Nira served the worldforest by reading to the trees, but she also delighted in the opportunity to learn for herself. From childhood, she had spent years keeping records of where missionary green priests were distributed around the Spiral Arm, bearing treelings, spreading the forest.

Young acolytes were taught to tend the forest. They nurtured the smallest potted treelings prepared for transportation off-world; they cared for the largest ancient sentinels, plucking off old fronds and picking bark clean of parasites. Nira preferred reading aloud, and she thought the trees enjoyed it as well. When she talked to the trees, even while she was doing menial tasks, Nira always kept her mind open and her ears cocked, listening for an answer. One day, when she was a green priest, she would hear the voice.

Barefoot and bare-chested, acolytes wore only loincloths, exposing as much skin as possible to the trees. Human skin was a sensitive receptor, an interface with the worldtrees. Whenever Nira climbed to the canopy for her daily work, she stroked the fronds, pressed her chest against the trunk. She had shorn her dark hair close to the scalp, as most acolytes did, leaving only a fuzz on the crown of her head. All her hair would fall out as soon as she took the green.

Since childhood, she had recognized her destiny to become part of the ecological web of the worldforest, which grew year after year. Before the Caillié had been brought here long ago, the worldforest had been only an isolated group of semiintelligent trees on a single planet. There, because it had no way to grow intellectually, or experience new things, the worldforest had languished in isolation for thousands of years.

However, when the settlers came, a girl named Thara Wen had learned to commune with the forest, and she taught other sensitive individuals. These early “priests” had discovered how to tap into the ponderous memory that was capable of storing and recalling vast amounts of information. The worldtrees were a living database, hampered only by a lack of experiences and outside knowledge. Thara Wen and her followers had taken care of that problem.

As the worldforest began to learn from its human companions, the relationship blossomed into a beneficial symbiosis. Green priests explained mathematics and science, history and folklore. Once its appetite was whetted, the worldforest wanted to absorb all human knowledge, from the dullest facts to the most sweeping legends. The arboreal computer could assimilate and assess a thousand tangential pieces of information and make brilliant and accurate projections, almost like prophecies from a benevolent earth spirit.

Around her, other acolytes read dull-sounding data, reciting records of weather patterns on planets she’d never even heard of; Nira was quite happy to be ensconced in the boughs with Malory’s epic chronicle. Priests played musical instruments or activated recordings of symphonies created by human composers; to the worldforest, music was as much a language as words.

Alone under the sky, Nira read for hours, not even shifting her position, completely focused on the story and on the listening trees. The trees could receive information in other ways, through direct telepathic link with functional green priests, but Nira did not have that option. Besides, she preferred to read aloud—it was the way stories were meant to be told, and the worldforest seemed to grasp that. Somehow, even without the symbiosis established, these magnificent plants understood that Nira would become part of their overall network soon. Very soon, she hoped.