Bright Segment (12 page)

“Start over, please,” April said. She shifted the baby in her arms. He was growing prodigiously. “Slowly. I used to know something about biology—or so I thought. But
this—
”

Teague almost smiled. It was good to see. The aging face had not had so much expression in it in five Earth-years. “I’ll get as basic as I can, then, and start from there. First of all, we call this thing a mushroom, but it isn’t. I don’t think it’s a plant, though you couldn’t call it an animal, either.”

“I don’t think anybody ever told me the real difference between a plant and an animal,” said Tod.

“Oh … well, the most convenient way to put it—it’s not strictly accurate, but it will do—is that plants make their own food and animals subsist on what others have made. This thing does both. It has roots, but—” he lifted an edge of the skirted stem of the mushroom—“it can move them. Not much, not fast; but if it wants to shift itself, it can.”

April smiled, “Tod, I’ll give you basic biology any time. Do go on, Teague.”

“Good. Now, I explained about the heterokaryons—the ability this thing has to produce spores which grow up into four completely different plants. One is a mushroom just like this. Here are the other three.”

Tod looked at the box of plants. “Are they really all from the mushroom spores?”

“Don’t blame you,” said Teague, and actually chuckled. “I didn’t believe it myself at first. A sort of pitcher plant, half full of liquid. A thing like a cactus. And this one. It’s practically all underground, like a truffle, although it has these cilia. You wouldn’t think it was anything but a few horsehairs stuck in the ground.”

“And they’re all sterile,” Tod recalled.

“They’re not,” said Teague, “and that’s what I called you in here to tell you. They’ll yield if they are fertilized.”

“Fertilized how?”

Instead of answering, Teague asked April, “Do you remember how far back we traced the evolution of Viridian life?”

“Of course. We got the arthropods all the way back to a simple segmented worm. The insects seemed to come from another worm, with pseudopods and a hard carapace.”

“A caterpillar,” Tod interpolated.

“Almost,” said April, with a scientist’s nicety. “And the most primitive reptile we could find was a little gymnoderm you could barely see without a glass.”

“Where did we find it?”

“Swimming around in—oh! In those pitcher plant things!”

“If you won’t take my word for this,” said Teague, a huge enjoyment glinting between his words, “you’ll just have to breed these things yourself. It’s a lot of work, but this is what you’ll discover.

“An adult gymnoderm—a male—finds this pitcher and falls in. There’s plenty of nutriment for him, you know, and he’s a true amphibian. He fertilizes the pitcher. Nodules grow under the surface of the liquid inside there—” he pointed “—and bud off. The buds are mobile. They grow into wrigglers, miniature tadpoles. Then into lizards. They climb out and go about the business of being—well, lizards.”

“All males?” asked Tod.

“No,” said Teague, “and that’s an angle I haven’t yet investigated. But apparently some males breed with females, which lay eggs, which hatch into lizards, and some find plants to fertilize. Anyway, it looks as if this plant is actually the progenitor of all the reptiles here; you know how clear the evolutionary lines are to all the species.”

“What about the truffle with the horsehairs?” asked Tod.

“A pupa,” said Teague, and to the incredulous expression on April’s face, he insisted, “Really—a pupa. After nine weeks or so of dormance, it hatches out into what you almost called a caterpillar.”

“And then into all the insects here,” said April, and shook her head in wonderment. “And I suppose that cactus-thing hatches out the nematodes, the segmented ones that evolve into arthropods?”

Teague nodded. “You’re welcome to experiment,” he said again, “but believe me—you’ll only find out I’m right; it really happens.”

“Then this scarlet mushroom is the beginning of everything here.”

“I can’t find another theory,” said Teague.

“I can,” said Tod.

They looked at him questioningly, and he rose and laughed. “Not yet. I have to think it through.” He scooped up the baby and then helped April to her feet. “How do you like our Sol, Teague?”

“Fine,” said Teague. “A fine boy.” Tod knew he was seeing the heavy occipital ridges, the early teeth, and saying nothing. Tod was aware of a faint inward surprise as the baby reached toward April and he handed him over. He should have resented what might be in Teague’s mind, but he did not. The beginnings of an important insight
welcomed criticism of the child, recognized its hairiness, its savagery, and found these things good. But as yet the thought was too nebulous to express, except by a smile. He smiled, took April’s hand, and left.

“That was a funny thing you said to Teague,” April told him as they walked toward their quarters.

“Remember, April, the day we landed? Remember—” he made a gesture that took in a quadrant of sky—“Remember how we all felt … good?”

“Yes,” she murmured. “It was like a sort of compliment, and a reassurance. How could I forget?”

“Yes. Well …” He spoke with difficulty but his smile stayed. “I have a thought, and it makes me feel like that. But I can’t get it into words,” After a thoughtful pause, he added, “Yet.”

She shifted the baby. “He’s getting so heavy.”

“I’ll take him.” He took the squirming bundle with the deep-set, almost humorous eyes. When he looked up from them, he caught an expression on April’s face which he hadn’t seen in years. “What is it, Ape?”

“You
—like
him.”

“Well, sure.”

“I was afraid. I was afraid for a long time that you … he’s ours, but he isn’t exactly a pretty baby.”

“I’m not exactly a pretty father.”

“You know how precious you are to me?” she whispered.

He knew, for this was an old intimacy between them. He laughed and followed the ritual: “How precious?”

She cupped her hands and brought them together, to make of them an ivory box. She raised the hands and peeped into them, between the thumbs, as if at a rare jewel, then clasped the magic tight and hugged it to her breast, raising tear-filled eyes to him. “That precious,” she breathed.

He looked at the sky, seeing somewhere in it the many peak mountains of their happiness when she made that gesture, feeling how each one, meticulously chosen, brought all the others back. “I used to hate this place,” he said. “I guess it’s changed.”

“You’ve changed.”

Changed how?
he wondered. He felt the same, even though he knew he looked older …

The years passed, and the children grew. When Sol was fifteen Earth-years old, short, heavy-shouldered, powerful, he married Carl’s daughter Libra. Teague, turning to parchment, had returned to his hermitage from the temporary stimulation of his researches on what they still called “the mushroom.” More and more the colony lived off the land and out of the jungle, not because there was any less to be synthesized from their compact machines; but out of preference; it was easier to catch flapping frogs or umbrella-birds and cook them than to bother with machine settings and check-analyses, and, somehow, a lot more fun to eat them, too.

It seemed to them safer, year by year.
Felodon
, unquestionably the highest form of life on Viridis, was growing scarce, being replaced by a smaller, more timid carnivore April called
Vulpidus
(once, for it seemed not to matter much any more about keeping records) and everyone ultimately called “fox,” for all the fact that it was a reptile.
Pterodon
was disappearing too, as were all the larger forms. More and more they strayed after food, not famine-driven, but purely for variety; more and more they found themselves welcome and comfortable away from the compound. Once Carl and Moira drifted off for nearly a year. When they came back they had another child—a silent, laughing little thing with oddly long arms and heavy teeth.

The warm days and the glowing nights passed comfortably and the stars no longer called. Tod became a grandfather and was proud. The child, a girl, was albino like April, and had exactly April’s deep red eyes. Sol and Libra named her Emerald, a green name and a ground-term rather than a sky-term, as if in open expression of the slow spell worked on them all by Viridis. She was mute—but so were almost all the new children, and it seemed not to matter. They were healthy and happy.

Tod went to tell Teague, thinking it might cheer the old one up a little. He found him lying in what had once been his laboratory, thin and placid and disinterested, absently staring down at one of the arthropodal flying creatures that had once startled them so by
zooming into the Coffin chamber. This one had happened to land on Teague’s hand, and Teague was laxly waiting for it to fly off again, out through the unscreened window, past the unused sprays, over the faint tumble of rotted spars which had once been a palisade.

“Teague, the baby’s come!”

Teague sighed, his tired mind detaching itself from memory episode by episode. His eyes rolled toward Tod and finally he turned his head. “Which one would that be?”

Tod laughed. “My grandchild, a girl. Sol’s baby.”

Teague let his lids fall. He said nothing.

“Well, aren’t you glad?”

Slowly a frown came to the papery brow. “Glad.” Tod felt he was looking at the word as he had stared at the arthropod, wondering limply when it might go away. “What’s the matter with it?”

“What?”

Teague sighed again, a weary, impatient sound. “What does it look like?” he said slowly, emphasizing each one-syllabled word.

“Like April. Just like April.”

Teague half sat up, and blinked at Tod. “You don’t mean it.”

“Yes, eyes red as—” The image of an Earth sunset flickered near his mind but vanished as too hard to visualize. Tod pointed at the four red-capped “mushrooms” that had stood for so many years in the test-boxes in the laboratory. “Red as those.”

“Silver hair,” said Teague.

“Yes, beau—”

“All over,” said Teague flatly.

“Well, yes.”

Teague let himself fall back on the cot and gave a disgusted snort. “A monkey.”

“Teague!”

“Ah-h-h … go ’way,” growled the old man. “I long ago resigned myself to what was happening to us here. A human being just can’t adapt to the kind of radioactive ruin this place is for us. Your monsters’ll breed monsters, and the monsters’ll do the same if they can, until pretty soon they just won’t breed any more. And that will be the end of that, and good riddance …” His voice faded away. His
eyes opened, looking on distant things, and gradually found themselves focused on the man who stood over him in shocked silence. “But the one thing I can’t stand is to have somebody come in here saying, ‘Oh, joy, oh happy day!’ ”

“Teague …” Tod swallowed heavily.

“Viridis eats ambition; there was going to be a city here,” said the old man indistinctly. “Viridis eats humanity; there were going to be people here.” He chuckled gruesomely. “All right, all right, accept it if you have to—and you have to. But don’t come around here celebrating.”

Tod backed to the door, his eyes horror-round, then turned and fled.

VII

April held him as he crouched against the wall, rocked him slightly, made soft unspellable mother-noises to him.

“Shh, he’s all decayed, all lonesome and mad,” she murmured. “Shh. Shh.”

Tod felt half-strangled. As a youth he had been easily moved, he recalled; he had that tightness of the throat for sympathy, for empathy, for injustices he felt the Universe was hurling at him out of its capacious store. But recently life had been placid, full of love and togetherness and a widening sense of membership with the earth and the air and all the familiar things which walked and flew and grew and bred in it. And his throat was shaped for laughter now; these feelings hurt him.

“But he’s right,” he whispered. “Don’t you see? Right from the beginning it … it was … remember Alma had six children, April? And a little later, Carl and Moira had three? And you, only one … how long is it since the average human gave birth to only one?”

“They used to say it was humanity’s last major mutation,” she admitted, “Multiple births … these last two thousand years. But—”

“Eyebrow ridges,” he interrupted. “Hair … that skull, Emerald’s skull, slanting back like that; did you see the tusks on that little … 
baboon
of Moira’s?”

“Tod!
Don’t!
”

He leaped to his feet, sprang across the room and snatched the golden helix from the shelf where it had gleamed its locked symbolism down on them ever since the landing. “Around and down!” he shouted. “Around and around and down!” He squatted beside her and pointed furiously. “Down and down into the blackest black there is; down into
nothing
.” He shook his fist at the sky. “You see what they do? They find the highest form of life they can and plant it here and watch it slide down into the muck!” He hurled the artifact away from him.

“But it goes up too, round and up. Oh, Tod!” she cried. “Can you remember them, what they looked like, the way they flew, and say these things about them?”

“I can remember Alma,” he gritted, “conceiving and gestating alone in space, while they turned their rays on her every day. You know
why?
” With the sudden thought, he stabbed a finger down at her. “To give her babies a head-start on Viridis, otherwise they’d have been born normal here; it would’ve taken another couple of generations to start them downhill, and they wanted us all to go together.”

“No, Tod, no!”

“Yes, April, yes. How much proof do you need?” He whirled on her. “Listen—remember that mushroom Teague analyzed? He had to
pry
spores out of it to see what it yielded. Remember the three different plants he got? Well, I was just there; I don’t know how many times before I’ve seen it, but only now it makes sense. He’s got four mushrooms now; do you see? Do you see? Even back as far as we can trace the bugs and newts on this green hell-pit, Viridis won’t let anything climb; it must fall.”