“Can we rely on you?” Ruiger pressed. “How long will it take?”
“Not long, not long. Leave him with us.”
“May we stay to watch?”
“No, no!” The Chid seemed indignant. “It is not seemly. You are our guests. Depart!”
“All right,” Ruiger said. “When shall we come back?”
“We will send him out when he is ready. Tomorrow morning, perhaps.”
“Good.” Ruiger stood uncertainly. He was eager to get out of the hut, but somehow reluctant to leave.
The Chid on the couch had completely ignored them, apart from one glance when they first entered. He still lay motionless, as if dead.
“Until tomorrow, then.”
“Until tomorrow.”
They withdrew, stiffly and awkwardly. To human sensibilities the Chid seemed to lack stability, Ruiger decided. They gave a neurotic, erratic, disconcerting impression. But it was probably a false impression, like that given by their idiot faces.
Back in the ship, Ruiger said: “Well, so far it went all right. If that Chid keeps his promise we’ve got nothing to worry about.”
“But this talk about sports and games,” Brand said anxiously. “What do they expect of us?”
“Never mind about that. As soon as we get Wessel back, and he’s all right, we simply take off.”
“We’ll owe them. They might try to stop us.”
“We’ve got guns.”
“Yeah… you know, I guess we’re all right, but what about Wessel? That hut doesn’t look a lot like an operating theatre to me. Somehow I find it hard to believe they can do anything.”
“They don’t work the way we do. But everybody knows they can accomplish miracles, almost. You’ll see. Anyway, it gives Wessel a chance. He didn’t have one before.”
They fell silent.
After a while Ruiger became restless. In crossing the continent they had backtracked on the sun; now it was evening again, and there were about eight hours to wait until dawn. Ruiger didn’t feel like sleeping. He suggested they take a walk.
After some hesitation Brand agreed. Once outside, they strolled towards the Chid’s wood, both of them curious to see what lay inside it. They skirted the depression where it grew, aware that the Chid could be watching and might not like strangers entering their private garden, if such it was.
There was little doubt that the wood was alien to the planet. It was quite unlike the open bush that covered most of the continent. Local flora and fauna were characterised by a quality of brashness, and their colours were light, all tawny, orange and yellow, but this seemed dark and oppressive, huddled in on itself, and unnaturally silent and still. The bark of the trees was slick, olive-green in colour, and glistened, while the foliage was almost black.
Out of sight of the Chid hut, Ruiger parted some shoulder-high vegetation that screened the interior of the wood from view and stepped between the slender tree trunks.
Quietly and cautiously, they sauntered a few yards into the wood. The light was suffuse and dim, filtering through the tree cover that seemed to press in overhead to create a totally enclosed little environment. Though fairly close-packed, the interior was less dense than the perimeter, which Ruiger began to think of as a barrier or skin. There was the same moist, rotting odour he had noticed in the Chid hut. The air was humid and surprisingly hot; presumably the wood trapped heat in some way, or else was warmed artificially.
The ground, sloping down towards the centre, was carpeted with a kind of moss, or slime, which felt unpleasant underfoot. Ruiger was struck by the dead hush of the place. Not a leaf moved; there was not the merest breath of a breeze. They crept on, descending the slope into the depths of the wood, and before long began to notice a change in the nature of the vegetation. Besides the slender trees other, less familiar plants flourished. Luxurious growths with broad, drooping leaves that dripped a yellow syrup. Python-like creepers that intertwined with the upper tree branches and pulsed slightly. Bilious parasites, like clusters of giant grapes or cancerous excrescences, that clung and tumbled down the squamous trunks, sometimes engulfing entire trees.
The wood was coming more to resemble a lush, miniature, alien jungle. Also, it was no longer still. There were sounds in it—not the rustle of leaves or the sigh of branches, but obscene little slurping and lapping sounds. Ruiger stopped, startled, as the scum carpet suddenly surged into motion just ahead of him. From it there emerged what looked like a pinkish-grey tangle of entrails, which swarmed quickly up a nearby tree and began to wrestle with the parasitic growth hanging there. The parasite apparently had a gelid consistency; the two shook and shivered like horrid jelly.
“Look,” Brand whispered.
Ruiger followed his gaze. A small creature was creeping through some undergrowth that sprouted near the base of a tree. It looked for all the world like the uncovered brain of a medium-sized mammal such as a dog or a tiger, complete with trailing spinal stem.
They watched it until it disappeared from sight. A few yards further on, they came to a clearing. It was occupied by a single tree—not one of the trees that made up the bulk of the wood, but a fat, pear-shaped trunk that contracted rhythmically like a beating heart. It was surmounted by a crown from which spread a mesh of fine twigs. As they entered the clearing this mesh suddenly released a spray of red droplets onto them.
Quickly they moved away. Ruiger examined the drops that had fallen on his tunic, head and hands. The liquid was sticky, like blood, or bile.
Distastefully they wiped the stuff off their exposed skin.
“I’ve seen enough,” said Brand. “Let’s get out.”
“Wait,” Ruiger insisted. “We might as well go all the way.”
They were approaching the bottom of the wood now, and Ruiger guessed there might be something special there. The rich, foetid smell was becoming so strong that both men nearly gagged, but a few yards further on they broke through a thicket of clammy-feeling tendrils, and there it was.
The surrounding trees leaned over it protectively, spreading their branches to form a complete canopy above it: a little lake of blood. Ruiger was sure the stuff was blood: it looked like it and smelled like it, though with not quite the same smell as human blood. Dozens of small creatures were gathered on the shores of the pool to drink: segmented creatures the size of lobsters, creatures like the brain-animal they had seen already, creatures that consisted of clusters of tubes, resembling assemblies of veins and arteries. The forest, too, put out hoses of its own into the pool, snaking them down from the trees and across the bushes.
Ruiger and Brand stared in fascination. Was this, Ruiger wondered, a pleasant little paradise to the Chid mind? He took his eyes from the gleaming crimson surface of the lake. The wood, with its covering of slime, its slick trees, its gibbous growths and pulsing python pipes that seemed neither animal nor vegetable, no longer looked to him like a wood in the Earthly sense. Its totally enclosed, self-absorbed nature put him in mind of what it might be like inside his own body.
He grunted, and nudged Brand. “Let’s go.”
Slowly they made their way up the bowl-shaped slope, towards the open starlight.
Minutes after they returned to the ship, the first of the Chid gifts arrived.
They did not know, at the time, that it was meant to be a gift, and if they had known, they still wouldn’t have known what they were supposed to do with it. It was an animal that came bounding from the Chid hut to prance about in front of the Earthmen’s ship. It was vaguely dog-like and about the size of a Great Dane, with hairless yellow skin.
Ruiger focused the external scanner on it, magnifying the image. There were slits in the animal’s body; as it moved, these opened, revealing its internal organs.