The Florians (6 page)

“There's someone coming,” said Nathan.

He had been listening to our conversation without manifesting any real interest, but now he was alert again. I shielded my eyes from the bright morning sun and looked ahead along the dirt road. About a mile away there was another horse-drawn vehicle approaching us. There was also a man on horseback. I thought, for a moment, that I saw several more horsemen some way off to the north, but when I tried to find them again with my eye they were out of sight. They were obviously not on the same road, in any case.

As we came closer, I saw that the other vehicle was a closed carriage. It looked like a miniature version of one of the ancient stagecoaches used in the days of the America pioneers.

“Someone coming to meet us?” suggested Nathan.

“Must be,” muttered Harwin, with obvious displeasure. He had not anticipated our being taken out of his hands so soon, and he obviously felt that there was a certain amount of prestige to be gained as the man who arrived in South Bay with the visitors from Earth. There was, however, nothing he could do. I wondered why the messenger had not been told that someone would come out to collect us.

Several minutes passed before we eventually met and both vehicles came to a halt, the horses face to face and apparently thoroughly bored. The man on horseback stayed behind the carriage, whose driver simply stared into space. It was the man who descended from the vehicle who was in command.

He was as massive and powerful as Harwin, but the manner of his clothing left no doubt that he was a townsman. The cloth was less coarse, and the way he wore the garments made it clear that they were not merely functional, but had style—far more style, in fact, than our own clothes, which were simple plastic all-purpose garments. As Nathan stepped down to greet the newcomer it seemed that the big man was the representative of civilization greeting a less-favored cousin. They exchanged formal pleasantries while I climbed down, and Nathan introduced me to him.

His name was Arne Jason. He did not mention any official rank or title but was so obviously accustomed to authority that the omission seemed natural. He thanked Harwin for taking care of us, and we thanked him too. Harwin accepted all the thanks with something less than perfect grace, but with a philosophical attitude. At least the ship was near his village, and would remain the center of affairs.

Nathan relaxed visibly as we transferred ourselves to the carriage. It was shaded from the sun, had upholstered seats, and smelled of polish...altogether more to his taste than a farm cart. In addition, Jason was a man to whom he could talk. Nathan Parrick was the kind of person who grows visibly brighter in the company of people with whom he has something in common.

As the carriage turned around, Jason looked out of the window. He was wearing a smile which struck me as being somehow unpleasant. His face was not handsome, but it was impressive. The features were clean-cut and the eyes were keen. There is an unreasoning prejudice which leads people to think that size and intelligence are inversely proportional, but this giant was obviously an intelligent man.

“I'm tempted to say,” he said smoothly, “that it's been a long time. But why pretend to be the voice of history? This is...completely unexpected. We had come to believe that Earth was finished with us. We have been working with that assumption.”

“Earth has passed through a kind of historical twilight zone,” explained Nathan. “It has proved impossible to send out ships for nearly a hundred years. We should not have left it so long before recontacting you, but circumstances went against us.”

I studied Jason, half expecting him to say something along the lines of “better late than never.” But he just smiled. I got the impression that he might have preferred never.

“I suppose,” said Nathan carefully, “that the news of our arrival has caused a certain amount of confusion. We did try to contact you while we were still in space, but it appears that you have no radio equipment.”

Again, Jason made no reply to the comment. Instead, he said, “I had not thought that we would be so very different. Have we changed so much in becoming Florians?”

I exchanged a quick glance with Nathan.

“It appears,” I said, “that there have been changes. You seem to have added twelve inches and sixty or seventy pounds to the average height and weight of the population here.”

“Floria,” he said, still smiling, “is a good world. We have done well here. Is that what you came to find out?”

“We are recontacting all the colonies,” said Nathan. “Restoring communication to the network of human culture spread across the arm of the galaxy. There has been an unfortunate hiatus, but we have better ships now, and the resources to equip them properly. Primarily, we have come to offer you help—if you need any.”

I disapproved slightly of the misleading nature of the statement, although the only point at which the truth was really stretched was the use of the word “ships” in the plural. But I kept quiet. It wasn't my scene.

“As simple as that?” said Jason.

“It's not simple,” said Nathan. “Our basic intention is to reopen communication and provide such help as we can...but that can be quite a complicated business. We come to your world, you see, in complete ignorance. We know nothing about you. We have a great deal to learn, before we establish any meaningful links. We don't know, for instance, what kind of government you have. You are taking us, I presume, to someone who can speak for the colony as a whole?”

“No one man can do that,” said Jason.

“That's what I mean,” said Nathan. “It can be difficult opening meaningful channels of communication.”

“And can you speak for Earth?” asked Jason smoothly. “The whole Earth?”

Nathan smiled apologetically. “Not really,” he said. “But in a purely practical sense, we represent Earth. Primarily, we represent Earth science. Our ship is a laboratory...we are equipped to analyze and perhaps help you combat any problems you have encountered in adapting to your new world.”

Jason shook his head. “We have no problems,” he said flatly. Maybe they had a proverb here: Beware of Earthmen bearing gifts. Nathan tried a different tack.

“I understand that the seat of government is several hundred miles away,” he said. “I presume we will be able to reach it by rail.” He was fishing desperately for some information. Jason wasn't exactly forthcoming. I thought, personally, that a straightforward “Where are we going?” might have served the purpose better.

“We'll have to take the train from South Bay,” agreed Jason. “It won't take too long. Our ultimate destination won't be the capital, even though the administration of the colony is centered there. I'll take you to the Library. The Planners operate from there.”

“The Planners?”

“They're the men who guide the colony. They're the people you will want to talk to.”

My mind went back to what I'd said to Karen about the possibility of guiding history by the selective introduction of technology. No prizes for guessing, though—it was logical enough, in the circumstances.

“We can't move the ship, I'm afraid,” said Nathan. “We set it down as close as possible to the location which was planned as a landing site for the first colony ship, but there's always an error factor—a few hundred miles isn't a great deal in terms of continental dimensions. The ship will have to serve as our operational base.”

“What operations are you intending to carry out?” asked Jason.

“Investigations into the co-adaptation process,” I interrupted.

“But we have no problems,” said Jason. “As I have already told you.”

“If that's so,” I replied, “I'm glad. But we'd like to know why you haven't.”

Nathan gave me a dirty look. I realized why as the giant pounced on the implication.

“You mean that other colonies do have such problems?” he asked. “Serious ones?”

“Yes,” I said. I saw no point in denying it.

“Perhaps, then, we have been lucky.”

“Perhaps,” I agreed.

There was a brief pause. Then Jason said, “I'm sure that the location of the ship will pose no real problems. I'm sure the Planners will be able to work with you wherever your base is. I'm sure that there will be a fruitful exchange of ideas. How long do you intend to be here?”

“We can't say, exactly,” said Nathan. “A year, perhaps.”

“That's a long time.”

“We've been such a long time getting here. There's a lot to catch up on. But if you need no actual help, then we may not stay so long.”

“And what happens next?” asked the big man. “Once you have forged your new links of communication, that is. What are your...long-range objectives?”

His tone was light and friendly. The inquiry was polite. But I didn't need Mariel's gift to guess what lay behind it. Jason didn't believe us. He didn't think that we'd come here to find out what Earth could do for Floria, but to find out what Floria could do for Earth. He was suspicious. And why not? A century and more had passed since the last shipment of colonists. We had shown no interest at all in the colony until now—until, it must seem from their point of view, they were beginning to win their struggle with the alien environment. They had conquered the world, in metaphorical sense, and now here were men from Earth, landing in their fields, asking how they were getting along. They didn't hate us for leaving them alone so long, as the colonists on Kilner's recontact mission had, but they had no cause to treat this as some kind of joyous family reunion. The farmers had given us a good welcome, but to the Planners who were busy mapping out the future of this world, our arrival—and the possibility of our interference—might be bad news indeed.

“We have no fixed long-term plans,” said Nathan. “What happens in the future depends very much on what we find in the present. Until the recontact has been completed, the UN can hardly form a policy. The important thing, though, is to reopen communication. Once we can talk to one another, we can begin to talk about uniting the whole network of human worlds into some kind of interplanetary community. There is only one human race, even though some of its fragments are widely scattered.”

“And some of them,” added Jason, “have changed.”

The mention of change reminded me that there was still a question to be answered here. I had made little or no progress in figuring out why the Florians were giants. Perhaps it was time to get some answers.

“What's the size of your total population?” I asked him. “How many people are there in the colony?”

His face changed. The smile disappeared, and for the first time his suspicions were clear in his expression. I realized I had hit a nerve. I had asked the question in one context, but he had understood it in another. I wondered why it seemed to him to be such a nasty question. Was there some mystery here? Was there something he wanted to conceal?

“I don't know,” he said, in answer. Not very helpful.

“You must have some idea,” I said. “Just an approximate figure.” I felt that since I'd made the initial gaffe I might as well press for some kind of answer.

“I have no idea,” he said. “Why do you want to know?”

I hesitated. I didn't really know what to say. “I was wondering what kind of role natural selection might have played in the colony's history,” I said, settling for the truth. “If your population is very high or very low relative to the initial numbers of colonists it might offer some clue as to why this change has taken place—and what sort of effects it's having demographically.”

He shook his head. “I'm sure the Planners will be able to supply you with the information you want,” he said. “I have no knowledge of such things.”

Nathan, obviously wanting to heal the breach, said, “You can't expect statistical information like that to be common knowledge. Taking census is an economic exercise, and there's probably no need for it yet. Have a little patience.”

I resented the patronizing tone slightly, but I took the advice. I gathered my patience, and turned to look out of the window at the alien world which stretched from the roadside into the distance.

There was, after all, plenty of time.

CHAPTER FOUR

When we reached South Bay, Jason got out of the carriage and asked us to wait while he attended to some business. We asked what time the train was scheduled to leave and were informed that we had “some time” in hand. When Nathan told him that we would look around the town, he seemed a fraction reluctant to sanction such a course of action, but there were no reasonable grounds on which he could refuse. He offered us the services of the man who had accompanied the coach on horseback as a guide. As a guide, however, the man—whose name was Lucas—was a complete washout. He seemed to be unnaturally taciturn. I don't believe that he was actually working hard to keep all information to himself—it seemed to come naturally to him.

We did discover, however, that the township had two primary roles to play in the colony. It was the southeasterly terminal of the railroad and began the distribution of most of the agricultural produce of the surrounding area. It was also a minor port, being situated in a bay between two large promontories. The major port, Leander, was away to the northwest. The greater importance of Leander was obvious in the fact that it had a deliberately conferred name rather than a title derived from a geographical or functional description.

South Bay had no beach. The waters of the ocean washed a shore which looked more like a river bank than a sea front. There were, of course, no tides to speak of on moonless Floria, and the promontories sheltered the harbor from violent weather. The sea was rippled by the wind, but only gently, and the water in the bay seemed extremely placid. The harbor itself had been cleared of weed, but farther out we could see the tips of the fronds which formed thick underwater forests in shallow water. Farther out to sea, I knew, vast rafts of floating weed could form, and the oceans of Floria were akin to the legendary Sargasso Sea of Earth—somewhat hazardous to navigate.

The ships moored in the harbor were all fairly small. None was longer than a hundred and fifty feet. They were wide bellied and looked sluggish. They were mostly cargo vessels. There were no fish in the sea, and though there was abundant invertebrate life the weed made netting virtually impossible, and the creatures were often so spectacularly ugly that there could be little demand for their meat.

Nathan asked Lucas about the extent of the exploration carried out by the colonists. How much did they know about conditions on other continents? How often were transoceanic trips made? Had the globe been circumnavigated? Were there any plans for subcolonies? When Lucas failed to provide adequate answers to these queries, merely indicating that ships
had
set out on voyages of exploration, Nathan grew a little impatient. The reason for Lucas's ignorance (or professed ignorance) was unclear. Was the distribution of knowledge in the colony really so parsimonious? Were the Planners maintaining a rigid control of information in order to secure their influence over the development of the colony? Or was Lucas simply not interested in the world beyond the horizon?

We watched the people working on the wharf, and there seemed to be activity enough to suggest that life was anything but listless. The big warehouses along the docks were busy, with goods being packed, loaded, and unloaded in an unsteady stream. There seemed to be little dogged efficiency about the way the men worked, but their effort was unstinted. It was testimony, of a sort, to the health and success of the growing colony. I studied the range of size exhibited by the population. The men ranged from six feet five or so to some inches over seven feet. We saw fewer women, but they seemed to fall into a similar spectrum ranging from six feet to seven. Most seemed to have a build appropriate to their height, but I saw several people who looked perceptibly overweight. There were too few children and old people to allow generalizations—in fact, I saw only one or two individuals who might have been over fifty, which might be evidence for the logical assumption that larger bodies have shorter life-expectancies.

Nathan and I attracted a good deal of curious attention. We must have seemed strange indeed to people who knew nothing of our provenance: ridiculous midgets wearing exotic clothing. Their own clothing was, by our standards, elaborate and dull in color. We wore fewer, lighter, more efficient, and more colorful outfits. Nathan did not attempt to approach any of them in search of information or polite conversation. He was content to watch them overtly while they watched us—covertly, for the most part.

In the streets which led to the waterfront there was no less activity. Cobblers, carpenters, sail-makers, and other more specialized practitioners maintained workshops close to the shore, and few such businesses seemed to be in the doldrums. We saw some transactions taking place, where the money that changed hands appeared to be unstandardized coins whose value was assessed by the weight and species of metal involved. It was a rough and ready system, but exchange value was obviously identical to actual value—anyone could strike his own coins, provided that he first found and extracted the metal from its ore. The sophistications of bureaucratic economics were still to come here on Floria, although conditions already seemed ripe. Again, I was disposed to wonder whether the Planners might not be wisely postponing the evil day as long as possible.

Both Nathan and I wanted to walk as far as possible in the time available—to see whatever might be around to be seen. Our walk took us through the town and beyond, and we ended up on the northern side of the bay looking back from the slope of the headland. Lucas had fallen behind and when we stopped he simply loitered forty or fifty yards away, making no attempt to join us. This gave us a chance to talk to one another without worrying about his hearing things not meant for his ears as well as sparing him our questions.

“Jason doesn't like us,” I said.

“He's wary of us,” Nathan replied. “Wouldn't you be, in his place? He doesn't understand us. To him, Earth is just a name...hardly a real place at all. The colony project, to him, is like a creation myth—it may be true but not really relevant to the everyday business of living. The farmers were impressed—he's not. He's shrewd, hardheaded.”

“And maybe dangerous,” I added.

“That's
not
the right attitude,” he said.

Patronizing bastard,
I thought, and said, “I don't like him.”

“Hostility,” he said, “is the last thing we need. You don't have to like him—provided that you treat him like a favored son.”

I thought, briefly and bitterly,
You should see the way I treat my son.
But I didn't say anything at all. I looked out over the bay, thinking about how beautiful it looked. If you like that sort of thing. I could see, albeit dimly, the great forest of weed which stretched away from the arms of the headlands out toward the horizon. The water was clear, and I could make out a profusion of colors which one only associates with tropical waters on Earth. Beneath a watery surface the photosynthetic optima are different, and browns and reds outweigh the greens.

Nathan seemed to feel that I'd been less than diplomatic. He still wanted to talk.

“Why are there no fish?” he asked, his gaze following the direction of mine. “How is it that the whole evolutionary process was short-circuited here?”

I sat down on the slope, feeling the alien grass with the palms of my hands.

“It wasn't,” I said. “We think the vertebrates are the most Important part of the tree of life, but we're biased. Plant evolution here has been complex and the plants have reached a very high degree of sophistication. They're not the same kind of plants we find on Earth because their evolution hasn't been so drastically affected by the parallel evolution of certain types of animal, but it hasn't been short-circuited. And I wouldn't think that that would be an apt term to use in connection with the animal evolution either.”

I paused, and thought,
Who's being patronizing now?

“Basically,” I continued, “there are two reasons why animal life here didn't develop in the same way that it did on Earth. There's no moon. No moon, no tides. No tides, no littoral zone. Evolution begins in the sea, and the type of organism which eventually comes out of the sea onto the land depends very much on the manner of its coming out. On Earth, the borderland between the two environments is a regime of constant, cyclic change. Creatures living there evolve to cope with successive immersion and desiccation. The littoral zone not only provides a way station for creatures to develop ways of coping without the ocean, first temporarily and then permanently, it also makes creatures individually adaptable. Earthly animals are built to cope with change—all the invaders of the land on Earth were already highly sophisticated organisms when they said good-bye to the tidal zone and went in for full-time life on land. They had to be, because they'd come out by a difficult route, a regime in which natural selection was very strong, permitting rapid, diversifying evolution.

“But that didn't happen here. Here, there was no such way- station, no regime of rigorous selection. Without rigorous selection, evolution remains much more subject to the dictates of chance. Land-forms did eventually arise, but they weren't super-refined in form and function. They weren't selected for individual adaptability. They're all worms and soft, squashy things. Once having opted for the land they've evolved ways of coping with desiccation, but they almost all remain creatures adapted to easy ways of life. Few of them eat one another—because there's an abundant supply of plants. Most of them don't even eat healthy plants, but specialize in rotting ones.”

“That covers land animals,” said Nathan, “but what about fish?”

“I said there were two reasons,” I reminded him. “No tide is one. The other is a corollary of that. You see it before you, as far as the eye can see.”

He found no immediate enlightenment in the ranging of his gaze.

“Weed,” I said. “The absence of tides also means that the sea itself is a relatively static environment, and the plant life which evolved there took advantage of that fact. The shallows get clogged with anchored weed. In deeper waters, floating weed occupies the surface and rotting vegetation the ocean floor, with a lifeless chasm in between. There's lots of scope for animal life—of certain kinds. The scavengers who move about the bottom, the worms, the things with the texture of jelly. But there are no openings for muscular, free-ranging swimmers. And again, it's all too easy for the scavengers because the plants produce so much. There are no incentives for animal-eating animals to evolve. The struggle for existence just isn't all that much of a struggle. In a billion years, maybe, things would have been different...but even then, one wouldn't expect a regime of slow, steady change to produce the same kind of organisms as a regime of quick, cyclic change, even given twice as long.

“You know, Nathan, we don't realize how much we owe to that absurdly large moon of ours. If it wasn't for that freak, you and I wouldn't be here. And nor would the colonies...because we'd never have found so many worlds where men can live but where no creatures comparable to man have evolved. Floria is just the extreme case: it's not coincidence that all the other colony worlds are worlds with moons conspicuously smaller than Earth's. And if we ever find another world in the right orbit, with a companion as big as the moon,
that's
where we can expect to find the guys who are going to give us trouble—or, if you look at it the other way, the guys who are going to provide us with stimulating conversation and rewarding partnership while we explore the universe together.”

“But there is intelligent life on some of the colony worlds,” he objected.

“Intelligent,” I agreed, “but not similar. There's no conflict or contact...and with all due respect to Mariel I don't believe there ever will be. Those aliens really are alien, in mind and in body. Their minds are structured to a wholly different range of priorities. Sure, some of them look like the idiots in plastic suits who used to feature in the old movies...but that doesn't mean to say that there are metaphorical men wrapped up inside them just aching to come out for a cheeseburger, a chat, and a game of chess. They're not only stranger than we think, but maybe stranger than we could ever imagine, and we'll need more than a fully certified Alice in Wonderland to get close to them.”

“You're pretty hard on Mariel,” he said.

“And this trip could be bloody hard on her,” I said. “That gift of hers may be just enough to let them turn her adolescent mind inside out...and I don't mean that in any trivial sense. I mean
completely
crazy.”

“Did you talk to Pietrasante about that?” he wanted to know.

“Did I get the chance?” I said bitterly. “Oh no! They were too worried about hurting my feelings to let me in on their plans. Nobody told me a damn thing until it was all worked out—in
committee
—and unchangeable.” I used
committee
as if it were a dirty word. Earth is run by committees. It has been for two hundred years. That's why it's in a mess, always has been, and always will be. The worst of it is that the alternatives are probably worse. Dictators are not nice. Sometimes, in thinking of my son and his faith, I almost wish I could believe in God myself, but I always run up against the problem of whether a God one can believe in would be a committee or a dictator. I wonder if the papal triumvirate has ever debated the issue.

Nathan changed the subject. It didn't seem worth pursuing when we had a different set of problems on hand immediately. “If conditions here could never lead to the evolution of anything
like
man,” he mused, “doesn't that imply a certain implicit hostility to human habitation? Or at least a certain inhospitality?”

“No,” I said comprehensively.

“Why not?”

“Because the colonists came here wanting to
use
the world, not to become adapted to it. Adaptation is a double-edged sword. When man moves into an ecosystem he fits too well he finds natural enemies—and where there are no natural enemies to start with it doesn't take long for them to turn up. Exploitation can run both ways. But not necessarily. Here, we have a high degree of chemical similarity between the life-systems, but little organizational similarity. It should be possible for man—as a clever and superadaptable species—to exploit without being exploited.”