Outside, things were quieting down. A lot. I looked around, and discovered that I could see through my windows.
There were no animals crushed up against them. There were no animals anywhere that I could see.
There never had been.
I took a very deep breath. The fairytale feeling I’d had for the world…
And the fact that the noises outside hadn’t changed from afternoon to morning. The feeling was, I began to realize, that a tape had been repeating itself—which turns out to be at the least a pretty good metaphor. A tape, so to speak, of the animal life Tree saw no reason to risk.
The damned trees had handed me a world full of threats and danger and terror. If I were a smart Unfamiliar Animal, I’d leave real quick.
OK I was a smart Unfamiliar Animal.
And I was going to have to persuade the Comity to be just as smart. I thought I could probably do that; right at the moment, the human race is not absolutely desperate for living space. That’s a feeling that comes and goes as the decades wander by, and it’s been going, really, since we started real expansion into the local stars. We could stand to write off one promising-looking planet, and Tree could go back to doing whatever it is it does when nobody’s watching.
I wish to hell I knew what that might be.
I thought back to that nice tuber recipe, and the nice taste of Key Lime pie in there.
Well, of course.
Tree had hypnotized me into a few small successes with its recipes—how much had been real and how much imagined, I might never know—just to keep me headed toward whatever its latest assault was going to be. It wanted to scare me, not kill me, and it wanted me to believe that all its threats, from Thumbelina to the animal kingdom, were perfectly real. The seventeen hours had been real—and caused by some sort of telepathy primed by the trees.
But its methods hadn’t worked. So it had holed up for a while, considered whatever it had learned about me in its study period, and decided it would quit kidding around and just tell me to get the hell off its face.
Meanwhile, it kept me occupied with recipes, some good, some bad. Stampeding had to be thought out carefully—Tree, planet of brotherly calm, wasn’t at all used to that sort of thing. (And I don’t really think it was all that bright. Furry birds? Teeny Knave? It had never had to be bright, I think, and it was improvising like crazy. Sometimes, like any improviser, it slipped a little.) And while it was planning, its target was thinking.
Very slowly, to be sure. It was all there in front of me—the sheer insanity of the pieces kept me from seeing the insanity of the whole, that was all. Teeny Knave—which my analysis actually saw, recorded, got small details about…
And those furry birds—
They’re what bother me most. There is no way for fairly heavy fur to substitute for feathers, as far as I can figure out (and as far as a few other, more knowledgeable people I’ve asked can figure out)—but there they were.
The drone ships actually saw them.
Question, friends: What is there that can hypnotize analysis devices, recording devices, and a drone ship?
Just what are the trees on Tree?
They might, after all, be intelligent, if (of course—like us) no more intelligent than they have to be.
They might, for that matter, be the plaything, or early warning system, or by-product, of something else, maybe something much smarter—how would we know?
Offhand, the best hope I have is that we never get close enough to it to find out.