Critical Threshold (7 page)

CHAPTER SEVEN

We made rather less progress in the morning than we might have, bearing in mind that the going was easy. We were forever pausing to look at plants, to watch butterflies, to look up into the trees at shy birds and their nests, to stir at thickets where creatures might be hiding, in pursuit of faint rustles we never quite traced to living sources. All this was, of course, primarily my fault, but neither Karen nor Mariel made any objection. They did not seem irritated, being eager enough to look themselves. Their interest was purely aesthetic, without any ulterior scientific motives, but there was a great deal for them to enjoy.

By midday I felt slightly heady. I didn't know whether to attribute it to the oxygen in the atmosphere, the organic traces in the air, or a purely subjective elation brought on by the surroundings. I guessed that all three might be true to a degree, but that the last was probably the most important. Feeling elated isn't usually a straight physiological reaction to chemicals in the environment. Feeling is something that happens in the mind, with or without the body's instigation.

I felt intoxicated because this was what it was all
about,
for me. This was what I'd come out to the stars for. Alien life, on its own terms, the product of alien processes; whole new worlds of living things, shaped by evolution to explore the same possibilities according to a new pattern; living things which the words I'd brought from Earth could never quite describe or conquer, needing a whole new universe of thought to understand. That's what it was all about. Up on high among the myriad fluttering wings of the colored insects were the fluttering wings of my imagination. And that was where they belonged.

It wasn't, of course, a perfect Garden of Eden. It had snakes a-plenty, although I hadn't seen one yet. Some of the insects were bothersome. None were adapted for feeding on human blood but some adventurous types were willing to have a go, and many secreted corrosive or irritant substances when touched. We accumulated our fair share of minor skin complaints as we marched, and though our medical resources were easily up to coping we couldn't quite overcome all the little trials and tribulations.

But there are no Gardens of Eden this side of the grave, and no one expects them. We took the forest as it came, snakes and all. It would take far more than a few minor drawbacks to destroy the fact that in opening up the colony worlds the starship had restored to humanity the whole vast concept-space of Utopian dreams. Even the failed colonies couldn't detract from the infinite possibilities, the infinite potential, that star travel had opened up for humankind.

The stream which we followed flowed slowly. It was surprisingly deep, for although it was generally no more than a foot or two wide I couldn't find the bottom with a branch nearly as long as my leg. I judged that the rock beneath the soil must be soft, and that the water had, over the ages, hollowed out a considerable groove.

We rested when we finally reached the river into which the stream flowed. By then it was mid-afternoon. The river, too, was placid and sluggish. The lower branches of the trees leaned over its banks and sometimes trailed the tips of their leaves upon the surface. There were occasional rafts of weed—wide, lobed leaves and bowl-shaped floating blossoms like yellow water lilies. There were no crocodiles, but as we arrived I saw a couple of small darting lizards scampering over the rafts toward the bank, seeming to run on the water where necessary. There were legions of tiny frogs, green and yellow, clinging to the rafts and sitting on the bank close to the spot where we set down our packs. Unlike the more excitable creatures the frogs ignored us, remaining aloof and unintimidated.

I stood by the edge and reached out with the branch which I had been using as a staff to touch and stir things of interest, and dragged its tip through the water, sending large ripples surging out toward the rafts.

I looked up at the tall trees. Their topmost branches were driven by a steady, strong wind, and all the trees seemed to have grown to accommodate the wind. Their ultimate growing points were directed not at the zenith but almost parallel to the ground, like flags waving in the violent airstream. And yet there was hardly a breath of breeze down here, at the surface of the river.

I realized that the wind in the treetops made a curious sound: a soft susurrus like the sound of blood in human veins magnified a thousand times. As a noise it was not noticeable, drowned out by the cacophony of the birds, but when I strained my ears to hear it I could find it ever-present beneath the irregular riot of birdsong. It was a gentle sound, a background which testified to the continued life of the whole forest, on a timescale of its own, in which the momentary twittering, even the transient lives of the birds, was negligible.

Struck by the contrast between the movement in the forest roof and the stillness of its floor, I seemed to possess once again some kind of intuitive insight into the nature of the forest and its life. It was so much bigger than a man, or a thousand men. Its affairs transcended theirs, ours. Fourteen hundred men and women had come to claim this world, to take it as their own, with the arrogant assumption that the forest could simply be chopped down as and where they pleased, and cleared out of the way. As it had turned out, it had not been possible. Without having the slightest idea why, I was not, in that particular moment, surprised.

The olfactory analysis made by the survey team had analyzed everything except the smell of the forest. Perhaps the whole survey report had analyzed everything of the forest but the forest itself. Perhaps the forest as a whole was so much more than the sum of its parts that the whole philosophy of human scientific analysis, taking things apart, descending further and further into a miasma of effects in search of tiny primal causes, was incompetent to deal with the forest.

We even have a phrase for it:
you can't see the wood for the trees.

The methods of scientific investigation are geared to looking for the trees, never for the forest. Parts, not wholes. Was that why the survey team hadn't been able to find the factor which had doomed the Dendran colony?

I put both my palms flat against the bole of a tree, feeling its warmth and its ancient solidity. It was thousands of years old. Ten minutes with an electric saw could see it felled. How could it strike back? What defense can a tree possibly have against the axe? Evolution doesn't make axes, and certainly not electric saws.

Karen offered me a knife, hilt first.

“Carve your initials?” she suggested.

I gave her a filthy look, and didn't bother with a verbal reply.

She grinned, but with genuine humor rather than mocking irony. She didn't carve her own.

“Which one is the tree of knowledge?” she asked. I didn't know.

“Maybe they all are,” I suggested.

Mariel was sitting apart, with her back to us, looking out across the water at a party of wading birds near the opposite bank. She didn't turn around, and there was nothing to indicate that she might be listening.

“Should I cut some fruit?” asked Karen. “Maybe gather enough for a frugal but Arcadian repast.”

“Later,” I said. “I'm not hungry.”

“You should be.”

People are superstitious about eating. They think that if they don't get three meals a day, regular as clockwork, horrible things might happen. Their hair might fall out and their horoscopes might turn on them and rend them limb from limb. Seven years' bad luck. Like all habits, eating gets to transcend necessity.

“Grab what you want,” I said, tiredly. “As and when you want. There's plenty around, and you know what's safe. Some of it, anyhow. You can be guinea pig and we'll watch with morbid interest to see if you shrivel and die.”

“Thanks,” she said. “Can I take the book for reference?” She took the book.

When we set off again Karen was content to lag behind, exploring the vegetation of the river bank with the aid of the book—not by any means an easy task, but one which had to be done and which I was pleased to be able to leave, in some measure, to her.

Thanks to the avenue of clear air above the river we were able to get a better sight of many of the bird species during the afternoon, and I also managed to catch sight of a tribe of monkeys on the far bank. But we found no sign whatsoever that other men had passed that way. There were no marks blazed on the trees, no artifacts abandoned at some point in the past either by accident or design. There seemed no sense in it. I thought of the seven mile wall and the psychological protection it afforded for the people behind it. And yet I could find nothing sinister in the beauty of the forest and its changelessness. It seemed to me to be welcoming, almost
made
for human habitation. There was a magnetic attraction drawing me into its being. How had the people of the settlement resisted it so utterly? And why?

It was not until the sun began to go down that we stopped again, and then both Mariel and I joined forces with Karen in trying to read from the book the most convenient way to gather the substance of a good and healthy meal. Thanks to what Karen had already learned, it was not difficult. The principal problem involved in taking a living from the forest appeared to be the need to climb. There was fruit available in abundance, and there were nuts, but there was more to the gathering of them than simply extending a hand. There were root tubers, too, but they were more difficult to locate, and required digging up and cleaning. Karen wanted me to shoot a bird in order to provide meat, but I refused.

We assembled a rather varied collection of certified-edible material, intending to test out the range of taste sensations available, to find out what was likeable as well as edible. This was really the most interesting part of the venture, as we had food concentrates in the packs sufficient to last us twenty days, whose only disadvantage was a lack of aesthetic appeal. For the first night, however, we were fairly careful in what we ate, knowing that we were risking stomach-aches as our internal mechanisms protested against the unfamiliar fare. Mariel, in particular, was a little nervous of the fruit. She had eaten the native produce of Floria without complaint or unease, but that had been different. There, even the alien crops were under extensive cultivation. On Dendra, everything remained
wild.

“How much trust do you think we can put in the advice of the book?” asked Karen. It was obviously an academic question as she had already trusted it enough to fill her stomach.

“As far as it goes,” I said. “It's not been put together haphazardly.”

“But if the disaster which overtook the colony was unforeseen...,” she supplemented.

“They would have added a warning in no uncertain arms,” I finished for her. “No, whatever happened to the colony it wasn't anything in this book.”

We all accepted that logic.

Despite a relative lack of appetite, Mariel seemed a litt1e more at ease in the evening than she had been when we set out in the morning. She remained quiet, but the walk seemed to have done her good, both in taking her away from the disturbing influence of the colonists and in making her use her body and tiring her out. She seemed relaxed, settled. While Karen and I put up the tent she lay flat on her back on a mound of grass and dozed lightly.

“You know,” I said, when I came to clear away the debris of our meal by throwing it into the river, “I can't help thinking that all of this is an existential joke.”

“All what?” asked Karen.

“Our dining handsomely on nuts and fruit. The seeds of the forest.”

“Why?”

“Because the purpose of seeds is reproduction. Trees grow seeds to make more trees. Or seeds grow trees to make more seeds. Either way the idea is to be fruitful and multiply. But on Dendra, that idea was worked out millions of years ago, just about. The forest is everywhere. There's not only nowhere for it to expand to, there's nowhere for it to
try
and expand to. And trees aren't like people. They don't die so readily. They go on and on and on, getting older and older, with no real need to die at all. They
do
die, for one reason and another, eventually. But only after thousands of years. The forest only needs to be replenished very slowly. And yet, the trees produce seed in abundance, constantly. Not even season by season but all the time. It's part of their intrinsic nature—evolutionary priorities which were once vital but are now no longer necessary. An echo of the past. You might almost say that the only reason the trees go on producing fruit is to feed the birds and the insects.”

“The same must apply to forests on Earth,” said Karen.

I shook my head, but not in contradiction. “In a way,” I said, “it happens everywhere. All species tend to overproduce their means of reproduction. But here, where everything is so perfectly balanced, it seems so strange....”

“Sometimes,” she said, “you're like a little child.” She said it soberly, without any derisory intention.

“Maybe,” I said. “But think of it. Trees can go on for thousands of years, just getting older. All the while they manufacture fruit. And yet all that's required, in the long run, is for one seed to replace one tree when it finally succumbs.”

“How many sperm have you generated in your lifetime, Alex?” she asked. “Just for your one lone son.”

I shrugged.

“Mind you,” she said. “You're right about some of it. Some of the stuff is no damned use at all. Tastes awful.”

The way she kept on returning to the egocentric viewpoint was faintly annoying. I hoped, perhaps unkindly, that if any one of us were to get sick as a result of a metabolic rebellion it would be Karen.

As it turned out, however, it was Mariel. She woke up from her doze when we lit the lamp, and it occurred to her almost at once that all was not well internally. I gave her something to help settle it, but it was the kind of situation where nothing works wonders. She ached for a long time into the night, and had diarrhoea. Karen kept her company outside the tent while I removed myself diplomatically from the scene. With a small hand- lantern I set out to explore the night life of the vicinity.