The Florians

by Brian Stableford

  “By all the rules, it’s the Planners we should be dealing with. They are the actual masters and it’s not up to us to question that. The only trouble is that it occurs to me that while the rebels have a very keen and real interest in using us, the Planners might just settle for quietly removing us from the scene with cut throats. The whole situation is rather more complex than that, because both sides are worried about what recontact may mean to them in the future, but with things as uncertain as they are my natural pessimism assures me that there’s a very real danger of someone opting for the simple answer...which is murder.”

  “And you still think we were wrong to run?”

  “I don’t know,” I told her. “It’s all very well for the UN to tell us that we’re expendable and lay down rules according to that assumption. I don’t feel very expendable, myself. So maybe we should try looking after ourselves. On the other hand, if we’d been able to keep the lid on and everything going smoothly, we might never have got into such a nasty set of circumstances. But here we are, so....”

  I didn’t bother to finish it, and she didn’t bother to help me out. Silence fell, for a full minute or more, while we thought about the implications of that “so....”

  “It’s bloody cold,” she commented finally.

  “We’ve no food,” I said. “No weapons. No friends. No plans. And on top of that, as you so aptly put it, it’s bloody cold. One can’t help but feel that the gods are against us.”

  “The gods are always against you,” she said philosophically. “But sometimes you can cheat them.”

  Which was a shrewd enough observation. Except that in order to cheat you have to have a chance to stack the deck...or to secrete a card in your sleeve. So far, it seemed, there wasn’t one of us who’d had a chance to do anything remotely clever.

  Perhaps it was time to start.

  “It seems to me,” I said, “that we have two basic choices. Either we go back to the ship and see what can be done there, or we go to the island, and see if we can recruit Nathan to our independent operation...or, just possibly, let him recruit us back into his.”

  “I don’t fancy our chances of getting near that ship,” she said.

  “I don’t much fancy our chances of contacting Nathan. either,” I admitted. “It looks like long odds both ways. But we have to opt for one or another.”

  “If you were in their place,” she mused, “which one would you expect us to try?”

  “The ship,” I said confidently.

  “They’ll be ready for us there,” she said.

  “But they might not expect us to try to get to Nathan.”

  “So....”

  “How are you with ships?” I asked, in a noticeably lighter tone. “The kind that float on water.”

  “I can row,” she offered.

  “So can I.”

  We let it rest for a moment while we thought it over. The more I thought the less like a rational plan of action it seemed. Finding Nathan might be like locating the proverbial needle in a haystack. And even the simple business of getting to the island in order to start looking might be far from easy. But the alternative didn’t seem to bear much thinking about either. At the ship, they’d be alert. And we already knew that they were prepared to play rough. It would be good to spring Mariel...but we had no guarantee that she’d still be there. For all we knew she might be on the island herself by now.

  It had to be the devil or the deep blue sea, and I always figured that in such a situation you had a better chance with the deep blue sea....

  “The island is the real heart of affairs,” I said. “That’s where we want to be, if things take a new turn. You never know—the plot could get sicker yet.”

  “OK,” she said. “I’m with you.”

  “But let’s take it easy,” I said. “We have to be careful. The long-term objective is to convince these people that we came to help them, not to pave the way for a takeover bid or to start meddling with their attempts at historical navigation. We have to persuade them to listen to us—and accept that dealing with us won’t mean a new wave of colonists with their own ideas and their own know-how.”

  “That’s not going to be easy,” she said. “Bearing in mind that it could be exactly what recontact will mean.”

  There had, of course, been no mention in the prospectus for the operation that we’d been shown of any such scheme. But it was natural enough to expect that if Earth wanted to restart the colony project, then exporting people to already established and successful colonies was safer and more justifiable than searching out new possibilities...especially if the overall success rate was low.

  “The UN can’t start exporting people to Floria,” I said optimistically. “It would start a war.”

  “But it would be a war that the invaders would win,” she pointed out. “And they’d win easily. There are no weapons here, remember.”

  The attempt to eliminate the possibility of civil war is by no means the best preparation for the repulsion of an invasion. Karen was right: if Earth wanted Floria, then Earth could take Floria, giants or no giants. And when every little thing that might help tip the balance was important in view of the poor state of Kilner’s colonies, one perfect world ripe for the plucking might be a weighty factor in the argument.

  “Killing us won’t help,” I said. “In the long run, it wouldn’t make the slightest difference.”

  “Wouldn’t it?” She pursued the point remorselessly. “The Daedalus is the only ship in space at this time. Maybe there’ll be more going out in the six years we’re scheduled to be away, but maybe not. The whole program hangs in the balance, and could become the victim of any political slogan war. If the Florians destroy Daedalus they just might get away with it. Maybe only for fifty years or a hundred...but maybe forever. Earth’s resources keep stretching and stretching, and propaganda’s had them on the brink of extinction for three hundred years and more. but the time is coming when there just might not be the resources for a space program unless we can somehow co-opt the resources of healthy and active colonies.”

  I hesitated, and finally found myself thrown back on the weakest argument of them all—the self-defeating argument.

  “The Florians don’t know all that,” I stated, without confidence. It was true, of course...the Florians didn’t know all that, and we’d be idiots to tell them. But the implications of that statement were that we were going to be exactly what the Florians suspected us of being: con men trying to win their friendship with false promises. That cap might fit Nathan, but I didn’t like it at all. I didn’t want to have to wear it.

  She wasn’t even finished yet.

  “And suppose,” she said, “that the Planners do decide to dispose of us. Or have already decided to...what then? We fight, we run, just as we’re doing now. We may die...but we may also get away with it. And we leave behind...what?”

  I saw what she was getting at. Now that we’d stirred up the wasps’ nest it was stirred. We couldn’t back out now and say “Sorry, wrong world.” Recontact had been achieved the moment the Daedalus landed, and the consequences of that recontact were going to be felt on Floria one way or another. We had arrived to find a world fighting very hard for permanent peace...but it wasn’t impossible that we might leave one arming for war. Against potential enemies from Earth, or against one another.

  Did they ever have a chance, I wondered, of building a new world for themselves? A world that could be different from Earth, a human race with different priorities? Perhaps it was always hopeless while there was any possibility of re-contact. Maybe, I thought, it isn’t just the people who learn nothing from history who find themselves trapped by it. Perhaps the trap is there whatever you learn.

  “It looks,” I muttered, “like a case of heads you win, tails I lose. For everyone. How the hell are we going to get out of this mess?”

  She pointed a finger up into the starry sky. “Like I said,” she drawled. “Cheat the bastards.”

  CHAPTER NINE

/>   As soon as the daylight came, we began the long march. There was no point in wasting time. We were cold, we were hungry...and we had a limited time in front of us before we were no longer capable of following any plan, however ill formed and crazy.

  The idea—mine—was to double back in a long arc which would take us around Leander to the seashore north of the port. Then under cover of the next night’s darkness, we would sneak back into the inhabited area just far enough to find and appropriate a rowboat. We would then row to the island and set about trying to locate Nathan or learn whatever there was to be learned by careful eavesdropping. We had no cards up our sleeves...our final recourse was simply surrender.

  Laboriously, we climbed the long slope at whose foot we had hid out for the night. We were hoping that at the top we might find a vantage point from which we could see the whole extent of the territory we had to cross, and thus identify an easy route across it.

  I didn’t expect that there would be any organized pursuit or search. It hardly seemed worth it, from Jason’s point of view or Vulgan’s. There was nothing we could do out here...we didn’t even have enough local knowledge to live off the land for a week. Sooner or later we’d have to come to them, and the only question so far as they were concerned was which one of them would be afforded the dubious privilege of grabbing us. In the meantime, they would be very busy...the conflict had been joined and the sides would have to be drawn up.

  From a crag atop the ridge—far above the wrinkled landscape we had traversed during our flight from the station—we could see the buildings of Leander and the harbor. We could also see the island—an irregular lump of rock looking, in profile, somewhat akin to a Poisson curve, with a tall building making up the tip of the modal point. It was some way to the north of the point at which the sun had risen from the sea, but it was still only a silhouette against the brightly lit sky and sea.

  There was a spur of land projecting into the sea north of the town, pointing like a thick finger at the island. This spur formed the northern bank of a river whose estuary was so close to Leander harbor that it must have been a good deal easier for ships to leave than to arrive. The harbor traffic must creep in from the south and then move to the north, where the current of the river would carry it out to sea through a relatively weed-clear channel.

  From where we stood we could inspect the country strung out between the ridge and the coast almost as if it were a gigantic map. It was hard to follow such minor colonial innovations as the dirt roads and the railroad because the folds of the territory and its forests hid large stretches from view, cutting them into small sections and destroying the visual impression of sequence. Except for the jungle of gray slate roofs that was Leander the humans, from this elevation, seemed to have made very little impact on the land. But this was not farming land. To the south—which was hidden from us by the hills—we would have seen a different kind of picture, with square divisions chopping up the territory into a multitude of regular segments, each one the symbol of human domination.

  Away to the north, beyond the river, there was a large flat area of mottled green and silver, with occasional streaks of brown mud. This I judged to be salt marsh—not a tidal marsh but a static one, with land slowly being whittled away by the corrosive flow of the river and its attendant streams, being reclaimed inch by inch into the ocean.

  Scattered on the north bank of the river there were a number of huts, which did not seem to be permanent dwellings but buildings erected for occasional convenience.

  I pointed them out to Karen. “That’s where we’ll find our boat,” I said. “We won’t have to go into town. That’s a base for occasional forays into the salt marsh.”

  “Why would they want to go into the salt marsh?” she asked.

  “Because it’ll be teeming with what passes for animal life on this world. Pretty repulsive creatures, for the most part, but all good solid protein. The people might find it unpalatable but the pigs won’t. It’s not enough to make an industry out of, but a few men sallying forth once or twice a month to pick up what they can could certainly make a worthwhile thing out of it.”

  “How do we cross the river?”

  I pointed almost due north, to a point at which there was a rough wooden bridge, half hidden in a clump of trees. It was only a footbridge, and the path which led to it wasn’t very noticeable.

  “That’s silly,” she said. “Why would they build a bridge there, in the middle of nowhere? There isn’t a house for miles.”

  “At a guess,” I said, “it’s the narrowest part of the river. Closer to the town a bridge would be a major engineering challenge, but that’s just a few logs spanning the water. Just for the sake of having a bridge available in case they want to go out into the country to the north.”

  She was measuring the distance between the river mouth and the island. “The current will help us,” she said, “but it’s still a fair way to row.”

  “The sea’s calm,” I pointed out. “The sea’s always calm. We can do it easily. No trouble at all...so long as they leave lights in the window to guide us. And why shouldn’t they?”

  “Fair enough,” she replied.

  We began to scramble down the slope on the other side of the ridge. It was almost exactly like the one we’d come up: the rock was firm but badly rutted. The crevices where vegetation grew with the characteristic Florian luxury offered an abundance of hand- and foot-holds, but could not always be trusted. Sometimes the plants would simply tear away from their anchorage in a shower of loose soil. It would have been a dangerous climb had the face been steeper, but we were able to choose a fairly simple way which took time but didn’t expose us to any real danger. I tested all my holds carefully, and not until I was almost at the bottom did one give way and spill me over. An apparently firm plant found my total weight too much to bear, and was ripped loose, roots and all, in my left hand. I scraped an elbow painfully in scrabbling for support, but was fortunate enough not to damage an ankle.

  When Karen arrived, moments later, to check that I was all right, I had already given up the morbid inspection of minor injuries and was examining the plant thoughtfully.

  “This is no time for collecting botanical specimens,” she commented sarcastically, “and that’s no way to go about it.”

  “Look at it,” I said.

  It had a tough, slender stem, thickened into wood but still elastic. It had many branches and leaves, arranged in the complex but exact and symmetrical geometrical pattern typical of Florian vegetation. The branches bore tiny conical seed-bearing structures, pale yellow in color, at their extremities. From the tip of the root-net to the crown of the foliage the plant was something under eighteen inches long...and yet it was unmistakably a tree.

  “So what?” said Karen, having inspected it.

  I looked around, and then pointed to a tree which was growing in the deep soil of the valley floor, well away from the shadow of the rock face. I walked over to it. It was some twenty feet high, but otherwise very similar in structure to the plant I held in my hand. My intention was simply to show Karen that my plant was a miniature of the larger one, but as I approached the big one and compared it with the one in my hand I began to realize the extent of the similarity.

  It was not simply that they were different representatives of the same species. The small tree was identical in all but size to the larger one. It had the same number of branches, and the extent of its development was the same. It had the same number of seed-cones, each one a perfect replica, albeit very tiny, of the ones on the greater tree.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” I murmured.

  “That’s nice,” said Karen, still sarcastic. “It’s a baby one.”

  “It’s impossible,” I said. “These things are identical. They must be brother trees—germinated at the same time from similar seeds. Genetically and developmentally identical in all respects but one. But that’s just not possible.”

  “It seems reasonable enough,” she objected. “The one
you’re holding was growing in a little tiny crack with hardly any soil, shielded from the sun for some of the day. That thing’s got all the sun and soil it could wish for.”

  “And so,” I said, “it’s grown to be a nice, healthy giant...like everything else on Floria. But what I want to know is how this one managed to grow at all. It had the bare minimum requirement for growth...it could germinate, and begin to grow...but not like this. It should have started out and then failed. Maybe it could stay alive, as a weedy stem with a couple of branches, but that’s not what it’s done—it’s reproduced the form of the healthy tree exactly. It’s developed perfectly—on a much smaller scale. It’s as if it knew when it started out that it couldn’t grow to be big. But that’s not the way things work...growth is genetically programmed. A plant can’t just ‘decide’ to stay small. Its development should have been short-circuited...it should never have grown to be a fully mature individual.”

  “But it did,” she pointed out. It was information I didn’t need. Despite my specialist’s eye, I had only just seen the evidence of the fact that Florian plants and Earthly plants had one more vital difference in their capabilities. I had been assuming too close a similarity. Because a tree is a tree, and grass is grass, anywhere on the colony worlds....

  I should have been the last person to fall into the obvious trap of taking things for granted, but it’s such an easy trap.

  “This is it,” I said quietly. “This is the key to the giantism. But how does it work?”

  “I’ve seen miniature trees on Earth,” said Karen. “They call them bonsai or something similar. It’s an ancient Japanese art.”