The Fangs of the Trees Read online

  “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.”

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