It was in this mood that he created cool groves of tall trees and concentrated in them thoughts of love and pleasure.
The humanoids took the hint remarkably quickly. He had many happy generations encouraging the humanoids to sport in his groves. She was furious. But trees were his province and there was nothing she could do about it.
"You're debasing them," she complained.
"They're enjoying themselves, aren't they?"
"Voyeur!"
Well, he frankly enjoyed the swift rush of little pink bodies in and out of the groves. He was sorry when she succeeded in countering with a sterner line of thought, bred out of her deserts and thin-grassed mountains, where she was full of thought of privacy, and continence, and wonder and the stars. When he could, he made life uncomfortable for these higher-minded generations. He was never slow to create sybaritic and sensual surroundings to knock them off their mental perches. In one group of islands—which she could not reach because his pines starved out her seeds before they had a chance to establish—he had a series of permanent statues erected to himself by the humanoids, and he had frank and open worship. He considered it very proper. He maintained a cool and bracing temperature in the trees around the sandy shores.
He had passed through four or five hundred generations of giant redwoods before the little humanoids established themselves in the cities across the planet. Many of their activities were too fast for him to perceive, but he could contemplate their cities.
These were temporary structures, on the scale of the thrusting growth he felt in one of his redwoods. Still, to these dizzy little humanoids no doubt the cities lasted long enough. It was rare now for him to pick up a humanoid thought. Unlike their first models, the present generations thought at the high speed which characterized their entire life. A blurred flicker of an impression to him was apparently the whole life's output of one of her contemplatives sitting in a cave, until he fell to pieces and was whizzed away.
The pink varieties no longer worshipped him, save fitfully, but he still had a pleasant range of warmer-colored humanoids whom he could tempt into an orgy. This kept him deep in the forests on the central belt of the planet.