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Title: The Imitation of Earth
Author: James Stamers
Release Date: April 7, 2016 [EBook #51682]
Language: English
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE IMITATION OF EARTH ***
Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online
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THE IMITATION OF EARTH
By JAMES STAMERS
Illustrated by CARTER
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Galaxy Magazine October 1960.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Once they had been human--now they shared a
remarkable destiny on an incredible new planet....
He was in some dark, moving medium which pressed him gently and
released him and pressed against him again with irregular rhythm. He
could not feel his hands. He could not feel any part of his body,
except a sort of itching in his calf.
He thrust downward to relieve this mild irritation and, surprisingly,
seemed to rise up. He seemed to be alive. He had no idea where, or
even when, or whether these were valid questions, for the ship had
been entering hyper-spacetime when they hit the asteroid belt. Warps
and elongations took place in hyper-spacetime. Perhaps he was now a
hyper-spaceman.
He could recall his name. It was John Shepherd. He could remember
objective events such as Doctor Adelitka Wynn creating a scene in the
Mars terminal bar. Her sociology was better than her sense, as she
accused him of making a pass at her. He would have liked to, perhaps,
but ship's etiquette said: "Crews date, captains wait, space is not
the place." He and she had been the last alive, and the last image he
had seen on the screen had been a sun. Whose sun, which sun, and where
were just uninformed speculations. But he was alive and conscious of
himself. And he was buried deep in something.
He tried to define his feelings.
The alternating pressure of the darkness was felt only in one spot,
in the area of his heart and about the size of a small bean. The
occasional itching came from below this. He thrust again and again
rose upward. Yet he had no heart, or no sense of hearing, for he could
hear no sound of pumping. After several years in space he was only too
familiar with the sound of his own blood circulating in his veins. The
voids of space turned men into especially noisy bodily orchestras.
There was none of that now.
He thought of himself as having the shape of a man, but perhaps that
was just habit. The only area he could in fact feel was the bean
slightly higher than his middle ... and a column perhaps attaching
him to the bean ... and this itching down below, in what seemed to be
one doubled-up leg. He thrust again and again, rising higher each
time. There was nothing else to do. He never felt tired. He never felt
anything, except the itching.
* * * * *
Eventually he felt a slackening on the upward pressure. He had kicked
with his one leg, risen and found no resistance. Warmth played over him
and he uncurled his head. So he had a head.
Habit had accustomed him to seeing with his eyes, from one set focal
point. It was some time before he found he could see, in a general way,
from any point on his exposed surface.
He could even see parts of himself, where the edges doubled over. It
was like being able to run round a large gallery on the top of a dome,
looking out at the view--and yet being the entire dome. He was green!
He looked down beneath him and saw a long green pillar, tubular and
shiny, rising out of a brown background.
He could still feel the beating pressure down below. It struck him
that he was a plant, growing from seed which presumably his liquified,
atomized or dissolved body had provided, and emerging on the surface of
a planet.
Immediately overhead a bright orange satellite swung through a
brilliant yellow and white sky. Unless there were two suns here, this
was no more than a satellite body, trapped in orbit, for he could feel
the fierce beat on his surface from another source on the other side of
the sky. This was a vast fiery globe traveling at immense speed.
He felt a vigorous thrusting inside his structure as he expanded. But
darkness rushed up from the bottom of the pit in which he stood, and
cloud came in to mask the sky.
The general inference was that he was on a very warm planet around
which the bright orange satellite swung, and that both were circling
the hot sun at a speed far exceeding that of Mercury. Naturally that
was only a subjective impression. But the little he had seen did not
suggest any system he had ever heard of. He curled up.
Each time the sun went past he grew further out toward the edge of
the pit. He branched and clung to the earth with subsidiary tendrils.
It was exactly as though he were clawing with fingers into the earth,
except that he did not remove them but simply grew on past them. When
he reached the top of the pit, and accustomed his seeing to the greater
distances now before him, he saw a violently active world of fire and
steam. The ultra-rapid rotation of this planet made day and night into
the flickering of a primitive film. Mountains of earth were raised up,
broke off and shattered. Remote volcanoes fizzed into action briefly
like fireworks and faded, their tremendous display spent. Whole swamps
heaved and moved with internal motion. He became big enough to be able
to lose a side creeper without giving it a thought. He felt no pain.
There were advantages in being a plant, and particularly in being
an apparently highly active creeper. He could see from any point in
his enormous network. He could organize races between his outlying
tendrils. He found that the orange satellite exerted quite a strong
pull on his internal sap system, which was not unpleasant.
* * * * *
The first sign of life other than himself, oddly, came up from a
neighboring pit.
It lay within the area he had grown over, but he had never bothered to
send down shoots and side creepers into it. It was a peculiar sensation
to recognize--Dr. Adelitka Wynn.
He sent out a sly root and detected that she was a bulb formation. Her
indignation was transmitted violently along the ground, in a series
of sharp shocks. She stood in tall sheaves of broad-bladed grass
which rustled in the wind. He found it was intelligible, though of a
different timbre than the deep, rough scraping he made with his own
hairy leaves.
"Kindly keep to yourself," she said in effect.
Her leaves had a high hissing note. He marveled that she had managed
to retain the same unpleasant approach to life.
She was objectionable again when she had filled her pit and found she
could not extend onto the flat earth 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.
* * * * *
Once they had induced the more-or-less fishes to leave the water,
progress was rapid.
There was never a difficulty quite as great as that again. On
land, wherever the land happened to be at the time, they could
induce generations of different shapes and sizes by modifying the
vegetation--themselves, in their many forms. He took his branches
higher and higher in a sparse zone, for example, to encourage the necks
of the local animals to extend. They were remodeling their program
deliberately on their old Earth, cutting off what they knew to be
unsuccessful by-paths and nurturing the developments that should lead
to man. The original crablike inhabitants had long since passed away,
though they had used some features of these. The insects continued to
multiply on their own by sheer probability and without their guidance.
They were both ruthless in their experiments. Once they abolished whole
races of enormous vegetarians by withholding themselves in inaccessible
areas. Like the dinosaurs, whom they resembled closely, these great
reptiles were too big and too stupid.
She blamed him for having allowed them to feed too many generations on
too highly radioactive parts of themselves.
"I can't be everywhere at once all the time," he said.
To annoy her, and because he had been a space captain, he encouraged an
entirely abortive series of flying reptiles.
His excuse was true. By exerting his consciousness to its maximum,
he could be aware of almost all the planet simultaneously, but this
awareness lacked intensity and definition.
The comfortable maximum for concentration was about a hundred square
miles. If he focused his attention within a square mile, his roots and
trunks and branches hissed with massive life and rapidly propagated
themselves into a thick jungle. This in turn multiplied the surface
areas and diffused his attention. There was a lot going on in the
undergrowth that they both missed.
They almost missed their ultimate triumph.
* * * * *
The satellite of their planet had cooled. The sun around which they
swung was shielded by thick banks of the carbon dioxide they breathed
off from their myriad bodies. They had stabilized most of the animals.
Despite the repeated cataclysms they had arrived at descendants who
could flower just as they themselves originally had flowered.
As a matter of fact, he was quite deeply taken with an offshoot wood of
flowering trees. In the guise of honeysuckle he spent most of his time
wooing tenderly round their trunks, to the fury of her grasses and the
lashing of her reeds.
An object that was a rudimentary improvement on an ape came shambling
into the wood where he was and quite idiotically tore off some of his
prettier flowers.
On checking, he found there were several varieties of this object in
various parts of the planet. None appeared any better than this brute,
who whizzed through the trees and bred and died in a flicker of time.
"He'll never last," he said to her. "His metabolism burns out before he
has time to do anything."
"He'll reproduce all the faster," she answered. "And leave those trees
alone. At your age, really!"
She was right about the prototype brute. Never in their experiments had
they produced a creature that was so active. They had raised animals
that bred much faster, but none that bred at a reasonable pace and also
kept flashing about the planet in a restless motion.
They had to litter the ground with suitable seeds before the humanoids
stopped long enough in one spot to try planting for themselves. And
even then, the idea did not take root for many many generations. But
here and there, at last, they had the beginnings of a culture, and the
beginnings of speech. The telepathic content of the humanoids' speech
was intelligible to them, though not apparently intelligible to the
humanoids themselves.
They concentrated on the temperate zones, where they could most easily
encourage the humanoids to stand still from generation to generation.
The humanoid dwellings flickered into existence and decayed too rapidly
for any reliable observations until several tribes of them took to
using stone for building materials.
"Well," he said thankfully, "at last I can tell where they are without
dashing from branch to branch like one of your monkeys."
He still did not believe her monkey experiments had had much to do with
it. Secretly he suspected she had encouraged that development to annoy
him--by putting multitudes in his hair, so to speak. It was just and
proper, therefore, that the humanoids trampled all over her grasslands
by preference.
It was in this mood that he created cool groves of tall trees and
concentrated in them thoughts of love and pleasure.
The humanoids took the hint remarkably quickly. He had many happy
generations encouraging the humanoids to sport in his groves. She was
furious. But trees were his province and there was nothing she could do
about it.
"You're debasing them," she complained.
"They're enjoying themselves, aren't they?"
"Voyeur!"
Well, he frankly enjoyed the swift rush of little pink bodies in and
out of the groves. He was sorry when she succeeded in countering with
a sterner line of thought, bred out of her deserts and thin-grassed
mountains, where she was full of thought of privacy, and continence,
and wonder and the stars. When he could, he made life uncomfortable for
these higher-minded generations. He was never slow to create sybaritic
and sensual surroundings to knock them off their mental perches. In one
group of islands--which she could not reach because his pines starved
out her seeds before they had a chance to establish--he had a series of
permanent statues erected to himself by the humanoids, and he had frank
and open worship. He considered it very proper. He maintained a cool
and bracing temperature in the trees around the sandy shores.
He had passed through four or five hundred generations of giant
redwoods before the little humanoids established themselves in the
cities across the planet. Many of their activities were too fast for
him to perceive, but he could contemplate their cities.
These were temporary structures, on the scale of the thrusting growth
he felt in one of his redwoods. Still, to these dizzy little humanoids
no doubt the cities lasted long enough. It was rare now for him to
pick up a humanoid thought. Unlike their first models, the present
generations thought at the high speed which characterized their entire
life. A blurred flicker of an impression to him was apparently the
whole life's output of one of her contemplatives sitting in a cave,
until he fell to pieces and was whizzed away.
The pink varieties no longer worshipped him, save fitfully, but he
still had a pleasant range of warmer-colored humanoids whom he could
tempt into an orgy. This kept him deep in the forests on the central
belt of the planet.
* * * * *
She signaled to him from across the main ocean. He transferred his
consciousness to join her on the edge of one of her wide prairies.
"I think we've done very well," she said.
"Surely you didn't call me all the way here just to say that."
"Yes. It really is Earthlike, isn't it? I felt it was about time you
congratulated me."
He thought back.
"I don't remember, now," he said. "But it seems to be roughly similar."
"Roughly! After all this time, you dare to suggest I have only achieved
a rough similarity? I was a trained sociologist, kindly remember. It is
_exactly_ like Earth."
He looked patiently up at the satellite and the stars. She was
detailing the achievement interminably.
"It's very difficult to tell," he said, interrupting her. "Our time
scale is quite different from what it was on Earth. These humanoids of
ours breed and die like ephemerids."
She rustled impatiently.
"If you took trouble to examine the species from their time scale, you
would find it is precisely the same as Earth time to them."
"Is it? Very well, I believe you. We have created an exact duplicate of
the other Earth. Congratulations."
"You're just agreeing without proof. I have evidence to show the
sociology is a detailed replica. These humanoids are repeating human
history exactly as we knew it! One of our ivy shoots even reported a
tombstone marked 'Killed in the Battle of Bunker Hill, June 17, 1775.'"
"Now you're exaggerating!" he said. "How could they possibly duplicate
a time system that applied on the other Earth?"
"What other Earth?" she said.
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