by J. S. Volpe
* * *
“Man, this is a big damn forest,” said Lucifer Brown as he picked his way through a dense tangle of shnozzberry bushes. “I thought we’d be through it by now.”
“Clearly you were concocting conclusions without so much as a single scrap of hard evidence to support them,” Marcy said, floating along beside him. “Business as usual for you, really.”
“And just what does that mean? What conclusions do I concoct without evidence?”
“Well, there’s all that rigmarole about destiny…”
Lucifer gawked at the drone. “You mean, after everything that’s happened, you still don’t believe me? Even after I crossed the bridge without so much as a scratch—”
“Dumb luck. Successfully passing the human guardhouse was, I admit, due to your own initiative. The guards certainly didn’t expect anyone to go charging past like that. It worked precisely because no one thought it would. But getting past the gorgim guards was pure dumb luck.”
“Or fate. Do you really think it’s a coincidence that the rainstorm happened exactly when it did?”
“Well, it had to happen sometime.”
“Yeah, exactly when I needed it to happen.”
“Coincidence.”
“Yeah, well, what about my surviving the fall down the hill? Even the damn horse didn’t survive that.”
“Dumb luck.”
Lucifer rolled his eyes. “How many times does luck have to happen before it stops being dumb and starts being smart?”
“It’s a matter of statistics, actually,” Marcy said. “In any series of random events, there will be seemingly orderly chains of goodness or badness or at least nonrandomness. It’s much like the old idea of a million monkeys with a million typewriters writing Shakespeare’s works, only on a much smaller scale. Your string of good luck is a far cry from Shakespeare’s complexity.”
They emerged from the shnozzberry bushes into a lush grove of thick, smooth-barked trees of a type neither of them recognized. Vines as thick as a man’s forearm hung in loops from the branches. The tall grass carpeting the grove and the fat, fleshy leaves on the trees were a shade of green that seemed too vivid to be genuine. The whole clearing had an almost unnaturally healthy look.
“How unusual,” Marcy said. “This reminds me of the pleasure gardens on the planet Kem. The soil here must be particularly fertile.”
“Yeah, whatever,” Lucifer said. “Let’s just get a move on.”
He took two steps into the heart of the clearing, and then from somewhere up in the trees, a hoarse voice croaked, “Help!”
“What the hell?” Lucifer said, peering up through the foliage. He could just make out two humanoid figures strung up amid the branches like flies in a web. “Who are you, and what’s going on?”
“Oh, my,” said one of the figures. “I recognize that voice.”
“As do I,” said the other. “That is the young man from the tavern last night. The one with the robot.”
“I believe they prefer to be called droids, or so I have heard.”
“Actually,” Marcy said, “the proper term in my case would be ‘companion drone,’ but I’m not a stickler for protocol.”
“Ah. Do either of you think it would be possible to extractulate Mr. Stone and myself from these vines, perhaps through the application of some swift and formidable knifemanship?”
Lucifer frowned and folded his arms across his chest. “Why should I? If you guys were in the tavern, that means you’re after the gold, too. You’re the competition.”
There was a long silence up in the trees, then some faint, mumbled conversation.
Finally Mr. Sand said, “If you unentrap us, we shall tell you exactly what it is that has captured us, for if you wish to proceed any further in this maddening forest, it will be greatly aidful to you to know what dangers await.”
“He has a good point,” Marcy said. “Besides, where I come from it is a firmly established axiom of sociology that aiding others is a more effective and mutually beneficial social strategy than competition, pace Darwin.”
Lucifer stared at the robot for a few seconds, then said, “I see.”
Marcy sighed. “You didn’t understand a word of that, did you?”
“I did so! I—”
Before he could say anything more, one of the vines hanging down nearby swooped toward him and wrapped itself around his right wrist.
“Hey!” he cried.
He reached out with his free hand to pull the vine off him, but another vine darted in and snagged the free arm by the elbow. Simultaneously two more vines snared his legs. The vines plucked him off the ground as if he were no more than a rag doll, and held him in mid-air, fifteen feet above the too-green grass.
“I’ll save you, sir!” Marcy said, darting forward. Before it could get far, a huge yellow flower on a sinuous green stalk shot out of the bushes on the edge of the clearing behind the drone like an attacking mongoose.
“Look out!” Lucifer cried.
It was too late. The flower was already upon Marcy, its petals opening wide like the fingers of a grasping hand. The petals snapped closed around the drone, and then the flower just hung there, motionless, while its thick leathery sides bulged as Marcy tried in vain to escape.
“Oh, dear,” said Mr. Sand. “Here we go again.”
Into the clearing strode a tall, wiry, green-skinned woman with hair that was a mass of long green shoots, ears that were pointy like an elf’s and appeared to be made of bark, arched dark-green eyebrows that were actually strips of very short grass, and eyes that consisted of an oval pupil on a field of greenish-gold that glimmered like sunlight shining through a canopy of tender spring leaves. She wore nothing at all, unless one counted the small leaves that sprouted from seemingly random spots on her smooth green body like moles or pimples.
Despite her nakedness, Lucifer found nothing arousing about her. Her limbs and face and torso were too long and thin, her expression too cold and remote, her eyes too sinister, her whole aspect too alien. Lusting after her would be like lusting after a hedge cut in the shape of a woman.
She stopped directly beneath Lucifer and regarded him with those strange eyes. Then her lips curled back from teeth that were actually two lines of blunt thorns, and in a voice as harsh as leaves hissing in a high wind, she said, “Another disgusting mammal. Slabs of oozing, bloody meat wrapped around white sticks. Repulsive.”
“Oh, right,” Lucifer said. “Like you’re a real prize.”
High overhead, Mr. Sand sighed. “Word of advice, dear boy: When a dryad has you at her mercy, it is most unwise to anger her.”
Lucifer peered at the plant woman below him. “A dryad, huh? Never seen one of those before. This is pretty cool, actually. It’ll make a great chapter in my autobiography.”
The dryad eyed Lucifer with fascination. “You are not frightened of me.”
“Why should I be? I’m chosen by the Twelve. I have a destiny.”
The dryad barked out a laugh as dry and sharp as a branch cracking. “You and these other humans are completely at my mercy. I can do whatever I want with you, and I shall. Does this not disturb you?”
“Nope.”
“Probably not the best response,” Mr. Sand said.
“It should disturb you,” the dryad said.
Lucifer shrugged as much as his trussed-up position would allow. “It doesn’t.”
“Oh, dear,” Mr. Stone said in dismay. “I fear the poor boy’s not long for this world.”
The dryad smiled a cold, mirthless smile.
“I see I shall have to change your attitude,” she told him. “Those two cowardly older mammals”—she waved an arm at Mr. Sand and Mr. Stone, both of whom harrumphed at the word “cowardly”—”they were merely a diversion, an entertainment. But you are an extremely arrogant mammal and must be taught a lesson. But first, tell me: Why have you chosen to intrude upon our home here? Why are there suddenly so many humans in the forest?”
“There are others besides us?”
“Oh, yes. I am connected with the green of this wood. Every tree, every bush, every blade of grass. Nothing happens here without my sensing it, and I know that since dawn many humans have entered the wood, as well as four gorgim. Two of the intruders, I sense, have even riled up the spiries like an unwitting animal stepping on a wasps’ nest.”
“What the hell are spiries?”
“The little screamers, of course. But it matters not. What matters is that you have made the mistake of invading us and—”
Lucifer rolled his eyes. “It’s not an invasion.”
“Liar!”
“It’s not! We’re all just passing through on our way to Ghost Gulch.”
“Ghost Gulch? What is a Ghost Gulch?”
“It’s where a big hunk of gold is.”
The dryad wrinkled her nose in disgust. “Metal? You would violate our wood for metal?”
“Well, yeah. The point is, this isn’t about you. We don’t give a rat’s ass about a bunch of dumbfuck plants”—a pair of groans from high above, followed by Mr. Stone muttering, “I do believe he’s trying to get us killed”—”because, I mean, plants’re boring. Well, except maybe to eat.”
“Oh, for coitus’s sake,” snapped Mr. Stone. “Shut up, you posterior aperture!”
“Bite me, grandpa!” Lucifer shouted up at him. Then to the dryad, who was now scowling in a manner that was making even Lucifer a little uncomfortable, he said, “Anyway, my point is that we’re all just passing through, and we want to do it quickly. If you leave us alone, we’ll be through your forest and out of your hair—or, um, weeds, or whatever that stuff is—in no time. But, see, by attacking us like this, you’re just making everything worse. You’re pushing us to fight back. And fighting’ll just wreck your bushes and stuff. Let us just pass through, and, yeah, maybe we’ll trample some grass and eat some berries and piss on your tree-trunks, but then we’ll be out of here, and everyone’ll be happy again.”
The dryad stared at him blankly for a long moment, her jewel-like eyes slitted, her willowy limbs hanging limp at her sides, her entire body still. It was only then, seeing her stillness, that Lucifer realized her chest didn’t move. It didn’t rise and fall with her breath because she was a plant, and plants don’t breathe the way humans do. Her total, tree-like immobility was actually pretty creepy, seeing as how she looked like something that was supposed to show signs of life—namely a human (or maybe an unusually tall elf, what with those ears). This thought led Lucifer to wonder why a plant would look so much like a “disgusting mammal” in the first place. Why did it have tits? Plants didn’t give milk or nurse their young. And why did it have a pussy (a really tight one, from the look of it)? It wasn’t as if plants had sex the way mammals did. Why did the damn thing have nipples and eyebrows and teeth? It didn’t need any of those things.
And then he realized these were Marcy questions. The stupid little robot was rubbing off on him. Before he met it three months ago, he never would’ve thought about the dryad’s appearance beyond noting whether or not he’d like to fuck her. But now…
Damn it. The fucking robot was making him start to think. That wasn’t right. He was a doer, not a thinker. Maybe hanging out with the robot wasn’t such a smart move after all.
His train of thought was abruptly derailed when the dryad smiled and said, “I think I will tear your limbs from your body and feed the soil with your decay.”
“Um…” He looked up at the two old geezers in the trees, then down at Marcy, who was still struggling to burst out of the flower, and he realized that none of them were going to be able to help him. And for the first time in a long time, he felt doubtful. He felt scared.
It was the thinking! The robot had jinxed him. He was fine when he was just doing, just acting on instinct. But when you started thinking, you started second-guessing, you started waffling, you started reasoning.
And that was bad. Very bad. That must be what was throwing him off his game. The Twelve didn’t want him to think, they wanted him to act, to fulfill the glorious destiny they had planned for him. Everything was already laid out; there was nothing for him to think about. If fact, thinking too much could be seen as lack of faith in the Twelve and their plans for him.
Crap.
The dryad’s grin widened as if she could sense his doubt and distress. She raised her arms like a conductor waving an orchestra to life, and the vines around Lucifer’s outstretched arms and legs began to pull him in four different directions at once. He sucked air through his clenched teeth as sharp pains shot through his shoulders and hips. Another few seconds and his limbs would be wrenched right off his body. He was being drawn and quartered by a bunch of fucking plants! Damn that thinky, jinxing robot!
And then the dryad’s smile vanished, and she turned her head slightly to the left, as if she had heard something far in the distance. The vines stopped pulling, Lucifer’s brutal death temporarily forgotten.
“Something disturbs the green,” she muttered.
And then in the distance Lucifer heard a faint, rhythmic toom toom toom toom, like the footfalls of a swiftly running giant.
Whatever it was, it was moving faster than a ten-legged deer; in only seconds the sound had grown doubly loud, and Lucifer could now make out the crack and crash of toppling trees travelling along with it. Something was tearing through the woods like a hurricane, and it was headed right for the clearing.
The dryad wasn’t happy about it. Her green upper lip curled back from her thorn-teeth, and she emitted a hissing sound like an angry cat.
“None may harm this wood and escape unscathed,” she proclaimed. She raised her arms, once again looking like an orchestra conductor, and this time all the vines in the clearing that weren’t holding up the dryad’s captives shot like flying snakes toward the side of the clearing the gigantic whatever-it-was was approaching, and quickly wove themselves into a dense net twenty feet wide and twenty-five feet high.
The dryad grinned with sinister delight. “I am ready for you, tree-killer.”
The sound grew louder, louder, louder. It was so close now that with each toom Lucifer felt himself sway in the grip of the vines. The leaves on the trees around him trembled. A few broke loose and drifted toward the ground.
The net of vines the dryad had made was too closely interwoven to see through it very well, so as the whatever-it-was approached, all that could be discerned was a dark, hulking shape over twenty feet tall sprinting toward them.
“You shall not pass my net, wretched plant-killing beast,” snarled the dryad. “You—”
The “beast” burst through the net as if it were made of spiderwebs, sending shreds of vine flying everywhere. For a moment Lucifer assumed he was looking at a robot like Marcy, albeit a hundred times larger and with legs, but then he caught a glimpse of two very alarmed men peering out the window that formed the front of its “head.” Lucifer thought they might be that annoying duo of thieves who were always hanging out at Moe’s and hatching schemes they could never quite make work. What were their names again? Lucifer couldn’t remember. Just call them Big Loser and Little Loser. At any rate, from that quick glimpse, Lucifer realized that it wasn’t a robot, but some kind of high-tech vehicle.
The dryad’s exultant expression melted into one of horror when she saw how effortlessly the machine destroyed her web of vines—and how fucked she was, since she was now directly in the machine’s path and had no time to get out of the way.
She tried, though. She lunged to her right and almost made it to safety. But almost wasn’t good enough, and the machine’s huge disc-like left foot slammed down on her. Green sap sprayed the clearing. When the machine raised its foot again, its sole was covered with a green tarry goop reminiscent of half-digested spinach.
Luckily the machine’s path took it to Lucifer’s right, the side of its hemispherical body narrowly avoiding his dangling, vulnerable form by less than three inches.
None of which meant
, however, that he was safe from the machine’s destructive rampage, for some of the vines in the net it had burst through had gotten stuck in its joints, and as the machine sprinted on, it pulled those vines along with it, and those vines were tangled with other vines, including those that were holding up Lucifer, Mr. Sand, and Mr. Stone.
Thus, as the machine exited the clearing, Lucifer felt himself fly five feet straight up, then stop briefly, then jerk to the right, then stop again, then fly ten feet forward. And all the while, the vines around him twanged and tangled and twisted, and Mr. Sand and Mr. Stone, who were likewise being jerked about by the ever-shifting vines, yelped and screamed above him.
And then he stopped moving, and the vines gripping his arms and legs pulled taut, and for one agonizing second, Lucifer was certain his limbs would indeed be torn from their sockets after all…
But then somewhere a vine snapped with a sharp schrip, and all the vines holding his arms and legs went slack. He started to sigh with relief, then realized that the vines had been the only things keeping him from plummeting the twenty-or-so feet to the hard ground.
“Aw, shiiiiiiiiiiiit,” he said as he hurtled downward.
And then the vine twined around his left leg got snarled on something, maybe a tree limb or another vine, and he jerked to a stop upside down less than a foot above the ground, his hair brushing the top of the grass as he swung back and forth in steadily diminishing arcs.
Off in the distance the toom toom toom of the machine faded away.
“Well, now,” Lucifer said as he eyed the too-green grass beneath him.
“Oh, this is a most woesome development,” said Mr. Sand from his new position twenty feet above Lucifer and ten feet to his left. “We are still trapped fast.”
“We shall find a way out,” said Mr. Stone, who now hung almost directly above his associate. “At least that excrement-eating little dryad is dead.”
“True, Mr. Stone. Very true.”
Lucifer drew his knife from his belt and with a grunt, curled himself upward as if he were doing a sit-up until he was able to grab the vine holding his leg. He almost couldn’t reach it; he had virtually no leverage at all. It was a good thing he did hanging ab crunches every day to keep his physique in good shape. If you wanted to be one of the beautiful people, you really had to work at it.
“I say,” said Mr. Stone, “what is he doing down there?”
“He seems to be cutting himself free of the vines,” said Mr. Sand.
“Goodness. He’s quite flexible, isn’t he?”
“Remarkably flexible.”
Lucifer cast an irritated glance at the two men as he sawed away at the vine with his dagger.
“Don’t you two ever shut up?” he said.
Mr. Stone scowled. “These young men today are appallingly rude.”
“Indeed they are. I blame the lackadaisical policies of the unwitted King Arbuthort.”
“That coitus-head. Toppling his fornicating regime shall be quite a pleasure, I assure you.”
“For Metarion’s sake, will you two shut your fucking mouths?” Lucifer cried.
“And such awful language,” Mr. Sand tutted.
“No morals,” Mr. Stone said. “No standards. No discipline. It’s as if we’re turning into a nation of gorgs.”
“Indeed. Your comment would be funny were it not so sadly true.”
There was a crackling sound, a thump, and a “whoof” as Lucifer finished cutting through the vine and dropped the last foot to the ground. He lay there a moment to catch his breath, then stood up, patted the dirt and grass and crisp fragments of vine from his clothes, and walked over to the big yellow flower that was still twitching and bulging like a burlap sack full of kittens.
As Lucifer cut the flower open, Mr. Sand said, “Excuse me, young man, do you think you would be generous enough to cut us down?”
Lucifer didn’t answer. He just continued slicing through the thick flower petals until he had made a slit large enough for Marcy to pass through.
“What happened?” the drone said as it looked this way and that around the clearing. Yellow pollen dusted its casing.
Lucifer grinned. “Another awesome tale for my autobiography.”
Marcy sighed.
“Erm, look,” Mr. Stone called out, “I know we haven’t exactly gotten off on the right foot here, if I may be figurative, but perhaps you could find within yourself the kindness to help us down, eh?”
Lucifer said nothing. He just turned west and started striding out of the clearing.
“I am still of the opinion that we should help them out, sir,” Marcy said, floating after him.
Lucifer shrugged. “Be of whatever opinion you want. All I know is I ain’t helpin’ the stupid old fucks.”
“But think of how cruel this will make you appear in your autobiography. People won’t like that.”
Lucifer stopped, turned around, and regarded the drone with a troubled, thoughtful look.
“Well…I could just not mention it…”
“In your biography, then. After all, others will no doubt want to write about your fantastic exploits. And truth will out, sir. It always does.”
Lucifer stared at Marcy, then heaved a greatly put-upon sigh and studied the snarl of vines filling the clearing. His gaze finally wound up on a vine that extended diagonally from somewhere high overhead to a bush on the eastern edge of the clearing.
“Fuck it,” he said, then slashed at the vine with the dagger. The vine snapped. Its upper half shot upward into the worst of the snarl directly above where Mr. Stone and Mr. Sand hung. There was a rapid, complex series of rustles from up there as vines slid and moved, and then the whole webwork of vines dropped to the ground, carrying Mr. Stone and Mr. Sand right along with it.
The two men thudded to the grass in the middle of the clearing and lay there groaning as the last of the vines slithered down upon them from above.
“Come on,” Lucifer said, turning away and striding west again.
“Gladly, sir,” Marcy said. It almost sounded happy for once.
“Oh, and by the way, you’re not a jinx after all.”
“Jinxes do not exist.”
“I knew you’d say that.”
