"God . . ." Gitta said, slipping a pair of camouflaged image-amplifier goggles to her eyes. "It's huge."
"They're not small animals," her husband said. He was looking in the same direction as Dieterling, his eyes squinting intently at something. "You're right. That tree must have had-what, eight or nine fusions?"
"At the very least," Dieterling said. "The most recent fusion might still be in its transition state."
"Still warm, you mean?" Cahuella said.
I could see the way his mind was working. Where there was a tree with recent growth layers, there might be near-adult hamadryads as well.
We decided to set up camp in the next clearing, a couple of hundred metres further down the trail. The drivers needed a rest after a day pushing through the trail, and the vehicles tended to accumulate minor damage which had to be put right before the next stage. We were in no haste to reach our ambush point and Cahuella liked to spend a few hours each night hunting around the camp's perimeter before retiring.
I used a monofilament scythe to widen the clearing, then helped with the inflation of the bubbletents.
"I'm going into the jungle," Cahuella said, tapping me on the shoulder. He wore his hunting jacket, a rifle slung over one shoulder. "I'll be back in an hour or so."
"Go easy with any near-adults you find," I said, only half joking.
"This is just a fishing trip, Tanner."
I reached over to the card table I had set up outside the tent, with some of our equipment on it. "Here. Don't forget these, especially if you're going to wander far." I held up the image-amp goggles.
He hesitated, then reached out and took the goggles, slipping them into a shirt pocket. "Thanks."
He stepped away from the pool of light around the tents, unhitching the gun as he went. I finished the first tent, the one where Gitta and Cahuella were sleeping, and then went to find her to tell her it was ready. She was sitting in the cab of the vehicle, an expensive compad propped on her lap. She was thumbing through something indolently, skimming pages of what looked like poetry.
"Your tent's done," I said.
She closed the compad with something like relief and allowed me to lead her towards the tent's opening. I had already checked the clearing for any lurking unpleasantnesses-the smaller, venomous cousins of hamadryads which we called dropwinders-but the place was safe. Still, Gitta moved hesitantly, afraid of putting her foot down on anything other than a brightly lit spot of ground, despite my reassurances.
"You look like you're enjoying yourself," I said.
"Is that sarcasm, Tanner? Do you expect me to enjoy this?"
"I told him it would be better for all of us if you stayed at the Reptile House."
I unzipped the opening. Within was a pantry-sized airlock which kept the tent from deflating whenever someone came or went. We set up the three tents at the apexes of a triangle, linked together by pressurised corridors a few strides long. The tiny generator which fed the tents the air which kept them inflated was small and silent. Gitta stepped within and then said, "Is that what you think, Tanner-that this is no place for a woman? I thought attitudes like that died before they ever launched the Flotilla."
"No . . ." I said, trying not to sound overly defensive. "That's not what I think at all." I moved to seal the outer door between us, so that she could enter the tent in her own privacy.
But she put a hand up and held mine from the zip. "What is it you think, then?"
"I think what's going to happen here won't be very pleasant."
"An ambush, you mean? Funny; I'd never have guessed that for myself."
I said something foolish. "Gitta, you have to realise, there are things you don't know about Cahuella. Or me, for that matter. Things about the work we do. Things we have done. I think you will soon have a better idea about some of those things."
"Why are you telling me this?"
"I think you should be ready for it, that's all." I looked over my shoulder, towards the jungle where her husband had vanished. "I should get to work on the other tents, Gitta . . ."
When she answered her voice had an odd quality to it. "Yes, of course." She was looking at me intently. Perhaps it was the way the light played on it, but her face seemed extraordinarily beautiful to me then; like something painted by Gauguin. I think it was in that instant that my intention to betray Cahuella crystallised. The thought of it must have always been there, but it had taken that instant of searing beauty to bring it to light. If the shadows had fallen slightly differently across her face, I wondered, would I still have made that decision?
"Tanner, you're wrong, you know."
"About what?"
"Cahuella. I know a lot more about him than you think. A lot more than anyone here thinks they do. I know he's a violent man, and I know he's done terrible things. Evil things. Things you wouldn't even believe."
"You'd be surprised," I said.
"No; that's precisely the point, I wouldn't be. I'm not talking about the violent little deeds he's committed since you've known him. They're barely worthy of consideration compared to the things he did before. And unless you're aware of those things, you really don't know him at all."
"If he's so bad, why do you stay with him?"
"Because he isn't the evil man he used to be."
Something flashed between the trees; a stammer of blue-white light, followed a moment later by the report of a laser-rifle. Something dropped through foliage to the ground. I imagined Cahuella stepping forward until he had found his kill; probably a small snake.
"Some people would say that an evil man never really changes, Gitta."
"Then they'd be wrong. It's only our deeds that make us evil, Tanner; they're what define us, nothing else, not our intentions or feelings. But what are a few bad deeds compared to a life, especially the kinds of lives we can live now?"
"Only some of us," I said.
"Cahuella's older than you think, Tanner. And the evil things he did were a long, long time ago, when he was much younger. They were what led me to him, eventually." She paused, glancing towards the trees, but before I could ask her what she had meant by that, she was already speaking again. "But the man I found wasn't an evil one. He was cruel, violent, dangerous, but he was also capable of giving love; of accepting love from another human being. He saw beauty in things; recognised evil in others. He wasn't the man I'd expected to find, but someone better. Not perfect-not by a long stretch-but not a monster; not at all. I found that I couldn't hate him as easily as I'd hoped."
"You expected to hate him?"
"I expected to do a lot more than that. I expected to kill him, or bring him to justice. Instead . . ." Gitta paused again. There was another crack of blue light from the forest: the deadfall of another animal. "I found myself asking a question; one I'd never thought of before. How long would you have to live as a good man-doing good-before the sum of your good actions cancelled out something terrible you'd once done? Could any human life be long enough?"
"I don't know," I answered, truthfully. "But I do know one thing. Cahuella may be better than he used to be, but he is still not anyone's idea of citizen of the month, is he? If you define the way he is now as a man doing good, I'd hate to think what he was like before."
"You would, yes," Gitta said. "And I don't think you could handle it, either."
I bade her goodnight and returned to preparing the other tents.
Chapter Twenty
IN THE midmorning, while the others struck camp, five of us walked back on foot until we had reached the point in the track where we had seen the hamadryad tree. From there it was an uncomfortable but short scramble through overgrowth until we reached the flared base. I led the party, sweeping the monofilament scythe ahead of me in an arc which cleared most of the vegetation.
"It's even bigger than it looked from the trail," Cahuella said. He was rosy-cheeked and jovial this morning, for his hunting last night had been successful, as we had discovered by the carcasses hung up outside the clearing.
"How old do you think it is?"
"It definitely predates the landing," said Dieterling. "Four hundred years old, perhaps. We'd need to cut it to know better." He began to stroll around the tree's circumference, tapping the bark lightly with the back of his knuckles.
With us were Gitta and Rodriguez. They looked up towards the tree's upper reaches, craning their necks and squinting against the sunlight which filtered through the jungle canopy.
"I don't like it," Gitta said. "What if . . ."
He had appeared out of earshot, but Dieterling answered her. "The chances of another snake coming by here are pretty damn minimal. Especially as this one seems to have fused very recently."
"Are you sure?" Cahuella said.
"Check it out for yourself."
He was nearly round the back of the tree. We crunched through the overgrowth until we reached him.
The hamadryad trees were a mystery to the first explorers, in those dreamlike years before the war began. They had swept through this part of the Peninsula at haste, eyes wide for the wonders of a new world, searching for marvels, knowing that everything would be studied in greater detail in the future. They were like children ripping open presents, scarcely glancing at the contents of each wrapper before beginning to unpeel another gift. There was just too much to be seen.
If they had been methodical, they would have discovered the trees and decided that they were worthy of immediate further study, rather than simply consigning them to the growing list of planetary anomalies. Had they done so, they would only have needed to place a few trees under study for a few years before the secret would have been revealed to them. But it was many decades into the war before the proper nature of the trees was established.
They were rare, but distributed across a large area of the Peninsula. It was that very rarity which had made them the focus of early attention, for the trees were conspicuously different to the other forest species. Each rose to the height of the canopy and no higher-forty or fifty metres above the forest floor, depending on the surrounding growth. Each was shaped like a spiral candlestick, thickening towards the base. Near the top, the trees flared into a wide, flattened structure like a dark green mushroom, tens of metres across. It was these mushrooms which had made the hamadryad trees so obvious to the first explorers, overflying the jungle in one of the Santiago 's shuttles.
Now and then they found a clearing near a tree and set down to investigate on foot. The biologists amongst them had struggled to find an explanation for the trees' shapes, or the strange differentiation in cell types which occurred around the tree's perimeter and along radial lines through it. What was clear was that the wood at the heart of the trees was dead growth, with the living matter existing in a relatively thin layer around the husk.
The spiral candlestick analogy was accurate up to a point, but a better description, I felt, was of an enormously tall and thin helter-skelter, like the dilapidated old one I remembered from an abandoned fairground in Nueva Iquique, its pastel blue paint peeling away a little more with each summer. The tree's underlying shape was more or less a tapering cylindrical trunk, but wrapped around this, ascending to the summit, was a helical structure whose spirals did not quite lie in contact with each other. The helix was smooth, patterned in geometric brown and green shapes which shimmered like beaten metal. In the gaps where the underlying trunk was visible, there was often evidence for a similar structure which had been worn down or absorbed into the tree, and perhaps levels of structure behind that too, though only a skilled botanist really had the eye to read those subtleties of tree growth.
Dieterling had indentified the major spiral around this tree. At the base, just where it looked as if the spiral ought to plunge into the ground like a root, it terminated in a hollow opening.
He pointed it out to me. "It's hollow almost all the way to the top, bro."
"Meaning what?" Rodriguez said. He knew how to handle the juvenile, but he was no expert on the creatures' biological cycle.
"Meaning it's already hatched," Cahuella said. "The juveniles from this one have already left home."
"They eat their way out of their mother," I said. We still had no idea whether there were distinct hamadryad sexes, so it was entirely possible that they had eaten their way out of their father as well-or neither. When the war was over, probing hamadryad biology would fuel a thousand academic careers.
"How big would they have been?" Gitta asked.
"As big as our own juve," I said, kicking the maw at the base of the spiral. "Maybe a touch smaller. But nothing you'd want to meet without some heavy firepower."
"I thought they moved too slowly to pose us any threat."
"That's the near-adults," Dieterling said. "And even then, you wouldn't necessarily be able to out-run it-not through overgrowth like this."
"Would it want to eat us-I mean, would it even recognise us as something to be eaten?"
"Probably not," Dieterling said. "Which might not be much consolation as it slithers over you."
"Ease off it," Cahuella said, putting a hand round Gitta. "They're like any wild animal-only dangerous if you don't know what the fuck you're doing. And we do know, don't we?"
Something crashed through the overgrowth behind us. Startled, we all turned around, half expecting to see the eyeless head of a near-adult bearing down on us like a slow-moving freight train, crunching through the jungle which impeded its implacable slithering progress about as efficiently as fog.
Instead, what we saw was Doctor Vicuna.
The doctor had shown no inclination to follow us when we had left camp, and I wondered what had made him change his mind. Not that I was in any way glad of the ghoul's company.
"What is it, Doctor?"
"I became bored, Cahuella." The doctor high-stepped through what remained of the overgrowth I had scythed. His clothes, as usual, were impeccable, even as ours picked up cuts and stains from the time in the field. He wore a knee-length dun field jacket, unzipped at the front. Around his neck dangled a pair of dainty image-amp goggles. His hair was kiss-curled, lending him the sordid air of a malnourished cherub. "Ah-and this is the tree!"
I stepped out of his path, my hand sweating around the haft of the monofilament scythe, imagining what it would do to the ghoul if I were to accidentally extend the cutting arc and flick it through him. Whatever pain he suffered in the process, I thought, could not be measured against the cumulative dose he had inflicted in his career.
"Quite a specimen, isn't it," Cahuella said.
"The most recent fusion probably only happened a few weeks ago," Dieterling said, as comfortable with the ghoul as his master. "Take a look at the celltype gradient here."
The doctor ambled forward to see what Dieterling was talking about.
Dieterling had unpacked a slim grey device from the waist pocket of his hunting jacket. Of Ultra manufacture, it was the size of an unopened Bible, set with a screen and a few cryptically marked controls. Dieterling pressed one side of the device to the helix and thumbed one of the buttons. In shades of pale blue, vastly magnified cells appeared on the screen. They were hazy cylindrical shapes, packed together haphazardly like body bags in a morgue.
"These are essentially epithelial cells," Dieterling said, sketching a finger across the image. "Note the soft, lipid structure of the cell membrane-very characteristic."
"Of what?" Gitta said.
"Of an animal . If I took a sample of your liver lining, it wouldn't look too dissimilar to this."
He moved the device to another part of the helix, a little closer to the trunk. "Now look. Totally different cells-arranged much more regularly, with geometric boundaries locked together for structural rigidity. See how the cell membrane is surrounded by an additional layer? That's basically cellulose." He touched another control and the cells became glassy, filled with phantom shapes. "See those podlike organelles? Nascent chloroplasts. And those labyrinthine structures are part of the endoplasmic reticulum. All these things are defining characteristic
s of plant cells."
Gitta tapped the bark where Dieterling had made the first scan. "So the tree is more like an animal here, and more like a plant-here?"
"It's a morphological gradient, of course. The cells in the trunk are pure plant cells-a cylinder of xylem around a core of old growth. When the snake first attaches itself to the tree, wrapping around it, it's still an animal. But where the snake comes into contact with the tree, its own cells begin to change. We don't know what makes that happen-whether the triggering cue comes from something in the snake's own lymphatic system, or whether the tree itself supplies the chemical signal to begin fusion." Dieterling indicated where the helix merged seamlessly with the trunk. "This process of cellular unification would have taken a few days. When it was over, the snake was inseparably attached to the tree-had, in fact, become part of the tree itself. But most of the snake was still an animal at that point."
"What happens to its brain?" Gitta asked.
"It doesn't need one anymore. Doesn't even need anything we'd exactly recognise as a nervous system, to be frank."
"You haven't answered my question."
Dieterling smiled at her. "The mother's brain is the first thing that the juveniles eat."
"They eat their mother?" Gitta said, horrified.
The snakes merged with their host trees, becoming plants themselves. It only happened when the snakes were in their near-adult phase, large enough to spiral around the tree all the way from the ground to the canopy. By then young hamadryads were already developing in what passed for the creature's womb.
The host tree had almost certainly already seen several fusions. Perhaps the original, true tree had long since rotted away, and what remained were only the locked spirals of dead hamadryads. It was likely, however, that the last snake to attach itself to the tree was still technically alive, having spread its photosynthetic cowl wide from the top of the tree, drinking sunlight. No one knew how long the snakes could have lived in that final brainless plant-phase. What was known was that another near-adult would arrive sooner or later and claim the tree for itself. It would slither up the tree and force its head through the cowl of its predecessor, then spread its own cowl over the old. Deprived of sunlight, the shadowed cowl would wither away quickly. The newcomer would fuse with the tree, becoming mostly plant. What little animal tissue remaining was there only to supply the young with food, born within a few months of the fusion. Some chemical trigger would cause them to eat their way out of the womb, digesting their mother as they went. Once they had eaten her brain, they would chew their way down the spiral length of her body, until they emerged at ground-level as fully formed, rapacious juvenile hamadryads.
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