In an instant Ives had the helmsman. “Patch me through to the engine room.”
Wooster listened a little more attentively, now. He didn’t think the captain meant to reverse course and he was looking forward to getting a look at these strange plants up close.
Ives didn’t disappoint him. When the engine room answered Ives ordered full steam ahead, handed the radio to Wooster, and waddled aft. He didn’t even take the trouble to order Wooster not to bother him again.
The rumbling resumed as the entire ship shuddered from the strain of cargo and current on her flexing hull. This reached equilibrium about the time the bow struck the first pad.
Wooster suddenly realized the captain had run off with his glasses. He didn’t need them now, of course; the naked eye, aided by the powerful searchlight, was more than good enough.
Wooster did not know what the dangling roots might do to the ship’s propeller shafts and screws but the relatively blunt prow was making short work of the pads. His apprehension subsided when he saw that their edges crumpled easily when struck squarely, and the pads bowed up and cracked down the centers when forced suddenly against each other.
The ship, it seemed, was more than a match for these immense vegetables and soon had cut a swath clear through the obstruction. With the exception of the captain, whose rest had been interrupted, and an assortment of birds and small reptiles who had been roosting on the pads, no one, it seemed, had suffered from the incident. Looking back at the fan tail, into the gleam of moonrise, Wooster could see a widening path of debris floating downstream.
He knew it wouldn’t take long for the gossiping radio operators to spread the word around, and that soon bashing lily pads would become a competitive sport among the mariners.
In the days that followed this prophecy was fulfilled. After briefly dominating the TV news when Amazon Trader made port, the giant pads quickly became an endangered species, so rare that enterprising camera crews were hard put to get any footage of undamaged, mature plants getting pureed. As soon as one made it into a navigable part of any stream it was either attacked with boats or towed off as a trophy to somebody’s private dock.
The company that had developed the giant strain protested, of course, claiming their property was being vandalized and stolen. But the Brazilian government took a practical posture: noninterference. If the company was truly serious, it said, it could employ the legal process Brazilian law provided to recover the pads. It knew, of course, that this would be prohibitively expensive.
So the Japanese company also adopted a practical position. It offered to reward anyone who provided evidence against people who made commercial use of the plants in violation of the patent rights they held. This discouraged large scale thievery, but domesticating feral plants remained perfectly legal in Brazil as long as they were not used for profit to extract minerals or pollutants from the water they grew in. This did not, of course, prevent the plants from concentrating such substances, which they naturally continued to do.
Time passed. People along the many tributaries of the Amazon got used to seeing giant lily pads, as this variety spread throughout connecting waterways. The river’s immense delta was full of them, except, of course, in the channels, where they remained fair game for watercraft. In many places along shore they were tethered and grew very large. When it became apparent that they had a substantial lifespan people began building on them. In calm waters they sometimes lashed several together.
At first, they built only modest, temporary structures, generally intended to shelter fishermen for only a short time. Almost unnoticed among the other more spectacular effects, the water became cleaner and the fishing got better.
Gradually, though, both size and permanency of constructions increased. Building was limited less by the weight and bulk of structures than by the need to reserve enough clear area for photosynthesis to take place. It was soon discovered that the growth rate, and therefore the size of the plant, could be controlled by regulating the exposed area.
Inevitably, accidents occurred. For various reasons, occupied pads occasionally broke loose from their anchorages. More rarely still one might float out to sea, usually during one of the massive floodtides peculiar to the Amazon estuary. Then, the normal brackish littoral flow reverses and bores far inland, its surge energetic enough to ravage vegetation and structures along the banks for many kilometers upstream.
The crews of government patrol boats learned to anticipate calls to rescue people whose houses had gone to sea on the ebbtide. They developed a standard procedure to handle them. Speedy action was the key, since the plants withered and shrank as soon as they left fresh water. Fortunately, the enormous volume of fresh water literally diluted the sea for several hundred kilometers out, so they had some wiggle room, but this also meant most rescues occurred well out of sight of land.
Since only satellites could monitor such enormous areas the Brazilians put a special device into an expensive stationary orbit. They next advised the company that owned the patent that henceforth, until it coughed up the money to cover this expense, the government would be indifferent to infringement claims.
The company promptly declared bankruptcy, after which the Japanese government nationalized it, paid the money, and then launched a devastating campaign to recoup its investment. Among the people sued was Martino Rossi, who had been clandestinely raping the bottoms of the Amazonian tributaries far upstream.
The price of gold plummeted.
Three more years passed before the lilies made headlines again. By then, gold had recovered some of its value. Despite industry’s ferocious effort to pollute it, the Amazon became the world’s cleanest river system. As silt washed off its banks into the water the particles were trapped in the gigantic root systems of the pads, causing the riverbed to shift and engulf the unproductive farmland stolen from the rain forest. Seedlings, dormant and long buried in the earth were freed. These floated into rich pockets of fertile silt, where they sprouted into a new forest.
Environmentalists breathed a sigh of relief. What reason could not stop, the irresistible power of nature did. The rape of the basin ceased with her victory.
In this interim, the pads themselves had become mundane. The news-hungry media ignored them. Only the people who lived on them, or who had tried to exploit them, maintained any interest.
Suddenly everything changed. Far away, well outside the view of the aging Brazilian satellite, within the scraggly tangle of familiar vegetation, a new shape appeared in the Sargasso Sea. It was a tiny cluster of disclike green plates, each surrounded by a high lip that easily kept its inner surface clear of the relatively feeble waves of these becalmed waters.
The Sargasso is pelagic, a wasteland devoid of reefs, a deep-water desert lacking the sustenance needed by large schools of fish. It has nothing the outside world wants badly enough to seek it out. It is trackless and untraveled, except by the aircraft that sometimes cross it while studying storms during hurricane season.
And so it was that during this particularly active season crewmen of an aircraft monitoring Hurricane Stanley, a potential class five storm with correspondingly great ability to attract attention, discovered and photographed a cluster of juvenile lily pads.
The first such photograph appeared in the Miami Herald the same day it was taken. Botanists, normally a fairly sedate bunch as scientists go, went ape as soon as they realized what it meant. Clearly, naturally or manmade, this was a mutation, a pad which could tolerate sea water. The seagoing variety also seemed to be a little larger than the riverine strain. The implications were stupefying.