[Apologies for the lack of posts, I’ve been ill for the last few weeks. Here is a short vignette, set sometime after Chapter 38 of The Maker’s Ark, my current serial in progress. The start is here, and links to my other work here. The next chapter is planned for around New Year’s.]

The small clearing wasn’t in a park, campground, or forest. Nor a preserve, orchard, or woodlot. But the surrounding trees felt welcoming and comforting, and someone, or several someones, had brought in a chunk of wood–it looked like a section of old telephone pole–for seating. Quite a while ago, from the signs Flicker had seen when she first found it. The spot was invisible from the outside, and there was an unobstructed path, if a bit twisty, in and out.

It was a private place. With no doors to worry about if she needed to leave in a hurry. It could get quite cold in the winter, but that didn’t bother her. Flicker liked it.

She’d finally felt obligated to ask the old farmer who owned the land it was on if it was okay for her to keep using it. She’d gotten a fifteen minute answer that could easily have gone on for an hour. It boiled down to ‘Yes’, quite a bit of history of the family that had previously farmed the surrounding parcel of land, and a strong impression that he was glad someone else appreciated it.

It was a good spot for a certain type of thinking. Flicker did that, while listening to the wind in the branches, until her phone beeped. It was Journeyman, responding to her earlier message. She sent a go ahead, with coordinates, and after a short delay he appeared.

He was wearing what appeared to a light jacket, a green mesh cap with 'Bob Elke’ on the front, worn jeans, and work boots. He looked nothing like a magician or superhero, and the most awkward question he was likely to be asked around here was where he was parked.

“Hi,” said Flicker. "Is that your disguise set?“

"I prefer 'low profile’,” he said, looking around. "My main coat and hat are still down for repairs. The defenses on these aren’t as strong. And they aren’t quite as resistant to yogurt and demon blood. But you said you just wanted to talk.“

"Yeah. I came here to to see if it would help with assimilating. I reviewed a bunch of notes from my high speed thinking bender that were part of today’s batch from DASI. One set didn’t fit together very well, and I was trying to figure out what I was thinking at the time.”

She waved her hand. "My mind wandered, and I didn’t figure out what I intended, but I think I maybe figured out something else.“

"No problem. I needed a break too.” He sat down beside her. "What’s on your mind?“

"Do you often put things together about something or someone, and then just… leave it, because it’s personal and doesn’t affect what you need to do?”

Journeyman gave her a look. "All the time. And I’m careful who I tell about suspicions. I recall a few disagreements we’ve had about that.“

"So do I. My problem is that I might suddenly need to know something for sure in enough of a hurry that there’s no one I can ask fast enough. Not even the Database, because of speed of light delays. But that’s a habit, and it isn’t always needed–which is why I wanted to talk you. Somewhere with no sense of urgency.”

“This is a nice spot for that.”

“Yeah. Do you know what this is?”

“Oh yeah. Straight strips of trees on flat farmland in the Midwest are pretty unmistakable.”

Flicker looked down. "Not to me when I first started seeing them while running around. This was after I’d met Doc but before he adopted me. I still couldn’t talk very well yet, and didn’t know the right words for a lot of questions. And I couldn’t figure out what the trees were for. They were on farms, and they looked like they’d been planted by people, but why in lines like that? I ran all around them, inspecting from all angles, but couldn’t figure it out.“

"Ah. Because you never stopped for long enough.”

“I did sometimes, but I didn’t notice what was significant. I finally broke down and asked Doc, and he smiled and said 'fluid dynamics’, and that gave me the clue I needed. They were windbreaks. I looked them up, and I realized people must have wanted them bad, because a lot of them were planted so long ago that there weren’t tree nurseries or easy transport. The easiest way for the farmers to get trees was to find a nearby river or stream and dig out seedlings by hand.”

Journeyman smiled. "If you live in a forest, you can take trees for granted. Around here… These are trees planted in places where there haven’t been any since the last ice age scraped everything flat. These trees are appreciated.“

Flicker smiled back. "By me too, once I figured that out. And when I came here today, I started thinking about people, and trees, and The Tree, and something Sylvi told me when I was healing my hand.”

“Yeah?” said Journeyman. His voice was guarded; he’d been very careful talking about Sylvi since Flicker had discovered she was still alive.

“She said that when she became Keeper of the Tree, there hadn’t been one for about a century. But the old one didn’t die–they left. She said they were unhappy with what the Wanderer was doing. Had you heard about that?”

“I heard there’d been a Keeper and they’d gone away. Not when. But Sylvi would know.”

“Yeah. And I wondered where they went. The Keeper’s job seems to be to protect and preserve. To keep things safe. And the old one must have cared about that a lot, or they wouldn’t have gotten upset enough to leave the Tree. And I thought about where a Keeper like that would be attracted to, if they came to Earth.”

Flicker looked around at the trees of the windbreak. The top branches were swaying occasionally, but the wind was hardly noticeable where they were sitting. "Somewhere like here. Somewhere trees are appreciated. Where they protect, and keep things safe. A windbreak in the plains. What do you think?“

"That sounds possible. But Earth is a big place.”

“It is. But then I started thinking about a Keeper who was trying to start fresh, and didn’t know much about Earth. They’d need time to learn, and grow, and figure out humans. And then it hit me. I was talking to the Gardener a while ago, and she used a word in a way I hadn’t heard before.”

“Yeah?”

“When a plant–a useful plant, not a weed–grows somewhere they didn’t expect, farmers and gardeners have a special word for it. Do you know what they call it?”

Journeyman frowned, then his eyes widened. "Oh.“

Flicker met his eyes. "They call it a volunteer.”