Lightspeed: Year One
Page 67
I was not the only one who never felt entirely at ease in the pretty cities. But, as I rationalized the intermittent twinges of conscience, it would have been ridiculous to build facilities when empty accommodations were already available, despite their obstinate refusal to work no matter how Dunlapil tried to energize them. Still, we managed fine and gradually came to ignore the anomalies we had never fully explored, settling down to make our gardens and our families grow.
The tenth year was just beginning, with surprising warmth, when Martin Chavez called a meeting with me and Dunlapil. Chavez had even convened it on a Restday, which was annoying as well as unusual.
“Just in case we have to call a meeting of the colony,” he told me when I protested. That statement, on top of his insistence on a meeting, was enough to make me feel apprehensive. Although Martin was a worrier he was no fool; he did not force his problems on anyone unnecessarily, nor was he one for calling useless meetings.
“I’ve an unusual report to make on a new plant growth discernible on the velvet fields, commissioner Sarubbi,” he announced, addressing me formally. “Such a manifestation is not generally associated with simple monocotyledonous plants. I’ve cross-checked both used and unused pastures, and the distortions of the growth in the used fields are distressing.”
“You mean, we’ve imported a virus that’s mutating the indigenous grasses?” I asked. “Or has the old virus that killed off the herbivorous life revived?”
“Nothing like this mutation has ever been classified and no, I don’t think it’s a return of a previous calamity.” Chavez frowned with worry.
“Ah, champion, Martin,” Dunlapil said with some disgust. “Don’t go calling for a planetary quarantine just when we’re showing a nice credit balance.”
Chavez drew himself up indignantly.
“He hasn’t suggested anything of the sort, Dun,” I said, wondering if the urban engineer was annoyed because Chavez might be closer to solving the enigma of the Tree than Dunlapil was the mechanics of the cities. “Please explain, Specialist Chavez.”
“I’ve just recently become aware of a weird evolution from the family Graminaceae, which these plants have resembled until now.” He snapped on the handviewer and projected a slide onto the only wall in my office bare of the ubiquitous murals. “The nodular extrusions now developing in the velvet fields show none of the characteristics of herbaceous plants. No joined stems or slender sheathing leaves.” He looked around to see if we had seen enough before he flashed on a slide of magnified cellular material. “This cross section suggests genus Helianthus, an improbable mutation.” Chavez shrugged his helplessness in presenting such contradictory material. “However, something new is under every sun and we have not yet determined how the usual blue light of this primary will affect growth after prolonged exposure. We might get a Bragae Two effect.”
“The next thing you’ll be telling us, Martin,” Dunlapil said as if to forestall a discourse on galactic comparisons, “is that these plants are the aliens who built these cities.” He shot me a grin.
“That ought to be obvious,” Chavez said with such a lack of rancor that the disbelief I had been entertaining disappeared. “Commissioner”—Chavez’s grave eyes met mine—”can you give me another reason why every city has similarly fenced lots, all placed to catch full daily sun? Why the velvet fields with that central dominant Tree symbol appear to be the reverent focus of the aliens—excuse me—the indigenous species?”
“But they’re humanoid,” Dunlapil said in protest.
“Their culture is agrarian. And there are no grazers. Not a single example of that blasted Tree anywhere on the planet—yet!”
That was when I truly began to be afraid.
“There are no grazing beasts,” Chavez went on inexorably, “because they have been eliminated to protect the velvet fields and whatever is growing in them now.”
“You mean, when those fields bloom with whatever it is they bloom with, the aliens will return?” Dunlapil asked.
Chavez nodded. “If we haven’t irreparably altered the growth cycle.”
“But that’s fantastic! An entire civilization can’t be dependent on a crazy who-knows-how-long cycle of plant life.” Dunlapil was sputtering with indignation.
“Nothing is impossible,” replied Chavez at his most didactic.
“Your research has been sufficiently comprehensive?” I asked him, although I was sick with the sense of impending disaster.
“As comprehensive as my limited equipment and xenobotanical experience allow. I would welcome a chance to submit my findings to a board of specialists with greater experience in esoteric plant-life forms. And I respectfully request that you have Colonial Central send us a team at once. I’m afraid that we’ve already done incalculable damage to the—” He paused and, with a grim smile, corrected himself. “—indigenous organism seeded in those fields.”
The semantic nicety jarred me. If Chavez was even remotely correct, we would require not only xenobotanists and xenobiologists but an entire investigation team from Worlds Federated to examine our intrusion into a domain that had not, after all, been abandoned by its occupants like a Marie Celeste but had simply been lying fallow—with the indigenous natives quiescently in residence.
As Chavez, Dunlapil, and I walked from my office toward the Comtower, I remember now that I felt a little foolish and very scared, like a child reluctant to report an accident to his parents but dutifully conscientious about admitting his misdemeanor. The plastisteel tower had never looked so out of place, so alien, so sacrilegious as it did now.
“Hey, wait a minute, you two,” Dulapil protested. “You know what an investigation team means . . . ”
“Anything and everything must be done to mitigate our offense as soon as possible,” Chavez said, interrupting nervously.
“Dammit!” Dunlapil stopped in his tracks. “We’ve done nothing wrong.”
“Indeed we have. We may have crippled an entire generation.” Chavez spoke with an expression of ineffable sorrow.
“There are plenty of fields we never touched. The aliens—natives—can use them for food.”
Chavez’s sad smile deepened and he gently removed Dunlapil’s hand from his arm. “‘From dust ye came, to dust ye shall return, and from dust shall ye spring again.’“
It was then that Dunlapil understood the enormity of our crime.
“You mean, the plants are the people?”
“What else have I been saying? They are born from the Trees.”
We did what we could even as we waited for the specialists and investigation team to arrive.
First we cleared the animals and crops from every one of the velvet fields. We removed every sign of our colonial occupation from the cities. The team, composed of five nonhuman and three humanoid species, arrived with menacing expedition well before the initial flood of xenospecialists. The team members did not comment on our preliminary efforts to repair our error, nor did they protest their quarters in the hastily erected dwellings on the bare, dusty plain and the subsequent roaring activity of the spaceport close by. All they did was observe with portentous intensity.
Of course, except for vacating the cities—and occupying them was apparently the least of our cumulative crimes—everything we did to remedy our trespass proved horribly inept in the final analysis. We would have been less destructive had we kept the cattle on the velvet fields and not slaughtered them for food. We ought to have let the crops ripen, die, and return to the special soils that had nourished them. For the fields we stripped produced the worst horrors. But how were we to know?
Now, of course, we know all too fully. We are burdened to this very day with guilt and remorse for the wholesale dismemberment and dispersal of those irretrievable beings; eaten, digested, defecated upon by grazers. And again, eaten, digested, and eliminated by those who partook of the grazers’ flesh. Of the countless disintegrated natives removed from their home soil by unwitting carriers, none can bear fruit on foreig
n soil. And on their own soil, to repeat, the fields we had stripped produced the worst horrors . . .
I remember when the last report had been turned in to the eight judges composing the investigation team. Its members wasted no further time in formulating their decree. I was called to their conference room to hear the verdict. As I entered, I saw the judges seated on a raised platform, several feet above my head. That in itself was warning that we had lost all status in Worlds Federated.
A flick of the wrist attracted my attention to one of three humans on the team. Humbly I craned my head back, but he refused to glance down at me.
“The investigation is complete,” he said in an emotionless tone. “You have committed the worst act of genocide yet to be recorded in all galactic history.”
“Sir . . . ” My protest was cut off by a second, peremptory gesture.
“Xenobiologists report that the growths in the velvet fields have reached the third stage in their evolution. The parallel between this life-form in its second stage and that of the cellulose fauna of Brandon Two is inescapable.” Chavez had already told me of that parallel. “Now the plants resemble the exorhizomorphs of Planariae Five and it is inevitable that this third stage will give way to the sentient life pictured in the murals of their cities.
“You came here as agrarians and agrarians you shall be, in the fields of those you have mutilated. What final reparations will be levied against you, one and all, cannot be known until the victims of your crimes pronounce the penance whereby you may redeem your species in the eyes of the Worlds Federated.”
He stopped speaking and waved me away. I withdrew to announce the verdict to my dazed fellow colonists. I would far rather that we had been summarily executed then and there, instead of being worn and torn apart by bits and pieces. But that was not the way of judgment for those who trespass in modern enlightened times.
We could not even make an appeal on the grounds that the planet had been released to us, for the colony in its charter took on all responsibility for its subsequent actions, having reaped benefits now so dearly to be paid for.
So we worked from that day until Budding Time late that heinous fall. We watched anxiously as the seedling exorhizomorphs grew at a phenomenal rate until they were ten, then twenty, finally twenty-five feet high, thick-trunked, branching out, lush with green triangular foliage. By midsummer we knew why it was that during our time on the planet we had never been able to find any examples of the Tree: Such Trees grew once every hundred years. For they were the Trees of Life and bore the Fruit of Zobranoirundisi in the cellular wombs, two to a branch, three to eleven branches per Tree. In the good fields—that is, the unviolated fields.
In the others . . .
The galaxy knows we tried to atone for our crime. Every man, woman, and child was devoted to tending the twisted, stunted, deformed, half-branched Trees that grew so piteously in those desecrated fields. Every one of us watched with growing apprehension and horror as each new day showed further evidence of the extent of our sacrilege. Oh, the hideous difference between those straight, tall, fine Zobranoirundisi and—the Others. We were ready for any sacrifice as penance.
Then, the morning after the first good frost, when the cold had shriveled the stems, the first Zobranoirundisi tore through his vegetable placenta. He shook his tall willowy body, turned and made obeisance to his natal Tree of Life, ate of the soil at its roots, of its triangular foliage . . . and knew.
I can never retell the agony of that day, when all those Zobranoirundisi faced us, their maimers, and announced the form our expiation would take. We bowed our heads to the inevitable, for we knew the sentence to be just and of Hammurabian simplicity.
We had to give back to the soil what we had taken from it. The handless Zobranoirundisi, recognizing his missing member from the cells now incorporated into the fingers of a young colony child nurtured on milk from cattle fed in the velvet fields, had every right to reclaim what was undeniably his own flesh. The legless Zobranoirundisi could not be condemned to a crippled existence when the Terran child had used the same cells to run freely for seven years on land where previously only Zobranoirundisi had trod.
We rendered, all of us, unto the Zobranoirundisi that which was truly theirs—seed and soil of the velvet fields, part and particle of the originally fertilizing dust that would have been reconstituted during the cycle we had so impiously interrupted.
Nor were we permitted to evade the least segment of required reparation, for the galaxy watched. I will say this of us proudly, though I no longer have a tongue: Mankind will be able to live with its conscience. Not one of us, when required, failed to give his flesh to the Zobranoirundisi in atonement.
THE HARROWERS
Eric Gregory
The kid didn’t have a feed. He glanced over his shoulder and scratched the back of his head, and I saw there was nothing in his neck. You didn’t find many folks without feeds in the city. Right away, I knew he’d brought me a problem. “I’m looking for Ez,” he said, and I said yeah, I was him.
He looked relieved then lowered his voice. “And you’re a guide?”
I wiped grease on the front of my jeans, closed the hood of the 4Runner, and gestured for the kid to follow me. He took the hint, nodding with absurd gratitude, and I led him down past the line of old rigs, all waiting to be stripped. Across the yard, someone cranked up a saw.
“Who gave you my name?” I asked.
“Guy called himself Coroner.”
“You don’t want to talk to him again.”
The kid gave a sad sort of smile. “No. I really don’t.”
He wasn’t the roughneck sort who usually came around looking for a guide. Right age, maybe: Seventeen, eighteen. But the boy had a pressed, conservative look to him. Skinny, clean-shaven, all done up in slacks and suspenders and a white, sweaty shirt. I didn’t know what to make of him, and I didn’t like that I didn’t know.
“You from around here?” I asked.
He shook his head. “No, sir. Lynchburg.”
“Nice town,” I lied. Hive of fanatics. “How long you been here, then?”
“Not quite a day.”
“And you already want to go outside.” I grinned. “Jesus.”
It wasn’t much cooler in the office, but there was beer and shade. The kid settled onto my ratty, floral-print sofa, and I opened two Yanjings, thinking maybe he was used to the fancy stuff. I still couldn’t get a fix on him, but he dressed like a big spender. He folded his arms and crossed his legs at the knee, glancing at the old gas station signs on the wall.
“What do I call you?” I said.
He frowned into his beer. “P.K.”
“All right, P.K. You want to tell me about your deathwish?”
He shook his head.
“No deathwish. I just want to see my old man again.”
My turn to frown. “Your old man.”
“Yessir. He’s outside.”
I slid my bottle across the desk, back and forth from one hand to the other.
“How far outside?”
“Cherokee North. Between here and Johnson City.”
“That’s a lot of forest.”
He shrugged.
Some guides don’t like to get nosy. Take the job, don’t ask questions. Lot of those guides develop a nasty case of dead.
“You want my help,” I said, “you’re going to have to tell me what he was doing there.” If Coroner had sent him, I didn’t have many choices here, but maybe the boy didn’t know that. He nodded, answered without hesitation.
“We were out harrowing.”
Christ, I thought. And then: Of course—P.K.: Preacher’s Kid. Should’ve caught that earlier. I finished off the Yanjing, then opened the cooler and unscrewed a jar of whiskey. I’d heard of harrowers before, but never met one alive.
“You were with him,” I said.
“Yessir.”
“He preaches, you shoot. That how it works?”
The kid looked embarrassed. �
�I haven’t learned to bless yet.”
“And you got separated?”
He inclined his head. “Pack of wolves surprised us. We were running, and my father—” He paused. “He fell. Over a ledge. I saw him roll, heard him call out, but the slope sharpened and—I didn’t see where he landed. I searched until sundown. I love my father, but—”he pursed his lips—”but I’m not stupid.”
“You did right.” I leaned forward. “But you understand he’s dead.”
The boy was silent.
“I ain’t gonna sell you false hope. Your daddy’s gone. I’ll take your money, I’ll take you out there, and I’ll help you make whatever amends you want to make. But I want us both to understand what’s going on here. I don’t want any confusion between us. You have to show me that you know we’re not going to find him smiling.”
“I have to find him,” he said. “I know the odds.”
I wasn’t sure he did. “I ain’t cheap. And I ain’t stupid either.” I told him the deposit. “I need to see triple the advance in a credit account, and I need the account linked to my feed. In the event of my death, the triple transfers automatically to my family.”
Little joke, there. Family.
“That’s fair,” he said. “And if I die?”
“We link your feed to my account. The deposit transfers back.”
He shook his head. “I don’t have a feed.”