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no better way of life, and I wish to see this culture expand, enriching itself
with the cultures of other worlds, adapting the good, overcoming the bad."
"In other words," said Joe. "You're as strenuous an imperialist as your
military friends. Only your methods are different."
"I'm afraid you have defined me," sighed Hableyat. "Furthermore I fear that in
this era military imperialism is almost impossible that cultural imperialism
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Vance, Jack - Son of the Tree (v1.0) (html).html the only practicable form. A
planet cannot be successfully subjugated and occupied from another planet. It
may be devastated, laid waste, but the logistics of conquest are practically
insuperable. I fear that the adventures proposed by the
Redbranch will exhaust Mang, ruin Ballenkarch and make the way easy for a
Druid religious imperialism."
Joe felt Elfane stiffen. "Why is that worse than Mang cultural imperialism?"
"My dear Priestess," said Hableyat, "I could never argue cogently enough to
convince you. I will say one word that the Druids produce very little with a
vast potentiality that they live on the backs of a groaning mass and that I
hope the system is never extended to include me among the Laity."
"Me, either," said Joe.
Elfane jumped to her feet. "You're both vile!"
Joe surprised himself by reaching, pulling her back beside him with a thud.
She struggled a moment, then subsided.
"Lesson number one in Earth culture," said Joe cheerfully. "It's bad manners
to argue religion."
A soldier burst into the chamber, panting, his face twisted in terror.
"Horrible
out along the road& Where's the Prince? Get the Prince a terrible growth!"
Hableyat jumped to his feet, his face sharp alert. He ran nimbly out the door
and after a second Joe said, "I'm going too."
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Elfane, without a word, followed.
Joe had a flash impression of complete confusion. A milling mob of men circled
an object he could not identify a squat green-and-brown thing which seemed to
writhe and heave.
Hableyat burst through the circle, with Joe at his side and Elfane pressing at
Joe's back. Joe looked in wonder. The Son of the Tree?
It had grown, become complicated. No longer did it resemble the Kyril Tree.
The Son had adapted itself to a new purpose protection, growth, flexibility.
It reminded Joe of a tremendous dandelion. A white fuzzy ball held itself
twenty feet above the ground on a slender swaying stalk, surrounded by an
inverted cone of flat green fronds. At the base of each front a green tendril,
streaked and speckled with black, thrust itself out. Clasped in these tendrils
were the bodies of three men.
Hableyat squawked, "The thing's a devil," and clapped his hand to his pouch.
But his weapon had been impounded by the Residence guards.
A Ballenkarch chieftain, his pale face distorted, charged the Son, hacking
with his saber. The fuzzy ball swayed toward him a trifle, the tendrils jerked
back like the legs of an insect, then snapped in from all sides, wrapped the
man close, pierced his flesh. He bawled, fell silent, stiffened. The tendrils
flushed red, pulsed, and the Son grew taller.
Four more Ballenkarts, acting in grim concert, charged the Son, six others
followed. The tendrils thrust, snapped and ten bodies lay stiff and white on
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if it were being magnified.
Prince Harry's light assured voice said, "Step aside& Now then, step aside."
Harry stood looking at the plant twenty feet to the top of the fronds while
the fuzzy white ball reared another ten above them.
The Son pounced, with a cunning quasi-intelligence. Tendrils unfurled, trapped
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a dozen roaring men, dragged them close. And now the crowd went wild, swayed
back and forth in alternate spasms of rage and fear, at last charged in a
screeching melee.
Sabres glittered, swung, chopped. Overhead the fuzzy white ball swung
unhurriedly. It was sensate, it saw, felt, planned with a vegetable
consciousness, calm, fearless, single-purposed. Its tendrils snaked, twisted,
squeezed, returned to drain. And the Son of the Tree soared, swelled.
Panting survivors of the crowd fell back, staring helplessly at the
corpse-strewn ground. Harry motioned to one of his personal guard. "Bring out
a heat-gun."
The Arch-Thearchs came forward, protesting. "No, no, that is the Sacred Shoot,
the Son of the Tree."
Harry paid them no heed. Gameanza clutched his arm with panicky insistence.
"Recall your soldiers. Feed it nothing but criminals and slaves. In ten years
it will be tremendous, a magnificent Tree."
Harry shook him off, jerked his head at a soldier. "Take this maniac away."
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A projector on wheels was trundled from behind the Residence, halted fifty
feet from the Son. Harry nodded. A thick white beam of energy spat against the
Son.
"
Aaah
!" sighed the crowd, in near-voluptuous gratification. The exultant sigh
stopped short. The Son drank in the energy like sunshine, expanded,
luxuriated, and grew. A hundred feet the fuzzy white ball towered.
"Turn it against the top," said Harry anxiously.
The bar of energy swung up the slender stalk, concentrated on the head of the
plant. It coruscated, spattered, ducked away.
"It doesn't like it!" cried Harry. "
Pour it on
!"
The Arch-Thearchs, restrained in the rear, howled in near-personal anguish. "
No
, no, no
!"
The white ball steadied, spat back a gout of energy. The projector exploded,
blasting heads and arms and legs in every direction.
There was a sudden dead silence. Then the moans began. Then sudden screaming
as the tendrils snapped forth to feed.
Joe dragged Elfane back and a tendril missed her by a foot. "But I am a Druid
Priestess," she said in dull astonishment. "The Tree protects the Druids. .The
Tree accepts only the lay pilgrims."
"
Pilgrims
!" Joe remembered the Kyril pilgrims tired, dusty, footsore, sick
entering the portal into the Tree. He remembered the pause at the portal, the
one last look out across the gray land and up into the foliage before they
turned and
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old, in all conditions, thousands every day&
Joe now had to crane his neck to see the top of the Son. The flexible central
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shoot was stiffening, the little white ball, swung and twisted and peered over
its new domain.
Harry came limping up beside Joe, his face a white mask. "Joe that's the
ungodliest creature I've seen on thirty-two planets."
"I've seen a bigger one on Kyril. It eats the citizens by the thousand."
Harry said, "These people trust me. They think I'm some kind of god myself
merely because I know a little Earth engineering. I've got to kill that
abomination." [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]