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Around him, if he’d cared to look, he might have seen the same small plants rolled up into the same small, heat-conserving spheres. He might have wished that he could do the same. But he was past all that, by now. From time to time he shivered, convulsions wracking his body, seeming to tighten the painful fibers around his waist, around his wrists, cutting off the circulation even further.

It was getting hard to think, and Lando didn’t know whether the cold was causing that or the tree. It seemed important to figure it out. What had he heard about trees like this? That there was nothing free in the universe—that what the crystals gave to those who wore them, they had first taken from someone else. Were they taking from him now?

Most of all, it hurt. His naked feet felt as if they were on fire. Even in the parched air, frost was forming on their tips, on the nails. How cold does tissue have to be before frost will form on it. Cold enough for gangrene?

Well, they weren’t going to get him that easily! He nodded confirmation to himself, and only then noticed the tears that had run down his cheeks and frozen there. If he could still feel his feet—he wished he couldn’t because the agony was as distracting as the cold itself—he ought to be able to feel his fingers. They were cold, too, but shielded from the air by his body, the little clothing they’d left him, and the tree.

The tree.

Its glassy trunk was like a block of ice at his back. Overhead, its strangely precise limbs showed a bit of transparency—or was it translucency?—where they crossed the moons.

He shook his head, and a pattern stopped. Dully, he tried to figure out what was missing. Had his heart stopped beating? He didn’t think so. He was still breathing—only now that he was conscious of it, it became an effort, an added burden to keep on doing so. He wished he could forget about it, begin breathing automatically again.

That was it! Unconsciously, he’d been doing something with his hands, his fingers. Why did the tips of his fingers hurt? Were they frozen, like his toes? They shouldn’t be—but “shouldn’t” was a funny word: he shouldn’t be there, trussed up to a tree that was eating his mind. He should be … should be … what should he be doing? Something about long corridors and beautiful women and … and … card-chips! What would he do with card-chips?

Trying to figure that one out, he didn’t notice that his fingers had gone back to picking the fabric at his wrists, stripping the aged cloth one shredded fiber at a time.

Begin with a metal pentagon, approximately thirty centimeters across its longest dimension, seven or eight centimeters thick at the edges, perhaps twice that in the rounded center.

In the center, a lens, deep red, the size of a man’s palm. And dark. Dark where it should be glowing softly, warmly. Dark as death itself.

Back at the edges, seams. On the other side of each seam, a tubular extension, joined every centimeter or so, tapering gracefully, each joint a little closer, a little finer than the one that preceded it. Sinuous, serpentine, and very, very highly polished, reflecting a curve-distorted picture of the frozen moons and cruel stars. Tangled now, heaped up and disheveled.

And at nearly every joint, at nearly every seam, a crude stubby brown pencil, rough and splintered, hundreds of them, jutting out at every conceivable angle. Where each arrow pierced the thin, fragile metal, a tiny pool of thick, transparent fluid welled. Some of it dripped off curved shining surfaces to the sand a few centimeters below.

Travel down the graceful, violated sinuosity, tapering, tapering, slimming impossibly. Approximately a meter from the torso seam, the tentacles branch again, into five delicate tapering fingers. Usually, these are held together so the tentacle seems to have a single, well-proportioned tip, concealing a tiny red optic in each “palm,” replicas of the larger eye in the torso. Now they are splayed, whether in haphazard array or in the agonies of death, only the mechanically sentient can tell, and they are a taciturn, unsentimental