He, Anana, and McKay had laughed. Urthona and Red Ore had looked disgusted. Their sense of humor had atrophied. Or perhaps they’d never had much.
Above the head of the tree was a growth of many slender stems rising two feet straight up. Broad green leaves, heart-shaped, covered the stems. From the trunk radiated six short branches, each three feet long, a pair on each side, in three ranks. These had short twigs supporting large round leaves. Between each ring of branches was a tentacle, about twelve feet long and as supple as an octopus’s. A pair of tentacles also grew from the base.
The latter helped balance the trunk as it moved on two short kneeless legs ending in huge round barky toeless feet. When the tree temporarily changed from an ambulatory to sedentary state, the lower tentacles bored into the soil, grew roots, and sucked sustenance from the ground. The roots could be easily broken off and the tentacles withdrawn when the tree decided to move on.
Kickaha had asked Urthona why he had had such a clumsy unnatural monster made in his biolabs.
“It pleased me to do so.”
Urthona probably was wishing he hadn’t done so. He had wakened the others, and all were staring at the weird-and frightening-creatures.
Kickaha walked up to him. “How do they communicate?”
“Through pheromones. Various substances they emit. There are about thirty of these, and a tree smelling them receives various signals. They don’t think; their brains are about the size of a dinosaur’s. They react on the instinctive-or robotic-level. They have a well-developed herd instinct, though.”
“Any of these pheromones stimulate fear?”
“Yes. But you have to make one of them afraid, and there’s nothing in this situation to scare them.”
“I was thinking,” Kickaha said, “that it’s too bad you don’t carry around a vial of fear-pheromones.”
“I used to,” Urthona said.
The nearest scout had halted thirty feet away. Kickaha looked at Anana, who was sixty feet from the group. Her beamer was ready for trouble from the three men or the tree.
Kickaha walked to the scout and stopped ten feet from it. It waved its greenish tentacles. Others were coming to join it, though not on a run. He estimated that with those legs they could go perhaps a mile an hour. But then he didn’t know their full potentiality. Urthona didn’t remember how fast they could go.
Even as he walked down toward the tree, he could feel the earth swelling beneath him, could see the rate of its shaping increase. The air became warmer, and spaces had appeared between the blades of grass. The earth was black and greasy-looking. If the shaping stopped, and there was no change for three days, the grass would grow enough to fill in the bare spots.
The thousand or so plants were still moving but more slowly. They leaned forward on their rigid legs, their tentacles extended to support them.
Kickaha looked closely at the nearest one and saw about a dozen apple-red spheres dangling from the branches. He called to Urthona. “Is their fruit good to eat?”
“For birds, yes,” Urthona said. “I don’t remember. But I can’t think why I should have made them poisonous for humans.”
“Knowing you, I’d say you could have done it for laughs,” Kickaha said.
He motioned to Angus McKay to come to him. The black came to him warily, though his caution was engendered by the tree, not Kickaha.
McKay was an inch shorter than Kickaha but about thirty pounds heavier. Not much of the additional weight was fat, though. He was dressed in black levis, socks, and boots. He’d long ago shed his shirt and the leather jacket of the motorcyclist, but he still carried his helmet. Kickaha had insisted that it be retained to catch rainwater in, if for nothing else.
McKay was a professional criminal, a product of Detroit who’d come out to Los Angeles to be one of Urthona’s hired killers. Of course, he had not known then that Urthona was a Lord. He had never been sure what Urthona, whom he knew as Mr. Callister, did. But he’d been paid well, and if Mr. Callister wasn’t in a business which competed with other mobs, that was all to the good. And Mr. Callister certainly seemed to know how to handle the police.