The Florians

by Brian Stableford

  “That’s different,” I told her. “As you say, it’s an art. It requires elaborate care and a certain degree of surgical interference. But here we have a kind of self-regulation. What has happened is that the primary roots have somehow ‘informed’ the developing embryo of the limitations of the environment in which the seed was growing—and because of this the whole developmental process has changed gear, so that instead of getting a stunted, useless plant trying to grow to ‘normal’ size and failing miserably we have a plant which comes to full, healthy maturity despite the conditions of deprivation. That’s quite some trick. The plants here are more highly developed than the plants on Earth, in terms of efficiency and organization of form, but this is something else.”

  “It’s only a matter of size,” she complained.

  “There’s no only about it,” I corrected her. “The matter of size is the heart of the problem. I wonder how they work the trick.”

  “What about the reports on the original survey?” she asked. “And the work that was done on the Florian plants brought back to Earth—wasn’t there anything in the reports on this?”

  I shook my head. “There wasn’t enough work done. People got very touchy about the handling of plants brought back from other worlds...and rightly so. You don’t take risks of that magnitude. Everything had to be done with the strictest quarantine regulations in force. And the question they wanted answers to was really a very narrow one: Could Earthly animals thrive on this particular alien produce? Basically, what they did was feed the stuff to test animals to see if it killed them. It didn’t. Answer to question: Yes. All other observations were incidental, with no comprehensive background study to tie them in together. A hell of a way to run a scientific investigation—but everyone knew that the volunteers were taking a big chance anyhow, and you know what committees are. Expenditure, in terms of effort as well as cash, has to be pared to the minimum. You can argue till doomsday about what constitutes a reasonable risk...and we very probably will. So, in brief, the original work on Floria’s life-system was inadequate. In a sense, the colony itself is the main experiment. The whole colony project is just so many experimental runs under slightly different conditions, and it’s still too early to register a final decision. Can men survive in alien life-systems, and if so, how? We still don’t know...not really.”

  I dropped the miniature tree, and wiped the dirt from my hand. I continued to look at it, still trying to sort it all out in my head. There was light at the end of the tunnel, now. I could make a reasonable guess at the cause of the growth epidemic. The probable answer didn’t fill me with joy and happiness.

  Karen put her hand on my arm.

  “Are you OK?”

  “Sure,” I said. “I’m sorry. We’re wasting time. Let’s get on.”

  She seemed slightly uncertain. I smiled reassuringly. “It’s all right,” I said. “It’s just that for the first time I can smell the rat I’m here to catch.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  One of the most useful features of the all-purpose clothing which we’d been issued for this expedition was the fact that it was water-repellent. The gaps could, all be sealed so that—if and when it became necessary—we could wade through water neck deep and stay dry.

  In the salt marsh, it almost came to that.

  We had no trouble getting across the bridge unseen by human eyes, but in order to make use of the structure we had been forced to come so far upstream that there were three or four miles of marsh to be traversed before we got to the group of huts. We couldn’t walk along the river bank itself, because there were paths running alongside the south bank. We had to go some way north so that the tall reeds and swamp shrubs hid us from any passersby across the river.

  It wasn’t easy forcing our way through the rushes which grew wherever there was exposed soil—all the tiny islands in the marsh were packed tight with all manner of growths. For the most part, it was easier to wade in the shallows beside the islets, though we couldn’t avoid the rushes without swimming.

  Progress was slow. I led the way, armed with a long stave I’d broken from a tree and trimmed with the aid of Karen’s iron bar, which was flattened at the hooked end and made a fairly serviceable scraper. I used the stave to test the depth of the water we were walking in. The bottom was invariably glutinous with silt and organic debris, and there were worms and aquatic slugs in some profusion feeding there—none of which made the going any easier.

  Occasionally, we came across great flat carpets of vegetation which seemed to offer a much easier way, but these were invariably floating rafts of tangled stems, and when we attempted to walk on them we could not persuade them to support our weight for more than a few seconds at a time. They gave the impression that if we were to run lightly over their surface, not pausing at any one point, we could avoid sinking, but the business smacked too much of tightrope-walking. If one of us were to fall into the middle of such a raft, becoming entangled in the mass of knotted fiber, getting out again might be next to impossible.

  We stopped, occasionally, on a convenient islet for a rest. Most of the squat trees were decked with creepers and colored fungoid growths, but it was usually the work of a couple of minutes for Karen to clear a space to sit with a few graceless swings of the crowbar, in whose use she was becoming adept.

  While we rested on such occasions I couldn’t help taking to “fishing” with the pole—trying to lift the denizens of the ooze up to the turbid surface where I could study them briefly before they flapped themselves clear and sank again to the mundane business of life. I would have lifted them out to display them, taking a more careful look at their bodily organization, but they were of such bizarre color and shape, and their texture so pliably gelatinous that even I didn’t like to handle them.

  There are, of course, only three basic styles in animal shapes: spherical, radial, and bilateral—and the first of those is generally restricted to the most elementary of organisms. But the majority of the creatures which I managed to haul up for inspection showed scant respect for any kind of symmetry—radial or bilateral. Even on Earth, nothing is exactly symmetrical, but here on Floria the basic symmetry underlying every growth process—and to which the plants adhered most rigorously—seemed to have been abandoned by most of the animals as they grew larger. They were untidy bundles of flesh, looking rather like parcels which had come apart in the mail and were barely constrained by loose, tangled string. Even the worms had bulbous processes and groups of tentacles distributed without rhyme or reason along their length. The creatures which were more bulbous to start with—creatures resembling sea cucumbers, starfish, jellyfish or mollusks—elaborated themselves in all kinds of strange ways.

  In water, of course, mass means little, and when your specific gravity is very much the same as that of the mud you inhabit it hardly matters what weird form you adopt, but the sheer profusion of it all was what seemed remarkable. It was not that there were incredibly vast numbers of organisms so much as the fact that there seemed to be no two alike. Every one I dredged up seemed to be something quite unique. It was an illusion, of course—it was simply that different individuals of the same species might differ considerably in details of form and coloring. On Earth, the human species exhibits two distinct physical forms and a number of minor variations of color and features but here...identity—individual identity—meant so much more. More, among the animals...but less among the plants.

  The trees themselves, where we rested, tended to have their animal life: small vermiform creatures not unlike leeches wandered among the branches, as did a profusion of snails (who wore their shells, of course, as a guard against desiccation, not a protection against predators). I looked at these creatures, too, and found their diversity fascinating. Karen, once I had confirmed that the leechlike individuals were not, in fact, leeches, was content to ignore them all. They did not have the same fascination for her.

  I was, not unnaturally, tempted to linger whenever we stopped. Over and above the necessity for
regular periods of rest I felt that I was under some compulsion to find the basic pattern underlying all this confusion. Occasionally, when the water was very shallow, I could watch the creatures in situ, moving slowly through the mud and throwing up tiny eruptions as they dived deeper or “surfaced.” The creatures I yanked up with my staff were the big, ugly ones, but not all the denizens of the swamp were big and ugly. There were tiny creatures: spiral worms, hydra-like creatures, and even ciliates and amoeboid forms comfortably visible to the naked eye. If I cupped my hands and dredged the mud in the shallows I could net thirty or forty tiny creatures which flipped around on my palms as the water drained away through my fingers. They reminded me strongly of the rich profusion of the microscopic protozoa inhabiting ponds and sea-shallows on Earth...except that these were on a larger scale. No doubt there were microscopic forms as well, to complete the spectrum. Except, of course, that the spectrum was not “complete” in the same way that Earth’s spectrum of motile creatures was. After all, these creatures of jellylike flesh were only half-animals, living on decaying organic matter. Only a very tiny fraction of them could eat healthy plant tissue, and virtually none could prey upon their brethren.

  The fierce competition for organic molecules—the motive force behind the primary differentiation of primitive cells into molecule-makers, and molecule-stealers, and thus into plants and animals—had never been fierce enough on Floria. The dice had been loaded in favor of the industrious molecule-makers, and the bandit cells which—on Earth—were ancestral to virtually all mobile, free-living organisms had never flourished.

  The analogy between the evolutionary ecology of Floria’s life-system and the history of the human colony did not escape me. In this life-system the struggle for existence was not a kill-or-be-killed, eat-or-be-eaten affair, but a competition for efficiency, where the healthiest and most competent won out by producing more offspring. The rigid regime of competition here was found among the plants, which competed for space and light, and all failures were stillborn: seeds which failed to germinate rather than organisms which grew halfway to maturity and then were destroyed. On Floria, evolution was not so cruel. And the Planners wanted to build a society in which cruelty was banished from human relationships.

  Was it possible? Was it possible, in either case? There was one piece, I knew, still missing from the evolutionary puzzle: the one fundamental thing which was responsible for the difference between Floria’s biosphere and Earth’s. I knew what kind of piece it was, but I hadn’t quite found it yet....

  Evolution, on Floria, had a kind of built-in indolence. A sloppiness. Animal evolution, that is. The plants were refined, precisely formed, efficient. But the animals got along any old how. They grew large, ugly. They were leisurely in their conduct, content to live on sludge. Soft flesh and idle habits. Why...?

  In a sense, I thought, Floria is a kind of Paradise. The pressure on living organisms is not the same. And because it’s a Paradise, it’s ugly. The animals are wonderful, but repulsive. Because there’s a correlation between beauty and efficiency. A big cat is beautiful because it’s been fashioned by evolution to a particular purpose. It is designed to chase and kill. And by the same token, the antelope is beautiful because it’s designed to run and escape. The whole process is circular—the faster and more graceful the predator becomes, the faster and more graceful the prey. But not here. Not on Floria. No grace, no speed. Just giants.

  The human colony on Floria was going the way of all Florian flesh. Slowly and casually (how else?) the humans were being sucked into participation in the Florian way of doing things.

  Today, giants...tomorrow....

  “My God,” said Karen, with feeling, “this is a horrible place!”

  A great flattened worm with a ragged fringe had convulsively coiled itself around her leg. It wanted to get away just as much as she wanted to get it loose, but as she stabbed at it with the iron bar it was at the mercy of its own reflexes. It coiled and writhed, and could not get free. I tried to stop her stabbing with the crowbar, but before I had her arms restrained she had slashed the soft flesh to ribbons, and cloudy dark green ichor was bursting from the rubbery flesh. I put my arm down and let the worm wind itself off Karen’s leg and onto my wrist, and then let it alone to uncoil itself and go on its way. But as it did so, it was already dying.

  “Do you have to start smashing everything with that damned thing?” I demanded, with some asperity.

  “Hell’s bells!” she replied, with more than equal ferocity. “It’s only a goddamn worm.”

  “It couldn’t do you any harm,” I said. “It’s not built to take injuries like that—once ruptured these creatures are as good as dead. They haven’t any built-in resilience.”

  “What the hell does it matter?” she demanded, perhaps more in surprise than in anger.

  “The crowbar isn’t the answer to everything,” I said soberly. “Nor is the way you use it. It’s for opening boxes...but ever since you picked it up you’ve been using it like a battle ax. That’s Earth thinking. It doesn’t belong here.”

  She looked at me, the surprise dulling into puzzlement. “You really mean that, don’t you?”

  “Of course I mean it.”

  “You’re a fool,” she informed me.

  “It may seem rather silly,” I admitted, “defending the rights of a worm. But I don’t think it makes me a fool.”

  “It’s not just the worm,” she said. “It’s everything. You really believe in all this, don’t you? You really have faith.”

  “All what?” I said guardedly.

  “The mythology of space conquest. The whole bit. Man emerging from the womb of Earth to a mature existence among the stars. Man learning to live on alien worlds, throwing off the shackles of his particular heritage, finding new cosmic perspectives. You believe in the possibility of a new saintly humanity out here in space, free of all the squalor and the viciousness and all the original sins of Earth. You believe in higher destiny...in the ultimate perfectibility of man...and you believe there’s something tragic in hitting a worm just because it isn’t built to cope with being hit.”

  The irony in her words was positively scorching. There was only one way I could possibly face it.

  “Certainly I do,” I told her. “I believe in all of that. Maybe more. Some of the words are loaded, of course...but so far as the thoughts underlying them go, I believe in the whole bag. Don’t you?”

  “You have to be joking,” she said.

  “Why? You came out here as part of the same project. You volunteered for space...accepting a part in all that mythology you’re so scornful about. We’re both here, on an alien world, wading through an alien swamp in pursuit of the same vague ends...what’s the difference between us?”

  “I’m carrying a battle ax and you’re feeling sorry for a wounded worm.”

  I sighed. “I was afraid you were going to say that.”

  She started to look self-satisfied, but she hesitated. She wasn’t sure. She didn’t know whether she’d won the exchange or not.

  “Go on,” I said tiredly. “There’s a long way to go yet.”

  We moved off, making the same slow progress. The sun was high in the sky by now, and we were sweating in the humid heat. I still led the way, probing with my stick.

  “You know,” I said, without turning my head to face her, “I have a son who feels exactly the way you do about the conquest of space. He thinks that it’s evil. He thinks that we should conquer Earth first, build a Utopia at home, before we even think about the stars. But he doesn’t understand. you see. He’s trapped by his historical perspective. He believes in progress by stages...levels of technology, if you like. He doesn’t realize that all kinds of processes go on simultaneously, that historical time can’t be segmented. Even in your own life, you have several processes going on simultaneously. All your selves develop together...all your personal mythologies grow and develop, each alongside the others.... That’s the way change happens.”

 
She didn’t answer, or indicate that she had even been listening. Perhaps it was all meaningless to her. Perhaps I had already exceeded the limits of her tolerance. But even cynics occasionally take time out to think.

  Sometimes.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  We waited in one of the huts until nightfall.

  I had hoped that there might be food to be discovered somewhere in the small huddle of buildings, but we were unlucky. Not so much as half a loaf of stale bread did we locate. Just boats, and nets, and miscellaneous tackle. The Florians were a habitually tidy people, not ones to let debris linger and accumulate.

  We had a choice of boats. We selected the smallest, believing that it would be the easiest to row. I took the oars first. We launched it into the river and tried to sneak unobtrusively along in the shadow of the north bank. This proved somewhat difficult as the current persistently attempted to drag us out and get a better grip of us. Although it was taking us the right way I found myself fighting it—and losing, thanks to the clumsiness born of inexperience. Within minutes, I realized that the best thing to do was allow the current to have its way. We were far more likely to be discovered because of my inexpert splashing of the oars than through the keen sight of anyone on the bank. A drifting boat occupied by two shadows might not receive much attention anyhow, whereas one obviously occupied by unskilled rowers quite possibly would.

  Once beyond the mouth of the river I began assisting the current again, and by the time the river’s thrust had abandoned us I had acquired a reasonable rhythm. It never became easy, but I felt that I had mastered the business and was moderately comfortable.

  We could see the lights of the town to the south, supported on a raft of liquid light that was their shimmering reflection in the sea. When there was no longer any possibility that we might be noticed, I began to find the view rather beautiful. Karen, who was sitting in the prow of the boat behind me, did not have the opportunity to become lost in rapt contemplation of it all, for it was her business to make sure that I stayed on the right course. Fortunately, the lights of the buildings on the island showed up as brightly as those of the town—individually, in fact, they were probably much brighter, and I guessed that the aristocrats of knowledge made far more use of electricity than the common people. Where wealth is knowledge you get a better class of status symbol.