They started up through the forest toward the plateau of giant trees. And now there was an awful unreality about this incredible world.
Farris felt no difference in himself. There was no sensation of slowing down. His own motions and perceptions appeared normal. It was simply that all around him the vegetation had now a savage motility that was animal in its swiftness.
Grasses sprang up beneath his feet, tiny green spears climbing toward the light. Buds swelled, burst, spread their bright petals on the air, breathed out their fragrance — and died.
New leaves leaped joyously up from every twig, lived out their brief and vital moment, withered and fell. The forest was a constantly shifting kaleidoscope of colors, from pale green to yellowed brown, that rippled as the swift tides of growth and death washed over it.
But it was not peaceful nor serene, that life of the forest. Before, it had seemed to Farris that the plants of the earth existed in a placid inertia utterly different from the beasts, who must constantly hunt or be hunted. Now he saw how mistaken he had been.
Close by, a tropical nettle crawled up beside a giant fern. Octopus-like, its tendrils flashed around and through the plant. The fern writhed. Its fronds tossed wildly, its stalks strove to be free. But the stinging death conquered it.
Lianas crawled like great serpents among the trees, encircling the trunks, twining themselves swiftly along the branches, striking their hungry parasitic roots into the living bark.
And the trees fought them. Farris could see how the branches lashed and struck against the killer vines. It was like watching a man struggle against the crushing coils of the python.
Very likely. Because the trees, the plants, knew. In their own strange, alien fashion, they were as sentient as their swifter brothers.
Hunter and hunted. The strangling lianas, the deadly, beautiful orchid that was like a cancer eating a healthy trunk, the leprous, crawling fungi — they were the wolves and the jackals of this leafy world.
Even among the trees, Farris saw, existence was a grim and never-ending struggle. Silk-cotton and bamboo and ficus trees— they too knew pain and fear and the dread of death.
He could hear them. Now, with his aural nerves slowed to an incredible receptivity, he heard the voice of the forest, the true voice that had nothing to do with the familiar sounds of wind in the branches.
The primal voice of birth and death that spoke before ever man appeared on Earth, and would continue to speak after he was gone.
At first he had been conscious only of that vast, rustling uproar. Now he could distinguish separate sounds — the thin screams of grass blades and bamboo-shoots thrusting and surging out of the earth, the lash and groan of enmeshed and dying branches, the laughter of young leaves high in the sky, the stealthy whisper of the coiling vines.
And almost, he could hear thoughts, speaking in his mind. The age-old thoughts of the trees.
Farris felt a freezing dread. He did not want to listen to the thoughts of the trees.
And the slow, steady pulsing of darkness and light went on. Days and nights, rushing with terrible speed over the hunati.
Lys, stumbling along the trail beside him, uttered a little cry of terror. A snaky black vine had darted out of the bush at her with cobra swiftness, looping swiftly to encircle her body.
Farris swung his bolo, slashed through the vine. But it struck out again, growing with that appalling speed, its tip groping for him.
He slashed again with sick horror, and pulled the girl onward, on up the side of the plateau.
“I am afraid!” she gasped. “I can hear the thoughts — the thoughts of the forest!”
“It’s your own imagination!” he told her. “Don’t listen!”
But he too could hear them! Very faintly, like sounds just below the threshold of hearing. It seemed to him that every minute — or every minute-long day — he was able to get more clearly the telepathic impulses of these organisms that lived an undreamed-of life of their own, side by side with man, yet forever barred from him, except when man was hunati.
It seemed to him that the temper of the forest had changed, that his slaying of the vine had made it aware of them. Like a crowd aroused to anger, the massed trees around them grew wrathful. A tossing and moaning rose among them.
Branches struck at Farris and the girl, lianas groped with blind heads and snakelike grace toward them. Brush and bramble clawed them spitefully, reaching out thorny arms to rake their flesh. The slender saplings lashed them like leafy whips, the swift-growing bamboo spears sought to block their path, canes clattering together as if in rage.
“It’s only in our own minds!” he said to the girl. “Because the forest is living at the same rate as we, we imagine it’s aware of us.”
He had to believe that, he knew. He had to, because when he quit believing it there was only black madness.
“No!” cried Lys. “No! The forest knows we are here.”
Panic fear threatened Farris’ self-control, as the mad uproar of the forest increased. He ran, dragging the girl with him, sheltering her with his body from the lashing of the raging forest.
They ran on, deeper into the mighty grove upon the plateau, under the pulsing rush of day and darkness. And now the trees about them were brawling giants, great silk-cotton and ficus that struck crashing blows at each other as their branches fought for clear sky — contending and terrible leafy giants beneath which the two humans were pigmies.
But the lesser forest beneath them still tossed and surged with wrath, still plucked and tore at the two running humans. And still, and clearer, stronger, Farris’ reeling mind caught the dim impact of unguessable telepathic impulses.
Then, drowning all those dim and raging thoughts, came vast and dominating impulses of greater majesty, thought-voices deep and strong and alien as the voice of primal Earth.
“Stop them!” they seemed to echo in Farris’ mind. “Stop them! Slay them! For they are our enemies!”
Lys uttered a trembling cry. “Andre!”
Farris saw him, then. Saw Berreau ahead, standing in the shadow of the monster banyans there. His arms were upraised toward those looming colossi, as though in worship. Over him towered the leafy giants, dominating all the forest.
“Stop them! Slay them!”
They thundered, now, those majestic thought-voices that Farris’ mind could barely hear. He was closer to them — closer—
He knew, then, even though his mind refused to admit the knowledge Knew whence those mighty voices came, and why Berreau worshipped the banyans.
And surely they were godlike, these green colossi who had lived for ages, whose arms reached skyward and whose aerial roots drooped and stirred and groped like hundreds of hands!
Farris forced that thought violently away. He was a man, of the world of men, and he must not worship alien lords.
Berreau had turned toward them. The man’s eyes were hot and raging, and Farris knew even before Berreau spoke that he was no longer altogether sane.
“Go, both of you!” he ordered. “You were fools, to come here after me! You killed as you came through the forest, and the forest knows!”
“Berreau, listen!” Farris appealed. “You’ve got to go back with us, forget this madness!”
Berreau laughed shrilly. “Is it madness that the Lords even now voice their wrath against you? You hear it in your mind, but you are afraid to listen! Be afraid, Farris! There is reason! You have slain trees, for many years, as you have just slain here— and the forest knows you for a foe.”
“Andre!” Lys was sobbing, her face half-buried in her hands.
Farris felt his mind cracking under the impact of the crazy scene. The ceaseless, rushing pulse of light and darkness, the rustling uproar of the seething forest around them, the vines creeping snakelike and branches whipping at them and giant banyans rocking angrily overhead.