“Artificial breeding, Darwin called it,” Susannah said. “And Luther Burbank changed the face of world agriculture with it in the early 20th century. The last hurrah of pre-gene-spliced agriculture.”
“Look, I want this as much as anyone,” Martin said, “but we’re out of time here. And now that Susannah’s feeling better—”
“Out of time for detailed testing, but not out of time for us to look for something more for you to mention in your report,” Jake said. “If you give the wrong spin to what Susannah ’thinks we’ve discovered here, to what you yourself have been edging towards with your Heidegger talk, it could be a century or more before any other team comes back here—too many new worlds elsewhere. And by then, who knows what shape the, ah, orchard will be in.”
Martin spoke through clenched teeth. “I’ve got to be honest in my report. Politics change with the seasons, you know that. We’re high-funded now, all that could change with the next election. If I encourage another expedition on the basis of what we want to see here, rather than what actually is, and they come back disappointed in a time of fiscal tightening, that could hurt the search for exo-intelligence very badly.”
“That’s why I want us to try to come up with more,” Jake said.
“With what?” Martin asked.
“How many other patches of these fruit trees have we seen on this planet?” Pavel asked.
“Dozens,” Jake said. “They’re all over the coast.”
“But none have any geometric designs,” Martin said.
“That’s because we scanned them prior to full fruiting,” Susannah said.
Martin scowled. “OK, look: We have a half-baked four-color scheme on a bunch of trees that bear tasty fruit that just happen to be near us. We need to correlate that color scheme to some kind of tangible difference in function. That’s the way intelligence would work, if it planned this. Otherwise, the colors are just so much natural smoke and mirrors. Fractals show that sometimes nature imitates technology.”
“I agree about needing to find a function,” Susannah said.
“Good,” Martin said. “So let’s think about it. I’m open to any ideas, really I am. But we leave tomorrow at 0900 hours.”
The camp was struck, the ship was packed, departure was imminent.
Pavel was making love to a last fruit. “Truly wonderful,” he said. “This one has a light strawberry finish. Martin, you could say in your report, with no lie, that this planet is worth another visit just to taste the fruit.”
Susannah snapped her fingers. “Taste. Taste! That could be it!”
“We’ve already been over that line of argument,” Martin said. “Don’t tell me again that delicious fruit equates with deliberate planting.”
“No, no, I mean variety of taste,” Susannah said. “That could be the function that correlates to the colors. I remember an old apple orchard near where I grew up in New York—had all sorts of yellow and green and usual red apple trees laid but in sectors to make harvesting of each variety easier. And of course the planters went to that trouble because people prized the tastes of the different apples.”
“So how many tastes have we noticed with this delectable fruit?” Jake asked.
Pavel closed his eyes in the enjoyment of remembrance. “Well, they’re all evocative of apple-plum, as you know. But let’s see. We have one with a tart cherry touch—”
“My favorite,” Martin said.
“Mine too,” Pavel said. “And one with mango—”
“Don’t forget the kiwi,” Jake said.
“Right,” Pavel said. “And this strawberry.” He took the pit out of his mouth and used its tip to clean some tartar off his teeth.
“That makes four,” Susannah said. “Four distinct flavors, four distinct shades in the planting.”
“And the planting’s in a geometric pattern,” Jake said.
“The pattern’s barely discernible, we don’t know it’s a planting,” Pavel said.
“We don’t even know if the colors correlate with the different tastes,” Martin said. “Could be two unrelated features.”
“Let’s find out,” Jake said.
“How?” Martin said. “By going out and tasting every fruit?”
Susannah thought she saw Pavel’s eyes light up for an instant.
“Not necessary,” Jake said. “I can run a macro on the enhanced color images of the orchard. I can pinpoint a few handfuls of sampling areas. Won’t be 100 percent conclusive, of course—no sample ever is—but it should give us a decent statistical assessment of the proposition that color correlates with taste in that fruit. Something you can put in your report. Fair enough?”
“We don’t have the time,” Martin said. “No one seems to understand that we’ve got to get off this planet—today—if we want reliable amounts of food for our voyage home.”
“Fifteen minutes to run the macro. What, an hour to do the tasting? We have time for that,” Jake said.
Martin shook his head, this time in resignation. “Barely. All right. Do it.”
“Tasting under pressure of blind survey isn’t the same as natural tasting,” Susannah said. “People get nervous, they’re not sure what they’re tasting.” She rubbed her stomach.
Jake noticed, said nothing.
“I never liked the arbitrary nature of statistics,” Susannah continued. “One probability level for significance if you’re testing a brand new drug; another if you’re confirming the value of an old one. What level of correlation is indicative of significance here? The figure you proposed certainly seems reasonable—but what’s reasonable when the stakes are possibly the first signs of human-like intelligence anywhere in the universe other than Earth?”
Jake put his hand over hers. “We should have the results in a few minutes. Pavel bit into a fruit that was rotten on one side, and that threw his taste off. Had to wash out his mouth, choose another fruit—so we lost about five minutes.”
“Jeez,” Susannah said. “The sample’s so small that the entire finding of significance or not could come down to that one damn peach—and the accuracy of Pavel’s taste buds.”
“So let’s hope he’s not taste-blind,” Jake said.
“Yeah,” Susannah said, and brushed a clump of hair, matted with sweat, from her forehead. “I’ll feel better when we have the results—as long as they turn out positive.”
Martin and Pavel walked in four minutes later, bearing fruit in their hands and big smiles on their faces.
“Care for one of these?” Pavel offered with a flourish.
“Why, of course,” Jake replied with a courtly gesture. “Tart cherry. My favorite.”
“The taste of intelligence!” Martin whooped.
Everyone joined in and applauded.
“Thus might the future course of humanity in the universe be changed,” Pavel intoned. “It was close. But the result of our doubleblind, stratified random sample is clearly over the significance line: taste, the function, correlates with color, which in turn is laid out in rough but discernible geometric patterns. This of course all could still be accidental or natural—we have no hard proof that it isn’t, just a statistical suggestion—but it’s a start.”
“Difficult universe,” Susannah said.
“Care to pass some more of that over, for confirmation?” Jake asked Pavel, and laughed. “The one you just gave me was pretty small.”
Everyone hugged.
And Susannah folded to the ground, brown eyes glassy. “Misjudged she mumbled. And then she went completely unconscious.
“Not good,” Pavel said, looking at Susannah’s dilated pupil large upon the screen, and the streams of numerical data that flowed like eyewash around it. “She’s getting worse.”