Susannah squeezed the sticky pit in her palm. Then touched her stomach and grimaced.
“Are you all right?” Martin asked. “How much of that fruit have you been eating?”
On the day before departure, Jake and Susannah went up in the shuttle pod for the customary final macroscan of the neighborhood.
“You look a little better,” Jake lied.
“I’m bucked up on stimulants,” Susannah said. “There’s nothing demonstrably wrong with me, and I didn’t want to miss this last chance to look around.”
Jake nodded. “You’re the doctor. Fortunately for you, there’s no way Martin can cite a medical problem as a reason for immediate departure without the medical officer’s consent. Nice little loophole. Otherwise he’d have had us off this planet last week. And I don’t know that I disagree with him any more.”
“Pavel looked me over and pronounced me fine, just tired and overworked,” Susannah said.
Jake made a derisive sound. “He’s a technician, not a diagnostician. Look, I just don’t want you to wind up like—”
“Deborah died instantly—jeez, you don’t have to be an MD to tell the difference between that and a little stomach ailment, do you?”
“OK.” Jake made a placating gesture. “We’re leaving tomorrow anyway, so there’s no point in arguing.”
Susannah was staring at the fruit trees near their landing site. “Look at that!” she suddenly said. “You see that? The slightly different shades make a pattern of circles and triangles!” She traced what she was seeing on the screen with her forefinger. “Looks like four different shades.”
“I don’t know,” Jake squinted. “Maybe. The lines aren’t clean.” He pointed to several places where the shades and the faint geometric patterns blurred into each other. “What would it mean anyway? Another lake that looks like a snowflake from the sky? Nature is quite the geometric artist on its own.”
“Not like this,” Susannah said. “It doesn’t look like anything I’ve seen before. I think this substantiates Martin’s hypothesis.”
Then she keeled over the console and threw up.
Martin was in the mood for neither an escalating last minute medical problem nor a new project. “I don’t see it.” He looked again at the recorded images, the patterns that Susannah had pointed out to Jake. “Honestly, I don’t. And I don’t think we should spend any more time on this. We need to concentrate on making sure Susannah is OK and then leaving.”
“Agreed,” Jake said, “but why not do the full digital workups anyway, and put this thing to rest? Only take about half an hour, right?” He felt a responsibility to take up Susannah’s position in her absence.
Pavel shrugged.
Jake pushed on. “This could be the rearranged furniture you’ve been musing about for the past month—fruit trees deliberately planted in geometric patterns. Low-tech, but tech, not nature.”
“We don’t have the time,” Martin said. “We’ve had six months here to do this—”
“The trees were barren when we arrived,” Jake said. “They’ve achieved full fruiting maybe just the last two weeks.”
Martin shook his head, tempted, undecided. “Susannah’s feeling a little better, she can travel now, “ he finally said. “I think it’s time to leave.”
“But we can’t be sure that Susannah’s not going to get worse,” Jake insisted. “You know that. And a fundamental rule here is that you don’t leave a planet when a member of the crew has an unexplained illness. You don’t want it spreading. The planet itself may have the only cure. Lots of reasons.”
“Who says it’s even an illness?” Martin said. “The tests turned up nothing. It’s probably just exhaustion—”
“And you’re so sure the tests could spot an alien bug?”
“All right. All right.” Martin held his hands up to indicate an end to discussion. “Pavel, do the image workups, as quickly as you can, please.”
“OK,” Pavel said. “Meanwhile, here are the data you asked for this morning.” He punched up the results of the analyses he had taken for the past week from the chemical conversion facilities that served as toilets. “These statistics speak for themselves—the four profiles are almost identical,” Pavel said and hurried off.
Martin regarded a part of the big screen and shook his head some more. “No real difference in the amount of the fruit each of us has eaten,” he said. “Damn, I still think the fruit has something to do with this. That was truthfully my first thought, after the obvious possibility that she was pregnant, which the readings show conclusively she isn’t.”
Jake tried to ignore the pregnancy jibe, which he knew was aimed at him. “Well, fruiting’s of course a kind of pregnancy too. The fruit attract digestive systems to deposit the seeds in a nice warm mound of fertilizer somewhere. But, then intelligence comes along, also prizes the taste of the fruit, breeds the trees, but throws away most of the seeds! Doesn’t matter to the trees, though—their new benefactors will keep planting trees to keep the good taste coming. Untended nature, deliberate intelligence—the trees and their fruit win either way.”
“Yeah,” Martin replied. “But where’s the evolutionary benefit to the trees in making one of us sick?”
Pavel returned twenty minutes later with image enhancements and a fistful of data. Susannah was with him. Martin started to object, but thought the better of it. If he could convince himself and Jake that all that had gotten to Susannah’s stomach was nerves or fatigue, their departure would be that less nerve-wracking.
“OK, we do have something here, four distinct shades all right,” Pavel said. He traced the patterns Susannah had seen, much clearer now under enhancement. “But they’re really just on the edge of what we could call a structure. See? It breaks down here, here, here, here, and here.” He fingered five swirling places where the colors from one section bled into the next to the dissolution of the pattern at those spots. There were more. “I mean, yes, if you have three straight lines almost touching each other at angles, then we can say we have a triangle. But if one of the lines has a gaping hole in it, and another is all wiggly and messy to the point where it’s not even really a line, then we get to the point where calling it a triangle may be going too far. I think we’re just at that cusp here—there’s a very high noise-to-signal ratio in this pattern.”
“Hell of a garbled way to send a message to visitors from outer space,” Martin muttered.
“It’s not a message, it’s not a math screen, it’s not an abandoned factory,” Susannah said. “I think it’s an orchard. A living community. Members die, new members come up over time. Of course the original blueprints of its planners get blurred.”
“Orchard?” Pavel’s ears perked up. “But I assure you I thoroughly checked all the DNA of these fruit. There’s nothing that looks engineered there.”
Jake shook his head. “DNA’s not the only indication of intelligent management of life. That’s the way it’s been done for the past few centuries on Earth, of course. But for thousands of years before that, people deliberately bred crops—and animals—the old-fashioned way, to bring out whatever favorable characteristics. In that kind of macro-program, you won’t find sharp discontinuities in the DNA.”