Colonist Channel Archive | "I've Lost Count of the Days Since Planetfall, But This Forest Is Quiet in the Wrong Way"

(The following is a transcription of an archived post from an internal open channel aboard the Daedalus. The poster is anonymous and the content has not been officially confirmed.)

After planetfall everyone on the open channel was posting good news. The air can be breathed, the water can be drunk, the gravity is right. Somebody put up a photograph of the sky, blue enough that set beside an old photograph of Earth you could not tell them apart; that one was reposted more than 4,000 times. 100,000 people flew 41 light-years and finally reached a second Earth.

This post sat in among the good news, and hardly anyone passed it on. Whoever wrote it left no name, only this —

I've lost count of the days since planetfall. All I remember is that this forest is quiet in the wrong way.

No insect noise. No birds. No breathing from any large animal. You stand in there and all you can hear is your own heart.

Our group draws the early shift, so we go out before the light cycle has climbed to its brightest. The inside of the faceplate fogs up and takes 3 minutes to clear. The ground is wet and stickier than mud when you tread on it, and the sole draws threads when you lift it, so every 20 steps you have to stop and scrape the layer off around your boot.

The leaves keep moving. But there is no wind. I watched them a long time — every leaf, the rhythm of the sway, the same. Neat enough that they might be listening to a single order.

I did a stupid thing. While nobody was looking I picked up a broken branch and stuck it between 2 trees, to see whether the leaves would go around it, or get stopped by it. Nothing happened. The branch stood there for a whole shift and the leaves swayed on, and from where I stood it was as if it were not there at all. At the end of the shift I pulled it up and took it back to the module. In my hand, it was still moving.

I took it to show one of the others on my shift. He laughed a bit and said a broken branch holds residual moisture, that it was normal. Then he did not open his mouth again, not once the whole way back to the airlock door. He is usually a talker.

One more thing. Our advance group came back a man short. He was back the next day, saying he had only got lost. The officers let it go. But I have shared quarters with him for 3 years and I know the way he walks. The one who came back walks steadier than he used to. Steady in a way that is not him.

Yesterday I put the spoon on his right side on purpose. He picked it up with his right hand and ate the whole meal, never switching. He is left-handed. 3 years in the same quarters and I have never seen him eat with his right hand.

The post breaks off there. The account showed as "Logged out" the next day, and has not come online since.

All of this has a normal explanation, of course. A young planet that has not yet grown large animals, that follows. Leaf synchrony could be some kind of phototropism; somebody on the biology team wrote it up that way. As for a man going missing for a night and coming back with less to say, put me in that forest overnight and I probably would not feel like talking either.

We are only saving it. If you are on this ship too, and you also think this planet is "quiet in the wrong way" — remember what the people around you were like before you boarded.