Explorers of Space Read online

  “Well?”

  “Well, you can’t have interplanetary fertilization unless something or someone is there to do the job. We did it this time, but we were the first humans ever to enter the cluster. So, before this, it must be nonhumans who did it; maybe the same nonhumans who transplanted the blooms in the first place. That means that somewhere in this cluster there is an intelligent race of beings; intelligent enough for space travel. And Earth must know about that.”

  Slowly Chouns shook his head. Smith frowned. “You find flaws somewhere in the reasoning?”

  Chouns put hi!; head between his own palms and looked miserable. “Let’s say you’ve missed almost everything.”

  “What have I missed?” demanded Smith angrily.

  “Your crossfertilization theory is good, as far as it goes, but you haven’t considered a few points. When we approached that stellar system our hyperatomic motor went out of order in a way the automatic controls could neither diagnose nor correct. After we landed we made no effort to adjust them. We forgot about them, in fact; and when you handled them later you found they were in perfect order, and were so unimpressed by that that you didn’t even mention it to me for another few hours.

  “Take something else: How conveniently we chose landing spots near a grouping of animal life on both planets. Just luck? And our incredible confidence in the good will of the creatures. We never even bothered checking atmospheres for trace poisons before exposing ourselves.

  “And what bothers me most of all is that I went completely crazy over the Gamow sighters. Why? They’re valuable, yes, but not that valuable—and I don’t generally go overboard for a quick buck.”

  Smith had kept an uneasy silence during all that. Now he said, “I don’t see that any of that adds up to anything.”

  “Get off it, Smith; you know better than that. Isn’t it obvious to you that we were under mental control from the outside?”

  Smith’s mouth twisted and caught halfway between derision and doubt. “ Are you on the psionic kick again?”

  “Yes; facts are facts. I told you that my hunches might be a form of rudimentary telepathy.”

  “Is that a fact, too? You didn’t think so a couple of days ago.”

  “I think so now. Look, I’m a better receiver than you, and I was more strongly affected. Now that it’s over, I understand more about what happened because I received more. Understand?”

  “No,” said Smith harshly.

  “Then listen further. You said yourself the (Gamow sighters were the nectar that bribed us into pollination. You said that.”

  “All right.”

  “Well, then, where did they come from? They were Earth products; we even read the manufacturer’s name and model on them, letter by letter. Yet, if no human beings have ever been in the cluster, where did the sighters come from? Neither one of us worried about that, then; and you don’t seem to worry about it even now.”

  “Well—”

  “What did you do with the sighters after we got on board ship, Smith? You took them from me; I remember that.”

  “I put them in the safe,” said Smith defensively. “Have you touched them since?”

  “No.”

  “Have I?”

  “Not as far as I know.”

  “You have my word I didn’t. Then why not open the safe now?”

  Smith stepped slowly to the safe. It was keyed to his fingerprints, and it opened. Without looking he reached in. His expression altered and with a sharp cry he first stared at the contents, then scrabbled them out.

  He held four rocks of assorted color, each of them roughly rectangular.

  “They used our own emotions to drive us,” said Chouns softly, as though insinuating the words into the other’s stubborn skull one at a time. “They made us think the hyperatomics were wrong so we could land on one of the planets; it didn’t matter which, I suppose. They made us think we had precision instruments in our hand after we landed on one so we would race to the other.”

  “Who are ‘they’?” groaned Smith. “The tails or the snakes? Or both?”

  “Neither,” said Chouns. “It was the plants.”

  “The plants? The flowers?”

  “Certainly. We saw two different sets of animals tending the same species of plant. Being animals ourselves, we assumed the animals were the masters. But why should we assume that? It was the plants that were being taken care of.”

  “We cultivate plants on Earth, too, Chouns.”

  “But we eat those plants,” said Chouns.

  “And maybe those creatures eat their plants, too.”

  “Let’s say I know they don’t,” said Chouns. “They maneuvered us well enough. Remember how careful I was to find a bare spot on which to land.”

  “I felt no such urge.”

  “You weren’t at the controls; they weren’t worried about you. Then, too, remember that we never noticed the pollen, though we were covered with it-not till we were safely on the second planet. Then we dusted the pollen off, on order.”

  “I never heard anything so impossible.”

  “Why is it impossible? We don’t associate intelligence with plants, because plants have no nervous systems; but these might have. Remember the fleshy buds on the stems? Also, plants aren’t free-moving; but they don’t have to be if they develop psionic powers and can make use of free-moving animals. They get cared for, fertilized, irrigated, pollinated, and so on. The animals tend them with single-minded devotion and are happy over it because the plants make them feel happy.”

  “I’m sorry for you,” said Smith in a monotone. “If you try to tell this story back on Earth, I’m sorry for you.”

  “I have no illusions,” muttered Chouns, “yet-what can I do but try to warn Earth. You see what they do to animals.”

  “They make slaves of them, according to you.”

  “Worse than that. Either the tailed creatures or the snake-things, or both, must have been civilized enough to have developed space travel once; otherwise the plants couldn’t be on both planets. But once the plants developed psionic powers (a mutant strain, perhaps), that came to an end. Animals at the atomic stage are dangerous. So they were made to forget; they were reduced to what they are. Damn it, Smith, those plants are the most dangerous things in the universe. Earth must be informed about them, because some other Earthmen may be entering that cluster.”

  Smith laughed. “You know, you’re completely off base. If those plants really had us under control, why would they let us get away to warn the others?”

  Chouns paused. “I don’t know.” Smith’s good humor was restored. He said, “For a minute you had me going, I don’t mind telling you.”

  Chouns rubbed his skull violently. Why were they let go? And for that matter, why did he feel this horrible urgency to warn Earth about a matter with which Earthmen would not come into contact for millennia perhaps?

  He thought desperately and something came glimmering. He fumbled for it, but it drifted away. For a moment he thought desperately that it was as though the thought had been pushed away: but then that feeling, too, left.

  He knew only that the ship had to remain at full thrust, that they had to hurry.

  So, after uncounted years, the proper conditions had come about again. The protospores from two planetary strains of the mother plant met and mingled, sifting together into the clothes and hair and ship of the new animals. Almost at once the hybrid spores formed; the hybrid spores that alone had all the capacity and potentiality of adapting themselves to a new planet.

  The spores waited quietly, now, on the ship which, with the last impulse of the mother plant upon the minds of the creatures aboard, was hurtling them at top thrust toward a new and ripe world where free-moving creatures would tend their needs.

  The spores waited with the patience of the plant (the all-conquering patience no animal can ever know) for their arrival on a new world—each, in its own tiny way, an explorer—

  VASTER THAN EMPIRES,

 
; AND MORE SLOW

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  When Ursula K. Le Guin’s novel The Farthest Shore received the 1972 National Book Award for Children’s Literature, the world of general publishing thereby confirmed what had been recognized for some years within the smaller world of science fiction: that Mrs. Le Guin is a writer of soaring vision and extraordinary accomplishment. Her stories had been appearing in science-fiction magazines since 1962, and, after publishing several well-received novels, she carried off both the Hugo and Nebula trophies for her 1969 book, The Left Hand of Darkness, now considered a modern science-fiction classic. Her work is marked not only by eloquent prose and sensitive insight into character but also by a strong grasp of the forces that shape and change a culture—not so surprising when one considers that her father, Alfred Kroeber, was perhaps the greatest of American anthropologists, and that her mother, Theodora Kroeber, wrote that superb portrait of the vanishing Indians of California, Ishi in Two Worlds.

  The story reprinted here takes its title from a poem by Andrew Marvell (1621-1678), To His Coy Mistress:

  My vegetable love should grow

  Vaster than empires, and more slow.

  Rarely has the familiar theme of planetary exploration been handled with such imagination and with such grace of style.

  IT WAS only during the earliest decades of the League that the Earth sent ships out on the enormously long voyages, beyond the pale, over the stars and far away. They were seeking for worlds which had not been seeded or settled by the Founders on Hain, truly alien worlds. All the Known Worlds went back to the Hainish Origin, and the Terrans, having been not only founded but salvaged by the Hainish, resented this. They wanted to get away from the family. They wanted to find somebody new. The Hainish, like tiresomely understanding parents, supported their explorations, and contributed ships and volunteers, as did several other worlds of the League.

  All these volunteers to the Extreme Survey crews shared one peculiarity: they were of unsound mind.

  What sane person, after all, would go out to collect information that would not be received for five or ten centuries? Cosmic mass interference had not yet been eliminated from the operation of the ansible, and so instantaneous communication was reliable only within a range of 120 light-years. The explorers would be quite isolated. And of course they had no idea what they might come back to, if they came back. No normal human being who had experienced time-slippage of even a few decades between League worlds would volunteer for a round trip of centuries. The Surveyors were escapists, misfits. They were nuts.

  Ten of them climbed aboard the ferry at Smeming Port, and made varyingly inept attempts to get to know one another during the three days the ferry took getting to their ship, Gum. Gum is a Cetian nickname, on the order of Baby or Pet. There were two Cetians on the team, two Hainishmen, one Beldene, and five Terrans; the Cetian-built ship was chartered by the Government of Earth. Her motley crew came aboard wriggling through the coupling tube one by one like apprehensive spermatozoa trying to fertilize the universe. The ferry left, and the navigator put Gum underway. She flitted for some hours on the edge of space a few hundred million miles from Smeming Port, and then abruptly vanished.

  When, after 10 hours 29 minutes, or 256 years, Gum reappeared in normal space, she was supposed to be in the vicinity of Star KG-E-96651. Sure enough, there was the gold pinhead of the star. Somewhere within a four-hundred-million-kilometer sphere there was also a greenish planet, World 4470, as charted by a Cetian mapmaker. The ship now had to find the planet. This was not quite so easy as it might sound, given a four-hundred-million-kilometer haystack. And Gum couldn’t bat about in planetary space at near lightspeed; if she did, she and Star KG-E-96651 and World 4470 might all end up going bang She had to creep, using rocket propulsion, at a few hundred thousand miles an hour. The Mathematician/Navigator, Asnanifoil, knew pretty well where the planet ought to be, and thought they might raise it within ten E-days. Meanwhile the members of the Survey team got to know one another still better.

  “I can’t stand him,” said Porlock, the Hard Scientist (chemistry, plus physics, astronomy, geology, etc.), and little blobs of spittle appeared on his mustache. “The man is insane. I can’t imagine why he was passed as fit to join a Survey team, unless this is a deliberate experiment in non-compatibility, planned by the Authority, with us as guinea pigs.”

  “We generally use hamsters and Hainish gholes,” said Mannon, the Soft Scientist (psychology, plus psychiatry, anthropology, ecology, etc.), politely; he was one of the Hainishmen. “Instead of guinea pigs. Well, you know, Mr. Osden is really a very rare case. In fact, he’s the first fully cured case of Render’s Syndrome—a variety of infantile autism which was thought to be incurable. The great Ter-ran analyst Hammergeld reasoned that the cause of the autistic condition in this case is a supernormal empathic capacity, and developed an appropriate treatment Mr. Osden is the first patient to undergo that treatment, in fact he lived with Dr. Hammergeld until he was eighteen. The therapy was completely successful.”

  “Successful?”

  “Why, yes. He certainly is not autistic.”

  “No, he’s intolerable!”

  “Well, you see,” said Mannon, gazing mildly at the saliva-flecks on Porlock’s mustache, “the normal defensive-aggressive reaction between strangers meeting—let’s say you and Mr. Osden just for example—is something you’re scarcely aware of; habit, manners, inattention get you past it; you Ve learned to ignore it, to the point where you might even deny it exists. However, Mr. Osden, being an empath, feels it Feels his feelings, and yours, and is hard put to say which is which. Let’s say that there’s a normal element of hostility towards any stranger in your emotional reaction to him when you meet him, plus a spontaneous dislike of his looks, or clothes, or handshake—it doesn’t matter what He feels that dislike. As his autistic defense has been unlearned, he resorts to an aggressive-defense mechanism, a response in kind to the aggression which you have unwittingly projected onto him.” Mannon went on for quite a long time.

  “Nothing gives a man the right to be such a bastard,” Porlock said.

  “He can’t tune us out?” asked Harfex, the Biologist, another Hainishman.

  “It’s like hearing” said Olleroo, Assistant Hard Scientist, stopping over to paint her toenails with fluorescent lacquer. “No eyelids on your ears. No Off switch on empathy. He hears our feelings whether he wants to or not”

  “Does he know what we’re thinking?” asked Eskwana, the Engineer, looking round at the others in real dread.

  “No,” Porlock snapped. “Empathy’s not telepathy! Nobody’s got telepathy.”

  “Yet,” said Mannon, with his little smile. “Just before I left Hain there was a most interesting report in from one of the recently discovered worlds, a hilfer named Rocannon reporting what appears to be a teachable telepathic technique existent among a mutated hominid race; I only saw a synopsis in the HILF Bulletin, but—” He went on. The others had learned that they could talk while Mannon went on talking he did not seem to mind, nor even to miss much of what they said.

  “Then why does he hate us?” Eskwana said.

  “Nobody hates you, Ander honey,” said Olleroo, daubing Eskwana’s left thumbnail with fluorescent pink. The engineer flushed and smiled vaguely.

  “He acts as if he hated us,” said Haito, the Coordinator. She was a delicate-looking woman of pure Asian descent, with a surprising voice, husky, deep, and soft, like a young bullfrog “Why, if he suffers from our hostility, does he increase it by constant attacks and insults? I can’t say I think much of Dr. Hammergeld’s cure, really, Mannon; autism might be preferable. . .”

  She stopped. Osden had come into the main cabin.

  He looked flayed. His skin was unnaturally white and thin, showing the channels of his blood like a faded road map in red and blue. His Adam’s apple, the muscles that circled his mouth, the bones and ligaments of his wrists and hands, all stood out distinctly as if displayed for an anatomy l
esson. His hair was pale rust, like long-dried blood. He had eyebrows and lashes, but they were visible only in certain lights; what one saw was the bones of the eye sockets, the veining of the lids, and the colorless eyes. They were not red eyes, for he was not really an albino, but they were not blue or grey; colors had canceled out in Osden’s eyes, leaving a cold water-like clarity, infinitely penetrable. He never looked directly at one. His face lacked expression, like an anatomical drawing or a skinned face.

  “I agree,” he said in a high, harsh tenor, “that even autistic withdrawal might be preferable to the smog of cheap secondhand emotions with which you people surround me. What are you sweating hate for now, Porlock? Can’t stand the sight of me? Go practice some auto-eroticism the way you were doing last night, it improves your vibes. Who the devil moved my tapes, here? Don’t touch my things, any of you. I won’t have it”

  “Osden,” said Asnanifoil in his large slow voice, “why are you such a bastard?”

  Ander Eskwana cowered and put his hands in front of his face. Contention frightened him. Olleroo looked up with a vacant yet eager expression, the eternal spectator.

  “Why shouldn’t I be?” said Osden. He was not looking at Asnanifoil, and was keeping physically as far away from all of them as he could in the crowded cabin. “None of you constitute, in yourselves, any reason for my changing my behavior.”

  Harfex, a reserved and patient man, said, “The reason is that we shall be spending several years together. Life will be better for all of us if—”

  “Can’t you understand that I don’t give a damn for all of you?” Osden said, took up his microtapes, and went out Eskwana had suddenly gone to sleep. Asnanifoil was drawing slipstreams in the air with his finger and muttering the Ritual Primes. “You cannot explain his presence on the team except as a plot on the part of the Terran Authority. I saw this almost at once. This mission is meant to fail,” Harfex whispered to the Coordinator, glancing over his shoulder. Porlock was fumbling with his fly-button; there were tears in his eyes. I did tell you they were all crazy, but you thought I was exaggerating.