"No animals at all," he said to the guide, still amazed at the society of this primitive world.
"Not now," the guide replied, chuckling.
"What's that?"
"I said, not now. There used to be."
"How do you know?"
"They've found the fossils," he said, fingering the stone hanging about his withered neck. "Thousands of them. Not any that might have been possessed by intelligent creatures. Primitive animals. Some small dinosaurs."
"What happened to them?" Hulann asked, fascinated.
The old naoli waved his arms around at the jungle. "The plants happened to them. That's what. The plants just developed a little faster. They think the animals were a slow lot. When the first ambulent plants arrived on the scene, they ate flesh."
Hulann shivered.
The forest seemed to close in on him, to grow from just a pleasant patch of trees to something malevolent and purposeful. He felt himself backing away toward their shuttlecraft, stopped himself, and chided himself for his youthful superstition. "Yet now the plants are finally subservient to animals. To us."
"Wouldn't be so certain," the old man said. He pulled on the iris stone. The warmth of his gnarled hand made the black and green gem pulsate, the green iris growing larger and smaller with the changes in temperature.
"How so?"
"The plants are trying to adapt to us. Hunting a way to do us in."
Hulann shivered. "Now you're talking the kind of superstition I just got finished scolding myself for."
"It's not superstition. Couple of years ago, the first Concrete Vines showed up."
"They-"
"Yeah. Eat concrete. The wall of the central administration building fell in. Killed a hundred and some. Roof collapsed under the stress. Later, they found a funny thing. They found these vines, only as big around as the tip of your tail, honeycombing the wall. They had come in from the forest edge, growing underground until they reached the wall. Then they grew upwards until they had weakened it. Ate the insides out of that wall. After a few more cases like that, we started building with plastics ant plastic metals." He laughed an ancient, dry cough of a laugh. "But I suppose we'll be seeing some Plastic Vines before long. The jungle has had time to work it out, I guess."
Hulann had gone back to the Tagasa with a brooding idea for a speculative fiction work about what might happen on Dala when the plants finally launched a successful attack against the naoli colonists. The book had been a critical and financial success. Twenty-one million cartridges had been sold. Forty-six years after publication, the plants of Dala launched a successful revolt
He had been making notes into his recorder about his day with the guide when a messenger had come from the captain's quarters with a private note that he did not want sent over the Phasersystem. It was a simple request to come to meet a few humans who had come to Dala to argue various trade contracts and whom the captain had requested aboard.
Hulann, having seen only seven of the eleven races (some are quite hermetic) and never having seen a human, was more than eager to comply with the request. Too, humans were the novelty of the many worlds, having only appeared in galactic society some twenty years earlier.
He had gone to the captain's quarters highly excited, unable to control the dilation of his primary nostrils, or the faint quivering of his interior eyelids. In the end, he had come away disappointed-and more than a little frightened.
The humans were cold, efficient men who seemed to have little time for pleasantries. Oh, they made all the gestures and did some customary small talk in broken naoli home-world tongue to prove their desire for cooperation. But the pleasantries ended there. They constantly steered the conversation back onto business topics whenever it strayed for more than a moment or two. They only smiled-never laughed. Perhaps it was this last quality which made them, in the final analysis, so terrifying. When those solid, phony grins were summoned to cover their faces, Hulann had wondered what laid behind the facade.
At first, this difficulty was deemed natural. None of the other races had been easily understood. It had taken as much as fifty years to break down the cultural lines and begin meaningful communications and day-to-day relationships. The naoli expected it would take at least as long with the humans.
Fifty years came and went. The humans moved farther into the galaxy, spreading out, founding colonies on unclaimed worlds (only the naoli, the glimm, the sardonia, and the jacksters wanted to compete for oxy-nitrogen planets; the other races considered such places at least undesirable, and at worst intolerable). Their rate of expansion into the many-peopled stars was slow by some standards, but the humans explained that they had their own method of pioneering. It was a not-so-polite way of telling everyone else to mind their business.
Fifty years came and went, and the humans that the naoli-and the other races-saw were still as withdrawn, cool, and unfriendly as ever. By the end of the second fifty years, various disputes arose between the naoli and the humans over trade routes and colony claims and half a hundred other things more petty. In not one case, could the races reach agreement. The humans began to settle many problems by force, the most expedient route — and the most illegal in the eyes of the naoli.
Eventually: the war.
It was not necessary to convince Hulann that the war was essential to the naoli's survival. He had always carried with him the memory of those humans on the Tagasa, the strange, smooth-skinned, hairy creatures with the brooding eyes and the quiet, solemn faces that argued for a shrewd and wicked mind within their skulls.
Long ago.
And this was the Here and Now. And Leo was beside him, sleeping, curled feotally. Why was the boy different? Why was the boy easy to reach? This was, as far as he knew, the first instance of intercommunication between naoli and man in the hundred and eighty years of their acquaintance. It went against all that was known of humans. Yet, here they were.
He abruptly broke his train of thought. It was leading him back through the events of the last two days, and he did not want to be plagued with those things again.
He blinked his large eyes and looked carefully through the wet glass at the road and the landscape around it. If anything, it was snowing harder now than when they had left Boston. Long, almost impenetrable walls of snow swirled by on both sides while the craft knifed between them, kicked up an even whiter inferno behind as its own draughts stirred the fluff on the road surface. The markers at the edges of the throughway were drifted over here and there. Elsewhere, just their orange, phosphorescent caps peaked out. The direction signs suspended overhead were collecting a film of the hard driven snow, becoming increasingly difficult to read.
If the storm grew worse and the drifts covered the roadbed, they would founder. A shuttlecraft could cross snow-as long as it was light enough to blow out of the way and give the down-draught a clear blow surface on the roadbed. Hard-packed drifts created an uneven surface, which invariably led to disaster.
Near Warren, in the human province of Pennsylvania, moving at a hundred and ninety miles an hour toward the province of Ohio, disaster stopped waiting and leapt at them
Hulann was squinting through the snow, paying strict attention to the highway in order to keep his mind off things he would rather not ponder. It was this extra attentiveness that saved their lives. Had he been lax, he would not have seen the glow of the crater