Critical Threshold (6 page)

“I remember,” I said.

“Well, I've been thinking about it. Whether you're right about the aliens, I don't know. No one really knows how Mariel's talent works. I guess we'll find out whether she's useful or not next year, on the first colony we visit where there are intelligent indigenes. But in the meantime these people here are sick, Alex. For whatever reason, their heads aren't straight. You heard what Mariel had to say about the difficulties of trying to work with disturbed minds, and quite frankly, I think she understated the case.

“I think the people here are having a bad effect on her, Alex. She's trying hard to make contact with them—to open lines of communication. And I think she's trying too hard. I'm not sure if it's a good thing to have her empathizing with people who are mentally ill. I think there's a very real danger to her—a danger of infection.”

I let the idea sink in. “I don't know,” I said. “To me, she always seems...uncomfortable. I don't talk to her much. And I don't really know much about her talent. She told me that it was simply intuitive non-verbal communication—being able to read in face muscles what isn't said in words.”

“That's part of it,” said Nathan, “but not the whole. Doctors trying to analyze her ability have said that—have told her that—but they were the sort of men who went looking for a simple explanation, determined to find one. Any explanation was better than none—you know how some scientists try to minimize events rather than accepting their own ignorance. It's a rebellion against the kind of supernatural explanations people are all too ready to invent where scientists can't provide an immediate answer. Yes, there's a certain degree of simple non-verbal communication involved. But there's also
complex
nonverbal communication. I don't want to use the word
telepathy
or the manifold vulgarizations of it. But Mariel can empathize with people to an extraordinary degree, and I think that in this particular case she could get hurt doing it. People in her kind of mental situation live, inevitably, in a schizoid world. It's not uncommon for them to become schizophrenic.”

“Especially,” I said, “if they're forced to live and work with schizophrenics. A whole community of them.”

He nodded.

“You could be right,” I affirmed. “But what can we do about it? Lock her up for the duration?”

“I want you to take her with you,” he said. “Into the forest. Away from here. For a while. It's a temporary solution, but it gives us time to think.”

I didn't like the idea, and I didn't bother to pretend that I did. I was uneasy in Mariel's presence. The idea that she knew more about what was going on in my mind than I chose to let out of normal channels made me uneasy. It wasn't that I had anything to hide, but just the simple fact—the idea of being perennially open to invasion.

“I intended to go alone,” I said.

“I'd advise against that anyhow,” said Nathan. “It may be dangerous out there. You know as well as I do that it would be unwise.”

“I can't take Conrad or Linda,” I said. “They have too much to do here. It's not just a matter of getting the people healthy, it's a matter of getting the fields healthy, reestablishing a base for adequate survival and expansion. I feel bad enough myself about turning my back on the real, obvious work for the business of simple exploring, without even knowing what I'm looking for.”

“The answer, as you said, is in the forest,” he reminded me.

“Sure,” I said. “But the forest covers the whole world. Where do I start looking? Do I just wander round waiting for inspiration? That seems to be all there is. But I can't take half the strength away from the immediate task, now can I?”

“You can't take Conrad or Linda,” agreed Nathan. “And my job is definitely here. But I think it would be as well if you took Mariel, for her own protection. And I think Karen should go with you, too. Not to help you find any answers to awkward questions, but as insurance against the possibility of something going wrong.”

“Pete won't relish being left to look after the ship on his own,” I said.

“The regulation about keeping two people on board at all times is a precautionary measure,” Nathan pointed out. “In a sense, it's exactly the same precaution you should take. We can stick to it. Conrad and Linda will have to do more work in the lab than out there, and if we break it once in a while the sky won't fall. This isn't Floria—we know we have nothing to fear so far as threats to the hardware are concerned.”

What he was saying was sensible enough. It was tempting fate to go into the forest alone. And maybe it was important to get Mariel out of the firing line. As long as Karen came too, I supposed that I could cope with my uneasiness with respect to the girl. Nathan had obviously thought it all out in advance.

“She's going to know,” I pointed out. “When we tell her. She's going to know what we're doing and why.”

“The thing I worry about,” said Nathan, “is whether we know what we're doing, and why. I'm sure of myself, but not of you. You don't help her much, you know. You avoid her. You dislike her.”

“Not personally,” I said. “I can't help my prejudice about the mind-reading. Maybe if I stayed here, and Conrad investigated the forest....”

“That's not an answer,” he said.

I had to admit that it wasn't.

“Fair enough,” I conceded. “We'll do it your way.”

“Get some sleep,” he advised. “There's no point in trying to commit the book to memory. You can take it out with you. But I think you should start drawing equipment when you wake up. Make a start when you can. If the forest is where the answer can be found, we need it as soon as humanly possible. Otherwise everything we do here, or try to do, might turn out to be meaningless.”

I couldn't resist it. I'd spent two days and three nights not saying it.

“This world should never have been colonized,” I said, as I got up, heading for my bunk. “Those people out there are all that's left of a noble experiment in political chicanery. You know that, don't you?”

His face slipped into a noncommittal mask.

“Don't start looking for the answers you
want
to find, Alex,” he said. “If you do, you might find no answers at all. And even when we know the full story, even then
it's not for you to judge.
It's not for any of us.”

“On the contrary,” I said. “It's for each and every one of us.
Everybody
must judge.”

CHAPTER SIX

The settlement's supply of fresh water was a small stream which cut diagonally across the corner that was furthest down the slope. One of the endpapers of the guidebook Nathan had found was a map, which showed that the stream wound its way on through the clustered hills to a valley where it joined a river of some magnitude. The river ran away to the north in a series of long sinuous curves, into the sub-tropical zone rather than toward the southern ocean.

The map plotted the river's course over something more than a hundred miles—five or six days' journey on foot—and ended with a rather tentative circle representing a lake. The course of the river lay between two great ridges and I hazarded a guess that the lower portion of the map had been constructed on the basis of what could be seen from the top of the higher ridge.

It seemed logical enough to follow the river ourselves when we began our trek into the forest. It would enable us to make what use there was to be made of the map, and we would presumably be retracing the steps not only of Dendra's first human explorers, but perhaps of Dendra's first mass exodus. If the colony had split in two—which still seemed to me to be highly unlikely—then the men who had left would almost certainly have gone north. To the south there was a relatively inhospitable mountain range and then a long drop into colder regions, while to the north there appeared to be vast plains of temperate climate and good soil.

We elected to travel as light as was practical, the only really heavy items being the tent and a bulky power pack to supply both light and heat. In accordance with UN recommendations we took only one substantial weapon—a rather clumsy rifle equipped to carry three different clips of ammunition, two of which consisted of anesthetic darts of varying strength and only one of which actually held lethal missiles. In the interests of self-protective convenience, however, we also carried small handguns with parabolic reflectors instead of barrels. When fired they emitted a loud bang and a brilliant flash—intimidating enough to scare away any unwelcome visitors, and even to blind them momentarily. These, like the rest of the necessary equipment—the radio, a portable lamp and the medical kit—were conveniently light.

The most precious thing we carried was the book.

When we left, the usual half-dozen children followed us across the fields and watched us climb over the wall. We had to climb—there was, in fact, no gate. Their expressions of patient wonder changed hardly at all as they watched us go. But they didn't come to the wall so that they could watch us move through the scrub to the green curtain where the foliage of the ancient forest dipped close to the ground. The wall, to them, was a conceptual barrier as well as a physical one. Once beyond it we were out of their world.

I waved to them from the top of the wall, before dropping out of sight. Surprisingly, one of them waved back. It was an oddly reassuring gesture.

We crossed the area where the forest was regenerating with some difficulty, for the ground had been left very uneven by the retreating colonists, littered with dead wood and some stones quarried from a cliff face a couple of miles away. Stiff-stemmed plants like bracken concealed much of the unevenness, and it was by no means easy to force a way through it. But the pseudo-bracken had a role to play only in the juvenile forest, and once we were into the forest proper the going became much easier. The tree trunks were much more widely spaced, and the ground between them was carpeted with plants which were not so tough and did not grow so high.

Small birds fluttered out of our way but showed no specific fear of us. They were content simply to stay out of reach. There did not seem to be so very many at a cursory glance, but our ears told us the truth which was veiled from our eyes—that there was, in fact, a great multitude hidden by the green ocean of the forest canopy. The trees, even here, grew between fifty and a hundred feet tall, and the boles of the most ancient specimens, knotted and gnarled, must have boasted a girth of thirty feet or so. Each tree extended its branches so as to barely touch the branches of one or two of its neighbors, so that sunlight crept down to the forest floor only through the strangely curved slits that remained. For the most part the lowest branches were eight or nine feet from the ground, but were virtually denuded of leaves save at their extremities. Nevertheless, the crown of each tree was a forest in its own right, on a tiny scale, hiding and sheltering birds, and perhaps beasts as well. The bark of every tree was covered by a waxy substance, which seemed lighter in color and softer in texture on the lesser trees, but blackened and set as hard as adamant on the oldest. This substance was fireproof, and though the internal wood of the trees burned well enough, forest fires could not spread on Dendra.

Because of this waxen coat, which often seemed so slick as to be polished, the insects moving on the tree trunks tended to be rather obvious. Some of them attempted to counterfeit the appearance of the wax in their own external aspect, but for the most part the legion of small flying and creeping things went in for flamboyant dress rather than cryptic coloration. Large beetles with wing cases decorated with gaudy patterns of brilliant blue and yellow were common, and even smaller bugs with bodies little bigger than pinheads often boasted such violent crimson coloring that they looked, when massed, like countless drops of blood. The most striking members of the forest population, however, were the butterflies. On Earth, the term “butterfly” refers to a relatively small range of genera which are all anatomically similar even if their wing patterns often vary strikingly. Other, closely related, creatures we call moths. There are, however, difficulties in re-applying Earthly terminology to alien life systems, and you always find some instances where the transfer is inadequate. Dendra's butterflies were one.

In stark contrast to Floria, where nothing flew at all, Dendra went in for flying creatures on a big scale. In a forest, this is not so surprising, especially a forest covering a whole world. The same modes of flying that had been developed on Earth had been developed here, but insect flight—and especially that variety of it practiced on Earth by butterflies and moths—had been much more heavily exploited by the evolutionary pattern. Instead of a few closely related genera the term ‘butterfly,' on Dendra, had to do for a great range of quite distinct families. The differences, of course, were largely to be observed in the type of body to which the paired, colored wings were attached. Some of the insects had bulbous, colored bodies, some had hardly any bodies at all, some resembled Earthly butterflies while still others boasted amazingly complex jointed structures, waxen in texture, which were equipped with tentacular limbs. Many had no legs whatsoever, and a significant fraction were eyeless.

It can be argued that for such a profusion of types, the one term is hopelessly inadequate, but the only way to be able to speak of alien life forms at all is to co-opt the vulgar, general terms in use in common parlance and apply them where they can be made to seem appropriate. Even on Earth, such commonplace nomenclature is far from scientifically exact, so the ineptitude of the method is not really an argument against it. Trouble arises where common Earthly names are generally applied only to one species or a similar group of species—thus it is easier to use words like
butterfly
,
insect
,
mammal
and
crab
than it is to use
lion
,
elephant,
or even
goat—
but for the most part one can acquire a comfortable descriptive power over an alien life system by the judiciously casual redeployment of terms. Thus, the hosts of Dendra's population of multicolored flyers became butterflies, although in themselves, and by scientific standards, they were so much more.

The forest would have been beautiful without the butterflies, but it was the butterflies which really gave that beauty an obviously unearthly quality. They were everywhere, and at a casual glance you could get the idea that they were all unique, every one an individual living gem with its own particular artwork. The colors were often harsh, and the patterns lacked subtlety—bold stripes, blotches and heavy borders were as common, if not more so, as detailed, exactly-planned color schemes—but the effect of the collective phenomenon was dazzling, and, to my mind, quite superb.

The birds which we saw were mostly small, and the great majority of them, like the butterflies, were brilliantly and profusely colored. It was difficult to estimate by the evidence of the eye how many species there were in the vicinity, but our ears assured us of the diversity. Though the foliage hid large numbers from sight it was no barrier to sound. The pitch and complexity of the calls sounded by the birds was similarly multifarious. I could not honestly say that the total effect was musical. Individual songs might be tuneful and pleasant, but in the competition to be heard there were a great many notes that were harsh and strident.

We saw no more than the merest glance of creatures that were furred rather than feathered. That mammals were present in some abundance I did not doubt, but they made far more use of the cover offered by the vegetation. We caught glimpses of squirrel-like animals ducking out of sight among the branches, and there were droppings on the ground testifying to the fact that the trail we used was in constant use by other beasts which might range in size from the dimensions of a rabbit to the bulk of a pig. In actual fact creatures distinctly similar to the wild pigs of Earthly forests were just about the largest mammals on Dendra. They were omnivorous and undoubtedly used to having their own way but were—according to the colony's guide-book—not inclined to attack people. The most aggressive predators in this particular locale, according to both the survey reports and the book, were a group of species resembling medium-sized members of the Earthly cat family. The whole group had been dubbed “panthers” for convenience, although most were blotchy brown in color.

I was surprised, as we went into the deeper and more luxuriant forest in the valleys, that there still remained a good deal of light by which to see what was going on around us. Evergreen forests on Earth—especially mono-cultural stands—tend to be dark and gloomy, and the forests of Floria had been designed with such economical perfection that their paths were all but pitch dark. Dendra's forest was, however, more varied and more relaxed. The trees were comfortably spaced and their shapes were elegantly irrational. Most seemed to be very old indeed. The trunks varied in color from a brown so light as to be almost ochreous yellow to a deep blue-black. Most were streaked Or mottled, often with metallic colors—copper and gilt. Because of the waxy tegument it often seemed that with the aid of a polishing rag a dedicated workman could make each tree gleam and shine like a vast, ornate living crystal.

The soil was moist and soft, thick with humus and scattered with loose grass and hummocks of moss or fungus. Flowering plants were common, but did not grow so profusely as to invite comparison with the birds and the insects. They were virtually all insect-pollinated and boasted blooms sculptured into all kinds of complex shapes, but for the most part they did not go in for riotous color. The pastel yellows and pinks seemed distinctly conservative by the standards set among the gaudy flying creatures. They attracted pollinators, it seemed, largely by scent. Sensory priorities were different here.

I guessed that a good many of the eyeless butterflies lived very largely by their sense of smell, experiencing the world as an ocean of organic traces. Some of the larger species might use sonar to guide them, but not the smaller ones. When you're tiny it doesn't matter much if you fly into a solid object, because you fly so slowly and the energy of collision is so very slight. Despite the fact that our superior eyesight made it easy enough to see our way in the forest the intensity of the light was such that evolution had favored different abilities in the species which had evolved to occupy this environment. I wondered whether the population of the forest underwent a considerable change after dark, with the birds resting and the bats emerging.

The air was humid and it seemed rather warmer within the forest than it had on the bare hillside of the settlement. Even the tree trunks seemed warm to the touch and it occurred to me that a certain amount of metabolic heat probably was being generated there. Down here, half-enclosed by the network of leaves and branches, was an environment so still and stable that it must be amenable to a degree of control. The survey team had commented on the constancy of the temperature in the forest and the narrow range of humidity. The forest had been here for millions of years, undisturbed save for movements of the ground itself. The whole system was integrated, and the whole environment under a form of collective homeostatic control. The forest was in many ways like a vast organism—a warm-blooded organism maintaining its own optimum internal environment.

Could it possibly be, I wondered, that the colony had failed to co-opt Dendran species to their own use because outside of their inordinately complex collectivity the organisms did not thrive? Or, even worse, underwent certain changes affecting their chemical makeup? Under different circumstances, I would have looked at the idea long and hard, but for that particular moment I filed it away. There was no time for dogmatic thinking. There was so much to see—so much that demanded the attention of my eyes and my mind.

But it was an idea I would have to return to.