The Orchard

by Paul Levinson

Illustration by Darryl Elliott

The wind blew through the fruiting trees on the hill. Branches sagged with their burden, scenting the air with invitation, attracting moths that flew and climbed and crawled and penetrated. Soft things fell to the ground, opening and oozing, calling forth more of the world around them.

It had been a long time since intelligence had set this in motion. Yet once there had been just a scraggly sapling or two on this bill, thin hints of things to come; later replaced by careful, deliberate rows of the bearers of luscious gifts. And after the initiation, intelligence had continued to tend this. Arranging with some logic the moldering leaves that fertilized the ground. Discouraging parasites, large and small, that would attack the trees, or plunder the fruit, dismember their beauty, before their time. The trees were bred to take countermeasures, take care of themselves…

And when the intelligence left, the trees carried on. More went fallow than under watchful eyes, a branch on this tree went a bit wild and choked out another. Thirty percent eventually died, twenty percent new growth sprung up in unordered places, but the trees carried on. As they had been intended to do. They had not the perception to miss their guardians, nor the capacity to do anything about it even if they had. But they continued. Fruiting for a quarter of their planet’s revolution around its star, leafy green the next half, barren in the wintry season. Fruiting, leafy, barren…

And one day, another flying thing came out of the sky…

The story of this expedition had been told long before the technology existed to make it possible. Humans achieved faster-than-light travel—artificial wormholes punctured Einstein’s conservatism about speed-of-light well before the end of the 21st century—and by the 22nd this had been developed into a more advanced “snake hole” system that could intelligently route a star craft just about anywhere within a 200-light-year radius from Earth. This newly accessible sea of stars and planets became to the human species what Earth itself, a sea of continents, had been since Magellan’s voyage in the 16th century. And the search for intelligent life was on.

Life it turned up aplenty. A bumper crop. Teeming, colorful, DNA-based, locomotive, photosynthetic, and more—the whole enchilada—but not a speck of it like anything humans would call humanly intelligent. The cognitive abilities of even chimps and dplphins were utterly lacking in the exo-phyla catalogued by the human teams dispatched to Earth-type planets around foreign suns.

And so the story of this expedition was old—another ship in search of the bright elusive butterfly of intelligence in the cosmos. Another team eager to award the appellation of human-level intelligence to some deserving species.

It was lonely at the top.

Deborah Sung-Lee was chief of the five-person first-skim team. Her specialty was cognitive exo-anthropology—anthropology having evolved to mean not just human but intelligent by this century, an odd linguistic turn considering that its new extended subject had yet to be discovered in reality. In truth it was more a hope than a description of a discipline.

The purpose of this first in-person encounter with the fifth planet of Beta Hydri was textbook tech-check: a thorough scan and sniff and sift of the planet’s land, air, and water for any sign of technology, any imprint of the peculiar kind of order that ran both counter and parallel to that of living structure. This meant a hunt for any perturbation of nature, even a discoloration of the soil that humans could take to be evidence of intelligent intervention in the course of things.

The first possible candidate she found was death.

Hers.

Martin Kendrick—exo-fossilist, Deborah’s lover, and now, by virtue of his seniority, first in command—stroked her face repeatedly, then moved his forefinger from his lips to hers, and whispered good-bye.

He turned to his colleagues. “The book says we get to vote, in these circumstances, whether to leave or continue working here,” he said, voice scratchy with emotion. “Your thoughts?”

“The problem, of course, is we don’t know why she died,” Pavel Chakravarty, the team’s DNA statistician, said. “So there’s some probability that we could all die trying to discover why.”

“Our directive is to look for intelligent life,” Jake Venza, macro-ecologist, countered. “Nothing takes precedence over that. Human death on an alien planet, while not unknown, is by definition unusual—it could be the result of alien intelligence. We didn’t ask anyone’s permission to land here. Maybe the locals got angry.”

“If there are locals here with any intelligence, so far they’ve been invisible,” Martin said quietly.

Pavel made a show of consulting his pad, even though he had memorized the relevant numbers. “Deborah’s is the 17th death out of 961 humans exploring worlds outside of our Solar System in the past 76 years. Seven were from natural causes, three from technological malfunction or accident, seven from local conditions—disease, predator, food initially judged to be edible turned out otherwise. Actually, that last sub-category can also be considered technological malfunction, at least in two cases. But, in any event, none of the seventeen were the result of any known alien intelligence at work. We have no reason to think that’s what’s going on here.”

“Not the point,” Jake said. “Of course we have no positive reason to conclude that Deborah was deliberately—or even accidentally—killed by some intelligence. But surely her death is more significant than nothing having happened here at all. Surely we’d be idiots not to take that into account.”

“We’re taking it into account right now,” Martin replied.

“Pavel, what do your figures show about our work intersections on the planet?” Susannah Ring asked. She was the not-unusual combination of medical officer and exo-botanist for the group.

Pavel looked at his pad in earnest this time, punching in some numbers. “OK, in the nearly fourteen earth-weeks we’ve been here on Beta Hydri 5, we’ve done sixty-seven different tasks outside, or the same tasks in different places. Minimum overlap for Deborah was two—she never performed a task alone, none of us do—and her average is 2.7. Her overlap on consumption of native food—leafy vegetables, tubers, stems, all tested as thoroughly compatible with human digestion, of course—is also right near the group mean, by the way. Deborah ingested nothing that at least two others of us haven’t also.”

“Not much help there,” Jake muttered.

“Well, no, that does suggest some sort of internal natural cause,” Pavel said. “And that assists us in knowing that this planet was likely not responsible for her death.”

“So why are you so eager to leave?” Jake shot back.

“I’m not eager, I—”

“That’s enough,” Martin interrupted. He looked at Susannah. “Your figures are likely the only ones that could really tell us something here,” he said.

Susannah sighed. “I can’t conjure up answers where there are none. Her heart stopped, sometime in the middle of the night, apparently when she and we were all sound asleep. She hadn’t performed any kind of dangerous, even stressful work before. She was apparently in perfect health, so she wasn’t hooked up to any night monitors—which would have woken me immediately when her heart stopped.”

“Well, we’re not making that mistake again,” Martin said.

Susannah nodded. “Yes, now that we’re each hooked up every night, we won’t be taken by surprise like that—and I can revive someone whose heart stops. So can Pavel if mine’s the body in distress. But as to what caused it in Deborah? Whatever it was, it left no trace. So either it was some kind of short-lived, deadly poison, like curare, or her heart just stopped of its own accord. That’s been known to happen. An essentially meaningless death.”

Martin winced.

Susannah touched his shoulder. “I’m sorry—”

“It’s OK,” he said. “I think it’s time to vote. Any last comments?”

“I say we stay,” Jake said.

“Pavel?” Martin asked.

“I’ve made my position clear,” Pavel said. “Deborah’s death means the risks outweigh the possibilities here. We ought to leave.”

“Susannah?”

“I’m with Jake,” she said. “We don’t know enough about Deborah’s death to leave yet. We owe it to her to try to find out more—or, at least, to make her sacrifice worth something by maybe finding something of interest here—finding some mark of intelligence. That’s what we came for.”

Martin looked back at Deborah. His was still the decisive vote, he knew, because the rules said that in case of a tie in such circumstances, the side with the team-leader’s vote wins. Forgive me, he said to himself, and to Deborah. I haven’t been leader long enough to know what’s good for the group as a whole—only what feels right to me.

“We stay,” he said. “I don’t want Deborah’s death to be meaningless.”

“You’re looking at the top of the line on this planet.” Jake pointed to images of what looked like small, wine-colored cheetahs darting in and out of the screen, the cream of three more months of reconnaissance and recording on four continents and the water around them, some 150 separate sojourns in all. “That’s the most intelligence we’ve seen.” Jake’s specialty was correlation of morphology, motion, other external characteristics to analogs on Earth. He was also known for an uncanny capacity to pinpoint DNA patterns from surface characteristics.

“Cats back home have a lot of intelligence,” Susannah said. “I’ve seen documented accounts of leopards stranded on islands learning how to fish. But no one’s ever seen any evidence of tools or language.”

“None here either,” Jake agreed. “Not so much as a pile of rocks in an x or a circle.”

Susannah bit into one of the fruits they’d recently found nearby. Blend of apple and plum in a peachy flesh, with maybe an edge of piquant cherry, she thought. Tested out as thoroughly edible, confirmed now by a week of eating and no ill effects. Her mouth watered at the sour sweetness.

“So we’ll do a few more macroscans,” Jake went on, “but we might as well go full steam on the DNA mapping now. No techno-intelligence in the life forms, no signs of tangible technology left behind, all we’ve got left to look for is some sign of manipulation in the genes. Though I’d be stunned if Pavel found any evidence of engineering there. Everything fits together too naturally on the surface level.”

Susannah closed her eyes, massaging a thread of fruit in her molars. “It’s a lovely world—at least as nice as the one around faraway Eta Pegasi. Fine array of life, full complement of plants, invertebrates, vertebrates. Air’s sweet, no apparent bacteria, viruses, or retros that our immunes can’t handle. Lots of water, local food is humanly edible; but no damn species around resembling humans, not even a monkey, no one to offer a commentary on the food. Same story as everywhere else.”

“Well, not exactly the same, not for Deborah,” Jake said.

“Yeah, I didn’t mean—” Susannah said, opening her eyes.

“I know,” Jake said. “But maybe this does mean that Deborah died of natural causes after all, and we should count our blessings that there’s no intelligent life out here to get us.”

“Well, I’ll take the risk of competition that companionship brings—I’ll take that over being the only intelligent life in the universe—any time.” Susannah shivered, even though the temperature in their dome was as comfortable as a summer day in her native New York State, just a degree or two warmer than outside. “We’ve found more than enough worlds for human habitation,” she added.

“ ‘And the human being a Miss Lonelyhearts in a sea of starry possibilities,’ ” Jake quoted from a song that had been a classic for at least two decades back on Earth.

Susannah nodded. “I think it was different back in the old ages of exploration on Earth. I think as much as the conquistadors, the imperialists, had contempt for the natives they found, the very existence of these native humans confirmed for the outsiders that humans had some kind of legitimacy to be there. We’ve been searching for nearly a century for that sort of confirmation.”

“Martin says we may be coming up empty because our search criteria are wrong.”

“What else could they be?” Susannah asked.

“I wish I knew,” Jake said. “I wish Martin knew. He’ll likely come up with an answer on our way back home—after he’s pressured us to leave.”

“Jeez, is he starting in with that again?”

Jack nodded.

“Martin’s a fossilist,” Susannah said. She bit into another fruit. “He’s trained to see things after the fact.”

“Martin’s a fossil,” Jake said, and they both laughed.

“Here, try this.” Susannah pressed her oozing, half-eaten fruit onto Jake’s lips. “This apple-plum, or whatever it is, is delicious.”

“I still think looking for gene-splicing when we’ve got no evidence of laser, or any other significant cutting technology, is a waste of time.” Martin was feeding huge gobs of data to Pavel on their two-person machine—two inputs, one screen, set up on a table by the window on a beautiful morning. It came programmed with complete genomes of 50,000 representative Earth species. The real knowledge it offered, though, was not in the genomes themselves, but in the patterns among them—the relationship of any one genome to those of the species presumed closest to it in evolution. These similarities and differences amounted to a road-map of natural selection on Earth. An auxiliary module of 15,000 additional genomes from a dozen exo-sources—the sum of those thus far extensively sampled by humans—yielded patterns highly analogous to the ones of Earth.

“Well, I’m inclined to agree with you,” Pavel replied. “But you’re the one whose vote decided that we stay here, so as long as we’re here, where’s the harm in proceeding?” The data Martin was putting into the system had been genomically analyzed—the distillate of some 700 local species, bacteria to fungi to grass and trees and froglike creatures and the wine-red cheetahs, harvested and continuously assessed over five months. The relationships among its genomes had been computed to a faretheewell, and were now undergoing summating comparison to the baseline biomes of Earth and the exodata from other places. Striking gold would be finding a discontinuity in the biomes of this Beta Hydri planet and the patterns of Earth—such as the presence of some bacillus or plant DNA in the genome of a vertebrate, or better yet, vertebrate DNA in a bacterium, where it had no apparent naturally-selected business being. This, at the very least, would indicate a weird alien evolutionary trajectory well worth pursuing in its own right. Or it could be evidence of intelligent technological intervention on the genetic level.

“All right, I think that does it for the data input,” Martin said. “Look, it’s not that I enjoy being our resident pessimist. And you’re right that it’s on my shoulders that we’re here, but we won’t be here forever.”

“Good,” Pavel said. “Deborah’s death unnerved me—I guess I hadn’t had any experience like that before. Everyone returned just fine in the two other expeditions I was part of. But now… I still don’t feel right being here. I’m going to get into a safer line of work when we get back home. As much as I love knowledge, I love life—mine—a little more.”

“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.”

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.”

“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.”

“She’s going the same way as Deborah, I can feel it,” Martin said. He savagely kicked a fruit that had fallen on the floor—it smashed against a far wall, juices dripping. “Too much of a price to pay!”

“No, it can’t be the same,” Pavel said. “Deborah died right away. I mean, Susannah was very clear about that—”

Jake entered the sickbay, grim. “I know what’s causing this.”

Martin and Pavel looked at him, both exhaling with relief. “So talk to us,” Martin urged.

Jake took a deep breath. “I, ahm, I was able to break some of her personal security codes—I guess I knew where to look—and was able to get to some of her personal files.”

“And?” Martin prompted again.

“And it’s the same thing that killed Deborah, goddamnit,” Jake said.

“What?” “How could that be?” “Impossible!” Martin and Pavel were shouting at the same time.

Jake continued, talking more to himself than to them. “So I read most of her files. I couldn’t believe it. Susannah’s not only a doctor but a botanist. Something in the way Deborah died made her think plant poison—some trees on Earth exude a resin that kills anything that crawls on them—”

“She said curare,” Pavel recalled. “That comes from some trees in the Amazon—was used by the people there in poison arrows, right?”

“Yeah,” Jake said. “And the poison here is in the bark of the fruit trees. That was Susannah’s theory. She tested it on herself—in very tiny doses at first. She identified the poisonous compound and had a way of diluting it. She wanted to see if there was a way to build up resistance, maybe come up with an antidote, in case any one else got exposed like Deborah. But then, she figured that if the trees were the result of intelligent planting, then the poisonous bark wasn’t accidental—and there might be an antidote already out there. And she realized that if she could discover that antidote, it would provide really tangible evidence of intelligence behind the trees. She reasoned out what it could be, and her notes say she found it—”

“So what the hell is it—let’s give it to her!” Martin bellowed.

Jake sat down, head in his hands. “I don’t know what it is—I don’t know. I couldn’t read that part of her files—she hadn’t saved them for even her own permanent record as yet. The last part of this all happened very recently, very quickly. She was sure she had the antidote. She was afraid that our taste test would prove inconclusive. So she took a higher dose of the poison than usual, enough to make her ill, with the intention of offsetting it with the antidote. That would be the palpable evidence. That would give the people back home the proof positive to put this place on the map of intelligence. But something went wrong. I don’t know…”

“We have to face the fact that maybe she was wrong about the antidote,” Pavel said softly.

“It could just as likely be that she didn’t give herself enough of it,” Jake replied.

“We can figure this out,” Martin said. “The first order of business is identifying the antidote. Let’s assume Susannah got that right. There’s got to be a way we can retrace her thinking. We start with what we know about the trees—socially as well as biologically. They’re part of an orchard—”

“Right,” Jake said. “And the planters apparently installed some sort of defense system—a poison in the trees—to ward off predators. Like poison ivy back home.”

“Yeah,” Pavel said, “but we’ve all gorged on the fruit of these trees, and none of us except Susannah is sick. Maybe she has some allergy to it.”

“Jake says that Susannah already established that it’s the bark, not the fruit, that’s causing the problem,” Martin said. “And I remember Deborah did do some work out there in those trees, after we first arrived, before they started fruiting. She was taking DNA samples—slicing off a few pieces of bark.”

“So did I,” Pavel objected. “We both wore gloves. And I’m not sick.”

“So maybe Deborah wasn’t as careful as you. We all make mistakes, get sloppy sometimes. Or maybe she sliced into a part of the bark that contained a central tap of the poison,” Martin said. His voice choked.

“Look, the planters—whoever created the orchard—wanted the fruit to be enjoyed and eaten,” Jake said. “So of course it wouldn’t be deadly. But taking off a piece of bark is an act of aggression against the tree—the planters would want any animal that did that to suffer, to get negative reinforcement.”

“I’m with you,” Martin said. “But how could the planters differentiate, say, between an animal, or even an intelligent vandal, and someone who might have been planting another tree, and accidentally broke off some bark? Surely the planters wouldn’t want to poison one of their own?”

“No, they wouldn’t…” Jake closed his eyes in thought. “Pavel, do you have any image readings on the age of the trees?”

“Age?” Pavel asked.

“Yeah,” Jake said. “Can you tell if there are any saplings in our grove?”

“Well, sure, of course,” Pavel said, and pulled a sequence of displays on to the screen. “These are very young. And here.”

“What are you getting at?” Martin said.

“I’m not sure,” Jake said. “But saplings, very young trees, obviously have slightly different chemistries in their bark than older specimens. I’m thinking that one way the planters might have distinguished between other planters and vandals is that the planters would have obviously come into contact with younger trees.”

“And?”

“And maybe exposure to the bark of the younger trees confers an immunity, is an antidote, to the poison of the older bark,” Jake said.

“So what are you proposing?” Martin asked. “Go out and get some bark from the saplings, and rub that all over Susannah’s skin? We already know the adult bark’s some kind of poison. What you’re suggesting could kill her outright! Like giving a diabetic in insulin shock more insulin!”

“I know,” Jake said. “I know.”

“She’ll be dead in an hour anyway, if we do nothing,” Pavel said.

Martin’s face was almost as pasty as Susannah’s. “Your call,” he said at last to Jake. “She’s—you and she—are more than professional. It’s right that you should make the decision. But I guess I’m with Pavel in that we don’t seem to have many—any—other options.”

Jake returned from the orchard with bark from a dozen of the youngest saplings he could find.

“Should I inject her?” Pavel asked, after the extract had been analyzed. It indeed had a composition very different in several respects from the extract of adult trees.

Jake nodded yes, and Pavel injected her.

Martin squeezed Jake’s shoulder. “Courage,” he said softly. “Courage.”

Susannah moaned. Her body twitched.

The seconds clicked off on a red display. Jake’s face bore the brunt of each click.

“Any change?” Martin finally demanded.

Pavel studied the readings, said nothing.

“Pavel?” Martin asked again.

Susannah’s body shuddered.

“She’s fading,” Pavel said. “We’re losing her.”

“Maybe we didn’t give her enough antidote,” Martin said.

Pavel looked at a second injector, loaded with sapling extract. “We have one more ready to go,” he said. “But wouldn’t we be seeing at least some slight improvement already if the sapling is the antidote?”

“Not necessarily,” Martin said. “We don’t know how this operates. Maybe below a certain level the antidote has no effect.”

“Or maybe I was wrong and the antidote’s just more goddamn poison and we’re killing her!” Jake cried out, and lunged for the injector.

He had it in his hand. He raised his arm, making a show of his intention of smashing the injector on the floor. “Goddam planet—”

But Martin tackled him to the floor first, squeezing Jake’s wrist in a hard grip that immobilized his hand and the injector.

Jake struggled, but Martin was the bigger, stronger man. He turned Jake’s face to him with his free hand. “Listen to me, listen to me,” he said. “She would have died anyway without the sapling extract. You and Pavel were right about that. And she’s going to die now if we do nothing more. We’ve got nothing to lose. We’ve got to try the second injection.”

Jake pulled his face away.

“It’s all we’ve got left,” Martin continued. “OK?”

Jake’s breath was shaky. “OK.”

Pavel gave Susannah the second injection.

Her voice made a low, guttural sound. Her eyes rolled back in her head.

But five minutes later, she opened them and smiled weakly.

“What happened?” she asked. “We have some evidence that the trees were deliberately planted, right?”

Jake gently stroked her hair, kissed her on the forehead. “Excellent evidence. Corroboration well beyond the taste test. The best evidence in the Universe. Especially now.”

Content

The Orchard
by Paul Levinson