Springthorn and Weiss

by Jeffrey Greene

Part 1 appears in this issue.

conclusion

“The communion will take only seconds, so if you will form a line behind this gentleman and lady — he pointed to Esa and me — standing opposite the gate that my assistant will shortly open, and lead you across the moat one by one. I will then show you to the door behind me. You will be alone with Springthorn for less than a minute. After the communion, some of you may feel the need to sit briefly, and if so, one of my assistants will show you to one of the many benches found everywhere around the tower. The feeling of mild exhaustion will pass quickly, leaving only the memory of Springthorn’s boundlessly generous spirit.”

A man in the green uniform of a groundskeeper silently opened the gate and nodded the two of us in. On crossing the short bridge and stepping onto the perfectly tended grass, Mr. Weiss came forward. With a nod to me, he smiled and offered his arm to Esa who, with a quick glance of apprehension at me, took his arm and allowed him to lead her to the brass door, which he unlocked with a brightly polished key, opened just wide enough for her to enter, then closed it behind her. He stood with his back to the door, his hands folded in front of him, his shaggy head bowed in apparent meditation.

In under a minute the door opened and Esa emerged, her careworn beauty transformed by an expression of bewildered joy and shock, and all but collapsed into Mr. Weiss’s arms, who nodded sympathetically and led her to a low bench discreetly hidden from the general view by a big elephant-ear plant, sat her down, then came over and gestured to me. With a worried look at Esa, who stared unseeing into the middle distance, I followed him to the brass door, and taking a deep breath, entered as the door closed behind me with an echoing thud.

The room was completely dark and silent, but I sensed that it was large and high-ceilinged. The silence oppressed me at first, perhaps because I knew that it wasn’t an empty silence. I felt surrounded by something alive, and there was an intensely strong, if not unpleasant odor in the air, vaguely reminiscent of stagnant ponds, of the smell on one’s hands after holding a live frog. It was as if I’d stepped into the open mouth of something huge and subterranean, yet somehow I didn’t fear that the mouth would close.

But it made my skin crawl, to feel enveloped in a living darkness. There was no sound of breathing or indeed any kind of audible respiration, so I had no warning when something cool, soft, slightly moist and feather-light touched my bare arm. I recoiled involuntarily, then, after a moment, the touch came again, and this time I endured it. There was a painless, almost imperceptible prick that may or may not have penetrated the skin, and then... everything changed.

I later discovered that our connection lasted about forty-five seconds, but subjectively, it was akin to one of those epic dreams that seem to take place over months, even years, except that it was the jumbled dream of two minds. There were no words, and I suspect that all the images crowding into my consciousness were my own brain’s interpretation of what, from Springthorn, was something closer to a purely empathic/telepathic merging of both our minds, revealing to me — and I to it — both our passages through time past, from our origins to the present, and then, somehow, what may have been my future in dense and lengthy detail.

Without any perception of reality beyond its fantastically evolved sense of touch, it knew me, inside and out, and I knew it. Although most of the images that our connection produced have faded, as dreams do, the enthralling whole of our time together has anchored itself so deeply in my core being that I wonder if our link has somehow continued, and will persist to my dying moment.

I can only call what we shared love, more pure and intense than that of any other relationship I’ve experienced, devoid of human need, self-interest or eroticism, a shared understanding that transcended all the physical and emotional barriers that so thoroughly isolate human beings. We flowed into each other, becoming, for those brief seconds, one indistinguishable self.

I almost drowned in the ocean when I was seven, and my panicked floundering against the rip-tide was as vivid during our communion as it was on the day it happened, thirty years before, with this difference: Springthorn was in every sense of the word present in that moment, not passively observing me like a scientist, but directly experiencing my panic, the pain of my exploding lungs just before I reached the moment of surrender and breathed water, my body’s desperate struggle, then the hopeless, yet no longer terrifying, acceptance of death moments before my father found me limply tumbling across the sandy bottom and pulled me out in time.

I realized with both wonder and astonished pity that my sharer was by its very nature incapable of objective indifference to another’s suffering or joy. Instead, its touch opened the floodgates of intimacy, allowing it — no, forcing it — to share another being’s experience and its own with a completeness that humans, in our spatial and mental isolation from one another, can only imagine. For Springthorn, the one barrier between its Self and the Other was the space between them, which, once breached with its touch, dissolved the illusion of the self’s isolation from all the other selves in creation.

And it equally shared with me the ecstasies and wonder of its travels through seas of time and unthinkable distances, the myriad creatures with whom it had briefly merged and bequeathed some of its immense kindness and curiosity, just as it added to itself those unique and ineffable qualities possessed by beings such as the mineral creatures on an unnamed planet that lived geologically long lives, for whom an hour’s conversation would represent a million years by our measure of time. And I sensed its own distress after the collision with the satellite, as it assessed the damage to its vessel, and knew it would either burn up in its fall to Earth or be marooned there.

As it knew the human form as well as its own, so I viscerally experienced the spreading, malleable contours of its shapeless body. It filled the room, exuding a sticky substance that soon dried, permanently anchoring it to the walls and ceiling and, through a large crack in the concrete where the wall and ceiling met, it had extended exploratory pseudopodia and spread upwards, slowly growing to fill all the chambers of the tower.

It had taken a long time, this gathering of life energy from thousands of human visitors, as well as from the small, crawling things that inhabited the tower’s interior, finally growing large enough to colonize the carillonneur’s playing cabin, just below the chamber of the bells. It extended many tendrils to the keyboard and felt its way to a gradual understanding of the wooden levers and pedals, and was soon playing the monumental instrument as it had never been played before, experiencing a pleasure entirely personal, unconnected with the joys of communion, if still a sharing through music.

What hadn’t occurred to me until now was how a being who knew the world only through its single sense of touch could hear itself play the carillon. Springthorn showed me the reason why Albert Weiss was always inside the tower when it played: they were in communion, the man’s hearing and response to the music also experienced by the performer. Using its ability to merge its consciousness with another, it could know the other’s sensory and emotional response to the music, even to the point of hearing it.

Combining this secondary telepathic “hearing” via Weiss, its human radio, with the vibrations coursing through the tower and its huge, spreading body as the clappers struck the bells, Springthorn had understood and partaken of the human love of music, a new experience in its millennia of roaming through the galaxy.

The rumors that it could see the future were true only in a limited sense. In the few seconds — or eons — of our time together, it perceived my genetic destiny, my inherent selfishness, and by extrapolating from my past mistakes and successes, good and bad habits of thought and behavior, showed me my probable future, even a prediction of how, if not exactly when, I would die.

And it was no less brutally honest with itself. Its lifespan was open-ended and, for as long as it could feed and find room to grow, there was no death for its species, not as we know it. Yet I was shocked and saddened to realize that it was slowly dying, not from absorbing the foreign elements of our world, or even from the loneliness of permanent exile, but from prolonged exposure to us. Yes, we humans were killing it, poisoning it with our impure nature: baseness, envy, prejudice, despair, greed, rage, and our limitless pride. Our capacity for love and self-sacrifice did not balance and cancel out our destructiveness, which it wholly accepted but could not endure indefinitely.

Albert Weiss, it turned out, was less its rescuer than its keeper. Springthorn’s ability to move over any distance was extremely limited, and it thrived only in darkness. Aside from the mice, birds, insects and spiders inhabiting the tower, from which it drew tiny sips of life energy, always careful not to take enough to kill anything, however small and humble, the paying human public was its only source of nourishment, a hopelessly tainted source. Without self-pity, it made me understand that its death, after thousands of years, was drawing nearer every day.

When it withdrew its touch, I wept like a child, not just for the imminent loss of a being of such purity, but for myself and my fallen species. I opened the door and staggered out, blinded by the bright morning sun. Blinking back tears, I stopped and stared at Albert Weiss with a mixture of silent contempt and reluctant acknowledgment of the importance of his symbiotic relationship with Springthorn.

He returned my gaze unflinchingly. But didn’t everyone who had experienced communion know what I knew? Could Springthorn possibly lie or withhold anything? And if all the people who shared the experience of being one with such a creature also knew that we, all of us, were slowly killing it, wouldn’t they have banded together and demanded that this vulgar carnival attraction be stopped?

While I stood there, Weiss approached me and nodded, as if he knew my thoughts. “What the hell do you expect me do about it?” he asked, spreading his arms theatrically. “If I could send it back to its home planet, I would, but I can’t. No one can. And what else besides us has it got to feed on? I know it’s dying, and so does every other person who goes in there. And yet many of these people will come back, some again and again, greedy for what it has no choice but to give. So go ahead and badmouth my set-up, but remember that this business doesn’t just give me my living, it keeps Springthorn alive, for a while longer, at least. It doesn’t judge me; it can’t. But you can. That’s what we do, isn’t it?”

He turned away, and as he met the next pilgrim with a broad smile and escorted her to the brass door, I looked for Esa at the bench where she’d been resting, but saw that it was empty. I crossed the moat and began searching for her. I found her sitting cross-legged at the foot of the reflecting pool, staring fixedly at an enormous goldfish nibbling at flakes of fish food scattered by a groundskeeper. She didn’t seem to care whether I was there or not, and when she finally did look up, we just stared at each other. There was nothing to say. It was as if Springthorn was there with us, sharing what we knew, which was everything, making us realize there wasn’t a thing we could do for it that we hadn’t already done, in those few seconds of communion. She knew there would be no children, and I knew she would outlive me.

The line of people by now stretched around the reflecting pool and back along the trail. Esa stood up, looking with dismay, anger and resignation at the long line of pilgrims — or were they addicts? — then took my hand and we started back down the hill.