Critical Threshold (8 page)

By night, the forest wore a different aspect. The camp was a fragment of alien existence becalmed in an oasis of blue-white light, with an infinite darkness all around. Only from the river bank itself could I actually look up and see the stars. One of Dendra's two moons was in the sky, and though it presented a disc rather than being simply a point of light it seemed no brighter than the most prominent stars.

The sound of the forest abated with the night, but lost nothing in terms of complexity. The birds, save for one or two nocturnal species, were silent, but whistling, whirring, clicking insects took their place. There were bats, too, fluttering about between the trees. Occasionally, I could just catch the lower registers of their constant auditory dialogue with the environment. Though the background noise was much quieter its components seemed more distinct and noticeable. Robbed of sight, human senses next give priority to hearing. But it isn't simply a matter of substituting one set of data for another. We are, by nature, creatures who order our expectations according to experience of a visible world. For us, it is
seeing
that is believing, and “I see” means “I understand”. When we are adrift in a dark world, therefore, the sensory environment becomes strange, eerie—often sinister. Fear of the dark is more reasonable than we sometimes assume.

The flashlight I carried seemed impotent as I wandered in the darkness—indeed, it was almost a handmaiden of the bewildering murmurs. It picked out shadows, and partial shapes, revealed just for fleeting seconds the flickering of bat wings, and once now and again would put a gleam into watching eyes. Most of the eyes belonged to tiny tree-frogs, but some did not.

The oceanic rippling of the forest canopy in the unsteady wind sounded, by night, like an ocean indeed, with countless breakers tumbling in the shallows. Against that background the calling of frogs, night birds, grasshoppers all seemed rather plaintive.

I wandered around, quite aimlessly, for more than half an hour. I was never out of sight of the bluish glow that emanated from the large lamp lighting the campsite. I dared not go further.

The lamp did not attract insects. I had assumed that it would, but you can't always judge by Earthly standards. Natural selection favors similar forms, often similar behavioral priorities, but there is never an exact tally. On Earth, moths are drawn to flames. On Dendra, they are not. On Dendra, eyes are not so important, and light plays little part in behavioral programming. The moths on Dendra, I guessed, would congregate not about a flame but about an odor.

When I returned to the camp Karen and Mariel were still outside. I knew that it was going to be a long night, but it was only to be expected. I waited until we were all inside and settled before I called Nathan to check in.

I told him how things stood with us, and he gave me a rundown on the day's work at the colony. There was nothing new to report. Everything was continuing. The lack of anything constructive to say weighed heavily on both our minds.

“Alex,” he said, trying to voice something of his unease, “you have to be careful.”

“I
am
careful,” I assured him.

“
Extra
careful. Don't relax. Don't take anything for granted.”

“Don't tell me,” I replied, somewhat sourly. “You have a premonition.”

“If you like,” he said. “Call it what you will. There's something badly wrong and I can't find it. I can't even ask the right question. But every time I walk down the hill I feel it's behind me, following me.”

“That's old-fashioned talk,” I said. “I don't expect it from you. You're the diplomat, remember?”

“I'm out of my depth,” he answered.

I already knew that.

“What does Conrad think?” I asked.

“Conrad doesn't know what he thinks,” Nathan replied. “He's in no better position to jump to conclusions than anyone else. So he isn't jumping. He's healing the sick and waiting...or trying to heal and trying to wait. Alex, these people haven't just
forgotten
what their ancestors were about. They act as if their minds are burned out—blown like fuses. Alex, if whatever is here can do that, I'm not even sure I want to know what it is.”

That was the darkness speaking. I guessed that it wasn't just Mariel who was disturbed by the remnants of the colony. Nathan was just letting it out a little. He didn't mean what he was saying. I guessed that he was alone, talking to the microphone. Sometimes it's easier to say what you need to say when you aren't face to face.

I knew that the problem was going through and through his mind. He couldn't let it rest. We aren't ever content with ignorance. We always have to know, or at least to attack what we don't know. The only safeguard is faith, and faith was something we couldn't really find here on Dendra.

I wished that I could assure Nathan—and myself—that there was no mind-breaking force lurking hereabouts. But I couldn't. The survey team had survived unscathed, but that no longer figured. Maybe we had a year in hand, maybe ten, but maybe not. Something, somewhere...

We just couldn't tell.

“Take it easy,” I said. “And slowly. Just keep sifting through the ruins. You'll find something.”

“Which ruins?” he asked. “The buildings, or the people?”

It wasn't a happy note on which to sign off.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Mariel lay in her sleeping bag, but she wasn't asleep. She looked as if she was feeling rough. I wasn't feeling much like sleep myself.

“How do you feel?” I asked her.

“Better,” she assured me, not very sincerely.

“You'll be okay,” I said.

She nodded.

There was a silence which I felt to be rather awkward. Mainly to break it. I asked: “What do you think? About the whole situation?”

“Wait a minute, Alex,” intervened Karen. “This isn't any time for a heavy discussion. Let her sleep.”

My eyes went to Karen, then back to the girl. I hesitated, waiting for Mariel to accept or reject the invitation to talk.

“I don't know what I think,” she said.

It seemed to be a common complaint....

“...But something's
wrong
,” she added, all in a rush.

It hardly needed saying. But there was a certain anguish in the way she said
‘wrong'.
She felt the wrongness much more basically than Nathan or I. It cut straight through to her mind. The people of the colony weren't just people to her. If even Nathan's calm professional approach was shaken, what of hers? She was
always
committed, involved. Her so-called talent, her so-called understanding, that laid her mind open like a gaping wound.

I snatched up my thoughts suddenly, remembering that she was looking at me. It was a habit we had all acquired. Keep an eye out for ideas, try to cut them back.

Even though it couldn't be any good.

Even the start, the break in the train, was revealing enough. I watched her, guiltily, and she looked away.

“I'm sorry,” I said, feeling rather foolish.

“It's all right,” she replied, in a dead tone. It was a formularistic response.

I wished, fervently, that there was some way this wall of doubt could be broken down. Why, I wondered, should it bother me so that Mariel had some knowledge of what want on in my mind? It wasn't as if I had anything to hide. I consider myself an honest man. Why the need to defend, not just the privacy, but the
secrecy
of the world of my mind?

Perhaps, I thought, that's another reason why seeing is believing and the things we hear are both suspect and strange. Because we're so used to telling one another lies—overt, covert, innocent, safe little lies.

I felt that I had to get out of the tent, if only for a few moments. I stepped outside quickly, without pausing to think it over and giving her the chance to use her talent on my hesitation.

I crouched down by the brightly burning lamp. I fiddled with the controls, turning the brilliance down and the heat up. The glow changed color and became ruddy. I spread my palms to receive the radiation.

“You're not cold,” said Karen, from behind me. She had followed me out.

“So what?” I said.

“The way you act,” she said, “is really tearing that poor kid.” She was speaking very softly. She didn't want Mariel to hear.

“I can't help it,” I replied. “I suppose you don't mind wa1king around with your mind naked?”

“I don't resent it the way you do,” she countered. “You have to take these things as they come. You've been around talents before.”

“Not this one.”

“No,” she said. “But what is it about this one?”

“I don't know.”

“You sure?” She crouched down opposite me, spreading her palms like mine so that there was a ring of fiery hands cutting out the light. But she wasn't cold either.

“She's a fourteen year old child,” I said.

“So what makes you uneasy?” she persisted. “Her age, or her sex?”

“That's a bastard thing to say. I have a son two years older than she is.”

“And what's he?” she said. “A talisman to ward off the evil spirit?”

I didn't take the trouble to answer that.

“Hell, Alex,” she said, after a pause, “I'll say this much for you. As a sympathetic and understanding human being you make a great scarecrow.”

“And what gives you the right to sneer?” I demanded, provoked at last.

That one
she
refused to answer.

“I wish I knew,” I said, “whose bloody stupid idea it was to send her along.”

“She has a talent, Alex,” said Karen. “A valuable talent. Maybe it has its drawbacks, but it's genuine. She could be useful out here. Okay, maybe she can't read an alien mind. But she has insight. A special kind of insight—the kind that you and Nathan specifically
don't
have. If we can only help her—if we can only put some trust in her. But you won't. You're
breaking
her, Alex.”

“It isn't me,” I said. I was thinking of minds being blown like fuses. But Karen wasn't. She was thinking about something else.

“You don't understand,” she said. “You don't understand how much Mariel has tied up in this. It's her chance to employ her talent. It's her chance to put herself to some
use.
You ought to be able to figure that. You're a top-class biologist, an expert on evolutionary ecology. On Earth, how much scope did you have for the exercise of
your
particular talent? How much would that talent have meant if you'd never had the chance to come out with the
Daedalus
, to see a whole
host
of alien evolutions, alien ecologies? This is your fulfillment, Alex. And it's hers, too. Even more so.

“On Earth, she was a party trick, a carnival freak. They tried to put her to work, to use her, and they failed. She's a great lie detector, and maybe she can tell whether people are sick in the head...but she couldn't ever find a role to play on Earth. You know that. They wouldn't let her. Because they're like you, Alex. Frightened of her. This is her chance to find some
purpose
in her life. Maybe her only chance. Do you think it helps to have you in constant reaction against her? How do you think it
does
feel, Alex? How do you think she feels about you wishing she were back on Earth, out of sight and out of mind?

“You think your job here is solving complicated problems. Spot the hitch, find the answer, Q.E.D., next question, please. Your mission in life is to help make these alien worlds safe for people to live in. To you, that's very straightforward. But did it ever occur to you that you might have other responsibilities as well? Responsibilities to the other people aboard
Daedalus
. To Mariel, to Nathan, to Pete? We all have a mission, Alex—in life as well as in our jobs. Do you have to set the kid up as an enemy? Nathan, I may grant you—he can take it. But not the kid.”

I had to divert the attack. It was too powerful. I just couldn't sit still and take it.

“You really do have one hell of a soft core under that hard exterior, don't you?” I said. I put as much sarcasm into my voice as I could muster.

It could have made her angry. On another occasion, she might have spit in my eye. But not tonight.

She had one last thing to say, and she said it straight. “She's fourteen years old,” she said. “And maybe you don't feel any sexual tension. But
she
does.”

I stayed still. She took her hands away from the heat, rubbed them on her pants, and then stood up.

“Don't stay up too late,” she said. “We have an early start to make.”

Then she went back into the tent.

CHAPTER NINE

I didn't sleep very well. I never do, first night in a strange milieu. The physical discomfort of sleeping on the ground in a crowded tent, together with the mental discomfort of perpetual semi-consciousness, made the remainder of the night unpleasant, and it was a relief to be able to get up with the dawn and prepare to move on. By the end of the second day, I knew, I would have reached a pitch of physical exhaustion which would make it easy to sleep through the second night.

We ate sparingly of ship's rations, not wanting to cause delay or discomfort by risking the inconvenient effects of the alien provender. It didn't take long to get everything packed and to get ourselves back on the march.

The river grew narrower as it began to wander in long, sinuous curves. By noon we had reached a stretch where it ran considerably faster. But as the river headed down the banks became steeper and the rough trail we followed took us upwards, away from the rippled surface. We could see ahead of us a deep gorge whose sides were steep enough to present the occasional bare face of golden-yellow rock, with only patches of tussock-grass and puny twisted trees scattered here and there. There were rocks projecting out of the water, too, and we could see, far ahead, the foam of rapids.

We had a choice. Either we could stick close to the river and hope to get through the gorge near water level, or we could start climbing. It had to be the latter. We had no guarantee of being able to get through at the bottom, and the attempt would be far more hazardous than the slower and steeper way. The climb wasn't something we could look forward to. The warm, humid air was going to make us sweat, and we certainly wouldn't reach the crown of the gorge in one afternoon's walk.

The elevation of the cliff top was much greater than the height of the hill on which the
Daedalus
had landed, and we could at least look forward to a good view when we did ultimately make it. How useful such a view might be we couldn't know. In all likelihood it would show us little more than a limitless ocean of leaves.

The ascent was by no means uniform. There were many ridges and gullies in between our objective and ourselves—far more than our eyes could initially reveal to us. As we walked out the remainder of that day we seemed to come no nearer to the distant target, although we walked aches into our bones, blisters on to our feet, and a creeping tiredness into our every muscle, The miles went by, but they seemed always to be the same miles, over and over again.

The character of the forest changed subtly as we ascended. The trees grew shorter and tended to assume more complex shapes. The higher we went the more starkly obvious these differences became. The boles of the trees were much thicker, and often gave the impression of being woven out of a number of individual strands bizarrely twisted and plaited together. Root ridges radiated out in all directions, breaking the surface because the soil was shallow and unevenly distributed over the surface of the rock. The limiting factor to the growth of the forest hereabouts was obviously the struggle for water.

Higher still, adventitious roots which were flattened into solid walls ran along the contour lines of the slope, forming a complex system of water-traps: gutters and dams to take command of the flow of water during heavy rain. Usually, the barricades were complete, running from tree to tree without a break, showing that many of the trees were not, in fact, separate dendritic organisms, but part of the same multiform being. In all probability, many of the tree species typical of the valleys were parts of similar superstructures, united by subterranean roots. How many dendrites might belong to a single genetic and structural entity was open to conjecture. Up here, it seemed that it might be anywhere between two and twelve, but the actual theoretical maximum might have far greater.

Although there was no question of the entire forest, or even local areas of it, being ‘taken over' by a single individual, the degree of co-operative interdependence between different plant species here was undoubtedly greater than on Earth. These trees had been together a long, long time. They had grown used to one another's company, had adjusted to one another's idiosyncrasy

If trees have dreams, then this was surely something akin to their Utopia.

Quite apart from the degree of what might be called the social harmony which existed between the individuals making up the forest there was a tendency for by far the majority of the species to be monoecious—which is say that both male and female reproductive organs were borne on the same plant. Virtually all the flowers were designed for self-fertilization, sometimes insect-aided. Inbreeding was the rule here, not the exception. That made sense. In a highly stable environment the trend must be towards genetic homogeneity, with little heterozygosity in the individual allele-pairs. Inbreeding puts the brake on evolutionary change, preserving stability. Outbreeding, and the wholesale mixing of different genetic complements, is basically an experimental procedure appropriate to meeting the demands of environmental change. It helps preserve the genetic load of recessive lethals and other deleterious mutations. Inbreeding, by constantly pairing up the lethals, weeds the genes out of the population, and maintains the health of the species, so long as environmental constancy can be maintained.

The same assumptions applied to the birds and butterflies. The striking color-patterns were part of the same system, facilitating mating choice, drawing like to like and helping to preserve and refine genetic consistency. The rich variety of species and the presence of “spectra” of species were testimony to the continual process of incestual refinement. Species subdivided themselves by accumulating idiosyncrasies—a kind of “binary fission” on the evolutionary scale—and the capacity for variation was thus maintained in the vast range of alternative species rather than (as on Earth) by the variations preserved within the gene pools of individual species.

Stability inevitably breeds resistance to change.

That brought me back, as we toiled on up the mountain, to the questions I'd raised earlier about the consequences of invasion. Would the plants taken from the forest flourish under the alien conditions of cultivation which the colonists had tried to impose? There had, of course, been tests—but tests carried out back on Earth, under quarantine conditions. The plants of the forest had shown themselves able to put up with a fairly wide range of stable conditions—but what hadn't been tested was their ability to stand up over long periods of time—several generations—to conditions which were not stable. On that hillside, where the ships had come down, the colonists, by stripping the land of the trees, had exposed their crops to the wayward whims of
weather.
That was the danger. Not a considerable climatic change, but a switch from a carefully maintained environment, more akin to a laboratory than a farmer's field, to an environment of all-but-perpetual changes. Was that, I wondered, one of the problems that had plagued the settlers?

Even if it was, I decided, it couldn't be enough. There were still the imported crops to grow in the fields, and the indigenous crops could be gathered from the forest. It cou1dn't have been by any means an insuperable difficulty.

There was, of course, the other side of the coin: the possibility that invasion from outside would upset the delicate balance preserved by the forest, and that would set off a great ecological chain reaction and destroy the whole system. But that possibility no longer needed to be considered, because if the Dendran colony had proved nothing else it had at least proved the incompetence of that hypothesis. The forest hadn't been destroyed by the invasion. It had proved to be immovable. And the colony had obviously been by no means irresistible.

When we stopped to rest, quite late, our mood reflected our exhaustion.

“The thing is,” said Karen, “that it doesn't look a single meter closer now than it did four hours ago.” She was looking up towards the still-distant crown of the gorge.

“Further away,” said Mariel. She didn't look as if she could carry on. I felt fairly happy—as if I had a good few miles in me yet. But we had to work on the convoy principle—ask no more of the group than the least is capable of giving.

“We're not in any hurry,” I said. “We'll jack it in, for today.”

Karen looked at the sun speculatively, measuring the hours of daylight left. But she knew the score. “Sure,” she said. “No point killing ourselves to get to the top. We aren't climbing it because it's there. We have to go down the other side, and on to God knows where.”

I didn't want to spend too much time on the mountain, if only because we were separated from the river, our primary source of water. But it didn't really matter that much. There was plenty of moisture to be found in the forest. We wouldn't go thirsty, even if it didn't rain for a week. Not too thirsty, anyhow.

“Suppose you were leaving the settlement,” I mused. “Going elsewhere. As an individual, or as a group. Abandoning what the colony had already achieved and looking for a new start. You might set off following the river. But would you climb the mountain? Or would you pick easier ground and go around?”

They both eyed the crest of the ridge, high up in the clouds, and considered the question.

“Climb it,” said Mariel.

Karen nodded agreement. “Every time,” she said. “It's damn near due north, toward the sun. They knew that there's a vast plain on the other side, and a lake. If they were leaving their lives behind, they wouldn't make it easy on themselves. They'd go up and over. And on.”

I agreed, too. Intuition, or a feeling for human nature, either way I thought that we were right.

“You think some of them
did
leave the settlement and go elsewhere?” asked Karen, turning back to look at me. I didn't know. But I nodded.

“Why?”

I shrugged slightly. “Because of the forest,” I said.

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“It's beautiful,” I said, simply. “A damn sight more beautiful than that bare hillside. You'd have to build a wall round a place like that to keep
me
in.”

Our eyes met, very briefly. She knew what I meant.

We began to unpack, and to pitch the tent. It didn't take long, and it left us with a lot of time on our hands—hours of daylight and nothing to do. Mariel was content to lie down and take the strain off her ligaments, but I still had energy in me that wouldn't let me flop like a rag doll no matter how tired my legs were. I wandered off along the slope, toward the edge of the shallow cliff which fell away to the river. I looked over and down. It was a long way, but I didn't find the sight particularly vertiginous. The slope wasn't sheer enough to carry me all the way down even if I did fall. It was safe enough, although there was a good deal of loose stone and soil around.

I found somewhere solid to sit down—a coign of vantage from which I commanded a view of the whole great valley. I scanned the far slope with my eyes, carefully. There was so much of it that my eyes tried to take in too much at once, but I managed to narrow the focus of my attention.

There was a small herd of mammalian creatures grazing among the green patches that formed a mosaic against the yellow rocks of the lower part of the face. They were too far away to see clearly. I had to get up and go back for the binoculars.

“Come and look,” I said to Karen.

“What at?”

“Mountain goats.”

Another time, she would have laughed, but she had nothing better to do. She came to look at the mountain goats. Surprisingly, after a moment's hesitation, Mariel got up and followed us.

The creatures weren't, in fact, much like goats. They looked more like hairy whippets, no more than a meter from nose to tail. There were about thirty in the herd. It was the first sizable group of flightless warm-blooded animals that we'd seen. The mammals were the least obtrusive of all the forest-dwellers.

“Lords of the world,” I commented, when I passed on the glasses. “The pinnacle of evolution.”

“What about the monkeys?” asked Karen, who had rather narrow anthropomorphic loyalties.

“Close relatives,” I said. “Smallish, dog-like general-purpose bodies. The monkeys are modified for dancing about in the treetops, these for dancing about on the ridges. But they're cousins. ‘Monkey' is only a convenience-term—it doesn't imply any kinship, even by analogy, with the human animal. There are no upright mammals with big brains here. If there are any animals with big brains it will be ones that live in the sea. The forest-dwellers are pretty standardized. The predators aren't too different from those things. Even the largest herbivores look like pigs or giant mice. A lot of them still have scales as well as hair, and there's a degree of continuity with the browsing lizards, just as there is between the lizards and the frogs. There's no powerful selection encouraging adaptive radiation, you see. Everything on Dendra is the standard economy model. A slow evolutionary diffusion. Even the birds, apart from their plumage, are physically very standardized. Only the insects, probably with the help of a few million years start, have managed to explore a great many evolutionary avenues.”

“I bet the dinosaurs never died out either,” she murmured, taking the lecture philosophically.

“No,” I said. “They never evolved....”

“Don't bother to explain why,” she said, quickly. “I'll guess. It'll be more fun.”

I shut up, feeling slightly unappreciated.

Mariel, meanwhile, had tired of the goats and was scanning the distant slopes with the binoculars in the hope of picking up something new. As she swung the lenses round to their limit, looking forward along the course of the river to a green area just visible beyond the gorge, through the narrow crack between the two faces of rock, she stopped.

“Smoke!” she said, in surprise.