Arthur Clarke - The Songs of Distant Earth

“There’s the bottom! Mostly rock — not much sand.”

“Naturally. Macrocystis thalassi needs rocks to cling to — it’s not like the free-floating Sargassum.”

Loren could see what the speaker meant. The slender trunks ended in a network of roots, grasping rock-outcroppings so firmly that no storms or surface currents could dislodge them. The analogy with a forest on land was even closer than he had thought.

Very cautiously, the robot surveyor was working its way into the submarine forest, playing out its cable behind it. There seemed no risk of becoming entangled in the serpentine trunks that reared up to the invisible surface, for there was plenty of space between the giant plants. Indeed, they might have been deliberately —

The scientists looking at the monitor screen realized the incredible truth just a few seconds after Loren.

“Krakan!” one of them whispered. “This isn’t a natural forest — it’s a — plantation?

They called themselves Sabras, after the pioneers who, a millennium and a half before, had tamed an almost equally hostile wilderness on Earth.

The Martian Sabras had been lucky in one respect; they had no human enemies to oppose them — only the fierce climate, the barely perceptible atmosphere, the planet-wide sandstorms. All these handicaps they had conquered; they were fond of saying that they had not merely survived, they had prevailed. That quotation was only one of countless borrowings from Earth, which their fierce independence would seldom allow them to acknowledge.

For more than a thousand years, they had lived in the shadow of an illusion — almost a religion. And, like any religion, it had — performed an essential role in their society; it had given them goals beyond themselves, and a purpose to their lives.

Until the calculations proved otherwise, they had believed — or at least hoped — that Mars might escape the doom of Earth. It would be a close thing, of course; the extra distance would merely reduce the radiation by fifty per cent — but that might be sufficient. Protected by the kilometres of ancient ice at the Poles, perhaps Martians could survive when Men could not. There had even been a fantasy — though only a few romantics had really believed it — that the melting of the polar caps would restore the planet’s lost oceans. And then, perhaps, the atmosphere might become dense enough for men to move freely in the open with simple breathing equipment and thermal insulation…

These hopes died hard, killed at last by implacable equations. No amount of skill or effort would allow the Sabras to save themselves. They, too, would perish with the mother world whose softness they often affected to despise.

Yet now, spread beneath Magellan, was a planet that epitomized all the hopes and dreams of the last generations of Martian colonists. As Owen Fletcher looked down at the endless oceans of Thalassa, one thought kept hammering in his brain.

According to the star-probes, Sagan Two was much like Mars — which was the very reason he and his compatriots had been selected for this voyage. But why resume a battle, three hundred years hence and seventy-five light-years away, when Victory was already here and now?

Fletcher was no longer thinking merely of desertion; that would mean leaving far too much behind. It would be easy enough to hide on Thalassa; but how would he feel, when Magellan left, with the last friends and colleagues of his youth?

Twelve Sabras were still in hibernation. Of the five awake, he had already cautiously sounded out two and had received a favourable response. And if the other two also agreed with him, he knew that they could speak for the sleeping dozen.

Magellan must end its starfaring, here at Thalassa.

There was little conversation aboard as Calypso headed back towards Tarna at a modest twenty klicks; her passengers were lost in their thoughts, brooding over the implications of those images from the seabed. And Loren was still cut off from the outside world; he had kept on the full-view goggles and was playing back yet again the underwater sledge’s exploration of the submarine forest.

Spinning out its cable like a mechanical spider, the robot had moved slowly through the great trunks, which looked slender because of their enormous length but were actually thicker than a man’s body. It was now obvious that they were ranged in regular columns and rows, so no one was really surprised when they came to a clearly defined end. And there, going about their business in their jungle encampment, were the scorps.

It had been wise not to switch on the floodlights; the creatures were completely unaware of the silent observer floating in the near-darkness only metres overhead. Loren had seen videos of ants, bees, and termites, and the way in which the scorps were functioning reminded him of these. At first sight, it was impossible to believe that such intricate organization could exist without a controlling intelligence — yet their behaviour might be entirely automatic, as in the case of Earth’s social insects.

Some scorps were tending the great trunks that soared up towards the surface to harvest the rays of the invisible sun; others were scuttling along the seabed carrying rocks, leaves — and yes, crude but unmistakable nets and baskets. So the scorps were tool-makers; but even that did not prove intelligence. Some bird’s nests were much more carefully fashioned than these rather clumsy artifacts, apparently constructed from stems and fronds of the omnipresent kelp.

I felt like a visitor from space, Loren thought, poised above a Stone Age village on Earth, just when Man was discovering agriculture. Could he — or it — have correctly assessed human intelligence from such a survey? Or would the verdict have been: pure instinctive behaviour?

The probe had now gone so far into the clearing that the surrounding forest was no longer visible, though the nearest trunks could not have been more than fifty metres away. It was then that some wit among the Northers uttered the name that was thereafter unavoidable, even in the scientific reports: ‘Downtown Scorpville”.

It seemed to be, for want of better terms, both a residential and a business area. An outcropping of rock, about five metres high, meandered across the opening, and its face was pierced by numerous dark holes just wide enough to admit a scorp. Although these little caves were irregularly spaced, they were of such uniform size that they could hardly be natural, and the whole effect was that of an apartment building designed by an eccentric architect.

Scorps were coming and going through the entrances — like office workers in one of the old cities before the age of telecommunications, Loren thought. Their activities seemed as meaningless to him as, probably, the commerce of humans would have been to them.

“Hello,” one of Calypso’s other watchers called, “What’s that? Extreme right — can you move closer?”

The interruption from outside his sphere of consciousness was jolting; it dragged Loren momentarily from the seabed back to the world of the surface.

His panoramic view tilted abruptly with the probe’s change of attitude. Now it was level again and drifting slowly towards an isolated pyramid of rock, which was about ten metres high — judging by the two scorps at its base — and pierced by a single cave entrance. Loren could see nothing unusual about it; then, slowly, he became aware of certain anomalies — jarring elements that did not quite fit into the now-familiar Scorpville scene.

All the other scorps had been busily scurrying about. These two were motionless except for the continual swinging of their heads, back and forth. And there was something else —