“Shaken up a little, is all.” He started to get up. I owe you a lot,” he said. “Another minute and I’d have been in Alcibiades’ mouth.”
“I almost let him eat you, Zen. He was just defending himself. But I couldn’t. So I shot off the tendrils.”
“Yes. Yes. I owe you a lot.” He stood up and took a couple of faltering steps toward her. “Here,” he said. “You better give me that needier before you burn a hole in your foot.” He stretched eut his hand.
“Wait a second,” she said, glacially calm. She stepped back as he neared her.
“What?”
“A deal, Zen. I rescued you, right? I didn’t have to. Now you leave those trees alone. At least check up on whether there’s a spray, okay? A deal.”
“But—”
“You owe me a lot, you said. So pay me. What I want from you is a promise, Zen. If I hadn’t cut you down, you’d be dead now. Let the trees live too.”
He wondered if she would use the needier on him.
He was silent a long moment, weighing his options. Then said, “All right, Naomi. You saved me, and I can’t refuse you what you want. I won’t touch the trees. I’ll find out if something can be sprayed on them to kill the rust.”
“You mean that, Zen?”
“I promise. By all that’s holy. You will give me that needier, now?”
“Here,” she cried, tears running down her reddened face. “Here! Take it! Oh God, Zen, how awful all this is!”
He took the weapon from her and bolstered it. She seemed to go limp, all resolve spent, once she surrendered it. She stumbled into his arms, and he held her tight, feeling her tremble against him. He trembled too, pulling her close to him, aware of the ripe cones of her young breasts jutting into his chest. A powerful wave of what he recognized bluntly as desire surged through him. Filthy, he thought. He winced as this morning’s images danced in his brain, Naomi nude and radiant from her swim, apple-round breasts, firm thighs. My niece. Fifteen. God help me. Comforting her, he ran his hands across her shoulders, down to the small of her back. Her clothes were light; her body was all too present within them.
He threw her roughly to the ground.
She landed in a heap, rolled over, put her hand to her mouth as he fell upon her. Her screams rose, shrill and piercing, as his body pressed down on her. Her terrified eyes plainly told that she feared he would rape her, but he had other perfidies in mind. Quickly he flung her on her face, catching her right hand and jerking her arm up behind her back. Then he lifted her to a sitting position.
“Stand up,” he said. He gave her arm a twist by way of persuasion. She stood up.
“Now walk. Out of the grove, back to the truck. I’ll break your arm if I have to.”
“What are you doing?” she asked in a barely audible whisper.
“Back to the truck,” he said. He levered her arm up another notch. She hissed in pain. But she walked.
At the truck he maintained his grip on her and reached in to call Leitfried at his info center.
“What was that all about, Zen? We tracked most of it, arid—”
“It’s too complicated to explain. The girl’s very attached to the trees, is all. Send some robots out here to get her right away, okay?”
“You promised,” Naomi said.
The robots arrived quickly. Steely-fingered, efficient, they kept Naomi pinioned as they hustled her into a bug and took her to the plantation house. When she was gone, Holbrook sat down for a moment beside the spray truck, to rest and clean his mind. Then he climbed into the truck cab again.
He aimed the fusion gun first at Alcibiades.
It took a little over three hours. When he was finished, Sector C was a field of ashes, and a broad belt of emptiness stretched from the outer limit of the devastation to the nearest grove of healthy trees. He wouldn’t know for a while whether he had succeeded in saving the plantation. But he had done his best.
As he rode back to the plantation house, his mind was less on the work of execution he had just done than on the feel of Naomi’s body against his own, and on the things he had thought in that moment when he hurled her to the ground. A woman’s body, yes. But a child. A child still, in love with her pets. Unable yet to see how in the real world one weighs the need against the bond, and does one’s best. What had she learned in Sector C today? That the universe often offers only brutal choices? Or merely that the uncle she worshipped was capable of treachery and murder?
They had given her sedation, but she was awake in her room, and when he came in she drew the covers up to conceal her pajamas. Her eyes were cold and sullen.
“You promised,” she said bitterly. “And then you tricked me.”
“I had to save the other trees. You’ll understand, Naomi.”
“I understand that you lied to me, Zen.”
“I’m sorry. Forgive me?”
“You can go to hell,” she said, and those adult words coming from her not-yet-adult face were chilling.
He could not stay longer with her. He went out, upstairs, to Fred Leitfried in the info center. “It’s all over,” he said softly.
“You did it like a man, Zen.”
“Yeah. Yeah.”
In the screen he scanned the sector of ashes. He felt the warmth of Naomi against him. He saw her sullen eyes. Night would come, the moons would do their dance across the sky, the constellations to which he had never grown accustomed would blaze forth. He would talk to her again, maybe. Try to make her understand. And then he would send her away, until she was finished becoming a woman.
“Starting to rain,” Leitfried said. “That’ll help the ripening along, eh?”
“Most likely.”
“You feel like a killer, Zen?”
“What do you think?”
“I know. I know.”
Holbrook began to shut off the scanners. He had done all he meant to do today. He said quietly, “Fred, they were trees. Only trees. Trees, Fred, trees.”
