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    The Grove
    The Grove
    The Grove
    Ebook49 pages36 minutes

    The Grove

    By Jennifer Foehner Wells

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Hain, a sentient plant creature, defies instinct and genetic imperative by holding herself separate from the planet-encompassing vegetative super-intelligence known as the Mother. Hain wants to explore the stars but when she finally encounters aliens, her destiny is forever changed. 

    This novelette was previously published in the anthology: The Alien Chronicles. It is longer than a short story, but shorter than a novella.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJennifer Foehner Wells
    Release dateMar 16, 2016
    ISBN9781524207908
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      Book preview

      The Grove - Jennifer Foehner Wells

      The Grove

      The Grove

      Jennifer Foehner Wells

      Blue Bedlam Science Fiction

      Contents

      Copyright

      Dedication

      The Grove

      Also by Jennifer Foehner Wells

      Afterword

      About the Author

      Copyright © 2015 by Jennifer Foehner Wells

      (Originally published in The Alien Chronicles 2015, Created by Samuel Peralta, Edited by David Gatewood)

      Cover art © 2015 Tom Edwards

      All rights reserved.

      No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

      Sign up for my new release email alerts here

      .

      Created with Vellum

      I am Hain

      The Grove

      In the moment when the last remaining filament between Hain and the Mother broke, the Mother’s parting thought raced through Hain’s mind, but Hain didn’t process it until later, when the sticky amber gum that oozed from her open wounds had begun to harden, and the euphoric newness of freedom had subsided.

      The Mother had said, Come back to me soon, little one.

      It had taken so long to break loose. Hain had been obsessed with wriggling, working, bending repeatedly in every possible direction, until the sapwood connecting the two of them had frayed to fine fibers and finally snapped, severing their nurturing connection. She had been so anxious to be free, so intent on experimenting with her unused, newly fully formed limbs, that she hadn’t even replied or said goodbye. She hadn’t meant to be so ungrateful to the one who had given her life.

      The day the Salvors came, Hain was retrofitting an ancient vehicle with every-terrain wheels. She’d redesigned them to manage better than the wheels that some of the Mother had used so long ago. Hain used the narrow three-wheeled vehicle to haul raw materials and items scavenged from the ruins. There had once been roads to drive on, but those were long gone. Even open spaces were rare now that the Mother dominated the world.

      She was tightening lug nuts onto a rusted wheel stud when she heard rumbling overhead. She saw a white streak in the sky, and instantly knew it had to be a contrail, though her own eyes had never seen anything like it before. She quickly moved to track the trajectory, and after some computation, she determined an approximate landing site.

      She was lucky the alien vehicle was landing on the same continent. It had never occurred to her to launch satellites to detect incoming activity from off-world, and she berated herself for her shortsightedness. She had no way of knowing whether these were the first, or if others had come before and landed on another continent, or if there were many of them simultaneously investigating sites all over the globe. Only the Mother knew the answers to those questions, and Hain couldn’t hear the Mother’s voices.

      She only heard one voice in her head now—her own. She’d

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