“There was an alien race living here,” he whispered. “And they’ve interbred.”
Magda Hollis nodded. “Fascinating! An entirely new species—semi-aquatic, I’d say.”
“Definite genetic mingling,” Ehrenfeld muttered. “And I’d say it’s been going on ever since the settlers first landed.”
“We’ll have to report this to Earth,” Rayner said. “We can’t cope with this ourselves. There’ll be a full investigation.”
“We’ll investigate first,” Ehrenfeld said. “Fully, before we notify Earth.”
Rayner turned on him. “Our job is to decide whether or not a planet is ready to enter the Council of Worlds, Ehrenfeld. You only need to glance around you to see that no such recommendation can be made here. We ought to pack up and get out, and have a team of specialists sent in to study whatever damnable thing has happened here.”
“I’ll make the decisions on this team,” Ehrenfeld snapped.
A colonist detached himself from the group and walked toward the little knot of whispering Earthmen. Rayner stared at him. He was half-human, half something else, with dark reptilian skin and the face of a human being.
When he spoke, it was in a velvet-lined voice that was more a gentle whisper than anything else. His language was barely recognizable as Terran, but the two centuries had distorted and altered the inflection until it seemed some new language altogether.
“Who are you creatures? Where are you from, and what do you want here?”
“We are from Earth,” Ehrenfeld said, speaking with exaggerated care. “Two hundred years have gone by since the settling of this world, and now we of Earth have returned to view your progress.”
“Earth?” the Maldonadi repeated incredulously. “You are from Earth?”
“Yes.”
The gentle strange eyes seemed to squint. The being turned away from them, faced the silent crowd, and spoke rapidly in what seemed to Rayner like an alien language until he realized it was only a sort of slurred distorted Terran. He caught the unmistakable final words: “They have come to us from Earth!”
Expressions of what seemed like joy spread over the crowd. Tension melted; they grinned toothily and began to cheer. Rayner distinctly heard what they were saying. The words puzzled him.
“They are from Earth! Praised be the Tree!”
The five Earthmen were given quarters in a large building near the center of town, which in times gone by had evidently been the community center of the settlement but which now served as a sort of hotel. Rayner was shown to a room on the ground floor. The building, like all the others in the village, was in a terrible state of repair, but none of the natives seemed to care or to apologize in any way for the shabby condition of the building. Evidently shabbiness was the norm among these strangely altered people.
Once he was settled, Rayner went out into the hall and found his comrades. Oddly, they seemed to feel none of the revulsion Rayner did. They were discussing the situation in abstract, objective tones.
“The survey team must have missed the native species completely,” Killian was saying. “They reported no intelligent animal life at all, and obviously there’s an unknown species of humanoid alien here.”
“And there’s been crossbreeding between human and alien ever since the landing,” Bryson said. “The race we’ve encountered is hybrid, of course. They’ve retained their language and some of the Terran customs, but the alien strain in them is becoming dominant.”
“Did you hear what they were yelling?” Rayner asked. “‘Praised be the Tree.’ They’ve developed their own religion, too.”
“Or borrowed one from the natives,” Magda said. “We can spend months here investigating these people, you know. We’ll be famous in scientific annals forever.”
Rayner shrugged. He knew it would be futile to oppose the four of them. They were determined to remain and study the settlers, and though it was a violation of regulations there was little Rayner could do if they insisted on remaining. His mind obstinately echoed with the pertinent section from Regulations:
101a sub-two: In the event that a world’s inhabitants have been found to deviate substantially from the parent stock, whether through natural mutation or any other genetic alteration, this fact is to be reported immediately to the offices of the Colonial Council. The Examination Squad will regard its work as terminated when such a world is discovered.
Obviously, thought Rayner. The job of an Examination Squad was purely and simply to live among a colonial culture for a period of a week to a month and determine whether the culture was sufficiently advanced to allow it to enter the main stream of galactic life. That meant opening the world to trade and tourism, granting them representation on the Council of Worlds.
Clearly this planet could not qualify for that. In many of the worlds Rayner had visited, there had been serious cultural deviation—as in the planet where cannibalism had become socially approved, or in the world where ceremonial blood-drinking was commonplace. These were relatively minor deviations compared with what had happened on Maldonad. The bloodline of Terra had been mingled with alien blood, here, as nowhere else in the universe.
Rayner shrugged. If his four companions wanted to stay here and act as an investigation committee instead of as an Examination Squad, there was nothing he could do but give in gracefully. He was outnumbered.
The next day they began their full-scale investigation into what had happened on Maldonad. The inhabitants—Rayner could not bring himself to call them “colonists” in their present state—were willing, in fact eager, to help the Earthmen in their inquiry.
The head of the village spent most of the morning with them, explaining the history of the settlement to them. His name was Smissun, he said, and that checked with something in the back of Rayner’s mind.
“Have you been head of the village all your life, Smissun?” Rayner asked.
“And my father before me, and my father’s father before him, and back into the mist of days,” replied the hybrid being, speaking in the soft slurred Terran the colonists used.
Rayner nodded. “That makes sense,” he said to Ehrenfeld. “The original Colony Director on the 2627 ship was named Jair Smithson. Smithson to Smissun; it makes sense. Control has stayed in the same family all along.”
“Tell us what you know of the early days of the colony,” Magda Hollis prompted. Her stylus raced over the pages of her notebook as Smissun spoke.
“We are told we came from Earth originally,” the chieftain said. “That was long ago, when we were different, when we looked like you. Before we found the Tree. Our fathers found the Tree, and chose their wives by it.”
Rayner frowned. The original colonists had all been married on Earth, before they made the trip. He wondered what Smissun meant, but he said nothing.
“In the beginning there were the Earthpeople and the Forest People,” Smissun said. “But the two peoples met at the Tree, and found each other good, and Earthpeople took women from Forest People and the Forest People married of the Earthpeople. And so we have lived.”
And so we have lived, Rayner thought. Hybrids.
Many things seemed puzzling. By all accounts the so-called Forest People were alien, even repugnant to Earthpeople. And yet there had been mating between the groups, and children had been born. Rayner wondered how that could have happened.
“This Tree,” Rayner said. “What is it?”
Smissun looked at him in surprise. “The Tree,” he said, “is the Tree. What else could it be?”
Patiently Rayner asked, “Where is it?”
Smissun pointed behind his shoulder. “In the forest. We go there once a week to worship.”
“And what kind of Tree is it?”
Smissun shrugged gently. “It is—the Tree,” he said simply.
Rayner gave up. Ehrenfeld said, “There are no Earth People left among you now? None of your people looks like us?”
“Occasionally one is born with the white skin and the webless t
oes,” Smissun said. “These do not live long. There has not been one of them grown to manhood within my lifetime, I believe.”
Killian scowled. “The alien genes are dominant, then. And recessive alien genes must be lethal.”
“What do the Forest People look like?” Bryson asked.
“Like us,” Smissun replied. “But they are better at swimming than we are, and their faces are different.”
“And when could you take us to meet the Forest People?” Rayner wanted to know.
“Soon.”
“This afternoon, perhaps?”
“Oh, no,” the hybrid said. “Not for four days. That is the time of the next Ceremony of the Tree, and we meet them there.”
“You couldn’t take us to the Tree today, then?”
“Oh, no. Not at all.”
The picture was taking shape, and it was a weird one indeed. The five Earthmen discussed it later in the day, as they transcribed their notes for permanent filing and began to form conjectures about what had taken place on the planet of Maldonad.
“The way I figure it,” Killian said, “the Earth settlers got here and built the colony as per regulations. Then somebody found this Tree in the forest. It turned into a sort of trysting place where Earthmen found alien lovers and vice versa. They must have thought it was a nice gag, going out into the forest and carrying on with alien beings.
“But then the babies started to be born both in the colony and in the forest, and the settlers discovered the two races could breed true. It’s a one-in-a-trillion fluke shot that two races developed on different planets could have a homogeneous chromosome pattern, but this must be the millionth shot.
“Within twenty or thirty years nearly all the new children had some degree of alien blood in them. Gradually the hybrid race evolved, and the pure Earth-types disappeared. That’s the situation now. The colonists are almost alien in form, though they’ve kept the language and some of the customs of Earth. And the Forest People still mate with the hybrid offspring of the old colonists.”
“One thing I don’t understand,” Rayner said. “How could it have started in the first place? I thought all the settlers were coupled off at the start. Why should they find these fishlike humanoids more attractive than their own mates?”
“It’s hard to explain to someone like you,” Magda said bitingly. “Maybe they simply found the aliens more attractive than each other. You wouldn’t understand such things.”
“That’ll be enough,” Ehrenfeld said warningly. “I’ve told you to stop ribbing Rayner, Magda.”
“Sorry,” Magda muttered. But there was nothing apologetic in her tone.
Bryson said, “There won’t be much we can do until they take us to the Tree, I guess. We can make photographic records of village life in the meanwhile, anyway.”
Ehrenfeld nodded. “We want to do a thorough job on this planet. I want to bring back a complete story.”
Rayner stared out the window at the bright sky, thick with fleecy clouds. His original feeling of uneasiness still persisted. The thought of a race of hybrids, half Earthmen and half alien creatures, was stomach-turning. He wondered how any such thing could ever have taken place.
There was no doubt that it had taken place. The original Terran genetic stock had been virtually obliterated in two hundred years. In a century more, no doubt, the people of the settlement would be identical in all respects to the mysterious creatures of the forest, and only the birth of an occasional throwback, an occasional pale child without webbed toes, would remind them of their time-shrouded origin on the planet Earth.
On the fourth day, Smissun came to them and said, “This is the day on which we go into the forest to worship the Tree.”
Rayner felt strange excitement stir him as he readied himself to make the journey out into the forest. He had kept to himself during the four days, saying little to his Terran comrades as they moved through the town, photographing, examining, recording.
It was obvious that the hybrids had not bothered to keep up the work of their remote ancestors. Many of the dwellings, Rayner discovered, were virtually falling apart. Some new ones had been built at the far end of the town, but these were of wood and of strange design. It was not hard to picture a day in the near future when all vestiges of the original colonial group from Earth had been eradicated by the grotesque change that had come over the one-time Earthmen.
There was a strange hush over everything as Smissun led them through the town and out into the glades of the forest beyond the broad fast-flowing river. The entire town seemed to accompany them—several thousand people, comprising a genetic melange of all conceivable variations on the human form. Many of the townsfolk were utterly alien in appearance; others still had lingering signs of their Terran ancestry.
They wore their finest clothes as they made the pilgrimage—clean dark-cloth sarongs for the women, loincloths for the men. The children either were naked or wore a brief twist of cloth round their middles.
Sunday morning in Maldonad Colony, Rayner thought wildly. The whole town is turning out for services.
The forest whispered gently as they walked through the well-trodden glades. Ehrenfeld’s camera clicked again and again as some bizarre broad-winged bird in flaming colors fluttered across their path, or some small alien reptile scuttled frantically into the underbrush at their approach. Rayner felt tension mount within him. We’re on our way to the Tree.
They were following the path of the river through the forest. It was still early morning, and the sun was not at its height; even so, the humidity was stifling. Sweat coursed down Magda Hollis’ bare back, and she cursed in a barely audible undertone. She was wearing only a brief and nearly translucent plastic wrap around her hips, and had left her breasts uncovered in the heat. Rayner felt no yearning for her, and he noted with some surprise that the other men in the group had taken no more notice of her near-nudity than had she been a wax doll. He had his own reasons for not being stirred by the sight of Magda’s full breasts, and old Bryson certainly could have no interest—but Killian was behaving most unlike his normal self, and Ehrenfeld seemed to have forgotten that he had once felt jealous of Killian at the time the biologist had been on good terms with Magda.
No one spoke. Smissun led the way, with his family around him and the Earthmen just behind. Then came the whole horde of villagers. In the distance, a forest beast honked thickly, and to their left the water rippled and eddied.
Suddenly Ehrenfeld pointed. “Look up there,” he said in a hushed voice.
Rayner glanced up. He whistled.
Directly ahead of them, perhaps five hundred yards ahead, a tree towered over its companions. Although many of the forest trees were two and three hundred feet high, this one topped them all by more than a hundred feet. Its magnificent crest thrust high up above the close-packed vegetation of the jungle.
There was no doubt. They were approaching the Tree.
Smissun halted and turned to face the Earthmen. There was an expression of exaltation on the hybrid’s face; his large golden eyes were gleaming with joy.
“We draw near the Tree,” he said. “And you will see the Forest People.”
He beckoned them forward. They advanced through a clearing beaten down by the regular procession of thousands of feet over hundreds of years, and suddenly they were in the presence of the Tree. It stood alone, in a broad bare patch in the forest.
It was immense. Its top loomed high in the haze above them, four hundred, five hundred feet from the ground—perhaps even more, Rayner thought. The base of its trunk was a massive wall of wood, more than a hundred feet thick. Great branches, each of them the dimension of a normal tree, grew from its sides in radial spokes. Each branch was heavy with vast limbs, and there was an abundance of glossy green leaves. Here and there, nestling in the foliage, Rayner saw the enormous bright-red bulk of the Tree’s fruit: a melon-sized fruit, bigger than a man’s head.
The hybrid folk were dropping to their knees around the great Tr
ee, falling in reverence before this monster of the forest. Rayner thought dizzily of the depth and breadth of root that must be necessary to support the bulk of a tree such as this one.
A wordless song of praise was rising from the townsfolk now. Rayner understood how humble these people must feel in the presence of the Tree. He felt like kneeling himself, almost, but remained upright.
Near him stood Magda, and not far away were Bryson, Killian, and Ehrenfeld. He glanced at his companions and saw that they, too, were overwhelmed by the magnitude of this Tree of Trees that was the god of the hybrids.
A hymn was going up, now. Rayner strained to catch the words, but it seemed that they were only partly in Terran, and mainly in some strange and alien language whose words were smooth-flowing and liquid, with many vowels and few harsh consonants.
The Earthman realized that other figures were coming from deeper within the forest—lithe, graceful figures, with nothing Earthly about them.
So these are the Forest People, he thought.
Only about twenty of them had appeared, though more seemed to lurk in the dark glades beyond. Superficially they looked humanoid; they had two arms, two legs. But their hands and feet were webbed and ribbed with spines, leaving only the thumb and great toe free for independent action. Their eyes were utterly alien, green-gold and depthless.
They were naked. Their bodies seemed to glisten, as if they were wet from swimming, and Rayner saw gill-like processes at the sides of their jaws that seemed to indicate a semi-aquatic existence.
He saw the differences now between the hybrids and the Forest People. The hybrids were, most of them, clumsy, still laden down with their Terran genetic heritage. The Forest People bore themselves with animal-like grace, and there was a sleek beauty to them that made Rayner understand how the original settlers might have come to mate with them.
The ranks of the Forest People increased now, and they too knelt, joining their hybrid cousins in worship of the great Tree. Rayner glanced around the clearing.