The Florians

by Brian Stableford

  “Nathan Parrick is a good man,” said the UN man. “And he’s not a pet diplomat. He is a diplomat...but he’s also a brilliant social scientist. You have a good deal in common. And a lot of the work he’ll take off your shoulders is work you wouldn’t want to be bothered with in any case. You’re a scientist, not a politician. You don’t want to get bogged down in petty disputes with the colonists, in negotiations and recriminations. You want to get on with your job. If only Kilner had been allowed to get on with his job instead of being involved in constant hassles with the people he was trying to help...This is all for the best, Alex. I’m sorry we couldn’t tell you sooner, but you don’t realize the amount of backstage argument that has gone into this. The UN is run by committees—the whole world is run by committees—and nothing ever gets done or decided until the eleventh hour. You know the way things are.”

  “Oh sure,” said Alexander wearily. “I know exactly how things are. It’s a wonder the whole damn world doesn’t grind to a halt.”

  “It has,” said Pietrasante. “That’s part of the problem. Perhaps the most desperate part of all.”

  Outside the car, night was gathering. Very slowly, darkness consumed the daylight. But the stars never came out, for the sky never lost the ruddy glow that was the reflection of the lights of sprawling civilization. Over the cities, the air was always hazy. Only the moon occasionally shone through.

  There were no horizons in the sky, but from the city streets there was no glimpse of infinity either.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The air in the hall was heavy with heat and odor. At first, it had been a welcome change from the cool, sterile air aboard the ship, but it didn’t take long before I began to feel slightly sick. I wasn’t acclimatized, and I hadn’t drunk enough...or maybe I’d drunk too much.

  I kept looking for an opportunity to get outside and take time to recover, wondering whether they’d be offended. But Nathan Parrick was playing the star role—the ambassador from Earth—and the time came when I figured that they’d hardly miss the odd spear-carrier. Several heads turned to watch me go, but their glances were incurious and nobody tried to haul me back into the party with an excess of drunken zeal.

  I don’t like parties, anyhow.

  The noise seemed somehow louder as it oozed out after me than it had been when I was in the middle of it. I suppose that was because I had the silence to compare it to. Outside, there was a light breeze and the sun was going down. There was not a soul in sight. To get away from the intrusive sound I went down the steps and began to walk away, into the village. I was, I suppose, walking down what one day might become the main street, but for the time being the conglomeration of buildings lacked that much organization. The hall where the welcoming party was staggering on toward the evening hours was simply the geometrical center of a loosely knit community extending on all sides. The distribution of homes and outhouses obeyed—in a rough and ready fashion—the inverse square law. Even the farm where the ship rested, which was something more than a mile to the west, was “in” the village,—a part of the community whose focal point this was.

  I’d gone maybe twenty or thirty paces when I heard someone coming after me. The feet fell lightly, and I knew without looking back that it wasn’t one of the natives. I waited, but didn’t turn until she was level with me. It was Karen Karelia, the spare ship-jockey.

  “Fleeing in disgust?” she asked. The hint of irony was rarely missing from her voice. Peter Rolving, whose position as captain she affirmed by fulfilling the role of “crew,” described her as a space freak, implying that she wanted off Earth largely because she wasn’t fond of her fellow men. She was crazy enough, of course—you have to be certifiable to want to ride a starship—but she wasn’t really a volunteer alien.

  “I just want to look around before it gets dark,” I told her. “Why should I be disgusted?”

  “Doesn’t it strike you as being a little over-extravagant? The food...the people...the way they’re working s hard to pretend that it’s a momentous occasion?”

  “It is,” I pointed out. “First contact in five generations, maybe six. The first of the sardine cans must have landed nearly a hundred and eighty years ago, the last...well maybe one-forty, give or take a few.”

  “But it isn’t quite what we expected, is it?” she said.

  I looked around, at the neat buildings grouped about the hall. There was a store, which had been extended within the last few years so that it now looked like two buildings tacked together. Its business must still be expanding as more and more goods came in from outside. There was a blacksmith’s shop. There were three great barns, semicircular in section, which—at the proper season—might be filled with the produce of the whole village, preparatory to its being loaded into wagons and hauled away.

  “I didn’t come with any fixed notions,” I told her. “No, this isn’t what Kilner found. Here, for once, the colony seems to have been successful. It looks good. And they weren’t ready to cut our throats when we came out through the lock...on the contrary, they seemed delighted to see us, even if it did take Nathan half an hour to explain who and what we are.”

  “But you sound as if you can’t quite believe it,” she said, “whether you expected the unexpected or not. And you’ve got to admit that they come as something of a surprise. Damn it all, half of them are getting on for seven feet tall!”

  I began to walk on, and she walked with me. We headed for a small stone bridge over the stream which cut a curved path through the village.

  “It’s odd,” I agreed.

  “What’s caused it?”

  “Maybe they eat well,” I said. It wasn’t a sarcastic remark, but she took it as such.

  “I know people back home who made eating the purpose of their lives,” she said. “People who knew just about everything there is to know about stuffing themselves full of every goddamn edible thing under the sun. They grew fat, but they didn’t grow seven feet tall.”

  “We’re under a different sun now,” I pointed out.

  She allowed me to dismiss the question without beginning to take it seriously. Inside, though, it was the thing that worried me most. The people looked healthy, happy, and strong. Very strong. A race of giants. People do grow that big on Earth—occasionally. There are a handful of giants in every generation. It’s natural...there’s nothing so very strange about it. But when everybody is built like an Olympic hammer-thrower...you have to wonder whether you’re not discovering a different order of nature altogether.

  But there was time to think about such questions. Abundant time. For now, though, I was on an alien world for the first time. I was walking on alien soil, beneath a different sky. I was beset by a strange mixture of sensations—a combination of familiarity and strangeness. It was absurd that the sky should be blue, that the sun sinking toward the horizon should have just the same ruddy face, that the distant clouds hazing its face should be the same clouds that floated over the Earth. Superficially, the familiarity concealed the alien. But there was the knowledge, inside me, that everything here was different. The sun and the sky were not the ones I knew, but were merely in disguise. The lack of any real sensory confirmation of the fact that this world was Floria, ninety light-years from Earth, and not the Earth itself, made me feel that this was all an elaborate facade...a sham...and that there was something weird and terrible lurking just out of sight in the corner of my eye.

  I stopped to lean on the parapet of the bridge, to look down into the water of the stream. It was only a couple of feet deep, but the rippled surface was so full of shadows and the red reflected glow of the sun that I couldn’t see anything beneath it.

  “No fish at all,” murmured Karen.

  “None whatsoever,” I agreed. Here was a point of essential difference. But it was a covert difference. Even if I had been able to see the depths beneath the surface, how could my senses have told me “This is not Earth...because there is no fish to be seen”? There were no fish in the streams of Earth. Only
in the farms and the factories, where the water flowed in sculpted channels, artificially aerated and thermostatically adjusted.

  She pulled herself up onto the parapet and used its height as a vantage point from which to look out at the village—but the stream itself was in a gully, and she could see little more from here than from the steps of the hall whence we had set out. I scanned the buildings incuriously, but my powers of observation worked uncontrolled, and my brain processed their information as a matter of habit.

  I noted that the buildings—each and every one, whether home or hut, brick or stone or wood, great or small—seemed curiously unfinished. There was not a one that had been. architecturally planned. They had been put up quickly, each to serve their function, with the assumption that each one might be constantly rebuilt—improved and extended. Each building had a life of its own. They were capable of growth and change, perhaps even of metamorphosis.

  It was a small thing, but it seemed meaningful. No one built that way on Earth. Here, the community was in a constant state of remaking itself: reshaping and replanning and reforming. They were unaffected by insidious myths of optimum use of resources and ultimate ends. There was a relaxation in the way things were done here, and a tension in the way they were done on Earth.

  “Perhaps it’s a local thing,” said Karen.

  “What?”

  “The giant business. Perhaps they’re inbred, perhaps it’s a freak.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  She was sitting on the parapet now, with her legs dangling down toward the water.

  “What happens tomorrow?” she asked.

  “They’ve sent a messenger to the nearest town. It’s on the coast. Nathan and I will go there in the morning, try to arrange meetings with the various people in authority. I don’t know whether it will be initially necessary for Mohammed to go to the mountain or whether they’ll come to us. Local transport isn’t very fast, although I hear they have the beginnings of a railroad. It may take a while to make the necessary contacts, but once we have channels of communication open it will get easier. What we need is a house—or a couple of houses—in the village, and people to handle liaison. Nathan and I may have to do a fair amount of traveling in the first few months, though.”

  “You think we’ll stay the full year? Even if things are really as healthy and happy as they seem?”

  “Almost certainly. If the colony is a success and doesn’t need our help, all well and good...but we’ll want to know why it’s a great success just as much as we’d want to know why it was in trouble. There’s a lot of work to be done. The whole question of whether there’s to be a new colony program may depend on the information we bring back—and from that point of view analyzing and documenting the successes may be even more vital than analyzing and documenting the failures.”

  “If it really is a success,” she said.

  “If...,” I echoed noncommittally.

  “You say they have a railroad,” she said. “Steam engines, I presume...Is that good or bad, after all this time? What sort of technological level are they supposed to have reached?”

  I shrugged. “Silly question,” I said, in an offhand manner. “There are no ‘levels of technology.’ Such things are an artifact of history. Maybe the notion has some meaning when you consider the order in which new discoveries are likely to be made—but there’s no coherent chain effect like a row of dominoes falling over. Here, where the colonists started out with all the knowledge of science and technology Earth could provide them with, and were limited only by the speed at which they could begin to muster the physical resources, technological developments would crop up in an entirely different order.”

  “But there are no tractors in the fields and horses do most of the work. They obviously don’t have internal combustion engines. Why not?”

  “Maybe they haven’t struck oil,” I suggested. “Or maybe they decided to do without. One advantage of having all that knowledge at your fingertips is that you can also decide which inventions you don’t want. Hindsight may have suggested to the old leaders of the colony that petrol engines are one thing the New Arcadia can do without. I don’t know...but did you see those magnificent horses? It isn’t just the people here that grow big and strong. There might be a lot to be said for a simpler way of life. Look where five centuries of industrial revolution got us on Earth.”

  “And you reckon that’s OK? The colony lands, burns the books, and starts over from scratch?”

  “That’s not what I said,” I pointed out. “They keep the books, and they use them. Only they aren’t simple-minded about it. They don’t just look to the books to tell them what to do—they look into them and try to figure out what not to do as well. The colonists were taking big risks to leave Earth...they must really have hated it. So why would they want to set out and slavishly recreate it? No...if this colony is succeeding, the men behind it will have had something up their sleeve...something that has allowed it to succeed.”

  “You really want to find something like that, don’t you?” she said. “A magic formula. Something to save the entire colony concept, renew the whole effort.”

  I studied her carefully. She had a hard, bony face, framed by white-blond hair which grew wild all around it. She was thirty-some, and didn’t look as if she’d done a lot of smiling in her life. Her sense of humor was decidedly acid. I liked her.

  “OK,” I said. “So I would. If there were such a thing to be found. But I’m not an idiotic optimist. I believe in the colony project even if there is no magic formula. I think we should keep trying, in spite of setbacks. I think we’ve done what we can with Earth. We have to move on to new levels of ambition.”

  I almost expected her to sneer, but she didn’t. “A lot of people think that kind of talk is poison,” she commented.

  “Not out here,” I said.

  “Don’t bet on it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What I said,” she muttered tersely.

  She couldn’t be talking about the colonists—she had to be thinking evil thoughts about someone on the strength. So who was on board to play devil’s advocate? Nathan? She wasn’t going to say. Maybe she was talking about herself. Maybe she meant to imply nothing more than the fact that other people didn’t quite have my deep-seated conviction about the rightness of it all.

  “It’ll be dark pretty soon,” she said, changing the subject.

  The sun was squatting on the horizon, but twilight might last some time. She wasn’t trying to pick an argument, though...just putting things back together again.

  “No point in taking a long walk,” I said. “They haven’t got street lights yet. Maybe they’re waiting till they have streets.”

  “It wouldn’t be very romantic anyhow,” she said, with the irony back at full force. “Not without a moon.”

  “That’s one hell of an old joke,” I said. “And it wasn’t ever funny.”

  “Don’t take it to heart,” she said.

  I suddenly felt slightly embarrassed, as though the sarcasm were directed specifically at me, instead of just coming naturally. I moved away reflexively, and then turned the movement into a first strolling step back in the direction of the hall.

  “Maybe they’re missing us,” I said. “It might be your turn to make a speech.”

  “Sure,” she countered. “I’d be a big hit. Every single dirty joke that’s been made up back home in the last two hundred years will be new to these guys.”

  “Don’t bet on it,” I told her.

  CHAPTER TWO

  There was a lot of the evening still to be endured. I say “endured” because it really wasn’t my scene at all. I’m not antisocial, but I find humanity en masse something of an embarrassment of riches. I don’t like crowds. Few scientists do. Once you have given over your life to the study of abstract principles governing the behavior of things which have only to be observed, never communicated with, your attitude to your fellow humans begins to change, and kee
ps on changing. A gap opens up between you, and no matter how close you stand to other people there’s an intangible distance forbidding a complete meeting of the minds. The distancing effect is even worse, of course, when the fellow human in question is one with whom you have nothing in common...not even a cultural background. In such instances, it is far too easy for said fellow human to become another thing to be observed, to be placed in a context of abstract and generalized principles rather than a context of social interaction.

  I have to confess that I could only watch the Florians from within. I could not reach out and join them. I could not enjoy the social occasion that they had concocted for our benefit, despite the fact that they were friendly. I didn’t, as Karen had suggested, find them disgusting...but there is something intimidating about men who tower over you by a full foot when, throughout your life, you have thought of yourself as a tall man.

  Nathan Parrick, however, seemed to be in his element. It wasn’t difficult to imagine his life on Earth consisting of endless official functions and informal but incredibly important meetings with all manner of VIPs. He talked easily and quickly, with the happy gift of being able to say nothing at all in the nicest possible way.

  There were speeches. Nathan’s was excellent, though lacking in dirty jokes. The ones which the farmers’ self-elected leader, Vern Harwin, attempted to deliver were by no means excellent but had a certain ring of sincerity which I found rather comforting. He didn’t tell any dirty jokes either.

  They were showing off, of course. (And so were we, in return.) The food and drink which they’d provided was too abundant, and so was the spirit of fellowship. Everybody laughed too loudly, said all the things they thought they ought to say. Everyone felt the need to make an impression.

  The farmers didn’t know that other colonies had failed, were in the process of failing. They didn’t know that they were, from our point of view, a great surprise. But they did know—or, at least, they believed—that they were, in their own right, a colossal success. They were proud of themselves and of their world. They loved showing off.