by Vernor Vinge
When Screwfloss finished his advice, Gannon was thoughtful and silent. Amdi scouted ahead and around, sniffed at some of the bushes. Now he was in question mode. Amdi wanted to know everything Screwfloss could tell him about what would trigger a shooter attack and about how clusters of shooters might be arranged. Screwfloss was full of details, a weird combination of technical analysis and medieval folktales.
Amdi ate it all up and had even more questions. By the time Chitiratifor signaled that they were stopping to make camp, Jorkenrud’s interest in safety procedures had been satisfied in mind-numbing detail.
Apparently, Chitiratifor had absorbed some brief form of this advice at lunch time. Ravna could tell by Raggedy Ears’ nervous uncertainty in setting up the night’s campsite.
As Ravna climbed down from the wagon, Amdi was standing all around her. “You know,” he said, his voice quiet and casual but not really secretive, “this really doesn’t make any sense.”
Then he trailed off in the direction of Jefri.
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Half an hour after they had stopped, Gannon and Jefri were at work with the evening housekeeping. Chitiratifor had decided on where the campfires should be but he was still ordering the wagons and draft animals moved around, trying to find the safest formation. Screwfloss accompanied Chitiratifor, providing his expert advice. Every time the two packs came within earshot Ravna listened with interest. One thing about Screwfloss’ story, it might distract Raggedy Ears from planning the murderous entertainment Amdi feared.
“Yes,” the ever-informative Screwfloss was saying, “you have to distract the trees. The things they react to are vibrations and physical attack.”
Raggedy Ears objected: “But we don’t eat these plants; we’re not even loggers. We won’t hurt the trees.”
“I’m afraid that doesn’t matter, my lord. The killer trees are more common here than I’ve ever seen, and I suspect that the way ahead will be even worse. Tonight we have some good luck, an opportunity to practice proper technique. On this side of the road we’ve found a small area that’s free of the killers, but our sounds will eventually cause a cook-off—that’s a human technical term, my lord, for when weapons spontaneously discharge. We’ll need to provoke a partial cook-off just to protect ourselves.”
“The troops aren’t going to like that.”
“Present it as a perfectly safe test, my lord—which is exactly what it will be. We’re camping on the west side of the trail, near the protection of the root bushes. I suggest you cause some small trauma to the trees on the east side.”
“Trauma?”
“I mean, cause some wound to the trees. You can have a single member do the job, using a wagon to provide it with safe cover. The rest of us can take shelter by the root bushes on this side of the road. We’ll get a good idea of what to expect on the road ahead.”
Raggedy Ears emitted a thoughtful noise, but the two packs were walking away and she couldn’t hear the rest of the conversation. The wagons eventually were parked, and the kherhogs sheltered a little behind the wagons. Jefri and Amdi were out of sight when Gannon and Chitiratifor came strolling in her direction. He was carrying a utility axe in one pair of jaws. Ravna suddenly realized that Raggedy Ears had figured out how an entertaining murder could help solve his other problems.
The pack dropped the axe on the ground in front of her. “You!” he said. “Go across the road and make cuts on the middle tree.”
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“You’ll do what Chitiratifor told you!” Gannon waved her back to the east side of the path and away from the wagons. “Now take the axe, damn it.” He lobbed the utility axe across the trail. The spinning blade sank deep into the ground two meters from Ravna’s feet.
At the sound of Gannon’s voice, Amdi and Jefri came around the fodder wagon. They must have been feeding the kherhogs. The weather was so warm now that there was no need for ferment-warming, but feeding the hungry animals was still a messy job—the kind of work that even Gannon managed to avoid.
“What are you doing with Ravna?” Jefri shouted. There was a good ten meters separating Gannon from herself, so this was evidently no ordinary form of harassment.
“He wants me to chop a tree,” Ravna shouted back.
“What?”
As Amdi and Jefri ran toward her, Chitiratifor moved casually into their path. He’d pulled battle axes from his panniers and idly swung them back and forth. Ravna noticed that the wagoneers had unlimbered their crossbows.
Gannon waved Jefri back. “Hei, Jef. Keep cool.”
Jefri looked across the trail at where Ravna stood, alone. His gaze swept up, across the trees. Abruptly, he turned on the nearest of Chitiratifor. “You need her! That’s the whole point of this expedition.”
There was a lazy smile in Raggedy Ears’ aspect. He flipped a battle axe adroitly. “You’re wrong. I don’t need the Ravna two-legs alive. I have a good use for her now. More use than I have for most two-legs.”
Gannon gave a nervous laugh and said to Jefri. “Just go along with it, Jef.”
Jefri glared at him and then around at the packs. The air was still for a moment, and Ravna saw that Amdi had been absolutely right. With Remasritlfeer gone, Chitiratifor was free to complete his mission. Please don’t try to fight them, Jefri. Amdi seemed to feel the same. He uttered a loud screech and tried to hold Jefri back by grabbing at the cuffs of his pants.
“Fine,” said Jefri—and reached toward the nearest of Chitiratifor. “Then give me an axe, too.”
“You craphead!” said Gannon.
For an instant, Ravna thought Raggedy Ears might slash at Jefri’s hand. Then the pack gave a rattling laugh and flipped one of the axes out of its mouth.
Jefri snatched the axe from the air. He kicked loose of Amdi’s grasp and stomped across the path to stand by Ravna. Amdiranifani followed all around.
Chitiratifor’s laughter swelled into full honking, and he said something to Screwfloss and the wagoneers. They were all having a good time. Their leader was going to show them just what all the killer tree fuss was about—without putting anyone worthwhile at risk. He gobbled something imperative at Amdi.
Amdi replied in human talk. “No, I won’t leave Jefri.” The words were brave, but there was white around his eyes.
Chitiratifor boomed angrily. Then he said in Samnorsk, “You are of interest, but you can still be punished. Would you like to be seven? or six?”
Screwfloss put in: “Oh, let him stay, my lord. He can stand over by the tree with the root bush. That should be relatively safe.”
Amdi cowered back, shuffling toward the tree that Screwfloss was pointing to. Ravna noticed that the campsite had been very carefully chosen. No tree near hers had a root bush.
Chitiratifor watched Amdi move; a smile spread across his aspect. “You are a coward clown.” His attention returned to Ravna and Jefri, but he had good humor for them too. “Now you, the female. Pick up the axe. Cut the tree behind you. Is that the one, Screwfloss?”
“Quite so, my lord. That’s almost certainly a true killer, and the lowest arrows look well-tensioned.”
“Are the kherhogs safely away?”
Screwfloss glanced at the carts and animals. “Oh yes.” The kherhogs were milling around as if they realized that something extreme was in the offing. “You’ve positioned them perfectly.”
Chitiratifor gobbled to the others. He sounded like he was putting on a show. Ravna recognized the word for “wager” in his chords. “And you, the male, stand by the second tree on the left.”
“But don’t chop anything yet,” said Screwfloss. “We want to see if one attack can provoke the other trees.”
Raggedy Ears elaborated for his Tinish audience.
“I said, pick up the axe!” Chitiratifor boomed at her. “You have a good chance at living if you do.” He said something to his audience. They gobbled back at him, and he added. “Four to one odds in your favor. But you’re sure dead if you don’t move.” His wag
oneers had both cranked back their bows.
Ravna grabbed the axe’s jaw handle and pulled it free of the sod. Flecks of needles fell from it and the edge glittered in the late afternoon light. It might be a utility blade, but it looked freshly sharpened.
On the other side of the trail, the wagoneers and Chitiratifor were watching her in the intense, still way that always bothered her about Tines. This wasn’t all a matter of entertainment. Except for the bow-holding members, they had wiggled most of themselves into the protective cover of the root bushes. Only Chitiratifor, Screwfloss, and Gannon were still standing in the open. Gannon looked around, seemed to realize his exposure. He turned and headed for the nearest unoccupied bush.
And now the wagoneers were making noise again. They were chanting, a blend of harmonics that made Ravna’s ears hurt. She knew the meaning: Do it, do it, do it. There were packs who chanted just that at the kids’ ballgames.
Ravna turned to the tree behind her. On her right, Amdi danced around in frightened excitement, edging nearer to the root bush that could protect him. He had no secret messages, at least nothing he would chance on human hearing. On her left, Jefri was looking at Amdi and then at her … and suddenly she realized that he and Amdi were playing a game, just as when they were very little, but now as a matter of life and death.
Do it, do it, do it.
“All right!” She walked toward the tree, gave the axe a little swing. An ancient human might have described the thing as double axe head fixed on a bale hook handle. There was no way she could get the full leverage a human would have with a real, made-for-human axe.
But the blade was sharp.
This particular tree was about eighty centimeters across, the bark almost as smooth as a baby’s skin, but a pale buff color such as you rarely saw on modern Homo Sapiens. The tree seemed no different from the thousands of bannerwoods she’d seen the last few days. Its straight trunk extended some forty meters up, a beautiful slim tower. The lowest branches grew straight out. The nearest were some thirty centimeters above her head, their needles growing in great sheaves from the lumps that Screwfloss called “tensioning knots.”
Do it, do it, do it.
She raised the axe and gave the smooth pillar a blow that was more a tentative tap. The blade sank a centimeter into the wood. When she eased the blade out, there was a film of clear sap on the steel and a little more oozing down the side of the tree. The smell of the sap was a dry, complex thing, somehow familiar. Oh. It was simply a sharp version of this forest’s pervasive smell.
Most important, the scent seemed to have no effect on the peaceful drowse of this late afternoon. Above and around her, the needle leaves hung in greenish silence, unmoving.
On the other side of trail, the audience was not happy. The chant had stilled, but the wagoneers gobbled irritably to each other. Screwfloss had nothing to say, but there was an ironic smile in his aspect, as if he were waiting for someone to say the obvious.
Chitiratifor’s voice boomed out, in Tinish and Samnorsk all at once: “Cut the tree, human! Chop up and down. We will see its insides, or we will see yours.”
The wagoneers laughed and swung their bows back toward her.
She turned back to the tree and began whacking. Her blows were still weak, but she did as she was told, hitting upwards and then down, at something like the same target line. At this pace, it might take her an hour to cut the tree down, but she was gouging a deep notch in the wood, revealing the growth ring pattern that was near-ubiquitous in the trees of Tines World.
She paused, partly because she was out of breath, partly because she heard Amdi make an anxious wheep sound. She noticed that Chitiratifor had edged closer to the safety of a large bush.
The forest was no longer silent. She heard a clattering sound in the branches above her. The nearest branches trembled, clusters of needles shivering faintly, jerked about by the tensioning knots that anchored them in place. The knots themselves, were … smoking? No, not smoke. It was a heavy haze of pollen, drifting slowly on the faint currents of the cooling afternoon. Where it floated through the brightest light, the reflection of the sun from the peaks above, it shone golden green.
On the other side of the path, some of the sporting humor had evaporated. The packs watched the drifting haze with wide eyes. As it floated outwards from Ravna’s tree, the rattling of branches spread to the trees around her and then across the wagon trail, creating a growing, golden green alarm. The wagoneers squeezed back beneath their root bushes; not even their bow carriers stood in the open now.
When the rattling reached the trees around Chitiratifor, he finally gave up his brave stance and wiggled himself deep into his own bush. Only screwloose Screwfloss was left unprepared. He hadn’t picked a big enough bush and now he was mostly unable to get adequate cover.
For the rest: the kherhogs were staring at them in uneasy wonder. Depending on how far the alarm spread, the wagons might not provide sufficient cover.
A dozen seconds passed. The rattling had spread beyond hearing, but no arrows had been triggered.
Screwfloss spoke up, sounding a bit nervous with his explanation: “When it comes, it could be an avalanche of arrows, my lord. Perhaps we have, um, overextended ourselves.”
Chitiratifor gave him an amused look. “Perhaps you have overexposed yourself, you silly asses. I see a small bush behind this tree. It may be enough for you. Burrow deep!” Then his attention finally returned to Ravna. “Chop us more wood, human.”
She turned back to her tree. Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed that Amdi was all hunkered down, stubbornly refusing to take cover. What’s the game, Jefri?
Do it. Do it. Do it.
She held the axe by the handle and the haft and took out all her fear on the poor dumb wood. Whack. Whack. Whack.
The arrow needles clattered louder than ever, and the alarm pollen grew chokingly thick. When she triggered the cascade, the pain was like arrows piercing her ears. She dived for the ground, trying to find cover in even the most shallow troughs of the earth. But the pain was not from real arrows. The pain was in the sheer power of Tinish screams.
“Get up! Run!” Some of Amdi was around her, trying to pull her to her knees. She came up, saw the rest of him racing toward Jefri.
It was chaos that didn’t make much sense at the time. She staggered to her feet, still crouching against the ambuscade. But there were no arrows flying. Anywhere. And yet across the trail, the screaming grew louder, backed up by the fainter, whistling mouth noises of Tines in terrible pain. She couldn’t see either of the wagoneers. The bushes they had been hiding under seemed lower and wider than before, and they trembled as if something struggled beneath.…
Amdi pushed and pulled her. “Back to the wagons!”
As she stumbled along, she saw that not all the other Tines had disappeared. Most of Screwfloss was standing just at the edge of a root bush, hacking at its branches. His limper hadn’t been fast enough to jump away; it was tangled at the edge.
Some of Chitiratifor was clear of the bush that was munching on him. He was fighting back with all his remaining hand axes. He almost had his bow carrier free of the trap. Then he noticed Ravna and Amdi. He gave a roar of anger, and his three free members raced after her.
Ravna ran. Ordinarily, that would have been a futile gesture. On open ground, pack members could outrun any two-legs, and packs with military training could give up consciousness for a brief killing charge. But the part of Chitiratifor that couldn’t follow must be in terrible pain. The three that raced after Ravna seemed to be on an invisible leash. Never slowing, they circled wide around, heading back to the rest of their pack, where they resumed hacking at the bush that trapped them.
Screwfloss was doing much better. He had freed his one trapped member. It staggered along with a three-legged walk, but the pack was making progress in their direction.
“I’ve got him,” shouted Jefri. He was closer to the wagons than she, but now he rushed back, scooped up Screwflo
ss’ limping member in his arms.
“Help me, help me!” It was Gannon. The boy was on his elbows, his lower body hidden by the bush that had flattened itself upon him. Stark terror was on his face and his hands were reaching out to her.
She had not known Gannon Jorkenrud when he was a small child. At best, he’d been a snotty teenager, growing more malevolent with each passing year. But in the beginning she had seen him as she had all the Children, as someone she could help. There had been a time when he had not seemed evil.
By some miracle, she still had that axe in her hand. And now she was running across the trail, toward Gannon’s beseeching hands.
Amdi was still pulling at her. “No! No! Please—”
Someone else just sounded angry: “Well, damn! Okay.” That was the able-bodied part of Screwfloss, running back from where Jefri had set down the wounded part. Jefri came right behind him. They circled around in front of Ravna, blocking her from Gannon.
But they were doing what she wanted done. Jefri got to the tree, used his reach to attack the bush near its base, where there was no danger of striking Gannon. The four of Screwfloss used knives to cut the branches, then grabbed at Jorkenrud’s jacket and began pulling him out.
Ravna was in the midst of Screwfloss now, pulling with him. She had Gannon around the shoulders. Every blow that Jefri struck with his battle axe sent a spasm through the bush and won another centimeter of freedom for Gannon.
Screwfloss shrieked and staggered back, losing his grip on Jorkenrud. Ravna looked up in time to dodge the metal tines. Raggedy Ears’ loose members were among them, slashing. At least one part of a wagoneer had freed itself and joined the attack.