Galaxy Science Fiction Super Pack #2. Edgar Pangborn
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beyond, because he had already covered the area.
“Come on,” he said. “We’ve got the whole world to ourselves.”
“I can’t,” she answered hissingly. “You have spikes on your stems. They’ll tear my leaves.”
He shut off the sap from a whole subsidiary system, killing it. She spread over his withered shoots and leaves without a sound of acknowledgment. They both developed toward the marshes.
As he approached, leaving her slower bulb-formation behind as he raced tendril ahead of tendril down the slope, he saw there were other forms of life, in the water.
He said nothing. But he quietly doubled his thorns and built up a reserve in his advance tendrils, so that he could rush an armored shoot across the ground at high speed if necessary. The aquatic life moved and died extremely fast. Whole species expanded from a single specimen, and for no visible reason extinguished themselves. Life on the planet did not seem to be stable. It was highly experimental. He had been down at the marsh for some time before the first crablike object came into existence and began to leave the water in fitful dashes. He gave it an early dose of his thorns. Thereafter it left him alone.
The former Dr. Adelitka Wynn, however, approached the marsh without looking.
He watched with satisfaction. She was a golden brown and tender green, and highly succulent apparently to the crab tribe. She cried for help.
They were, after all, the only two of human origin on the planet. So he put his reserve to work and sent an armored set of shoots racing across the ground as a barrier between her and the marsh. The crab tribes retreated.
“Thank you,” she said, regenerating her clipped stems.
“That’s the first time you’ve ever said that,” he said hoarsely.
“I’m sorry. I am ... really glad you’re here.”
“How glad?”
“This is a most peculiar world,” she said, changing the subject. “I don’t recognize it at all.”
He said nothing but sent out an advancing barrier of thorns to clear a small area of marsh for her. He performed small services with his roots and tendrils, levering apart her bulbs where they were in danger of rotting, brushing small insects off her leaves when they became established in colonies. His main trunk was now thicker than the body of a man, and he covered several miles. In the marsh, his shoots were thick and black, standing like dark fingers deep into the ooze. Out in the drier areas, which seemed to be spreading, he modified his system to conserve internal moisture. He grew fine multitudes of hairs against the heat and predatory insects. Dr. Adelitka Wynn covered several acres herself, surrounded by his thorn barriers.
*
When she felt well established, she flowered in great blue blossoms, heavy with orange pollen. He had been waiting, and flowered all along his immense length in every color of the spectrum, mile upon mile of wide flat flowers, open and ready for the breeze. She did not protest. He sent clouds of pollen from his anthers, turning the landscape into a fine mist that drifted over her. He covered her with several pounds of fine golden dust.
“Thank you,” she said.
He wondered whether she would produce a bulb like her or a young creeper like himself. He kept young tendrils hanging around her like a catcher’s glove, until she told him to go away and let her seed in peace.
She seeded in a particularly stormy period and in profusion. She did it with a gusto and variety that amazed him. Seeds with airborne devices, parachutes, airvanes, twirling rotators, balls of down, with hard shells, soft shells. She even kept some pods, and, with a gesture almost tender, allowed ripe seeds to fall into his waiting leaves. He passed these very slowly and carefully along his system, from cup to cup. He cleared a slope near the marsh and brushed deep furrows with his thorns to put the seeds in. He planted them gently and grew an open lattice of thorny stems above them, so that only the sunlight could get in. As they grew, he retreated his protective screen to allow them air and free ground of their own. They shot up straight and tall, saplings headed for the stars.
The other seeds had taken hold in remote regions, in marshes, on the rising and falling mountains, and in great flat stretches of pulverized volcanic dust. He found he was aware of them and could, by concentrating, even gain a vague impression of the ground around them, as if each were a locus of his consciousness. He also found a telepathic link now existed between him and their mother. It was vague at first but it became clearer, eventually superseding speech between them.
None of their children had flowers. Only the two of them flowered, pollinated and seeded with regularity. Their seeds spread in a variety—and variety was the word, for in the first seeding she had packed as many variations as she could imagine. There was, in his opinion, too much emphasis on grasses after her own general style and too few creepers like himself. But that was a small detail. The original form did not last long in any case. Some of his seedlings had been enclosed by the rising marshes and were now more comfortable under water than above. A few wilder members even retained a measure of mobility and spent their lives floating from place to place.
*
He did not entirely approve of this. But, as the marshes grew under the constant rain and acquired an unpalatable saltiness so that they were virtually seas, he saw the sense of this development. He now covered, by himself and in proxy through his seeds, almost the entire land area of the planet. She extended just as far. They came to a working agreement to leave certain areas primarily for the grass-like progeny and others for his more treelike seedlings. The global view led them both to consider the same experiment.
There were occasional worms and crablike creatures, minute bodies floating with his somewhat gipsy water-seedlings, but they and their own seeds were the only significant forms of life on their planet.
“Shall we see what we can evolve?” he suggested.
“I had that thought myself,” she answered.
“At least we know the end product. It seems unlikely, now, but man must have come from much this environment on Earth.”
“Very well. Where shall we start?”
“I have some enterprising water-plants,” he said diffidently.
“We have.”
It was an ambitious program. But, on the other hand, life on Earth had presumably also developed against all probabilities. Here on their planet they could provide continual intelligent guidance.
They went out into their water-plants and sensed through their miles of sensory surfaces the most favorable areas of the planet. They encouraged the water-plants to breed, cross-breed and extend. They fed fractional parts of themselves to each other, loaded certain areas with nutrient life, encouraged mobility.
Great continental areas rose and sank. Generation after generation was rapidly produced and as rapidly developed and died. The planet was littered with the remains of unsuccessful experiment. But, mainly by concentration on iron-rich diets and localizing their sight perceptions repeatedly in one particular part of their species, they produced plants which no longer responded to them. They had separate existence of their own.
At last they managed to lure repeated generations out of the water and onto land.
They had the advantage not of merely controlling the environment but of being the environment. Subject to the violence of volcanoes and the endless shifting of the planet’s crust, aberrations in the plane of rotation, and rapid changes of climate, as ice mounted and retreated and heat waxed and waned, within these limits they could and did make arbitrary decisions. By withdrawing from an area, either of them could create a desert. By doubling their rate of growth in a local tributary of themselves, they could create a forest. Their descendant seeds were as much part of themselves as the original trunks. In fact, they rarely distinguished between that original growth and later developments. It came as quite a surprise to them both to find there was not much left of the first bulb clusters and the first sprawling creeper.
*