The Florians (11 page)

She wasn't even finished yet.

“And suppose,” she said, “that the Planners
do
decide to dispose of us. Or have already decided to...what then? We fight, we run, just as we're doing now. We may die...but we may also get away with it. And we leave behind...what?”

I saw what she was getting at. Now that we'd stirred up the wasps' nest it was stirred. We couldn't back out now and say “Sorry, wrong world.” Recontact had been achieved the moment the
Daedalus
landed, and the consequences of that recontact were going to be felt on Floria one way or another. We had arrived to find a world fighting very hard for permanent peace...but it wasn't impossible that we might leave one arming for war. Against potential enemies from Earth, or against one another.

Did they ever have a chance, I wondered, of building a new world for themselves? A world that could be different from Earth, a human race with different priorities? Perhaps it was always hopeless while there was any possibility of re-contact. Maybe, I thought, it isn't just the people who learn nothing from history who find themselves trapped by it. Perhaps the trap is there whatever you learn.

“It looks,” I muttered, “like a case of heads you win, tails I lose. For everyone. How the hell are we going to get out of this mess?”

She pointed a finger up into the starry sky. “Like I said,” she drawled. “Cheat the bastards.”

CHAPTER NINE

As soon as the daylight came, we began the long march. There was no point in wasting time. We were cold, we were hungry...and we had a limited time in front of us before we were no longer capable of following any plan, however ill formed and crazy.

The idea—mine—was to double back in a long arc which would take us around Leander to the seashore north of the port. Then under cover of the next night's darkness, we would sneak back into the inhabited area just far enough to find and appropriate a rowboat. We would then row to the island and set about trying to locate Nathan or learn whatever there was to be learned by careful eavesdropping. We had no cards up our sleeves...our final recourse was simply surrender.

Laboriously, we climbed the long slope at whose foot we had hid out for the night. We were hoping that at the top we might find a vantage point from which we could see the whole extent of the territory we had to cross, and thus identify an easy route across it.

I didn't expect that there would be any organized pursuit or search. It hardly seemed worth it, from Jason's point of view or Vulgan's. There was nothing we could do out here...we didn't even have enough local knowledge to live off the land for a week. Sooner or later we'd have to come to them, and the only question so far as they were concerned was which one of them would be afforded the dubious privilege of grabbing us. In the meantime, they would be very busy...the conflict had been joined and the sides would have to be drawn up.

From a crag atop the ridge—far above the wrinkled landscape we had traversed during our flight from the station—we could see the buildings of Leander and the harbor. We could also see the island—an irregular lump of rock looking, in profile, somewhat akin to a Poisson curve, with a tall building making up the tip of the modal point. It was some way to the north of the point at which the sun had risen from the sea, but it was still only a silhouette against the brightly lit sky and sea.

There was a spur of land projecting into the sea north of the town, pointing like a thick finger at the island. This spur formed the northern bank of a river whose estuary was so close to Leander harbor that it must have been a good deal easier for ships to leave than to arrive. The harbor traffic must creep in from the south and then move to the north, where the current of the river would carry it out to sea through a relatively weed-clear channel.

From where we stood we could inspect the country strung out between the ridge and the coast almost as if it were a gigantic map. It was hard to follow such minor colonial innovations as the dirt roads and the railroad because the folds of the territory and its forests hid large stretches from view, cutting them into small sections and destroying the visual impression of sequence. Except for the jungle of gray slate roofs that was Leander the humans, from this elevation, seemed to have made very little impact on the land. But this was not farming land. To the south—which was hidden from us by the hills—we would have seen a different kind of picture, with square divisions chopping up the territory into a multitude of regular segments, each one the symbol of human domination.

Away to the north, beyond the river, there was a large flat area of mottled green and silver, with occasional streaks of brown mud. This I judged to be salt marsh—not a tidal marsh but a static one, with land slowly being whittled away by the corrosive flow of the river and its attendant streams, being reclaimed inch by inch into the ocean.

Scattered on the north bank of the river there were a number of huts, which did not seem to be permanent dwellings but buildings erected for occasional convenience.

I pointed them out to Karen. “That's where we'll find our boat,” I said. “We won't have to go into town. That's a base for occasional forays into the salt marsh.”

“Why would they want to go into the salt marsh?” she asked.

“Because it'll be teeming with what passes for animal life on this world. Pretty repulsive creatures, for the most part, but all good solid protein. The people might find it unpalatable but the pigs won't. It's not enough to make an industry out of, but a few men sallying forth once or twice a month to pick up what they can could certainly make a worthwhile thing out of it.”

“How do we cross the river?”

I pointed almost due north, to a point at which there was a rough wooden bridge, half hidden in a clump of trees. It was only a footbridge, and the path which led to it wasn't very noticeable.

“That's silly,” she said. “Why would they build a bridge there, in the middle of nowhere? There isn't a house for miles.”

“At a guess,” I said, “it's the narrowest part of the river. Closer to the town a bridge would be a major engineering challenge, but that's just a few logs spanning the water. Just for the sake of having a bridge available in case they want to go out into the country to the north.”

She was measuring the distance between the river mouth and the island. “The current will help us,” she said, “but it's still a fair way to row.”

“The sea's calm,” I pointed out. “The sea's
always
calm. We can do it easily. No trouble at all...so long as they leave lights in the window to guide us. And why shouldn't they?”

“Fair enough,” she replied.

We began to scramble down the slope on the other side of the ridge. It was almost exactly like the one we'd come up: the rock was firm but badly rutted. The crevices where vegetation grew with the characteristic Florian luxury offered an abundance of hand- and foot-holds, but could not always be trusted. Sometimes the plants would simply tear away from their anchorage in a shower of loose soil. It would have been a dangerous climb had the face been steeper, but we were able to choose a fairly simple way which took time but didn't expose us to any real danger. I tested all my holds carefully, and not until I was almost at the bottom did one give way and spill me over. An apparently firm plant found my total weight too much to bear, and was ripped loose, roots and all, in my left hand. I scraped an elbow painfully in scrabbling for support, but was fortunate enough not to damage an ankle.

When Karen arrived, moments later, to check that I was all right, I had already given up the morbid inspection of minor injuries and was examining the plant thoughtfully.

“This is no time for collecting botanical specimens,” she commented sarcastically, “and that's no way to go about it.”

“Look at it,” I said.

It had a tough, slender stem, thickened into wood but still elastic. It had many branches and leaves, arranged in the complex but exact and symmetrical geometrical pattern typical of Florian vegetation. The branches bore tiny conical seed-bearing structures, pale yellow in color, at their extremities. From the tip of the root-net to the crown of the foliage the plant was something under eighteen inches long...and yet it was unmistakably a tree.

“So what?” said Karen, having inspected it.

I looked around, and then pointed to a tree which was growing in the deep soil of the valley floor, well away from the shadow of the rock face. I walked over to it. It was some twenty feet high, but otherwise very similar in structure to the plant I held in my hand. My intention was simply to show Karen that my plant was a miniature of the larger one, but as I approached the big one and compared it with the one in my hand I began to realize the extent of the similarity.

It was not simply that they were different representatives of the same species. The small tree was
identical
in all but size to the larger one. It had the same number of branches, and the extent of its development was the same. It had the same number of seed-cones, each one a perfect replica, albeit very tiny, of the ones on the greater tree.

“Well, I'll be damned,” I murmured.

“That's nice,” said Karen, still sarcastic. “It's a baby one.”

“It's impossible,” I said. “These things are identical. They must be brother trees—germinated at the same time from similar seeds. Genetically and developmentally identical in all respects but one. But that's just not possible.”

“It seems reasonable enough,” she objected. “The one you're holding was growing in a little tiny crack with hardly any soil, shielded from the sun for some of the day.
That
thing's got all the sun and soil it could wish for.”

“And so,” I said, “it's grown to be a nice, healthy giant...like everything else on Floria. But what I want to know is how
this
one managed to grow at all. It had the bare minimum requirement for growth...it could germinate, and begin to grow...but not like this. It should have started out and then failed. Maybe it could stay alive, as a weedy stem with a couple of branches, but that's not what it's done—it's reproduced the form of the healthy tree
exactly.
It's developed perfectly—on a much smaller scale. It's as if it knew when it started out that it couldn't grow to be big. But that's not the way things work...growth is genetically programmed. A plant can't just ‘decide' to stay small. Its development should have been short-circuited...it should never have grown to be a fully mature individual.”

“But it did,” she pointed out. It was information I didn't need. Despite my specialist's eye, I had only just seen the evidence of the fact that Florian plants and Earthly plants had one more vital difference in their capabilities. I had been assuming too close a similarity. Because a tree is a tree, and grass is grass, anywhere on the colony worlds....

I should have been the last person to fall into the obvious trap of taking things for granted, but it's such an easy trap.

“This is it,” I said quietly. “This is the key to the giantism. But how does it work?”

“I've seen miniature trees on Earth,” said Karen. “They call them bonsai or something similar. It's an ancient Japanese art.”

“That's different,” I told her. “As you say, it's an art. It requires elaborate care and a certain degree of surgical interference. But here we have a kind of self-regulation. What has happened is that the primary roots have somehow ‘informed' the developing embryo of the limitations of the environment in which the seed was growing—and because of this the whole developmental process has changed gear, so that instead of getting a stunted, useless plant trying to grow to ‘normal' size and failing miserably we have a plant which comes to full, healthy maturity despite the conditions of deprivation. That's quite some trick. The plants here are more highly developed than the plants on Earth, in terms of efficiency and organization of form, but this is something else.”

“It's only a matter of size,” she complained.

“There's no only about it,” I corrected her. “The matter of size is the heart of the problem. I wonder how they work the trick.”

“What about the reports on the original survey?” she asked. “And the work that was done on the Florian plants brought back to Earth—wasn't there anything in the reports on this?”

I shook my head. “There wasn't enough work done. People got very touchy about the handling of plants brought back from other worlds...and rightly so. You don't take risks of that magnitude. Everything had to be done with the strictest quarantine regulations in force. And the question they wanted answers to was really a very narrow one: Could Earthly animals thrive on this particular alien produce? Basically, what they did was feed the stuff to test animals to see if it killed them. It didn't. Answer to question: Yes. All other observations were incidental, with no comprehensive background study to tie them in together. A hell of a way to run a scientific investigation—but everyone knew that the volunteers were taking a big chance anyhow, and you know what committees are. Expenditure, in terms of effort as well as cash, has to be pared to the minimum. You can argue till doomsday about what constitutes a reasonable risk...and we very probably will. So, in brief, the original work on Floria's life-system was inadequate. In a sense, the colony itself is the main experiment. The whole colony project is just so many experimental runs under slightly different conditions, and it's still too early to register a final decision. Can men survive in alien life-systems, and if so, how? We still don't know...not really.”

I dropped the miniature tree, and wiped the dirt from my hand. I continued to look at it, still trying to sort it all out in my head. There was light at the end of the tunnel, now. I could make a reasonable guess at the cause of the growth epidemic. The probable answer didn't fill me with joy and happiness.

Karen put her hand on my arm.

“Are you OK?”

“Sure,” I said. “I'm sorry. We're wasting time. Let's get on.”

She seemed slightly uncertain. I smiled reassuringly. “It's all right,” I said. “It's just that for the first time I can smell the rat I'm here to catch.”