The Florians

by Brian Stableford

  And they felt, somehow, superior to us. They couldn’t conceal it. We were smooth-talking visitors from the parental world (which to them could only be an awesome myth), had arrived in our great black sky-borne cylinder, representatives of a “higher” civilization. And yet they felt superior. Because they were bigger? Or because the memory of Earth that survived within their culture was a memory of a failed world...a world which had lost its way in a history controlled by fortune?

  These people were cocksure. They had a wealth of pride. And that made me uneasy...for in every land of milk and honey lurks a rat, and the difference between proud people and humble ones is that the humble ones are aware of the rat before it starts picking their bones.

  But they were only farmers. I told myself that. Somewhere in this world would be shrewder men. They would be afraid of us—perhaps they might hate us—but they would be able to tell us what we wanted to know.

  Five of us had come to the party. Standing orders required two people to stay with the ship at all times. Rolving had insisted on being one, and somehow it had been agreed that Linda Beck should be the other. After two weeks in transit, no doubt we could all have used a sight of the sky and a breath of air, but a fortnight isn’t an eternity, by any means—which meant, among other things, that the relief at being free from the confining walls of the ship wore off fairly quickly. As the party dragged on, I watched the others wilt, nod began to count the minutes. Only Nathan maintained his front of inexhaustibility.

  Conrad seemed to be maintaining himself aloof from it all. He’d drunk a fair amount but he was cold sober. He had a head like concrete—nothing ever threatened his presence of mind. He was fifty, but looked older. He was tall, by Earthly standards, but life was beginning to drain his flesh and he no longer looked strong. His hair was white, and there was something birdlike about him: perhaps the suggestion of the way he held his head to expose his neck, or his uncommonly bright eyes.

  He alone, of the team who had gone out with Kilner, had elected to go out again. A five-year turn of duty followed quickly by seven: a punishing sequence. Perhaps he had expected to take Kilner’s place, although I had never detected the slightest sign of resentment in his attitude toward me.

  The noise seemed simply to roll around Conrad like the ocean waves around a rock. He was unmoved by it. Karen and I endured it. Mariel, though, seemed at once to be absorbed within it and pained by it. Mariel was fourteen. I couldn’t help thinking of fourteen as being very young...I had, after all, a son some three years older. She seemed to me to have no place aboard the ship, no place in such a venture as ours. And she made me uneasy. I knew, although I had not yet seen any outward evidence of the fact, that her mind was not like mine. She seemed to me far more alien than these men of Floria—or the truly alien creatures of Floria. They fit. She did not. One expects strangers in strange lands. But not within the sanctified enclave of home.

  I found myself watching her as she reacted and replied to the questions flung at her from all sides. The Florians understood her presence no more than I did. To them, she must, seem even younger, for although she had not yet grown into her frame she would never be tall...not even by Earthly standards. She seemed neither lively nor particularly interested in what was going on, and yet the colonists—particularly the women—seemed to feel it necessary to keep her constantly involved. Their questions were inane...though they genuinely wanted to know about Earth they could not find the right questions to ask. Not of Mariel...not even of Nathan.

  I think we were all profoundly glad when the affair broke up. They asked us politely if we wished to stay in the village, though finding five beds for us would undoubtedly have proved difficult. When we expressed a preference for our bunks in the ship they offered us lanterns to light our way through the dark night. The farmer whose house was close to the ship, and whose field we had destroyed by landing on it, adopted the role of guide. His name was Joe Saccone.

  We took our time walking back, and made no effort to stay in a close-knit group. I dropped back deliberately, in order to talk to Conrad Silvian. He had charge of one of the lanterns, and thus it didn’t matter how far behind we fell.

  “What do you think?” I asked him.

  “About things in general? Or the size of things in particular?”

  “Both.”

  “In general,” he said, his voice dry and slow, “things are good. Better than I saw on the first trip. This community is well established and working. They talk of towns and cities, and they have only a vague notion of the things which are going on in the far west—in the forests and the mountains The colony is big, complex...and relaxed. We found nothing like this on the first trip. The colonists on those worlds knew exactly what was going on everywhere, because the whole operation was tightly knit, geared to survival They’d never got beyond the point where any group of men could survive independent of the efforts of the whole colony Here we have a kind of cultural diffusion—the parts becoming independent of the whole. I think that’s promising....”

  “But...,” I supplied.

  “But,” he agreed, “something is happening here and it’s strange. The wrong way around. We came expecting to find deficiency disease, and what we find is superficiency disease. People on Earth grow to be seven feet tall and stay fit and healthy. They may make damn good sportsmen. They tend to die twenty years ahead of their three score and ten even without taking environmental effects into account, but there’s an awful lot of small men would trade years for size. So maybe this is a good sign, too. Maybe these are a better breed of men, growing big and strong in their alien Eden. They think so. But I want to know why. Rigorous natural selection for height and mass is out of the question—any subtractive selection strong enough to add a foot and more to the average height in seven generations would have decimated the colony. So...it seems that something is affecting their glandular balance, altering the control of growth. There are steroid drugs on Earth which permit the body to put on a lot of weight by acting as hormone mimics and upsetting the metabolic balance. They don’t usually add height, but they’re not usually given to growing children. If something in the alien plants that have been conscripted as food fit for humans has such an effect, it would be perpetually present, and might permanently affect the hormonal balance.”

  “That’s possible,” I agreed.

  “We’ll be able to find out in the lab,” he said. “But it would help us to look if we could find out about their eating habits.”

  “It might also be worth asking a few simple questions about the population size, birth rates, death statistics, and so on,” I mused. “And we mustn’t overlook the possibility that this may be a local condition. We’re looking at one tight-knit group. Maybe in the towns—or in similar communities a long way away—there’s a wider range of heights. Maybe somewhere atavisms like us still survive. You know...pygmies.”

  He didn’t laugh. It wasn’t funny. Anything you can’t understand is something to worry about...especially the simple things. Sometimes you can leap to the obvious conclusion and be hopelessly wrong. The history of science is the history of people belatedly realizing the obvious and still being wrong.

  We lagged so far behind the others that by the time we got back to the ship there was no queue for the safety lock. The lock took two at a time, and we were able to go through together. Another advantage in being slow was that the burden of answering what’s-it-like? questions posed by Linda and Pete Rolving fell principally on other shoulders. Even so, we didn’t entirely get away with it, because Linda wanted specialist impressions as well as general ones, and Conrad and I were the natural ones to provide them. Between us, we went over most of the ground we’d covered in our earlier conversation.

  I finally got to my bunk feeling utterly weary, but with my mind still in a high gear. I lay back on the sleeping bag trying to slow things down inside my head. I was just about easing back when there was a knock at the door. It was Mariel. I’m afraid that my tone as I asked her wha
t she wanted was mildly hostile.

  “I thought you ought to know,” she said. “Those people in the village. They really meant it.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “They’re honest people. They aren’t hostile. They put on a show—but it wasn’t really false.”

  I hadn’t got up from the bunk. I let my head rest on the pillow while I stared at her for a few moments.

  “You mean that you can tell when people are lying?” I said finally.

  “Usually,” she replied.

  “And they weren’t. They really were pleased to see us. They really think that everything here is going well. Unlike the people in Kilner’s colonies.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Why tell me? I’m just the rat-catcher. Nathan’s the contact man.”

  “You seemed worried...as if you weren’t sure of them.

  “And you thought you’d take the weight off my mind?”

  “Yes.” I could see that the bluntness of my comments was wounding her. She was holding the door ajar, and her fingers were moving slightly as she gripped it. I felt contrite, but I couldn’t disguise the uneasiness which was constricting my voice. I hadn’t known that her talent extended to being a lie detector. I didn’t really know how far her talent extended at all, or what it consisted of. The vague notion that she might, to some extent, be able to read the thoughts behind my words was disturbing.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, a little more kindly. “Thanks for telling me.”

  “Do you know why they’re so big?” she asked hesitantly.

  “No,” I replied, wondering whether she was asking because she didn’t know or because she did.

  “Neither do they,” she told me. “They didn’t realize...it’s normal with them...they didn’t know that they were different from the original colonists...” She searched for more words, but failed to find them. She had the gift of tongues...but it was the gift of understanding, not of speaking.

  “Didn’t they, now?” I said, sitting up, and feeling my mind get back into gear. I looked at her carefully. She had nothing more to say of her own accord, and was waiting rather anxiously for questions. She pulled the door open a little further, ready to go.

  “How can you tell when people are lying?” I asked gently.

  She shrugged slightly. “Reflexes,” she said. “Most people can’t control the little physical signs which go with their thoughts. Your pupils dilate when you look at people you like, the muscles in your face change when you react inside your head to things which happen. I...just decode the signals. I don’t know how...it’s not really conscious. But I’ve been tested. That’s how I do it. I have to see people, close to...I can’t read minds.”

  I wondered what she could read from my face. I knew she knew I was wondering. Even if she couldn’t get inside my head, there was still cause for uneasiness. Who can tell when his pupils are dilating?

  “If they don’t realize it’s happened,” I reasoned, aloud, “then it must have happened over several generations, and uniformly throughout the population.” I looked at her for confirmation. She said nothing, and if there were signs in her face, I couldn’t read them. But then logic wasn’t her department. What she wanted was some acknowledgment of the fact that she’d been right to tell me—and some apology for the fact that I hadn’t been ready to listen.

  “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.