The Seedling Stars

by James Blish

  "To make men? But only gods ..."

  "No, no. Be patient and listen," said Jarl Eleven. "We don't make men. We make them suitable. There's a great deal of difference between the two. We take the living germ plasm, the sperm and the egg, and we modify it; then the modified man emerges, and we help him to settle down in his new world. That's what we did on Tellura — it happened long ago, before Gerhardt and I were even born. Now, we've come back to see how you people are getting along, and to lend a hand if necessary."

  He looked from Honath to Mathild, and back again. "Do you follow me?" he said.

  "I'm trying," Honath said. "But you should go down to the jungle-top, then. We're not like the others; they are the people you want to see."

  "We shall, in the morning. We just landed here. But, just because you're not like the others, we're more interested in you now. Tell me: has any condemned man ever escaped from the jungle floor before?"

  "No, never. That's not surprising. There are monsters down there."

  Jarl Eleven looked sidewise at the other Giant; he seemed to be smiling. "When you see the films," he remarked, "you'll call that the understatement of the century. Honath, how did you three manage to escape, then?"

  Haltingly, at first, and then with more confidence as the memories came crowding vividly back, Honath told him. When he mentioned the feast at the demon's nest, Jarl Eleven again looked significantly at Adier, but he did not interrupt. "And, finally, we got to the top of the chimney and came out on this flat space," Honath said. "Alaskon was still with us then, but when he saw you and the shining thing he threw himself back down the cleft. He was a criminal like us, but he should not have died. He was a brave man, and a wise one."

  "Not wise enough to wait until all the evidence was in," Adier said enigmatically. "All in all, Jarl, I'd say 'prodigious' is the word for it. This is really the most successful seeding job any team has ever done, at least in this limb of the galaxy. And what a stroke of luck, to be on the spot just as it came to term, and with a couple at that!"

  "What does it mean?" Honath said.

  "Just this, Honath. When the seeding team set your people up in business on Tellura, they didn't mean for you to live forever in the treetops. They knew that, sooner or later, you'd have to come down to the ground and learn to fight this planet on its own terms. Otherwise, you'd go stale and die out."

  "Live on the ground all the time?" Mathild said in a faint voice.

  "Yes, Mathild. The life in the treetops was to have been only an interim period, while you gathered knowledge you needed about Tellura, and put it to use. But to be the real masters of the world, you will have to conquer the surface, too.

  "The device your people worked out, of sending only criminals to the surface, was the best way of conquering the planet that they could have picked. It takes a strong will and exceptional courage to go against custom; and both those qualities are needed to lick Tellura. Your people exiled just such fighting spirits to the surface, year after year after year.

  "Sooner or later, some of those exiles were going to discover how to live successfully on the ground, and make it possible for the rest of your people to leave the trees. You and Honath have done just that."

  "Observe please, Jari," Adier said. "The crime in this first successful case was ideological. That was the crucial turn in the criminal policy of these people. A spirit of revolt is not quite enough; but couple it with brains, and — ecce homo!"

  Honath's head was swimming. "But what does all this mean?" he said. "Are we — not condemned to Hell any more?"

  "No, you're still condemned, if you still want to call it that," Jari Eleven said soberly. "You've learned how to live down there, and you've found out something even more valuable: How to stay alive while cutting down your enemies. Do you know that you killed three demons with your bare hands, you and Mathild and Alaskon?"

  "Killed ..."

  "Certainly," Jari Eleven said. "You ate three eggs. That is the classical way, and indeed the only way, to wipe out monsters like the dinosaurs. You can't kill the adults with anything short of an anti-tank gun, but they're helpless in embryo — and the adults haven't the sense to guard their nests."

  Honath heard, but only distantly. Even his awareness of Mathild's warmth next to him did not seem to help much.

  "Then we have to go back down there," he said dully. "And this time forever."

  "Yes," Jari Eleven said, his voice gentle. "But you won't be alone, Honath. Beginning tomorrow, you'll have all your people with you."

  "All our people? But — you're going to drive them out?"

  "All of them. Oh, we won't prohibit the use of the vine-webs, too, but from now on your race will have to fight it out on the surface as well. You and Mathild have proven that it can be done. It's high time the rest of you learned, too."

  "Jari, you think too little of these young people themselves," Adier said. "Tell them what is in store for them. They are frightened."

  "Of course, of course. It's obvious. Honath, you and Mathild are the only living individuals of your race who know how to survive down there on the surface. And we're not going to tell your people how to do that. We aren't even going to drop them so much as a hint. That part of it is up to you."

  Honath's jaw dropped.

  "It's up to you," Jarl Eleven repeated firmly. "We'll return you to your tribe tomorrow, and we'll tell your people that you two know the rules for successful life on the ground — and that everyone else has to go down and live there, too. We'll tell them nothing else but that. What do you think they'll do then?"

  "I don't know," Honath said dazedly. "Anything could happen. They might even make us Spokesman and Spokeswoman — except that we're just common criminals."

  "Uncommon pioneers, Honath. The man and woman to lead the humanity of Tellura out of the attic, into the wide world." Jarl Eleven got to his feet, the great light playing over him. Looking up after him, Honath saw that there were at least a dozen other Giants standing just outside the oval of light, listening intently to every word.

  "But there's a little time to be passed before we begin," Jarl Eleven said. "Perhaps you two would like to look over our ship."

  Numbly, but with a soundless emotion much like music inside him, Honath took Mathild's hand. Together they walked away from the chimney to Hell, following the footsteps of the Giants.

  Book Three

  Surface Tension

  Prologue

  D r. Chatvieux took a long time over the microscope, leaving la Ventura with nothing to do but look at the dead landscape of Hydrot. Waterscape, he thought, would be a better word. From space, the new world had shown only one small, triangular continent, set amid endless ocean; and even the continent was mostly swamp.

  The wreck of the seed-ship lay broken squarely across the one real spur of rock which Hydrot seemed to possess, which reared a magnificent twenty-one feet above sea-level. From this eminence, la Ventura could see forty miles to the horizon across a flat bed of mud. The red light of the star Tau Ceti, glinting upon thousands of small lakes, pools, ponds and puddles, made the watery plain look like a mosaic of onyx and ruby.

  "If I were a religious man," the pilot said suddenly, "I'd call this a plain case of divine vengeance."

  Chatvieiix said: "Hmn?"

  "It's as if we'd been struck down for — is it hubris? Pride, arrogance?"

  "Hybris," Chatvieux said, looking up at last. "Well, is it? I don't feel swollen with pride at the moment. Do you?"

  "I'm not exactly proud of my piloting," la Ventura admitted. "But that isn't quite what I mean. I was thinking about why we came here in the first place. It takes a lot of arrogance to think that you can scatter men, or at least things very much like men, all over the face of the galaxy. It takes even more pride to do the job — to pack up all the equipment and move from planet to planet and actually make men, make them suitable for every place you touch."

  "I suppose it does," Chatvieux said. "But we're only one of several hundred se
ed-ships in this limb of the galaxy, so I doubt that the gods picked us out as special sinners." He smiled. "If they had, maybe they'd have left us our ultraphone, so the Colonization Council could hear about our cropper. Besides, Paul, we don't make men. We adapt them — adapt them to Earthlike planets, nothing more than that. We've sense enough — or humility enough, if you like that better — to know that we can't adapt men to a planet like Jupiter, or to the surface of a sun, like Tau Ceti."

  "Anyhow, we're here," la Ventura said grimly. "And we aren't going to get off. Phil tells me that we don't even have our germ-cell bank any more, so we can't seed this place in the usual way. We've been thrown onto a dead world and dared to adapt to it. What are the pantropes going to do with our recalcitrant carcasses — provide built-in waterwings?"

  "No," Chatvieux said calmly. "You and I and all the rest of us are going to die, Paul. Pantropic techniques don't work on the body; that was fixed for you for life when you were conceived. To attempt to rebuild it for you would only maim you. The pantropes affect only the genes, the inheritance- carrying factors. We can't give you built-in waterwings, any more than we can give you a new set of brains. I think we'll be able to populate this world with men, but we won't live to see it."

  The pilot thought about it, a lump of cold blubber collecting gradually in his stomach. "How long do you give us?" he said at last.

  "Who knows? A month, perhaps." The bulkhead leading to the wrecked section of the ship was pushed back, admitting salt, muggy air, heavy with carbon dioxide. Philip Strasvogel, the communications officer, came in, tracking mud. Like la Ventura, he was now a man without a function, and it appeared to bother him. He was not well equipped for introspection, and with his ultraphone totally smashed, unresponsive to his perpetually darting hands, he had been thrown back into his own mind, whose resources were few. Only the tasks Chatvieux had set him to had prevented him from setting like a gelling colloid into a permanent state of the sulks.

  He unbuckled from around his waist a canvas belt, into the loops of which plastic vials were stuffed like cartridges. "More samples. Doc," he said. "All alike — water, very wet. I have some quicksand in one boot, too. Find anything?"

  "A good deal, Phil. Thanks. Are the others around?"

  Strasvogel poked his head out and hallooed. Other voices rang out over the mudflats. Minutes later, the rest of the survivors of the crash were crowding into the pantrope deck: Saltonstall, Chatvieux' senior assistant, a perpetually sanguine, perpetually youthful technician willing to try anything once, including dying; Eunice Wagner, behind whose placid face rested the brains of the expedition's only remaining ecologist; Eleftherios Venezuelos, the always-silent delegate from the Colonization Council; and Joan Heath, a midshipman whose duties, like la Ventura's and Phil's, were now without meaning, but whose bright head and tall, deceptively indolent body shone to the pilot's eyes brighter than Tau Ceti — brighter, since the crash, even than the home sun.

  Five men and two women — to colonize a planet on which 'standing room' meant treading water.

  They came in quietly and found seats or resting places on the deck, on the edges of tables, in corners. Joan Heath went to stand beside la Ventura. They did not look at each other, but the warmth of her shoulder beside his was all that he needed. Nothing was as bad as it seemed.

  Venezuelos said: "What's the verdict, Dr. Chatvieux?"

  "This place isn't dead," Chatvieux said. "There's life in the sea and in the fresh water, both. On the animal side of the ledger, evolution seems to have stopped with the Crustacea; the most advanced form I've found is a tiny crayfish, from one of the local rivulets, and it doesn't seem to be well distributed. The ponds and puddles are well-stocked with small metazoans of lower orders, right up to the rotifers — including a castle-building genus like Earth's Floscularidae. In addition, there's a wonderfully variegated protozoan population, with a dominant ciliate type much like Paramoecium, plus various Sarcodines, the usual spread of phyto-flagellates, and even a phosphorescent species I wouldn't have expected to see anywhere but in salt water. As for the plants, they run from simple blue-green algae to quite advanced thallus-producing types — though none of them, of course, can live out of the water."

  "The sea is about the same," Eunice said. "I've found some of the larger simple metazoans — jellyfish and so on — and some crayfish almost as big as lobsters. But it's normal to find salt-water species running larger than fresh-water. And there's the usual plankton and nanoplankton population."

  "In short," Chatvieux said, "we'll survive here — if we fight."

  "Wait a minute," la Ventura said. "You've just finished telling me that we wouldn't survive. And you were talking about us, the seven of us here, not about the genus man, because we don't have our germ-cells banks any more. What's ..."

  "We don't have the banks. But we ourselves can contribute germ-cells, Paul. I'll get to that in a moment." Chatvieux turned to Saltonstall, "Martin, what would you think of our taking to the sea? We came out of it once, long ago; maybe we could come out of it again on Hydrot."

  "No good," Saltonstall said immediately. "I like the idea, but I don't think this planet ever heard of Swinburne, or Homer, either. Looking at it as a colonization problem alone, as if we weren't involved in it ourselves, I wouldn't give you an Oc dollar for epi oinopa ponton. The evolutionary pressure there is too high, the competition from other species is prohibitive; seeding the sea should be the last thing we attempt, not the first. The colonists wouldn't have a chance to learn a thing before they'd be gobbled up."

  "Why?" la Ventura said. Once more, the death in his stomach was becoming hard to placate.

  "Eunice, do your sea-going Coelenterates include anything like the Portuguese man-of-war?"

  The ecologist nodded.

  "There's your answer, Paul," Saltonstall said. "The sea is out. It's got to be fresh water, where the competing creatures are less formidable and there are more places to hide."

  "We can't compete with a jellyfish?" la Ventura asked, swallowing.

  "No, Paul," Chatvieux said. "Not with one that dangerous. The pantropes make adaptations, not gods. They take human germ-cells — in this case, our own, since our bank was wiped out in the crash — and modify them genetically toward those of creatures who can live in any reasonable environment. The result will be manlike, and intelligent. It usually shows the donors' personality patterns, too, since the modifications are usually made mostly in the morphology, not so much in the mind, of the resulting individual.

  "But we can't transmit memory. The adapted man is worse than a child in the new environment. He has no history, no techniques, no precedents, not even a language. In the usual colonization project, like the Tellura affair, the seeding teams more or less take him through elementary school before they leave the planet to him, but we won't survive long enough to give such instruction. We'll have to design our colonists with plenty of built-in protections and locate them in the most favorable environment possible, so that at least some of them will survive learning by experience alone."

  The pilot thought about it, but nothing occurred to him which did not make the disaster seem realer and more intimate with each passing second. Joan Heath moved slightly closer to him. "One of the new creatures can have my personality pattern, but it won't be able to remember being me. Is that right?"

  "That's right. In the present situation we'll probably make our colonists haploid, so that some of them, perhaps many, will have a heredity traceable to you alone. There may be just the faintest of residuums of identity — pantropy's given us some data to support the old Jungian notion of ancestral memory. But we're all going to die on Hydrot, Paul, as selfconscious persons. There's no avoiding that. Somewhere we'll leave behind people who behave as we would, think and feel as we would, but who won't remember la Ventura, or Dr. Chatvieux, or Joan Heath — or the Earth."

  The pilot said nothing more. There was a gray taste in his mouth.

  "Saltonstall, what would you recommend as
a form?"

  The pantropist pulled reflectively at his nose. "Webbed extremities, of course, with thumbs and big toes heavy and thorn-like for defense until the creature has had a chance to learn. Smaller external ears, and the eardrum larger and closer to the outer end of the ear-canal. We're going to have to reorganize the water-conservation system, I think; the glomerular kidney is perfectly suitable for living in fresh water, but the business of living immersed, inside and out, for a creature with a salty inside means that the osmotic pressure inside is going to be higher than outside, so that the kidneys are going to have to be pumping virtually all the time. Under the circumstances we'd best step up production of urine, and that means the antidiuretic function of the pituitary gland is going to have to be abrogated, for all practical purposes."

  "What about respiration?"

  "Hm," Saltonstall said. "I suppose book-lungs, like some of the arachnids have. They can be supplied by intercostal spiracles. They're gradually adaptable to atmosphere-breathing, if our colonist ever decides to come out of the water. Just to provide for that possibility. I'd suggest that the nose be retained, maintaining the nasal cavity as a part of the otological system, but cutting off the cavity from the larynx with a membrane of cells that are supplied with oxygen by direct irrigation, rather than by the circulatory system. Such a membrane wouldn't survive for many generations, once the creature took to living out of the water even for part of its life-time; it'd go through two or three generations as an amphibian, and then one day it'd suddenly find itself breathing through its larynx again."

  "Ingenious," Chatvieux said.