Not your Grandfather's Lorax
By Chronic Guardian
Written for Twelve Shots of Summer Series 9, Week 1. "Believe it!" and "Hidden in Leaves"
"I wouldn't do that if I were you."
Doctor Josie Barnum looked up from her survey equipment and frowned at the visitor. "Excuse me?"
The stowaway, a man in a brown trench coat and blue tweed suit, regarded her with an owlish glare from beneath a wild swoosh of brown hair. "You were about to recommend this planet to your client," he went on, hands stuck in his pockets, "for the use of fresh page mulch. Funny stuff, that: pages. You go and invent digital readers so you don't have to deal with the stuff and then keep coming back to it every few centuries. Don't get me wrong, it's a marvelous invention when everyone wants to rewrite history so they're the heroes, but you can't enjoy a good read when you can't breathe. There comes a point where it's just not worth it to cut down another tree."
Josie cocked an eyebrow and lowered her data pad. "You're worried about climate crisis on an uninhabited forest world?"
"Wellll…" The man sucked in a breath and looked away. "More just incidental food for thought, really. You cut this one down and we'll regret it a lot more than anything on this planet. Vashta Nerada don't regret, but they do get very angry." He twitched and scratched at the back of his neck, continuing on in a mutter. "Angry… hostile? No, there's a better word for it… Aggressive and angry, vengeful and hostile..."
"The what?"
"Vashta Nerada," he repeated. "Think microscopic piranhas swarming through the air. Not much harm on their own, but you get enough of them together and they prove a threat is a threat, no matter how small."
"Listen, I don't know who you are—"
"I'm the Doctor," he cut in, still fixing his eyes on the nearest tree as he unsuccessfully reviewed his mental dictionary.
"You're a doctor," Josie corrected lightly, reactivating her equipment. From what she saw in the readings before the egomaniac had interrupted her, it would produce a decent amount of the materials she'd been queried to collect. "And not one employed by the Lux family to be on this expedition. Who are you really?"
"I am someone very clever you don't want to mess with. Now let's pack those bags and tell them all we didn't find what we're looking for, no trees fit for print."
Josie bit her lip and nodded to herself as she sized him up. "You're a maroon," she concluded. "You're from that flight that disappeared here years back. Were you their field scientist?"
"Impossible."
The new voice entering the conversation, low and grizzled, belonged to John Taft, captain of the expedition ship that had brought Josie and her crew to the forested wilds of DW-3929. He was a veteran of the expansion voyages and had come back stern, superstitious, and missing his right eye. The remaining left eye was trained wide on the mad man Josie had been negotiating with.
"The last vessel what passed this way crashed with no survivors," the captain went on, sidling his way up to Josie without breaking contact on their strange visitor. "I surveyed the site myself. No, Dr. Barnum, what we have here is a second coming."
"A second what?" For once, the mystery man seemed taken off guard. "I'm sorry, have we met, sir?"
"The second coming of the great prophet. His writings were eradicated by rival groups warring through the twenty-first century, but some copies survived in underground children's libraries. It wasn't until recently his following saw a revival."
The man from the forest gave Captain Taft a hard stare as if seriously considering the story before again looking for his shadow piranhas around the trees. "Yeah, sorry, I think you might have me confused for someone else. Not much of an author, me. Or a cult leader, for that matter."
"Spare me the modesty," Taft rumbled, "you are him come again: the Doctor of doctors, hero of children and champion of the strange and unusual."
"Okay, well, that sounds more to the bill—"
"You are Doctor Seuss."
The forest fell silent. Josie looked between the two men, the Captain standing completely serious while the stranger allowed his jaw to drop while his eyebrows knit.
"You come again to warn us," Taft continued after a very long pause, during which the other man tried and failed to form words. "The Lux family will blindly burn through this world's resources once they find out how many pages they can produce from just one tree. Like the tragic Onceler before them, they will not see until it is too late."
"Now hold on," Josie protested. "We weren't hired to make that judgment, we were only hired to survey they planet."
"Josie," Taft said gravely, "He speaks for the trees, we can't interfere."
"No, you most certainly can't," the man in the trench coat agreed quickly, finally catching his footing again. "The trees would like to not be made into books today, so I'm afraid I'm just going to have to wave you along. Off we go! Alons-y!"
"But—!"
"No buts, Dr. Barnum," the Captain said, taking her arm, "He meant what he said and he said what he meant, the Doctor is faithful, one-hundred percent."
The Doctor waited until he could confirm all targets had returned to the ship and were not infected with Vashta Nerada before returning himself to his TARDIS and collapsing into a chair.
He didn't stay there for long, only enough to catch his breath before he got up again and started charting a course for the 21st century. Whoever this Seuss fellow was, he must have slipped through the cracks. Still, he deserved some thanks for averting a crisis, no matter how tangentially.
Fin
