With the vibration of the main trunk, the branches would quiver, and the nuts shake, producing a light, faintly bell-like clanging.
“And that’s why,” she finally explained to him, “the chimers won’t reproduce in captivity. I’ve calculated that reproduction requires the presence of a minimum of two hundred and six healthy, active trees.
222
Ye Who Would Sing
“Can you think of any one city, any one corporation, any one system that could afford two hundred and six chimers of a proper spread of maturity?”
Of course he couldn’t. No system, not even Terra-Sol, could manage that kind of money for artistic purr poses.
“You see,” she continued, “it takes that number of trees, singing in unison, to stimulate the bola beetle to lay its eggs. Any less and it’s like an orchestra playing a symphony by Mahler. You can take out, say, the man with the cowbell and it will still sound like a symphony, but it won’t be the right symphony. The bola beetle is a fastidious listener.”
She dug around in the earth, came up with a pair of black, stocky bugs about the size of a thumbnail. They scrambled for freedom.
“When the nuts are exactly ripe, the forest changes to a specific highly intricate melody with dozens of variations. The beetles recognize it immediately. They climb the trees and lay their eggs, several hundred per female, within the hollow space of the nuts. The loose seeds inside, at the peak of ripeness, provide food for the larvae while the hard shell protects them from predators. And it all works out fine from the bola’s point of view—except for the tumbuck.