A quote: “Let both grow together until the harvest, and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, “Gather the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.”’” ~~ Matthew 13:30
I’ll start with a story …
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“It’s pretty late in the year for an Archivist, son. Harvest was two months ago.”
I had ridden up to the farm openly with coat open so my vest of Archivist tartan was visible, my saddle bags marked by the Archivist seal.
The man was calm, but suspicious. Behind him ranged a few young men. Armed. I cleared my throat.
“Matthew 13:30, sir. We now gather more than seeds. May I dismount?”
His suspicion turned to curiosity, “You may, sir. You are welcome at my table. I am Richard.”
Formalities observed, especially in the outer Territories, was a good sign. I started breathing again.
The table was rough-hewn, the room cozy, tidy, and the mug I held steamed rich with spices. I nodded to the saddlebag and let him open and inspect it. He pulled out one of the many leather-bound journals I carried, flipped it open to fine vellum pages.
“Richard, Archivists have noticed across the Territories that our oral traditions are changing. Histories shift from place to place. I’m here to write down your stories just as you tell them. We will store them as we do seed. For future generations.”
He nodded, as did family in the room. I caught the eye of one young woman in the back smiling at me.
It was going to be an interesting winter.
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Now, it’s your turn.
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. featured image, cropped, Adobe Stock standard license
In our second year as settlers on Myaayan, the crops went strange. The corn grew fat like it had become infested with smut fungus, except it was rainbow-colored. The potato plants grew tall and woody like trees, with potatoes big as pumpkins. We had to use our front-end loaders to dig those things out of the ground.
Some people from the Chongu equivalent of a county office came by and took samples of everything. When we were warned not to try to eat any of it, feed it to livestock, or sell it, we feared it would be a prelude to orders to plow everything under, or even burn everything in hopes of keeping some dread disease from spreading.
In the midst of a war against exterminationist fanatics, securing more planets and more systems might well be the edge that would give the victory to us, species of individuals.
Days became weeks, as we watched familiar terrestrial plants take strange forms. With every visit by the Kitties’ scientists, we wondered how bad it could get. Might they discover this planet had some horrible surprise that made it too dangerous to even evacuate the settlers? Might we be left to survive as best we could without their technological support, as we watched some kind of quarantine enforcement spacecraft orbit overhead, foreclosing any form of rescue lest we spread whatever was changing everything?
And then came the day when expert exobiologists from the Chongu homeworld arrived to examine things in situ. We wondered if we dared to hope that this was a good sign. Surely they wouldn’t allow senior scientists to visit a world that might prove so dangerous it had to be closed off.
Their announcement astonished us — yes, there was a strange new organism on this world, and thankfully it affected only plants, not livestock or peole. Uncontrolled, it wreaked havoc on plant development — but if it could be domesticated, it would help adapt food and fodder plants to worlds that had proved far more difficult to settle.
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