The Florians. Brian Stableford
It looks good. And they weren’t ready to cut our throats when we came out through the lock...on the contrary, they seemed delighted to see us, even if it did take Nathan half an hour to explain who and what we are.”
“But you sound as if you can’t quite believe it,” she said, “whether you expected the unexpected or not. And you’ve got to admit that they come as something of a surprise. Damn it all, half of them are getting on for seven feet tall!”
I began to walk on, and she walked with me. We headed for a small stone bridge over the stream which cut a curved path through the village.
“It’s odd,” I agreed.
“What’s caused it?”
“Maybe they eat well,” I said. It wasn’t a sarcastic remark, but she took it as such.
“I know people back home who made eating the purpose of their lives,” she said. “People who knew just about everything there is to know about stuffing themselves full of every goddamn edible thing under the sun. They grew fat, but they didn’t grow seven feet tall.”
“We’re under a different sun now,” I pointed out.
She allowed me to dismiss the question without beginning to take it seriously. Inside, though, it was the thing that worried me most. The people looked healthy, happy, and strong. Very strong. A race of giants. People do grow that big on Earth—occasionally. There are a handful of giants in every generation. It’s natural...there’s nothing so very strange about it. But when everybody is built like an Olympic hammer-thrower...you have to wonder whether you’re not discovering a different order of nature altogether.
But there was time to think about such questions. Abundant time. For now, though, I was on an alien world for the first time. I was walking on alien soil, beneath a different sky. I was beset by a strange mixture of sensations—a combination of familiarity and strangeness. It was absurd that the sky should be blue, that the sun sinking toward the horizon should have just the same ruddy face, that the distant clouds hazing its face should be the same clouds that floated over the Earth. Superficially, the familiarity concealed the alien. But there was the knowledge, inside me, that everything here was different. The sun and the sky were not the ones I knew, but were merely in disguise. The lack of any real sensory confirmation of the fact that this world was Floria, ninety light-years from Earth, and not the Earth itself, made me feel that this was all an elaborate facade...a sham...and that there was something weird and terrible lurking just out of sight in the corner of my eye.
I stopped to lean on the parapet of the bridge, to look down into the water of the stream. It was only a couple of feet deep, but the rippled surface was so full of shadows and the red reflected glow of the sun that I couldn’t see anything beneath it.
“No fish at all,” murmured Karen.
“None whatsoever,” I agreed. Here was a point of essential difference. But it was a covert difference. Even if I had been able to see the depths beneath the surface, how could my senses have told me “This is not Earth...because there is no fish to be seen”? There were no fish in the streams of Earth. Only in the farms and the factories, where the water flowed in sculpted channels, artificially aerated and thermostatically adjusted.
She pulled herself up onto the parapet and used its height as a vantage point from which to look out at the village—but the stream itself was in a gully, and she could see little more from here than from the steps of the hall whence we had set out. I scanned the buildings incuriously, but my powers of observation worked uncontrolled, and my brain processed their information as a matter of habit.
I noted that the buildings—each and every one, whether home or hut, brick or stone or wood, great or small—seemed curiously unfinished. There was not a one that had been. architecturally planned. They had been put up quickly, each to serve their function, with the assumption that each one might be constantly rebuilt—improved and extended. Each building had a life of its own. They were capable of growth and change, perhaps even of metamorphosis.
It was a small thing, but it seemed meaningful. No one built that way on Earth. Here, the community was in a constant state of remaking itself: reshaping and replanning and reforming. They were unaffected by insidious myths of optimum use of resources and ultimate ends. There was a relaxation in the way things were done here, and a tension in the way they were done on Earth.
“Perhaps it’s a local thing,” said Karen.
“What?”
“The giant business. Perhaps they’re inbred, perhaps it’s a freak.”
“I don’t think so,” I said.
She was sitting on the parapet now, with her legs dangling down toward the water.
“What happens tomorrow?” she asked.
“They’ve sent a messenger to the nearest town. It’s on the coast. Nathan and I will go there in the morning, try to arrange meetings with the various people in authority. I don’t know whether it will be initially necessary for Mohammed to go to the mountain or whether they’ll come to us. Local transport isn’t very fast, although I hear they have the beginnings of a railroad. It may take a while to make the necessary contacts, but once we have channels of communication open it will get easier. What we need is a house—or a couple of houses—in the village, and people to handle liaison. Nathan and I may have to do a fair amount of traveling in the first few months, though.”
“You think we’ll stay the full year? Even if things are really as healthy and happy as they seem?”
“Almost certainly. If the colony is a success and doesn’t need our help, all well and good...but we’ll want to know why it’s a great success just as much as we’d want to know why it was in trouble. There’s a lot of work to be done. The whole question of whether there’s to be a new colony program may depend on the information we bring back—and from that point of view analyzing and documenting the successes may be even more vital than analyzing and documenting the failures.”
“If it really is a success,” she said.
“If...,” I echoed noncommittally.
“You say they have a railroad,” she said. “Steam engines, I presume...Is that good or bad, after all this time? What sort of technological level are they supposed to have reached?”
I shrugged. “Silly question,” I said, in an offhand manner. “There are no ‘levels of technology.’ Such things are an artifact of history. Maybe the notion has some meaning when you consider the order in which new discoveries are likely to be made—but there’s no coherent chain effect like a row of dominoes falling over. Here, where the colonists started out with all the knowledge of science and technology Earth could provide them with, and were limited only by the speed at which they could begin to muster the physical resources, technological developments would crop up in an entirely different order.”
“But there are no tractors in the fields and horses do most of the work. They obviously don’t have internal combustion engines. Why not?”
“Maybe they haven’t struck oil,” I suggested. “Or maybe they decided to do without. One advantage of having all that knowledge at your fingertips is that you can also decide which inventions you don’t want. Hindsight may have suggested to the old leaders of the colony that petrol engines are one thing the New Arcadia can do without. I don’t know...but did you see those magnificent horses? It isn’t just the people here that grow big and strong. There might be a lot to be said for a simpler way of life. Look where five centuries of industrial revolution got us on Earth.”
“And you reckon that’s OK? The colony lands, burns the books, and starts over from scratch?”
“That’s not what I said,” I pointed out. “They keep the books, and they use them. Only they aren’t simple-minded about it. They don’t just look to the books to tell them what to do—they look into them and try to figure out what not to do as well. The colonists were taking big risks to leave Earth...they must really have hated it. So why would they