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SUMMARY: "A World for Georgiana" is set far in the future when sentient plants inhabit the Earth.

A World for Georgiana

by
Vasilis Afxentiou




She soon felt much better. Sunny thoughts splintered the bizarre apparitions that only a while ago she thrashed at trying to fend off.
She leaned her head back now and stretched her swan-like neck soaking up the titillating humus of the pool. Her body felt warm and rich. The phantoms of the dream ebbed with the flow of dawn.
Somba Evans did not know about it, that it was the same dream every time: short and tall scuffed pylons that extruded from the soil with swelling tops, bipeds that ingested solids...
She was fully awake when Somba rose, dressed, and went outside to farm the plots, collect the sap and cover up the cells. It was the end of perihelion, but daylight was still too harsh for the sensitive neurophyte cells.
Georgiana drew herself out of the pool and settled on its pulpy edge. She leaned over her reflection and tidied the dripping, shoulder-length strands of black, serpentine hair. The eyes, she regarded, had not tinted notablely. Somba's irides were more perky. They gleamed emeralds in the morning, and at dusk acquiesced to pool-green. How lucky, a mate with such innovative eyes. Yet, tales were around of blue, even brown eyes.
She perused over her cheeks, a smidgen of azure upon pallid green cheekbones. The fine contours of her dainty nose accentuated the flare of the nostrils. Below these, two gossamer-thin ridges led to a delicate upper lip and a slightly fuller lower one. Her chin jutted petite, recherche.
A silly notion piqued her. She brought her little finger up and sucked and feigned the chewing motion in her dream. A kindling charge swirled up her spine. The cheeks blushed cyan and the plumb line of down below her navel-less tummy tingled.
"Oh, Green--!" she gasped.
Chagrined she sprang up and donned her one piece cellular suit. She wandered into the laboratory disturbed by her frivolous experimenting.
When Somba came back there was the smell of sap dew in his suit. He handed her the vessel of chloroplasma and newcells.
"How did you sleep?" he asked.
She took it, and turned away. She did not want him to see her preoccupied, "Very well," she said.
Somba then ambled to the ancient hard-stuff counter and sat on an equally old and scarred stool. He commenced checking the tendrils leading to the terminal before him. Georgiana watched as his elegant hands gently rippled over them, running the length of the pasty-green synapses down to the half-buried cell beneath the counter. He patted the neurophyte and it noticeably bloated to his touch.
"Things look fine on our side," he said.
She responded with a wide grin exposing tender, baby gums.
"You've got the cutest smile in all of Cloverfarm," he said, then switched the terminal on.
The turtle-sized cell below gave a visible kick and burrowed deeper into the soil by flattening its hump allowing dirt around it to fall and cover it completely. Georgiana could picture the cell's fibrous piths boring deeper into the earth, absorbing minerals and converting their neutral charges into ionized elements by stripping electrons and depositing them on the complex root-grid.