The Fangs of the Trees by Robert Silverberg

From the plantation house atop the gray, needle-sharp spire of Dolan's Hill, Zen Holbrook could see everything that mattered: the groves of juice-trees in the broad valley, the quick rushing stream where his niece Naomi liked to bathe, the wide, sluggish lake beyond. He could also see the zone of suspected infection in Sector C at the north end of the valley, where—or was it just his imagination?—the lustrous blue leaves of the juice-trees already seemed flecked with the orange of the rust disease.
If his world started to end, that was where the end would start.
He stood by the clear curved window of the info center at the top of the house. It was early morning; two pale moons still hung in a dawn-streaked sky, but the sun was coming up out of the hill country. Naomi was already up and out, cavorting in the stream. Before Holbrook left the house each morning, he ran a check on the whole plantation. Scanners and sensors offered him remote pickups from every key point out there. Hunching forward, Holbrook ran thick-fingered hands over the command nodes and made the relay screens flanking the window light up. He owned forty thousand acres of juice-trees—a fortune in juice, though his own equity was small and the notes he had given were immense. His kingdom. His empire. He scanned Sector C, his favorite. Yes. The screen showed long rows of trees, fifty feet high, shifting their ropy limbs restlessly. This was the endangered zone, the threatened sector. Holbrook peered intently at the leaves of the trees. Going rusty yet? The lab reports would come in a little later. He studied the trees, saw the gleam of their eyes, the sheen of their fangs. Some good trees in that sector. Alert, keen, good producers.
His pet trees. He liked to play a little game with himself, pretending the trees had personalities, names, identities. It didn't take much pretending.
Holbrook turned on the audio. "Morning, Caesar," he said. "Alcibiades. Hector. Good morning, Plato."
The trees knew their names. In response to his greeting their limbs swayed as though a gale were sweeping through the grove. Holbrook saw the fruit, almost ripe, long and swollen and heavy with the hallucinogenic juice. The eyes of the trees—glittering scaly plates embedded in crisscrossing rows on their trunks—flickered and turned, searching for him. "I'm not in the grove, Plato," Holbrook said. "I'm still in the plantation house. I'll be down soon. It's a gorgeous morning, isn't it?"
Out of the musty darkness at ground level came the long, raw pink snout of a juice-stealer, jutting uncertainly from a heap of cast-off leaves. In distaste Holbrook watched the audacious little rodent cross the floor of the grove in four quick bounds and leap onto Caesar's massive trunk, clambering cleverly upward between the big tree's eyes. Caesar's limbs fluttered angrily, but he could not locate the little pest. The juice-stealer vanished in the leaves and reappeared thirty feet higher, moving now in the level where Caesar carried his fruit. The beast's snout twitched. The juice-stealer reared back on its four hind limbs and got ready to suck eight dollars' worth of dreams from a nearly ripe fruit.
From Alcibiades' crown emerged the thin, sinuous serpentine form of a grasping tendril. Whiplash-fast it crossed the interval between Alcibiades and Caesar and snapped into place around the juice-stealer. The animal had time only to whimper in the first realization that it had been caught before the tendril choked the life from it. On a high arc the tendril returned to Alcibiades' crown; the gaping mouth of the tree came clearly into view as the leaves parted; the fangs parted; the tendril uncoiled; and the body of the juice-stealer dropped into the tree's maw. Alcibiades gave a wriggle of pleasure: a mincing, camping quiver of his leaves, arch and coy, self-congratulations for his quick reflexes, which had brought him so tasty a morsel. He was a clever tree, and a handsome one, and very pleased with himself. Forgivable vanity, Holbrook thought. You're a good tree, Alcibiades. All the trees in Sector C are good trees. What if you have the rust, Alcibiades? What becomes of your shining leaves and sleek limbs if I have to burn you out of the grove?
"Nice going," he said. "I like to see you wide awake like that."
Alcibiades went on wriggling. Socrates, four trees diagonally down the row, pulled his limbs tightly together in what
Holbrook knew was a gesture of displeasure, a grumpy harrumph. Not all the trees cared for Alcibiades' vanity, his preening, his quickness.
Suddenly Holbrook could not bear to watch Sector C any longer. He jammed down on the command nodes and switched to Sector K, the new grove, down at the southern end of the valley. The trees here had no names and would not get any. Holbrook had decided long ago that it was a silly affectation to regard the trees as though they were friends or pets. They were income-producing property. It was a mistake to get this involved with them—as he realized more clearly now that some of his oldest friends were threatened by the rust that was sweeping from world to world to blight the juice-tree plantations.
With more detachment he scanned Sector K.
Think of them as trees, he told himself. Not animals. Not people. Trees. Long tap roots, going sixty feet down into the chalky soil, pulling up nutrients. They cannot move from place to place. They photosynthesize. They blossom and are pollenated and produce bulging phallic fruit loaded with weird alkaloids that cast interesting shadows in the minds of men. Trees. Trees. Trees.
But they have eyes and teeth and mouths. They have prehensile limbs. They can think. They can react. They have souls. When pushed to it, they can cry out. They are adapted for preying on small animals. They digest meat. Some of them prefer lamb to beef. Some are thoughtful and solemn; some volatile and jumpy; some placid, almost bovine. Though each tree is bisexual, some are plainly male by personality, some female, some ambivalent. Souls. Personalities.
Trees.
The nameless trees of Sector K tempted him to commit the sin of involvement. That fat one could be Buddha, and there's Abe Lincoln, and you, you're William the Conqueror, and—
Trees.
He had made the effort and succeeded. Coolly he surveyed the grove, making sure there had been no damage during the night from prowling beasts, checking on the ripening fruit, reading the info that came from the sap sensors, the monitors that watched sugar levels, fermentation stages, manganese intake, all the intricately balanced life processes on which the output of the plantation depended. Holbrook handled practically everything himself. He had a staff of three human overseers and three dozen robots; the rest was done by telemetry, and usually all went smoothly. Usually. Properly guarded, coddled, and nourished, the trees produced their fruit three seasons a year; Holbrook marketed the goods at the pickup station near the coastal spaceport, where the juice was processed and shipped to Earth. Holbrook had no part in that; he was simply a fruit producer. He had been here ten years and had no plans for doing anything else. It was a quiet life, a lonely life, but it was the life he had chosen.
He swung the scanners from sector to sector, until he had assured himself that all was well throughout the plantation. On his final swing he cut to the stream and caught Naomi just as she was coming out from her swim. She scrambled to a rocky ledge overhanging the swirling water and shook out her long, straight, silken golden hair. Her back was to the scanner. With pleasure Holbrook watched the rippling of her slender muscles.   Her spine was clearly outlined by shadow; sunlight danced across the narrowness of her waist, the sudden flare of her hips, the taut mounds of her buttocks. She was fifteen; she was spending a month of her summer vacation with Uncle Zen; she was having the time of her life among the juice-trees. Her father was Holbrook's older brother. Holbrook had seen Naomi only twice before, once when she was a baby, once when she was about six. He had been a little uneasy about having her come here, since he knew nothing about children and in any case had no great hunger for company. But he had not refused his brother's request. Nor was she a child. She turned, now, and his screens gave him apple-round breasts and flat belly and deep-socketed navel and strong,  sleek thighs. Fifteen. No child. A woman. She was unself-conscious about her nudity, swimming like this every morning; she knew there were scanners. Holbrook was not easy about watching her. Should I look? Not really proper. The sight of her roiled him suspiciously. What the hell: I'm her uncle. A muscle twitched in his cheek. He told himself that the only emotions he felt when he saw her this way were pleasure and pride that his brother had created something so lovely. Only admiration; that was all he let himself feel.  She was tanned,  honey-colored, with islands of pink and gold. She seemed to give off a radiance more brilliant than that of the early sun. Holbrook clenched the command node. I've lived too long alone. My niece. My niece. Just a kid. Fifteen. Lovely. He closed his eyes, opened them slit-wide, chewed his lip. Come on, Naomi, cover yourself up!
When she put her shorts and halter on, it was like a solar eclipse. Holbrook cut off the info center and went down through the plantation house, grabbing a couple of breakfast capsules on his way. A gleaming little bug rolled from the garage; he jumped into it and rode out to give her her morning hello.
She was still near the stream, playing with a kitten-sized many-legged furry thing that was twined around an angular little shrub. "Look at this, Zen!" she called to him. "Is it a cat or a caterpillar?"
"Get away from it!" he yelled with such vehemence that she jumped back in shock. His needier was already out, and his finger on the firing stud. The small animal, unconcerned, continued to twist legs about branches.
Close against him, Naomi gripped his arm and said huskily, "Don't kill it, Zen. Is it dangerous?"
"I don't know."
"Please don't kill it."
"Rule of thumb on this planet," he said. "Anything with a backbone and more than a dozen legs is probably deadly."
"Probably!" Mockingly.
"We still don't know every animal here. That's one I've never seen before, Naomi."
"It's too cute to be deadly. Won't you put the needier away?"
He bolstered it and went close to the beast. No claws, small teeth, weak body. Bad signs: a critter like that had no visible means of support, so the odds were good that it hid a venomous sting in its furry little tail. Most of the various many-leggers here did. Holbrook snatched up a yard-long twig and tentatively poked it toward the animal's mid-section.
Fast response. A hiss and a snarl and the rear end coming around, wham! and a wicked-looking stinger slamming into the bark of the twig. When the tail pulled back, a few drops of reddish fluid trickled down the twig. Holbrook stepped away; the animal eyed him warily and seemed to be begging him to come within striking range.
"Cuddly," Holbrook said. "Cute. Naomi, don't you want to live to be sweet sixteen?"
She was standing there looking pale, shaken, almost stunned by the ferocity of the little beast's attack. "It seemed so gentle," she said. "Almost tame."
He turned the needier aperture to fine and gave the animal a quick burn through the head. It dropped from the shrub and curled up and did not move again. Naomi stood with her head averted. Holbrook let his arm slide about her shoulders.
"I'm sorry, honey," he said. "I didn't want to kill your little friend. But another minute and he'd have killed you. Count the legs when you play with wildlife here. I told you that. Count the legs."
She nodded. It would be a useful lesson for her in not trusting to appearances. Cuddly is as cuddly does. Holbrook scuffed at the coppery-green turf and thought for a moment about what it was like to be fifteen and awakening to the dirty truths of the universe. Very gently he said, "Let's go visit Plato, eh?"
Naomi brightened at once. The other side of being fifteen: you have resilience.
They parked the bug just outside the Sector C grove and went in on foot. The trees didn't like motorized vehicles moving among them; they were connected only a few inches below the loam of the grove floor by a carpet of mazy filaments that had some neurological function for them, and though the weight of a human didn't register on them, a bug riding down a grove would wrench a chorus of screams from the trees. Naomi went barefoot. Holbrook, beside her, wore knee boots. He felt impossibly big and lumpy when he was with her; he was hulking enough as it was, but her litheness made it worse by contrast.
She played his game with the trees. He had introduced her to all of them, and now she skipped along, giving her morning greeting to Alcibiades and Hector, to Seneca, to Henry the Eighth and Thomas Jefferson and King Tut. Naomi knew all the trees as well as he did, perhaps better; and they knew her. As she moved among them they rippled and twittered and groomed themselves, every one of them holding itself tall and arraying its limbs and branches in comely fashion; even dour old Socrates, lopsided and stumpy, seemed to be trying to show off. Naomi went to the big gray storage box in midgrove where the robots left chunks of meat each night, and hauled out some snacks for her pets. Cubes of red, raw flesh; she filled her arms with the bloody gobbets and danced gaily around the grove, tossing them to her favorites. Nymph in thy orisons, Holbrook thought. She flung the meat high, hard, vigorously. As it sailed through the air tendrils whipped out from one tree or another to seize it in midflight and stuff it down the waiting gullet. The trees did not need meat, but they liked it, and it was common lore among the growers that well-fed trees produced the most juice. Holbrook gave his trees meat three times a week, except for Sector D, which rated a daily ration.
"Don't skip anyone," Holbrook called to her.
"You know I won't."
No piece fell uncaught to the floor of the grove. Sometimes two trees at once went for the same chunk and a little battle resulted. The trees weren't necessarily friendly to one another; there was bad blood between Caesar and Henry the Eighth, and Cato clearly despised both Socrates and Alcibiades, though for different reasons. Now and then Holbrook or his staff found lopped-off limbs lying on the ground in the morning. Usually, though, even trees of conflicting personalities managed to tolerate one another. They had to, condemned as they were to eternal proximity. Holbrook had once tried to separate two Sector F trees that were carrying on a vicious feud; but it was impossible to dig up a full-grown tree without killing it and deranging the nervous systems of its thirty closest neighbors, as he had learned the hard way.
While Naomi fed the trees and talked to them and caressed their scaly flanks, petting them the way one might pet a tame rhino, Holbrook quietly unfolded a telescoping ladder and gave the leaves a new checkout for rust. There wasn't much point to it, really. Rust didn't become visible on the leaves until it had already penetrated the root structure of the tree, and the orange spots he thought he saw were probably figments of a jumpy imagination. He'd have the lab report in an hour or two, and that would tell him all he'd need to know, one way or the other. Still, he was unable to keep from looking. He cut a bundle of leaves from one of Plato's lower branches, apologizing, and turning them over in his hands, rubbing their glossy undersurfaces. What's this here, these minute colonies of reddish particles? His mind tried to reject the possibility of rust. A plague striding across the worlds, striking him so intimately, wiping him out? He had built this plantation on leverage: a little of his money, a lot from the bank. Leverage worked the other way too. Let rust strike the plantation and kill enough trees to sink his equity below the level considered decent for collateral, and the bank would take over. They might hire him to stay on as manager. He had heard of such things happening.
Plato rustled uneasily.
"What is it, old fellow?" Holbrook murmured. "You've got it, don't you? There's something funny swimming in your guts, eh? I know. I know. I feel it in my guts too. We have to be philosophers, now. Both of us." He tossed the leaf sample to the ground and moved the ladder up the row to Alcibiades. "Now, my beauty, now. Let me look. I won't cut any leaves off you." He could picture the proud tree snorting, stamping in irritation. "A little bit speckled under there, no? You have it too. Right?" The tree's outer branches clamped tight, as though Alcibiades were huddling into himself in anguish. Holbrook rolled onward, down the row. The rust spots were far more pronounced than the day before. No imagination, then. Sector C had it. He did not need to wait for the lab report. He felt oddly calm at this confirmation, even though it announced his own ruin.
"Zen?"
He looked down. Naomi stood at the foot of the ladder, holding a nearly ripened fruit in her hand. There was something grotesque about that; the fruits were botany's joke, explicitly phallic, so that a tree in ripeness with a hundred or more jutting fruits looked like some archetype of the ultimate male, and all visitors found it hugely amusing. But the sight of a fifteen-year-old girl's hand so thoroughly filled with such an object was obscene, not funny. Naomi had never remarked on the shape of the fruits, nor did she show any embarrassment now. At first he had ascribed it to innocence or shyness, but as he came to know her better, he began to suspect that she was deliberately pretending to ignore that wildly comic biological coincidence to spare his feelings. Since he clearly thought of her as a child, she was tactfully behaving in a childlike way, he supposed; and the fascinating complexity of his interpretation of her attitudes had kept him occupied for days.
"Where did you find that?" he asked.
"Right here, Alcibiades dropped it."
The dirty-minded joker, Holbrook thought. He said, "What of it?"
"It's ripe. It's time to harvest the grove now, isn't it?" She squeezed the fruit; Holbrook felt his face flaring. "Take a look," she said, and tossed it up to him.
She was right: harvest time was about to begin in Sector C, five days early. He took no joy of it; it was a sign of the disease that he now knew infested these trees.
"What's wrong?" she asked.
He jumped down beside her and held out the bundle of leaves he had cut from Plato. "You see these spots? It's rust. A blight that strikes juice-trees."
"No!"
"It's been going through one system after another for the past fifty years. And now it's here despite all quarantines."
"What happens to the trees?"
"A metabolic speedup," Holbrook said. "That's why the fruit is starting to drop. They accelerate their cycles until they're going through a year in a couple of weeks. They become sterile. They defoliate. Six months after the onset, they're dead." Holbrook's shoulders sagged. "I've suspected it for two or three days. Now I know."
She looked interested but not really concerned. "What causes it, Zen?"
"Ultimately, a virus. Which passes through so many hosts that I can't tell you the sequence. It's an interchange-vector deal, where the virus occupies plants and gets into their seeds, is eaten by rodents, gets into their blood, gets picked up by stinging insects, passed along to a mammal, then—oh, hell, what do the details matter? It took eighty years just to trace the whole sequence. You can't quarantine your world against everything, either. The rust is bound to slip in, piggybacking on some kind of living thing. And here it is."
"I guess you'll be spraying the plantation, then."
"No."
To kill the rust? What's the treatment?"
"There isn't any," Holbrook said.
"But—"
"Look, I've got to go back to the plantation house. You can keep yourself busy without me, can't you?"
"Sure." She pointed to the meat. "I haven't even finished feeding them yet. And they're especially hungry this morning."
He started to tell her that there was no point in feeding them now, that all the trees in this sector would be dead by nightfall. But an instinct warned him that it would be too complicated to start explaining that to her now. He flashed a quick sunless smile and trotted to the bug. When he looked back at her, she was hurling a huge slab of meat toward Henry the Eighth, who seized it expertly and stuffed it in his mouth.
The lab report came sliding from the wall output around two hours later, and it confirmed what Holbrook already knew: rust. At least half the planet had heard the news by then, and Holbrook had had a dozen visitors so far. On a planet with a human population of slightly under four hundred, that was plenty. The district governor, Fred Leitfried, showed up first, and so did the local agricultural commissioner, who also happened to be Fred Leitfried. A two-man delegation from the Juice-Growers' Guild arrived next. Then came Mortensen, the rubbery-faced little man who ran the processing plant, and Heemskerck of the export line, and somebody from the bank, along with a representative of the insurance company. A couple of neighboring growers dropped over a little later; they offered sympathetic smiles and comradely graspings of the shoulder, but not very far beneath their commiserations lay potential hostility. They wouldn't come right out and say it, but Holbrook didn't need to be a telepath to know what they were thinking: Get rid of those rusty trees before they infect the whole damned planet.
In their position he'd think the same. Even though the rust vectors had reached this world, the thing wasn't all that contagious. It could be confined; neighboring plantations could be saved, and even the unharmed groves of his own place—if he moved swiftly enough. If the man next door had rust on his trees, Holbrook would be as itchy as these fellows were about getting it taken care of quickly.
Fred Leitfried, who was tall and bland-faced and blue-eyed and depressingly somber even on a cheerful occasion, looked about ready to burst into tears now. He said, "Zen, I've ordered a planetwide rust alert. The biologicals will be out within thirty minutes to break the carrier chain. We'll begin on your property and work in a widening radius until we've isolated this entire quadrant. After that we'll trust to luck."
"Which vector are you going after?" Mortensen asked, tugging tensely at his lower lip.
"Hoppers," said Leitfried. "They're biggest and easiest to knock off, and we know that they're potential rust carriers. If the virus hasn't been transmitted to them yet, we can interrupt the sequence there and maybe we'll get out of this intact."
Holbrook said hollowly, "You know that you're talking about exterminating maybe a million animals."
"I know, Zen."
"You think you can do it?"
"We have to do it. Besides," Leitfried added, "the contingency plans were drawn a long time ago, and everything's ready to go. We'll have a fine mist of hopperlethals covering half the continent before nightfall."
"A damned shame," muttered the man from the bank. "They're such peaceful animals."
"But now they're threats," said one of the growers. "They've got to go."
Holbrook scowled. He liked hoppers himself; they were big rabbity things, almost the size of bears, that grazed on worthless scrub and did no harm to humans. But they had been identified as susceptible to infection by the rust virus, and it had been shown on other worlds that by knocking out one basic stage in the transmission sequence the spread of rust could be halted, since the viruses would die if they were unable to find an adequate host of the next stage in their life cycle. Naomi is fond of hoppers, he thought. She'll think we're bastards for wiping them out. But we have our trees to save. And if we were real bastards, we'd have wiped them out before the rust ever got here, just to make things a little safer for ourselves.
Leitfried turned to him. "You know what you have to do now, Zen?"
"Yes."
"Do you want help?"
"I'd rather do it myself." "We can get you ten men."
"It's just one sector, isn't it?" he asked. "I can do it. I ought to do it. They're my trees."
"How soon will you start?" asked Borden, the grower whose plantation adjoined Holbrook's on the east. There was fifty miles of brush country between Holbrook's land and Borden's, but it wasn't hard to see why the man would be impatient about getting the protective measures under way.
Holbrook said, "Within an hour, I guess. I've got to calculate a little, first. Fred, suppose you come upstairs with me and help me check the infected area on the screens?"
"Right."
The insurance man stepped forward. "Before you go, Mr. Holbrook—"
"Eh?"
"I just want you to know, we're in complete approval. We'll back you all the way."
Damn nice of you, Holbrook thought sourly. What was insurance for, if not to back you all the way? But he managed an amiable grin and a quick murmur of thanks.
The man from the bank said nothing. Holbrook was grateful for that. There was time later to talk about refurbishing the collateral, renegotiation of notes, things like that. First it was necessary to see how much of the plantation would be left after Holbrook had taken the required protective measures.
In the info center, he and Leitfried got all the screens going at once. Holbrook indicated Sector C and tapped out a grove simulation on the computer. He fed in the data from the lab report. "There are the infected trees," he said, using a light-pen to circle them on the output screen. "Maybe fifty of them altogether." He drew a larger circle. "This is the zone of possible incubation. Another eighty or a hundred trees. What do you say, Fred?"
The district governor took the light-pen from Holbrook and touched the stylus tip to the screen. He drew a wider circle that reached almost to the periphery of the sector.
"These are the ones to go, Zen."
"That's four hundred trees."
"How many do you have altogether?"
Holbrook shrugged. "Maybe seven, eight thousand."
"You want to lose them all?"
"Okay," Holbrook said. "You want a protective moat around the infection zone, then. A sterile area."
"Yes."
"What's the use? If the virus can come down out of the sky, why bother to—"
"Don't talk that way," Leitfried said. His face grew longer and longer, the embodiment of all the sadness and frustration and despair in the universe. He looked the way Holbrook felt. But his tone was incisive as he said, "Zen, you've got just two choices here. You can get out into the groves and start burning, or you can give up and let the rust grab everything. If you do the first, you've got a chance to save most of what you own. If you give up, well burn you out anyway, for our own protection. And we won't stop just with four hundred trees."
"I'm going," Holbrook said. "Don't worry about me."
"I wasn't worried. Not really."
Leitfried slid behind the command nodes to monitor the entire plantation while Holbrook gave his orders to the robots and requisitioned the equipment he would need. Within ten minutes he was organized and ready to go.
"There's a girl in the infected sector," Leitfried said. "That niece of yours, huh?"
"Naomi, yes."
"Beautiful. What is she, eighteen, nineteen?"
"Fifteen."
"Quite a figure on her, Zen,"
"What's she doing now?" Holbrook asked. "Still feeding the trees?"
"No, she's sprawled out underneath one of them. I think she's talking to them. Telling them a story, maybe? Should I cut in the audio?"
"Don't bother. She likes to play games with the trees. You know, give them names and imagine that they have personalities. Kid stuff."
"Sure," said Leitfried. Their eyes met briefly and evasively. Holbrook looked down. The trees did have personalities, and every man in the juice business knew it, and probably there weren't many growers who didn't have a much closer relationship to their groves than they'd ever admit to another man. Kid stuff. It was something you didn't talk about.
Poor Naomi, he thought.
He left Leitfried in the info center and went out the back way. The robots had set everything up just as he had programmed: the spray truck with the fusion gun mounted in place of the chemical tank. Two or three of the gleaming little mechanicals hovered around, waiting to be asked to hop aboard, but he shook them off and slipped behind the steering panel. He activated the data output and the small dashboard screen lit up; from the info center above, Leitfried greeted him and threw him the simulated pattern of the infection zone, with the three concentric circles glowing to indicate the trees with rust, those that might be incubating, and the safety-margin belt that Leitfried had insisted on his creating around the entire sector.
The truck rolled off toward the groves.
It was midday, now, of what seemed to be the longest day he had ever known. The sun, bigger and a little more deeply tinged with orange than the sun under which he had been born, lolled lazily overhead, not quite ready to begin its tumble into the distant plains. The day was hot, but as soon as he entered the groves, where the tight canopy of the adjoining trees shielded the ground from the worst of the sun's radiation, he felt a welcome coolness seeping into the cab of the truck. His lips were dry. There was an ugly throbbing just back of his left eyeball. He guided the truck manually, taking it on the access track around Sectors A, D, and G. The trees, seeing him, flapped their limbs a little. They were eager to have him get out and walk among them, slap their trunks, tell them what good fellows they were. He had no time for that now.
In fifteen minutes he was at the north end of his property, at the edge of Sector C. He parked the spray truck on the approach lip overlooking the grove; from here he could reach any tree in the area with the fusion gun. Not quite yet, though.
He walked into the doomed grove.
Naomi was nowhere in sight. He would have to find her before he could begin firing. And even before that, he had some farewells to make. Holbrook trotted down the main avenue of the sector. How cool it was here, even at noon! How sweet the loamy air smelled! The floor of the grove was littered with fruit; dozens had come down in the past couple of hours. He picked one up. Ripe: he split it with an expert snap of his wrist and touched the pulpy interior to his lips. The juice, rich and sweet, trickled into his mouth. He tasted just enough of it to know that the product was first-class. His intake was far from a hallucinogenic dose, but it would give him a mild euphoria, sufficient to see him through the ugliness ahead.
He looked up at the trees. They were tightly drawn in, suspicious, uneasy.
"We have troubles, fellows," Holbrook said. "You, Hector, you know it. There's a sickness here. You can feel it inside you. There's no way to save you. All I can hope to do is save the other trees, the ones that don't have the rust yet. Okay? Do you understand? Plato? Caesar? I've got to do this. It'll cost you only a few weeks of life, but it may save thousands of other trees."
An angry rustling in the branches. Alcibiades had pulled his limbs away disdainfully. Hector, straight and true, was ready to take his medicine. Socrates, lumpy and malformed, seemed prepared also. Hemlock or fire, what did it matter? Crito, I owe a cock to Asclepius. Caesar seemed enraged; Plato was actually cringing. They understood, all of them. He moved among them, patting them, comforting them. He had begun his plantation with this grove. He had expected these trees to outlive him.
He said, "I won't make a long speech. All I can say is good-bye. You've been good fellows, you've lived useful lives, and now your time is up, and I'm sorry as hell about it. That's all. I wish this wasn't necessary." He cast his glance up and down the grove. "End of speech. So long."
Turning away, he walked slowly back to the spray truck. He punched for contact with the info center and said to Leitfried, "Do you know where the girl is?"
"One sector over from you to the south. She's feeding the trees." He flashed the picture on Holbrook's screen.
"Give me an audio line, will you?"
Through his speakers Holbrook said, "Naomi? It's me, Zen."
She looked around, halting just as she was about to toss a chunk of meat. "Wait a second," she said. "Catherine the Great is hungry, and she won't let me forget it." The meat soared upward, was snared, disappeared into the mouth of a tree. "Okay," Naomi said. "What is it, now?"
"I think you'd better go back to the plantation house."
"I've still got lots of trees to feed."
"Do it this afternoon."
"Zen, what's going on?"
"I've got some work to do, and I'd rather not have you in the groves when I'm doing it."
"Where are you now?"
"C."
"Maybe I can help you, Zen. I'm only in the next sector down the line. I'll come right over."
"No. Go back to the house." The words came out as a cold order. He had never spoken to her like that before. She looked shaken and startled; but she got obediently into her bug and drove off. Holbrook followed her on his screen until she was out of sight."Where is she now?" he asked Leitfried.
"She's coming back. I can see her on the access track."
"Okay," Holbrook said. "Keep her busy until this is over. I'm going to get started."
He swung the fusion gun around, aiming its stubby barrel into the heart of the grove. In the squat core of the gun a tiny pinch of sun-stuff was hanging suspended in a magnetic pinch, available infinitely for an energy tap more than ample for his power needs today. The gun had no sight, for it was not intended as a weapon; he thought he could manage things, though. He was shooting at big targets. Sighting by eye, he picked out Socrates at the edge of the grove, fiddled with the gun-mounting for a couple of moments of deliberate hesitation, considered the best way of doing this thing that awaited him, and put his hand to the firing control. The tree's neural nexus was in its crown, back of the mouth. One quick blast there—
Yes.
An arc of white flame hissed through the air. Socrates' misshapen crown was bathed for an instant in brilliance. A quick death, a clean death, better than rotting with rust. Now Holbrook drew his line of fire down from the top of the dead tree, along the trunk. The wood was sturdy stuff; he fired again and again, and limbs and branches and leaves shriveled and dropped away, while the trunk itself remained intact, and great oily gouts of smoke rose above the grove. Against the brightness of the fusion beam Holbrook saw the darkness of the naked trunk outlined, and it surprised him how straight the old philosopher's trunk had been, under the branches. Now the trunk was nothing more than a pillar of ash; and now it collapsed and was gone.
From the other trees of the grove came a terrible low moaning.
They knew that death was among them; and they felt the pain of Socrates' absence through the network of root-nerves in the ground. They were crying out in fear and anguish and rage.
Doggedly Holbrook turned the fusion gun on Hector.
Hector was a big tree, impassive, stoic, neither a complainer nor a preener. Holbrook wanted to give him the good death he deserved, but his aim went awry; the first bolt struck at least eight feet below the tree's brain center, and the echoing shriek that went up from the surrounding trees revealed what Hector must be feeling. Holbrook saw the limbs waving frantically, the mouth opening and closing in a horrifying rictus of torment. The second bolt put an end to Hector's agony. Almost calmly, now, Holbrook finished the job of extirpating that noble tree.
He was nearly done before he became aware that a bug had pulled up beside his truck and Naomi had erupted from it, flushed, wide-eyed, close to hysteria. "Stop!" she cried. "Stop it, Uncle Zen! Don't burn them!"
As she leaped into the cab of the spraying truck she caught his wrists with surprising strength and pulled herself up against him. She was gasping, panicky, her breasts heaving, her nostrils wide.
"I told you to go to the plantation house," he snapped.
"I did. But then I saw the flames."
"Will you get out of here?"
"Why are you burning the trees?"
"Because they're infected with rust," he said. "They've got to be burned out before it spreads to the others."
"That's murder."
"Naomi, look, will you get back to—"
"You killed Socrates!" she muttered, looking into the grove. "And—and Caesar? No. Hector. Hector's gone too. You burned them right out!"
"They aren't people. They're trees. Sick trees that are going to die soon anyway. I want to save the others."
"But why kill them? There's got to be some kind of drug you can use, Zen. Some kind of spray. There's a drug to cure everything now."
"Not this."
"There has to be."
"Only the fire," Holbrook said. Sweat rolled coldly down his chest, and he felt a quiver in a thigh muscle. It was hard enough doing this without her around. He said as calmly as he could manage it, "Naomi, this is something that must be done, and fast. There's no choice about it. I love these trees as much as you do, but I've got to burn them out. It's like the little leggy thing with the sting in its tail: I couldn't afford to be sentimental about it, simply because it looked cute. It was a menace. And right now Plato and Caesar and the others are menaces to everything I own. They're plague-bearers. Go back to the house and lock yourself up somewhere until it's over."
"I won't let you kill them!" Tearfully. Defiantly.
Exasperated, he grabbed her shoulders, shook her two or three times, pushed her from the truck cab. She tumbled backward but landed lithely. Jumping down beside her, Holbrook said, "Dammit, don't make me hit you, Naomi. This is none of your business. I've got to burn out those trees, and if you don't stop interfering—"
"There's got to be some other way. You let those other men panic you, didn't you, Zen? They're afraid the infection will spread, so they told you to burn the trees fast, and you aren't even stopping to think, to get other opinions, you're just coming in here with your gun and killing intelligent, sensitive, lovable—"
"Trees," he said. "This is incredible, Naomi. For the last time—"
Her reply was to leap up on the truck and press herself to the snout of the fusion gun, breasts close against the metal. "If you fire, you'll have to shoot through me!"
Nothing he could say would make her come down. She was lost in some romantic fantasy, Joan of Arc of the juice-trees, defending the grove against his barbaric assault. Once more he tried to reason with her; once more she denied the need to extirpate the trees. He explained with all the force he could summon the total impossibility of saving these trees; she replied with the power of sheer irrationality that there must be some way. He cursed. He called her a stupid hysterical adolescent. He begged. He wheedled. He commanded. She clung to the gun.
"I can't waste any more time," he said finally. "This has to
be done in a matter of hours or the whole plantation will go." Drawing his needier from its holster, he dislodged the safety and gestured at her with the weapon. "Get down from there," he said icily.
She laughed. "You expect me to think you'd shoot me?"
Of course, she was right. He stood there sputtering impotently, red-faced, baffled. The lunacy was spreading: his threat had been completely empty, as she had seen at once. Holbrook vaulted up beside her on the truck, seized her, tried to pull her down.
She was strong, and his perch was precarious. He succeeded in pulling her away from the gun but had surprisingly little luck in getting her off the truck itself. He didn't want to hurt her, and in his solicitousness he found himself getting second best in the struggle. A kind of hysterical strength was at her command; she was all elbows, knees, clawing fingers. He got a grip on her at one point, found with horror that he was clutching her breasts, and let go in embarrassment and confusion. She hopped away from him. He came after her, seized her again, and this time was able to push her to the edge of the truck. She leaped off, landed easily, turned, ran into the grove.
So she was still outthinking him. He followed her in; it took him a moment to discover where she was. He found her hugging Caesar's base and staring in shock at the charred places where Socrates and Hector had been.
"Go on," she said. "Burn up the whole grove! But you'll burn me with it!"
Holbrook lunged at her. She stepped to one side and began to dart past him, across to Alcibiades. He pivoted and tried to grab her, lost his balance, and went sprawling, clutching at the air for purchase. He started to fall.
Something wiry and tough and long slammed around his shoulders.
"Zen!" Naomi yelled. The tree—Alcibiades—"
He was off the ground now. Alcibiades had snared him with a grasping tendril and was lifting him toward his crown. The tree was struggling with the burden; but then a second tendril gripped him too and Alcibiades had an easier time. Holbrook thrashed about a dozen feet off the ground.
Cases of trees attacking humans were rare. It had happened perhaps five times altogether, in the generations that men had been cultivating juice-trees here. In each instance the victim had been doing something that the grove regarded as hostile—such as removing a diseased tree.
A man was a big mouthful for a juice-tree. But not beyond its appetite.
Naomi screamed and Alcibiades continued to lift. Holbrook could hear the clashing of fangs above; the tree's mouth was getting ready to receive him. Alcibiades the vain, Alcibiades the mercurial, Alcibiades the unpredictable—well named, indeed. But was it treachery to act in self-defense? Alcibiades had a strong will to survive. He had seen the fates of Hector and Socrates. Holbrook looked up at the ever closer fangs. So this is how it happens, he thought. Eaten by one of my own trees. My friends. My pets. Serves me right for sentimentalizing them. They're carnivores. Tigers with roots.
Alcibiades screamed.
In the same instant one of the tendrils wrapped about Holbrook's body lost its grip. He dropped about twenty feet in a single dizzying plunge before the remaining tendril steadied itself, leaving him dangling a few yards above the floor of the grove. When he could breathe again, Holbrook looked down and saw what had happened. Naomi had picked up the needier that he had dropped when he had been seized by the tree, and had burned away one tendril. She was taking aim again. There was another scream from Alcibiades; Holbrook was aware of a great commotion in the branches above him; he tumbled the rest of the way to the ground and landed hard in a pile of mulched leaves. After a moment he rolled over and sat up. Nothing broken. Naomi stood above him, arms dangling, the needier still in her hand.
"Are you all right?" she asked soberly.
"Shaken up a little, is all." He started to get up. I owe you a lot," he said. "Another minute and I'd have been in Alcibiades' mouth."
"I almost let him eat you, Zen. He was just defending himself. But I couldn't. So I shot off the tendrils."
"Yes. Yes. I owe you a lot." He stood up and took a couple of faltering steps toward her. "Here," he said. "You better give me that needier before you burn a hole in your foot." He stretched eut his hand.
"Wait a second," she said, glacially calm. She stepped back as he neared her.
“What?"
"A deal, Zen. I rescued you, right? I didn't have to. Now you leave those trees alone. At least check up on whether there's a spray, okay? A deal."
"But—"
"You owe me a lot, you said. So pay me. What I want from you is a promise, Zen. If I hadn't cut you down, you'd be dead now. Let the trees live too."
He wondered if she would use the needier on him.
He was silent a long moment, weighing his options. Then said, "All right, Naomi. You saved me, and I can't refuse you what you want. I won't touch the trees. I'll find out if something can be sprayed on them to kill the rust."
"You mean that, Zen?"
"I promise. By all that's holy. You will give me that needier, now?"
"Here," she cried, tears running down her reddened face. "Here! Take it! Oh God, Zen, how awful all this is!"
He took the weapon from her and bolstered it. She seemed to go limp, all resolve spent, once she surrendered it. She stumbled into his arms, and he held her tight, feeling her tremble against him. He trembled too, pulling her close to him, aware of the ripe cones of her young breasts jutting into his chest. A powerful wave of what he recognized bluntly as desire surged through him. Filthy, he thought. He winced as this morning's images danced in his brain, Naomi nude and radiant from her swim, apple-round breasts, firm thighs. My niece. Fifteen. God help me. Comforting her, he ran his hands across her shoulders, down to the small of her back. Her clothes were light; her body was all too present within them.
He threw her roughly to the ground.
She landed in a heap, rolled over, put her hand to her mouth as he fell upon her. Her screams rose, shrill and piercing, as his body pressed down on her. Her terrified eyes plainly told that she feared he would rape her, but he had other perfidies in mind. Quickly he flung her on her face, catching her right hand and jerking her arm up behind her back. Then he lifted her to a sitting position.
"Stand up," he said. He gave her arm a twist by way of persuasion. She stood up.
"Now walk. Out of the grove, back to the truck. I'll break your arm if I have to."
"What are you doing?" she asked in a barely audible whisper.
"Back to the truck," he said. He levered her arm up another notch. She hissed in pain. But she walked.
At the truck he maintained his grip on her and reached in to call Leitfried at his info center.
"What was that all about, Zen? We tracked most of it, arid—"
"It's too complicated to explain. The girl's very attached to the trees, is all. Send some robots out here to get her right away, okay?"
"You promised," Naomi said.
The robots arrived quickly. Steely-fingered, efficient, they kept Naomi pinioned as they hustled her into a bug and took her to the plantation house. When she was gone, Holbrook sat down for a moment beside the spray truck, to rest and clean his mind. Then he climbed into the truck cab again.
He aimed the fusion gun first at Alcibiades.
It took a little over three hours. When he was finished, Sector C was a field of ashes, and a broad belt of emptiness stretched from the outer limit of the devastation to the nearest grove of healthy trees. He wouldn't know for a while whether he had succeeded in saving the plantation. But he had done his best.
As he rode back to the plantation house, his mind was less on the work of execution he had just done than on the feel of Naomi's body against his own, and on the things he had thought in that moment when he hurled her to the ground. A woman's body, yes. But a child. A child still, in love with her pets. Unable yet to see how in the real world one weighs the need against the bond, and does one's best. What had she learned in Sector C today? That the universe often offers only brutal choices? Or merely that the uncle she worshipped was capable of treachery and murder?
They had given her sedation, but she was awake in her room, and when he came in she drew the covers up to conceal her pajamas. Her eyes were cold and sullen.
"You promised," she said bitterly. "And then you tricked me."
"I had to save the other trees. You'll understand, Naomi."
"I understand that you lied to me, Zen."
"I'm sorry. Forgive me?"
"You can go to hell," she said, and those adult words coming from her not-yet-adult face were chilling.
He could not stay longer with her. He went out, upstairs, to Fred Leitfried in the info center. "It's all over," he said softly.
"You did it like a man, Zen."
"Yeah. Yeah."
In the screen he scanned the sector of ashes. He felt the warmth of Naomi against him. He saw her sullen eyes. Night would come, the moons would do their dance across the sky, the constellations to which he had never grown accustomed would blaze forth. He would talk to her again, maybe. Try to make her understand. And then he would send her away, until she was finished becoming a woman.
"Starting to rain," Leitfried said. "That'll help the ripening along, eh?"
"Most likely."
"You feel like a killer, Zen?"
“What do you think?"
"I know. I know."
Holbrook began to shut off the scanners. He had done all he meant to do today. He said quietly, "Fred, they were trees. Only trees. Trees, Fred, trees."