Poems are Made by Fools Like Me

2.

Very well: I was dreaming. Soon I would wake up in my Key West Cabin, to find out that all the limes were dead. Or I would wake up somewhere else, to find out that my entire life had been a dream, and that I was, perhaps, eight years old.

Or, of course, not.

It began to occur to me, as I made my way back to my log cabin, that somebody really hated me. Somebody wanted me dead, and was doing a very earnest job of making wishes come true. How this involved a miniature Gerald Knave I had no idea, but that had to be a necessary piece of the puzzle; nobody would add it in as an afterthought, especially since the miniature was, under normal circumstances, invisible to its target.

No, there had to be a very good reason for the miniature to be Gerald Knave’s miniature. My only thought at that moment, as I opened the log cabin door and more or less fell inside, shutting and sealing the door as I fell, was a brief one, labeled sympathetic magic.

The miniature, in other words, was some sort of doll or copy of me, meant to do me very special harm because it had my qualities. Someone had stolen bits of my skin or hair or fingernails, and used the bits in making the miniature, and that gave the miniature some sort of creepy and uncanny power over me (perhaps only over my remaining skin, hair or fingernails, to be sure).

There were actually people who believed that sort of thing, back not too many centuries. I’m sure that there are people somewhere in the Comity who still believe it, because there are always people, somewhere, who will believe anything you can even vaguely imagine, and forty or fifty things you’d have sworn you couldn’t. Mother Nature does indeed get exceptionally weird now and then, but she is not even a patch on human nature, after all.

The trouble with feeling superior to the sympathetic magic people was that, while I truly didn’t want to add sympathetic m. to my own little library of possibilities, I didn’t have anything else around that seemed any more plausible.

I would cheerfully have settled for the whole thing being a dream, if that could have made any difference. But if it was a dream, I was stuck living in it, and if I was living in it I had to act, and respond, just as if it were real. And if, of course, it wasn’t a dream… well, then, it had to have some sort of explanation tied to it somewhere.

I couldn’t imagine one—but that, damn it, was my trouble, and not something I could blame on the events.

I sat in a chair in my log cabin, staring at the Glassex windows and deciding to settle for rations for a noon meal—a Survivor does bring such things along for the early going, when Joy of Cooking is only a page or so long—and trying the various pieces for fit: a rocket, a miniature me, a series of pretty good tries at killing the normal-sized me, and a planet with the hell of a lot of trees.

After a minute of thinking I was forgetting something, I brought back the feeling that the noises outside should have changed from late afternoon to fairly early morning. I couldn’t make that piece fit anywhere; but it was not thereby a unique piece. I couldn’t make any of the pieces fit any damned thing at all.

After a while I gave up and ate lunch. It was, as it always is after some crowded action, vaguely surprising that it was lunch time instead of, say, dinner time three days into the future.

Vague surprise was almost a pleasant, reassuring feeling by that time.

After lunch, I went out to pick tan buttons. There wasn’t really anything else to do at the moment; I was going to have to rig something to prevent Thumbelina, as I’d decided to call the rocket, from shooting at me every so often, but that wasn’t going to be too difficult; my supplies had been chosen with large, unfriendly animals in mind, and a rather small, murderous rocket looked like something the supplies would handle.

I wasn’t about to go to war with it. I had a job, I had a year to do it in, and that left very little spare time for fooling around with this off-planetary hazard. I might be curious, and my bump of curiosity, if you’ll forgive the Classical allusion, is more like Olympus Mons than like, say, the small pimple most people seem to have for the function—but I was just going to have to sacrifice my feelings and get on with the job.

So, over that day and part of the next, I sank some warning flashers, rigged to small explosives. I made a nice perimeter around the log cabin, big enough so that it included a fair number of vegetable patches of various sorts (there were some nice-looking tubers, for which I had high hopes, but the first few varieties were major disappointments, wet, ragged and tasteless or worse no matter what I tried)—and distant enough so that the explosives wouldn’t jar me or the log cabin if they did go off.

I had every confidence that they wouldn’t go off; the rocket, when I got a chance to see some of the readouts (and collect some more; the rocket hadn’t come back for them, and, very cautiously and in full field, I recovered most of the dropped valuables myself early next morning) it became clear that the damned thing had detectors to spare, detectors to rent out, detectors to sell to the natives. It was going to spot my perimeter long before it had to deal with it, and it was going to stay nicely out of range.

Until, of course, it figured out its next move. I thought I knew what that had to be, and took the indicated precautions.

Then I went back to Joy of Cooking, chapter on tubers.

I won’t bother you with most of the Joy of Cooking, since you ’re not going to be able to use the Tree volume, and while cookbooks make fascinating bedtime reading for some of us, there are a lot of people who simply aren’t going to care about recipes they’ll never try out. There are even, sad as it seems, some people who just don’t cook.

I did try a lot of tubers, being very fond of tubers myself, but the first four varieties, as I’ve said, wouldn’t come up to real edibility.

And it was a full three days before Thumbelina decided to try again; I was trying a fifth brand of tuber that day, along with some vaguely violet climbing vines that seemed to be filled with a combination of gas and seeds.

In those three days I had done some hard thinking, and I’d managed to get a little closer to the idea of Teeny Knave. If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it may yet be a particularly persuasive wind-up toy, and it had begun to dawn on me that the figure I’d seen wasn’t necessarily a living being, in the usual sense of the word. (Are robots—Totums, Robbies, robots of all sorts—living beings? It depends on how you define every word in that question, and what that means is that there is no general agreement on the subject, definitions being as individual as they are. It is always safer, however, to treat any unknown as if it were alive, from your Totum to your toothbrush.)

A robot built to look like me didn’t make a lot more sense than a Teeny Living Sympathetically Magical Me (and made even less sense when I looked at some of the chemical-composition readouts), but the thought was, for reasons I hope are obvious, a lot easier to live with.

Somebody—human or otherwise-had built a robot to kill me with, and had, for reasons I had to insist were important, built it so it looked enough like me for me to recognize. (There might have been a clue in there; the robot didn’t necessarily look like me to an impartial observer, if there is one anywhere in the Universe; what I recognize as me is what I happen to think looks like me in what I happen to see as important details. People you insist look alike aren’t at all likely to agree with you; their list of important details is a different list.)

Well, on the third day, Thumbelina came flying over my log cabin, fully intending to drop in.

To drop in, that is to say, a small bomb.

As I’ve said, I’d taken the indicated precautions—the thing was obviously going to avoid a ground approach, and that left flying or burrowing, and I couldn’t really picture the rocket making its way to me like a nematode—and when it noticed that I’d rigged a blasting cannon (a fairly small one, but a small cannon is a hell of a big weapon) to cover the rooftop, it went sadly away again without anything in the way of a real try.

Smart rocket. Just smart enough so that I started worrying, at once, about its next try. Intelligence is a welcome quality in your friends, in your enemies, it’s only half welcome; there are things you know an intelligent enemy won’t bother to try, which is helpful, but there are things he will bother to try that you haven’t thought of yet— which is not.

All I knew for certain was that it hadn’t given up. It never did seem the type for that, right on through to the end—though in fact I never saw it again.

The end, however, was some while coming. I worked away at Joy of Cooking, getting, over two crowded weeks, a fair listing of basic vegetable dishes, and starting to think about meats and fishes. I had some of the adventures a Survivor gets to expect— being chased by a three-legged horned beast, a fascinating cross between a rhinoceros and a wheelbarrow, for instance, or falling into a rapidly running stream of not-quite-water on a day when I hadn’t been wearing any sort of protective field; the job requires leaving that stuff off whenever possible, naturally, as colonists aren’t going to live in protective fields.

That fall led to several days of charting my temperature and reactions while I stayed firmly in the log cabin; exposure to the water wouldn’t kill me, the drones had promised, but the only way to find out exactly and for certain how very small doses of oddities affect the human body is to let them affect the human body. A slight rise in temperature, and, believe it or not, two days of intermittent hiccups seemed to be about the worst of things, and even that set of reactions would calm down as more and more colonists arrived, and as the planet itself was slowly pushed into closer and closer approximations of the colonists’ needs and wants; small-scale terraforming is what people normally do, everywhere and all the time.

I had no word of any kind from the rocket for those two weeks, and that worried me more than anything else, because I had to believe it was laying plans. If I’d been the rocket, I’d have been laying plans, and I thought of two or three notions that might very plausibly work, and never doubted that Thumbelina Himself was thinking of two or three more than that.

The final interruption, though, was the assault. “Unexpected” was turning out to be a fine word for Tree, with “damned nuisance” a close runner-up and winner of Miss Congeniality. They’re all unexpected, sure, but Tree seemed to be leaning on the quality a little more than most new planets do.

I can’t call it a stampede, though it involved a good many Tree animals— large ones, all of them: the goo-spitting giraffe was among those present, as was the rhinobarrow—there were also, always at a distance, any number of furry birds. (Every time I saw the damned birds, and I saw them every damned day, I wondered about the substitution of what seemed fairly heavy fur for feathers, and the plain fact never did dawn on me, not from that direction.) The animals weren’t running in a crazed fashion from A to as near Z as manageable.

They were running purposefully.

I’d gone to sleep crowned with success-one final tuber recipe had in fact panned out nicely, with a strong taste of both yam and, believe it or not, Key Lime pie when strained and baked; I felt several steps ahead of myself and very victorious indeed. And I awoke at dawn to a symphony of horrible noises. I hardly had to look out the window to know what was going on.

The noises were an expansion for full orchestra of the panicked trumpeting, screaming and thrashing I’d caused by shooting off a slug gun back near the start of all this. That much told me: Animals on the Run.

The noises were getting louder by the second, and that told me: Running Toward Me.

Well, I didn’t think they could trample the log cabin, which was after all impervious, according to guarantee. Some animals would have their heads bashed in if they ran straight for the walls, and in seconds I wouldn’t be able to see out my Glassex windows because they’d be covered with animal, but that was about the extent of the threat.

The animals were racing straight toward me—I did look out the window in time to see that much; there wasn’t even a slight angle away from the cabin. And there were a lot of large animals, a lot of distant flying furry birds, a lot of everything. Fish were missing (there being no running stream up to the cabin), and Thumbelina was missing, but everyone else in the cast appeared to have accepted the invitation with pleasure.

And why did I think Thumbelina should have been there? Well, because the animals were headed straight toward me…

A rhinobarrow smacked the Glassex with its horn and face, lost interest in the whole affair and tried to sink gracefully to the ground. It didn’t get there, because a flying wedge of other animals—with a sort of bald tan spider the size of a gorilla in the lead—was also trying to get to, or through, the Glassex, and everybody was being held up, while unconscious, by everybody else. I stopped trying to see through my covered window, and went back to theory, while smacks and thumps were added in great quantities to the screaming and trumpeting and so on.

The animals were headed straight toward me.

Now, what would have pushed them into anything like that?

Some sort of reaction against a stranger… shared among various animals? A sort of jungle telepathy?

Well, telepathy was certainly possible for some races. But I’d been on Tree for several weeks. Telepathy that took that long a time to make up its mind, so to speak, didn’t seem worth even ten seconds of thought.

So something outside the animals had pushed the animals…

Thumbelina?

It seemed a good first hypothesis.

And then something else dawned on me, and very, very slowly—as the trumpeting, crashing, thudding, and general hooraw continued—all the pieces began to fall into place. I remembered what I’d really forgotten— not the identity of the noises, but the damned seventeen hours. I’d been unconscious for seventeen hours. I’d barely thought about that since— which was itself a massive, major due.

But that wasn’t the biggest clue. The biggest clue was one simple sentence I had never so much as said to myself:

Nothing happened more than once.

A: I fell down, unconscious, for seventeen hours.

B: I was shot at by a beamer.

C: I was shot at by a different beamer.

D: I was shot at by a disintegration thingummy.

E: I was shot at with a load of teeny buzz-saws.

F: …And so on. And, goddamn it, so on.

I felt like kicking myself, and no wonder. I was, again, outwardly calm and inwardly screaming and jumping up and down. The animal assault was beginning to fade, just a bit; there were fewer trumpetings, and a lot less in the way of thuds, because animals were now running into each other at some distance from the actual log cabin; I appeared to have a sort of outer coating five or six beasts thick in places.

Not that it mattered. Not that any of it mattered.

Nothing happened more than once—and things began by putting me out cold for seventeen hours.

Furry birds.

A robot Knave. (Who resembled me by my own measurements.)

And (as I had had every chance to realize while checking myself out from a fall into almost-water) the only way to find out how teeny doses of things affect the human body is to let them affect the human body.

Well, I knew what the leaves on those damned trees exuded, didn’t I? At least in an operational sort of way; whatever the composition, I knew what the stuff was meant to do, and what, in fact, it did do—and very, very well, too.

A totally unfamiliar animal is an immense threat. He may poison you; he may just taste terrible (or make everything else taste terrible, I suppose); he may decide to eat you.

Do you kill the animal? Probably not; you don’t know that you can kill it, and you aren’t quite sure how, in any case; it’s rather large, as killable animals go around you.

You chase it away. And chasing it away will look, to the animal, like a series of serious attacks.

And when one “Shoo!” doesn’t work, you try another. Why? Because that’s the way your mind works, if a mind is what’s controlling all this, and one of these days one of those “Shoo!”s is going to pay off. You have, after all, researched things carefully; you had seventeen hours to do that in.

Telepathy… well, telepathy had to be a part of the place, and the leaves that had primed me for it should have told me that, or the furry birds—long, long ago. If I hadn’t been so preoccupied with trying to find real reasons for a robot Knave in a rocket…

And, come to think of it, if I hadn’t known how telepathy worked in human beings. I’d had some experience with it a few years before, when an indigenous telepathic race tried to take over a human colony on a new planet some damn fool Survivor had passed as safe.

In human beings, telepathy just takes over—the human mind and spirit seems to be erased, and no one has ever figured out how to bring it back, though there have been lots of tries and work is still, they tell me, ongoing.

But this was different—that chemical emitted by the leaves had to act as a sort of primer, allowing just enough telepathy to get inside a human mind without kicking the resident human out of it.

And the trees, or Tree itself—I have no idea which, and can’t see that it makes any practical difference just now; I prefer to blame the damn trees, but that’s nothing but preference—had done just that to me.

Outside, things were quieting down. A lot. I looked around, and discovered that I could see through my windows.

There were no animals crushed up against them. There were no animals anywhere that I could see.

There never had been.

I took a very deep breath. The fairytale feeling I’d had for the world…

And the fact that the noises outside hadn’t changed from afternoon to morning. The feeling was, I began to realize, that a tape had been repeating itself—which turns out to be at the least a pretty good metaphor. A tape, so to speak, of the animal life Tree saw no reason to risk.

The damned trees had handed me a world full of threats and danger and terror. If I were a smart Unfamiliar Animal, I’d leave real quick.

OK I was a smart Unfamiliar Animal.

And I was going to have to persuade the Comity to be just as smart. I thought I could probably do that; right at the moment, the human race is not absolutely desperate for living space. That’s a feeling that comes and goes as the decades wander by, and it’s been going, really, since we started real expansion into the local stars. We could stand to write off one promising-looking planet, and Tree could go back to doing whatever it is it does when nobody’s watching.

I wish to hell I knew what that might be.

I thought back to that nice tuber recipe, and the nice taste of Key Lime pie in there.

Well, of course.

Tree had hypnotized me into a few small successes with its recipes—how much had been real and how much imagined, I might never know—just to keep me headed toward whatever its latest assault was going to be. It wanted to scare me, not kill me, and it wanted me to believe that all its threats, from Thumbelina to the animal kingdom, were perfectly real. The seventeen hours had been real—and caused by some sort of telepathy primed by the trees.

But its methods hadn’t worked. So it had holed up for a while, considered whatever it had learned about me in its study period, and decided it would quit kidding around and just tell me to get the hell off its face.

Meanwhile, it kept me occupied with recipes, some good, some bad. Stampeding had to be thought out carefully—Tree, planet of brotherly calm, wasn’t at all used to that sort of thing. (And I don’t really think it was all that bright. Furry birds? Teeny Knave? It had never had to be bright, I think, and it was improvising like crazy. Sometimes, like any improviser, it slipped a little.) And while it was planning, its target was thinking.

Very slowly, to be sure. It was all there in front of me—the sheer insanity of the pieces kept me from seeing the insanity of the whole, that was all. Teeny Knave—which my analysis actually saw, recorded, got small details about…

And those furry birds—

They’re what bother me most. There is no way for fairly heavy fur to substitute for feathers, as far as I can figure out (and as far as a few other, more knowledgeable people I’ve asked can figure out)—but there they were.

The drone ships actually saw them.

Question, friends: What is there that can hypnotize analysis devices, recording devices, and a drone ship?

Just what are the trees on Tree?

They might, after all, be intelligent, if (of course—like us) no more intelligent than they have to be.

They might, for that matter, be the plaything, or early warning system, or by-product, of something else, maybe something much smarter—how would we know?

Offhand, the best hope I have is that we never get close enough to it to find out.