“Nothing abnormal about that,” Martin said. “At least no one else has suffered any calamity here.”
“So far,” Pavel said.
Martin rubbed his eyes. “That’s why I want to make sure the time we have here is put to best use. All research has value, of course, if only in once in a while turning up the unexpected. I suppose we could be on a world that once had intelligent, technology-wielding life with gene-splicing capability, and they and their equipment long since vanished, leaving behind only the organic results of their genetic engineering. In that scenario, what we’re doing here now could uncover something.”
Pavel nodded, nose back to the screen now. “But we know from Earth experience that genetically engineered organisms left to their own devices in the biosphere tend to blur into the natural in the long run—tend to lose their unique DNA to natural selection, a sort of regression to the mean via evolution.” He shook his head, pulling back from the screen. “Nope, you were right in your first instinct. Nothing here—the full comparisons will take a few hours to detail to the standard degree, but I can see already that we’re dealing with the same genomic relationships we have on Earth and the other planets.”
Martin frowned. “We’re going about this the wrong way.”
“I’m all ears about the right way,” Pavel said. Now that he had turned away from the computer, he permitted himself one of the sweet fuzzy fruits. He punctured its ripe skin with his front teeth, and let its taste ooze over his tongue. “Mmm. This one reminds me of mango in some way.” He smacked his lips. “This almost makes our trip worthwhile all by itself. It’s popping up along most of the western shore of this continent now.”
“You know who Heidegger is?” Martin asked.
“A fruiterer, right? No, I know who he was.” Pavel chuckled at his own joke. “I’m a little rusty on my philosophy of science, but he was what, late 20th, early 21st century, Viennese contemporary of Freud?”
“Almost,” Martin replied. “German, and did his major work just a bit after Freud—mid-20th century.”
Pavel nodded, tongue playing with the tom skin of the fruit.
“Anyway,” Martin continued, “he defined human existence as not so much intelligence, but intelligence aware of its own existence and seeking to rearrange the furniture of the world to make it more comfortable for its pursuits. That rearrangement was, in a word, technology.”
“OK,” Pavel said. “Makes sense. Patkar in India published something along the same lines, oh, some fifteen years ago, I think.”
“Right. It’s an oft-researched theme. But Heidegger’s real originality was his insistence that we could understand the workings of human intelligence only from the inside out—starting with the thinking subjects that create technology—rather than looking at the technological artifacts.”
“So how does that apply to us here?” Pavel asked. “We’re busy looking for technological artifacts, products of intelligence, when we should be looking for what—the inside of the minds that made them? How do we do that? We haven’t found any organisms that seem to have minds—Jake’s come up as empty as we have.” His teeth made clicking contact with the hard pit of the fruit.
“I’m not sure,” Martin replied. “I guess we’d need to know their taste in furniture—how they’d want to rearrange their world. But let’s say they were minimalists, unlike us, and didn’t want to change their world too much, if at all. That could be why we don’t know what to look for. That could be why there doesn’t seem to be any evidence of their intelligence.”
Pavel sucked the fruit pit—it was mottled with wavy grooves and riverbeds, like a peach’s. He rolled it around on his tongue, wrapped his tongue around it, teasing and jabbing the underside of his tongue with the point of the pit till his eyes watered with pleasure. Then he took it out of his mouth with his fingers. He held it up to the window so that it blocked out the top of a nearby tree. “Also could be that there isn’t any evidence because there wasn’t any intelligence,” he said. “That’s the more likely explanation. You know, if we found a fruit without pits or seeds, that would almost certainly be good evidence of technological intervention, and recent at that—seedless varieties, after all, wouldn’t last on their own. But all of these delicious fruit have pits.” He flicked the pit in a long arc and just missed making a basket.
Martin had worked with Deborah on three other discovery expeditions, and had heard her talk many times about how they all seemed to progress in a similar pattern of stages. You arrive in a new place, everyone is bursting with energy and conviction that great discovery is at hand. Then, as test after test fails to deliver what you came for, your work changes from excitement to work—you grit your teeth and hunker down for the long run of tedious probing, testing, repetition. Then one day you realize that the time for departure is almost at hand, and this lights within you an absolute surety that the missing link you sought is just around the corner. You convince yourself of the portentous signs of data you earlier rejected. You immerse yourself in a frenzy of activity. If you could just stay a bit longer, success would undoubtedly be yours.
Martin had to make sure that he didn’t get seduced by this manic endgame to the point of losing his ability to get his team off the planet at the appropriate time. He had more than enough reason to want to stay here—making Deborah’s death something more than another unfortunate statistic, his own half-formed ideas about how the traces of intelligent life might yet be uncovered here… But they’d been six earthmonths on this planet now. And that, plus the voyage out and back, was approaching the maximum the food supplies carried by this size ship could reliably cover. Yes, food on the planet was edible, but edibility and long-term compatibility to human digestion and health were two quite different things.
Susannah had a fruit in her mouth and a thoughtful expression on her face as she entered Martin’s quarters. “This one has the velvety kiwi undertone,” she said. “Haven’t had one of those in a few weeks.”
“We’ll take some pits and cuttings back with us,” Martin said. “Your bailiwick.”
“Sure,” Susannah said, still apparently distracted with the taste of the fruit. “So that makes this, what, the thirteenth planet with lots of life but no sign of technological intelligence our species has come across?”
“Actually, fourteenth,” Martin said. “They finally got around to taking a closer look at the second planet around Delta Pavonis—only nineteen light-years away, don’t know why it took them so long—but it didn’t matter anyway. No great shakes. More birds than usual. Nothing humanly intelligent.”
“Bet they had nothing like this apple-peach fruit.” Susannah licked the last of the tangy pulp off the pit.
“No word on its fruit in the report I just saw.”
“Hard to believe that fruit this good just happened,” Susannah said, “that it wasn’t developed to delight a palate that could communicate its delight to others.”
“Seems to me there are lots of birds and those chipmunk-like rodents that are doing a fine job communicating that delight to their own kind around here,” Martin said.
“You know what I mean,” Susannah said.
“I do,” Martin said. “But deliciousness of fruit surely isn’t a sign of technological intervention—lots of creatures wolf down natural delicacies in the tropics on Earth—bonbons that fuel the workings of evolution.”
“What kind of sign of intelligence would you want to see in this fruit then?” Susannah asked. “Just for argument’s sake.”
Martin shrugged. “The DNA analysis showed nothing unusual. We scanned the trees in the area—for color, size, leaf pattern, the usual indices—up and down and ten ways to Sunday when we first arrived, and then two months later, and came up null. I’d want to see some order, some structured variation in their form—something that spoke of a deliberate intervention in their coming to be. But nothing I’m telling you is new. The bottom line is: great tasting fruit is nothing out of the ordinary, however much we may project it to be. The fruit’s just great natural furniture. Came with the property. That’s likely all.”