The Florians Page 6

  “And some of them,” added Jason, “have changed.”

  The mention of change reminded me that there was still a question to be answered here. I had made little or no progress in figuring out why the Florians were giants. Perhaps it was time to get some answers.

  “What’s the size of your total population?” I asked him. “How many people are there in the colony?”

  His face changed. The smile disappeared, and for the first time his suspicions were clear in his expression. I realized I had hit a nerve. I had asked the question in one context, but he had understood it in another. I wondered why it seemed to him to be such a nasty question. Was there some mystery here? Was there something he wanted to conceal?

  “I don’t know,” he said, in answer. Not very helpful.

  “You must have some idea,” I said. “Just an approximate figure.” I felt that since I’d made the initial gaffe I might as well press for some kind of answer.

  “I have no idea,” he said. “Why do you want to know?”

  I hesitated. I didn’t really know what to say. “I was wondering what kind of role natural selection might have played in the colony’s history,” I said, settling for the truth. “If your population is very high or very low relative to the initial numbers of colonists it might offer some clue as to why this change has taken place—and what sort of effects it’s having demographically.”

  He shook his head. “I’m sure the Planners will be able to supply you with the information you want,” he said. “I have no knowledge of such things.”

  Nathan, obviously wanting to heal the breach, said, “You can’t expect statistical information like that to be common knowledge. Taking census is an economic exercise, and there’s probably no need for it yet. Have a little patience.”

  I resented the patronizing tone slightly, but I took the advice. I gathered my patience, and turned to look out of the window at the alien world which stretched from the roadside into the distance.

  There was, after all, plenty of time.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  When we reached South Bay, Jason got out of the carriage and asked us to wait while he attended to some business. We asked what time the train was scheduled to leave and were informed that we had “some time” in hand. When Nathan told him that we would look around the town, he seemed a fraction reluctant to sanction such a course of action, but there were no reasonable grounds on which he could refuse. He offered us the services of the man who had accompanied the coach on horseback as a guide. As a guide, however, the man—whose name was Lucas—was a complete washout. He seemed to be unnaturally taciturn. I don’t believe that he was actually working hard to keep all information to himself—it seemed to come naturally to him.

  We did discover, however, that the township had two primary roles to play in the colony. It was the southeasterly terminal of the railroad and began the distribution of most of the agricultural produce of the surrounding area. It was also a minor port, being situated in a bay between two large promontories. The major port, Leander, was away to the northwest. The greater importance of Leander was obvious in the fact that it had a deliberately conferred name rather than a title derived from a geographical or functional description.

  South Bay had no beach. The waters of the ocean washed a shore which looked more like a river bank than a sea front. There were, of course, no tides to speak of on moonless Floria, and the promontories sheltered the harbor from violent weather. The sea was rippled by the wind, but only gently, and the water in the bay seemed extremely placid. The harbor itself had been cleared of weed, but farther out we could see the tips of the fronds which formed thick underwater forests in shallow water. Farther out to sea, I knew, vast rafts of floating weed could form, and the oceans of Floria were akin to the legendary Sargasso Sea of Earth—somewhat hazardous to navigate.

  The ships moored in the harbor were all fairly small. None was longer than a hundred and fifty feet. They were wide bellied and looked sluggish. They were mostly cargo vessels. There were no fish in the sea, and though there was abundant invertebrate life the weed made netting virtually impossible, and the creatures were often so spectacularly ugly that there could be little demand for their meat.

  Nathan asked Lucas about the extent of the exploration carried out by the colonists. How much did they know about conditions on other continents? How often were transoceanic trips made? Had the globe been circumnavigated? Were there any plans for subcolonies? When Lucas failed to provide adequate answers to these queries, merely indicating that ships had set out on voyages of exploration, Nathan grew a little impatient. The reason for Lucas’s ignorance (or professed ignorance) was unclear. Was the distribution of knowledge in the colony really so parsimonious? Were the Planners maintaining a rigid control of information in order to secure their influence over the development of the colony? Or was Lucas simply not interested in the world beyond the horizon?

  We watched the people working on the wharf, and there seemed to be activity enough to suggest that life was anything but listless. The big warehouses along the docks were busy, with goods being packed, loaded, and unloaded in an unsteady stream. There seemed to be little dogged efficiency about the way the men worked, but their effort was unstinted. It was testimony, of a sort, to the health and success of the growing colony. I studied the range of size exhibited by the population. The men ranged from six feet five or so to some inches over seven feet. We saw fewer women, but they seemed to fall into a similar spectrum ranging from six feet to seven. Most seemed to have a build appropriate to their height, but I saw several people who looked perceptibly overweight. There were too few children and old people to allow generalizations—in fact, I saw only one or two individuals who might have been over fifty, which might be evidence for the logical assumption that larger bodies have shorter life-expectancies.

  Nathan and I attracted a good deal of curious attention. We must have seemed strange indeed to people who knew nothing of our provenance: ridiculous midgets wearing exotic clothing. Their own clothing was, by our standards, elaborate and dull in color. We wore fewer, lighter, more efficient, and more colorful outfits. Nathan did not attempt to approach any of them in search of information or polite conversation. He was content to watch them overtly while they watched us—covertly, for the most part.

  In the streets which led to the waterfront there was no less activity. Cobblers, carpenters, sail-makers, and other more specialized practitioners maintained workshops close to the shore, and few such businesses seemed to be in the doldrums. We saw some transactions taking place, where the money that changed hands appeared to be unstandardized coins whose value was assessed by the weight and species of metal involved. It was a rough and ready system, but exchange value was obviously identical to actual value—anyone could strike his own coins, provided that he first found and extracted the metal from its ore. The sophistications of bureaucratic economics were still to come here on Floria, although conditions already seemed ripe. Again, I was disposed to wonder whether the Planners might not be wisely postponing the evil day as long as possible.

  Both Nathan and I wanted to walk as far as possible in the time available—to see whatever might be around to be seen. Our walk took us through the town and beyond, and we ended up on the northern side of the bay looking back from the slope of the headland. Lucas had fallen behind and when we stopped he simply loitered forty or fifty yards away, making no attempt to join us. This gave us a chance to talk to one another without worrying about his hearing things not meant for his ears as well as sparing him our questions.

  “Jason doesn’t like us,” I said.

  “He’s wary of us,” Nathan replied. “Wouldn’t you be, in his place? He doesn’t understand us. To him, Earth is just a name...hardly a real place at all. The colony project, to him, is like a creation myth—it may be true but not really relevant to the everyday business of living. The farmers were impressed—he’s not. He’s shrewd, hardheaded.”

  “And maybe dangerous,�
� I added.

  “That’s not the right attitude,” he said.

  Patronizing bastard, I thought, and said, “I don’t like him.”

  “Hostility,” he said, “is the last thing we need. You don’t have to like him—provided that you treat him like a favored son.”

  I thought, briefly and bitterly, You should see the way I treat my son. But I didn’t say anything at all. I looked out over the bay, thinking about how beautiful it looked. If you like that sort of thing. I could see, albeit dimly, the great forest of weed which stretched away from the arms of the headlands out toward the horizon. The water was clear, and I could make out a profusion of colors which one only associates with tropical waters on Earth. Beneath a watery surface the photosynthetic optima are different, and browns and reds outweigh the greens.

  Nathan seemed to feel that I’d been less than diplomatic. He still wanted to talk.

  “Why are there no fish?” he asked, his gaze following the direction of mine. “How is it that the whole evolutionary process was short-circuited here?”

  I sat down on the slope, feeling the alien grass with the palms of my hands.

  “It wasn’t,” I said. “We think the vertebrates are the most Important part of the tree of life, but we’re biased. Plant evolution here has been complex and the plants have reached a very high degree of sophistication. They’re not the same kind of plants we find on Earth because their evolution hasn’t been so drastically affected by the parallel evolution of certain types of animal, but it hasn’t been short-circuited. And I wouldn’t think that that would be an apt term to use in connection with the animal evolution either.”

  I paused, and thought, Who’s being patronizing now?

  “Basically,” I continued, “there are two reasons why animal life here didn’t develop in the same way that it did on Earth. There’s no moon. No moon, no tides. No tides, no littoral zone. Evolution begins in the sea, and the type of organism which eventually comes out of the sea onto the land depends very much on the manner of its coming out. On Earth, the borderland between the two environments is a regime of constant, cyclic change. Creatures living there evolve to cope with successive immersion and desiccation. The littoral zone not only provides a way station for creatures to develop ways of coping without the ocean, first temporarily and then permanently, it also makes creatures individually adaptable. Earthly animals are built to cope with change—all the invaders of the land on Earth were already highly sophisticated organisms when they said good-bye to the tidal zone and went in for full-time life on land. They had to be, because they’d come out by a difficult route, a regime in which natural selection was very strong, permitting rapid, diversifying evolution.

  “But that didn’t happen here. Here, there was no such way- station, no regime of rigorous selection. Without rigorous selection, evolution remains much more subject to the dictates of chance. Land-forms did eventually arise, but they weren’t super-refined in form and function. They weren’t selected for individual adaptability. They’re all worms and soft, squashy things. Once having opted for the land they’ve evolved ways of coping with desiccation, but they almost all remain creatures adapted to easy ways of life. Few of them eat one another—because there’s an abundant supply of plants. Most of them don’t even eat healthy plants, but specialize in rotting ones.”

  “That covers land animals,” said Nathan, “but what about fish?”

  “I said there were two reasons,” I reminded him. “No tide is one. The other is a corollary of that. You see it before you, as far as the eye can see.”

  He found no immediate enlightenment in the ranging of his gaze.

  “Weed,” I said. “The absence of tides also means that the sea itself is a relatively static environment, and the plant life which evolved there took advantage of that fact. The shallows get clogged with anchored weed. In deeper waters, floating weed occupies the surface and rotting vegetation the ocean floor, with a lifeless chasm in between. There’s lots of scope for animal life—of certain kinds. The scavengers who move about the bottom, the worms, the things with the texture of jelly. But there are no openings for muscular, free-ranging swimmers. And again, it’s all too easy for the scavengers because the plants produce so much. There are no incentives for animal-eating animals to evolve. The struggle for existence just isn’t all that much of a struggle. In a billion years, maybe, things would have been different...but even then, one wouldn’t expect a regime of slow, steady change to produce the same kind of organisms as a regime of quick, cyclic change, even given twice as long.

  “You know, Nathan, we don’t realize how much we owe to that absurdly large moon of ours. If it wasn’t for that freak, you and I wouldn’t be here. And nor would the colonies...because we’d never have found so many worlds where men can live but where no creatures comparable to man have evolved. Floria is just the extreme case: it’s not coincidence that all the other colony worlds are worlds with moons conspicuously smaller than Earth’s. And if we ever find another world in the right orbit, with a companion as big as the moon, that’s where we can expect to find the guys who are going to give us trouble—or, if you look at it the other way, the guys who are going to provide us with stimulating conversation and rewarding partnership while we explore the universe together.”

  “But there is intelligent life on some of the colony worlds,” he objected.

  “Intelligent,” I agreed, “but not similar. There’s no conflict or contact...and with all due respect to Mariel I don’t believe there ever will be. Those aliens really are alien, in mind and in body. Their minds are structured to a wholly different range of priorities. Sure, some of them look like the idiots in plastic suits who used to feature in the old movies...but that doesn’t mean to say that there are metaphorical men wrapped up inside them just aching to come out for a cheeseburger, a chat, and a game of chess. They’re not only stranger than we think, but maybe stranger than we could ever imagine, and we’ll need more than a fully certified Alice in Wonderland to get close to them.”

  “You’re pretty hard on Mariel,” he said.

  “And this trip could be bloody hard on her,” I said. “That gift of hers may be just enough to let them turn her adolescent mind inside out...and I don’t mean that in any trivial sense. I mean completely crazy.”

  “Did you talk to Pietrasante about that?” he wanted to know.

  “Did I get the chance?” I said bitterly. “Oh no! They were too worried about hurting my feelings to let me in on their plans. Nobody told me a damn thing until it was all worked out—in committee—and unchangeable.” I used committee as if it were a dirty word. Earth is run by committees. It has been for two hundred years. That’s why it’s in a mess, always has been, and always will be. The worst of it is that the alternatives are probably worse. Dictators are not nice. Sometimes, in thinking of my son and his faith, I almost wish I could believe in God myself, but I always run up against the problem of whether a God one can believe in would be a committee or a dictator. I wonder if the papal triumvirate has ever debated the issue.

  Nathan changed the subject. It didn’t seem worth pursuing when we had a different set of problems on hand immediately. “If conditions here could never lead to the evolution of anything like man,” he mused, “doesn’t that imply a certain implicit hostility to human habitation? Or at least a certain inhospitality?”

  “No,” I said comprehensively.

  “Why not?”

  “Because the colonists came here wanting to use the world, not to become adapted to it. Adaptation is a double-edged sword. When man moves into an ecosystem he fits too well he finds natural enemies—and where there are no natural enemies to start with it doesn’t take long for them to turn up. Exploitation can run both ways. But not necessarily. Here, we have a high degree of chemical similarity between the life-systems, but little organizational similarity. It should be possible for man—as a clever and superadaptable species—to exploit without being exploited.”

  “An
d yet,” said Nathan, “the people have changed, and are changing, in response to some factor in the environment here.”

  “True,” I said. “Puzzling, isn’t it?”

  He didn’t seem to consider this an overwhelmingly successful reply. There are too many men who think that they can turn to an expert and say, “This is your area of concern, what’s the answer?” Nobody’s omniscient.

  Lucas, who’d been content to keep his distance until now, came up to us and informed us that it was time to start back. He didn’t say how he knew, but we were prepared to trust his judgment.

  This time, instead of lagging behind, our so-called guide led the way. He didn’t believe in dawdling, it seemed, and because of his size his stride perpetually attempted to carry him on ahead of us. Every few paces, he had to pause to let us catch up, and it began to seem as if he had made a mistake in thinking we had adequate time by assuming that we could cover the same distance he could in the same kind of time.

  Nathan made some attempt to keep up with him, but I was a little less ready to hurry so ostentatiously. Thus, as we walked, we tended to be perpetually strung out, with me to the rear.

  As there was no conversation, and we were retracing ground we had already covered, I allowed myself to lose myself slightly in my thoughts. Thus, when I glanced up and saw something terrible about to happen my brain was too far behind my senses to make any immediate sense out of it. I didn’t get to shout a warning.

  From the loft of a warehouse ahead of us there extended a heavy wooden beam, pivoted within and equipped with block hod tackle for lifting and shifting heavy goods from the cobblestones of the wharf. Leaning out from the loft was a man, holding by one hand the edge of a heavy net of rope, the rest of which was draped over the beam. He had only to flip his wrist to drop the net—and that was exactly what he did, just as Lucas was passing underneath. At that particular moment Nathan was trying to draw abreast of him, and he, too, was caught by the folds of the net and felled.