The Fronds of the Believer

by Andrew James Woodyard

Ira's a storm planet. Constant hurricanes, your standard tempest winds, rapid bursts of lightning and barely any ground to spit on; none of it dry. SOLITARIUM: The Only Big Island, where the mega-fronds grow like mangled bamboo, all the cheap salty chow that you can cram down your gullet, and the Believer, beseeching whatever magical alien carcass of a god it prays to – plus more sea monsters in all of fantasy fiction and folklore combined.

Doctor Leaf wasn't even human — imagine that! Of all the snollygosters in the Colonial Reach, the Core sent a sp'ape, a klutzy chimp who vocalized from a floating metal brain ball, all for some cockamamie boondoggle to get the Believer to spill its secrets — BALDERDASH! — she'd get vaporized like the last lummox that tried that cogswallop. And she brought some newfangled gizmo on four legs with her too, insulting the evolution of your standard feline, but made of metal and sprockets: a monkey with a house pet, how perverse.

"'Bout time, be quick about it — spill the beans!"

The cat hissed and all that jazz.

"Piss off," I casually replied — I have no respect for worthless automatons that serve no purpose but to advance the agenda of some pencil pushing fat-cat, or takes the form of a feline for that matter, but apparently, it knew the subtle art of backtalk, all nonsense — not worthy of typing  — nothing but idioms and inferior malarkey.

She was the first spa'pe I'd seen since getting shafted on this backwater moon — no fault of my own, mind you, I always wanted to fester among a bunch of moonstruck grifters in a subterranean labyrinth, only seeing sunlight once every six or seven years — paradise really, if you're a mole or a cetacean. She grinned wide, her dentist must be very proud, and bobbed her undersized head like any good troglodyte would do. What was I dealing with here, an animal uprising? A future kangaroo court, literally run by kangaroos; with an elephant bailiff and some shiesty zebra lawyer? The zoo belonged on Earth, not out here in the sticks!

"Brother Barbosa?" her mouth gurgled.

"Yeah, who's asking?"

She schmoozed me with some dry nonsense about a fancy piece of paper — a bunch of babel really. "…when was the last Silent Day?"

"Ask an android — I don't have that many phalanges." What an astonishing and unexpected rebuttal I slapped her with, one of my best. She postulated nervously via that cybernetic doohicky that orbited her — maybe she'd nominate me for an award for oratory excellence — I certainly deserve it.

She mumbled about some nonsense, political jargon and procedures — some wild accusations too — but I'd heard enough, the waves of planetary freedom were parting for me, crashing against the breakwater of my patience and a grumbling stomach that ached for a little nosh and a swig of stout. "Go climb a tree, plenty of fronds there. Bananas!" I went off to better things, tasks worthy of grand titles and decorative labels that the universe will surely remember me by — they'll name a beer after me in the least, just for dealing with this primitive, barely bipedal academic: Barbosa's Baboon Best, spiced with an abundance of gruit, consumptive fortitude and plenty of vigor.

•   •   •

My first encounter with Barbosa the 9^th, the emissary for the Savants on Ira, was problematic at best — he didn’t take my work seriously, made several rude comments about my nature as a biologically enhanced chimpanzee, and dismissed my intentions as nonsensical. No wonder the Brotherhood stuck him out here, so far from the Core. After a brief exchange and an attempt to explain the details of the experiment, he abandoned me at the landing bay with only my sentinel for company.

“Useless,” Archibald noted, circling me. “He’ll hinder your progress.”

“More likely he’ll be too inebriated to interfere.”

“He’s a Savant; they get in the middle of things. You’ll need his approval to access classified Core records from Solitarium’s database.”

I didn’t see any other sp’apes in the landing bay, or any other sentinels, but I felt secure with Archibald at my side; we received a lot of strange looks. There was no point in waiting around, so we boarded a rail-bus, then secured our residence for the duration of our stay. The pod was rectangular with spartan furnishings — a sliver of a bed, a single porthole window to view the endless storms outside and a number of foldout devices for my physical needs — home for the next seven years, a typical apartment for long term tourists seeking to experience the Silent Day and the beauty of the Blooming that would come with it — then the horrors and destruction of it’s aftermath.

•   •   •

Information; she kept wanting it, interfering with my calculations, my daily rituals, my love of lox, and jinxing my creative process. What did she think I was, a librarian? I'm a Savant, goddamit, your standard order of scholars and wisenheimers, but that's just a front — a deception, humbuggery to hide what I'm really up to, the nature of which would infuriate my superiors if they ever got wind of my intentions: writing the great universal novel, then making them foot the bill for whatever expenses that I damn well come up with. I'm no amateur, mind you, no weekend warrior of the written word — I was born on bookshelf between a waterlogged copy of the Catcher in the Rye and a Thesaurus. I write the way the Old Folks did it, goddamit, the right way — on a fucking typewriter, as God intended. But Barbosa, or whatever these schmucks call here you on Water Planet, aren't you here to yada yada yada? Yes, and no  — it doesn't matter — the book and words in it are what's important to me. Fuck the Core, the Fringer's abandoned the universe and left us with a bunch of over-sized bones and otiose contraptions — I do what needs to be done for the betterment of the entire human race, sp'apes included I suppose: I write.

Don't get me wrong, I have great respect for the unstoppable power of Mother Nature, and her bubbe, Quantum Physics, but nothing terrifies me more than what lingers in the bottomless depths of Seas of Ira, save for blackout poetry, what a fetid concept. If you think blue whales are massive, think again: bigger things, with more teeth, gallbladders and syllables than an English major's graduate thesis lurk within depths, just waiting for the cyclones to subside, when at long last the sunlight cleaves through the clouds as the foliage finally flowers  — when they feed. The sort of Beasts of the Sea that could devour a leviathan whole, and would rightfully cause a severe case of hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia, especially when you've witnessed such a scourge with your own two, inebriated eyes. Call me crazy, but on planet covered in endless oceans dropping seven kilometers deep, the abyss really does stare back into you — into the core of your soul.

I hate being interrupted, whether I'm busy or not — like when I'm shpatziring by a bar, stuttering soliloquies in an attempt to get some seaside floozy to come to bed with me.

"Barbosa, I thought you said your name was Herschel?"

"What? No," I was flummoxed, and the floozy was onto me — did she see through my clever disguise now that chimp was confronting me, the eccentric editor from some off-world publication firm, eager to read any old manuscript that somehow avoided the slush-pile, and at a dive bar in the Low Quarter of all places, where she just happened to meet me. Yes, I'd be happy to read that book of poetry she'd been working on for the last two weeks, something clearly worthy of immediate publication — so long as I get to take her clothes off.

The sp'ape spat another insult, or maybe a question, it's hard to tell with their rambling ilk. She'd come far, dug deep, gone to ground — hell, she tracked me down and learned my given name, then used it against me  — and here she was, interrupting my day like she did on the nudiustertian eve.

"Who's the sp'ape?" the floozy asked.

"Her? She's nobody — a stalker. She's after my money, I've got lots of it!" I needed every advantage I could get to wiggle into this woman's undergarments — I'd play the prey, being hunted for once, if it got me what I wanted.

She slapped me and that was that.

"You've ruined me, monkey," I cursed, turning to my foe and finishing my drink.

Yada yada yada — more words and sentences — a demand for answers, something about competence, then an all out attack on my character — how dare that chimpan-bitch. The smokey taste of my late afternoon scotch was still sharp on my tongue, so I did what any good standing man of unspeakable character would do — I ran away and came up with a new alias.

•   •   •

“Zimmerman,” Dr. Charm, a local xeno-biologist, informed me. She was an older woman, dressed well, as a fellow academic — thin with shoulder length graying hair. “Hans Zimmerman — This Savant of yours is a fraud.”

An image of the man, short and oddly dressed, his eyes masked behind black goggles, appeared in the holo. It’s difficult for me to differentiate between humans sometimes, but I could pick him out in a crowd, especially with that swaying gait of his.

“I’ve been here for months; every time I request information from him on the Believer and the unique biology of this planet, he’s avoided me  — one time he pointed past me screaming about a fire, then slipped into a crowd. I’m hoping you will be more helpful.”

Archibald lay at my feet, imitating the purring sound of actual cat.

“I’m glad you came to me — Barbosa has a reputation with the university, particularly the writing department — he’s banned from stepping foot on campus grounds.”

“Are there any other Savants on this planet?” I asked, “I need someone who can access secure information from the Core database.”

She sighed. “No, thus his reputation, and we have filed complaints about him on multiple occasions, but he’s managed to avoid any sort of reprimands, as far as I’m aware.”

“What can you tell me about Ira’s biome, Dr. Charm.”

“Well, for starters, there are actually three biospheres here, unlike any other known planet: 70% are unique to Ira, including nearly all the sea-life and the mega-fronds, but roughly 25% of the life-forms here on Solitarium, and the smaller islands, are evolved from Fringer fauna, from whatever planet they originated on.”

“And the rest?” I asked.

She laughed. “Earth, counting us, a variety of house pets, and countless micro-organisms that have expanded into the wilderness since humanity discovered this planet. Three biospheres, more or less, which after a period of intensely chaotic interactions now reside together in harmony.”

“Is the Believer part of the native biome?” I asked.

“We have no way of being certain, as we have no genetic information on it. Anything that gets too close to it is disintegrated. During the Blooming, however, the quantum field around it weakens, and the Believer acts in a more responsive manner than normal until the Blooming ends.”

I scanned through thousands of images of it, and numerous recordings. It resembles a praying mantis, but with an elongated, C-shaped head ending with a bulbous organ, and six weirdly backward arms. I spent weeks shifting through data that detailed the Believer’s path around the island, it’s anatomy and analyzed decades worth of measurements on its quantum field.

“The early colonists called it the Believer because it looks like it’s praying, for all we know it could be.”

“What do you think the it is?” I asked.

“An enigma,” she replied. “All our evidence says that it’s been slowly crawling around Solitarium for almost half a billion years in a roughly oval shaped pattern, incredibly slowly — a centimeter a year at most — with a clear trail of radiation marking where it’s been.”

“Has anyone ever went up to it and asked where it came from?”

Dr. Charm laughed. “Yes, but if it answers, there’s no way to tell: they vanish without a trace.”

“I guess there’s a first time for everything.”

•   •   •

She's ruined me — that evil, scheming fur-ball wench. She found my weak spot, stabbed deep and twisted the knife — my paycheck. That psychopathic savage reported my actions to my superiors and this time they actually did something about it, leaving me high and dry and unable to spend other people's money. What was I going to do, find a job? Teach? Good heavens, the thought alone fills me with dread — Savant's don't exist to do anything useful, we're natural manipulators, we're—

Oh, God — I see it now, I've become the thing I hate the most. I've literally been signing checks for thirty years and doing nothing of value but writing banal reports on the native environment, nearly all of it plagiarized from the local university. I'm probably lucky that none of my superiors caught wind of it all until now — yes, there's my book too, but that's beyond value — I've unintentionally become the most heinous variety of creature ever known within the entire universe: a goddamn bureaucrat — not a legitimate one mind you, I don't do a damn thing the Brotherhood tells me to do, but technically speaking, the Fraternal Order of Savants is not just a social club, but a society of federal employees — oy vey, iz mir. There was only one way to end this conflict of interest, to bring justice to the universe, and to restore my reliance on my monthly stipend: I would actually have to help that insolent chimp, then convince her to recount her statement.

"Okay, you called my bluff — I'm out of cards — so sue me."

She retorted, I rebutted, with a pinch of salt for good measure — but now, none of my usual schmegegge was working.

"You're a Savant — tell me what you know about the Believer and it's connection to the Blooming."

"The Believer — god's balls, it's death incarnate — you wanna stroll up to that abomination and shake it's hands, by all means — really, go brave the storms; do it right now — it'll make my day, it'll get rid of you — no offense, but you smell, and I don't like you."

"I don't care for you either, Mr. Zimmerman."

"Barbosa, Herschel Zimmerman's rocket crashed into a black hole — the galaxy's a nasty place you know."

"Solitarium's records state your first name is Hans."

"That's bupkis, some sort of cheap mix-up, a charade!" damn her, she was probing further, like some sort of drugged up proctologist, probably working for some simian overlord, a greater ape than King Kong — Dear God, that was on an island too! Whatever, I needed to work on my novel and get free money to buy unlimited quantities of alcohol while doing it, and this dirty marmoset was in my way. "Fine, whatever — you got me, I'm Zim, or Hans or whatever, just don't call me late for dinner. Where do we start?"

•   •   •

“Your access codes to Solarium’s mainframe database are suspended,” I informed him.

“Inconceivable,” he replied, sniffing the air inexplicably.

“However, Dr. Charm at the University said you were,” I paused, “apparently an expert on the subject of the Believer — you developed a lot of images and video of it, even during the worst of the storms.”

“Half true, I paid some dumb schmucks do go out in the rain for me. The real story, heaven forbid, is the story itself.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Archibald circled him cautiously.

“Keep that cybernetic flee-bag away from me,” the Savant jumped and spun around. “Hiss, I say — a hiss onto you!”

“Schemer,” Archibald muttered.

“I’ll show you a scheme, you lizard-loving robot — I’m onto you!”

“The story?” I asked, “what do you mean?”

“Mean? Why, I’ve been downright lovely, if you ask me — unless you talking about this rusting clanker! Oh, the story,” he lit a small white stick with a little metal box, which gave off a horrible smell and a lot of smoke. “The story is my novel — the greatest ever told.”

“What?”

“What, what? Seriously, the information you need, to get me off the hook and recount that rubbish you reported to my superiors — is all in my book, er, the notes for my book — what the Hell do you think I’ve been writing about all these years, a whale tale? No, that’s been done to death — I’m writing about the goddamn Believer, and for fuck’s sake, if you wanna proof read the thing, which could take months, years maybe, then we better get started — I could use a good editor.”

•   •   •

I brought her home, she fussed at the state of my library, plus the loo — okay, I'll admit it, I'm a slob, and a schlemiel in every sense of the word, but as a yid on the run and low on funds, I damn well felt I had the right to be.

"Far too many of your stories about you and the Believer going on awkward adventurers together," she noted, rummaging hopelessly through my backlog.

"No shit, I'm a novelist — thirty years of rewrites and side stories can lead to pandemonium, the mind wanders at times — eventually you strike gold, but the rest is dirt. Don't read from the box marked with three X's, it's filthy."

She was growing on me, I'll admit it — like a fungus, or a wart, not the sort of growth you see a doctor about, more the kind you hide with a heavy dose of shame, then chased with a stiff drink. I've never owned a pet, but at least she came toilet trained.

Paper, it was everywhere — books too, and screens by the baker's dozen. She went nuts, scoffed at my novelette about underwater jungles, laughed and smacked her lips when she stumbled across my memoir, or its sequel for that matter — standard fiction really, plus at least three pissed stained journals — which made her hoot like her arboreal ancestors. I will admit, it was nice to finally have an audience; I had resigned to have my genius discovered only after my demise — possibly from liver failure, or more likely drowning.

•   •   •

It would have been easier if Barbosa wasn’t so unbelievably disorganized, or so fond of alcoholic beverages and less of an incessant flibbertigibbet, but some trees can’t be trimmed. There were so many piles of papers, old notebooks, digital folders filled with manuscripts — mostly unfinished and much of it mindless dribble, but some of it — detailed observations on the Believer’s most minute movements, deeply thought out concepts, hundreds of them, on what it could be thinking and where it may have come from — only an individual devoted to imagining impossible worlds could conceive of so many potential origins of such a creature — and how it could have evolved.

One manuscript in particular caught my attention: an untitled series of theories on the nature of the Blooming and the possibility that the Believer itself was causing the Silent Days, possibly intentionally controlling much of the native environment on the island, luring the giant hexapi toward Solitarium, with the intention of having them attempt to eat the Believer, only to have their tendrils obliterated by it. Of course, all notable scientific journals published from the university on such a connection rejected any ideas like it based on an absolute lack of proof, and the irrefutable evidence that the primary biosphere on Ira predated any known trace of the Believer’s presence by two billion years.

“That’s bupkis,” he spat.

“You wrote it.”

“Thirteen years ago,” he lit yet another cigarette — disgusting things. “Idiotic rantings from an antediluvian age.”

“Cancer,” Archibald whispered.

Barbosa kicked toward him. “Blender, the perfect place for a cat — even a metal one.”

“What if you were right though? What if the Believer is using the hexapi to feed itself with its quantum field — using the frond fruit as bait to lure them in.”

He inhaled, then blew smoke into an air scrubber vent. “Then this is his island, his planet — what are we then?”

“Insects,” I replied.

He laughed, took a long drink from a dark bottle, swayed oddly, then sprung to his feet. “Bumble bees, buzzing about — how annoying.”

•   •   •

Three years of cyclones later and the sun came out. The island quieted, oceans calmed to a smooth sway and just a quickly the fronds engorged and blossomed — everywhere all at once. I've witnessed eight prior Bloomings, but the chimp — Leaf, and that insufferable quadruped of hers, didn't see it coming — no one ever does.

"Outside — get a move on it — get that ferric feline of yours and get busy!" and off we went.

Strange thoughts drip into your mind just before slumber — the drizzle of dreaming — then suddenly the Sandman comes and the world is all color and glory. Outside of the labyrinths the day shimmered, the skies cleared, and everywhere you could see fronds unfolded with golden globes of fruit — billions of them. People paused their daily grind, put down their sporks and chop-sticks, they even stopped screwing to roll over and look out the window. Vaults and airlocks parted, fresh air blasted in, the tang of the sea with it, pouring into the halls of each city, lugging in the scent of spring and the taste of sustenance.

Sky blue, then rolling thickets of banana yellow, great gibbous mammary growths of ruby red and vines of vivid purple were painted across the horizon, with the distant reaches rimmed by dark gray bands of the reseeding storms — artists rushed into the open wilds with their easels and brushes for the brief chance to paint a glimpse of the occasion; barefoot lolligaggers dismissed their usual misbehavior for outdoor frolicking like mythical fey in the short, safe window of peace within the grandeur of gloss  — while the machinations of farming rolled out to harvest as much of the precious eatable and fermentable fruit that they could possibly collected — and we followed them.

The frond fruit tastes like honey and mango with a hint of coconut, and the sting of nutmeg — I ate my fill, Leaf did as well, as we descended to the hillside where the Believer was lurking, along with hundreds of pilgrims.

Its massive thorax bowed on the ground, its weight distributed by a pair of forelegs and its hulking hind-limbs, the other four arms laying limp and useless at its sides. Its head was arched upward, turned leeward, as if it were smelling the sea. It had no obvious eyes, but it did have a mouth, small and rounded at the bottom of the tube that was generally considered to be its head, along with a prehensile tongue. Its insect-like abdomen rose above and behind it, in two segments, with its hindquarters containing a erect bulb of bloody meat — possibly some sort of reproductive organ with a tinge of blue at its finite tip, perfectly mismatched with the pewter and tan of the rest of the organism.

The crowd kept ten meters back, cooing and whispering, some bowing in crude imitations to the beast, speaking backward tongues and dancing gaily. A small gaggle sobbed for what likely was the first suicidal attempt to approach it for the season.

"There she blows," my sarcasm spat, but my cigarette did all the real talking.

•   •   •

We made a counter-clockwise circle around it, examining its form in every detail, as the creature slowly angled its head, blindly following us.

“Detection,” Archibald replied. The crowds muttered as we stopped in an opposing position from the direction that the Believer’s head was turned, and we waited to see if it would maneuver to face us — it took an hour, but as predicted it loomed in on us, and shifted its weight, rising a little in height. The crowd audibly gasped, as threads of colors flexed and folded across its body.

“Baloney!” Barbosa proclaimed.

“No,” I noted, “the Proximity Blades housed within Archibald’s frame are having an effect on it; I think it detects them.”

“Blades?” Barbosa replied, “Fringer weapons are rare as owls teeth — how many of those contraptions are in there?”

“Archibald, unfold,” I stated.

My sentinel’s frame opened, revealing a series of black rectangular shafts, six total, three on each side, mounted by their hilts within his machinery.

The Believer’s color shifted to bands of green and orange with spots of dark blue, not unlike an octopus mimicking a new environment.

“That’s fresh,” Barbosa noted, then stepped back, discarding his cigarette.

“It believes!” someone shouted, “It’s awakening!”

“Communication,” Archibald replied, as the Believer’s exoskeleton flashed in rhythmic patterns.

“Can you simulate it?” I asked.

“Yes, this was an assumed possibility — chromatic signaling, but these patterns are far more complex than any cataloged organism from the database can produce.”

“Tell us when you can understand any of it.”

“Poppycock,” Barbosa spat, “Hellfire and damnation — this behemoth could destroy us all!”

The patterns stretched and flaunted, and the Believer slowly turned its body further toward my sentinel. Archibald copied the colors and complex patterns across its carapace, and aligned the six Proximity Blades together, points first, toward an empty space — a dull throb, an ice-pick headache, stabbed into my skull at that moment, and faint strands of light swam and twirled around the two of them.

“Ask it where it came from and what it’s purpose is?” I asked.

Barbosa withdrew, as Archibald glistened.

“Penance,” Archibald replied, “or captive — the exact meaning is unclear as I only have a rudimentary vocabulary regarding its chromatic shifts.”

“It’s a prisoner?”

“Or it’s a warden,” Barbosa hissed, “keeper of the hexapi, inmates from across the gulf of entropy!”

“Ask it what happened to the Fringers — we know they came to Ira eons before we colonized it.”

The spectrum of light danced and tangled in wiry bands within the void between us, as folds within its quantum field flashed brighter across the visual spectrum.

“It’s annoyed,” Archibald stated. “It’s chromatic fluctuations are increasing—”

One moment the Believer stood firm, then without any trace of movement it shifted its entire body over and crushed Archibald under its thorax, impaling my sentinel with two of its arms — Barbosa grabbed my wrist, yanking me away, forcing me into a rolling tumble. I looked up and watched as hallucinatory waves of color washed over him.

“Shenanigans,” he said, then faded into the brilliance of the quantum field — the crowd fleeing in panic.

Archibald peered at me from under the Believer’s bulk, angling the six Proximity Blades upward, with the rainbow hues of the quantum field deflected beyond it, shielding him from its effects.

“It says,” he began, as the folds of reality around him bent inward, “God laughs.”

The blades bent and splintered, shattering to a dust of a hundred elements, then a bright blast flared so luminously that my eyes burned black. If not for the jagged bluffs where Barbosa discarded me, I would have been annihilated with most of the crowd and the fronds around it.

•   •   •

A beautiful silence, then absolute cacophony — I was a man, now I'm a butterfly, figuratively speaking of course. I felt the goddamn fields burn through me, right down to my quarks and neutrons, then I transmigrated into another realm of possibilities.

"Rain for mega-fronds, their roots dig deep," my soul whispered, as my consciousness expanded to understand previously unimaginable complex dimensions. The Believer was a dejected nihilist, some alien schmuck left to die on a worthless planet that God forgot about, with only the hexapi to sedate it when its three stomachs rumbled loud enough. And they did come, as always, by the hundreds of thousands, reaching their inexplicably long coils out over the cliffs to feast on the fruit of the fronds, shredding the beauty of Solitarium's brief tranquility to utter ruin once more. Tendrils blindly grasped at the Believer, as always, then blinked out of existence, as they always did. Nothing on Earth compares to the uber-fauna from the bleak crevices of Ira, nor ever will. Black tentacles, darker than quintessence, stretching miles out from the shores of the island, feasting on the smorgasbord of life within the interior. Then the winds resumed, the rain pranced, as the aroma of petrichor enticed the ire of Ira's hateful weather once more.

How can I describe the multi-dimensional Oylem-Habeh where the Believer's quantum fuckery flicked me off to, a place beyond good and evil at the end of all things? Seven words: spongy voids of shaggy ribbons in ultraviolet.

©2026 by Andrew James Woodyard. All rights reserved. May not be used for A.I. training.