The Songs of Distant Earth (16 page)

Whatever its destination might be, it seemed to have found it, at a depth of two hundred and fifty metres. Thereafter, it still kept moving around, but inside a very limited area. This continued for two more days; then the signals from the ultrasonic pinger suddenly stopped in mid-pulse.

That the scorp had been eaten by something even bigger and nastier than itself was far too naive an explanation. The pinger was enclosed in a tough metal cylinder; any conceivable arrangement of teeth, claws, or tentacles would take minutes – at the very least – to demolish it, and it would continue to function quite happily inside any creature that swallowed it whole.

This left only two possibilities, and the first was indignantly denied by the staff of the North Island Underwater Lab.

“Every
single component had a back-up,” the director said. “What’s more, there was a diagnostic pulse only two seconds earlier; everything was normal. So it could
not
have been an equipment failure.”

That left only the impossible explanation. The pinger had been switched off. And to do that, a locking-bar had to be removed.

It could not happen by accident; only by curious meddling – or deliberate intent.

The twenty metre twin-hull
Calypso
was not merely the largest, but the only, oceanographic research vessel on Thalassa. It was normally based on North Island, and Loren was amused to note the good-natured banter between its scientific crew and their Tarnan passengers, whom they pretended to treat as ignorant fishermen. For their part, the South Islanders lost no opportunity of boasting to the Northers that
they
were the ones who had discovered the scorps. Loren did not remind them that this was not strictly in accord with the facts.

It was a slight shock to meet Brant again, though Loren should have expected it, since the other had been partly responsible for
Calypso’s
new equipment. They greeted each other with cool politeness, ignoring the curious or amused glances of the other passengers. There were few secrets on Thalassa; by this time everyone would know who was occupying the main guest-room of the Leonidas home.

The small underwater sledge sitting on the afterdeck would have been familiar to any oceanographer of the last two thousand years. Its metal framework carried three television cameras, a wire basket to hold samples collected by the remote-controlled arm, and an arrangement of water-jets that permitted movement in any direction. Once it had been lowered over the side, the robot explorer could send its images and information back through a fibre-optic cable not much thicker than the lead of a pencil. The technology was centuries old – and still perfectly adequate.

Now the shoreline had finally disappeared, and for the first time Loren found himself completely surrounded by water. He recalled his anxiety on that earlier trip with Brant and Kumar when they had travelled hardly a kilometre from the beach. This time, he was pleased to discover, he felt slightly more at ease, despite the presence of his rival. Perhaps it was because he was on a much larger boat …

“That’s odd,” Brant said, “I’ve never seen kelp this far to the west.”

At first Loren could see nothing; then he noticed the dark stain low in the water ahead. A few minutes later, the boat was nosing its way through a loose mass of floating vegetation, and the captain slowed speed to a crawl.

“We’re almost there, anyway,” he said. “No point in clogging our intakes with this stuff. Agreed, Brant?”

Brant adjusted the cursor on the display screen and took a reading.

“Yes – we’re only fifty metres from where we lost the pinger. Depth two hundred and ten. Let’s get the fish overboard.”

“Just a minute,” one of the Norther scientists said. “We spent a lot of time and money on that machine, and it’s the only one in the world. Suppose it gets tangled up in that damned kelp?”

There was a thoughtful silence; then Kumar, who had been uncharacteristically quiet – perhaps overawed by the high-powered talent from North Island – put in a diffident word.

“It looks much worse from here. Ten metres down, there are almost no leaves – only the big stems, with plenty of room between them. It’s like a forest.”

Yes, thought Loren, a submarine forest, with fish swimming between the slender, sinuous trunks. While the other scientists were watching the main video screen and the multiple displays of instrumentation, he had put on a set of full-vision goggles, excluding everything from his field of view except the scene ahead of the slowly descending robot. Psychologically, he was no longer on the deck of
Calypso;
the voices of his companions seemed to come from another world that had nothing to do with him.

He was an explorer entering an alien universe, not knowing what he might encounter. It was a restricted, almost monochrome universe; the only colours were soft blues and greens, and the limit of vision was less than thirty metres away. At any one time he could see a dozen slender trunks, supported at regular intervals by the gas-filled bladders that gave them buoyancy, reaching up from the gloomy depths and disappearing into the luminous “sky” overhead. Sometimes he felt that he was walking through a grove of trees on a dull, foggy day: then a school of darting fish destroyed the illusion.

“Two hundred fifty metres,” he heard someone call. “We should see the bottom soon. Shall we use the lights? The image quality is deteriorating.”

Loren had scarcely noticed any change, because the automatic controls had maintained the picture brilliance. But he realized that it must be almost completely dark at this depth; a human eye would have been virtually useless.

“No – we don’t want to disturb anything until we have to. As long as the camera’s operating, let’s stick to available light.”

“There’s the bottom! Mostly rock – not much sand.”

“Naturally.
Macrocystis thalassi
needs rocks to cling to – it’s not like the free-floating
Sargassum.”

Loren could see what the speaker meant. The slender trunks ended in a network of roots, grasping rock-outcroppings so firmly that no storms or surface currents could dislodge them. The analogy with a forest on land was even closer than he had thought.

Very cautiously, the robot surveyor was working its way into the submarine forest, playing out its cable behind it. There seemed no risk of becoming entangled in the serpentine trunks that reared up to the invisible surface, for there was plenty of space between the giant plants. Indeed, they might have been deliberately
–

The scientists looking at the monitor screen realized the incredible truth just a few seconds after Loren.

“Krakan!” one of them whispered. “This isn’t a natural forest
–
it’s a –
plantation?
”

29. Sabra

T
hey called themselves Sabras, after the pioneers who, a millennium and a half before, had tamed an almost equally hostile wilderness on Earth.

The Martian Sabras had been lucky in one respect; they had no human enemies to oppose them – only the fierce climate, the barely perceptible atmosphere, the planet-wide sandstorms. All these handicaps they had conquered; they were fond of saying that they had not merely survived, they had prevailed. That quotation was only one of countless borrowings from Earth, which their fierce independence would seldom allow them to acknowledge.

For more than a thousand years, they had lived in the shadow of an illusion – almost a religion. And, like any religion, it had performed an essential role in their society; it had given them goals beyond themselves, and a purpose to their lives.

Until the calculations proved otherwise, they had believed – or at least hoped – that Mars might escape the doom of Earth. It would be a close thing, of course; the extra distance would merely reduce the radiation by fifty per cent – but that might be sufficient. Protected by the kilometres of ancient ice at the Poles, perhaps Martians could survive when Men could not. There had even been a fantasy – though only a few romantics had really believed it – that the melting of the polar caps would restore the planet’s lost oceans. And then, perhaps, the atmosphere might become dense enough for men to move freely in the open with simple breathing equipment and thermal insulation …

These hopes died hard, killed at last by implacable equations. No amount of skill or effort would allow the Sabras to save themselves. They, too, would perish with the mother world whose softness they often affected to despise.

Yet now, spread beneath
Magellan,
was a planet that epitomized all the hopes and dreams of the last generations of Martian colonists. As Owen Fletcher looked down at the endless oceans of Thalassa, one thought kept hammering in his brain.

According to the star-probes, Sagan Two was much like Mars – which was the very reason he and his compatriots had been selected for this voyage. But why resume a battle, three hundred years hence and seventy-five light-years away, when Victory was already here and now?

Fletcher was no longer thinking merely of desertion; that would mean leaving far too much behind. It would be easy enough to hide on Thalassa; but how would he feel, when
Magellan
left, with the last friends and colleagues of his youth?

Twelve Sabras were still in hibernation. Of the five awake, he had already cautiously sounded out two and had received a favourable response. And if the other two also agreed with him, he knew that they could speak for the sleeping dozen.

Magellan
must end its starfaring, here at Thalassa.

30. Child of Krakan

T
here was little conversation aboard as
Calypso
headed back towards Tarna at a modest twenty klicks; her passengers were lost in their thoughts, brooding over the implications of those images from the seabed. And Loren was still cut off from the outside world; he had kept on the full-view goggles and was playing back yet again the underwater sledge’s exploration of the submarine forest.

Spinning out its cable like a mechanical spider, the robot had moved slowly through the great trunks, which looked slender because of their enormous length but were actually thicker than a man’s body. It was now obvious that they were ranged in regular columns and rows, so no one was really surprised when they came to a clearly defined end. And there, going about their business in their jungle encampment, were the scorps.

It had been wise not to switch on the floodlights; the creatures were completely unaware of the silent observer floating in the near-darkness only metres overhead. Loren had seen videos of ants, bees, and termites, and the way in which the scorps were functioning reminded him of these. At first sight, it was impossible to believe that such intricate organization could exist without a controlling intelligence – yet their behaviour might be entirely automatic, as in the case of Earth’s social insects.

Some scorps were tending the great trunks that soared up towards the surface to harvest the rays of the invisible sun; others were scuttling along the seabed carrying rocks, leaves – and yes, crude but unmistakable nets and baskets. So the scorps were tool-makers; but even that did not prove intelligence. Some bird’s nests were much more carefully fashioned than these rather clumsy artifacts, apparently constructed from stems and fronds of the omnipresent kelp.

I felt like a visitor from space, Loren thought, poised above a Stone Age village on Earth, just when Man was discovering agriculture. Could he – or it – have correctly assessed human intelligence from such a survey? Or would the verdict have been: pure instinctive behaviour?

The probe had now gone so far into the clearing that the surrounding forest was no longer visible, though the nearest trunks could not have been more than fifty metres away. It was then that some wit among the Northers uttered the name that was thereafter unavoidable, even in the scientific reports: “Downtown Scorpville”.

It seemed to be, for want of better terms, both a residential and a business area. An outcropping of rock, about five metres high, meandered across the opening, and its face was pierced by numerous dark holes just wide enough to admit a scorp. Although these little caves were irregularly spaced, they were of such uniform size that they could hardly be natural, and the whole effect was that of an apartment building designed by an eccentric architect.

Scorps were coming and going through the entrances – like office workers in one of the old cities before the age of telecommunications, Loren thought. Their activities seemed as meaningless to him as, probably, the commerce of humans would have been to them.

“Hello,” one of
Calypso’s
other watchers called, “What’s
that?
Extreme right – can you move closer?”

The interruption from outside his sphere of consciousness was jolting; it dragged Loren momentarily from the seabed back to the world of the surface.

His panoramic view tilted abruptly with the probe’s change of attitude. Now it was level again and drifting slowly towards an isolated pyramid of rock, which was about ten metres high
–
judging by the two scorps at its base – and pierced by a single cave entrance. Loren could see nothing unusual about it; then, slowly, he became aware of certain anomalies – jarring elements that did not quite fit into the now-familiar Scorpville scene.

All the other scorps had been busily scurrying about. These two were motionless except for the continual swinging of their heads, back and forth. And there was something else
–

These scorps were big.
It was hard to judge scale here, and not until several more of the animals had scurried past was Loren quite sure that this pair was almost fifty per cent larger than average.

“What are they doing?” somebody whispered.

“I’ll tell you,” another voice answered. “They’re guards
–
sentries.”

Once stated, the conclusion was so obvious that no one doubted it.