The Silent Forest

The forest on the surface was quiet in a way that was not right. No insect noise, no birds, no breathing rhythm from any large animal — the background clutter a mature ecosystem ought to have was entirely absent.

The biology team ran one check at the tree line: the whole team stopped moving, stopped talking, touched no equipment, and a high-sensitivity recorder was held up for a full 4 minutes 37 seconds. What came back was 5 people breathing, the fine sound of metal loosening as the Forward Module's engine cooled, and a heartbeat amplified by a faceplate mic.

The plants were further off still. Wind speed at the time was 0.4 metres per second, direction N-NW; the leaves swayed on a fixed bearing of E-NE, aligned with every petiole and unrelated to the wind vector. Up close, the pulse in each leaf started at the petiole end and ran along the veins to the tip, at the same speed and in the same direction every time. What Janus came back with after the comparison was harder to swallow: this sway period ran on the same period as the deep pulse 37 kilometres beneath the planet.

Stay at the tree line for a full 4 minutes and you first hear your own heartbeat climb from 82 a minute to 86, then feel, down at the level of the ribs, a low-frequency pressure the ears cannot pick up, arriving once every seventy-odd seconds.

The forest was moving. The way it moved was like something enormous breathing evenly.

In the ship's files this forest had once been a single line of vegetation cover. Even from long-range observation the leaves could be seen moving; the record from then read "sway even, regular", and the interpretation field said wind. The real difference only showed within 2 centimetres of a leaf: the pulse had a starting point, and on every leaf that starting point sat in the same place.

Inside the scan area there was one exception. It had stopped on the same wind phase, and its veins no longer pulsed; cut open, the central conducting duct had been severed, the cut clean, as if something high-temperature or corrosive had burned through it in an instant, no inflammation at the edges and no healing. That leaf went into sample case 007 and came back to the ship, and the label was later rewritten into 2 lines:

007-A  Dead leaf  Only one in the scan area
007-B  Adhering to the back of 007-A  Nature undetermined