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.