The Florians (5 page)

“You're right,” I said. “It is important. Next time, I'll...well, I just didn't realize. Thanks.”

Without so much as a smile, she disappeared. I looked back at the words, and tried to sort out what thoughts had mingled with them as I'd spoken. I knew what I'd said...but what had I said
to her?

I lay back again, and for the second time I tried to unwind.

But I couldn't get to sleep. I turned over and over and over, knowing that I was tired, but my thoughts just wouldn't die away. They clouded over, but they remained loud, made themselves heard. Trying to exclude sensory impressions merely left my mind awash with ideas, memories, half-formed sentences. My attention leaped from point to point in bizarre sequences controlled by the imagistic logic of the mind, often devoid of all apparent reason.

Hours passed before consciousness slowly and reluctantly yielded its grip upon me.

CHAPTER THREE

I was glad to get up when the morning came. I felt as if I'd had no sleep at all, but such impressions are usually false. I'd lost track of time, and that in itself is a kind of rest from the measured regime of consciousness.

I found most of the others already up and about, discussing how they might best make use of the day or two we had in hand before contact was made with the appropriate authority. Only Nathan and I were committed to the trip into town, and it seemed wisest for the rest to stay close to the ship. For the moment, five of us went to the nearby house. The farmer had offered us breakfast, and it was there that Vern Harwin would meet us with transport to take us into town. The two who stayed within the ship were Pete and Conrad.

The atmosphere prevailing in the house bore no resemblance whatsoever to the hall of the night before. It was quiet, and unhurried, and the silence was perhaps a little embarrassed. Conversation did not flourish. Joe Saccone was by no means the extrovert that Harwin was, and his wife hardly paused long enough to exchange more than half a dozen words at a time. They had children, but we didn't see them. They were, it seemed, already out working. I wasn't quite sure why they'd been banished...for the sake of convenience, or because the farmer wanted to keep them away from us.

The main room of the house, where the family lived and ate, was clean and tidy. It also seemed to me to be
empty:
empty not merely of things, but also of personality. There was none of the kind of superfluous trivia which tends to accumulate wherever people make their homes. The aspect of the room and all its contents was essentially functional. I cast my mind back into my hazy knowledge of history, trying to imagine what kind of world the original colonists had left, what kind of assumptions and prejudices they might have carried with them to the stars and embedded in the structure of their new society.

It had been a time of crisis, of course—the resource crisis and the economic crisis and the population crisis had been perpetual even then. What made the difference between that time and the present was not the crisis but the manner of the reaction to it. Those had been days of violent rejection of old assumptions, demands for action. It had been a hot-tempered period. It had been dominated by the ethic of
make for use
...the criminality of waste, the condemnation of luxury. There had been anti-art movements in America and Europe, when a great deal of what had formerly been treasured as “artistic heritage” had been destroyed. There were the media riots, campaigns to destroy private transport...

It all seemed very vague and faraway. But there were, it seemed to me, echoes of the zeitgeist here, on this world. The people here had not recovered a mania for acquisition, although circumstances might permit such a thing. They still made for
use
. They still seemed to waste very little—not materials, not effort. But, as time progressed, could they possibly maintain such an ethic? Someone once commented that those who fail to respect history are condemned to repeat it. Would that happen here? Or did these people have something left to them by the original colonists that would not die, and which might help them into a new direction of social evolution?

Breakfast consisted of bread and soup. It was a vegetarian meal, for a variety of reasons. Floria had only extremely limited animal life—only simple invertebrates had evolved here. That meant that pigs and horses had had to be imported along with the colonists—an unusual step for the old Colony Commission to have taken. Pigs and horses are heavy. There's a world of difference between shipping a couple of thousand eggs across ninety light-years to give a new world the basis of a chicken population and shipping large mammals. It had had to be done, however. People need meat and work-animals. The relationship between the colonists and their imported animals had, however, been a strange one. On an alien world, there was a kinship between man and horse, and between man and pig, that simply did not exist on Earth. It seemed that as a consequence of this the colonists did not eat horseflesh at all, and had gathered about the business of slaying and eating pigs a kind of ritual—a system of taboos. We had eaten pork at the welcoming party, but that had been a public occasion and a ceremonious one. Breakfast was bread and vegetable soup.

The bread was made from imported corn. The soup contained, I think, a mixture of vegetables brought from Earth and some of the native plants adopted by the colonists. It tasted rich and rather sweet.

The organic correspondence factor evaluating the degree of biochemical similarity between Floria's life-system and Earth's was eighty-eight: just about the highest the survey teams had ever found. There ought to be plenty of native plants perfectly edible and worth cultivating. I was tempted to go into the question with Joe, but there just wasn't time. Harwin turned up before we'd finished...not that any of us actually
did
finish, because the meal was scaled to Floria standards.

Nathan and I left the others to continue the business of nurturing friendly interplanetary relations at the grass-roots level, and mounted Vern Harwin's cart. There was room for three to sit up front, which was perhaps as well considering the strong agricultural smell emanating from the back.

“How long will it take to get to the town?” asked Nathan of Harwin.

“Not long,” was the reply. Harwin had no watch. There probably weren't more than a handful of clocks in the village. Nathan didn't pursue the point.

“Did the messenger who went to tell them we were coming get back yet?” I asked.

Harwin nodded.

“Did he say anything?”

Harwin shrugged. “The people in South Bay will handle things. They didn't send any messages back.”

I gave up. Apparently, we had to wait and see. Harwin seemed to have only vague notions about things which did not actually involve him. It wasn't really surprising, but it was a little frustrating. There was no point in trying to find out most of the things we wanted to know here.

We passed through the village and moved into open countryside again. Cultivated fields stretched in all directions, and small clusters of buildings were dotted randomly over the whole area. It seemed very Earth-like, but we were in a region which had at one time been cleared of all native vegetation so that imported crops could be sown. To some extent the Earth crops had now been replaced by Florian ones, but the techniques of artificial cultivation had made sure that the alien plants did not seem too strange. All the vegetation was exceptionally rich—the Earth plants as well as the native ones flourished in this soil and grew well. There was little enough contrast because the Florian plants were green, and the range of shades was not dissimilar to the range of their counterparts. The actual photosynthetic agent was not chlorophyll, but it was designed to the same operational specifications and with the same optimal characteristics. This is not always the case on worlds which may be classified as Earth-like in purely physical terms, but unless the empirical chemical foundations of a planetary life-system are fairly similar to those of Earth's life-system colonization is not possible. On all worlds to be successfully used by man, the building blocks of life have to be the same. The proteins and complex carbohydrates are always liable to be different, but the simple amino acids and hexose sugars which form their structural units are almost invariably the same. The limits of chemical possibility are ultimately binding and not all that wide (given identical physical conditions). There are only so many ways that you can build a molecule out of a handful of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen atoms. Natural selection operates between chemicals as well as between organisms, and the ones recruited to do various specific jobs are generally very similar. Hence, Floria's chlorophyll-substitute looked and acted like chlorophyll.

But what holds true for chemical evolution does not hold true for the evolution of organisms. It isn't until you first set foot on alien soil that you begin to realize how large a role pure chance has played in the design of Earth's biosphere. This applies far more to animals than plants, but even the Florian plants—to my trained eyes, at least—showed their alienness in their structure.

The casual observer screens out the unfamiliar and sees the familiar. A casual observer looking at the fields of alien crops planted by the colonists would see nothing odd. He would see leafy plants and grasses, huge bulbous fruits and seed-pods. But the casual observer has no real appreciation of complexity or of the various kinds of unity underlying complexity. The trained eye, however, screens out similarities and searches for the unfamiliar—not merely in the complexity of forms but in the kinds of unity underlying the complexity. The more my eyes searched the fields which we passed by in the cart as the two dray horses made their leisurely way along the rutted track, the more I was able to perceive the oddities which I had, until now, known only as remarks in reports written more than a century before.

Perhaps the most striking thing of all was the strict adherence to geometric principles practiced by Floria's plants. Stems grew straight, foliage was arranged in an orderly fashion. Leaves tended to be precisely shaped, although the shapes were often very complex and three-dimensional—the curving of the photosynthetic sheets was as important and as precisely defined as the dimensions of the sheet themselves.

There were no pretty flowers because there were no insects to recruit to the business of pollination. However, though there were no birds and mammals either, there were fruits. Because most of the motile life-forms on the world were saprophytes, preferring dead flesh to living, the fruits were grown only to rot. The seeds were usually tiny, and were picked up accidentally by the worms and slugs which fed on the rotting fruit, either internally or externally, and were thus redistributed. The colonists, by taking the fruit early to eat while still fresh, were introducing a new factor into the whole balance of nature here.

Soon, we passed beyond the cultivated fields into wilder land, where the Florian life-system still reigned supreme. There was no sign of invasion of this untouched land by Earthly “weeds.” The imported plants could not compete with the native ones on equal terms. Here, trees grew, and wild grasses in great profusion. There was not, however, the same degree of randomness as is seen in wild land on Earth. The geometrical compulsion was still clear, in the distribution of the plants as well as their forms. The trees grew tall, and they bent in the wind to show off a considerable degree of elasticity. Their branching was precise and ordered. They carried passengers: not merely parasites such as often infest the bodies of Earthly trees, but commensals using the structure without, apparently, inconveniencing the trees overmuch. The grasses were wide bladed and rather rigid, looking rather like clusters of crystals.

The Florian plants were photosynthetically more efficient than the Earth plants, not because of their chemical organization but because of their structural design. An acre of Florian plants could fix a good deal more solar energy than an acre of plant cover in a comparable environment on Earth. This was, in a very literal sense, a land of plenty, where everything grew big and healthy. With nearly twice as much energy pouring into the biosphere, there was much more available at the top of every food chain. But there was also a very fast energy turnover here. The plants grew fast, but they also died quickly. The flesh-structures built with such calm efficiency decayed very quickly. That was why there was so much scope here for saprophytes...so much scope that herbivores had never evolved. And just as herbivores had never evolved, neither had carnivores.

“Do you have much trouble keeping the native plants out of your fields?” I asked Harwin. “It seems to me you might have difficulties with alien weeds.”

“They come back,” said the farmer laconically. “But it's not too bad. We clear ‘em out before planting. Some of them are real bastards—can grow a mile of root in a week, it seems. But we manage.”

“I suppose it's easier with the native crops, though,” I said.

“We don't get much trouble there,” he agreed.

“And a higher yield per acre?” I asked.

He nodded.

“In that case,” I said, “one might expect that all you farmers would be gradually switching over to native produce. The demand for it must have been low to start with, but over the years you must be slowly replacing the Earth stock with native plants.”

He turned to look at me then, and recognized with the slight nod that he gave me that I knew what I was talking about. I was right, and he was slightly surprised that I knew.

“It could be dangerous,” I commented, “phasing out the Earth crops altogether.”

“Won't happen,” he said. “Still a lot of prejudice. Lot of people in the towns won't eat nothing but the stuff that came with the ships. Out here...well, we grow the stuff. It comes out of the same soil, and we do the same work putting it in and taking it out. The difference don't seem so important to us, I suppose.”

Here, at last, was something useful. There were people who ate only traditional food...and yet they were presumably as big as the farmers who lived on a mixed diet...they had to be. Otherwise the correlation would have been too easy to miss. So it wasn't as simple as it seemed. It wasn't just something in the native food that made them grow.

“Does anyone live exclusively on native crops?” I asked.

“I don't know,” he said. “Pigs, I guess. Don't see why not, but don't know that it ever happens, either. But like I said, out here we don't think so much of the difference. We just grow what we can, and what the people in town want. What's it matter which ones came with the first colonists and which were here when we arrived?”

And from his point of view, of course, it
didn't
much matter. So far as he was concerned, Floria was the one and only world, not one of a series of alien planets. To him, it was all familiar. And familiarity breeds...well, not always contempt, but at least contentment. It would be easy for these farmers to take too much for granted. Nothing in the alien life-system had ever proved inimical to human life...yet.