"You don't look so good yourself," she said, smiling.
Normally, her voice was a rich contralto, but now it was gravelly.
She stood up. She was slim but broad-shouldered and full-breasted. She was only two inches shorter than his six feet one inch, was as strong as any man her weight, and inside fifty yards she could outrun him. Why not? She had had ten thousand years to develop her physical potentialities.
She took a comb from the back pocket of her torn bellbottom trousers and straightened out her long hair, as black as a Crow Indian's.
"There. Is that better?" she said, smiling. Her teeth were very white and perfect. Only thirty years ago, she'd had tooth buds implanted, the hundredth set in a series.
"Not bad for a starving dehydrated old woman," he said. "In fact, if I was up to it ... "
He quit grinning, and he waved his hand to indicate the hilltops. "We've got visitors."
It was difficult in this light to see if she'd turned pale. Her voice was steady. "If they're bearing fruit, we'll eat."
He thought it better not to say that they might be eaten instead.
He handed her the beamer. It looked like a six-shooter revolver. But the cartridges were batteries, of which only one now had a charge. The barrel contained a mechanism which could be adjusted to shoot a ray that could cut through a tree or inflict a slight burn or a stunning blow.
Kickaha went back to where his bow and a quiver of arrows lay. He was an excellent archer, but so far only two of his arrows had struck game. The animals were wary, and it had been impossible, except twice, to get close enough to any to shoot. Both kills had been small gazelles, not enough to fill the bellies of five adults in twelve days. Anana had gotten a hare with a throw of her light axe, but a long-legged baboon had dashed out from behind a hill, scooped it up, and run off with it.
Kickaha picked up the bow and quiver, and they walked three hundred feet away from the sleepers. Here he lay down and went to sleep. His knife was thrust upright into the ground, ready to be snatched in case of attack. Anana had her beamer, a light throwing axe, and a knife for defense.
They were not worried at this time about the trees. They just wanted to keep distance between them and the others. When Anana's watch was over, she would wake up McKay. Then she'd return to lie down by Kickaha. She and her mate were not overly concerned about one of the others trying to sneak up on them while they slept. Anana had told them that her wristwatch had a device which would sound an alarm if anybody with a mass large enough to be dangerous came close. She was lying, though the device was something that a Lord could have. They probably wondered if she was deceiving them. However, they did not care to test her. She had said that if anyone tried to attack them, she would kill him immediately. They knew that she would do so.
CHAPTER THREE
HE AWOKE, SWEATING from the heat, the bright light of "day" plucking at his eyes. The sky had become a fiery light red. The clouds were gone, taking their precious moisture elsewhere. But he was no longer in a valley. The hills had come down, flattened out into a plain. And the party was now on a small hill.
He was surprised. The rate of change had been greater than he'd expected. Urthona, however, had said that the reshaping occasionally accelerated. Nothing was constant or predictable here. So, he shouldn't have been surprised.
The trees still ringed them. There were several thousand, and now some scouts were advancing toward the just-born hill. They were about ten feet tall. The trunks were barrel-shaped and covered with a smooth greenish bark. Large round dark eyes circled the trunk near its top. On one side was an opening, the mouth. Inside it was soft flexible tissue and two hard ridges holding shark-like teeth. According to Urthona, the plants were half-protein, and the digestive system was much like an animal's. The anus was the terminus of the digestive system, but it was also located in the mouth.
Urthona should know. He had designed them.
"They don't have any diseases, so there's no reason why the feces shouldn't pass through the mouth," Urthona had said.
"They must have bad breath," Kickaha had said. "But then nobody's going to kiss them, are they?"
He, Anana, and McKay had laughed. Urthona and Red Ore had looked disgusted. Their sense of humor had atrophied. Or perhaps they'd never had much.
Above the head of the tree was a growth of many slender stems rising two feet straight up. Broad green leaves, heart-shaped, covered the stems. From the trunk radiated six short branches, each three feet long, a pair on each side, in three ranks. These had short twigs supporting large round leaves. Between each ring of branches was a tentacle, about twelve feet long and as supple as an octopus's. A pair of tentacles also grew from the base.
The latter helped balance the trunk as it moved on two short kneeless legs ending in huge round barky toeless feet. When the tree temporarily changed from an ambulatory to sedentary state, the lower tentacles bored into the soil, grew roots, and sucked sustenance from the ground. The roots could be easily broken off and the tentacles withdrawn when the tree decided to move on.
Kickaha had asked Urthona why he had had such a clumsy unnatural monster made in his biolabs.
"It pleased me to do so."
Urthona probably was wishing he hadn't done so. He had wakened the others, and all were staring at the weird-and frightening-creatures.
Kickaha walked up to him. "How do they communicate?"
"Through pheromones. Various substances they emit. There are about thirty of these, and a tree smelling them receives various signals. They don't think; their brains are about the size of a dinosaur's. They react on the instinctive-or robotic-level. They have a well-developed herd instinct, though."
"Any of these pheromones stimulate fear?"
"Yes. But you have to make one of them afraid, and there's nothing in this situation to scare them."
"I was thinking," Kickaha said, "that it's too bad you don't carry around a vial of fear-pheromones."
"I used to," Urthona said.
The nearest scout had halted thirty feet away. Kickaha looked at Anana, who was sixty feet from the group. Her beamer was ready for trouble from the three men or the tree.
Kickaha walked to the scout and stopped ten feet from it. It waved its greenish tentacles. Others were coming to join it, though not on a run. He estimated that with those legs they could go perhaps a mile an hour. But then he didn't know their full potentiality. Urthona didn't remember how fast they could go.
Even as he walked down toward the tree, he could feel the earth swelling beneath him, could see the rate of its shaping increase. The air became warmer, and spaces had appeared between the blades of grass. The earth was black and greasy-looking. If the shaping stopped, and there was no change for three days, the grass would grow enough to fill in the bare spots.
The thousand or so plants were still moving but more slowly. They leaned forward on their rigid legs, their tentacles extended to support them.
Kickaha looked closely at the nearest one and saw about a dozen apple-red spheres dangling from the branches. He called to Urthona. "Is their fruit good to eat?"
"For birds, yes," Urthona said. "I don't remember. But I can't think why I should have made them poisonous for humans."
"Knowing you, I'd say you could have done it for laughs," Kickaha said.
He motioned to Angus McKay to come to him. The black came to him warily, though his caution was engendered by the tree, not Kickaha.
McKay was an inch shorter than Kickaha but about thirty pounds heavier. Not much of the additional weight was fat, though. He was dressed in black levis, socks, and boots. He'd long ago shed his shirt and the leather jacket of the motorcyclist, but he still carried his helmet. Kickaha had insisted that it be retained to catch rainwater in, if for nothing else.