I’ll be on every limb.
The dream rushed back around him and for a while he could not free himself. He looked out to the limb’s end where the leaf-embroidered subsidiary branches twinkled in the sun and the wind. This time he was surprised when he did not see a dryad.
After a long while he brought his eyes back to where they belonged, and re-aimed the cutter. For all men kill the thing they love, he thought, and squeezed the trigger. By all let this be heard. “Take her up, Mr. Wright,” he said.
When the limb was being lowered, he moved out of the way and severed the larger subsidiary branches as it passed. Most of them would hang up in the foliage below, but eventually they would end up on the ground as he worked his way down the tree. The end branches were too small to bother with and when they came opposite him, he turned away to inspect the next limb. Just before he did so, one of the soft leaves brushed his cheek.
It was like the touch of a woman’s hand. He recoiled. He wiped his cheek furiously.
His fingers came away red.
It was some time before he realized that there had been blood—no, not blood, sap—on his fingers before he had wiped his cheek; but he was so shaken by then that the realization did little good, and the little good it did do was cancelled when he moved back to check the limbline and saw the “blood” welling out of the new stub.
For an insane moment all he could think of was the stump of a woman’s arm.
Presently he became aware of a voice in his mind. “Tom,” the voice said. “Tom! Are you all right, Tom?” It dawned on him that it was Wright’s voice and that it wasn’t in his mind at all, but emanating from his eareceiver.
“Yes?”
“I said, ‘Are you all right?’ ”
“Yes… I’m all right.”
“It took you long enough to answer! I wanted to tell you that the lumber mill superintendent just sent word that all the wood we’ve removed so far is half-rotten. He’s afraid they won’t be able to salvage any of it. So watch your step, and make sure your limbline crotches are solid.”
“The tree looks healthy enough to me,” Strong said.
“Maybe so, but don’t trust it any further than you have to. It doesn’t add up in more ways than one. I sent several samples of the sap to the village lab, and they say that in its crude state—that’s before it goes through the photosynthesis process—it contains an unusually high concentration of nutrients, and in its elaborated stage—that’s after it goes through the photosynthesis process—it consists of twice as many carbohydrates and twice as much oxygen as even a healthy thousand-foot tree needs to sustain itself. And not only that, they say that there’s no pigment present that could possibly account for the sap’s unusual color. So maybe we just imagine we’re seeing ‘blood’.”
“Or maybe the tree induces us to imagine we’re seeing ‘blood,’ ” Strong said.
Wright laughed. “You’ve been consorting with too many dryads, Mr. Strong. Watch yourself now.”
“Will do,” Strong said, tonguing off.
He felt better. At least he wasn’t the only one who was bothered by the “blood.” The next cut did not bother him nearly so much, even though the stub “bled” profusely. He “burned” down to the next limb and started out upon it. Suddenly he felt something soft beneath his foot. Glancing down, he saw that he had stepped on a flower that had fallen either from the crest or from one of the limbs he had just removed. He stooped over and picked it up. It was crushed and its stem was broken, but even dying, it somehow managed to convey a poignant suggestion of a woman’s face.
He attacked the tree, hoping that action would blunt his perceptions.
He worked furiously. Sap got on his hands and stained his clothing, but he forced himself to ignore it. He forced himself to ignore the tree-flowers, too, and the leaves that sometimes caressed his face. By noon he had cut his way down past the limb where he had spent the night, and above him nearly three hundred feet of stubbed trunk rose into the foliaged crest.
He made a few swift calculations: the crest represented about ninety feet; the distance from the ground to the first limb was two hundred and eighty-seven feet; he had de-limbed nearly three hundred feet. Roughly, then, he had about three hundred and fifty feet to go.
After a brief lunch of tree-rations, he went back to work. The sun was blistering now, and he missed the limbs and leaves that had shaded him yesterday. He had to keep moving his saddle-rope to lower and lower stub-crotches, but the length of the lower limbs made moving the limbline unnecessary. He was a little awed, despite himself, at their size. Even when you knew that the line you were using couldn’t break, it was unnerving to watch so thin a cable pull a two- to three-hundred-foot limb from a horizontal to a vertical position and then support if while it was being lowered to the ground.
The tree “bled” more and more as his downward progress continued. The “blood” from the upper stubs kept dripping down into the lower branches, smearing limbs and leaves and making his work a nightmare of incarnadine fingers and red-splotched clothing. Several times he came close to giving up, but each time he reminded himself that if he did not finish the job, Suhre, who had drawn the second longest blade of grass, would; and somehow the thought of Suhre’s insensitive fingers manipulating the cutter beam was even more unendurable than the “blood.” So he persisted, and when the day was done, he had less than two hundred feet to go.
He pitched his tent on the topmost lower limb, some five hundred feet down from the crest, and asked Wright to send up water, soap and towels. When Wright complied, he stripped, soaped himself thoroughly, and rinsed the soap suds away. After drying himself, he washed out his clothes in the remaining water and hung them over the campfire. He felt better. When Wright sent up his supper—another special plate prepared by the mayor’s wife—he ate cross-legged before his tent, a blanket wrapped around his shoulders. By the time he finished, his clothes were dry, and he put them on. The stars came out.
He opened the thermo-cup of coffee that had accompanied his meal and smoked a cigarette between sips.
He wondered if she would come tonight.
The night grew chill. At length the first moon rose, and before long her two silvery sisters came too. Their argent radiance transformed the tree. The limb on which he sat seemed part of a huge configuration of limbs that formed the petals of a massive flower. And then he saw the stubbed and ugly trunk rising out of the flower’s center and the metaphorical illusion collapsed.
But he did not turn his eyes away. He stood up instead and faced the trunk and looked up at the cruel caricature he had created. Up, up he looked, to where the crest showed dark and lustrous against the sky, as lovely as a woman’s hair… There was a flower tucked in her hair, he noticed; a lonely flower glowing softly in the moonlight.
He rubbed his eyes and looked again. The flower was still there. It was an unusual flower, quite unlike the others: It bloomed just above the highest crotch—the crotch where he had first seen her blood.
The moonlight grew brighter. He located the limbline-crotch up there, and followed the limbline down with his eyes to where he had secured it after the day’s operations. He reached out and touched it and it felt good to his fingers, and presently he began climbing in the moonlight.
Up, up he went, his biceps knotting, his laterals swelling against his shirt. Up into moonlight, into magic. The lower branches dwindled into asilvery mass beneath him. When he came to the saddle-rope crotch, he pulled the rope free and coiled and slung it over his shoulder. He felt no tiredness, knew no shortness of breath. It wasn’t until he reached the limb line-crotch that his arms became weary and his breathing rapid. He coiled a lineman’s loop and threw it through a stub-crotch some fifteen feet above his head. Eight more throws brought him up to the original saddle-rope crotch. His chest was tight, and his swollen muscles throbbed with pain. He released his spurs and started up the final section of the trunk. When he reached the highest crotch, he saw her sitting on an overhead bough, and the flower was her face.