The Meat Tree

1. Title Page
   
2. Dedication
   
3. New Stories from the Mabinogion
   
4. Charles Darwin Quote
   
5. The Meat Tree
   
6. 1. Technical Preparation
   
7. 2. Approach
   
8. 3. Boarding
   
9. 4. Entry
   
10. 5. Forest
    
11. 6. Breeding Season
    
12. 7. The Wild
    
13. 8. Offspring
    
14. 9. Name
    
15. 10. Arms
    
16. 11. Flower
    
17. 12. Wife
    
18. 13. The Tree
    
19. The Fourth Branch of the Mabinogion
    
20. Afterword
    
21. Acknowledgements
    
22. Advertisements
    
23. Copyright
    

To Eira

New Stories from the Mabinogion

Introduction

Some stories, it seems, just keep on going. Whatever you do to them, the words are still whispered abroad, a whistle in the reeds, a bird's song in your ear.

Every culture has its myths; many share ingredients
with each other. Stir the pot, retell the tale and you draw out something new, a new flavour, a new mean
ing maybe.
There's no one right version. Perhaps it's because myths were a way of describing our
place in the world, of putting people and their search for meaning in a bigger picture that they linger in our imagination.

The eleven stories of the
Mabinogion
(‘story of
youth') are diverse native Welsh tales taken from
two medieval manuscripts. But their roots go back hundreds of years, through written fragments and the
unwritten, storytelling tradition. They were first
collected under this title, and translated into English, in the nineteenth century.

The
Mabinogion
brings us Celtic mythology, Arthurian romance, and a history of the Island of Britain seen through the eyes of medieval Wales – but tells tales that stretch way beyond the boundaries of contemporary
Wales, just as the ‘Welsh' part of this island once did:
Welsh was once spoken as far north as Edinburgh. In one tale, the gigantic Bendigeidfran
wears the crown of
London, and his severed head is buried there, facing France, to protect the land
from invaders.

There is enchantment and shape-shifting, conflict, peacemaking, love, betrayal. A wife conjured out of flowers is punished for unfaithfulness by being turned into an owl, Arthur and his knights chase a magical wild boar and its piglets from Ireland across south Wales to Cornwall, a prince changes places with the king of the underworld for a year…

Many of these myths are familiar in Wales, and
some have filtered through into the wider British
tradition, but others are little known beyond the Welsh border. In this series of New Stories from the Mabinogion the old tales are at the heart of the new, to be enjoyed wherever they are read.

Each author has chosen a story to reinvent and retell for their own reasons and in their own way:
creating fresh, contemporary tales that speak to us as much of the world we know now as of times
long gone.

Penny Thomas, series editor

The structure of
every organic being is related, in the most 
essential yet often hidden manner, to that of all other organic 
beings, with which it comes into competition for food or residence,
or from which it has to escape, or on which it preys.

Charles Darwin,
The Origin of Species

The Meat
Tree

1

Technical Preparation

Synapse Log 28 Jan 2210, 09:00

Inspector of 
Wrecks

Is that working now, I wonder? I hate these thought recorders. They're good in very confined spaces, where you don't want to overhear the idiotic things your colleagues say to their families back on Mars, but I think they're overrated. But, there we are, I'm Old School. The trick is to keep the unconscious out
of it as much as possible and pretend that you're
talking to yourself.

Now, I think it's settling down. Right.
Well, we're just about approaching the Mars Outer Satellite Orbit. Not seeing too much debris around at the
moment, they must have had a clean up fairly
recently. Last time I was here, you could hardly move for junk. We've glimpsed the ship in the distance, and should arrive later this afternoon.

The new girl's feeling sick but won't admit it. She thinks I don't know that she threw up in the heads, but you can't hide any smells in a spacecraft. If
Nona doesn't stop vomiting, I'll have to make her take the drugs. Her eyes are red already, she's dehydrated. I can't have her out of action, we're too close to the target vessel. Typical, getting lumbered with a student on my last mission.

Before anything starts happening, I'm going to get my expenses software set up...

Apprentice

So Campion's telling me how he does his mileage first ‘and all else follows' and I'm about to throw up all over him, but I manage to swallow it. Ironic. My whole life to get into Mars orbit, and now I'm here I feel too awful to take it in.

I did get to look out of a porthole as we passed
close to home. Saw a dust storm in Thaumasia,
thousands of miles wide. It looked like miso soup when you stir it up. Made me nauseous all over again. So I stopped looking.
You wouldn't believe how hard it is to catch floating vomit in a paper bag.

We're not one day in and I'm already tired of
hearing about the Department of Wrecks in the Good Old Days. When flotsam came in from as far as the Sculptor galaxy or the Microscopium Void. When he had a full team and they got to work on really interesting cultures. Not like this speck from God knows where, just me and him – the one man in the service who has absolutely no imagination.

Oh, I think he wants to do an equipment check.

Joint Thought Channel 28 Jan 2210, 09:02

Inspector of
Wrecks

This is so that we can talk to each other on the vessel
without disturbing any of the artifacts. Sometimes alien communication patterns can be diffused by the human voice, so we'll keep to Joint Thought mode until we know more about what's going on.

Apprentice

You mean like a mind-meld? God! I didn't mean to say that.

Inspector of
Wrecks

The whole trick of this channel is to avoid personal static. Keep it professional.

Apprentice

Sorry. Of course.

Inspector of
Wrecks

It's a knack. Not a silent version of speaking out loud, but it's a way of sharing two sets of sense impressions from slightly different angles. It doubles the amount of data we can record. But you'll have to learn to make a very precise form of running commentary. It's not your uncensored thoughts, but it's not formal reporting either. Try doing it on me for a second.

Apprentice

He looks much taller than he did on Mars. And
skinnier.

Inspector of
Wrecks

That's close, but you can do better. It's a question of what's appropriate. Give me some sensory data, because that's often
much more valuable than your opinions. We won't know what
we're seeing, but we need to record the effect it's
having on us.
Try again.

Apprentice

The smell of his soap makes me sick to my stomach, I can't get away from it.

Inspector of
Wrecks

That's much, much better. Relevant stuff.
A little personal, perhaps, but that's good. We'll be getting all the objective data from the robots we send in
before us.

Again.

Apprentice

His comb-over looks like the tendrils of a plant in zero gravity.

Inspector of
Wrecks

That's it, you're getting it. And don't worry, you can't
offend me. What I'm looking for is information. Record it, even if it doesn't seem important at the time. I'm
particularly interested in alien emotio-translation technology, we have a lot to learn in that area. This technique is going
to be especially important if we have to go into Virtual
Reality.

Apprentice

The sleep of leaves!

Inspector of
Wrecks

All right! That's it! That will do for now. Oh, and I'll change the soap. Didn't realise it was a problem. You should have said.

2

Approach

Synapse Log 28 Jan 2210, 15:00

Inspector of Wrecks

Could never understand why so many people find space travel boring. There's nothing like the excitement of being out in deep space, watching volcanic
plumes rise over Io in Jupiter-shine. Or seeing an
asteroid pass like a piece of pumice, or like one of those ancient Henry Moore sculptures, torsos without limbs. Don't suppose she has the faintest idea who Henry Moore was, she's far too young. They don't learn even the basics these days…

Just off Mars and we're practically home, I can see my dome near the rippled flats of Argyre Planitia. It was snowing when we passed last time.

Apprentice

The way we approach the vessel, slow and steady, I love it. Last time I looked, the target ship was the size
of the moon on my fingernail. Now it's an eye,
coming closer, looking at us with curiosity.

He

Just my luck. It looks like a fairly primitive mid-
Carolingian solar sailing vessel. Two rings of concave photon sails, maybe Mylar and Kapton, a habitat module like the stigma of a flower. In fact, the whole thing looks like a daffodil. Pity. You've seen one of these, you've seen them all. No chance now of my adding anything spectacular to my life list. It's a bog-standard rudimentary Earth vessel.

She

Been hailing them for hours. The old fart gave me the signals job, but the modem's tried all the intergalactic space languages and no response.