Beastchild

'Well, then?'

'I couldn't enter the Haven with you. What would I do?' The worst thing now was to be utterly alone. He' could not have put it in words, but it was the thing he most dreaded. To be an outcast, a murderer, and without friends on an alien world of which he could never hope to be a part of.

'I'll talk to them. You're different, Hulann. I'll make them see.'

'Well-' he said.

'Please, Hulann. I want to be with my people again.'

Hulann could understand that desire. 'All right,' he said.

They followed the markers over the beltway, eventually heading west across the great expanse of the North American continent. They did not see even one other car in the hours left of the night. In the silence and gently thrumming music of the blades beneath them, Leo fell asleep, once more.

Chapter Four

As Hulann drove, he allowed his mind to wander, for a deluge of memories seemed the only present manner of assauging his depression. Therefore, he raised up a monolith of the past and walled off the recent events, then studied the brickwork of his partition.

He had met his first human while aboard the naoli ship Tagasa which had been of the private fleet of the central committee. He had been a guest of the government, a writer of creative history then. The Tagasa had been en-route from the home worlds to a series of outlying colony planets in the Nucio System. The rich background of the Nucio colonies had been obvious material for a series of tapebook adventures, and Hulann had been quick to take the chance to investigate the worlds first-hand.

The Tagasa had been in port on the world called Dala, a place of vegetation and no animals. He had returned to his cabin after a day of exploration of the surrounding jungle. He had seen the snake vines which moved almost as fast as a man could walk, slipping oily over each other and the trees on which they grew, pollinating the flowers that grew on the bark of some of the larger pines. He had seen the plants which ate other plants (and which impolitely spat out his finger when, at the urging of his guide, he had stuffed it into the pulpy orifice). He saw the breathing plants with their baggy, lunglike flowers, busy spewing out carbon dioxide to continue the cycle that had started here eons earlier.

'An incredibly old culture,' his guide had said. 'To have evolved plant life this far.'

'No animals at all?' he asked.

'None. They've found a few insects, little mites, that live between the outer and second layer of bark on the red-top trees.'

'Ah?'

'But there's a question about those two. Seems the boys working on them in the labs have found traces of chlorophyll in them.'

'You mean-'

'Plants too. Looking quite like insects. Mobile. Able to suck up nutriment from other plants and move about like animals.'

The guide-an elderly naoli with a jewelry affectation: he wore a raw iris stone around his neck on a wood bead necklace-had shown him more. The Quick Ferns, for instance. Cute little, frilly, green things, lush and vibrant, swaying briskly under the slightest breath. They lined the forest floor, the shortest growth, a carpet beneath all else. As he watched, they grew, pushed up new plants, spread their feathery leaves-then grew brown, blackened, collapsed, gave off a puff of spores, and were gone. In a place where there was no animal feces, no animal decay, the vegetation had come to rely on its own death to give it life. For so much life-there was a wild, thick sprawl of growing things unlike anything he had ever seen before-a great deal of fertilizer was required. It was natural, then, that the Quick Ferns should have a total life span, from spore germination to death of the plant and ejection of the next spore cycle of fourteen minutes. At the end of each summer on Dala, there was a five foot layer of thick, black organic material lying on, the forest floor. By the following spring, it was decomposed, gone, and the Quick Ferns began their job again.

'No animals at all,' he said to the guide, still amazed at the society of this primitive world.

'Not now,' the guide replied, chuckling.

'What's that?'

'I said, not now. There used to be.'

'How do you know?'

'They've found the fossils,' he said, fingering the stone hanging about his withered neck. 'Thousands of them. Not any that might have been possessed by intelligent creatures. Primitive animals. Some small dinosaurs.'

'What happened to them?' Hulann asked, fascinated.

The old naoli waved his arms around at the jungle. 'The plants happened to them. That's what. The plants just developed a little faster. They think the animals were a slow lot. When the first ambulent plants arrived on the scene, they ate flesh.'

Hulann shivered.

The forest seemed to close in on him, to grow from just a pleasant patch of trees to something malevolent and purposeful. He felt himself backing away toward their shuttlecraft, stopped himself, and chided himself for his youthful superstition. 'Yet now the plants are finally subservient to animals. To us.'

'Wouldn't be so certain,' the old man said. He pulled on the iris stone. The warmth of his gnarled hand made the black and green gem pulsate, the green iris growing larger and smaller with the changes in temperature.

'How so?'

'The plants are trying to adapt to us. Hunting a way to do us in.'

Hulann shivered. 'Now you're talking the kind of superstition I just got finished scolding myself for.'

'It's not superstition. Couple of years ago, the first Concrete Vines showed up.'

'They-'

'Yeah. Eat concrete. The wall of the central administration building fell in. Killed a hundred and some. Roof collapsed under the stress. Later, they found a funny thing. They found these vines, only as big around as the tip of your tail, honeycombing the wall. They had come in from the forest edge, growing underground until they reached the wall. Then they grew upwards until they had weakened it. Ate the insides out of that wall. After a few more cases like that, we started building with plastics ant plastic metals.' He laughed an ancient, dry cough of a laugh. 'But I suppose we'll be seeing some Plastic Vines before long. The jungle has had time to work it out, I guess.'

Hulann had gone back to the Tagasa with a brooding idea for a speculative fiction work about what might happen on Dala when the plants finally launched a successful attack against the naoli colonists. The book had been a critical and financial success. Twenty-one million cartridges had been sold. Forty-six years after publication, the plants of Dala launched a successful revolt

He had been making notes into his recorder about his day with the guide when a messenger had come from the captain's quarters with a private note that he did not want sent over the Phasersystem. It was a simple request to come to meet a few humans who had come to Dala to argue various trade contracts and whom the captain had requested aboard.

Hulann, having seen only seven of the eleven races (some are quite hermetic) and never having seen a human, was more than eager to comply with the request. Too, humans were the novelty of the many worlds, having only appeared in galactic society some twenty years earlier.

He had gone to the captain's quarters highly excited, unable to control the dilation of his primary nostrils, or the faint quivering of his interior eyelids. In the end, he had come away disappointed-and more than a little frightened.

The humans were cold, efficient men who seemed to have little time for pleasantries. Oh, they made all the gestures and did some customary small talk in broken naoli home-world tongue to prove their desire for cooperation. But the pleasantries ended there. They constantly steered the conversation back onto business topics whenever it strayed for more than a moment or two. They only smiled-never laughed. Perhaps it was this last quality which made them, in the final analysis, so terrifying. When those solid, phony grins were summoned to cover