by Jerry Oltion
And across the garden, the tree thrashed its branches and yanked its roots out of the ground with a wet slurp.
Judy twisted the gas valve off again. "Sorry. That was stupid. I should have realized it would spray liquid butane out the burner."
"You sure got the tree's attention," Allen said.
Judy fielded the tumbling can of ice, then looked over at the tree. The silvery light from overhead seemed even dimmer after the bright flash of flame, and its afterimage left a bright blue triangle in her field of vision when she blinked, but she could see well enough when she held her eyes open for a second. The tree's flinch had pulled it completely free of the ground; now it was drifting into the air and tipping slowly backward as it did. Fortunately, it was close enough to the irregular wall that its branches brushed the native bushes growing there, and the moment they made contact, the tree wrapped the tips of its branches around the bushes and pulled itself back. It did a complete somersault, then its roots hit the wall and they dug in. The tree held fast for a moment, and Judy thought maybe it had gone catatonic again, but then it let go with its branches and slowly stood away from the wall.
Now its trunk was sticking straight out at them. There was still at least thirty feet of space between it and them, but Judy got ready to duck if it tried to jump.
"I'm going to try another series of prime numbers," Tippet said. The walkie-talkie beeped its ascending trill again, and this time the tree rustled its leaves and tilted them flat toward the source of the noise.
"Very good!" he said. "It's echoing my numbers back to me." Judy hadn't heard its response. The walkie-talkie squeaked again, then they waited a few seconds, then it squeaked some more, but she couldn't hear a thing coming from the tree.
"Are you sure it's saying anything?" she asked.
"Yes, I hear it quite clearly. And now it's responding with the next prime numbers in the sequence."
"Oh." And it wasn't attacking. That was good. Yet . . .
She stood in the hatchway, the cold air chilling her face and hands while the screeching radio sent chills of an entirely different nature down her spine. The trees were intelligent. She'd met two new alien species in two days. She was all for expanding her horizons, but things were moving a bit too fast for her at the moment.
Actually, at the moment they seemed to be moving right past her. Tippet was the one learning to talk with the tree. How could she talk to something she couldn't even hear?
Her thoughts must have shown even in the dim light. Allen reached out with his free hand to touch the side of her face. "Are you okay?" he asked.
"Yeah," she said automatically, then she said, "No, that's not true. I think I'm about to collapse into a gibbering ball of goo."
"Good."
" What?" She hadn't expected that.
"I thought maybe it was just me."
"Oh. No, I think anybody would, after what we've been through." She shoved the stove and the can of ice back inside the tank, then took his hands in hers and squeezed.
"If you would like to rest," Tippet said, "that would be fine. I suspect it will be some time before we can communicate with any useful degree of facility."
Any useful degree of facility. Right. And he'd learned English how long ago?
The foot or so of space between Judy's and Allen's hatches prevented them from getting any closer. That was intolerable.
Judy looked out at the tree, over at Tippet, then back to Allen. "Tippets right. At the moment, we're as useless as propellers on a rocket. Let's get some rest while we can, 'cause there's no telling when we'll have the chance again."
He didn't argue. He just let go her hands and pushed himself inside. She did the same, moving by feel after her head cleared the hatch. The dim light from the shuttered window didn't even provide a hint of illumination inside.
"We've only got one sleeping bag left," he said.
"That's fine with me." She started stripping off her spacesuit. "It's warmer with two people in one bag anyway."
"It's going to be pretty cramped, too." She could hear him fumbling with his own spacesuit as he spoke.
She banged her elbow on the hyperdrive, and the reaction sent her spinning until her head and shoulder met the beanbag chair, still strapped to the bottom of the tank. "At least we don't have gravity pulling us down to the floor," she said. "We can shove the water bucket aside and stick our feet through the gap. That ought to let us stretch out."
"Yeah." She heard more thumping and bumping, and a helmet clonked her gently in the back. She couldn't tell if it was his or hers, and at the moment she didn't care. It was cold without her suit, but she stripped on down to bare skin. The best way for two people to get warm in one sleeping bag was to get naked, and besides, she wanted the human contact. At the moment she wasn't sure she would ever let go.
"Foot of the sleeping bag coming through," Allen said.
He must have already moved the bucket aside. Judy reached into the opening where it had been and pulled the bottom of the sleeping bag through into her half of the tank, then stuck her head and shoulders through into his side. There was a pleasant few minutes of fumbling in the dark while they climbed into the bag, then they zipped it up and wrapped their arms and legs around one another to hold themselves together. She could feel his arousal as he pressed up against her, and she thought briefly about losing herself in a few minutes of pure animal joy, but she wasn't sure if she could handle the extra emotion at the moment. She pressed her face into the hollow where his neck met his shoulders and tried to relax instead.
Neither of them had bathed in days, unless you counted her unplanned dip in the river, but they were both too cold to give off much aroma. What scent she did get off Allen was actually kind of comforting. It was a human smell: honest sweat, a faint hint of shampoo in his hair, the indescribable maleness of his skin.
Outside, the walkie-talkie piped more of Tippet's shrill math lesson at the tree.
"Sounds like a modem trying to connect out there," Allen said softly.
"Mmm." It did. Not surprising, she supposed: a modem was basically a device for encoding numerical data into sound waves, and that's exactly what Tippet was doing. She wondered if the sound would change when he started learning the tree's language. She couldn't believe she was falling asleep with that going on just outside—after all, Tippet was talking to a tree!—but her capacity for wonder was just about maxed out, along with her ability to keep her eyes open any longer. Even her ears seemed to blank out for long seconds at a time; a sure sign that her brain was about to shut down whether she wanted it to or not.
She kissed Allen softly on the side of his neck. "Wake me up if anything interesting happens," she said.
He snickered.
"To me," she added, but if he said anything, she was already asleep. 42
If there were dreams, she didn't remember them. The next thing she knew, Allen was rubbing her back and whispering her name.
"What?" she asked. It was way too soon to get up. For one thing, it was still dark out. Then she remembered what had been going on when she went to sleep.
"Has Tippet figured out—"
"Something's going on in the French camp," Allen said.
She tried to sit up, but the sleeping bag only let her lean away from him a little bit, sucking cold air into the space between them. She pulled herself close again. "What kind of something?" Tippet's voice came from outside, where the walkie-talkie was still wedged in under the parachute strap. "The forest has closed back over their encampment," he said. "We can hear frantic calls over the radio. They're speaking French, so we can't decipher much of what's going on, but it doesn't sound good."
She shook her head, trying to wake up. She couldn't see whether Tippet was in the tank with her and Allen or if he was still outside, but it sounded like the modem was still trying to connect even while he spoke to her.
"Is someone else talking to the tree now?" she asked.
Without a pause in the bleeps and twitters, Tipp
et said, "No. The radio's speaker can duplicate a complex waveform with adequate fidelity to talk to it and to you at the same time."
"Oh." She shouldn't have been surprised. While he was linked with the hive mind, Tippet could probably handle dozens of conversations at once, in a dozen different languages. "Are you . . . actually speaking with it?" she asked.
"My vocabulary is still limited, and my understanding of the parts of speech is full of conjecture, but yes, I'm making progress in learning its language."
Allen cleared his throat. "Does it, uh, does it know anything about what's happening to the French?" Tippet said, "No. It seems to have little concept of distance, and no way to communicate that far even if it did. But I have learned enough to make an educated guess."
"Oh?"
"The trees who approached us seem to be leaders, or perhaps 'herders' is a more accurate term. They maintain the forest. I haven't yet determined if it's a farm that they grow for a specific purpose, or if their function is a natural ecological niche that they have evolved into, but whatever the reason, they were afraid that we would harm the trees under their care."
So the big trees were shepherds, eh? Or maybe alpha males. Judy wondered if they kept all the female trees to themselves, and for a moment she had the ludicrous image of two trees locked in a coital embrace. Then she remembered what she and Allen had done beneath one of them right after they had arrived, and she felt her body temperature skyrocket. They didn't need to imagine anything about human sexuality.
Nor, unfortunately, about the danger humanity posed for them.
She said, "So if the forest that the French landed in is protected by guardians . . ."
"Just so. I believe they are defending their herd."
Her mouth tasted awful. She unzipped the sleeping bag and felt along the edge of the tank until she found one of the beer cans full of water that she had wedged into a corrugation. The ice had melted, but it was still cold enough to make her teeth ache. That and its crisp, fresh flavor helped her wake up. She thought about retrieving the walkie-talkie and bringing it inside, but she could hear it well enough where it was, and Tippet was still using it to talk with the tree. She cleared her throat. "Why did they wait until now to go after the French camp?" Tippet said, "As you guessed, the trees are nocturnal. When they wake and when they sleep is not a choice, as with our animals, and presumably with yours. From what I understand, they can't even remain sentient in daylight."
"So they woke up at dusk and found a couple dozen of their friends murdered."
"Worse," said Tippet. "Some of them were on fire. Nothing seems to scare the trees worse than fire."
"Yeah, we saw that." And no wonder, if even green branches would burn.
"There's no animals," Allen said.
"What?"
His voice was distant, distracted, the way he got when he was thinking just a few words ahead of his mouth. "Without animals, there's no balance. Atmospheric oxygen builds up until something catches fire. The only renewable carbon source is the same vegetation that produces the oxygen, so it's always living right on the edge of burning up." He whistled softly. "I'll bet their ability to move around evolved as a way to turn oxygen back into carbon dioxide at least as much as a way to run from fires." Tippet said, "Perhaps. There could be other explanations."
"What about the French landing party?" Judy asked. If she let these two start speculating on the evolution of the local flora, it could be hours before they remembered that someone else was in deep trouble.
One nice thing about Allen: he could switch gears in a heartbeat. He pushed himself up beside Judy, pulling the sleeping bag up around both of them again, and said, "Tippet, can you speak enough of the tree language to talk to the ones that're attacking the camp?"
"No," Tippet replied. "And even if I could, it's not likely that they speak the same language on a separate continent."
"Good point. Well, we should at least radio the submarine and tell them what we've learned. You could bust in on the same frequency they're using to communicate with the ground, right?"
"That much would be easy," said Tippet.
"Judy? What do you think?"
She thought it over for a few seconds. They probably should have done that as soon as they saw the French cutting down trees in the first place, but the landing party had seen for themselves that the trees could move, which was about all she and Allen could have told them at the time. She hadn't thought the trees could fight back. It certainly hadn't looked like it then. Besides, the French were supposed to be America's enemies. Neither side had actually declared war, but even talking to them felt like fraternizing with the enemy. And this particular batch of them had brought their troubles on themselves. On the other hand, she and Allen had managed to get in trouble with the forest, too; and Allen, at least, had been trying to reduce international tension with his hyperdrive. Maybe it was time to consider anyone who made it beyond the Solar System simply "human" and leave nationality out of it.
"Yeah, what the hell, go for it," she said.
"Okay," Allen said. "Tippet, how do we go about this?"
"Simply speak," said Tippet. "I will relay your words to the submarine." All the while, his conversation with the tree had never wavered.
Allen said, "Okay, here goes. Hello, this is Allen Meisner calling French submarine. Allen Meisner calling French submarine. Do you read, over?"
There was a pause, then an astonished voice came over the walkie-talkie. "Allo? Allen Meisner?
Vraiment?"
He gave Judy a quick squeeze. She knew just what he was thinking: International celebrity! "Yes, it's me," he said. "Does anybody there speak English?"
She imagined the tangled web of communications that were flying back and forth: from Allen to Tippet to the hive mind to the sub, and who knew what further relays on board before the final link in the chain up there replied down the same pathway.
"Yes," a different voice replied. "I speak English, but you must wait. We have an . . . urgent situation to attend to." The man's accent was as cliched as Inspector Clouseau's.
"We know," said Allen. "And we've got some information you need. The trees are intelligent, and you've pissed them off by cutting down their buddies. They're not going to back off."
"The trees? Intelligent? You joke."
"They're running roughshod all over your base camp, aren't they?"
"How do you know this?"
"We've got friends in high places. Look, the shepherd trees aren't going to stop until your people are out of there. They've got to jump back into orbit."
"They try. Not everyone can make it to the capsules." There was a moment of dead air, then, "We must leave this frequency open for the rescue effort. Go up ten kilocycles and we will talk more, yes?"
"Tippet, can we do that?" Allen asked.
"Yes," Tippet replied. "No problem."
"Okay, moving up."
Tippet had only been giving them the signal from the submarine, but Judy could imagine what it must be like on the ground, with trees stomping around all over the place and people running for cover. The human instinct would be to run toward the trees, but that would be the exact wrong thing to do now. She felt a moment of disorientation, as if she were there herself, her head spinning with confusion. She fought it down, but the sensation wouldn't go away completely. Apparently the sight of moving trees had affected her more than she thought.
"Are you there?" the Frenchman asked.
"Yes," Allen replied. "Tell your ground crew to try spotlights. The trees don't seem to like bright light."
"No!" Tippet said. "That terrifies them. It puts them to sleep against their will."
"Isn't that a good thing?" Allen asked.
At the same time, the Frenchman asked, "Who is that?"
"His name's Tippet," Allen said. "He's, uh, been studying the trees." Tippet said, "A spotlight isn't bright enough to put a tree to sleep unless you surprise it. The tree can fold its leaves back in order to stay awake.
In the meantime, it becomes desperate to stop the threat." More dead air, then, "Oui, that fits what we have seen. But what can we do?" The guy probably had no idea he was talking to an alien. Judy wasn't ready to give away that much information, either. But Tippet apparently didn't care. "Use a bigger spotlight," he said. "Tell your people to shield their eyes."
"What do you mean? What are you going to do?"
"You will see. Allen, Judy, prepare for thrust."
"What?" Judy said. "Wait a—"
The disorientation she'd been feeling for the last few seconds stopped, then there was a deep rumble that she felt more than heard, followed by thumps and rattles as all the floating debris inside the Getaway drifted toward Judy's feet. She reached out to grab the walls to keep herself from sliding under the hyperdrive to the other side of the tank. Fortunately the thrust was only a tenth of a gee or so; she and Allen were in way too awkward a position to hold themselves up in full gravity.
"Mon Dieu!" the Frenchman said. A babble of voices rose up in the background, then cut off. She would have killed for an outside view, but she could see it clearly enough in her mind's eye: The butterflies had turned their ship, then lit the drive. The huge engines at the back were no doubt aimed at the planet, spraying their exhaust directly at the French encampment. Not that they'd have to be that accurate. With the kind of power those engines could unleash, the whole night side of the planet was probably lit up like day, and auroras would be flashing like neon lights from pole to pole even so. And the trees would be freezing in place like bugs caught in amber.
"Move quickly," Tippet said. "We can't keep this up for long." The Frenchman they'd been speaking to didn't reply for a moment, and when he did it was only to say, "Just a few more seconds."
Something thumped hard against the Getaway, or perhaps that was the Getaway smacking up against the aft wall. "Down" was along the axis of the ship, and they had been resting against a wall when the drive had come on line. They were lucky they hadn't tumbled.
"How's the tree?" Judy asked. "Is it hanging on?"
"They have stopped moving," the Frenchman said, then Tippet said, "Oh. I relayed that before I realized you were asking me. It is hanging on. But we must cut our thrust soon. We had no time to prepare the ship for it; we will cause damage if we persist."
