The Imitation of Earth, James Stamers [ebook reader macos .TXT] 📗

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.

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Imitation of Earth, by James Stamers