He grounded the flyer on slagged earth near the familiar gray stone buildings on the eastern headland. The men got out and George and Helen Toyama, smiling and gray-haired in lab smocks, came to welcome them. Craig’s left boot was tight and it hurt, but he could wear it unlaced. Helen told him Midori was painting in the gorge. He limped down the gorge path, past Midori’s small house and the Toyama home on the cliff edge at left. Midori and the Toyamas were the only people on Burton Island. The island was a phyto research sanctuary and it had never been touched by Thanasis. It was the only place other than Base Camp where humans lived permanently.
The gorge was Midori’s special place. She painted it over and over, never satisfied. Craig knew it well, the quartz ledge, the cascading waterfall and pool, the phytos dancing in sunlight that the silvery stem forest changed to the quality of strong moonlight. Midori said it was the peculiar light that she could never capture. Craig liked watching her paint, most of all when she forgot him and sang to herself. She was clean and apart and beautiful and it was just good to be in the same world with her. Through the plash of the waterfall and the phyto piping Craig heard her singing before her easel beside a quartz boulder. She heard him and turned and smiled warmly.
“Roy! I’m so glad to see you!” she said. “I was afraid you’d gone home after all.”
She was small and dainty under her gray dress, with large black eyes and delicate features. Her dark hair snugged boyishly close to her head. Her voice had a natural, birdlike quality and she moved and gestured with the quick grace of a singing bird. Craig grinned happily.
“For a while I almost wished I did,” he said. “Now I’m glad again I didn’t.” He limped toward her.
“Your foot!” she said. “Come over here and sit down.” She tugged him to a seat on the boulder. “What happened?”
“Touch of Thanasis. It’s nothing much.”
“Take off your boot! You don’t want pressure on it!”
She helped him take the boot off and ran cool fingertips over the red, swollen ankle. Then she sat beside him.
“I know it hurts you. How did it happen?”
“I was kind of unhappy,” he said. “I went and sat on a ringwall and let my bare feet hang over.”
“Foolish Roy. Why were you unhappy?”
“Oh … things.” Several brilliant phytos settled on his bare ankle. He let them stay. “We got to sleep in the field now, ’stead of coming here. The new guys are all red dots. I’m just a nothing again and—”
“You mean they think they’re better than you?”
“They are better, and that’s what hurts. Killing a Great Russel is a kind of spirit thing, Midori.” He scuffed his right foot. “I’ll see the day when this planet has enough Great Russels so no kid has to grow up cheated.”
“The phytos are not going to die,” she said softly. “It’s very clear now. We’re defeated.”
“You Belcontis are. Mordinmen never give up.”
“Thanasis is defeated. Will you shoot phytos with rifles?”
“Please don’t joke about rifles. We’re going to use trans-something on Thanasis.”
“Translocation? Oh, no!” She raised her fingers to her lips. “It can’t be controlled for field use,” she said. “They wouldn’t dare!”
“Mordinmen dare anything,” he said proudly. “These guys all studied on Belconti, they know how. That’s another thing … .”
He scuffed his foot again. Phytos were on both their heads and shoulders now and all over his bared ankle. They twittered faintly.
“What, Roy?”
“They make me feel ignorant. Here I been ringwalling for two years, and they already know more about phytos than I do. I want you to tell me something about phytos that I can use to make the guys notice me. Like, can phytos feel?”
She held her hand to her cheek, silent for a moment.
“Phytos are strange and wonderful and I love them,” she said softly. “They’re mixed plant and animal. Life never split itself apart on this planet.”
The flying phytozoons, she explained, functioned as leaves for the vegetative stems. But the stems, too, had internal temperature control. The continental network of great conduit roots moved fluids anywhere in any quantity with valved peristalsis. A stem plus attached phytos made a kind of organism.
“But any phyto, Roy, can live with any stem, and there’re forever shifting. Everything is part of everything,” she said. “Our job here on Burton Island is to classify the phytos, and we just can’t do it! They vary continuously along every dimension we choose, physical or chemical, and kind simply has no meaning.” She sighed. “That’s the most wonderful thing I know about them. Will that help you?”
“I don’t get all that. That’s what I mean, I’m ignorant,” he said. “Tell me some one simple thing I can use to make the guys take notice of me.”
“All right, tell them this,” she said. “Phyto color patterns are plastid systems that synthesize different molecules. The way they can recombine parts to form new organisms, without waiting for evolution, gives them a humanly inconceivable biochemical range. Whatever new poison or free-system we design for Thanasis, somewhere by sheer chance they hit on a countersubstance. The knowledge spreads faster each time. That’s why Thanasis is defeated.”
“No! Don’t keep saying that, Midori!” Craig protested. “This here translocation, now—”
“Not even that!” Her voice was sharp. “The phytos have unlimited translocation and any number of sexes. Collectively, I don’t doubt they’re the mightiest biochemical lab in the galaxy. They form a kind of biochemical intelligence, almost a mind, and it’s learning faster than we are.” She shook his arm with both her small hands. “Yes, tell them, make them understand,” she said. “Human intelligence is defeated here. Now you will try human ferocity … oh, Roy … .”
“Say it,” he said bitterly. “You Belcontis think all Mordinmen are stupid. You sound almost like you want us to lose.”
She turned away and began cleaning her brushes. It was nearly dark and the phytos were going to rest on the stems overhead. Craig sat miserably silent, remembering the feel of her hands on his arm. Then she spoke. Her voice was soft again.
“I don’t know. If you wanted homes and farms here … But you want only the ritual deaths of man and dinothere … .”
“Maybe people’s souls get put together different ways on different planets,” Craig said. “I know there’s a piece missing out of mine. I know what it is.” He put his hand lightly on her shoulder. “Some holidays I fly down to Russel Island just to look at the Great Russel there, and then I know. I wish I could take you to see him. He’d make you understand.”
“I understand. I just don’t agree.”
She swished and splashed brushes, but she didn’t pull her shoulder away from his hand. Craig thought about what she had said.
“Why is it you never see a dead phyto? Why is it there ain’t enough deadwood on a whole continent to make one campfire?” he asked. “What eats ‘em? What keeps ’em down?”
She laughed and turned back to him, making his arm slide across her shoulders. He barely let it touch her.
“They eat themselves internally. We call it resorption,” she said. “They can grow themselves again in another place and form, as a ringwall, for instance. Roy, this planet has never known death or decay. Everything is resorbed and reconstituted. We try to kill it and it suffers but its—yes, its mind—can’t form the idea of death. There’s no way to think death biochemically.”
“Oh bullets, Midori! Phytos can’t think,” he said. “I wonder, can they even feel?”
“Yes, they feel!” She rose to her feet, throwing off his arm. “Their piping is a cry of pain,” she said. “Papa Toyama can remember when the planet was almost silent. Since he’s been here, twenty years, their temperature has risen twelve degrees, their metabolic rate and speed of neural impulse doubled, chronaxy halved—”
Craig stood up too and raised his hands. “H
old your fire, Midori,” he pleaded. “You know I don’t know all them words. You’re mad at me.” It was too dark to see her face plainly.
“I think I’m just afraid,” she said. “I’m afraid of what we’ve been doing that we don’t know about.”
“The piping always makes me feel sad, kind of,” Craig said. “I never would hurt a phyto. But Great Russel, when you think about whole continents hurting and crying, day and night for years—you scare me too, Midori.”
She began packing her painting kit. Craig pulled on his boot. It laced up easily, without any pain.
“We’ll go to my house. I’ll make our supper,” she said.
They had used to do that sometimes. Those were the best times. He took the kit and walked beside her, hardly limping at all. They started up the cliff path.
“Why did you stay on past your contract, if the work makes you sad?” she asked suddenly.
“Two more years and I’ll have enough saved to buy me a Great Russel hunt back on Mordin,” he said. “I guess you think that’s a pretty silly reason.”
“Not at all. I thought you might have an even sillier reason.”
He fumbled for a remark, not understanding her sudden chill. Then Jordan’s voice bawled from above.
“Craig! Ho Craig!”
“Craig aye!”
“Come a-running!” Jordan yelled. “Bork’s raising hell ’cause you ain’t loading pellets. I saved chow for you.”
The rest of the field period was much better. Jordan took his turn on camp chores and joked Rice and Whelan into doing the same. Only Wilde and Cobb still called Craig “Blanky.” Craig felt good about things. Jordan sat beside him in the control cabin as Craig brought the flyer home to Base Island. Russel Island loomed blue to the south and the Main Continent coast range toothed the eastern sea rim.
“Home again. Beer and the range, eh, Craig?” Jordan said. “We’ll get in some hunting, maybe.”
“Hope so,” Craig said.
Base Island looked good. It was four thousand square miles of savanna and rolling hills with stands of young oak and beech. It teemed with game animals and birds transplanted from Mordin. On its northern tip buildings and fields made the rectilinear pattern of man. Sunlight gleamed on square miles of Thanasis greenhouses behind their ionic stockades. Base Island was a promise of the planet’s future, when Thanasis would have killed off the phytos and been killed in its turn and the wholesome life of Planet Mordin replaced them both. Base Island was home.
They were the first ringwalling team to come in. Wilde reported twelve hundred miles of ringwall destroyed, fifty percent better than the old Belconti average. Barim, the Chief Huntsman, congratulated them. He was a burly, deep-voiced man with roached gray hair and four red dots on his forehead. It was the first time Craig had ever shaken hands with a man who had killed four Great Russels. Barim rewarded the crew with a week on food hunting detail. Jordan teamed up with Craig. Craig shot twenty deer and twelve pigs and scores of game birds. His bag was better than Cobb’s. Jordan joked at Cobb about it, and it made the sparrowy little man very angry.
The new men had brought a roaring, jovial atmosphere to Base Camp that Craig rather liked. He picked up camp gossip. Barim had ordered immediate production of translocator pollen. Mildred Ames, the Belconti Chief Biologist, had refused. But the labs were Mordin property. Barim ordered his own men to work on it. Miss Ames raised shrill hell. Barim barred all Belcontis from the labs. Miss Ames counterattacked, rapier against bludgeon, and got her staff back into the labs. They were to observe only, for science and the record. It had been very lively, Craig gathered.
Jealous, scared we’ll show ’em up, the Mordin lab men laughed. And so we will, by the bones of Great Russel!
Craig saw Miss Ames several times around the labs. She was a tall, slender woman and now she looked pinch-mouthed and unhappy. She made Sidis a lab observer. He would not ringwall anymore. Craig thought about what Midori had told him. He particularly liked that notion of resorption and waited for his chance to spring it at the mess table. It came one morning at breakfast. Wilde’s crew shared a table with lab men in the raftered, stone-floored mess hall. It was always a clamor of voices and rattling mess gear. Craig sat between Cobb and Jordan and across from a squat, bald-headed lab man named Joe Breen. Joe brought up the subject of ringwalls. Craig saw his chance.
“Them ringwalls, how they make ’em,” he said. “They eat themselves and grow themselves again. It’s called resorption.”
“They’re resorbing sons of guns, ain’t they?” Joe said. “How do you like the way they mate?”
Wilde shouted from the head of the table. “That way’s not for me!”
“What do they mean?”
Craig whispered it to Jordan. Cobb heard him.
“Blanky wants to know the facts of life,” Cobb said loudly. “Who’ll tell him?”
“Who but old Papa Bork?” Wilde shouted. “Here’s what they do, Blanky. When a flitterbug gets that funny feeling it rounds up from one to a dozen others. They clump on a stem and get resorbed into one of them pinkish swellings you’re all the time seeing. After a while it splits and a mess of crawlers falls out. Get it?”
They were all grinning. Craig blushed and shook his head.
“They crawl off and plant themselves and each one grows into a phytogenous stem,” Jordan said. “For a year it buds off new phytos like mad. Then it turns into a vegetative stem.”
“Hell, I seen plenty crawlers,” Craig said. “I just didn’t know they were seeds.”
“Know how to tell the boy crawlers from the girl crawlers, Blanky?” Cobb asked. Joe Breen laughed.
“Lay off, Cobb,” Jordan said. “You don’t tell their sex, you count it,” he told Craig. “They got one pair of legs for each parent.”
“Hey, you know, that’s good!” Wilde said. “Maybe a dozen sexes, each one tearing a piece off all the others in one operation. That’s good, all right!”
“Once in a lifetime, it better be good,” Joe said. “But Great Russel, talk about polyploidy and multihybrids—wish we could breed Thanasis that way.”
“I’ll breed my own way,” Wilde said. “Just you give me the chance.”
“These Belconti women think Mordinmen are crude,” Joe said. “You’ll just have to save it up for Mordin.”
“There’s a pretty little target lives alone on Burton Island,” Wilde said.
“Yeah! Blanky knows her,” Cobb said. “Can she be had, Blanky?”
“No!” Craig clamped his big hand around his coffee cup. “She’s funny, quiet, keeps to herself a lot,” he said. “But she’s decent and good.”
“Maybe Blanky never tried,” Cobb said. He winked at Joe. “Sometimes all you have to do is ask them quiet ones.”
“I’m the guy that’ll ask, give me the chance!” Wilde shouted.
“Old Bork’ll come at her with them two red dots a-shining and she’ll fall back into loading position slick as gun oil,” Joe said.
“Yeah, and he’ll find out old One-dot Cobb done nipped in there ahead of him!” Cobb whooped.
The work horn blared. The men stood up in a clatter of scraping feet and chairs.
“You go on brewhouse duty until Monday,” Wilde told Craig. “Then we start a new field job.”
Craig wished they were back in the field already. He felt a sudden dislike of Base Camp.
The new job was dusting translocator pollen over the many North Continent areas where, seen from the air, silver streaking into dark green signaled phyto infiltration of old-strain Thanasis. The flowerless killers were wind pollinated, with the sexes on separate plants. Old ringwall scars made an overlapping pattern across half the continent, more often than not covered by silvery, iridescent stands of pure phyto growth where Thanasis had once ravaged. Wilde charted new ringwalls to be blown the next time out. It was hot, sweaty work in the black protective suits and helmets. They stayed contaminated and ate canned rations and forgot about campfires. After two weeks their po
llen cargo was used up and they landed at Burton Island. They spent half a day decontaminating. As soon as he could, Craig broke away and hurried down the gorge path.
He found Midori by the pool. She had been bathing. Her yellow print dress molded damply to her rounded figure and her hair still dripped. What if I’d come a few minutes earlier, Craig could not help thinking. He remembered Cobb’s raucous voice: sometimes all you have to do is ask them quiet ones. He shook his head. No. No.
“Hello, Midori,” he said.
Small phytos, patterned curiously in gold and scarlet and green, clung to her bare arms and shoulders. She was glad to see him. She smiled sadly when he told her about spreading translocator pollen. A phyto settled on Craig’s shoulder and he tried to change the subject.
“What makes ’em do that?” he asked. “The guys think they suck blood, but they never leave no mark on me.”
“They take fluid samples, but so tiny you can’t feel it.”
He shook the phyto off his hand. “Do they really?”
“Tiny, tiny samples. They’re curious about us.”
“Just tasting of us, huh?” He frowned. “If they can eat us, how come us and pigs and dinotheres can’t eat them?”
“Foolish Roy! They don’t eat us!” She stamped a bare foot. “They want to understand us, but the only symbols they have are atoms and groups and radicals and so on.” She laughed. “Sometimes I wonder what they do think of us. Maybe they think we’re giant seeds. Maybe they think we’re each a single, terribly complicated molecule.” She brushed her lips against a small scarlet-and-silver phyto on her wrist and it shifted to her cheek. “This is just their way of trying to live with us,” she said.
“Just the same, it’s what we call eating.”
“They eat only water and sunshine. They can’t conceive of life that preys on life.” She stamped her foot again. “Eating! Oh, Roy! It’s more like a kiss!”
Worldmakers Page 14
