James H. Schmitz - Balanced Ecology.pdf

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Next is a farm story, if you likebut this is no ordinary farm.
Under the bucolic surface of this tale of another planet, with its
consistent and beautifully worked out details, there is a tricky
problem, about which I will give you one or two hints;
Ecology is something human beings can adapt to suit their own
purposes; right? But human beings in an environment are part
of its ecology . . .
Or: if an experimental animal alters its responses in order to
get food from the experimenterwho is conditioning whom?
BALANCED ECOLOGY
James H. Schmitz
The diamondwood tree farm was restless this morning, llf
Cholm had been aware of it for about an hour but had said
nothing to Auris, thinking he might be getting a summer fever
or a stomach upset and imagining things and that Auris would
decide they should go back to the house so llf's grandmother
could dose him. But the feeling continued to grow, and by now
llf knew it was the farm.
Outwardly, everyone in the forest appeared to be going
about their usual business. There had been a rainfall earlier in
the day; and the tumbleweeds had uprooted themselves and
were moving about in the bushes, lapping water off the leaves.
llf had noticed a small one rolling straight towards a waiting
slurp and stopped for a moment to watch the slurp catch it. The
slurp was of average size, which gave it a tongue-reach of
between twelve and fourteen feet, and the tumbleweed was
already within range.
The tongue shot out suddenly, a thin, yellow flash. Its tip
flicked twice around the tumbleweed, jerked it off the ground
and back to the feed opening in the imitation tree stump within
which the rest of the slurp was concealed. The tumbleweed
said "Oof!" in the surprised way they always did when
something caught them, and went in through the opening.
After a moment, the slurp's tongue tip appeared in the opening
again and waved gently around, ready for somebody else of the
right size to come within reach.
llf, just turned eleven and rather small for his age, was the
right size for this slurp, though barely. But, being a human boy,
he was in no danger. The slurps of the diamondwood farms on
Wrake didn't attack humans. For a moment, he was tempted to
tease the creature into a brief fencing match. If he picked up a
stick and banged on the stump with it a few times, the slurp
would become annoyed and dart its tongue out and try to knock
the stick from his hand.
But it wasn't the day for entertainment of that kind. llf
couldn't shake off his crawly, uncomfortable feeling, and while
he had been standing there, Auris and Sam had moved a couple
of hundred feet farther uphill, in the direction of the Queen
Grove, and home. He turned and sprinted after them, caught
up with them as they came out into one of the stretches of
grassland which lay between the individual groves of
diamondwood trees.
Auris, who was two years, two months, and two days older
than llf, stood on top of Sam's semiglobular shell, looking off to
the right towards the valley where the diamondwood factory
was. Most of the world of Wrake was on the hot side, either
rather dry or rather steamy; but this was cool mountain
country. Far to the south, below the valley and the foothills
behind it, lay the continental plain, shimmering like a flat,
green-brown sea. To the north and east were higher plateaus,
above the level where the diamondwood liked to grow. llf ran
past Sam's steadily moving bulk to the point where the forward
rim of the shell made a flat upward curve, close enough to the
ground so he could reach it.
Sam rolled a somber brown eye back for an instant as llf
caught the shell and swung up on it, but his huge beaked head
didn't turn. He was a mossback, Wrake's version of the turtle
pattern, and except for the full-grown trees and perhaps some
members of the clean-up squad, the biggest thing on the farm.
His corrugated shell was overgrown with a plant which had the
appearance of long green fur; and occasionally when Sam fed,
he would extend and use a pair of heavy arms with three-
fingered hands, normally held folded up against the lower rim
of the shell.
Auris had paid no attention to llf's arrival. She still seemed to
be watching the factory in the valley. She and llf were cousins
but didn't resemble each other, llf was small and wiry, with
tight-curled red hair. Auris was slim and blond, and stood a
good head taller than he did. He thought she looked as if-she
owned everything she could see from the top of Sam's shell; and
she did, as a matter of fact, own a good deal of itnine tenths of
the diamondwood farm and nine tenths of the factory, llf
owned the remaining tenth of both.
He scrambled up the shell, grabbing the moss-fur to haul
himself along, until he stood beside her. Sam, awkward as he
looked when walking, was moving at a good ten miles an hour,
clearly headed for the Queen Grove, llf didn't know whether
it was Sam or Auris who bad decided to go back to the house.
Whichever it had been, he could feel the purpose of going
there.
"They're nervous about something," he told Auris, meaning
the whole farm. "Think there's a big storm coming?"
"Doesn't look like a storm," Auris said.
llf glanced about the sky, agreed silently. "Earthquake,
maybe?"
Auris shook her head. "It doesn't feel like earthquake."
She hadn't turned her gaze from the factory, llf asked,
"Something going on down there?"
Auris shrugged. "They're cutting a lot today," she said.
"They got in a limit order."
Sam swayed on into the next grove while llf considered the
information. Limit orders were fairly unusual; but it hardly
explained the general uneasiness. He sighed, sat down, crossed
his legs, and looked about. This was a grove of young trees,
fifteen years and lisss. There was plenty of open space left
between them. Ahead, a huge tumbleweed was dying, making
happy, chuckling sounds as it pitched its scarlet seed pellets far
out from its slowly unfolding leaves. The pellets rolled
hurriedly farther away from the old weed as soon as they
touched the ground. In a twelve-foot circle about their parent,
the earth was being disturbed, churned, shifted steadily about.
The clean-up squad had arrived to dispose of the dying
tumbleweed; as Hf looked, it suddenly settled six or seven
inches deeper into the softened dirt. The pellets were hurrying
to get beyond the reach of the clean-up squad so they wouldn't
get hauled down, too. But half-grown tumbleweeds, speckled
yellow-green and ready to start their rooted period, were rolling
through the grove towards the disturbed area. "They would wait
around the edge of the circle until the clean-up squad finished,
then move in and put down their roots. The ground where the
squad had worked recently was always richer than any other
spot in the forest.
Bf wondered, as he had many times before, what the clean-
up squad looked like. Nobody ever caught so much as a glimpse
of them. Riquol Cholm, his grandfather, had told him of
attempts made by scientists to catch a member of the squad
with digging machines. Even the smallest ones could dig much
faster than the machines could dig after them, so the scientists
always gave up finally and went away.
"llf, come in for lunch!" called llf's grandmother's voice.
llf filled his lungs, shouted, "Coming, Grand"
He broke off, looked up at Auris. She was smirking.
"Caught me again," llf admitted. "Dumb humbugs!" He
yelled, "Come out. Lying Lou! I know who it was."
Meldy Cholm laughed her low, sweet laugh, a silverbell
called, the giant greenweb of the Queen Grove sounded its
deep harp note, more or less all together. Then Lying Lou and
Gabby darted into sight, leaped up on the mossback's hump.
The humbugs were small, brown, bobtailed animals, built with
spider leanness and very quick. They had round skulls, monkey
faces, and the pointed teeth of animals who lived by catching
and killing other animals. Gabby sat down beside llf, inflating
and deflating his voice pouch, while Lou burst into a series of
rattling, clicking, spitting sounds.
"They've been down at the factory?" llf asked.
"Yes," Auris said. "Hush now. I'm listening."
Lou was jabbering along at the rate at which the humbugs
chattered among themselves, but this sounded like, and was, a
recording of human voices played back at high speed. When
Auris wanted to know what people somewhere were talking
about, she sent the humbugs off to listen. They remembered
everything they heard, came back and repeated it to her at their
own speed, which saved time. llf, if he tried hard, could
understand scraps of it. Auris understood it all. She was
hearing now what the people at the factory had been saying
during the morning.
Gabby inflated his voice pouch part way, remarked in
Grandfather Riquol's strong, rich voice, "My, my! We're not
being quite on our best behavior today, are we, llf?"
"Shut up," said llf.
"Hush now," Gabby said in Auris' voice. "I'm listening." He
added in llf's voice, sounding crestfallen, "Caught me again!"
then chuckled nastily.
llf made a fist of his left hand and swung fast. Gabby became
a momentary brown blur, and was sitting again on llf's other
side. He looked at llf with round, innocent eyes, said in a
solemn tone, "We must pay more attention to details, men.
Mistakes can be expensive!"
He'd probably picked that up at the factory, llf ignored him.
Trying to hit a humbug was a waste of effort. So was talking
back to them. He shifted his attention to catching what Lou
was saying; but Lou had finished up at that moment. She and
Gabby took off instantly in a leap from Sam's back and were
gone in the bushes, llf thought they were a little jittery and
erratic in their motions today, as if they, too, were keyed up
even more than usual. Auris walked down to the front lip of the
shell and sat on it, dangling her legs. llf joined her there.
"What were they talking about at the factory?" he asked.
"They did get in a limit order yesterday," Auris said. "And
another one this morning. They're not taking any more orders
until they've filled those two."
"That's good, isn't it?" llf asked.
"I guess so."
After a moment, llf asked, "Is that what they're worrying
about?"
"I don't know," Auris said. But she frowned.
Sam came lumbering up to another stretch of open ground,
stopped while he was still well back among the trees. Auris
slipped down from the shell, said, "Come on but don't let them
see you," and moved ahead through the trees until she could
look into the open. llf followed her as quietly as he could.
"What's the matter?" he inquired. A hundred and fifty yards
away, on the other side of the open area, lowered the Queen
Grove, its tops dancing gently like armies of slender green
spears against the blue sky. The house wasn't visible from here;
it was a big one-story bungalow built around the trunks of a
number of trees deep within the grove. Ahead of them lay the
road which came up from the valley and wound on through the
mountains to the west.
Auris said, "An aircar came down here a while ago . . . There
it is!"
They looked at the aircar parked at the side of the road on
their left, a little distance away. Opposite the car was an
opening in the Queen Grove where a path led to the house, llf
couldn't see anything very interesting about the car. It was
neither new nor old, looked like any ordinary aircar. The man
sitting inside it was nobody they knew.
"Somebody's here on a visit," llf said.
"Yes," Auris said. "Uncle Kugus has come back."
llf had to reflect an instant to remember who Uncle Kugus
was. Then it came to his mind in a flash. It had been some while
ago, a year or so. Uncle Kugus was a big, handsome man with
thick, black eyebrows, who always smiled. He wasn't llfs uncle
but Auris'; but he'd had presents for both of them when he
arrived. He had told llf a great many jokes. He and
Grandfather Riquol had argued on one occasion for almost two
hours about something or other; llf couldn't remember now
what it had been. Uncle Kugus had come and gone in a tiny,
beautiful, bright yellow aircar, had taken llf for a couple of
rides in it, and told him about winning races with it. llf hadn't
had too bad an impression of him.
"That isn't him," he said, "and that isn't his car."
"I know. He's in the house," Auris said. "He's got a couple of
people with him. They're talking with Riquol and Meldy."
A sound rose slowly from the Queen Grove as she spoke,
deep and resonant, like the stroke of a big, old clock or the hum
of a harp. The man in the aircar turned his head towards the
grove to listen. The sound was repeated twice. It came from the
giant greenweb at the far end of the grove and could be heard
all over the farm, even, faintly, down in the valley wifen the
wind was favorable, llf said, "Lying Lou and Gabby were up
here?"
"Yes. They went down to the factory first, then up to the
house."
"What are they talking about in the house?" llf inquired.
"Oh, a lot of things." Auris frowned again. "We'll go and find
out, but we won't let them see us right away."
Something stirred beside llf. He looked down and saw Lying
Lou and Gabby had joined them again. The humbugs peered
for a moment at the man in the aircar, then flicked out into the
open, on across the road, and into the Queen Grove; like small,
flying shadows, almost impossible to keep in sight. The man in
the aircar looked about in a puzzled way, apparently uncertain
whether he'd seen something move or not.
"Come on," Auris said.
Hf followed her back to Sam. Sam lifted his head and
extended his neck. Auris swung herself upon the edge of the
undershell beside the neck, crept on hands and knees into the
hollow between the upper and lower shells, llf climbed in after
her. The shell-cave was a familiar place. He'd scuttled in there
many times when they'd been caught outdoors in one of the
violent electric storms which came down through the
mountains from the north or when the ground began to shudder
in an earthquake's first rumbling. With the massive curved shell
about him and the equally massive flat shell below, the angle
formed by the cool, leathery wall which was the side of Sam's
neck and the front of his shoulder seemed like the safest place
in the world to be on such occasions.
The undershell tilted and swayed beneath llf now as the
mossback started forward. He squirmed around and looked out
through the opening between the shells. They moved out of the
grove, headed towards the road at Sam's steady walking pace.
Jif couldn't see the aircar and wondered why Auris didn't want
the man in the car to see them. He wriggled uncomfortably. It
was a strange, uneasy-making morning in every way.
They crossed the road, went swishing through high grass
with Sam's ponderous side-to-side sway like a big ship sailing
over dry land, and came to the Queen Grove. Sam moved on
into the green-tinted shade under the Queen Trees. The air
grew cooler. Presently he turned to the right, and llf saw a flash
of blue ahead. That was the great thicket of flower bushes, in
the center of which was Sam's sleeping pit.
Sam pushed through the thicket, stopped when he reached
the open space in the center to let llf and Auris climb out of the
shell-cave. Sam then lowered his forelegs, one after the other,
into the pit, which was lined so solidly with tree roots that
almost no earth showed between them, shaped like a mold to fit
the lower half of his body; he tilted forward, drawing neck and
head back under his shell, slid slowly into the pit, straightened
out, and settled down. The edge of his upper shell was now level
with the edge of the pit, and what still could be seen of him
looked simply like a big, moss-grown boulder. If nobody came
to disturb him, he might stay there unmoving the rest of the
year. There were mossbacks in other groves of the farm which
had never come out of their sleeping pits or given any
indication ,of being awake since llf could remember. They
lived an enormous length of time and a nap of half a dozen
years apparently meant nothing to them.
llf looked questioningly at Auris. She said, "We'll go up to
the house and listen to what Uncle Kugus is talking about."
They turned into a path which led from Sam's place to the
house. It had been made by six generations of human children,
all of whom had used Sam for transportation about the
diamondwood farm. He was half again as big as any other
mossback around and the only one whose sleeping pit was in
the Queen Grove. Everything about the Queen Grove was
special, from the trees themselves, which were never cut and
twice as thick and almost twice as tall as the trees of other
groves, to Sam and his blue flower thicket, the huge stump of
the Grandfather Slurp not far away, and the giant greenweb at
the other end of the grove. It was quieter here; there were fewer
of the other animals. The Queen Grove, from what Riquol
Cholm had told llf, was the point from which the whole
diamondwood forest had started a long time ago.
Auris said, "We'll go around and come in from the back.
They don't have to know right away that we're here . . ."
"Mr. Terokaw," said Riquol Cholm, "I'm sorry Kugus Ovin
persuaded you and Mr. Bliman to accompany him to Wrake on
this business. You've simply wasted your time. Kugus should

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