Blish, James - Seedling Stars 3 - Surface Tension

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Ventura could see forty miles to the horizon across a flat bed of

mud. The red light of the star Tau Ceti, glinting upon thousands of

small lakes, pools, ponds and puddles, made the watery plain look

like a mosaic of onyx and ruby.

"If I were a religious man," the pilot said suddenly, "I'd call this a

plain case of divine vengeance."

Chatvieux said: "Hmn?"

"It's as if we'd been struck down for - is it hubris? Pride, arro-

gance?"

"Hybris," Chatvieux said, looking up at last. "Well, is it? I don't

feel swollen with pride at the moment. Do you?"

."I'm not exactly proud of my piloting," la Ventura admitted. "But

that isn't quite what I mean. I was thinking about why we came

here in the first place. It takes a lot of 'arrogance to think that you

can scatter men, or at least things very much like men, all over the

face of the galaxy. It takes even more pride to do the job - to pack

up all the equipment and move from planet to planet and actually

make men, make them suitable for every place you touch."

"I suppose it does," Chatvieux said. "But we're only one of several

hundred seed-ships in this limb of the galaxy, so I doubt that the

gods picked us out as special sinners." He smiled. "If they had,

maybe they'd have left us our ultraphone, so the Colonization

Council could hear about our cropper. Besides, Paul, we don't make

men. We adapt them adapt them to Earthlike planets, nothing more

than that. We've sense enough - or humility enough, if you like that

better - to know that we can't adapt men to a planet like Jupiter, or

to the surface of a sun, like Tau Ceti."

"Anyhow, we're here," la Ventura said grimly. "And we aren't go-

ing to get off. Phil tells me that we don't even have our germ-cell

bank any more, so we can't seed this place in the usual way. We've

been thrown onto a dead world and dared to adapt to it. What are

the pantropes going to do with our recalcitrant carcasses - provide

last.

"Who knows? A month, perhaps."

The bulkhead leading to the wrecked section of the ship was

pushed back, admitting salt, muggy air, heavy with carbon dioxide.

Philip Strasvogel, the communications officer, came in, tracking

mud. Like la Ventura, he was now a man without a function, and it

appeared to bother him. He was not well equipped for introspection,

and with his ultraphone totally smashed, unresponsive to his per-

petually darting hands, he had been thrown back into his own

mind, whose resources were few. Only the tasks Chatvieux had set

him to had prevented him from setting like a gelling colloid into a

permanent state of the sulks.

He unbuckled from around his waist a canvas belt, into the loops

of which plastic vials were stuffed like cartridges.

"More samples. Doc," he said. "All alike - water, very wet. I have

some quicksand in one boot, too. Find anything?"

"A good deal, Phil. Thanks. Are the others around?"

Strasvogel poked his head out and hallooed. Other voices rang

out over the mudflats. Minutes later, the rest of the survivors of the

crash were crowding into the pantrope deck: Saltonstall, Chatvieux'

senior assistant, a perpetually sanguine, perpetually youthful tech-

nician willing to try anything once, including dying; Eunice Wagner,

behind whose placid face rested the brains of the expedition's only

remaining ecologist; Eleftherios Venezuelos, the always-silent dele-

gate from the Colonization Council; and Joan Heath, a midshipman

whose duties, like la Ventura's and Phil's, were now without mean-

ing, but whose bright head and tall, deceptively indolent body shone

to the pilot's eyes brighter than Tau Ceti brighter, since the crash,

even than the home sun.

Five men and two women - to colonize a planet on which

"standing room" meant treading water.

They came in quietly and found seats or resting places on the

to the rotifers - including a castle-building genus like Earth's Flos-

cularidae. In addition, there's a wonderfully variegated protozoan

population, with a dominant ciliate type much like Pammoecium,

plus various Sarcodines, the usual spread of phyto-flagellates, and

even a phosphorescent species I wouldn't have expected to see any-

where but in salt water. As for the plants, they run from simple

blue-green algae to quite advanced thallus-producing types -

though none of them, of course, can live out of the water."

"The sea is about the same," Eunice said. "I've found some of the

larger simple metazoans - jellyfish and so on - and some crayfish

almost as big as lobsters. But it's normal to find salt-water species

running larger than fresh-water. And there's the usual plankton

and nannoplankton population."

"In short," Chatvieux said, "we'll survive here - if we fight."

"Wait a minute," la Ventura said. "You've just finished telling me

that we wouldn't survive. And you were talking about us, the seven

of us here, not about the genus man, because we don't have our

germ-cells banks any more. What's"

"We don't have the banks. But we ourselves can contribute germ-

cells, Paul. I'll get to that in a moment." Chatvieux turned to Salton-

stall, "Martin, what would you think of our taking to the sea? We

came out of it once, long ago; maybe we could come out of it again

on Hydrot."

"No good," Saltonstall said immediately. "I like the idea, but I

don't think this planet ever heard of Swinburne, or Homer, either.

Looking at it as a colonization problem alone, as if we weren't in-

volved in it ourselves, I wouldn't give you an Ocdollar for epi oinopa

ponton. The evolutionary pressure there is too high, the competition

from other species is prohibitive; seeding the sea should be the last

thing we attempt, not the first. The colonists wouldn't have a

chance to learn a thing before they'd be gobbled up."

"Why?" la Ventura said. Once more, the death in his stomach

- in this case, our own, since our bank was wiped out in the crash -

and modify them genetically toward those of creatures who can live

in any reasonable environment. The result will be manlike, and in-

telligent. It usually shows the donors' personality patterns, too,

since the modifications are usually made mostly in the morphology,

not so much in the mind, of the resulting individual.

"But we can't transmit memory. The adapted man is worse than a

child in the new environment. He has no history, no techniques, no

precedents, not even a language. In the usual colonization project,

like the Tellura affair, the seeding teams more or less take him

through elementary school before they leave the planet to him, but

we won't survive long enough to give such instruction. We'll have to

design our colonists with plenty of built-in protections and locate

them in the most favorable environment possible, so that at least

some of them will survive learning by experience alone."

The pilot thought about it, but nothing occurred to him which

did not make the disaster seem realer and more intimate with each

passing second. Joan Heath moved slightly closer to him. "One of

the new creatures can have my personality pattern, but it won't be

able to remember being me. Is that right?"

"That's right. In the present situation we'll probably make our

colonists haploid, so that some of them, perhaps many, will have a

heredity traceable to you alone. There may be just the faintest of

residuums of identity - pantropy's given us some data to support

the old Jungian notion of ancestral memory. But we're all going to

die on Hydrot, Paul, as self-conscious persons. There's no avoiding

that. Somewhere we'll leave behind people who behave as we would,

think and feel as we would, but who won't remember la Ventura, or

Dr. Chatvieux, or Joan Heath - or the Earth."

The pilot said nothing more. There was a gray taste in his

mouth.

"Saltonstall, what would you recommend as a form?"

the antidiuretic function of the pituitary gland is going to have to be

abrogated, for all practical purposes."

"What about respiration?"

"Hm," Saltonstall said. "I suppose book-lungs, like some of the

arachnids have. They can be supplied by intercostal spiracles.

They're gradually adaptable to atmosphere-breathing, if our colonist

ever decides to come out of the water. Just to provide for that pos-

sibility. I'd suggest that the nose be retamed, maintaining the nasal

cavity as a part of the otological system, but cutting off the cavity

from the larynx with a membrane of cells that are supplied with

oxygen by direct irrigation, rather than by the circulatory system.

Such a membrane wouldn't survive for many generations, once the

creature took to living out of the water even for part of its lifetime;

it'd go through two or three generations as an amphibian, and then

one day it'd suddenly find itself breathing through its larynx again."

"Ingenious," Chatvieux said.'

"Also, Dr. Chatvieux, I'd suggest that we have it adopt sporula-

tion. As an aquatic animal, our colonist is going to have an indefi-

nite life-span, but we'll have to give it a breeding cycle of about six

weeks to keep up its numbers during the learning period; so there'll

have to be a definite break of some duration in its active year. Oth-

erwise it'll hit the population problem before it's learned enough to

cope with it."

"And it'd be better if our colonists could winter over inside a

good, hard shell," Eunice Wagner added in agreement.

"So sporulation's the obvious answer. Many other microscopic

creatures have it."

"Microscopic?" Phil said incredulously.

"Certainly," Chatvieux said, amused. "We can't very well crowd a

six-foot man into a two-foot puddle. But that raises a question.

We'll have tough competition from the rotifers, and some of them

aren't strictly microscopic; for that matter even some of the protozoa

gether on leaving a record for these people. We'll micro-engrave the

record on a set of corrosion-proof metal leaves, of a size our colo-

nists can handle conveniently. We can tell them, very simply, what

happened, and plant a few suggestions that there's more to the uni-

verse than what they find in their puddles. Some day they may puz-

zle it out."

"Question," Eunice Wagner said. "Are we going to tell them

they're microscopic? I'm opposed to it. It may saddle their entire

early history with a gods-and-demons mythology that they'd be

better off without."

"Yes, we are," Chatvieux said; and la Ventura could tell by the

change in the tone of his voice that he was speaking now as their

senior on the expedition. "These people will be of the race of men,

Eunice. We want them to win their way back into the community of

men. They are not toys, to be protected from the truth forever in a

fresh-water womb."

"Besides," Saltonstall observed, "they won't get the record trans-

lated at any time in their early history. They'll have 'to develop a

written language of their own, and it will be impossible for us to

leave them any sort of Rosetta Stone or other key. By the time they

can decipher the truth, they should be ready for it."

"I'll make that official," Venezuelos said unexpectedly. And that

was that.

And then, essentially, it was all over. They contributed the cells

that the pantropes would need. Privately, la Ventura and Joan

Heath went to Chatvieux and asked to contribute jointly; but the

scientist said that the microscopic men were to be haploid, in order

to give them a minute cellular structure, with nuclei as small as

Earthly rickettsiae, and therefore each person had to give germ-cells

individually - there would be no use for zygotes. So even that con-

solation was denied them; in death they would have no children,

but be instead as alone as ever.

down too. He took her hand. The glare of the red sun was almost

extinguished now, and together they watched it go, with la Ventura,

at least, wondering somberly which nameless puddle was to be his

Lethe.

He never found out, of course. None of them did.

was a small, intermittent scratching sound. This was followed by a

disquieting sensation in his body, as if the world - and Lavon with it

- were being rocked back and forth.

He stirred uneasily, without opening his eyes. His vastly slowed

metabolism made him feel inert and queasy, and the rocking did

not help. At his slight motion, however, both the sound and the

motion became more insistent.

It seemed to take days for the fog over his brain to clear, but

whatever was causing the disturbance would not let him rest. With

a groan he forced his eyelids open and made an abrupt gesture with

one webbed hand. By the waves of phosphorescence which echoed

away from his fingers at the motion, he could see that the smooth

amber walls of his spherical shell were unbroken. He tried to peer

through them, but he could see nothing but darkness outside. Well,

that was natural; the amnionic fluid inside the spore would

generate light, but ordinary water did not, no matter how vigorously

it was stirred.

Whatever was outside the sphere was rocking it again, with the

same whispering friction against its shell. Probably some nosey

diatom, Lavon thought sleepily, trying to butt its way through an

object it was too stupid to go around. Or some early hunter, yearn-

ing for a taste of the morsel inside the spore. Well, let it worry itself;

Lavon had no intention of breaking the shell just yet. The fluid in

which he had slept for so many months had held his body proc-

esses static, and had slowed his mind. Once out into the water, he

would have to start breathing and looking for food again, and he

could tell by the unrelieved darkness outside that it was too early in

the spring to begin thinking about that.

He flexed his fingers reflectively, in the disharmonic motion from

little finger to thumb that no animal but man can copy, and

watched the widening wavefronts of greenish light rebound in larger

arcs from the curved spore walls. Here he was, curled up quite

Reluctantly, Lavon uncurled, planting his webbed toes and

arching his backbone as hard as he could, pressing with his whole

body against his amber prison. With small, sharp, crepitating

sounds, a network of cracks raced through the translucent shell.

Then the spore wall dissolved into a thousand brittle shards, and

he was shivering violently with the onslaught of the icy water. The

warmer fluid of his winter cell dissipated silently, a faint glowing

fog. In the brief light he saw, not far from him, a familiar shape: a

transparent, bubble-filled cylinder, a colorless slipper of jelly, spi-

rally grooved, almost as long as he was tall. Its surface was furred

with gently vibrating fine hairs, thickened at the base.

The light went out. The Proto said nothing; it waited while Lavon

choked and coughed, expelling the last remnants of the spore fluid

from his book-lungs and sucking in the pure, ice-cold water.

"Para?" Lavon said at last. "Already?"

"Already," the invisible cilia vibrated in even, emotionless tones.

Each separate hair-like process buzzed at an independent, chang-

ing rate; the resulting sound waves spread through the water, in-

termodulating, reinforcing or cancelling each other. The aggregate

wave-front, by the time it reached human ears, was rather eerie,

but nevertheless recognizable human speech. "This is the time, La-

von."

'Time and more than time," another voice said from the returned

darkness. "If we are to. drive Flosc from his castles."

"Who's that?" Lavon said, turning futilely toward 'the new voice.

"I am Para also, Lavon. We are sixteen since the awakening. If

you could reproduce as rapidly as we"

"Brains are better than numbers," Lavon said. "As the Eaters will

find out soon enough."

"What shall we do, Lavon?"

The man drew up his knees and sank to the cold mud of the

.Bottom to think. Something wriggled tinder his buttocks and a tiny

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Venturacouldseefortymilestothehorizonacrossaflatbedofmud.TheredlightofthestarTauCeti,glintinguponthousandsofsmalllakes,pools,pondsandpuddles,madethewateryplainlooklikeamosaicofonyxandruby."IfIwereareligiousman,"thepilotsaidsuddenly,"I'dcallthisaplaincaseofdivinevengeance."Chatvieuxsaid:"Hmn?""It'sas...

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Blish, James - Seedling Stars 3 - Surface Tension

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