Galaxy Science Fiction Super Pack #2. Edgar Pangborn

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ