Terrene: the Hidden Valley



  Terrene: the hidden valley

  Eric Liu

  Copyright 2011 Eric Liu

  Foreword:

  I believe stories can save the world.

  The progress of human civilization is tremendous. In the last two hundred years we have managed to take to the skies, explore the depths of the ocean, and even venture beyond our native planet into space unimagined just a few centuries before. In the last few decades we have flattened the world, freed information from paper, and made our pockets smarter than we are. The possibilities for the future are endless, and yet a great doom looms overhead, for the next century also brings humanity’s greatest challenges.

  The world is changing, and our society must be willing to move forward with it. How can we prepare for a future that we cannot imagine? How can we sacrifice and overcome without hope? Our greatest tool is imagination, and its greatest vehicle is the story.

  This is why I write. I seek to stimulate the imagination, to open up the possibilities for the future, and to package hope inside entertainment that inspires as well as teaches. I hope you enjoy this book and then go on to save the world in your own way.

  to the dreamers

  Chapter 1: The Blooming

  She was alone.

  Flora Karachi settled down on the edge of a rocky outcrop that jutted prominently out over the valley, just out of reach of the whispers of the crowd. She had slinked away from the bubbling excitement to experience the coming spectacle free from the watchful eye of society. To the conformists, she was the weird girl. To the charitable, she was an opportunity to express overwhelming pity. But out here above Terrene, she was just Flora, and she didn’t have to worry about what that meant.

  Don’t blink.

  Ignoring the rasping chill of the pre-dawn air, she focused on remaining calm. Her right foot shook back and forth unconsciously as she awaited the culmination of four months of careful preparations and patient efforts. Having just turned fourteen, careful and patient were two words that Flora would never have used to describe herself, and yet she found herself trying very hard to let those words transform her into a paragon of serenity.

  Don’t blink.

  As Flora watched, the sun peeked shyly over the Eastern mountains, like the bud of a climbing jarvis weed peering over a garden wall. Terrene lay beneath its curious gaze, a bowl of lush greenery sleeping silently beneath the safety of the mountainous rim. The bud blossomed into a fiery globe, sending rays of light cutting through the brisk morning air to light up Flora’s attentive face, making her dark skin glow unnaturally white in stark contrast to the tangled strands of obsidian that settled upon her shoulders. 

  The warmth spread from Flora’s cheeks, down her wiry torso and all the way down to her calloused fingers and toes. She gasped, the sun breathing life into her body as it brought life to the valley every day. She kept her eyes on the sun despite the pain, soaking in the pure energy for as long as she could before being forced to look away.

  Don’t blink.

  The sunlight illuminated the western mountains, presenting them like an orchid tapestry hanging over the darkened meadows. Slowly, but surely, the tapestry wove itself across grassy fields as the light stretched into the foothills and then into the valley. A seemingly artificial line cut across the valley, separating night from day as if night was simply a blanket that could be peeled from the dewy fields. 

  At the very edge of the valley, far from Flora’s perch, a solitary camellia shivered in the morning breeze, its petals wrapped tightly into a bud. A single photon bounced off its wrapped petals, shocking it awake. Millions more followed, bombarding the pink flower with a shower of light. The light kissed the first petal, willing it to unfurl. Then, one by one, the rest of the petals followed as the camellia stretched its pink blooms out towards the sky.

  Don’t blink.

  Flora watched as the tiny pinprick of pink began a rich cascade as hundreds of camellias bloomed in quick succession, releasing their sweet fragrance into the air where it rode the gentle morning breeze towards Flora’s waiting nose. At the slightest touch from sunlight’s brush, flowers bloomed, painting a brilliant stroke of color that trickled along the aqueducts that brought water from the mountains and into the valley. A carefully orchestrated event, the Blooming happened just once a year, and Flora was about to witness the beauty of the Flow.

  Once the brush hit Weston Res, it set off an explosion of bright pinks, reds, and violets as the rooftop gardens and walls of the residence U’s transformed into a rosy emblem that broadcast their village colors to the whole valley.

  In the distance, Flora could hear the Westoners chanting a cheer. The familiar cadence had become a tradition, repeated to the letter every year just as they planted the identical arrangement each year. The Eastoners would reliably plant the mirror image: beautiful, yet unexciting. But soon the Blooming would reach Southton Res and Flora’s own rooftop. For better or worse, her unique work would be exposed to the entire valley, and Flora was beginning to feel nervous.

  “Don’t blink, or you’ll miss the Blooming,” Crick had said. Now she couldn’t get that stupid thought out of her head.

  Flora watched as the lengthening daylight drew dashes of yellow along the Eastern road towards Podek City, the center of Terrene’s government and commerce. The unimaginative use of daffodils was likely the result of uninspired transportation workers, but they served their purpose, directing Flora’s eyes to downtown Podek, where the sun’s rays released a torrent of white flowers, demonstrating the neutrality of Podek. Of course Flora knew that by early afternoon the white would turn to yellow as clouds of pollen coated the city in gold.

  Simultaneously, the northern and southern roads lit up as the yellow markers raced towards Northton Res and her own Southton res. Flora’s other foot started shaking in excitement despite her best efforts to stay emotionally detached from the predictable yet arresting display below her. She had traded heavily to borrow rooftop space from some of her neighbors, working extra shifts in the fields for months. The debut of her artistry and philosophy would unfold in seconds. Anticipation ripped through Flora’s body as her eyes followed the dawn line towards the edge of Southton Res. Five seconds. Four. Three.

  A familiar shiver touched the back of Flora’s neck as panic gripped her heart and stopped its rhythm. Don’t blink, don’t blink. Flora reached up with her hands to prop her eyes open, but it was already too late. A single blue dot filled the blackness of her vision, pulsing softly in the distant void. It sat there for the briefest of moments or an unrecognizable eternity, and then it was gone.

  Flora blinked and then quickly shielded her face as the full power of the sun overwhelmed her senses. No way. She felt a hand on her shoulder and turned to find her mother by her side. She shrugged the hand off as she instinctively squinted at the sun. Two hours. She had missed two hours.

  “You shouldn’t run off by yourself,” her mother said as she wiped the drool off Flora’s face with the hemp swatch she carried around for just this purpose. “You could have gotten hurt,” she chided. “It’s safer for you to stay with the crowd. Plus, don’t you want to hang out with your friends?”

  Flora pushed the hand away, then finished the job with the neck of her shirt. “I don’t like crowds,” she muttered. Her mother was gorgeous, blond, and charming. She couldn’t understand that Flora didn’t have any friends. “Argh. How can the Source hate me this much?” she asked.

  “The Source doesn’t hate you, Flora,” her mother said. “It saved you. This is a small price to pay.”

  “Yes, I was this close to being born during the incident,” she recited. “I’m lucky to be alive,” she added blandly. “Sometimes being alive just does
n’t feel that lucky to me.”

  “Oh, you didn’t miss too much, dear,” her mother said, a grating beacon of optimism. “The flowers are still there. Isn’t it beautiful?”

  Flora followed the arc of her mother’s hand as it waved over the blossoming valley, now a static picture of symmetry in both color and proportion, except for her small contribution, a brilliant blue floral wave cresting towards the west. “As beautiful as a glowing symbol of missed opportunity can be,” Flora responded. Her Blooming had been all about the flow, and she had missed it.

  Her mother just sighed the sigh of a mother with no idea what to say and let her sit in silence. Flora’s shoes started squeezing her feet, reminding her to give them more sun. She shifted her feet into the sun, giving the meshgrass a chance to catch up to her most recent growth spurt.

  In response, her mother pulled the light stems that had guided their path here out of her pack and lay them out on the rock, painstakingly arranging them in evenly spaced rows.

  “The plants don’t care for visual symmetry,” Flora said.

  “Well, I do,” her mother replied. A flash of disapproval crossed her face as her eyes darted to Flora’s wardrobe. Flora scratched at the lycravine that spiraled down her left arm, a sleeve she had spliced onto the main hempweb so that it would grow together. Sure, it was a little odd to have one sleeve long and flexible and the other short and durable. But it was too hot to wear long sleeves on both arms, and she wanted to hide the scars on her left. She wasn’t symmetric either. Her mother sighed. “I’m sorry. You must be very angry at the world right now,” her mother added.

  “I’m not angry,” Flora said. “I’m just bathing in a pool of self-pity. I believe that’s a basic human right. I’m sure it’s even written into some ancient text locked up in the Institute.” Her mother didn’t smile. She didn’t consider sarcasm a valid form of artistic expression. Flora sighed. “So how did the flow work out on my plots?” she asked.

  Her mother reached out across her shoulders again in cold comfort. “Maybe I should help you next time with the fertilization and hydration treatments,” she suggested.

  Flora pushed her mother’s arm off her shoulders again. “What went wrong?” Flora asked.

  “Well,” her mother said slowly as if the extra second would give her a chance to think of a better answer. “Your blooming kind of went backwards. It’s nothing that we can’t fix next year, it’s just that - “

  “That’s the point, Mom,” Flora interjected. “Don’t you see how the waves travel to the left? My Blooming canvas paints backwards, a lone standout, bravely running counter to the all-consuming eastward wave of conformity. It’s a statement of independence against the mindless acceptance of tradition as the only truth.”

  “That’s ridiculous, dear,” her mother said. “Doing something different doesn’t make it art. There’s a reason for tradition.”

  “It is not,” Flora said, at a loss for a more convincing argument. She was too frustrated to care. If her mother didn’t understand her work, it was likely that no one else had. It had been very difficult to balance the water and fertilizer just right so that her plants bloomed in reverse succession, and everyone just thought she had screwed up.

  “Now you’re getting angry,” her mother said. “Why don’t you try to calm down? You don’t want to suffer another blackout.”

  “I’m glad you’re getting better at identifying my emotions,” Flora snapped back, “but no need to worry about me. I can’t black out so soon after my last one.” She didn’t know if that was true, but she was too frustrated to care. “I bet Dad would have liked my Blooming,” she muttered.

  One look at the pain on her mother’s face was enough to flood her soul with pungent regret. It was true that her father had always encouraged her independent streak, but he had left, and her mother had stayed. Flora had very few memories of her father, and her mother never talked about him. He was just a distant ghost now, an irrelevant memory, and yet Flora couldn’t help but imagine that he was somewhat like her. But seeing the pain on her mother’s face was enough to stop her tongue and dam her curiosity. Despite all their fights, her mother had always been there for her, and Flora felt her mother’s pain like it was her own.

  “Mom, I -,” she stammered, unable to find the right words. But as fast as it had come, the look of anguish had fled from her mother’s face, replaced by the encouraging smile that Flora knew was just a facade.

  “Well, we don’t want you to miss the Weaving as well,” her mother said. “Let’s go.” Her mother reached out to help her walk as if she were a toddler on amateur legs. Flora held onto her mother’s arm for just a second, the comfort of that touch erasing the last five minutes of awkwardness. Then she pulled herself out of her mother’s grasp.

  “I can walk by myself, Mom,” Flora said as she ran a few steps ahead out of her mother’s protective reach. “It’s not like I’ve never passed out before.”

  In fact, this was the four-hundred and thirty-seventh blackout since she decided to start keeping count after her father left. For her, one minute he was there and one throbbing blue dot and blink of an eye later, he was gone. That was number one. There were plenty of blackouts before that, but she was too young to remember them. Her parents hadn’t even realized they were happening until she was two or three. They were just thrilled that she was so easy to put to sleep, not realizing what a cursed daughter they had.

  “Grandma’s over to the right of Pinto holding a spot for us,” her mother called after her as she ran on ahead, eager to erase her disappointment with an auspicious Weaving. “I gave her the ribbons as well.”

  Tilarny Point, named after the 25th Mayor of Terrene and the founder of the Weaving ceremony, was usually a place of serenity, a romantic overlook riddled with tiny groves of trees that gave the illusion of privacy to generations of teen lovers. Today it had transformed into a bustling frenzy of activity, the grass clearing filled with almost the entire population of Terrene. The crowd gathered around a single large pine tree along the south edge of the clearing, its thick branches eclipsed by the towering mountain range that dominated Terrene’s southern horizon.

  According to legend, Pinto was already a wise and majestic tree when Tilarny Point was discovered hundreds of years ago. No one knew how old he truly was. To the villagers of Terrene, he was a symbol of strength and permanence. To Flora, he was an old friend. He never laughed at her, never demanded her attention or offered her charity. He just stood there, providing his steady presence, unchanged since her childhood. Today, Pinto played host to a dozen men and boys who climbed through his branches, tying colorful ribbons onto his limbs. 

  Flora slipped through the crowd, her slim body cutting through the crowd with ease. She found her grandmother waiting twenty feet from the tree’s base. Upon seeing Flora, her grandmother beckoned at her urgently, waving their ribbons up in the air.

  “Just in time, Suwanee,” her grandmother said, giving her a quick hug. “I think the invocation is going to start soon, and all the low branches have been taken.”

  Sure enough, there were only a half dozen people left in the tree, and they were all on their way down. No matter. Flora had never intended to aim for one of the lower branches. She grabbed the ribbons from her grandmother, giving her a kiss on the cheek. 

  Flora, her mother, and her grandmother had each grown their grass ribbons over the last two months from the same seeds, but they looked completely different. Her grandmother’s ribbon was a classic five-part braid, probably using a 2-day pot-turning cycle. The navy blue color was also very traditional, indium fertilizer being one of the oldest known plant dyes. Her mother had created a more complex weave, turning the plant three times a day to make the grasses weave themselves into a complex pattern. She used multiple fertilizer dyes to create a pastel rainbow of threads. Flora was proud of her ribbon. She had staggered the coloration so that it formed a giant wave with white crests to match her rooftop display.

  “Don
’t worry,” Flora said. “I’ll get these up in no time.” She gave her grandmother another hug.

  “I want a high branch,” her grandmother added. “It’s better luck.” She smiled.

  “Of course, Nana,” Flora said, smiling back confidently. Flora’s grandmother never worried about her and never treated her delicately. In fact, she was the one person that asked Flora for help. Perhaps that’s why she spent much of her free time helping her grandmother in the clothes gardens or the vegetable clusters instead of playing with the other teens. With her grandmother, she wasn’t a burden.

  She sprinted to the tree before her mother could sense that she was about to do something mildly dangerous and started making her way up the trunk, utilizing hand and footholds that had become etched into her memory. No doubt her mother would expect her to pass out and fall out of the tree at any moment. To be fair, it had happened before, but she had only been seven at the time. Her hand went instinctively to her side, tracing her three-inch souvenir from that occasion. That was number twenty-one. She now had a total of thirty-two scars from her blackouts, the one beneath her right eye the most noticeable. 

  Flora stood up on the lowest branch, but she wasn’t ready to tie the ribbons yet. Tradition dictated that proper balance must be kept with the ribbon placements, and there were already too many ribbons on the lower half of the tree. The man of the household or a boy over thirteen typically tied a family’s ribbons, and there was an unofficial competition going over whose ribbons would be placed highest in the tree. There were no men left in Flora’s family, but she was a great climber, perhaps the best, and she was eager to prove it. 

  She jumped effortlessly from branch to branch, quickly making her way up the tree, unfazed by her increasing distance from the ground. Her blackouts were triggered by sudden flare ups of anger, fear, or even hope and love, and Flora found physical exertion to be quite calming. The hills and forests above Terrene had become her sanctuary, a place where she could relax in the comfort of being alone. She hadn’t earned a physical scar in over a year, but at school, the territory of teenage drama, she was getting plenty of fresh wounds, ones that her mother couldn’t see.