Leo Frankowski

largest private tree house she
had ever seen. She was very unsure of herself as she knocked on the door. Two weeks of
dead ends and false leads were telling on her. It opened.
    “Can I be of
service to you, my lady?”
    Patricia was shocked
by the creature’s appearance. While transparent blouses were in that season,
going about bare-breasted was not. It was a minute or two before she noticed that while
from the waist up her greeter looked like a well-developed adolescent, from the
waist down she was more goat than human. And her ears were pointed.
    “Uh, I’m
Patricia Cambridge. Does Dr. Guibedo live here?”
    “Yes, my lady.
My Lord Guibedo has mentioned you. He is in his workshop. I shall tell him that
you’re here. Please come in.”
    Success!
    The living room of
the tree house was fabulous; comfort and beauty had been Guibedo’s only
considerations when he designed it. Seated with a gourd of champagne by a waterfall,
Patricia waited for an hour, reading old trade journals. It was cool in the
cavernous room, and Patricia, dressed in businesslike microshorts and a transparent top, became
chilly waiting for Dr. Guibedo.
    Finally Guibedo
bubbled in—talking rapidly, waving his thick arms. “Ach, Patty! Sorry to
keep you waiting, but when you got a DNA loop stretched out, you don’t go away until you’re
finished with it, by golly! Hey! It’s gonna be so pretty, Patty! This little
seed is gonna be the theater and exercise room for the ballet society here. If those
little girls had any idea what a time I had with that big mirror, hooh!”
He smiled at the faun.
    “Liebchen! I am
so happy you take such nice care of our guest. I get more proud of you every day,
by golly!” The faun glowed with happiness, wiggled her hoofs on the carpet, and
waggled her tail vigorously.
    “But anyway, Patty! What are you
doing here and why didn’t you get here
before? I haven’t seen you for three years! You don’t like me or what?” What
a pretty girl this Patty is! Guibedo thought.
    “Uh, why didn’t I… Dr. Guibedo,
don’t you realize that every man in the FBI
is looking for you? That every government
in the world is screaming for your blood? I’m amazed that I found you so quickly, when none of those government men could. It’s the biggest
manhunt since Patty Hearst.”
    “Well, a lot of
them did find me; then they looked the town over and decided that maybe staying here was nicer than playing cops and robbers. What do you
think of my town? Pretty snazzy, huh?”
    “It’s gorgeous,
Dr. Guibedo! But I’d hardly call it a town—it covers half of Death Valley!”
    “We paid for it
fair and square. And now we call it Life Valley.” This Patty looks so
much like my poor Hilde, before she died.
    “But I still
don’t see how you were so easy to find.”
    “Simple. You
didn’t come here looking to hurt nobody, and you didn’t bring your whole
television studio along. We try not to get too much publicity.” With his new set of
glands, Guibedo was feeling urges that he hadn’t felt in thirty years.
    “Publicity! Dr.
Guibedo, since your trees killed all those people, you’ve been one of the most
sought-after men in the world!”
    “Ach. That was
an accident! I was only making it so the tree could fix its own absorption
toilet. And when a plant thinks you don’t like it, it doesn’t grow so good, and some of the
toilets grew in the beds and absorbed a few people.”
    “A few people!
You sent those seeds to some of the most influential people in the world.
Thousands of them were killed!”
    She even gets mad
like my Hilde did. “That many people can starve to death in Africa, and
nobody cares enough to give them a sandwich. No! The problem was that they were all
big shots. And the worst crime that a big shot can think of is killing a big shot.
Anyway, I got all that fixed now. The worst thing that can happen is if you
hate your tree, the food gets not so good.
    “Food! Hey,
Liebchen! Would you get me some sauerbraten and some Boch beer, please? And
maybe some strudel for Patty?”
    “Yes, my
lord!” Happy to be noticed at last, the faun pranced into the kitchen.
    “Ach, Liebchen
is so pretty.”
    “Dr. Guibedo,
what is she?”
    “Liebchen is a
faun. You see, my nephew, Heiny, he makes with the animals like I make with the plants. Fauns are sort of part of the tree. The brains of
it. Lieb chen is in empathic contact with Oakwood, my tree house here.
She makes him grow the way I want, and