Critical Threshold

by Brian Stableford

  My ears, too, confirmed the difference. The settlement land was almost silent, but the forest was a continuing chaos of whistles, clicks, creaks and rustles, as if the trees themselves were continually shuffling their feet. The youthful forest seemed to be busy—not merely active but at work. The human domain was derelict, still in the process of dying even while it was in the early stages of rebirth.

  I realized that I felt slightly sick. The revelation of what was here had gone to my stomach. In my head I felt little—not even sadness. The sense of tragedy was more physical than that.

  Floria had been far from perfect, the colonists had needed our help badly, but the people there had been successful. They had done what they had set out to do. They had had every chance to do it. Almost everything had been in their favor, and the one thing that had not had now been set aside, thanks to the Daedalus.

  But here....

  “No judgments,” I murmured.

  “What?”

  I glanced at Linda, making a slight grimace. “We’re supposed to ask why,” I said. “But there are certain answers we’re not allowed to arrive at. We’re not allowed to answer that they never had a chance in the first place, that they should never have been sent.”

  “That’s not an answer at all,” she said. “That’s what comes after the answer. It’s the excuse. An excuse.”

  What she left unsaid was: ‘And it isn’t any part of our job to provide excuses.’

  I hopped down off the wall, just for a moment. Linda didn’t follow. I took only three or four paces away from her. I didn’t reach out to touch anything. I paused, and looked back.

  “It smells good,” she said, looking down at me.

  I realized that she was right. The one thing the survey’s olfactory analyses hadn’t said, and I’d almost missed it, too. Like their mechanical apparatus, my mind had been tied up with abstract matters.

  It did smell good. I breathed in deeply. The extra two or three per cent oxygen didn’t give me any lift. It wasn’t enough of an increase to have an intoxicating effect.

  I came back to the wall and jumped up. I scrambled over and dropped back inside. There would be other times to go into the forest, to see the alien world on its own terms. Not now.

  Linda came down too, and we both looked at the wall from within, still not quite understanding why it was there.

  “You’re right,” she said. “It is absurd. An awful lot of work has to be put into building something like that. Mile upon mile....”

  “I don’t believe it’s a physical barrier at all,” I said. I think it’s a psychological one.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” she objected. “Nobody would build a seven-mile wall for psychological reasons.”

  I shrugged.

  “It seems to me,” I replied, in a low voice, “that nobody would build one for any other kind of reasons.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  As night fell, making nonsense once again of the dutiful hands of the ship’s clock and the schedule of shifts by which Pete and Karen, at least, tried hard to operate, we all gathered back at the ship.

  On Floria, first night down, we’d been treated by the locals to an evening of celebration. By the time we’d all got together again aboard the Daedalus our thoughts had been turned toward the next morning. We’d had little enough to say to one another.

  This first night down could hardly have been more different. We had to talk. We’d been pitched into a situation which seemed desperate. For the Dendran colonists this was the eleventh hour, or maybe later. Maybe too late. We had to talk—to attack the situation with all the intellectual artillery at our disposal.

  “There are just ninety-two left,” said Nathan. “Originally, there were more than fourteen hundred.”

  “We don’t know that both ships made it,” objected Linda Beck. “There could have been a disaster in ultraspace.”

  Nathan shook his head. “I’ve looked around the village, the core of the settlement. The original ships were cannibalized in order to provide the initial shelters. There are bits of both ships built into the structure of the buildings.”

  “Can you be sure that there are bits of two ships, not one?” This questions came from Pete Rolving. The point did need pressing.

  “We’ll take a closer look in good time,” said Nathan. “But I think there are two.”

  “What about the people?” I asked.

  Nathan looked at Conrad. Conrad deferred to Mariel. She had been sitting with her elbows on the table and her head cupped in her hands. She looked unhappy, but she sat up straight.

  “A few years ago,” she said, “they tried to use my talent in psychiatry. I was only ten...eleven...it lasted six months or so. The idea was that I could get inside people’s problems, find out why they were really screwed up, instead of why they thought they were. It worked, after a fashion. But I didn’t like it. I didn’t have much contact with extreme psychosis—usually it was personal problems, depression, dislocation. Crazy people—really crazy people—made me sick. My father, and some of the doctors, thought I was in danger. The whole thing never really got off the ground. They tried to teach me some theory, but I was too young. I didn’t get it. And it didn’t seem to fit with the kind of thing I read anyhow.

  “What I’m trying to lead up to is this. Those people aren’t just simple. They’re mad. They’re sick.”

  “They’re schizoid,” said Conrad, cutting in quickly. “Dislocated from their surroundings. Out of contact with the environment. But it’s something that’s arisen quite naturally out of the way they’re living. They haven’t ‘gone insane.’ They’re not psychotic. I don’t believe there’s any physical damage to their brains. It’s a matter of the way they’ve grown up, in a depleted environment. Not only physically depleted but mentally. They talk, but they don’t really communicate. They’re living half-lives, having lost virtually everything the original colonists had: all the knowledge, all the values, the sense of identity. Their humanity has simply drained away, over the years and the generations. They retain enough to survive—just. The population is imbalanced, incidentally; there are twice as many females as males, and the ratio is much higher in the higher age-groups. It seems the women cope better than the men, or the girls than the boys.”

  “Can we get through to them?” asked Linda.

  “In time,” said Nathan. Mariel confirmed what he said with a nod. “Especially the children,” he went on. “They may be the ones to concentrate on. They can learn. They can be re-educated.”

  “And then?” I said.

  Nathan looked at me, and waited.

  “What are we going to try to do?” I said. “You say they can be re-educated, but what’s the aim of the re-education? To turn them back into decent human beings, like the original colonists? To wind them up like clockwork toys, and then to let them go so they can repeat the whole process? There are less than a hundred! If fourteen hundred able and knowledgeable people couldn’t cope, couldn’t begin to build a viable colony here, what chance have ninety-two?”

  “That depends,” said Nathan coolly.

  “On what?”

  On what prevented the original colonists from carrying through what they started. On whether we can find out what it was. And on what we can do about seeing that it doesn’t happen again.”

  “You talk as if the colony had been the victim of some kind of disaster,” I said. “Something that could have been avoided if it could have been foreseen. We don’t know that.”

  “We don’t know anything, yet,” he countered. “We have to find out. And while we’re finding out, we have to do what we can. There are no alternatives, Alex. We have to do what we can to help these people survive here. We can’t take them away.”

  “No,” I said, harshly. “We can’t.” I shut up, then. There was no point in going on.

  Nathan was quick to move in the falling silence. “There are a few other points which ought to be mentioned,” he said. “Concerning what I saw in the village. I
saw the radio, which is still, as we know, operative. There’s other equipment from the ships. But what I didn’t see is any sign of the data bank: the tapes, the films, the equipment for use with the tapes and films. That’s something we’ll have to search for, if we’re going to discover why all the knowledge contained in that bank no longer exists—or seems not to exist—in the minds of the people.

  “The people seem to live exclusively out of what remains of the original farming operation. They have chickens, eggs, and vegetables still growing in the fields. I saw no sign of anything gathered from the forest.

  “Another thing I didn’t find was a graveyard. If the original colonists had put up commemorative markers—or any sort of markers at all—we might have a better idea of the pattern of decline. But it seems the dead are simply buried. No records. No memories. In fact, the generations that have passed away seem to have left very little of themselves behind at all. So little that I wonder if maybe they didn’t go somewhere else.”

  “You think what’s left is only a remnant of the original colony?” asked Karen. “That the rest are living elsewhere.”

  “Maybe not living,” said Nathan. “Perhaps they went elsewhere and died.”

  “Into the forest?” This from Linda.

  “And that,” I mused, chipping in again, “might explain the wall. It might explain why the present generation are so afraid of the forest, if something out there killed a large number of the original settlers.”

  It made a kind of sense. The survey team had spent a year in the forest and found nothing inimical. But the settlers were here for a lifetime—all the time in the world to find what the survey team had missed.

  “The present settlers,” said Conrad, quietly, “don’t seem to know why they fear the forest. We couldn’t get any answers. It’s all very well to suggest that something in the forest kills people, but it doesn’t begin to explain what’s happened here, inside the settlement.”

  And that was true enough, too.

  “The people out there now,” said Conrad, continuing in the same calm tone, “are the sixth and seventh generations. But the sixth generation must have overlapped the fourth, and the fourth the second. It’s not a long chain of communication. The kind of mental deterioration which has happened here wasn’t caused by simple forgetfulness. A generation doesn’t grow up in this kind of total ignorance unless something happened to prevent one of the prior generations passing on what they knew.

  “Before the Daedalus set out on its first tour we discussed the possibility of historical regression in the colonies. It seemed a real possibility that the descendants of the actual settlers might grow up to learn a wholly different scheme of things, without most of the knowledge their parents needed and took for granted. But the colonists who came out here, and to all the other worlds, knew the danger of concentrating exclusively on practical matters. They knew how vital it was to protect the information they carried with them, how necessary it was to make use of it in every way possible. They must have had plans to guard that heritage as the most precious thing they brought with them from Earth, for that is what it was.

  “These people here have lost that heritage, and it isn’t a trivial question to ask how. Indeed, it’s the most important question of all, especially in view of what Nathan has said about there being no sign of the data bank or its associated equipment in the village. If it isn’t there, where is it?”

  No one had anything to add to that.

  “You’ve been through those survey reports more often than anyone, Alex,” said Nathan. “Now you’ve had your twenty minutes on the ground, too. Do you have anything to add?”

  I regretted my cavalier statement about being able to deduce more from twenty minutes direct observation than from weeks of careful study. All I really had to add was the fact that the forest had a pleasant smell.

  “There were once fourteen hundred people here,” I said, recapitulating the basics while I fought to see some significant possibility hitherto overlooked. “That was a century and a half ago. They started to clear land, to build houses. And they made a good start. They did clear land—more than this tiny area—and they did build houses. They planned fields, built hedges, planted crops.

  “But then, some time later, they changed their priorities. They retreated to a pitiful tract of land barely three square miles in area. They walled it in and surrendered the land outside. To judge by the extent to which the forest has reclaimed that land. I’d guess this happened a hundred years ago, give or take fifteen.

  “Something happened to change their minds. Not necessarily something sudden. A growing realization that they couldn’t make it—a gradual acceptance of defeat—could have forced the decision just as easily as any specific catastrophe. But when they retreated, they retreated all the way. Not just physically, but in terms of what they were trying to do. Their original intention must have been to select what was useful from the native land and combine it with what they had brought with them, to achieve a synthesis of the two life-systems which would permit them to live and grow. For some reason, they discovered—or concluded—that such a synthesis was either impossible or undesirable.

  “The obvious explanation is that they discovered something in the native life-system inimical to human life. The survey team found nothing, but that’s not necessarily conclusive. The team that surveyed Floria didn’t identify the tricky factor there. We must also presume that whatever they found is responsible for the mental breakdown of the colonists after or during the period of retreat.

  “That’s the obvious explanation. In skeletal form, at least. I can’t think, off-hand, of a respectable alternative. But I don’t feel happy about it. There’s something missing. Not just a detail, but something major. An extra factor.”

  “Why so sure?” asked Linda.

  They were all waiting for some amazing revelation. I didn’t have one. All I had was a feeling.

  “The wall,” I said. “It doesn’t keep the forest out. It keeps the people in. Their rejection of the forest is more than just the result of finding danger there. Psychologically, it’s more powerful than that. And more subtle. Hatred, rather than fear. That wall is a gesture of defiance, not a barrier.”

  I stopped, losing the thread of the thought. I didn’t seem to have got anywhere. I looked up, at the circle of faces, still expectant.

  “Whatever the answer is,” I said. “We won’t find it here. We’ll have to look for it in the forest.”

  And we all knew who was going to be the one who went looking.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The next two days passed slowly. It was the kind of time interval which tends to become marginal when relegated to the memory, as though of doubtful reality. I do not remember the days as patterns of events but as one deep well of emotional reaction from which I was eager to be released. The quality of the emotion involved was not easy to label. It lasted too long to be called horror. It was more a kind of psychological nausea.

  The village was a village of ghosts. The houses, despite their tenants, were locked into the process of slow deterioration which one associates with total neglect: erosion by weather and waste. Of the people, some talked hardly at all, and others hardly stopped, but the latter exercised little control over the constant spillage of phonemic assemblies which no longer encoded conscious ideas by any effort of will.

  They were docile. They accepted whatever we tried to do to and for them with a fatalism barely touched by fear. The children tended to follow us around, to watch what we did with wide-eyed stares still, apparently, possessed of a glimmering curiosity.

  The situation was by no means hopeless. The total lack of any real animal aggression—which had, no doubt, been a contributory factor in the general decay—would work in our favor while we attempted to re-educate the relict of the colony. Nathan, at least, was outwardly confident that we could salvage the minds of the younger members of the population. There was no possibility of turning them into beings like ourselves, but we c
ould show them ways to survive more easily, and perhaps reinvest them with the will to do so. But setting them up again was the lesser part of the problem. The greater part lay in trying to discover why the disaster had occurred in the first place, and in asking the question of whether it might not happen yet again.

  As we went among the people in the settlement in those two days we found ourselves acting a part—a part for which none of us was entirely suited. They did not seek to make gods out of us, and we did not want to pretend to such a role, but the situation was shaped in such a way that the prerogatives normally abandoned to god or chance became ours. We had to make decisions about the way in which the lives of the people were to be redesigned and redirected. It was a responsibility that I, for one, did not find comfortable.

  Conrad, Linda and I spent the two days conducting medical examinations with all the thoroughness and analytical sophistication at the disposal of the Daedalus lab. We found the colonists to be suffering from various deficiency diseases and general malnutrition, but none of the serious organic malfunctions which prey upon people so weakened on Earth. Dendra, in fact, was a remarkably healthy place to live. Although there were mammalian creatures in the native life-system their bodily chemistry was sufficiently different to set up a considerable barrier to bacterial and virus adaptation. The original colonists, of course, had been rigorously debugged in order to prevent their importing anything potentially dangerous. The people of the settlement were having a little trouble with plant ectoparasites, fungal skin-infections, but internally they were virtually free of toxic infection. Nearly all of them, of course, would have developed allergy reactions to local proteins, but local circumstances generally permitted no build-up of allergens in the local environment, thus preventing the massive reactions often associated with pollen seasons on Earth. Although the survey team had found the air to be replete with strange substances their concentration was always well below danger level. The unusual steadiness of the atmospheric circulation—the wind which blew perpetually from the south—helped maintain this constancy.