The Station, Part 61

That may more difficult than I had just anticipated. I can see so much foliage, the branches with leaves of all shapes and sizes, many of them laden with what could only be fruits and seeds. I know nothing of them. This is a problem. I am without the advantage of observing other animals’ eating habits. The small primates I witnessed eating the figs back at the mountains was in all likelihood a stroke of luck on my part. In addition, that world was the most familiar of them all. A more primitive, yet nearly identical version your own world. Here, in this very different place, there is the most superficial familiarity. I can recognize these analogues of trees, vines, shrubs and all their parts. But what I don’t have knowledge of would be the chemistry. I have a virtual feast around me, or a world of death my any number of poisons. I will have to abstain for now and ignore the noise in my belly. But nature is insistent. If I have to rely on my own willpower alone, I may have to hurry along. I can’t let mere hunger rule my decision. I am ever closer to the Junction. I know that I must travel upward, into the canopy, for passage on the ground looks to be all but impossible. And the sudden knowledge of my arboreal skills is an excellent clue as to how I am to meet my goal.

I’m climbing ever higher into this canopy. I must be nearly one hundred meters above ground by now. The immensity of this jungle is astounding, dwarfing anything else in my experience. As I ascend ever higher, I still have not seen a hint sky. There might not be one, just a ceiling of metal perhaps. I can just toss that idea away right now. Although I have seen other places without skies, there can be no greenery without the aid of a sun. Energy from light of course. Or can there? Still no hint of rays, yet there is a dim light throughout. That light has to come from somewhere.

I have noticed subtle changes in the vegetation species as I further separate myself from the jungle floor. The deep greens, which now that I think of them may be in fact due to the lack of light giving them their darker shades, have been supplanted by an ever increasing population of ever more bizarre looking plants upon other plants, many must be epiphytic in nature, others of a more parasitic nature. I cannot differentiate between the two if that is indeed the case. I matters little to me—they are all in all probability inedible. Yet these oddities are but a few of the strange forms I have seen as I climb. Growths for which I have no comparison appear in I dare say have a grotesquery that have had the temporary yet strangely beneficial effect of curbing my appetite. It is not so much that that have shapes and textures I would not apply to plants life. That would be quite enough. But it is way in which I see that they do lay prone. Grasses and leaves sway in the wind. But there is nothing about the air that I can surmise that explains the way in which these creatures of vegetation…pulse…undulate. My nearness to them is disturbing some sense within me, an ancient understanding that is being contradicted. I want to be away from them, yet I know in that maddeningly mysterious way that these moving forms are not the obscene things I want them to be. They are nothing of the sort. The more I look on them, the more repulsed I am by my growing attraction to them. My stomach has rumbled again and I’m appalled by the suggestion. And where are all the animals? In such a dense biomass and great variety, what fills these niches? Can it be that even with my new senses, that I can miss all of it?