Cino shot Melnone neatly through the head, splattering Dalreay with blood and brains.
“Come with me, Prestin. And bring your friend with you.” The Mauser waved with an authority Prestin could not disobey.
VIII
Crowded by Cino and his bullies, Dalreay and Prestin hurried along the corridor and entered a small cylindrical chamber. The door slid shut. The floor shifted and then rose rapidly. Dalreay grasped at Prestin, his face looking shattered by the experience.
“Elevator,” Prestin said. “We’re going up.”
“These hunters are mortally afraid of science,” scoffed Cino. The man made Prestin feel that life should sometimes not be allowed. “We’re going up inside one of the Sorba trees. They’re among the largest in the rain forest.”
“Rain forest,” said Prestin. “The Big Green, the Big Growth, the Cabbage Patch. I see.”
“We’re right in the middle of it—” Dalreay’s pallor tinged green around the edges. Prestin wanted to help the Dargan, but he felt that nothing he could say would be of any use. He kept himself away from Cino; the contrast between the two men could have served as the model for ying and yang.
The elevator stopped after what seemed like an over-long ascent for inside a tree. Prestin began to wonder if he was being duped—that the rain forest was not the Amazonian basin he had conjured up. As a city dweller, the ideas of jungles had always held a romantic lure for him, a golden-green promise of strange and gallant adventures.
They went out of the door as soon as it slid open, Cino swaggering ahead. Dalreay kept close to Prestin, who could take no comfort from the reversal of their roles. Ahead of them, a circular expanse of windows walled the aerial platform in perspex. Prestin guessed that the platform was a round construct bolted onto the tree trunk like a lollipop on a stick. He followed the others, with Dalreay half a pace behind him, and walked across to look out the windows.
He had not been duped: he was indeed looking out from the top story of a true rain forest. Slowly, and with growing realization and awe, he fathomed the true stature of those trees. It would have been impossible for him to have judged their height if there were no gaps in which he could see down far enough to what he imagined was the ground—or was it merely the top of another story of jungle trees? But a group of giants had fallen, tearing with them lianas, vines, and parasites of all sorts; the gap ripped the eternal closeness of the jungle to let in long beams of sunlight. Prestin could only guess at the heights involved. A thousand feet? That seemed impossible; then he remembered the elevator ride, and saw what his eyes told him of diminishing perspectives.
Birds and vividly colored flying animals flitted between the trees. The Sorba trees must be those he could see with the bushy golf-ball tops. They sprouted up here and there through the welter of greenery, that formed the topmost layer of continuous forest. To look down on that bunched series of treetops was to imagine it a solid surface that one could walk across as easily as a grass field.
He knew, of course, the surface existed as a closely integrated yet diffuse culture medium; no one was going walking there. Where that canopy had been broken and the sunshine poured through, plants below grew avidly, madly, with an almost visible reaching for the light. What went on down in those lower depths made any imagination boggle. He knew that a terrestrial tropical forest biome might support as many as five stories of trees. Looking down he could see three separate linked levels where certain trees reached their highest growth—he did not care to guess how many others there might be here. With water and sunlight in abundance, the rest could safely be left to nature, here on Irunium as well as on Earth.
“Strange, isn’t it,” said Cino with his patronizing sneer. “How the forest ceases so abruptly—there is quite a sharp edge where the savanna begins. The answer, of course, is that the dividing line is marked by the beginning of the jewel-bearing rocks. We live in the Big Green because it is safe for us.” He waved his Mauser casually and Prestin and Dalreay moved along. “But we mine the savanna. It’s nice that way.”
“That Lombok Vine,” said Prestin, appalled. “That grew out of there?”
Cino sniggered. “That was a baby one. Down in the Big Green the Lomboks and the Narwhals really grow big. We keep a constant check on our trees, like this Sorba. A strangler fig can germinate from an epiphyte reasonably high up on a tree, reach down to the ground, kill the tree and take over its place in the sunshine. We don’t like that happening to the trees we live in.”
“And this is safer than living out there on the open land?”
“Safer for us, surely, because we have the technology to cope with these brainless plants.” Cino took out a crumpled cigarette pack and shook one out. “Smoke?”
“No, thank you.” Prestin did not add, “It’s a mug’s game.”
They went on around the perspex-walled enclosure until they reached a short staircase going up. So the aerial platform had itself more than one story.
“You,” Cino said to Prestin. “Up. You,” to Dalreay, “wait here.” The cigarette moved between his lips as he spoke in a modish 1930-type fashion.
Prestin climbed up the stairs, wondering what nastiness awaited him. He had not forgotten Melnone, nor that ghastly seeking vine, and he felt himself acutely aware of the unanswered questions.
The head of the stairs was enclosed by a small anteroom, quite unremarkable, and he walked through it toward the double doors at the end. He pushed them open and heard a splashing of water and a girl’s soft voice saying, “In here, Bob.”
This, he told himself, not without humor, should be interesting.
He went in and forgot his flippancy; he stood for a moment on the threshold, dizzied by the scene.
Without question, the stage had been set. Ancient Greco-Roman statuary, voluptuous in its clean whiteness of line, stood on marble floors. A fine mist of scented vapors coiled langourously from the bath where, like Diana among her ladies, a girl lay half-submerged in the fragrant water. Her limbs and body shone with pink health, her toenails gleamed ah impudent scarlet. Her dark hair, coiffed and sprinkled with gems, had not been imprisoned by any bathcap horror. Three copper-skinned maidens, nearly as naked as she was, tended her, one with unguents, one with an oversized sponge, the other delicately applying an ivory strigil. They laughed in low, throaty giggles as he stood there like a loon.
Music floated wantonly in from some hidden source; it was soft, stroking, quarter-tone music, forgettable but creating an atmosphere of unquestioning relaxation.
“You are a little early, Bob. But you don’t mind if I keep you waiting, do you?”
Her voice, smooth and apparently unsubtle, reached Prestin very agreeably. He looked at her overtly now, aware that she was coolly enjoying his discomfiture. She was well worth looking at, at that, with her dark hair, her violet eyes, and her mouth that might have been too ripe and soft and pouting for some tastes.
“I’d like you to tell me what this is all about.”
“Of course, Bob. That’s why I asked you to come up. I hope Cino found you all right?”
“Oh, yes. He found me. He found a cringing little thing called Melnone, too—”
“Melnone was a fool!” The words cracked hard and then, with a soft smile and a splash of water, she covered them with a tinkle of merriment. Foam churned in the bath and the scarlet toenails disappeared. Knees—inevitably dimpled—appeared in their stead. “His usefulness was over. All the Valcini think of is their awful sports.”