Trees abound here. Maples with wine-red leaves, aspens in gold and green, deep blue-green spruce and Christmas-green douglas-firs and sugi-cedars. Incongruously, there are also tropical hardwoods around: teak, narra, mahogany. You'd think you were in some magical forest somewhere on an alternate Earth, but the unceasing blue sky with no direct sun, and so many well manicured, numbered, and lit paths and occasional hovering interpretive markers remind the viewer that this is not natural at all, but the Arboretum in the Sky, the great botanical garden that fills a full floor of New Yamato.
Leaning against an ash tree is a lithe young woman, her long blonde hair streaked with green. She has a folded up blue and yellow garment tucked under one arm, but is herself dressed in much more utilitarian garb, khaki overall shorts over a pink crop top, her hands covered in gardening gloves, one holding a trowel covered in dark soil, the other an indeterminate sapling ready to be replanted, looking incongruously healthy despite being uprooted, as if being in perfect health from the woman's touch. Her eyes are deep emerald green, and skin pale but kissed by the slightest bit of sun.
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Isn't it a bit personal and less than professional to start your interviews with your girlfriend, dear?
I guess we'll start from the beginning, then!
My Yamato name probably sounds weird, it's Susama, with the characters for "uncanny" and "horse". But my true-name is Yggdrasill Johansson. Okay, maybe that seems a bit weird too, but it makes more sense when you're born into a family of Askafroa. In the old speech, that means "wife of the ash tree"; think of us like dryads.
What am I doing in space? Well, it may come as a shock to you but we tree-folk can sometimes have wanderlust too! We may prefer to be near our trees, but we don't tree if we're away from them. Though we do like to bring our trees along with us, this is a daughter sapling of my tree right here, and I brought her onboard as a sprig when I first came here, before the Arboretum in the Sky was even a dream.
I actually came here as a mechanic for the water maintenance systems. I had learned hydraulic engineering back in Uppsala, and found it dovetailed well with my druidic skills. After several tours around the world with irrigation systems, like in Ak-chin, Babylon, and Dunhuang, I was recruited to come to New Yamato, where we could pioneer a truly enclosed system, like the pre-Ascension works near Tucson or the more recent arcologies in some urban areas since then. And of course, we just end up teleporting stuff in all the time, so it isn't realy enclosed at all, so I started thinking about how I missed being around forests, and looked at our energy surplus, and thought, maybe we could build our own little biosphere here.
The administration told me that was exactly the idea they were looking for, and gave me a whole floor to play with! Between the different ecosystems, and of course the extradimensional space, we would qualify as the largest arboretum on Earth, if we were, of course, actually on Earth! Getting the right amount of light in here is tricky though, had to work with some evokers and enchanters to get that right. And then it was a matter of sourcing the plants. It was easy enough to teleport some bits and bobs from Padjelanta and the Salish forests and then folks started to really pitch in and I was getting really random submissions for a while, and I'm very glad my druidic powers allow me to pinpoint the species and provenance of everything in here, down to the newest fruiting mushroom, or I'd have been so overwhelmed. And this is a constantly work in progress and I shift things all the time; I hear some folks call this "the Lost Woods" because they keep relying on trees as landmarks when I keep warning people that the landscape apart from the set paths is subject to change at all times!
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It's not like I'm intentionally pranking people or being mean, it's just hard to make up my mind where anything belongs, especially with so many new trees to plant and new species to catalog!
And then one day, while heading through the shopping street to the commissary, I see all these tropical fruits I've never seen before, because I never made it to Southeast Asia with my job, you know. And I thought those fruits were so beautiful, and then I saw something even more beautiful than that, and my family told me, if I ever saw anything that was more beautiful to me than any member of the plant kingdom, that this was the moment an Askafroa falls in love.
Yeah, I'm blushing. No, *you're* blushing!
Look, I'm not blind or deaf. I know what happens in my arboretum. *Everything* that happens there. I warn people the arboretum is under constant surveillance so everyone has to know every makeout session or tryst has ... an audience? You don't need to talk to trees to know when people are sharing water under your roof. That's just human nature at work. I've even shifted the forest a few times to keep folks "private". I don't mind doing that. People are pretty too.
But ... Estrella isn't just "people" to me. We bonded over our love of plant life but she sees things from such an interesting perspective, that painter's eye I've heard about. And ... I guess I came to see her the way she sees the world.
So I'm starting to work on a little Camiguin in my arboretum, with the seeds from the very first fruits she sold me. Some lanzones, some jackfruit, some mangos, a little imported volcanic soil from that island of fire. To match with my little Padjelanta. What was once a world away, now just an arm's reach.
Just like us.
That's actually why I agreed to be the first interview, because I wanted to take a moment here.
Six months ago, you came onto the station and opened my world to a new possibility. And you came to my arboretum and saw and understood the beauty and heart of my mission. I know better than to ask you to be my one and only, any more than you expect me to be faithful to you alone, but I still want you to share your path with me all the same, if you would have me as your travel companion.
Estrella, will you marry me anyway?
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Despite being put thoroughly on the spot, the author did in fact say yes, emphatically, or she would not have published this article; the author is also now the bearer of a twining ash-branch ring of lunar silver.
(I'm not going to promise not to get personally entangled with future interviewees, but this won't be normal, okay?)