“Laurilu started to shake her head, then stopped and said, ‘Yes I did. But still it seems to me that they protect themselves, even deliberately.’
“‘The cactus has its spines,’ I told her. ‘What’s more, and as well as deadly stinging tentacles, the Portuguese man-o’-war navigates the ocean’s currents under sail. But not one of these species is equipped to think or do anything deliberately, Laurilu. They do things automatically, yes. But deliberately, no.’
“While I could see that I had her half-convinced, still she said, ‘So what do we get out of a full-grown tree fern? I mean, pound for pound, dollar for dollar, are they worth it?’
“‘Oh, yes!’ On that I was positive. ‘A full-grown tree? We get maybe nine gallons of sap. Add a little sweetener—it’s as good as milk. Whip it, it’s cream. Curdle it, it’s cheese. Then there’s the tender roots, of which there’s almost as much below ground as above; maybe half a ton. And they’re as good as potatoes. As for the fronds: they break down into fiber for textiles. The bark is thick but pliable: cork. And the wood…well it’s wood, for burning. To settlers here the tree ferns will be like coconut-palms to the South-Sea islanders—when there were coconuts and South-Sea islands, that is.’
“‘And when they’ve gone?’ she said, staring at me, so that for the first time I noticed how beautiful her eyes are. ‘After we’ve used them all up? What then?’
“‘We won’t use them all up. For every one we cut down we’ll plant another. The only ground we clear will be for farming, to support us and whichever Earth livestock can thrive here. We’ll put home-world fish into the lakes and oceans, put grass out on the creeper plains…we’ll even have soft fruit again.’
“‘Oh? How?’ she said. I thought you said they were gone for good—or for bad.’
“I shook my head. ‘No, I didn’t say that. You said that. On Earth… they’re probably gone for good, yes. We fooled around with them genetically and weakened them. We may even have introduced that virus into the soil, albeit accidentally. The breeds—all the exotics—they were the first to suffer. But we have seeds, shoots, cuttings, all carefully preserved or in hibernation, just biding their time, waiting to be planted in a little rich, living soil under some generous G-type sunlight.’
“She sighed her relief and said, ‘Which means that when the first settlers get here—’
“‘Which is only a few short years away, once we get back to Earth and I deliver my feasibility report.’
“‘—that at least for a little while, and probably quite a while, they’ll have to be vegetarians? Can I at least have that much to look forward to?’
“‘Ah—not so.’ Trying not to take too much pleasure in it, I shook my head. ‘See, it’s the general rule that if something eats something we eat, we can usually eat the first something. There are exceptions, of course, but….’
“Laurilu frowned and said, ‘Come again?’
“And by way of explaining, I said: ‘Those little, er, armadillo guys?’
“Her jaw fell open. ‘Those little…but they’re animals!’
“‘That’s right—and very nutritious, too. And what do you think cows, rabbits, goats, sheep and pigs are, Laurilu? And as for chickens…well, we’ll have them all here, eventually.’
“Clenching her fists, she almost stood up. ‘What do I think they are?” she said. ‘I think they’re sentient! Oh they may not think too good, but they do respond to stimuli…they do have brains, feelings—’
“‘—And souls?’ I got it in quick. ‘Are you religious?’
“‘What?’ she said, caught a little off guard. ‘Religious? I think so. My god may not be your god, but I don’t believe everything is just accidental.’
“‘Well me neither,’ I said. ‘And the Good Book tells us Man shall have dominion over all…We’re that far above the other animals, that’s all. We’re almost as far above the home world’s fauna as it is above the flora! So of course we eat it. Fish or fowl or four-legged beast, if it isn’t poisonous we eat it! But we have to find that out first…which is what me and my team have been doing here on Ophiuchus VIII.’
“‘But—’
“‘But there’s no but about it, Laurilu! Put it this way: do we just let humanity go to hell in a bucket along with the home world? No, of course not. It’s us or the lesser species, kid.
“Again she shook her head, sighed, and said, ‘Another world to ruin.’
“And I admit I nodded, sighed with her and said, ‘Yes, only now we can do it a whole lot faster….’ But I knew at once that I had made a mistake.
“Laurilu narrowed her eyes and said, ‘We’ll do what? How do you mean?’
“I shrugged, but not negligently, and answered, ‘We managed to finish off the Earth in about—oh, I don’t know—say four or five thousand years? But that was from our tribal beginnings to where we are now; from a time when the only fires were campfires to a time when we’ve sucked all of the black juice out of the ground and burned it in our cars, in heating our cities and powering our machines; from clean air and oceans to radioactive ruins and skies that leak dilute acid rains…. Are you with me so far?’
“‘Go on,” she said, but very quietly now.
“‘Ten years from now,’ I said, just as quietly, ‘they’ll be sinking oil wells here. Twenty, there’ll be towns, small cities. Twenty-five: airplanes and ocean-going liners, roads and tracks joining up the towns, motor cars on the roads and trains on the tracks. Another thousand years…well, by then we should have found Earth III, or IV, or even V. It’s evolution, Laurilu. Mankind is evolving, expanding throughout the universe.’
“‘And leaving precious little room for anything else,’ she said.
“‘But is there anything else?’ I asked her then. ‘We’re it, as far as I can see. Where sentience is concerned, we’re definitely it, Ma Nature’s clever kids, Laurilu. The universe is our playpen, our schoolyard, our many worlds—all the places we’re going to grow up in.’
“‘You’re saying that nature is so utterly uncaring, insensitive of the rest of her creations, that she’s given us a whole universe to sack? All those stars and planets out here—or out there—and they’re all for us? Only for us?’
“‘That’s how it appears,’ I replied. Then I asked her: ‘Did you ever hear of SETI?’
“‘SETI?’
“‘The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence,’ I told her. ‘SETI operated for over two hundred years sending radio signals out to the stars. Now we can get there faster than the signals! But you know what? There wasn’t a single reply, not one. By now those signals have reached out over four hundred light-years in all directions, and no one out there gives a damn because there is no one out there. It’ll take us two thousand years to get to all the places those signals have already left behind, where as far as we know there’s nothing like us to compete with. So yes, it looks like it’s all ours, Laurilu. If there is a god, we are his—or her—main men.’
“‘Men and women.’ She corrected me, shivering a little.
“So I put my arm around her, and she drew close. ‘We’re all there is,’ I said. ‘So we must make the best of what we’ve been given. Even of each other.’
“She pulled away just a little. ‘But we haven’t, we aren’t, making the best of it. We’re making a mess of it at the expense of everything we touch! And yet something you said has given me hope.’
“I smiled and pulled her in again. ‘Now don’t you start going soft on me, Laurilu!’
“She drew away again, quite suddenly, which caused the zipper on her uniform blouse to unzip two or three inches. But she didn’t seem to notice. I noticed; after all this time away from Earth, well I was bound to. But just then it didn’t occur to me that she’d been the same time away. And: ‘No,’ she said, ‘don’t distract me!’ (Though I didn’t know I had.) ‘It’s what you were saying about the tree ferns: how the settlers can use every bit of them. See, it’s all the waste that I hate the most.’