Bright Segment

by Theodore Sturgeon

  It was Teague’s son Nod who found what was needed to bring Teague’s interest back, at least for a while. The child came back to the compound one day, trailed by two slinking Felodons who did not catch him because they kept pausing and pausing to lap up gouts of blood which marked his path. Nod’s ear was torn and he had a green-stick break in his left ulna, and a dislocated wrist. He came weeping, weeping tears of joy. He shouted as he wept, great proud noises. Once in the compound, he collapsed, but he would not lose consciousness, nor his grip on his prize, until Teague came. Then he handed Teague the mushroom and fainted.

  The mushroom was and was not like anything on Earth. Earth has a fungus called schizophyllum, not uncommon but most strange. Though not properly a fungus, the red “mushroom” of Viridis had many of the functions of schizophyllum.

  Schizophyllum produces spores of four distinct types, each of which grows into a genetically distinct, completely dissimilar plant. Three of these are sterile. The fourth produces schizophyllum.

  The red mushroom of Viridis also produced four distinct heterokaryons or genetically different types, and the spores of one of these produced the mushroom.

  Teague spent an engrossing earth-year in investigating the other three.

  VI

  Sweating and miserable in his integument of flexskin, Tod hunched in the crotch of a finger-tree. His knees were drawn up and his head was down; his arms clasped his shins and he rocked slightly back and forth. He knew he would be safe here for some time—the fleshy fingers of the tree were clumped at the slender, swaying ends of the branches and never turned back toward the trunk. He wondered what it would be like to be dead. Perhaps he would be dead soon, and then he’d know. He might as well be.

  The names he’d chosen were perfect and all of a family: Sol, Mercury, Venus, Terra, Mars, Jupiter … eleven of them. And he could think of a twelfth if he had to.

  For what?

  He let himself sink down again into the blackness wherein nothing lived but the oily turning of what’s it like to be dead?

  Quiet, he thought. No one would laugh.

  Something pale moved on the jungle floor below him. He thought instantly of April, and angrily put the thought out of his mind. April would be sleeping now, having completed the trifling task it had taken her so long to start. Down there, that would be Blynken, or maybe Rhea. They were very alike.

  It didn’t matter, anyway.

  He closed his eyes and stopped rocking. He couldn’t see anyone, no one could see him. That was the best way. So he sat, and let time pass, and when a hand lay on his shoulder, he nearly leaped out of the tree. “Damn it, Blynken—”

  “It’s me. Rhea.” The child, like all of Alma’s daughters, was large for her age and glowing with health. How long had it been? Six, eight … nine Earth years since they had landed.

  “Go hunt mushrooms,” Tod growled. “Leave me alone.”

  “Come back,” said the girl.

  Tod would not answer. Rhea knelt beside him, her arm around the primary branch, her back, with his, against the trunk. She bent her head and put her cheek against his. “Tod.”

  Something inside him flamed. He bared his teeth and swung a heavy fist. The girl doubled up soundlessly and slipped out of the tree. He stared down at the lax body and at first could not see it for the haze of fury which blew and whirled around him. Then his vision cleared and he moaned, tossed his club down and dropped after it. He caught up the club and whacked off the tree-fingers which probed toward them. He swept up the child and leapt clear, and sank to his knees, gathering her close.

  “Rhea, I’m sorry, I’m sorry … I wasn’t … I’m not—Rhea! Don’t be dead!”

  She stirred and made a tearing sound with her throat. Her eyelids trembled and opened, uncovering her pain-blinded eyes. “Rhea!”

  “It’s all right,” she whispered, “I shouldn’t’ve bothered you. Do you want me to go away?”

  “No,” he said. “No.” He held her tight. Why not let her go away? a part of him wondered, and another part, frightened and puzzled, cried, No! No! He had an urgent, half-hysterical need to explain. Why explain to her, a child? Say you’re sorry, comfort her, heal her, but don’t expect her to understand. Yet he said, “I can’t go back. There’s nowhere else to go. So what can I do?”

  Rhea was quiet, as if waiting. A terrible thing, a wonderful thing, to have someone you have hurt wait patiently like that while you find a way to explain. Even if you only explain it to yourself … “What could I do if I went back? They—they’ll never—they’ll laugh at me. They’ll all laugh. They’re laughing now.” Angry again, plaintive no more, he blurted, “April! Damn April! She’s made a eunuch out of me!”

  “Because she had only one baby?”

  “Like a savage.”

  “It’s a beautiful baby. A boy.”

  “A man, a real man, fathers six or eight.”

  She met his eyes gravely. “That’s silly.”

  “What’s happening to us on this crazy planet?” he raged. “Are we evolving backward? What comes next—one of you kids hatching out some amphibids?”

  She said only, “Come back, Tod.”

  “I can’t,” he whispered. “They’ll think I’m … that I can’t …” Helplessly, he shrugged. “They’ll laugh.”

  “Not until you do, and then they’ll laugh with you. Not at you, Tod.”

  Finally, he said it, “April won’t love me; she’ll never love a weakling.”

  She pondered, holding him with her clear gaze. “You really need to be loved a whole lot.”

  Perversely, he became angry again. “I can get along!” he snapped.

  And she smiled and touched the nape of his neck. “You’re loved,” she assured him. “Gee, you don’t have to be mad about that. I love you, don’t I? April loves you. Maybe I love you even more than she does. She loves everything you are, Tod. I love everything you ever were and everything you ever will be.”

  He closed his eyes and a great music came to him. A long, long time ago he had attacked someone who came to comfort him, and she had let him cry, and at length she had said … not exactly these words, but—it was the same.

  “Rhea.”

  He looked at her. “You said all that to me before.”

  A puzzled small crinkle appeared between her eyes and she put her fingers on it. “Did I?”

  “Yes,” said Tod, “but it was before you were even born.”

  He rose and took her hand, and they went back to the compound, and whether he was laughed at or not he never knew, for he could think of nothing but his full heart and of April. He went straight in to her and kissed her gently and admired his son, whose name was Sol, and who had been born with hair and two tiny incisors, and who had heavy bony ridges over his eyes …

  “A fantastic storage capacity,” Teague remarked, touching the top of the scarlet mushroom. “The spores are almost microscopic. The thing doesn’t seem to want them distributed, either. It positively hoards them, millions of them.”

  “Start over, please,” April said. She shifted the baby in her arms. He was growing prodigiously. “Slowly. I used to know something about biology—or so I thought. But this—”

  Teague almost smiled. It was good to see. The aging face had not had so much expression in it in five Earth-years. “I’ll get as basic as I can, then, and start from there. First of all, we call this thing a mushroom, but it isn’t. I don’t think it’s a plant, though you couldn’t call it an animal, either.”

  “I don’t think anybody ever told me the real difference between a plant and an animal,” said Tod.

  “Oh … well, the most convenient way to put it—it’s not strictly accurate, but it will do—is that plants make their own food and animals subsist on what others have made. This thing does both. It has roots, but—” he lifted an edge of the skirted stem of the mushroom—“it can move them. Not much, not fast; but if it wants to shift itself, it can.”

  April smiled, “Tod, I’ll give you basi
c biology any time. Do go on, Teague.”

  “Good. Now, I explained about the heterokaryons—the ability this thing has to produce spores which grow up into four completely different plants. One is a mushroom just like this. Here are the other three.”

  Tod looked at the box of plants. “Are they really all from the mushroom spores?”

  “Don’t blame you,” said Teague, and actually chuckled. “I didn’t believe it myself at first. A sort of pitcher plant, half full of liquid. A thing like a cactus. And this one. It’s practically all underground, like a truffle, although it has these cilia. You wouldn’t think it was anything but a few horsehairs stuck in the ground.”

  “And they’re all sterile,” Tod recalled.

  “They’re not,” said Teague, “and that’s what I called you in here to tell you. They’ll yield if they are fertilized.”

  “Fertilized how?”

  Instead of answering, Teague asked April, “Do you remember how far back we traced the evolution of Viridian life?”

  “Of course. We got the arthropods all the way back to a simple segmented worm. The insects seemed to come from another worm, with pseudopods and a hard carapace.”

  “A caterpillar,” Tod interpolated.

  “Almost,” said April, with a scientist’s nicety. “And the most primitive reptile we could find was a little gymnoderm you could barely see without a glass.”

  “Where did we find it?”

  “Swimming around in—oh! In those pitcher plant things!”

  “If you won’t take my word for this,” said Teague, a huge enjoyment glinting between his words, “you’ll just have to breed these things yourself. It’s a lot of work, but this is what you’ll discover.

  “An adult gymnoderm—a male—finds this pitcher and falls in. There’s plenty of nutriment for him, you know, and he’s a true amphibian. He fertilizes the pitcher. Nodules grow under the surface of the liquid inside there—” he pointed “—and bud off. The buds are mobile. They grow into wrigglers, miniature tadpoles. Then into lizards. They climb out and go about the business of being—well, lizards.”

  “All males?” asked Tod.

  “No,” said Teague, “and that’s an angle I haven’t yet investigated. But apparently some males breed with females, which lay eggs, which hatch into lizards, and some find plants to fertilize. Anyway, it looks as if this plant is actually the progenitor of all the reptiles here; you know how clear the evolutionary lines are to all the species.”

  “What about the truffle with the horsehairs?” asked Tod.

  “A pupa,” said Teague, and to the incredulous expression on April’s face, he insisted, “Really—a pupa. After nine weeks or so of dormance, it hatches out into what you almost called a caterpillar.”

  “And then into all the insects here,” said April, and shook her head in wonderment. “And I suppose that cactus-thing hatches out the nematodes, the segmented ones that evolve into arthropods?”

  Teague nodded. “You’re welcome to experiment,” he said again, “but believe me—you’ll only find out I’m right; it really happens.”

  “Then this scarlet mushroom is the beginning of everything here.”

  “I can’t find another theory,” said Teague.

  “I can,” said Tod.

  They looked at him questioningly, and he rose and laughed. “Not yet. I have to think it through.” He scooped up the baby and then helped April to her feet. “How do you like our Sol, Teague?”

  “Fine,” said Teague. “A fine boy.” Tod knew he was seeing the heavy occipital ridges, the early teeth, and saying nothing. Tod was aware of a faint inward surprise as the baby reached toward April and he handed him over. He should have resented what might be in Teague’s mind, but he did not. The beginnings of an important insight welcomed criticism of the child, recognized its hairiness, its savagery, and found these things good. But as yet the thought was too nebulous to express, except by a smile. He smiled, took April’s hand, and left.

  “That was a funny thing you said to Teague,” April told him as they walked toward their quarters.

  “Remember, April, the day we landed? Remember—” he made a gesture that took in a quadrant of sky—“Remember how we all felt … good?”

  “Yes,” she murmured. “It was like a sort of compliment, and a reassurance. How could I forget?”

  “Yes. Well …” He spoke with difficulty but his smile stayed. “I have a thought, and it makes me feel like that. But I can’t get it into words,” After a thoughtful pause, he added, “Yet.”

  She shifted the baby. “He’s getting so heavy.”

  “I’ll take him.” He took the squirming bundle with the deep-set, almost humorous eyes. When he looked up from them, he caught an expression on April’s face which he hadn’t seen in years. “What is it, Ape?”

  “You—like him.”

  “Well, sure.”

  “I was afraid. I was afraid for a long time that you … he’s ours, but he isn’t exactly a pretty baby.”

  “I’m not exactly a pretty father.”

  “You know how precious you are to me?” she whispered.

  He knew, for this was an old intimacy between them. He laughed and followed the ritual: “How precious?”

  She cupped her hands and brought them together, to make of them an ivory box. She raised the hands and peeped into them, between the thumbs, as if at a rare jewel, then clasped the magic tight and hugged it to her breast, raising tear-filled eyes to him. “That precious,” she breathed.

  He looked at the sky, seeing somewhere in it the many peak mountains of their happiness when she made that gesture, feeling how each one, meticulously chosen, brought all the others back. “I used to hate this place,” he said. “I guess it’s changed.”

  “You’ve changed.”

  Changed how? he wondered. He felt the same, even though he knew he looked older …

  The years passed, and the children grew. When Sol was fifteen Earth-years old, short, heavy-shouldered, powerful, he married Carl’s daughter Libra. Teague, turning to parchment, had returned to his hermitage from the temporary stimulation of his researches on what they still called “the mushroom.” More and more the colony lived off the land and out of the jungle, not because there was any less to be synthesized from their compact machines; but out of preference; it was easier to catch flapping frogs or umbrella-birds and cook them than to bother with machine settings and check-analyses, and, somehow, a lot more fun to eat them, too.

  It seemed to them safer, year by year. Felodon, unquestionably the highest form of life on Viridis, was growing scarce, being replaced by a smaller, more timid carnivore April called Vulpidus (once, for it seemed not to matter much any more about keeping records) and everyone ultimately called “fox,” for all the fact that it was a reptile. Pterodon was disappearing too, as were all the larger forms. More and more they strayed after food, not famine-driven, but purely for variety; more and more they found themselves welcome and comfortable away from the compound. Once Carl and Moira drifted off for nearly a year. When they came back they had another child—a silent, laughing little thing with oddly long arms and heavy teeth.

  The warm days and the glowing nights passed comfortably and the stars no longer called. Tod became a grandfather and was proud. The child, a girl, was albino like April, and had exactly April’s deep red eyes. Sol and Libra named her Emerald, a green name and a ground-term rather than a sky-term, as if in open expression of the slow spell worked on them all by Viridis. She was mute—but so were almost all the new children, and it seemed not to matter. They were healthy and happy.

  Tod went to tell Teague, thinking it might cheer the old one up a little. He found him lying in what had once been his laboratory, thin and placid and disinterested, absently staring down at one of the arthropodal flying creatures that had once startled them so by zooming into the Coffin chamber. This one had happened to land on Teague’s hand, and Teague was laxly waiting for it to fly off again, out through the
unscreened window, past the unused sprays, over the faint tumble of rotted spars which had once been a palisade.

  “Teague, the baby’s come!”

  Teague sighed, his tired mind detaching itself from memory episode by episode. His eyes rolled toward Tod and finally he turned his head. “Which one would that be?”

  Tod laughed. “My grandchild, a girl. Sol’s baby.”

  Teague let his lids fall. He said nothing.

  “Well, aren’t you glad?”

  Slowly a frown came to the papery brow. “Glad.” Tod felt he was looking at the word as he had stared at the arthropod, wondering limply when it might go away. “What’s the matter with it?”

  “What?”

  Teague sighed again, a weary, impatient sound. “What does it look like?” he said slowly, emphasizing each one-syllabled word.

  “Like April. Just like April.”

  Teague half sat up, and blinked at Tod. “You don’t mean it.”

  “Yes, eyes red as—” The image of an Earth sunset flickered near his mind but vanished as too hard to visualize. Tod pointed at the four red-capped “mushrooms” that had stood for so many years in the test-boxes in the laboratory. “Red as those.”

  “Silver hair,” said Teague.

  “Yes, beau—”

  “All over,” said Teague flatly.

  “Well, yes.”

  Teague let himself fall back on the cot and gave a disgusted snort. “A monkey.”

  “Teague!”

  “Ah-h-h … go ’way,” growled the old man. “I long ago resigned myself to what was happening to us here. A human being just can’t adapt to the kind of radioactive ruin this place is for us. Your monsters’ll breed monsters, and the monsters’ll do the same if they can, until pretty soon they just won’t breed any more. And that will be the end of that, and good riddance …” His voice faded away. His eyes opened, looking on distant things, and gradually found themselves focused on the man who stood over him in shocked silence. “But the one thing I can’t stand is to have somebody come in here saying, ‘Oh, joy, oh happy day!’ ”