The Florians

by Brian Stableford

  “Perhaps, somewhere, locked in the vaults where you keep your closely guarded supply of human knowledge—knowledge two centuries out of date by Earthly standards—you have the information which would have allowed you to know what is happening to you. But where is the man with that knowledge in his head? Where is the man who uses that knowledge in his everyday work and his everyday thinking? He is not here, because so far as you are concerned that knowledge is for use, and for use only, in practical terms. You deal in the knowledge which is necessary in order to make and build things...and in the knowledge which has to be concealed lest certain other things be made and built. Because you have no theoretical scientists, but only applied scientists, you have no one with the broad perspectives necessary to see past your own limited objectives. You have no one, except us.

  “And even if you had a man, or men, with a mind educated in such a way that he was capable of perceiving what is desperately wrong here, what could he do about it? You are, I have no doubt, making great strides in medical science and medical technology. But I have no doubt, also, that the science of genetic engineering is one of those areas of knowledge which you have decided—on the basis of good historical evidence—should be left untouched. It is too dangerous, too amenable to misuse. What were its consequences on Earth? Plagues, bacteriological warfare, tragic accidents in ecological management. There were successes, too, of course, but history is an interpretative art...and it is always easier to explain disasters.

  “There is, I believe, no way that you can cope with the disaster which you face, a disaster which already has you in its grip, without our aid. Aid which only Earth can provide.

  “It is not a matter of tolerating our presence here—it is a matter of welcoming it and making use of it. I cannot say that if you command us to leave you will all die, or even that your grandiose schemes will be doomed to failure. I only assure you that we are the only ones who can find out how much danger there is...and you cannot afford not to know.”

  I paused, and looked around at all the pairs of eyes that were watching me. They were hostile: each and every one. It wasn’t surprising. I was attacking the very roots of all their most precious dreams. Nathan, no doubt, had walked carefully in the garden of their hopes and beliefs, determined not to step on any cherished blossom. He had won such support as he had gained with flattery and promises and sweet words. But I was no diplomat.

  Behind me, I heard the door open and close. Without turning around, I knew that Jason had left the room. He didn’t know what the outcome of the argument would be, but he already knew enough. He had failed to win us or to make use of us. He felt that all his ambitions were under threat. He had gone to do something about it. While I paused, I wondered what.

  But there was no time....

  “Tell us, please,” said Rondo coldly, “exactly what danger you imagine faces us.”

  “The flesh on your bones,” I said bluntly. “And the bones themselves.” He made as if to interrupt, but I held up my hand. “Oh, yes,” I went on, “you’re aware of the problem. You’re seriously concerned about it. But what you don’t realize is the full range of its implications.

  “When the average height and weight of the colonists began to increase, you± forefathers probably thought of it as a good, healthy sign...Earthmen growing big and strong in their new world. At first it seemed good, and later, it seemed normal. The change has been gradual, uniform...almost imperceptible in a population of ignorant people. You knew...when the unfortunate corollaries of growth began to appear you became concerned. But only you. And even you fell prey to the same trap. It seemed to be normal, to be part of your way of life. In your minds, you knew that you were different from Earthmen and becoming more so. But knowing something intellectually isn’t enough of a stimulus. You accepted its consequences, because they were consequences which affect you all, and you have an insular perspective.

  “And there’s another factor, too: the belief that the man who is obese, or, indeed, loses control over his body in any way at all, is personally responsible. When a man is injured. or invaded by parasites, that is sickness—to be treated. But when a man grows fat, that is the legacy of self-indulgence, a lack of self-discipline—not sickness so much as failure. There is a certain contempt which people feel for other men who become fat and ugly...and there is a similar contempt which such men feel for themselves. You know—intellectually—that obesity may result from genetic or glandular disorders, but again it is what you feel that is preventing you from searching out the whole truth.

  “I am sure you have searched for the glandular disorders. I am sure that you have tried to identify, somewhere in the range of foods you use, some chemical compound which is causing your bodies to put on weight unnaturally. Perhaps you have searched for a virus or for an anomaly in the tissue involved. You have tried to see it as a disease, as a cancer. And you have failed. But this only reinforces the feeling that you have that you yourselves are responsible...that you lack control over your bodies because of some inner inadequacy.”

  They were looking at me as if I were mouthing obscenities. I could see hatred in more than one pair of eyes. But I had already cut away all the clothes of convention, the rituals of unmentionability. They were listening. They were hanging on to my every word.

  “I don’t know how old you are,” I said. “I don’t know how long you expect to live. All the indicators by which I’d try to guess are confused, and even the terms in which I’d have to measure are different. Floria’s year is not the same as Earth’s year. But I believe that you’re dying too soon...that you have barely as long a maturity as you have a youth, and that your bodies begin to betray you all too early in life. I think that if I were a Florian I would now be barely able to walk. I would be eternally hungry and eternally putting on excess weight by the pound. My life would be almost over. As things are, however, I am perhaps halfway through my life. I have as many years left to me as I have already used. In ten years, in thirty years, I’ll still be active in body and in mind. Frail, perhaps, and slow...but active, still able to use my body.”

  All this was merely hitting them where it hurt. I wanted to be sure of them. I wanted them frightened. I wanted them committed not just to making deals with us, but protecting us as the richest resource on the planet. I wished only that Jason were still here to listen, because I thought I could have panicked even him.

  “What you must realize now is that you are still Earthmen trying to live on an alien world. You have deliberately forgotten that fact, tried to bury it. This is your Mother World, your only world, the world with which you identify, the world whose substance is the substance of your flesh...but it is still an alien world, and may always be so. You think you have adapted, but adaptation is something which can take seventy generations rather than seven, and may take forever. As you adapt, the world adapts: and you grow apart as well as together.

  “You are all being poisoned, by a poison so slow that it takes generations to take effect, and so subtle that you cannot detect it. We can detect it, because we have the resources.”

  “All this is very inventive.” The speaker now was one of the older men, not Rondo—the formalities had been abandoned now. “But it is only rhetoric. You will have to tell us more about this poison you have invented.”

  “I will,” I told him. I went on, “The most puzzling aspect of the giantism which affects you all is its uniformity. This was what troubled me most when I first arrived here. Had it been caused by any individual agent—a hormonal mimic fortuitously manufactured by an alien plant or group of plants—then certain members of your population would have suffered far more than others, and you would have had no trouble identifying the cause. But the fact that all of you seemed to have been affected to the same degree suggested that it was something universal—not only in the alien life-system, but in the crops you had yourselves imported. It was several times pointed out to us that on Floria, everything grows big. Men, pigs, pigeons, potatoes, even ears of corn.<
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  “I didn’t immediately see how that could be, until I’d had a chance to look at things more closely. The important fact, and the key to the whole thing, was something I already knew—but only in my mind. It wasn’t until I came here, and got out into the wilderness, that I began to see and feel the implications of that fact.

  “The balance of nature here is a very different balance from that found on Earth. All the secondary consumers on this world consume dead and decayed matter—the soil is exceptionally rich in organic compounds, the legacy of previous generations of plants. The plants here are superefficient. They fix solar energy quickly, grow quickly—and die quickly. The turnover in the energy budget is remarkably high. I was inclined to think that the fact that real animals—consumers of living flesh—had never evolved here was because there were no incentives. It was too easy to live on decayed flesh, because there was always plenty of it about.

  “But that explanation, you see, isn’t competent. Where there are opportunities for a new way of life, natural selection will inevitably discover them...provided that natural selection has a chance to work.

  “On Floria, it hasn’t. This is partly due to the fact that there are so few regimes of change...the lack of tides is important here. But it’s also due to the fact that there is a factor here channeling change, preventing change along certain lines by permitting it along others.

  “Natural selection is so important on Earth because minor changes in genetic structure mean big changes in physical form. Organisms in Earth’s life-system have very little innate plasticity. I’m using the word plasticity here in a special sense which it assumes within genetic theory: it means the range of different options open to different organisms with identical genes. It’s sometimes important in plants when genetically identical seeds grow in very different environments: from one seed you might get a tall plant with abundant leaves, whereas from another you might get a small one with aberrant leaves—these differences can be forced by different limiting factors in the soil. The growth of an embryo is not entirely controlled by genes, but also by factors prevailing in the environment where it develops. Now, on Earth only plants have a very considerable degree of plasticity—and by careful management of their growth and judicious interference one can turn out miniature trees or giant fruits. Animals, by and large, have less plasticity...and among the higher animals, whose embryos grow in carefully regulated conditions within the womb, there is virtually no natural plasticity at all. Growth can be stunted by malnutrition, but that’s not really the same thing. Muscles can be destroyed and limbs permanently bent by consistent physical interference, but again, that’s in no way natural.

  “Here on Floria, things are different. Especially with respect to tissue growth. I’ve seen trees which were twins genetically but as far apart on the spectrum of size as one could imagine. I’ve seen marsh creatures obviously belonging to the same species with a host of small, idiosyncratic differences almost all involving excessive tissue growth locally or generally. Here, all life-forms are individually plastic to a large extent; and where genetic changes make far less difference to the options of a growing organism natural selection is far, far less effective. The animals of Floria, feeders on the dead, have not evolved because they are so individually adaptable that new species hardly ever arise.

  “The reason why such plasticity is universal has to be that the system of genetic regulation characteristic of this life-system—the way that the expression of the genes is controlled and regulated, not only during embryo-growth but also during functional life—differs somewhat from the system by which the genes in Earth’s life-system are regulated. The poison that you, and every other species you have brought to Floria, are picking up here is something rather more basic than a hormonal mimic: it’s a compound which interferes with the regulation of genetic programming, with the way the genetic code is read in building and maintaining organisms. Obviously, this regulator compound is not as effective in Earth species as it is in Florian ones. But at this level, compounds are selected for function—and just as the photosynthetic agent which makes your grass green is functionally similar to chlorophyll, so this compound is capable of functioning to some degree in Earth-type genetic systems.

  “As to where you’re picking up the poison from, the answer is everywhere. You see, it’s in the soil. It’s part of the decayed plant-matter which is the staple diet of all organisms on Floria that don’t make their own molecules. It’s taken up by the imported crops, and it affects them. When your animals are fed on alien food, and even when they’re fed on Earth food, they are affected by it, too. And the same applies to you. Whatever grows in Florian soil, or feeds on the produce of Florian soil, picks up this poison.

  “Within the Florian life-system, of course, this compound is useful. It is, in fact, central to the whole Florian way of life, in the broadest possible sense of the phrase. In humans, too, it can have useful effects. If its effects could be restricted, perhaps it might not be reckoned as a poison at all. But human bodies, you see, were designed by natural selection on the assumption that plasticity was virtually nonexistent. Human genes aren’t organized to cope with plasticity. In the developing embryo, the regulated conditions of the womb restrict the influence of the rogue factor to a matter of size: a fairly slight influence, within the spectrum of human practicality. But in the mature organism, which isn’t built to last forever, the influence of the rogue factor increases with time—and eventually, the body runs wild. The careful limitations on the behavior and control of tissues are eroded. You all fall victims to a kind of slow, generalized cancer.

  “That is what is happening to you. It has to be brought under control. You have to find a way of coping with this poison; and since you can’t avoid it you must find a way of opposing its action. It should be possible...once we have isolated the compound in the Daedalus laboratory and studied its action. All complex biological compounds have weaknesses. We not only have the means to find out what those weaknesses are, and build biological counteragents in the laboratory, but through genetic engineering we can alter plants or microorganisms in order to make them produce the counteragent for us. We can design a life-form to do the job, to substitute for the laboratory. That’s what we’re here to do for you, if you’ll let us.

  “You must not cut yourselves off from Earth,” I concluded, in a voice so soft as to be almost a stage whisper. “Because, no matter how much you despise all that Earth stands for in your mythology, you remain men of Earth...and you cannot become men of Floria in the ultimate sense of the word unless you accept all the help that Earth can possibly offer.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  They wanted to discuss it. There wasn’t really anything to discuss, and we all knew it, but they didn’t like the way I’d rammed it down their throats and they were determined to make some kind of show. Karen, Nathan, and I returned to Nathan’s room like the accused awaiting the verdict of the jury.

  I found, when we got there, that I was trembling. I had to sit down and grip the arms of the chair to hold myself ready.

  “When did you work that out?” asked Karen. She sounded a little sour, as if she felt that she might have been let in on the secret earlier. She thought it had all come to me in a flash of divine inspiration when the miniature tree came away in my band, or when I was fishing in the salt marsh.

  “I don’t know,” I told her truthfully. “The pieces just fell Into place. Slowly. I wasn’t sure when I started exactly what I was going to say. I hoped only that I could make some sense of it. It isn’t as simple as that, not really. But I had to make it clear.”

  “Are you sure it’s right?” demanded Nathan.

  “You don’t solve scientific problems like Sherlock Holmes,” I told him, for the second time. “I wish you did. But it’s the right way to look at the problem...and before you ask, I can’t guarantee results. All I can say is that if the answer’s accessible, we’ll find it. Given the chance.”

  “You’ll get your chan
ce,” he said. “There can’t be much doubt about that.”

  “What about your chance?” I said. “Your successful world doesn’t look quite as good anymore, does it? There really isn’t so much difference between Floria and the other colonies, is there?”

  “There’s enough,” he assured me.

  “What you mean,” I said, “is that if you write your reports cleverly enough, playing up the right aspects and glossing over the embarrassing ones, you can make this seem a very different proposition.”

  “You disapprove?” he said. “But this is all in the service of the dream you hold so dear. Isn’t this what you want? The rebuilding of the myth, the reinstitution of the space program, the union of Earth and colonies...surely you believe that what I’m trying to achieve is for the good of mankind?”

  His voice was mocking, and I was surprised by the sudden aggressiveness. It made me angry. I couldn’t make out for a moment or two what I’d done to annoy him, to justify the attack. Then I realized that it might not be anger, but a mixture of contempt and envy. I’d upstaged him before the Planners—and I’d done it with a sincerity, a sense of purpose, which be didn’t feel. He was doing a job—playing a game—and he believed only in the game. Ars gratia Artis. He looked upon this whole mission as an exercise in manipulation: manipulation of the people with whom we came to deal, manipulation of the great host of committees back home who would have the job of deciding what to do on the basis of our reports. In a way, he was like Arne Jason, the man in the middle, rejoicing in the unique privilege of his situation. History was cupped in the palms of his hands...but the power to exert his own influence upon it meant far more to him than any sense of purpose, any sense of responsibility. I realized now what Karen had implied when she had told me, back in the village, that not everyone shared my outlook.