Graushpaz, seeing Ulysses, lifted his trunk and snorted shrilly. He said, 'This has been too easy. I do not think I have redeemed myself.'
'This is not over yet by a long way,' Ulysses said. He stationed guards outside the entrance to the great chamber, and then he approached one of the diaphragms. He reached out and tapped it three times quickly, and the diaphragm vibrated and boomed out three times.
Ulysses had availed himself of the knowledge forced from the bat-men prisoners. Though his time had been so limited while building his ships, he had given up hours of sleep to become proficient in the pulse-code.
Now he tapped on the diaphragm, 'This is the stone god in the city of the Dhulhulikh.'
He had been told that The Tree was an entity and the Dhulhulikh were its servants. And the Book of Tiznak had told him much the same. But he still could not believe.
'The last of the humans!' the diaphragm vibrated in answer.
Could there be some vast vegetable brain somewhere in this colossal trunk? Or perhaps away off in another trunk, in the deep heart of The Tree itself? Or was there a little pygmy winged man squatting before another diaphragm in a buried chamber? A little man determined to maintain the myth of the thinking Tree?
'Who are you?' Ulysses tapped out.
There was a pause. He looked around. The Neshgai standing in the middle of the dome-shaped chamber were grotesque shadowy figures, their skins purple-bluish in the light. Awina was, as usual, beside him. The white parts of her fur looked icy bluish, and her eyes were so dark they seemed empty holes. The Wagarondit and Alkunquib looked like half-cat, half-burglar surrealist statues. The abacus machines with their squares of upright strings and beads were pale subterranean robots. The bat-men prisoners were hunched together in one corner, their brown skins now black in the light and their faces reflecting the knowledge of their sure death.
Ulysses lifted his hand to signal the men carrying the bombs to come to him. At that moment, the diaphragm vibrated.
'I am Wurutana!'
'The Tree?' Ulysses tapped back.
'The Tree!'
The code for the exclamation mark came through seemingly louder. So the vegetable entity, if it was one, could have emotion; in this case, pride. And why not? It was not possible for sentient life to exist without emotion. Emotion was as natural and as vital for sapiency as intelligence. Those science-fiction stories with unemotional, extraterrestrial sapients were based on an unrealistic premise. A life form needed emotion to survive as much as it needed a thinking mind. No living creature could thrive, or even exist, on logic alone. Not unless it was a protein or vegetable computer and, therefore, not self-conscious.
'I learned about you many thousands of years ago,' the diaphragm pulsed.
He wondered how this entity could have any sense of time. Did it sense each year by some subtle internal change responding to the change of seasons? Or did it have some internal clock placed in it by the geneticists who had designed it?
'Those who must die told me about you.'
Those who must die. Thus it designated the little forms of mobile life that communicated with it.
'Those who must die can nevertheless kill,' Ulysses tapped.
He got back the answer he expected.
'They cannot kill me! I am immortal! And invincible!'
'If that is so,' Ulysses tapped, 'why do you fear me?'
There was another moment of silence. He hoped that the vegetable brain was quivering with shock. It gave him a perverse pleasure to upset the creature, though there was no other profit in it for him.
Finally, the diaphragm boomed, 'I do not fear you, one who must die!'
'Then why did you try to have me captured? What had I done to you to warrant your hostility?'
'I wanted to talk to you. You were a strange thing, an anachronism, a species that has been extinct for twenty million years.'
It was Ulysses' turn to be shocked. So the time was twenty, not ten, million years. Twenty million years!
He told himself that there was no reason to be startled. Twenty million years meant no more than ten.
'How do you know that?' he tapped.
'I was told so by my creators. They put an enormous amount of data into my memory cells.'
'Were your creators human?'
The diaphragm did not move for several seconds and then, 'Yes.'
So this was why, despite its denial, it feared him. Men had created it, and so a man could destroy it. That must be its logic. What it probably did not know was that this man was an ignorant savage in comparison with the creators of The Tree. Still, he was not ineffectual. If he could get the proper metals, he could eventually make an atom bomb. Even The Tree could not stand up to a dozen fission devices.
But what if, as seemed likely, Earth had been stripped of all its metals? Twenty million years of sapient life must have taken everything except traces or deposits left undisturbed because of reasons of economy. There was no iron or copper anywhere. He was certain of that. Man and his successors had long ago plucked all of those out of the earth and squandered them.
However, The Tree must have a centre which could be killed, after which the body must die. And it seemed probable that The Tree would have located the Dhulhulikh here to protect that brain. If the brain were in this trunk, then it could be gotten to. It would take an enormous amount of blasting powder and of stone chipping tools, and many many people to do it, but it could be done. And The Tree must know this.
It was also possible that The Tree had placed the Dhulhulikh here as a decoy. The brain could be in a trunk a hundred miles from here. Or in the trunk next door.
He was startled out of his reverie by the booming of the diaphragm.
'There is no reason for us to be enemies! You can live on me with great comfort and security. I can guarantee that none of the sentients who live on me will harm you. Of course, the nonsentients are not under my control any more than fleas on the sentients. But there is no such thing as one hundred percent security for those who must die. Yet the life I can offer them is far better than the life they would have without me.'
'That may be true,' Ulysses replied. 'But the peoples who choose to live on you also choose a savage and ignorant and very restricted life. They can know nothing of science or sophisticated art. They can know nothing of progress.'
'Progress? What has that ever meant to any sentient life except eventual overpopulation, overkill and the poisoning of earth, air and water? Science has, in the end, meant the abuse of science, the suicide of the race and the near-death of the entire planet before the race killed itself off. This has happened a dozen times at the very least. Why do you think that human beings finally concentrated on biology at the expense of other physical sciences? Why do you think that the tree-cities were originated? Mankind realised that he had to become one with Nature. And he did. For a while. Then his arrogance, or stupidity, or greed, or whatever you call it, got the better of him again. But he was wiped out by the Andromedans, because the Andromedans thought that humanity was a very serious menace to them.
'So other sentients inherited the Earth, the sentients that mankind had created from the lesser beings in his domain. And these began to repeat mankind's mistakes and crimes. Only they were limited in their ability to do harm because mankind had exhausted the stock of most of Earth's minerals.
'I am the only thing that stands between the sentients, those who must die and who are also, as you truthfully said, those who must kill, and the death of life on this planet. I am The Tree, Wurutana. Not the Destroyer, as the Neshgai and Wufea call me, but the Preserver. Without me there would be no life. I keep the sentients in their place, and in so doing I benefit them and benefit all the rest of life, too.
'That is why the Neshgai and you, unless you give in, must die. You would destroy the Earth again if you could. You would not do so intentionally, of course. But you would do it.'
The humans had lived in their tree-cities, which were also their reference libraries and their computers. The great vegetables contained cells for storing information and for using this information as the residents required. But then, whether by design or the accident of evolution, the computing vegetable had become a self-conscious intelligent entity. From servant, it had become master. From vegetable, a god.
Ulysses could not deny that most of what it said was true. But he did not believe that it was inevitable that
