Free Cloud Country by Andy Futuro

rock, what Saru hoped was a safe distance away. She followed John out of the plane, and was hit with the heat and the dryness and the stillness of the desert, a brand-new sensation among her trophy rack of novel pains. There was a smell in the air she couldn’t place, something moldy and sweet, and as it tickled her nose, images formed in her mind of a world far different from her own. She saw deserts that rose and fell, high and low, in ribbons and ridges and contours like the valleys of a brain, the sand held fast by the warped magnetism of the alien core. Flowers like these, but grander, and larger, and varied to infinity, covered the entire arid surface. John looked at her, his eyes less open in wonderment, and she saw this smell was the language of the plants, and they spoke to her with their stink.
    It was her planet, yes, but there, staring across the field that reached nearly the limits of her vision, endless crystal plants stinking words to one another and sharing touch with their commingling insect organs, she felt herself in an alien place, a tourist. She saw in her imagination that just as the great American explorers had set out in their ships and planes to colonize the inferior cultures of the Earth, so too had come these aliens to her planet, across oceans of time and space and bizarrities of physics. The time a sentient species spent alone was the mere incubatory period of its life, the days spent nurtured in the womb, and the length of its adulthood was shared with other sentient beings, all with their own ideas of how things should be, and what life had a right to exist.
    The smell in the air changed to that of death, rotted corpses, the vacated bowels of the newly dead, choking, suffocating death, so thick Saru thought she might vomit. The leaves and stems rattled, a rainmaker sound, filling the air, generating a breeze that swept back her hair, carrying the stench of death. She saw again the planet of dunes, saw the flowers now pestilent, horrid tumors and boils of pus, and living worms formed of their very nerves spreading out and stabbing into one another with infection and pain. The pus oozed from their flesh to stain the ground and they melted in the acid of the plague and merged. Their minds were bound still to the flesh, like a mess of brains sewn and soldered together, and somehow living. And from the tumors of the melding flesh came a new smell, a smell that was a picture and a sound, or a fragment of a sound, the opening cough, the orchestral warm-up of the leviathan song that wound its way through world after world to swallow all other notes within its putrid whole: uausuausuausuausuausuau…
    The stink overwhelmed, forcing its way into Saru’s eyes and down her throat, to drive out tears and coughs, and clammy sweat, and bile-tasting dry heaves. Images paraded through her brain of the planet devoured, of the torture and pain of the plants, and of their vast terror at what was happening. A thousand equivalent years of the mysterious rot, their unconcern until it came and ate them all. And then it was quiet and the smell was gone. The scenes of alien death faded. The breeze had stopped. The glowing insects had disappeared. Saru stood there with John in the absolute stillness of the desert, ears and nostrils straining, and there was nothing. It seemed that the silence was a warning, a message as clear as the stink of shit to these plants, but the message passed right over her head without the slightest hint as to its meaning.
    All Saru knew was that this was still not the chimera John was looking for. It was just another telepathic red herring, the equivalent of a bad tip from a crackhead in a growing-hopeless investigation. They boarded the plane and flew away.

5. Moonlit Stroll
    John was looking ragged. He’d eaten nothing, despite Saru’s attempts to shove some peanuts down his throat. The most he would allow was a sip of water that the bottle proclaimed was from a tropical island