Dynasty of the Small

by John Russell Fearn

  Maxted uttered the words in jerks. “It’s utterly without precedent, either in botany or biology. There has to be a reason for this, Belling, something to make us realize that we are not insane!”

  “We can’t both be insane, sir.”

  “No—I suppose not. This—is it male or female?”

  “Can’t tell very well, sir...yet.”

  They looked again at the nodule and it seemed to both of them that there was a constant suggestion of growth about it. It was enlarging even as they watched.

  “Bclling....” Maxted gripped his servant’s arm tightly, his face drawn with the effort of trying to understand. “Belling, we’ve stumbled on something infinitely more amazing than a black rose! We’ve got to watch what happens. Best thing we can do is stay in here and sleep in turns.”

  “Yes, sir,” Belling agreed excitedly. “Indeed, yes!”

  The decision arrived at, they drew up chairs and then seated themselves where they could watch the enigma in the frame.... The fact remained that the thing was certainly growing.... But into what?

  * * * *

  Maxted and Belling soon discovered that their vigil was not to be a matter of hours, or even of days—but three weeks. During this period the conservatory was kept electrically at the same high temperature as on the morning when the rose cutting had been planted. When he had to be absent, at his Civil Service work in London, Maxted held down his emotions as much as possible—but all the time his thoughts were carrying the remembrance of what he had seen in the conservatory so far.

  Then, the moment time permitted, he was rushing homeward again, bolted a meal while Belling related the day’s progress; then they went together to survey the miracle’s advancement.

  The former nodule in the experimental frame had now become an obviously human creature, standing alone in the special bed of soil and surrounded by plants, which screened any chance draft. The sex was definitely female, down to the waist. From this point, however, the trunk of the body branched off into a myriad gray filigrees which, in the fashion of nerves, trailed along and sank into the soil.

  A woman, yes—or half a woman—her nakedness concealed by an Oriental dressing gown as a concession to convention. A woman, yes, indescribably, magnetic, with her now opened enormous green eyes and masses of Albino-blonde hair on the formerly bald scalp. A woman who thrived on fertilizers, humanly poisonous material, and crushed bone residue; a woman the pupils of whose eyes contracted and expanded with startling rapidity at the least variation of light.

  Mysterious! Incredible!

  So far the woman had made no attempt to communicate. In fact, no sound whatever had escaped her. She seemed able to take nourishment either by the mouth or through the weird mass of sensory nerves trailing from her like roots. At other times her eyes were closed and her body relaxed as though she were sleeping.

  “Have you any theories, sir, as to what happened to cause this?” Belling asked when they had finished their latest survey.

  “One—just one,” Maxted breathed. “It can explain it, but it is so incredible I hardly believe it myself.... Do you know Arrhenius’ theory?”

  Belling reflected. He had a good smattering of general knowledge.

  “You mean the one about him believing that life came to Earth through indestructible spores surviving the void of space and then germinating here?”

  “That’s the one....” Maxted mopped his streaming face and glanced at the thermometer. It stood at 120° F. “It may be possible,” he went on, “that somehow a wandering spore was in the soil when I planted that rose cutting. The cutting died because of the strength of the germinating spore drawing all the nature out of the soil. In this conservatory here we must have accidentally reproduced all the conditions necessary to germinate the spore....”

  Maxted looked at the silent woman-plant long and earnestly as she slept, head drooping on her breast.

  “Yes, I’m sure I’m right,” he resumed. “Life on any other world would be vastly different from ours. This half-woman must belong to a world where intelligent life takes on the form of a plant. A hot, burning world— Where, Belling? What miracle have we come upon?”

  To this there was no immediate answer. Both men kept unceasing watch on the astounding creation in the nights and days that followed....

  * * * *

  She grew no taller, but there was greater development in the shoulders as time passed. Once even she seemed ill and wilting, but .a saturation of the soil with water and phosphates revived her.

  During this period she remained practically motionless, her eyes studying the conservatory intently—or else the two men as they surveyed her. It was as though she were trying to determine the nature of her surroundings. When she moved at all it comprised a sinuous writhing of her well-rounded arms, as though she yearned to stretch herself....

  Then one morning, when the autumn sun was streaming through the great windows, she made the first sound. It began at about the pitch of a soprano’s high C and then sailed up effortlessly through two octaves in the purest bell-like clearness it had ever been Belling’s good luck to hear. Immediately he rushed out for Maxted, who was sleeping after his night’s watch.

  “She’s singing, sir.” Belling shouted, as he blundered into the bedroom.

  Maxted listened drowsily to the silver purity of those notes, then he hurried out of bed and dragged on some clothes.... The astounding woman was singing with the joyous abandon of a nightingale when they burst in upon her. In fact, their entry was perhaps too sudden, for she stopped abruptly.

  “Shut the door!” Maxted ordered. “We can’t risk any cold air in here....”

  He went over to the woman slowly, stared into her huge green eyes. The pupils, so abysmally wide in artificial light, were now contracted to pin points in the glare of sunshine, leaving great emerald-colored irises.

  “Who are you?” Maxted asked in an awed voice, repeating a question he had asked dozens of times already. “How did you ever get here?”

  The eyes, like those of a tigress, stared back at him hypnotically. He realized that such delicately constructed orbs were intended for a planet of alternate glare and total dark.... Blinding sun for a very long day; perhaps moonless night for a like period. A world of titanic vegetation perhaps—of such people as this...?

  Maxted gave himself a little shake and turned his gaze away by sheer physical effort. Belling was beside him, watching and wondering.

  “Have you—a language?” Belling asked urgently.

  The woman gestured with two copper-colored arms, and somehow it revealed that she did not understand. Then from her cherry red mouth, with its oddly pointed teeth, came a stream of sing-song notes in that breathtaking purity of tone.

  “Speech, sir!” Belling insisted urgently, clutching Maxted’s arm. “That’s what it is. She’s trying to talk to us.”

  “Yes....” Maxted listened to her in bewildered attention. “Yes—speech.”

  Even so it was but the commencement of weeks of hard work to come, of the exchange of words. But gradually the woman seemed to understand what was meant. By means of pantomime and untiring patience, Maxted struggled to bridge the gap between species. In the intervals between these spells of study the woman either sang gloriously or slept.

  Those times when he had to be away on business were the hardest for Maxted, but somehow he got through it.

  * * * *

  Inevitably, though, the conservatory’s secret did not remain within those hot glass walls. Seated on the bridge parapet one morning, tearing up a piece of paper and watching the strips flutter into the brook below, was Idiot Jake. He heard a voice of uncommon range and clarity floating from somewhere beyond the village, born on the south wind.

  Its beauteous harmony attracted him, drew him irresistibly

  He traced it finally to the conservatory, where a slightly open ventilator permitted the sound to come forth. Idiot Jake could see quite clearly through the plain glass windows—and he started a rum
our, which went through the clannish, scandal-loving community of the village with seven league boots.

  Harvey Maxted, the mystery man, the apparent misogamist, had got an ash-blonde woman living with him! Been no announcement of a marriage or anything, either! Jake himself had seen her, both in the day and at night. She always sat in that little outbuilt conservatory, singing or talking and dressed in a sort of Oriental costume.

  That she was only half a woman was not apparent to the prying busybodies of Bollin. The shrubs surrounding the special soil bed hid the filigree of nervous tendrils that began at the waistline. From outside it looked as though she were sitting down among the plants.

  In groups, by night, the denizens of the village crept into the grounds of the house and looked through the unscreened windows on to the scene within. They said it was not even decent and that Maxted ought to be locked up for it, and his servant with him.... Then, gradually, they tired of their scandal and ceased to bother.

  All except Idiot Jake. Though he no longer risked detection by hiding in the grounds in the daylight, he was certainly there every night, his crafty pale blue eyes watching over the thick bushes, his warped brain considering all manner of speculations about the terribly lovely woman who either sat and gestured or else sang with a richness which stirred Idiot Jake to the depths.

  Maxted and Belling, absorbed in their efforts to communicate with the plant-woman, never even gave eavesdropping a thought. That the conservatory had no window shades they knew full well, but since it and the house were in the midst of grounds, the possibility of being overlooked never occurred to them.

  Besides, they were making good progress in language exchange now. The woman was able to express herself with comparative fluency, and where she stumbled the gap could always be filled in. Certainly the time had come, in Maxted’s opinion, for a determined effort to solve the mystery.

  “Just who are you?” he asked the woman, seated on one side of the soil bed and Belling on the other.

  “I come from the moon of another planet,” the woman’s dulcet voice replied, and she added an arm gesticulation.

  “Moon of the another planet?” Maxted repeated, frowning. “You mean outside of the solar system?”

  “Another solar system,” the woman agreed, then she hesitated as she chose her words. Slowly, with many pauses, she began to tell her story. “My name is Cia. I lived, ages ago, upon the satellite of another world. Upon this satellite, as upon the parent world, there existed—and still does on the parent world—a race of beings like me. I am not either male or female, as you would call it, but both....”

  “You mean hermaphrodite?” Maxted asked sharply.

  “If you call two sexes in one that—yes. Many of your Earth plants have that quality and some of your animals and birds. New plants—new living beings in our case—are born simply by the casting of seed. Under the influence of rich soil it grows and can choose its own sex as far as appearance is concerned. Nature has cursed our race by making us plantlike and immobile, but as a compensation she has given us vast intelligence. Even the ability to read thoughts: that is how I have learned your language so quickly. Whether it be a jest of Nature to give great intellect to beings who cannot move from the spot where they are born do not know....”

  Maxted looked sharply at the absorbed Belling across the soil bed, then the woman resumed haltingly.

  “This, though, I do know. Life—our life—became so profuse on our moon, and the rnyriad roots became so deep and destructive, that it finally smashed the satellite in pieces, just like some of your climbing plants tear down a wall. We were aware in advance of what was happening and so contracted ourselves back into spore form—”

  “How could that be done?” Belling asked.

  “I’ve heard of certain plants, and even animals, which can contract themselves,” Maxted answered. “Take, for instance, certain sea squirts which spend the winter in the form of small white masses in which the organs of the normal animal are quite absent. In the spring they reverse the process and grow up again. Sea anemones do the same thing if starved of nutriment. So do flat worms. But usually this contraction business applies only to the invertebrates. You, Cia, appear to have a backbone.”

  “Not in the sense you know it,” she answered. “It is hard tissue, not solid bone.”

  “That would explain your ability to shrink then,” Maxted admitted. “As for your male-female unity, we call it parthenogenesis.”

  “This power to contract does not destroy our intelligence,” the woman resumed, “because in a sense we are still alive. When the satellite broke up we were, of course, cast adrift into space. Myriads of us must have drifted down on to the parent world; drawn by the gravity, to take root and flourish anew. In my case, I can only think that cosmic tides wafted me across the infinite to this world where I have lain, in a form of suspended animation, for untold ages. Then you produced conditions here identical to those on my former world and I came to life. My effort to understand explains why I took time to communicate. Our ability to what you call ‘sing’ comes from the need of calling to each other over great distances....”

  There was a silence and Maxted drew a deep breath. He looked at the woman from a far off world, and then at Belling; but before he could speak his attention was caught by something outside one of the huge windows.

  A face was looking into the conservatory—a thin, fox-like face topped by a battered panama hat. The licentious blue eyes of Idiot Jake were watching every detail.

  “By God!” Maxted breathed angrily, jumping up. “I’ll show him. It’s that damned yokel out of the village—”

  He strode to the door and opened it, closing it quickly again to prevent any drastic change of air. In a few quick strides he was out through the back entrance into the grounds. Evidently Idiot Jake had guessed what was intended, for he had just commenced to slink away into the bushes. In one dive Maxted was upon him, whirling him round with a tight grip on the collar of his shabby coat.

  “Just a minute, Jake! What are you doing here?”

  “Nothin’ mister....” Jake cringed and averted his face. “I just wanted to see the pretty singer.... You can’t hit me for that!”

  Maxted tightened his lips for a moment.

  “The pretty singer, eh? Is that what you have been telling everybody in the village? How often have you been here?”

  “Never before,” Jake lied emphatically, and Maxted gave him a shove.

  “All right—you get back home before I break your neck. And if I ever find you on my property again I’ll hand you over to the police. Go on—get moving!”

  Jake touched the brim of his battered panama and grinned vacantly, then he went loping off amidst the bushes.

  Maxted came back into the conservatory with a troubled frown.

  “I don’t like it,” he confessed to Belling when he had briefly recounted what had happened. “That imbecile is likely to spread all kinds of idiotic tales—granting even that he hasn’t done so already.”

  “Doesn’t seem to be much we can do, sir,” Belling reflected. “The damage, if any, is done already.”

  Maxted nodded regretfully, then, with a shrug, which seemed to indicate that he had decided to drop the matter he turned to look again at Cia. She was watching him intently.

  “This meeting between Earth and another planet—or at any rate that planet’s moon—is about the most marvelous thing that ever happened,” he said. “But wonderful though it is, it is incomplete in itself. We are just individuals representing our respective species. There will have to be a way found for space to be bridged and our two worlds to have exchange of visits.... You understand what I mean, Cia?”

  “I understand,” she assented.

  “Good! Tell me, with all the high intelligence your race possesses, have you any ideas on interstellar travel?”

  “Yes, although much is theory. Being immobile we have no use for space travel, but handed down in the knowledge of our race is the story of a shi
p from space that crashed upon our world. From the few survivors—they were somewhat similar to your race, and our climate suited them—we learned much about the construction and working of their machine.”

  Maxted stroked his chin and frowned.

  “Strange that Earth has never had visitors from another planet. I wonder—could these visitors of yours have come from our system—Mars perhaps?”

  “No. According to our knowledge, they came from the outer deeps of space, and only chance directed them to us. Most of the travelers were killed when the ship crashed—the few survivors were unable to repair the damage and spent the rest of their lives living amongst us. Their knowledge expanded our concepts tremendously.”

  There was silence for a while, whilst Maxted paced slowly up and down the conservatory; then Cia resumed.

  “We of my world need a race like yours to free us from bondage. We are intellectual giants chained down by Nature. None of our mighty ideas can bear fruit until we have somebody with us who can move about and so help us. I am prepared to give you the secrets of spaceship design and atomic power, which you will need for propulsion—if you in turn will pledge yourselves to work side by side with us to free us from enslavement.”

  Maxted was silent, overawed by the immensity of the proposition. He reflected for quite a time, watched anxiously by Belling and the woman, before he made up his mind.

  “I cannot, of course, speak for my entire race, Cia; it would take years to make everybody understand what is happening here, and even then there would be no guarantee of others agreeing with my viewpoint that we should help you and your people. But, speaking for myself and the many scientists who for years have been crying out for a chance like this, I am willing to co-operate. Once the thing is done, collusion between our worlds is inevitable.”

  “Very well,” the woman said. “I realize that you cannot convince your race without proof, so I shall make the secrets your property.”

  “Now?” Maxted questioned eagerly.

  “No, tomorrow night. I must have time to consider the relative differences between your mathematics and mine. For tonight I prefer to be left alone.”