‘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 cell-type 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 characteristics 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.
