Anderson, Poul - The Dipteroid Phenomenon

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THE DIPTEROID PHENOMENON

Paul Anderson

THE DIPTEROID PHENOMENON

Moru understood about guns. At least, the tall strangers had demonstrated to their

guides what the things that each of them carried at his hip could do in a flash and a

flameburst. But he did not realize that the small objects they often moved about in their

hands, while talking in their own language, were audiovisual transmitters. Probably he

thought they were fetishes.

Thus, when he killed Donli Sairn, he did so in full view of Donli's wife.

That was happenstance. Except for prearranged times, morning and evening of the

planet's twenty-eight hour day, the biologist, like his fellows, sent only to his computer.

But because they had not been married long, and were helplessly happy, Evalyth

received his 'casts whenever she could get away from her own duties.

The coincidence that she was tuned in at that one moment was not great. There was

little for her to do. As militech of the expedition - she being from a half barbaric part of

Kraken where the sexes had equal opportunities to learn of combat suitable to primitive

environments - she had overseen the building of a compound; and she kept the routines

of guarding it under a close eye. However, the inhabitants of Lokon were as

cooperative with the visitors from heaven as mutual mysteriousness allowed. Every

instinct and experience assured Evalyth Sairn that their reticence masked nothing

except awe, with perhaps a wistful hope of friendship. Captain Jonafer agreed. Her

position having thus become rather a sinecure, she was trying to learn enough about

Donli's work to be a useful assistant after he returned from the lowlands.

Also, a medical test had lately confirmed that she was pregnant. She wouldn't tell him,

she decided: not yet, over all those hundreds of kilometres, but when they lay again

together. Meanwhile, the knowledge that they had begun a new life made him a

lodestar to her.

On the afternoon of his death she entered the biolab whistling. Outside, sunlight struck

fierce and brass-coloured on dusty ground, on prefab shacks huddled about the boat

which had brought everyone and everything down from the orbit where New Dawn

circled, on the parked flitters and gravsleds that took men around the big island that was

the only habitable land on this globe, on the men and the women themselves. Beyond

the stockade, plumy treetops, a glimpse of mud-brick buildings, a murmur of voices

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THE DIPTEROID PHENOMENON

and mutter of footfalls, a drift of bitter woodsmoke, showed that a town of several

thousand people sprawled between here and Lake Zelo.

The biolab occupied more than half the structure where the Sairns lived. Comforts were

few, when ships from a handful of cultures struggling back to civilization ranged across

the ruins of empire. For Evalyth, though, it sufficed that this was their home. She was

used to austerity anyway. One thing that had first attracted her to Donli, meeting him

on Kraken, was the cheerfulness with which he, a man from Atheia, which was

supposed to have retained or regained almost as many amenities as Old Earth knew in

its glory, had accepted life in her gaunt grim country.

The gravity field here was 0.77 standard, less than two-thirds of what she had grown up

in. Her gait was easy through the clutter of apparatus and specimens. She was a big

young woman, good-looking in the body, a shade too strong in the features for most

men's taste outside her own folk. She had their blondness and, on legs and forearms,

their intricate tattoos; the blaster at her waist had come down through many

generations. Otherwise she had abandoned Krakener costume for the plain coveralls of

the expedition.

How cool and dim the shack was! She sighed with pleasure, sat down and activated the

receiver. As the image formed, three-dimensional in the air, and Donli's voice spoke,

her heart sprang a little.

'- appears to be descending from a clover."

The image was of plants with green trilobate leaves, scattered low among the reddish

native pseudo-grasses. It swelled as Donli brought the transmitter near, so that the

computer might record details for later analysis. Evalyth frowned, trying to recall

what… oh, yes. Clover was another of those life forms that man had brought with him

from Old Earth, to more planets than anyone now remembered, before the Long Night

fell. Often they were virtually unrecognizable; over thousands of years, evolution had

fitted them to alien conditions, or mutation and genetic drift had acted on small initial

populations in a nearly random fashion. No one on Kraken had known that pines and

gulls and rhizobacteria were altered immigrants, until Donli's crew arrived and

identified them. Not that he, or anybody from this part of the galaxy, had yet made it

back to the mother world. But the Atheian data banks were packed with information,

and so was Donli's dear curly head

And there was his hand, huge in the field of view, gathering specimens. She wanted to

kiss it. Patience, patience, the officer part of her reminded the bride. We're here to

work. We've discovered one more lost colony, the most wretched one so far, sunken

back to utter primitivism. Our duty is to advise the Board whether a civilizing mission

is worthwhile, or whether the slender resources that the Allied Planets can spare had

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THE DIPTEROID PHENOMENON

better be used elsewhere, leaving these people in their misery for another two or three

hundred years. To make an honest report, we must study them, their cultures, their

world. That's why I'm in the barbarian highlands and he's down in the jungle among

out-and-out savages.

Please finish soon; darling.

She heard Donli speak in the lowland dialect. It was a debased form of Lokonese,

which in turn was remotely descended from Anglic. The expedition's linguists had

unravelled the language in a few intensive weeks. Then all personnel took a brain-feed

in it. Nonetheless, she admired how quickly her man had become fluent in the

woodsrunners' version, after mere days of conversation with them.

'Are we not coming to the place, Mora? You said the thing was close by our camp.'

'We are nearly arrived, man-from-the-clouds.'

A tiny alarm struck within Evalyth. What was going on? Donli hadn't left his

companions to strike off alone with a native, had he? Rogar of Lokon had warned them

to beware of treachery on those parts. But, to be sure, only yesterday the guides had

rescued Haimie Fiell when he tumbled into a swift-running river… at some risk to

themselves…

The view bobbed as the transmitter swung in Donli's grasp. It made Evalyth a bit dizzy.

From time to time she got glimpses of the broader setting. Forest crowded about a game

trail, rust-coloured leafage, brown trunks and branches, shadows beyond, the occasional

harsh call of something unseen. She could practically feel the heat and dank weight of

the atmosphere, smell the unpleasant pungencies. This world (which no longer had a

name, except World, because the dwellers upon it had forgotten what the stars really

were) was ill suited to colonization. The life it had spawned was often poisonous,

always nutritionally deficient. With the help of species they had brought along, men

survived marginally. The original settlers doubtless meant to improve matters. But then

the breakdown came - evidence was that their single town had been missiled out of

existence, a majority of the people with it - and resources were lacking to rebuild, and

the miracle was that anything human remained except bones.

'Now, here, man-from-the-clouds.'

The swaying scene grew steadily. Silence hummed from jungle to cabin. 'I do not see

anything,' Donli said at length.

'Follow me. I show.'

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