dwell, but as if you were an intruder, touching only the smallest of things, tugging on a cover here, trailing your fingers lightly along a moss-speckled surface there. Soon you sealed your access hatch and left. But you brought something with you.

I felt it in the added weight and the hollowness of it, even if you didn’t coax out your rainfall tinkles anymore: you carried the thing you made vibrate. You stood there for some time, and when you set it down in the crook of my widest roots, you didn’t intentionally strum, but it made the tiniest off-key quiver.

I had had hopes, but only after you fixed it there a little bit more firmly, and you again showed the understanding you had worked out for yourself by sprinkling soil on top of it, I knew you truly intended it as a gift.

And what a gift it was!

I took my time tasting it, filament first and rootwood later, and I found something familiar in its strange shape among bits of metal and synthetics. Years upon years of rooting and growing were embedded in its wooden body, and I sensed the faint echoes of far-away forests: spaciously arrayed evergreens dreaming under the weight of a wintery chill; a tangle of mist-enclasped giants teeming with a flurry of wildlife; mellow woodlands in the gentle sway of ever-changing seasons. The forests this wood had been taken from were old and alien, growing and reaching like us, but different down to the tiniest components of their cells. They were forever beyond reach, but they were kin nonetheless, kin across the skies, kin under a different sun. Such was the gift you gave me, and I couldn’t hold it in, jolted the rootscape with my prompts of taste! feel!, hoping it would reach my spirit-kin and make them understand: ours is not the only Conversation.

Other memories were tangled within the wood, the ghosts of caressing skin and dancing fingers, fragments of you like overtones to the whispering of the wood: you, clearly among your spirit-kin, cheered and accompanied while you energetically enticed the hum from the wood. You, alone, exploring along a burbling stream and adding your own tinkling to while away the night. You, clasping the wood as if it supported you, when a stranger’s message opened the sky to you and got you thumping all over down to your fingertips. And you in a capsule, suspended in the void with three others, reaching for this body of wood whenever you needed a piece of something grown, a piece of home.

I almost felt the pulse of being Rootless, of being pulled along and beyond the field lines of our world. Would it be so bad to leave? Wouldn’t it be nice to explore, to experience places the rootscape could never touch and our Conversation had never envisioned?

No amount of excitement would stir the interest of my kin above a friendly rustle, while they invoked the feeling of the sun and the rain providing for us, the soil reliably carrying our weight and the weight of our memories. Messages of comfort to calm my strange thoughts.

And yes, the sun warmed me just as well as ever, its rays caressed my leaves just as gently, but I felt it was not enough. There was a longing for different suns, suns I could never feel.

You knew this longing. It made you reach, it made you fall.

But it shouldn’t have tangled you in roots you never wanted, cut off from your own Conversation. Shouldn’t have made you dwell in my shade all miserable and yearning, the sky like a mockery above you.

I might not be able to act upon my longing, and I could never reach a distant sun, but there was one thing I could do, even if it would hurt to lose you.

---

We are rooted, and while we are not able to abandon our places and leave, we are shapers and shifters, and with the right approach, we raze mountains.

So I reached toward the sun and gathered my strength.

You didn’t know. You were focused on your own movement: into a new shelter by my side, draped in vines and cushioned with mosses, and away from your failure, exploring the forest, though when you climbed, it was less energetic and never all the way up to the canopy anymore.

Ironically, we were now as I had envisioned us to be. We had an understanding, you and I, that we were akin in curiosity.

You brought me stones washed up in the riverbed, rich in history with leaf imprints from a long-lost nation. Smaller Rootless you found and nurtured, and maybe you kept those for yourself, but they were still a gift, nesting in my branches, basking on my leaves. Even if I had experienced them a hundred times before in the Conversation, these gifts always felt new after they passed through your hands.

I tried to do the same for you, so you could sense our world beyond your reach. I made you smell the acrid tang of the distant salt flats before you left, where our mining kin’s crystalized leaves chime in the wind. Taste the sweet desert dew collected in thorn-clad night forests, distilled into a fruit. I wanted you to consider us worth exploring, despite your fall.

All the while my grove-kin sent me strength no matter what, even when you foolishly brought saplings grown from my fruit out to places they were completely unsuited for. So inconsiderate, these Rootless, they said, but you meant well, and the filament took care of the offshoots.

I couldn’t be bothered much, toiling away as I was. To you it must have seemed crude, for I have always been more of a dreamer than a builder, but if you ever felt disrespected by the way I treated your abandoned enclosure, you didn’t complain.

My roots found and widened the cracks, and then the real work began. Defying every gravitropic impulse, I slanted my roots upwards, away from the soil, reaching for the sky myself. Some things had to yield along the way, walls bent and whole panels crashed down, but never the capsule itself. I’m not that clumsy. Upwards I strained, ever upwards in the dark, until I touched the canopy.

I noticed you sticking closer, your circles getting smaller, more reluctant. And maybe I, too, would have grown reluctant in my task, because I didn’t want to lose you, didn’t want this pod to bear you away yet. But roots have their own momentum.

As they strengthened, metal bulged and tore, seams strained and burst, until I was the only thing holding them together. The canopy cracked, not elegantly as it was supposed to, but under my brute force. Still, when the first slanted rays of sunlight touched the capsule inside, it was as beautiful as any blooming.

That’s when you realized what I was doing, didn’t you? After you hung your piece of fabric each morning, mended in so many places now it felt small and brittle, you wouldn’t explore. You just walked the clearing, stopping often, to take it in from every angle, what was now fused, part root, part wreckage.

And when I had finished my task, you went inside, gingerly climbing through the broken hatch. Using the stick you had taken to walking around with to lift the covers you had placed.

This is where we are. You are leaving.

The petals of your flower are crumpled, some have already fallen. Before you, the sky unfolds. Before me, the dream of your next discovery, of the suns you will visit.

And while you prepare to leave, slowly making your way through the root-shot interior of the wreckage, touching capsule and console alike with shaking hands, and while I sense the awakening of the power that will whisk you away, this is what I want to tell you, in every rustling leaf and every pulse of sap. All the things I can’t say, because the Conversation is eluding you. You need to go and rejoin your own.

I’ll never know the wonders you’re going to encounter on your way, and I’ll never thank you for your gift of seeing me, of singling me out in a vast forest. I’ll never know what you want to tell me. Because that’s what you’ve been doing all the time, haven’t you? You talked to me almost from the day we met, with these gentle vibrations you breathe into the air.

You’re talking to me now, patting my roots, your hands unsteady, your whole being shaking. A rumble builds up, pulsing slowly first as your capsule wakes from its hibernation, but gaining the irresistible strength of an earthquake.

No root will hold you back, no matter its strength, and when you hurry to your shelter, I know these are your last preparations, to get sustenance for the time you need to enfold yourself into your pod while it is shooting away.

But when you fumble your way back, carefully planting your stick, it is an armful of my saplings you carry, cultivated from my fruit, the ones you always tried to spread across the forest. It is them you place into the capsule first. This is when something in me begins to sing, to the tinkling of raindrops and the rhythm of a distant sea. This is when I allow my thoughts to shoot up and accompany you, hurrying ahead even, faster and farther than I have ever dared to reach.

But you, with your shaking hands and your unsteady step, you seal the capsule off, and you back away.

The rumbling grows, and you are not inside.

You are, in fact, at my side, and your hand is on me, a map of ridges and valleys against my skin, no firmness left in your grip.

I brace against the pain every departing pod causes, as its power surges. Woundwood will soon seal those gifted roots as they burn away in a blast of heat.

The forest is utterly still. In the aftermath of the thundering departure, none of the Rootless dare move.

A pod capsule once sprung is gone for good, out of reach, but I know it is on its journey. These are our saplings, I want to shout into the Conversation, but only you are still able to follow their course, bent back to see them shoot across the sky. I wish them luck on their flight, and should they ever fall, I hope they are met by a friend.

You stayed. You are leaning on me, harder than ever, your fingers slowly sifting through the soil after you sit down. It is your soil now, too, a Conversation waiting to be joined. You stayed, while my saplings are farther away every moment, and the joy of knowing both runs through me like a sun-dappled river.

Evening approaches, and you take a slow walk around the clearing, filament already claiming the scattered remnants of the wreckage. Your shuffling steps are gentle, almost too light for me to sense on the upturned soil as you walk in the dusk.

The Rootless, it is said, are passers-by, only ever leaving. But they may try for roots, and we may try for new suns. And we may both find completion in trying.

---

Host Commentary

Hello and welcome to Escape Pod, your weekly science fiction podcast. I’m Valerie Valdes, your host for this episode.

Our story this week, and our final story of the year, is Forever the Forest, by Simone Heller. It originally appeared in Life Beyond Us: An Original Anthology of SF Stories and Science Essays, edited by Susan Forest, Lucas K. Law, Julie Novakova, May 2023.

Simone Heller lives on an island in the river Danube in Regensburg, Germany. She has been working as a literary translator for over 15 years. Her first steps in writing in English were taken in 2016, after workshopping with a group of international writers in Munich, and her short fiction has since appeared in several magazines and anthologies. She loves learning all kinds of things: words most of all, but also history, science, and everything about the strange creatures of Earth (and beyond?).

Our narrator this week is Hugo Jackson. Hugo is an author and streamer on the East Coast of the USA. Born in the UK, they moved to the US be with their partner and has since published the first three novels of a five-book young adult fantasy series, The Resonance Tetralogy, through Inspired Quill (https://www.inspired-quill.com/product/legacy). They also stream semi-regularly on Twitch (username pangolinfox), and run a yearly charity stream on World Pangolin Day to raise money for one of their favourite animals, the aforementioned pangolin.

Now, get ready for a love letter from a tree to a visitor from the stars… because it’s storytime.

#####

Once again, that was “Forever the Forest”, by Simone Heller.

The author had this to say about her story:
I love stories that explore and try to “translate” a different sensorium. Like literary translating, which is my day job, it is an exercise in failure, but opens up interesting spaces.

As the year comes to an end, it feels fitting to close things with a story about, on the one hand, helping a stranger to survive and thrive in an unfamiliar and sometimes hostile place, and on the other hand, making a new home when the hope for returning to the past is gone. We humans often misunderstand each other, misinterpret things and cause harm, whether it’s intentional or not, but we also have a vast capacity for solidarity and altruism, for empathy and caregiving. Despite the endless hostility of which our species is capable, every day we see examples of people refusing to give up, to give in, to accept what appears inevitable and succumb to futility and nihilism. We continue to strive, bleak as our situations may become, uncertain as their outcomes may be. Even when we cannot hope to see the results of our efforts, like the character in this story, we can load our escape pods with saplings and send them rocketing into the future for the next generation. Every ending carries within it the seeds of a new beginning, as long as we’re willing to keep planting them.

Escape Pod is part of the Escape Artists Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, and this episode is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license. Don’t change it. Don’t sell it. Please do share it.

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Our opening and closing music is by daikaiju at daikaiju.org.

And our closing quotation this week is from Ursula K. Le Guin, who said: “We’re each of us alone, to be sure. What can you do but hold your hand out in the dark?”

Thanks for joining us, and may your escape pod be fully stocked with stories.