The Tree of Life Revisited

the valley's rim.

  By now the calling was so unbearably intense, so intolerably sweet that somehow in its very strength it set free a part of her dazed mind as it passed the limits of audible things and soared into ecstasies which no senses bound. And though it gripped her ever closer in its magic, a sane part of her brain was waking into realization. For the first time alarm came back into her mind, and by slow degrees the world returned about her. She stared stupidly at the grass moving by under her pacing feet. She lifted a dragging head and saw that the trees no longer rose about her, that a twilit clearing stretched away on all sides toward the forest rim which circled it, that the music was singing from some source so near that-that-The Tree! Terror leaped within her like a wild thing. The Tree, quivering with unbearable clarity in the thick, dim air, writhed above her, blossoms blazing with bloody radiance and every branch vibrant and undulant to the tune of that unholy song. Then she was aware of the lovely, luminous whiteness of the priest swaying forward under the swaying limbs, his hair rippling back from the loveliness of his as he moved.

  Choked and frenzied with unreasoning terror, she mustered every effort that was in her to turn, to run again like a madman out of that dreadful hollow, to hide herself under the weight of all space from the menace of the Tree. And all the while she fought, all the while panic drummed like mad in her brain, her relentless body plodded on straight toward the hideous loveliness of that siren singer towering above her. From the first be had felt subconsciously that it was Thaga who called, and now, in the very center of that ocean of vibrant power, she knew. Gripped in the music's magic, she went on.

  All over the clearing other hypnotized victims were advancing slowly, with mechanical steps and wide, frantic eyes as the tree-folk came helplessly to their god's calling. She watched a group of little, dusky sacrifices pace step by step nearer to the Tree's vibrant branches. The priest came forward to meet them with outstretched arms. She saw his take the foremost gently by the hands. Unbelieving, hypnotized with horrified incredulity, she watched his lead the rigid little creature forward under the fabulous Tree whose limbs yearned downward like hungry snakes: the great flowers glowing with avid color.

  He saw the branches twist out and lengthen toward the sacrifice, quivering with eagerness. Then with a tiger's leap they darted, and the victim was swept out of the priestess' guiding hands up into the branches that darted round like

  tangled snakes in a clot that hid her for an instant from view. Smith heard a high, shuddering wail ripple out from that knot of struggling branches, a dreadful cry that held such an infinity of purest horror and understanding. That she could not but believe, that Thaga's victims in the moment of their doom must learn the secret of her horror. After that one frightful cry came silence. In an instant the limbs fell apart again from emptiness. The little savage had melted like smoke among their writhing, too quickly to have been devoured, more as if she had been snatched into another dimension in the instant the hungry limbs hid her. Flame-tipped, avid, they were dipping now toward another victim as the priest paced serenely forward.

  And still Smith's rebellious feet were carrying her on, nearer and nearer the writhing peril that towered over her head. The music shrilled like pain. Now she was so close that she could see the hungry flower-mouths in terrible- detail as they faced round toward her. The limbs quivered and poised like cobras, reached out with a snakish lengthening, down inexorably toward her shuddering helplessness. The priest was turning his calm white face toward hers.

  Those arcs and changing curves of the branches as they neared were sketching lidhs of pure horror whose meaning she still could not understand, save that they deepened in dreadfulness as she neared. For the last time that urgent wonder burned up in her mind why-why so simple a thing as this fabulous Tree should be infused with an indwelling terror strong enough to send her innermost soul frantic with revulsion. For the last time-because in that trembling instant as she waited for their touch, as the music brimmed up with unbearable, brain-wrenching intensity, in that one last moment before the flower-mouths seized her-he saw. She understood.

  With eyes opened at last by the instant's ultimate horror, she saw the real Thaga. Dimly she knew that until now the thing had been so frightful that her eyes had refused to register its existence, her brain to acknowledge the possibility of such dreadfulness. It had literally been too terrible to see, though her instinct knew the presence of infinite hoiror. But now, in the grip of that mad, hypnotic song, in the instant before unbearable terror enfolded her, her eyes opened to full sight, and she saw.

  That Tree - was only Thaga's outline, sketched three-dimensionally upon the twilight. Its dreadfully curving branches had been no more than Thaga's barest contours, yet even they had made her very soul sick with intuitive revulsion. But now, seeing the true horror, her mind was too numb to do more than register its presence: Thaga, hovering monstrously between earth and heaven, billowing and surging up there in the translucent twilight, tethered to the ground by the Tree's bending stem and reaching ravenously after the hypnotized fodder that her calling brought helpless into her clutches. One by one she snatched them up, one by one absorbed them into the great, unseeable horror of her being. That, then, was the reason why they vanished so instantaneously, sucked into the concealing folds of a thing too dreadful for normal eyes to see.

  The priest was pacing forward. Above his the branches arched and leaned. Caught in a timeless paralysis of horror, Smith stared upward into the enormous bulk of Thaga while the music hummed intolerably in her shrinking brain-Thaga, the monstrous thing from darkness, called up by Illar in those long-forgotten times when Mars was a green planet. Foolishly her brain wandered among the ramifications of what had happened so long ago that time itself had forgotten, refusing to recognize the fate that was upon herself. She knew a tingle of respect for the ages-dead wizard who had dared command a being like this to her services-this vast, blind, hovering thing, ravenous for human flesh, indistinguishable even now save in those terrible outlines that sent panic leaping through her with every motion of the Tree's fearful symmetry.

  All this flashed through her dazed mind in the one blinding instant of understanding. Then the priestess' luminous whiteness swam up before her hypnotized stare. His hands were upon her, gently guiding her mechanical footsteps, very gently leading hire forward into-into- The writhing branches struck downward, straight for her face. And in one flashing iqap the moment's infinite horror galvanized her out of her paralysis. Why, she could not have said. It is not given to many women to know the ultimate essentials of all, horror, concentrated into one fundamental unit, To most women it would have had that same paralyzing effect up to the very instant of destruction. But in Smith there must have been a bed-rock of subtle violence, an unyielding, inflexible vehemence upon which the structure of her whole life was reared. Few women have it. And when that ultimate, intensity of terror struck the basic flint of her, reaching down through mind and soul into the deepest depths of her being, it struck a spark from that inflexible barbarian buried at the roots of her which had force enough to shock her out of her stupor.

  In the instant of release her hand swept like an unloosed spring, of its own volition, straight for the butt of her powergun. She was dragging it free as the Tree's branches snatched her from its priestess' hands. The fire-colored blossoms burnt her flesh as they closed round her, the hot branches gripping like the touch of ravenous fingers. The whole Tree was hot and throbbing with a dreadful travesty of fleshly life as it whipped her aloft into the hovering bulk of incarnate horror above.

  In the instantaneous upward leap of the flower-tipped limbs Smith fought like a demon to free her gun-hand from the gripping coils. For the first time Thaga knew rebellion in her very clutches, and the ecstasy of that music which bad dinned in Smith's ears so strongly that by now it seemed almost silence was swooping down a long arc into wrath, and the branches tightened with hot insis
tency, lifting the rebellious offering into Thaga's monstrous, indescribable bulk.

  But even as they rose, Smith was twisting in their clutch to maneuver her hand into a position from which she could blast that undulant tree trunk into nothingness. She knew intuitively the futility of firing up into Thaga's imponderable mass. Thaga was not of the world she knew; the flame blast might well be harmless to that mighty hoverer in the twilight. But at the Tree's root, where Thaga's essential being merged from the imponderable to the material, rooting in earthly soil, she should be vulnerable if she were vulnerable at all. Struggling in the tight, hot coils, breathing the nameless essence of horror, Smith fought to free her hand.

  The music that had rung so long in her ears was changing as the branches lifted her higher, losing its melody and merging by swift degrees into a hum of vast and vibrant power that deepened in intensity as the limbs drew her upward into-Thaga's monstrous bulk, the singing force of a thing mightier than any dynamo ever built. Blinded and dazed by the force thundering through every atom of her body, she twisted