BOOK FOUR WATERSHED The murmurs of discontent Capt. Gorbel, being a military man, thought of it as "disaffection"among the crew of the R.S.S. Indefeasible had reached the point where they could no longer be ignored, well before the ship had come within fifty light years of its objective. Sooner or later, Gorbel thought, sooner or later this idi- otic seal-creature is going to notice them. Capt. Gorbel wasn't sure whether he would be sorry or glad when the Adapted Man caught on. In a way, it would make things easier. But it would be an uncomfortable moment, not only for Hoqqueah and the rest of the pantrope team, but for Gorbel himself. Maybe it would be better to keep sitting on the safety valve until Hoqqueah and the other Altarians were put off onwhat was its name again? Oh yes. Earth. But the crew plainly wasn't going to let Gorbel put it off that long. As for Hoqqueah, he didn't appear to have a noticing cen- ter anywhere in his brain. He was as little discommoded by the emotional undertow as he was by the thin and frigid air the Rigellian crew maintained inside the battlecraft. Se- cure in his coat of warm blubber, his eyes brown, liquid and merry, he sat in the forward greenhouse for most of each ship's day, watching the growth of the star Sol in the black skies ahead. And he talked. Gods of all stars, how he talked! Capt. Gor- bel already knew more about the ancientthe very ancient history of the seeding program than he had had any. desire to know, but there was still more coming. Nor was the seed- ing program Hoqqueah's sole subject. The Colonization Coun- cil delegate had had a vertical education, one which cut in a narrow shaft through many different fields of specialization in contrast to Corbel's own training, which had been spread horizontally over the whole subject of spaceflight without more than touching anything else. Hoqqueah seemed to be making a project of enlarging the Captain's horizons, whether he wanted them enlarged or not. "Take agriculture," he was saying at the moment. "This planet we're to seed provides an excellent argument for taking the long view of farm policy. There used to be jungles there; it was very fertile. But the people began their lives as farmers with the use of fire, and they killed themselves off in the same way." "How?" Gorbel said automatically. Had he remained silent, Hoqqueah would have gone on .anyhow; and it didn't pay to be impolite to the Colonization Council, even by proxy. "In their own prehistory, fifteen thousand years .before their official zero date, they cleared farmland by burning it off. Then they would plant a crop, harvest it, and let the jungle return. Then they burned the jungle off and went through the cycle again. At the beginning, they wiped out the greatest abundance of game animals Earth was ever to see, just by farming that way. Furthermore the method was totally de- structive to the topsoil. "But did they learn? No. Even after they achieved space- flight, that method of farming was standard in most of the re- maining jungle areaseven though the bare rock was show- ing through everywhere by that time." Hoqqueah sighed. "Now, of course, there are no jungles. There are no seas, either. There's nothing but desert, naked rock, bitter cold, and thin, oxygen-poor airor so the people would view it, if there were any of them left. Tapa farming wasn't solely responsible, but it helped." Gorbel shot a quick glance at the hunched back of Lt. Aver- dor, his adjutant and navigator. Averdor had managed to avoid saying so much as one word to Hoqqueah or any of the other pantropists from the beginning of the trip. Of course he wasn't required to assume the diplomatic burdens involved those were Corbel's crossesbut the strain of dodging even normal intercourse with the seal-men was beginning to tell on him. Sooner or later, Averdor was going to explode. He would have nobody to blame for it but himself, but that wouldn't prevent everybody on board from suffering from it. Including Corbel, who would lose a first-class navigator and adjutant. Yet it was certainly beyond Corbel's authority to order Averdor to speak to an Adapted Man. He could only suggest that Averdor run through a few mechanical courtesies, for the good of the ship. The only response had been one of the stoniest stares Corbel had ever seen, even from Averdor, with whom the Captain had been shipping for over thirty Galactic years. And the worst of it was that Corbel was, as a human being, wholly on Averdor's side. "After a certain number of years, conditions change on any planet," Hoqqueah babbled solemnly, waving a flipper-like arm to include all the points of light outside the greenhouse. He was working back to his primary obsession: the seeding program. "It's only logical to insist that man be able to change with themor, if he can't do that, he must establish himself somewhere else. Suppose he had colonized only the Earthlike planets? Not even those planets remain Earthlike forever, not in the biological sense." "Why would we have limited ourselves to Earthlike pla-nets in the first place?" Corbel said. "Not that I know much about the place, but the specs don't make it sound like an optimum world." "To be sure," Hoqqueah said, though as usual Corbel didn't know which part of his own comment Hoqqueah was agreeing to. "There's no survival value in pinning one's race forever to one set of specs. It's only sensible to go on evolving with the universe, so as to stay independent of such things as the aging of worlds, or the explosions of their stars. And look at the results! Man exists now in so many forms that there's always a refuge somewhere for any threatened people. That's a great achievementcompared to it, what price the old arguments about sovereignty of form?" "What, indeed?" Corbel said, but inside his skull his other . self was saying: Ah-ha, he smells the hostility after all. Once an Adapted Man, always an Adapted Manand always fighting for equality with the basic human form. But it's no good, you seal-snouted bureaucrat. You can argue for the isi rest of your life, but your whiskers will always wiggle when you talk. And obviously you'll never stop talking. "And as a military man yourself, you'd be the first to ap- preciate the military advantages, Captain,". Hoqqueah added earnestly. "Using pantropy, man has seized thousands of worlds that would have been inacccessible to him otherwise. It's enormously increased our chances to become masters of the galaxy, to take most of it under occupation without steal- ing anyone else's planet in the process. An occupation without dispossessionlet alone without bloodshed. Yet if some race other than man should develop imperial ambitions, and try to annex our planets, it will find itself enormously out- numbered." "That's true," Capt. Gorbel said, interested in spite of him- self. "It's probably just as well that we worked fast, way back there in the beginning. Before somebody else thought up the method, I mean. But, how come it was us? Seems to me that the first race to invent it should've been a race that already had itif you follow me." "Not quite. Captain. If you will give me an example1" "Well, we scouted a system once where there was a race that occupied two different planets, not both at the same time, but back and forth," Gorbel said. "They had a lifecycie that had three different forms. In the first form they'd winter over on the outermost of .the two worlds. Then they'd change to another form that could cross space, mother-naked, without ships, and spend the rest of the year on the inner planet in the third form. Then they'd change back into the second form and cross back to the colder planet. "It's a hard thing to describe. But the point is, this wasn't anything they'd worked out; it was natural to them. They'd evolved that way." He looked at Averdor again. "The navi- gation was tricky around there during the swarming season." Avedor failed to rise to the bait. "I see; the point is well taken," Hoqqueah said, nodding with grotesque thoughtfulness. "But let me point out to you, Captain, that being already able to do a thing doesn't aid you in thinking of it as something that needs to be perfected. Oh, I've seen races like the one you describe, tooraces with polymorphism, sexual alteration of generation, metamorphosis of the insect life-history type, and so on. There's a planet named Lithia, about forty light years from here, where the dominant race undergoes complete evolutionary recapitulation after birthnot before it, as men do. But why should any of them think of form-changing as something extraordinary, and to be striven for? It's one of the commonplaces of their lives, after all." A small bell chimed in the greenhouse. Hoqqueah got up at once, his movements precise and almost graceful despite his tubbiness. "Thus endeth the day," he said cheerfully. "Thank you for your courtesy, Captain." He waddled out. He would, of course, be back tomorrow. And the day after that. And the next dayunless the crewmen hadn't tarred and feathered the whole bunch by then. If only, Gorbel thought distractedly, if only the damned Adapts weren't so quick to abuse their privileges! As a dele- gate of the Colonization Council, Hoqqueah was a person of some importance, and could not be barred from entering the greenhouse except in an emergency. But didn't the man know that he shouldn't use the privilege each and every day, on a ship manned by basic-form human beings most of whom could not enter the greenhouse at all without a direct order? And the rest of the pantropists were just as bad. As pas- sengers with the technical status of human beings, they could go almost anywhere in the ship that the crew could goand they did, persistantly and unapologetica...
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