Promised Land (7 page)

It was Max who gave
me the full story as regards the crypto-arachnids (otherwise known as spiders).

Evolution on Chao Phrya had elected to tread pretty much the same boring path as on Earth and a whole host of other worlds, but slight differences in timing and anatomical organisation had resulted in big differences in the later stages. A million years or so isn't much in evolutionary terms, but that doesn't mean to say that a group can give the rest of creation that much start and still have no trouble in establishing itself at the level it could otherwise have attained.

What had happened on Chao Phrya was that the endoskeletal forms had been slow in coming out of the sea, and the exoskeletal forms had a good start on them in the matter of adapting to land life. The exoskeletals had used that time to solve all the problems which had proved crucial limitations on Earth: a clumsy breathing apparatus, an inefficient egg, and a brain built around the gullet.

On Earth and most other places it was the hardcored individuals who developed the cleidoic egg and—later—homoiothermy. On Chao Phrya the soft-cores beat them to it, so that when the exoskeletals finally emerged from the oceanic womb as air-breathers they met much tougher competition than statistical evidence suggested that they had any right to expect. The selective pressure on the hard-cores had soon pulled back the million years, but selective pressure works both ways, and they had never managed to dislodge the crypto-arthropods from the niches at the top of the Eltonian pyramid. The crypto-chordates supplied most of the herbivores, a lot of the insectivores, and the omnivorous Anacaona, but the crypto-arachnids and the crypto-scorpioids survived and thrived. Birds never got off the ground, and the soft-cores retained their monopoly on flying, but the types of tree available on Chao Phrya didn't offer much incentive to passeriformes, so perhaps that wasn't too surprising.

I couldn't help thinking that it would have been nice if the crypto-arthropods had managed some sentients, as they had contrived to dodge the hole-in-the-brain trap which had bugged the whole line on Earth. The galaxy is radically short of unchordate sentients. But even on Chao Phrya, the creepy-crawlies just didn't have it in them.

Pity.

Max delighted in showing off his knowledge of the science of life. His evolutionary account was a little doctrinaire, but he could afford to be proud of the way the
Zodiac
mob had buckled down to the task of getting to know their Promised Land. He was a bit free with words like ‘impossible' and ‘inevitable', and if he'd been some of the places I'd been he might well have modified his way of thinking. But I couldn't really blame him for having a narrow mind. He hadn't had much chance to broaden it.

My first impressions of the rain forest were distinctly unfavourable. It was, as I had prophesied, dark. But it wasn't quite the way I'd expected to find it. I'd not really been able to visualise just how high and dense the canopy would be.

We didn't have to hack our way through a glorified hawthorn hedge decked out with bindweed, thank heaven. We could walk without overmuch difficulty, although much of the time we were thigh-deep—sometimes waist-deep—in mushy fungus and other primitive plants.

The trees were gigantic—their trunks were thirty to fifty feet in diameter at chest height, and root tangles often doubled that close to the ground. The most dangerous impediment to our progress were root-ridges hidden by the clustering undergrowth. The canopy was the best part of a quarter of a mile up in the air. The branches were long, and much burlier than the whiplash-things we'd seen in the open country, but they were still flexible. They supported vast filamentous webs and whole decks of translucent membranes for extracting energy from the sunlight. The canopy wasn't deep, so far as I could judge, but it was very complicated. From on top, the forest had been green. From underneath, by transmitted instead of reflected light, it was bluey violet. The red wavelengths had been almost entirely filtered out, which implied that the photon traps in the latticework were of a very high order of sophistication and efficiency indeed.

The cover provided by the canopy was virtually total. There were no holes—only slightly brighter patches. The roof of the forest was a very efficient moisture trap. It was also a great big greenhouse. If it hadn't been for the fact that the trees used up most of the IR and deflected the rest, we would have been cooked. As it was we could have been a damn sight more comfortable. I judged that a lot of the nonphotosynthetic material in the ground cover was thermosynthetic rather than saprophytic. They took up a lot of the moisture, too, so that the humidity was only mildly unbearable.

The air in the forest was heady as well as damp. The oxygen content was a good eight to ten percent up on the open-land atmosphere, owing to the fact that the canopy discharged a lot of its waste gases down instead of up, and diffusion through the canopy was far too slow to compensate, at least during the day. At night the oxygen percentage declined slowly while the trees breathed but didn't photosynthesise.

As we progressed from the edge of the jungle, we grew progressively more intoxicated. It took several hours before our lungs adjusted and our brains acclimatised. We marched in single file. Danel and Mercede led, then Max, Eve, myself and Linda, with Micheal bringing up the rear.

‘Nice, isn't it?' I said to Eve. She wasn't impressed. This was slightly odd—I hadn't quite expected her discomfort to cancel out her sense of wonder. Lapthorn's spirits had never been quelled by a little heat and moisture. Perhaps she wasn't quite as space-hungry as she thought she was. It had often struck me that she might be pushing herself too hard because of what had happened to her brother.

‘Why isn't it green?' she asked.

I explained to her the difference between transmitted light and reflected light. She'd never encountered transparent foliage before. She looked annoyed when I explained. She'd known all along, really.

‘It looks like one continuous sheet,' she complained. ‘There's no real light getting in anywhere'

‘The trees are separate, all right,' I assured her, ‘but they have a beautiful gentleman's agreement about the space between the crowns. They can't overlap for more than a few inches, or we'd see the fringes. In any case, they have to bow their heads when it rains to make way for the water, and they couldn't do that if there was any substantial interlocking.'

‘How does the excess water get out again?' she asked.

‘Rivers,' I said briefly. Also, no doubt, evaporation from the canopy must be pretty terrific, since the laminae didn't have wax coats like the leaves of jungle trees on most worlds. But I didn't think it was worth complicating the discussion with a diatribe on water relations in subtropical environments.

‘Actually,' Linda intervened, ‘the canopy gets badly ripped during heavy rain, and the crowns fold up in order to regenerate. There's free evaporation then.'

I thanked her kindly for the supplemental information. Everybody on Chao Phrya seemed to know how the world worked. Knowledge is pride. Vanity is knowing more than you need to. Promised Land breeds vanity.

‘Damn stuff is hell to clear,' supplied Max, referring more to the root formations than to the trees themselves. ‘Can't drive proper roads through the forest. We wouldn't want to chop the trees down, of course, except so far as is necessary. But without roads the whole damn jungle is an impassable barrier.'

‘Tough,' I commented unsympathetically. But I knew they'd find a way to bring civilisation to the land on the other side. They weren't the type of people to let a little tiny rain forest stand in the way of their ambition.

‘We're not likely to encounter heavy rain, are we?' asked Eve of Linda.

‘No,' Linda replied. ‘Out of season. Everything is stable at this time of year.'

‘I haven't seen any large animals yet,' said Eve.

‘Lucky you,' I commented. ‘Be content with all the crawlers in the undergrowth. They can prove troublesome enough in the long run, without our running into any giant spiders.'

‘The bugs on the ground are safe,' said Max, dropping back so that he could address himself to me more easily. ‘There are a lot of them, but none of them are likely to bite us. We don't taste that good. Provided that you don't mind sharing your boots with a few of them they won't bother you at all.'

‘I believe you,' I said. ‘But I'd still feel better with the medical resources of the
Swan
in my packsack. I don't trust that witch-doctor kit you've got. Don't you know that science has progressed while your granddaddies were locked up in their iron coffin?'

‘We have everything we could possibly need,' said Linda, with a hint of petulance.

‘You'd better be right,' I said, with fake ominousness.

‘What about the Anacaona?' asked Eve. It was a good point. We had the best boots that the galaxy could supply, but we weren't vulnerable to the local bloodsuckers. They had light sandals, and they were.

‘They'll be all right,' Max assured us. It was his best line. It seemed to be his only line. I'd have appreciated it far more if he'd occasionally tempered it with some kind of awareness of some of the things which could go wrong if they wanted to. He was too bloody cocky by half. I knew full well that nothing is ever as safe as he was assuring us that everything was.

I was always expecting something to go wrong, all the time that I was hoping it wouldn't.

He must have sensed my distrust, because he laughed, and said: ‘There's absolutely nothing here that can hurt you except for spiders and magna-drivers. The forest ecology is too straightforward to support more varied dangers than that. Everything else is only interested in plants and bugs.'

‘And what,' I asked him, in tones suggesting weary suspicion, ‘is a magna-driver?'

‘About that big,' he said, measuring off two feet by one with his hands. ‘The little bastards swarm in this stuff'—here he kicked up a mess of fungus and assorted vegetable debris with the toecap of his boot—‘and creep up on the croppers. They can strip a whole herd to the bones in a matter of hours. A piteous sight. But they're not too strong. They're brittle and they're very vulnerable to a good bit of kicking. And they run like hell if you start to burn the ground cover.' He really relished the account.

‘Don't you think,' I said patiently, ‘that it would have been a good idea to mention such less than innocuous creatures
before
we actually got started?'

‘Want to go back?' he asked.

‘You know we can't go back,' I said. ‘That's exactly why it's such a bloody good idea that you warn us about all these things before we start treading on them. Why the hell didn't you tell us last night?'

‘Wasn't with you last night,' he pointed out. ‘And I'm telling you now.'

‘Oh God,' I said. ‘You're a fool.'

‘Thanks,' he said, unworried by the prospect.

‘You've never been here before, have you?'

‘Only briefly,' he said. ‘Linda has.'

‘With the Anacaona.'

‘Of course.'

‘Who know this place better than you could ever hope to know it. Doesn't it strike you as a considerable idiocy to march in here, knowing next to nothing about the practicalities of jungle expeditions, as if...' I paused ‘...as if you
owned
the bloody place.'

I should, of course, have realised before I began.

‘Oh, the hell with the lot of you,' I said, with feeling. ‘Give me that gun.'

‘No.'

‘Look,' I said, adopting the wrong approach as a matter of course, ‘you aren't fit to be trusted with a bucket and spade. Give me the gun.'

‘Go to hell,' he said.

I shook my head in tired despair. ‘We very probably will,' I said. ‘All of us. And sooner than you think.'

Which dire prediction closed the conversation.

I could count two things on my side—experience and the wind. Apart from those, I would have to place my meagre faith in the Anacaona and blind chance. What I didn't know about what could go wrong would have filled an encyclopaedia. I only hoped that Danel's years as a spiderhunter had given him all the expertise he needed. Somehow, I doubted it. He wasn't that old. I wondered how many spiders he had chopped to death with his trusty axe. He, at least, was appreciative enough of danger to carry a beamer to back him up in the event of unforeseen circumstance.

I couldn't relax.

I was concerned for Eve even more than for myself. She hadn't done anything to deserve this. She was going to be more uncomfortable than I. She was going to get a lot more tired than I. And she was in quasi-blissful ignorance of how bad it all was, which might keep her from being scared, but sure as hell wouldn't keep her from being careless. If anyone was fated to die on this crazy joyride, she was the number one candidate. I didn't like that. My life had already been sufficiently plagued by dying Lapthorns.

I found the excess of fellow-feeling an embarrassment.

We walked all day, and we sat still all night. So much for optimism.

When it began to get dark—and darkness in the forest was as black as the caves of Rhapsody—we lit lamps and set about industriously clearing a space to pitch our tents in. The clearing was easy, because the plants which made up the bulk of the undergrowth were soft-structured and not attached to their roots with any degree of intimacy. For the first time, however, we were able to appreciate the multitudinous size of the creepy-crawly population. Though the insects here could grow as big as they wanted, most of them obviously found it convenient to stay small. The bugs looked offensively like bugs everywhere else. Shake a bush on virtually every populous world in the known galaxy, and the living detritus which falls to the ground will look pretty much the same. I've known bugs awaken quite a sense of nostalgia in some spacemen on worlds where everything else was noticeably unearthly. Not me, of course.