Beastchild

as fast as a man could walk, slipping oily over each other and the trees on which they grew, pollinating the flowers that grew on the bark of some of the larger pines. He had seen the plants which ate other plants (and which impolitely spat out his finger when, at the urging of his guide, he had stuffed it into the pulpy orifice). He saw the breathing plants with their baggy, lunglike flowers, busy spewing out carbon dioxide to continue the cycle that had started here eons earlier.
        "An incredibly old culture," his guide had said. "To have evolved plant life this far."
        "No animals at all?" he asked.
        "None. They've found a few insects, little mites, that live between the outer and second layer of bark on the red-top trees."
        "Ah…"
        "But there's a question about those two. Seems the boys working on them in the labs have found traces of chlorophyll in them."
        "You mean-"
        "Plants too. Looking quite like insects. Mobile. Able to suck up nutriment from other plants and move about like animals."
        The guide-an elderly naoli with a jewelry affectation: he wore a raw iris stone around his neck on a wood bead necklace-had shown him more. The Quick Ferns, for instance. Cute little, frilly, green things, lush and vibrant, swaying briskly under the slightest breath. They lined the forest floor, the shortest growth, a carpet beneath all else. As he watched, they grew, pushed up new plants, spread their feathery leaves-then grew brown, blackened, collapsed, gave off a puff of spores, and were gone. In a place where there was no animal feces, no animal decay, the vegetation had come to rely on its own death to give it life. For so much life-there was a wild, thick sprawl of growing things unlike anything he had ever seen before-a great deal of fertilizer was required. It was natural, then, that the Quick Ferns should have a total life span, from spore germination to death of the plant and ejection of the next spore cycle of fourteen minutes. At the end of each summer on Dala, there was a five foot layer of thick, black organic material lying on, the forest floor. By the following spring, it was decomposed, gone, and the Quick Ferns began their job again.
        "No animals at all," he said to the guide, still amazed at the society of this primitive world.
        "Not now," the guide replied, chuckling.
        "What's that?"
        "I said, not now. There used to be."
        "How do you know?"
        "They've found the fossils," he said, fingering the stone hanging about his withered neck. "Thousands of them. Not any that might have been possessed by intelligent creatures. Primitive animals. Some small dinosaurs."
        "What happened to them?" Hulann asked, fascinated.
        The old naoli waved his arms around at the jungle. "The plants happened to them. That's what. The plants just developed a little faster. They think the animals were a slow lot. When the first ambulent plants arrived on the scene, they ate flesh."
        Hulann shivered.
        The forest seemed to close in on him, to grow from just a pleasant patch of trees to something malevolent and purposeful. He felt himself backing away toward their shuttlecraft, stopped himself, and chided himself for his youthful superstition. "Yet now the plants are finally subservient to animals. To us."
        "Wouldn't be so certain," the old man said. He pulled on the iris stone. The warmth of his gnarled hand made the black and green gem pulsate, the green iris growing larger and smaller with the changes in temperature.
        "How so?"
        "The plants are trying to adapt to us. Hunting a way to do us in."
        Hulann shivered. "Now you're talking the kind of superstition I just got finished scolding myself for."
        "It's not superstition. Couple of years ago, the first Concrete Vines showed up."
        "They-"
        "Yeah. Eat concrete. The wall of the central administration building fell in. Killed a hundred and some. Roof collapsed under the stress. Later, they found a funny thing. They found these vines, only as big around as the tip of your tail, honeycombing the wall. They had come in from the forest edge, growing underground until they reached the wall. Then they grew upwards until they had weakened it. Ate the insides out of that wall. After a few more cases like that, we started building with plastics ant plastic metals." He laughed an ancient, dry cough of a