The Fangs of the Trees

by Robert Silverberg

  The Fangs of the Trees

  Robert Silverberg

  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 fe
el 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.