Critical Threshold (9 page)

I looked where the glasses were pointing. I couldn't see a thing. It was much too far.

“Can't be,” I said. “The trees won't burn.” But even as I said it I was aware of the catch. The trees didn't burn—unless the outer coating was stripped away and the xylem chopped up to make firewood...

She pointed, handing me the glasses. “It's smoke,” she said.

I looked. Even through the glasses the green blur of the, land beyond the gorge didn't seem any clearer. I could see the grayish haze which Mariel had identified as smoke, but it was so tenuous...

I altered the focus of the glasses, very slightly, and realized that the gray haze and the green blur weren't equidistant. The haze was, in fact, rather closer—
in
the gorge, above the surface of the river. It was a swirling cloud, drifting close to a patch of scrub clinging to a crevice above the rushing water. It seemed to sparkle, to change as it swirled. It was a kind of yellow-gray, but it didn't look like wood smoke to me. And there was definitely no hint of flame. While it isn't always true that there's no smoke without fire, the absence of the latter is at least grounds for suspicion...

The cloud wasn't smoke. It wasn't ascending into the sky, just swirling round and round. It wasn't at the mercy of the wind, which must have been quite tangible in the crack of the gorge. How big it might be I couldn't really tell, because it was too far away, but it must have been quite some size, involving millions of individual particles.

“They're butterflies,” I declared. “It's a cloud of insects. The sparkle effect is the fluttering of parti-colored wings. Yellow and white—maybe yellow and blue. There are millions of them.”

I gave the glasses back to Mariel, and she fiddled with the focusing device, trying to confirm what I'd said. She didn't like to disbelieve me, but she wasn't convinced. Eventually, though, she decided that I had to be right. It wasn't smoke.

“What are they doing?” she asked.

“Having a party,” said Karen, reaching out to take the binoculars to get a look herself.

“Insects often congregate,” I said. “It's probably not unusual. We can see that lot because they're over open water. It probably happens all the time, in the forest.”

“Like swarms of locusts,” added Karen, helpfully.

“No,” I said, perhaps too quickly. “That's a seasonal phenomenon.”

“Okay,” she said, levelly. “Don't bother.”

“It looked like smoke,” said Mariel, defensively.

I nodded. “No way to tell,” I said. “Not at this distance. Not immediately.”

“They
are
having a party,” said Karen, irrelevantly. “Look at them go.”

“We'll get a chance to see it close someday,” I said, more to Mariel than to Karen. “It'll be quite something. Perhaps they congregate like that before mating. It may be that there are areas of the forest where such congregations often happen—the geographical equivalent to springtime.”

“Yes,” she said, without injecting any real meaning into the word. She looked uneasy, still uncertain. For once I didn't have any pangs of guilt about what thoughts she might have picked up in my head that I'd rather have left hidden. I had a clear conscience. I smiled at her. Briefly, she smiled back.

Slowly, we walked back to the camp.

CHAPTER TEN

Nathan called just before nightfall. He sounded tired, and none too happy. The tone of his voice said clearly that there was news, but that almost all of it was bad.

“We cracked it,” he said. “The whole thing. Wide open.”

“How?” I asked.

“You know that heap of rocks close to the ship?”

“The cairn? At the very top of the hill?”

“That's it. Well, today we finally got round to wondering whether it was only there to mark the hilltop or to commemorate the landing or something else equally useless. We'd gone through every damn building in the settlement and come up with nothing but garbage, and we wondered if maybe they'd erected the monument for a purpose. Pete and I spent most of the day shifting the stones and then we started to dig. It was one hell of a job. Give you three guesses as to what we found?”

“A mass grave?” I suggested. My mind was running along morbid lines.

“A cylinder about five feet deep and a yard in diameter. Made out of twenty millimeter steel plate. Pete had to burn the end off with a torch. And inside it....”

“...was the data bank.” I felt entitled to interrupt. I was still owed two guesses.

“The lot. The films, the tapes, and the apparatus. And that wasn't all. We also found the records—the history of the colony, the explanation of what happened.”

“Buried under a heap of stones on the hilltop.”

“It's a time capsule, Alex,” said Nathan. “Preservation for posterity. Preservation for a thousand years, if need be....”

“I get the picture,” I said. “Tell me why.”

“I've only scanned the stuff so far. I called you as soon as I got the basics worked out. Actually, there's a sort of letter here—addressee unknown. Maybe you could call it a kind of cultural suicide note. It's a bit emotional, but it makes the point clearly enough. You want me to read it?”

“No thanks,” I said. “Suicide notes always make me cry. Just tell us what it says.”

“The colony broke up, Alex. It disintegrated. Slowly.”

“Why?”

“That's the hard part. I'm not entirely certain. I don't think the guy who wrote the note to posterity was entirely certain, either. He spends a lot of time condemning people but not too many words trying to explain or understand them.

“The first generation tried to follow the scheme laid down for them—to clear land, plant crops, gather in food from the forest, build houses, and it began to work, too. For five years, ten, but it didn't continue to work. The Dendran plants they tried to cultivate weren't successful. They grew, but they wouldn't yield. They didn't have a great deal of variety in the stuff they'd imported—it was enough to live on, but it wasn't enough to make living particularly pleasant.”

“But they could still get food from the forest,” I intervened, trying to hurry him up. “There's one hell of a lot of it. They didn't
need
to make the Dendran crops grow in fields beside farmhouses.”

“That,”
said Nathan, dispiritedly, “is just the point. They couldn't domesticate the Dendran plants to their own system of cultivation. They couldn't unite the two sources of supply. The farms and the forests remained separate, and the question arose....”

“...As to why they needed the farms at all,” I finished for him.

The forest, I'd said, is beautiful. They'd need a wall to keep me out of it.

“It wouldn't have been so bad,” said Nathan, “if they'd been able to make a corporate decision. But they weren't. The people who came out from Earth wanted to stay with the ships, with the farms, with what they knew to be safe. They didn't want to take any risks—especially knowing that this world was close to the threshold of acceptable risk anyhow. But the younger people—the ones who came out as babies, or were born on Dendra itself—had different ideas. They were for the forest. If it had even been a clean division of opinion, a polarization of the population into two camps, it might have been okay. The colony might have split into two. But that wasn't the way it happened. There were all kinds of proposals raised, all kinds of argumentative standards. They just couldn't find any measure of agreement, any policy of concerted action. They argued, they fought, and gradually, over fifty or sixty years, the colony disintegrated. They went into the forest, in ones and twos and groups, and the people who were left fought a long, long battle to keep things going, to preserve what they had. A long, long battle which, in the end, they lost.

“The more people went into the forest the harder it became for those that were left behind. And the harder it became the more attractive, by comparison, the forest seemed. And the more attractive the forest seemed, the easier it became to be converted from the conservative camp to the radical, and so on.”

“Positive feedback,” I sad, dryly.

“And, of course,” he went on, “the older generation got older. They died. One by one, the ones who would
never
have surrendered, under any circumstances, died and were put away. And their children...what else could they do? They had two choices—to stay with the colony and watch it fail, or to follow the Dendrans who wanted to
become
Dendrans, aliens, abandoning everything they'd brought from Earth.”

“There had to be a compromise,” I said. “A whole series of compromises. They could have kept both, if only they'd tried to work it out. It didn't have to be one extreme or the other.”

“They couldn't agree, Alex. They just couldn't agree. And while they argued, they lost the chance. Events overtook them. They didn't have the social cohesion. They didn't have enough to bind them together in spite of their differences. They never really became a
community
in their own right. They were just an assembly, an assembly of individuals which disintegrated under the strains of individualism.”

He paused, but I didn't have anything to say. The silence was slightly awkward.

He began again: “I don't know exactly how many were left when they decided to construct the time capsule. Few enough, anyhow, to know that there was no real hope. They did the only thing that was left to them—took the legacy of Earth and made it safe, for the hypothetical day when the descendants of the would-be Arcadians might one day need it again. Then they too went into the forest. They felt they had no choice—the decision had been made for them, by the others. They didn't go to join the others—there was too much bitterness for that. They went to make their own way, as one of a score or a hundred separate splinters of the original group.

“And that was it. Those who wanted to, and in the end, those who didn't want to and those who didn't know what they wanted all went to be savages, living the idyllic simple life in the great forest. Every last one.”

I was following the string of sentences in my mind, letting them reinforce one another by repetition. It did make a sort of sense. It was crazy, but it was convincing. Much more convincing than the guesses we'd made. We hadn't realized because we hadn't remembered that what people do often seems, in retrospect, to have been quite irrational. We know full well that the patterns in history are patterns formed by the statistical aggregation of vast numbers of individual and idiosyncratic events, actions and decisions, but we insist on pretending that things happened and will happen in an orderly fashion, according to a rational scale of motives. The one thing that history never reminds us of is that motives and explanations are almost always put together
after
the event, not before.

My mind ran on along those rather maudlin philosophical lines until it suddenly struck me that with all his repetitive emphasis Nathan had been trying to tell me something. We might have some answers, but there was still one glaring problem.

“Every last one?”
I queried.

“That's right,” he said. “That's what the letter to posterity says. We have no reason to doubt it. The plain fact is, Alex, that the people who are in the colony now aren't the relict of the original colony at all; they're the ones who came back, and the descendants of the ones who came back.”

“But if that's the case,” I said, “if they couldn't make a go of it in the forest, why didn't they dig up the data bank and make a real effort to start over in the settlement?”

It was a good question. But it wasn't really the important question. The important question was a little thornier than that. So far, in the forest, we had seen no sign of human habitation. Maybe that was significant, and maybe not. But if so, the question was: what had happened, here in the forest, to drive those people back to the colony and to make them the way they were now?

It wasn't the kind of question which had to have a dramatic answer. Maybe it was all fairly simple. Perhaps the colonists had fared no better, over fifty years or so, living the simple life in the forest than they had trying to be subsistence farmers on the cleared land. Maybe the same thing had happened in reverse disintegration, people going back one by one...a younger generation who didn't necessarily know anything about the steel cylinder buried under the cairn. People who'd already reverted, culturally and psychologically, to the savage.

“Alex?” said Nathan.

“I'm still here,” I told him.

“Could
they have made a living in the forest?”

“No,” I said. “I don't think they could. They were mad to try.”

“So what we have here are likely to be the only survivors of the experiment?”

“No way to say for certain,” I hedged. “But it's possible. I wouldn't bet either way, at the moment, but if you're hoping that we'll find a thriving community out here, adapting in their own sweet way to the great garden of Dendra, I shouldn't pin too much faith on it.”

“You'll keep going, though?” he asked, rhetorically.

“We'll be on our way,” I said. “First thing in the morning.”

“We'll keep going through the stuff in the cylinder,” he said. “If I find anything vital, I'll let you know.”

“Thanks,” I said. And signed off.

I looked round at Mariel and Karen, who'd been hanging on to every word.

“Well,” I said. “We found the corpse and we know whodunit. All we have to find out now is what happened afterwards.”

“They must have been out of their tiny minds,” said Karen. “Cracking up like that. Abandoning everything to run wild in the woods. They must have been eating something which screwed up their heads.”

“I talked to Pietrasante,” I said. “Before the lift. When he explained to me why Nathan had been added to the strength. I thought he was just making excuses, but maybe not. He said that the UN was worried—they weren't quite sure how to read Kilner's reports. They thought that the primary reason for the failure of the five colonies might not be ecological problems at all. He said that the colonies might be failing for sociological reasons—because the men of the twenty-second century were not the stuff pioneers ought to be made of. In exporting men of the twenty-second century you also export the social excesses of the twenty-second century. The colonists just couldn't unite into a community, a tribe. They didn't have it in them.”

“Come on!” said Karen. “Everybody can get along when needs must. Everyone has it in them.”

“When needs must,” I said, “maybe so. But suppose people come to believe that needs
don't
must. That's what happened here. They thought they could make it on their own. They thought it was all easy. And so they tried.”

On Earth, it's easy to live a completely private life. It's easy to isolate yourself in a crowd. It's easy to be alone even when you're adrift in a limitless sea of faces. The necessities of life come to you through the complex machinery that's built up all around you, and its processes are quite depersonalized. You don't have to be
involved
with the people who sell you what you need or the people who provide you with the money you need to buy it with. The whole bureaucratic organism functions without high-friction personal contacts. It's easy to live with the illusion—with the reality—that other people are immaterial. They are, in themselves, in their unique personalities. Only
en masse
, as interchangeable cogs the machinery, are they essential to you and to the sustaining of your private, well-designed existence.

On Earth, every man can be an island. That's been true since the twentieth century.

But the kind of society that makes it easy to live a totally private life isn't the kind of society which can put out successful colonies. In a settlement in a human enclave on an alien world the situation is exactly the opposite. Social machinery doesn't exist. Privacy doesn't exist. The only thing that there is is other people. The cogs can't be interchanged at all. Social relationships can't be reduced to me plus the masses—everyone has to work on a face-to-face basis. People who go out to the stars to start new lives have to make lives that are
new
in every sense of the word.

Colonists have to be willing to try. That's one of the qualifications, not only for going, but for wanting to go.

But being willing to try doesn't make it easy. By no means. Of course, it
can
be done. People are adaptable psychologically as well as physically. But it always helps you to adapt if there's no choice—if the alternatives are impossible. People adapt best under rigorous conditions. Most colony worlds didn't offer a great deal of encouragement to the man who wants to cut adrift and go his own way. But Dendra was different. It
seemed
hospitable. It offered the illusion of a life of idyllic ease.

The
illusion
.

“You know,” I said. “If only the colony had been chosen by the customary balloting, I think they might have made it. People drawn from different social backgrounds on Earth, thrown together haphazardly, are
forced
to try and make something out of their inherent lack of unity. But the Dendran colony was selected on a different basis. A political maneuver. They'd taken it all too much for granted—they were never
prepared
....”