by Brian Aldiss
‘There are better solutions to that problem than to desecrate other worlds.’
‘Desecrate!’ Ann Gillett exclaimed. ‘The pioneers and colonists are terribly brave people who generally have to fight a strange environment before they can settle down and create civilisation. You call that desecration?’
Dr Mays nodded his head vigorously.
‘Yes, I call that desecration, however savage the planet is.’
‘We’ve never yet found a planet,’ Harry said, ‘with any form of life that can rival man and man’s ability to create civilisation. Why shouldn’t we move in and make ourselves comfortable?’
The exobotanist leant forward and pointed a finger at Harry.
‘Supposing a race of aliens with our sciences had discovered Earth back in the Carboniferous Age. Supposing they had adopted your attitude. Supposing they had “colonised” our planet. Supposing they had drained the swamps, cleared the forests, dammed the rivers, built roads – done all the things the Council is planning to do to Damonn. Supposing all that had happened, then ask yourself this question: would we be here now? Would mankind have evolved at all? Would any of the species of Earth creature we know have been given a chance to evolve over the long centuries, beyond perhaps the humble slug and the woodlouse? You know the answer: a decided No.’
During Dr Mays’s last speech, Harry had become red in the face.
‘What if all you say is true?’ he asked. ‘What do you want to do in a case like Damonn? – Sit about for three hundred million years and see if anything interesting evolves? No! Man’s the only intelligent form of life we know of. Why should we need other kinds? There’d probably only be trouble with them if we found them.’
‘We shall never find them, the way we blunder along,’ Dr Mays said soberly. He gestured out at the immensity of hyperspace beyond his viewport. ‘Look out there, Mr Gillett. The universe is a large and lonely place. Man’s a young race yet, riding among the stars like a kid on his first motor-cycle. Don’t you think the day will come – perhaps not for millions of years – when we are going to want other company, other sorts of life, that can supplement our limited senses with senses of their own?’
Ann stood up before Harry could reply.
‘Travelling on other planets must make you very far-sighted, Dr Mays,’ she said. ‘But in peering ahead you should be careful you don’t fall over the facts at your feet. I think Harry and I will go to bed before we all say things we may regret later. Don’t forget the three of us have to work as a team.’
‘Good-night, ladies,’ Jhim called. ‘And I wish you pheasant dreams.’
When the Gilletts had gone, Dr Robert Mays sat in a chair, too restless to retire. He felt that he had made a fool of himself. Moodily, he picked up the brochure concerning the flight which the space line, Allied Astronautics, placed by every bedside on the ship. The brochure took the form of a phototec cube, with a button set in its opaque rear wall. As he pressed the button, the images in the brochure changed, now with an image of one of the line’s new ships, now with a view of one of the cabins, now with a list of the directors of the line.
At the last item, Dr Mays stopped. He looked more closely at the directors’ names. The Chairman was Sir Hilary Gillett.
Dr Mays’s heart gave an extra beat. Sir Hilary would be Harry’s uncle. And Allied Astronautics were the firm who would get the contract to transport colonists from Earth to Damonn unless Dr Mays could carry through his plans for that unfortunate planet. The contract would be worth several billion credits over a period of twenty years. In the circumstances, it was hardly likely that he could expect support from Ann and Harry!
He put the brochure down beside him, and sat staring into the future.
The flight to Damonn was uneventful, except for a failure of the environment machinery. This was the small laboratory amidships where the used air was recycled, its moisture content removed, and fresh oxygen-nitrogen mixture pumped back over the ship’s ventilators. For several hours, both passengers and crew lay on their bunks and laboured to breathe increasingly foul air, while two engineers and a chemist fought to remedy the fault. After that unpleasant experience, everyone was correspondingly keener to arrive at Damonn as soon as possible.
By ship’s chronometers, they broke out of hyperspace seven days after entering it. Owing to the phenomenon called relativity, time in hyperspace had crawled by comparison with Earth time; during their seven-day voyage, four months had passed on Earth.
Time meant nothing to the stars. They hung unchangingly in the mighty dark of space. And two of them grew into bright suns; they were known as B79 Alpha and Beta, the binary suns about which Damonn revolved. Presently the green disk of Damonn was visible, swelling like some incredible fruit from a mote to a great globe.
Touchdown was the name of the first township on Damonn. It lay in the bend of a river that fifty miles further down its course flowed into a mighty ocean covering half the world. It was with gratitude that Ann, Harry, Dr Mays, and the other passengers – not forgetting Jhim – climbed out and stretched their legs.
‘This is better than face flight!’ Jhim exclaimed, as he circled above Dr Mays’s head, landed on his shoulder, and scuttled down his back to the ground.
During the journey, they had all been inoculated against hostile micro-organisms in Damonn’s atmosphere. They could now breathe the fresh air with impunity, and enjoy it.
Transport was still in short supply on Touchdown. Ann, Harry and Dr Mays walked to the prefabricated building that served as government offices. All arrangements were simple; within five minutes they had shed their luggage in an outer office and had been shown in to see Governor Phillips. He shook hands perfunctorily and motioned them into chairs.
‘I don’t pretend I’m glad to see you back, Dr Mays,’ he said. ‘However, I’ve been instructed to give you some assistance in your surveys, so that I shall do. Forestry Department have laid on a hovercar that is yours when you need it.’
‘Thank you, Governor. I’m grateful.’
‘Then show your gratitude please by refraining from spreading propaganda. Your project for preserving Damonn in its natural state has its sympathisers even here, and I don’t want any trouble. I’m committed to a hard job and a strict timetable, and nothing must go wrong.’
‘We are here to work, not talk, Governor,’ Harry reminded him.
The governor turned his big head and inspected Harry.
‘Keep on feeling like that, young man. I know Damonn is a pretty planet, but we aren’t here to be sentimental. Nor are we going to spoil everything. Remember that this idea of preserving Damonn as it is is just a romantic fancy. There aren’t any natives, there aren’t any animals. All we’re doing is lopping off the confounded plant life – and Damonn has too much of that to be healthy!’
He moved to a map of the planet that hung on the wall behind his desk, and thumped it.
‘See this pink square here? That’s the land we are clearing first. Two hundred square miles of it, absolutely impassable at present, but potentially useful agricultural land. In three months’ time, the reclamation team will have finished there and can move on to another area. Then we’re ready for eighty thousand colonists in the first area. It’s man’s work we’re doing here, Mays.’
‘And whose work are you undoing?’
‘Don’t go mystical on me, Mays. Mr Gillett, you and your wife are welcome here, but get on with your work. This is a tough world. It’s a fine place to work. It’s not a good place to stand around and try to argue.’
As they emerged into the sunlight, Dr Mays said, ‘You see now the sort of bigotry I’m up against.’
‘But just look at the planet the Governor’s up against,’ Ann said.
They were standing near the perimeter of the town, marked here by a high wire fence. Beyond it, the ground had not been cleared. The vegetation grew tall, although not particularly close together. It was mainly of the very dark green that Ann and Harry had observed in the exobo
tanist’s specimens. Two factors rendered it sinister. Patches of colour moved over the plants in fugitive fashion, vanished, appeared again; and the vegetation moved, though there was no wind to move it. It rustled and stirred as if a horde of creatures awaited in ambush there.
‘Is it – does it always writhe like that?’ Ann asked.
Dr Mays raised an eyebrow and gazed at her mockingly.
‘Only when people are about,’ he said.
Touchdown boasted no hotels as yet. Dr Mays and his companions left their luggage at the government rest house, where cubicles had been allotted them, and set to work immediately. Harry in particular was keen to get started.
As they walked over to Forestry Department to collect the promised hovercar, the exobotanist outlined his plans.
‘If the entire biosphere of this planet is to be ruined, as Phillips and his friends intend, then we must have as complete a record as possible of as many forms of Damonn’s life as possible. We’ll fly out to the farthest reclamation camp, see what’s going on there, and then aim to keep always one jump ahead of them. In that way we can work by hops right up to the north pole. Then we survey the south continent, which is absolutely virgin ground. Have you got all the equipment you need, Harry?’
Ann laughed.
‘I couldn’t pile a thing more on to him or he’d collapse,’ she said.
‘He’d collapse if I sat on his shadow,’ Jhim cackled, trotting along beside them.
Harry was so loaded with apparatus that Dr Mays helped him with the heavier items. They found the hovercar without any trouble, signed for it with the Department, and loaded it up. Five minutes later, they were in the air and heading north.
Both of Damonn’s suns, Alpha and Beta, were in the sky, with Beta sinking towards the western horizon. It looked like a large fuzzy ball, perhaps three times the size of Earth’s sun, and emitting appreciably less light. As Dr Mays explained, this star was a red giant, and several hundred million miles away. The nearer star, and the one round which Damonn revolved, was Alpha, a blinding blue-white dwarf sun only some sixty million miles distant and at present almost at zenith in the sky, shining through thin cloud.
‘A good plant-growing world,’ the exobotanist said, squinting up at the sky. ‘Though how the colonists will take to the heavy rainfall, I don’t know.’
When the sun was obscured, half an hour later, it was not by cloud but smoke. They rose higher, passing over a whole bank of it. Below them, a forest fire blazed, its fire front clearly visible as they flew beyond it.
‘You see that! That’s how the vandals clear the land,’ Dr Mays said.
‘It seems a pretty efficient way of doing it,’ Harry said dryly.
‘And what follows? They divide the ground into fields, they build houses. The rain comes, the wind blows. All that delicate topsoil, so long sheltered by the jungles, gets blown away. In five years, this whole continent will be a dust bowl.’
‘They’re aware of all those factors. They’ll guard against them.’
‘Certainly, certainly. I’m not saying they’re fools, Harry. But they’re greedy. They won’t take enough safeguards, they’ll cut corners and costs, because they’re greedy for quick profits. I tell you this’ll be desert in a few years.’
The reclamation outpost was in sight. They lapsed into silence as the hovercar sank. Ann was looking at the forest towards which the fire was heading. Pulses of dim colour were flowing outwards from the danger centre, and all the vegetation was in movement. Then her view was obscured as rain came sliding in from the south.
It was at that moment the time bomb exploded.
Acrid smoke billowed round them. Ann screamed. The cabin glass shattered and rain came spurting in. Dr Mays fought with the controls, but they were useless. The dark vegetation came plunging up to meet them. They struck it with tremendous force, and darkness closed round them.
Ann was roused by the sound of her own coughing. She opened her eyes to find thick smoke swirling about her. She was sprawled on the floor of the wrecked hovercar. Harry and Dr Mays lay near her; Harry had a wound on his head.
With the smell of burning vegetation in her nostrils, Ann tried to lift her head, and at once she saw the plants. Large and black, but flecked with livid colours, one of them loomed over the car, bending forward and pressing its leaves against the wreck. It was like an immense fleshy fir tree. Its limbs came through the broken windows. They extended towards her and touched her. Even as she was attempting to scream, she fainted.
When she came to, she was upside-down and being pulled out of the wreckage. As she rose into the air, she had a clear view of the forest fire, unquenched by the rain. The noise from it struck her in a dull roar; the heat painted the sky crimson. And then she found herself being passed up into the higher branches of the tree, just as the geranium had been passed in Dr Mays’s conservatory, back on Earth. She struggled frantically.
Something gaudy fluttered by her cheek. It was Jhim, calling to her.
‘Keep still! Keep still! Let sleeping ducks lie! The plants say they can save us.’
As Ann twisted round to look at the little creature, she caught sight of the two men. They were both in the grip of the vegetation. Dr Mays was swathed in it, and had already been lifted from the wrecked machine. Harry was just being pulled out. Through the swirling smoke, Ann saw her husband dragged free and placed on the back of an astounding object.
The trees were passing her from one to another, away from the direction of the fire. She knew now that the vegetation was acting in unison to save her and Harry and Dr Mays. Tossed high in the dark foliage, she saw Harry more clearly. He had been placed on the back of a giant vegetable. Dr Mays had recovered consciousness and was leaning over Harry.
The two men were being carried along on one of the biggest life forms on the planet, the kind that Dr Mays had heard referred to by explorers as a soil-sucker. Unlike the tree-like plants that were passing Ann along to safety, the soil-suckers were able to move from location to location – after the fashion of Dr Mays’s butterfly net plant, but on a much larger scale.
This soil-sucker was over 20 feet long, and broad in the body. It plodded through the forest, its fastest pace a slow walk, moving caterpillar fashion, drawing itself up and then extending again, so that the two men were given an uncomfortable ride. Once it stopped and let down the double row of suckers that had given it its name; the suckers drank up water and mud from a stream. The soil-sucker, in fact, was like a flower that carries its own private flower bed inside it. Dr Mays lolled in a bed of mauve petals each a foot long.
As he was bandaging Harry’s brow, the phototect roused and opened his eyes.
‘The crash,’ he whispered. ‘What happened? The hovercar. …’
‘We were sabotaged, Harry. You can see that various groups have a strong financial interest in exploiting this planet to the uttermost. They want me out of the way, and are ruthless enough to have tried to do so without worrying whether you and Ann were killed.’
‘Was Ann. …’
He did not finish his question. Relief filled him when Dr Mays pointed to her in the rocking treetops. Though she looked rather green, she managed to give him a reassuring wave. Harry sat up, and Dr Mays explained what was happening.
By now the rain was stopping, the smoke had thinned, and the fire was falling behind them, though its crimson stain still flooded the sky behind them.
Jhim came down on to Dr Mays’s shoulder, hopping about restlessly.
‘The plants call my name,’ he said. ‘All the forest is a voice crawling to me.’
The trees petered out on the margins of savannah land. Ann was lowered to the ground, and the soil-sucker stopped. Harry and Dr Mays slid off its back and ran over to Ann. She was dizzy and breathless, but otherwise unharmed. All round them, other types of vegetable capable of movement were emerging from the forest and crawling into the long grass to safety.
‘I don’t want a ride like that again,’ Ann gasped. ‘But w
hat is happening to the soil-sucker?’ They looked behind them. Bands of colour were passing over the mass of tousled petals. It began to move slowly away.
‘I feel we ought to thank it,’ Harry said. Then he caught the exobotanist’s eyes. ‘They have intelligence, haven’t they?’
‘Why not?’ Dr Mays said. ‘They’ve had millions of years evolving without any opposition from animal life. It is hardly extraordinary that they should have developed intelligence.’
He paused. Jhim was flying off with the soil-sucker, settling on its back. The exobotanist called to it, but the creature did not obey. Instead it called, ‘The plants know me, so I go. Good-bye, Doctor! A rolling stain gathers no morse.’
Dr Mays shaded his eyes and stared after the disappearing Jhim and the soil-sucker.
‘Jhim has found friends,’ he said quietly to Harry. ‘You were right. He can communicate with them. He’ll be better with them than with me. I’ve long been convinced that the colour changes we have observed are an elaborate form of language; that’s a point I have come back to study, though I’d say we’ve just had conclusive proof of it.’
Harry suddenly burst into a rage that astonished Ann even more than the exobotanist.
‘All right, all right! What’s the good of standing in the middle of this wilderness and discussing things so calmly? Things aren’t half as simple as you think, Dr Mays. Let’s give our mouths a rest and get our legs in action!’
Laying a hand on his arm, Ann asked, ‘What’s all that about? I suppose you’re furious because you’ve lost your equipment?’
Harry began to flush round the neck. ‘I’m sorry, Ann. I’m mad at myself. I’ve been such a fool, and I’ve expected you to be a fool with me. Dr Mays, I have an uncle – he’s the chairman of Allied Astronautics – who stands to gain very considerably from the colonisation of Damonn; consequently, I stand to gain too; and I’ve let this prejudice me against your cause. I hope that you will let me now aid you in your fight against exploiting Damonn.’
