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, we’ll 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 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 goodbye. 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!”
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 needler 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 pulling 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.
The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume 2: To the Dark Star: 1962-69 Page 23
