The Three Suns of Amara

“But that was to prove himself, didn’t you say?”

“Yes. He had to. But he might have stayed with me if I hadn’t been so foolish. I annoyed him so much sometimes that he tried to beat me.”

“But you wouldn’t let him. You knocked him down with your pocket thunderbolt, didn’t you? What are you —an electric eel?”

She didn’t understand the reference, and let it pass. “Yes, I was very foolish. He came here seeking self-respect, and I tried to help him—and I did, too. And then I would lose my temper and spoil everything, undo all I’d built up. Maybe he would have gone on his way eventually, all the same. He had a mission, you see. He said he must face the most dangerous creatures on this planet, stand up to them and survive. Only then, he said, would he be able to call himself a man.”

“What are these dangerous creatures?”

“They’re called the Three-people. I’ve never seen them and I never want to. They live in the pass between the mountains in the northwest. Only fools or heroes go there. The fools never return. The heroes return seldom —and when they do, they have become fools. They’ve lost their wits and rave wildly about the Three-people. But nothing they say makes any sense any more. Their minds have gone. Lee said he would come back to me. I think he meant to. But he has been gone a long time, far longer than it should take him to reach the mountains and return. So sometimes I fear he will never return. And sometimes I fear he will—as a poor crazy man.”

Sherret tugged at his beard absently.

“This planet of yours, Rosala, gets a bit too bizarre for me at times. I can’t get a clear picture of the place. I keep trying to piece it together, but nothing joins onto anything. I’m beginning to think the pieces aren’t meant to fit. They belong to different jigsaw puzzles. Melas trees and Petrans and Three-people… Have you ever heard the expression ‘Beware of those who become three’?”

“Yes, it’s a common saying. It relates to the Three-people.”

“But how do they become ‘three’?”

“I don’t know, Sherry. I don’t think anybody knows. But they are terrible monsters of some kind. It frightens me to think about them. Let us forget them. Let’s talk about—oh, the Melas trees.”

“It rather frightens me to think about them,” said Sherret, ruefully. “But all right, tell me about them.”

Long ago, she said, the Melas tree was a simple fruit-bearing tree which flourished in this part of the country in a perfectly normal way. The birds ate its fruit and carried its seeds far and wide.

Then the species was attacked by a blight which all but killed it off. Its fruit became poisonous; only the ignorant devoured it and died. The birds shunned it. Moreover, the seeds lost the vital reproductive power, except for the occasional throwback or sport. The lone tree near the house must have sprung from an odd exception of this kind. Maybe some creature carried the seed there, maybe at the cost of its life.

But Melas trees didn’t give up that easily. They had a tremendously strong instinct for survival. Paradoxically, the disease caused a mutation which helped survival. All plants have a primitive awareness, not exactly a mind and certainly not intelligence. They are simply aware in a weakly telepathic way.

The disease caused some chemical change in the sap of the Melas tree which enormously increased the sensitivity of its awareness, its telepathic awareness.

“You mean, gave it reasoning power?” asked Sherret.

Rosala shook her head. The tree hadn’t any reasoning power to begin with, so that couldn’t be stimulated. It completely lacked hindsight or foresight. But it was aware that past and future states existed, because it was aware that humanoid creatures were conscious of them.

And quite unthinkingly it happened upon a way of using the humanoid brain as a medium for reproducing itself. Literally reproducing itself—not just producing seedlings.

For in the humanoid mind there was foreknowledge of the Melas tree’s continued existence tomorrow. And tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow… In short, a Melas tree existing in thousands of future instants of time. The Melas tree, able to live only in the present, but aware of this picture in the humanoid mind, conceived these multitudinous future states of itself as separate other trees, all existing in the same instant—somewhere. Instinctively, it sought to contact its own kind, and reproduce.

And contact it did, through any humanoid mind which came within its sphere of influence. This sphere extended only to the reach of its branches. Any humanoid who strayed under them became a victim.

Even so, the tree’s control was limited. If the humanoid was contemplating the past or present or was unconscious, it was useless to the tree. For the past was unalterable, the present couldn’t be duplicated, and an unconscious mind couldn’t be contacted. Only the future was malleable.