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The Orchard [Story 1 in The Orchard Universe] [MultiFormat]
eBook by Paul Levinson
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$0.95 |
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eBook Category: Science Fiction HOMer Award Nominee
eBook Description: Humanity has begun to explore nearby stars, only to discover there is no intelligent life out there. Or is there? Is a world with luscious fruit trees the result of natural selection, or perhaps of intelligent agriculture? A crew starts to investigate when its captain, Deborah Sung-Lee, suddenly dies....
eBook Publisher: Fictionwise.com, Published: Analog, 1998
Fictionwise Release Date: May 2002
41 Reader Ratings:
Available eBook Formats [MultiFormat - What's this?]: eReader (PDB) [40 KB]
, ePub (EPUB) [42 KB]
, Rocket/REB1100 (RB) [25 KB]
, Portable Document Format (PDF) [104 KB]
, Palm Doc (PDB) [27 KB]
, Microsoft Reader (LIT) [73 KB]
, Franklin eBookMan (FUB) [97 KB]
, hiebook (KML) [93 KB]
, Sony Reader (LRF) [59 KB]
, iSilo (PDB) [23 KB]
, Mobipocket (PRC) [29 KB]
, Kindle Compatible (MOBI) [57 KB]
, OEBFF Format (IMP) [40 KB]
Words: 7989
Reading time: 22-31 min.
Microsoft Reader (LIT) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
Portable Document Format (PDF) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud DISABLED
All Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED
 
"Paul Levinson adds a new wrinkle to the ages old search for intelligent life in the universe in "The Orchard." It is now the 22nd century and through the discovery of "snake holes"--an advanced system of wormholes--Mankind has discovered that the universe is teeming with all sorts of life--though none approaching what we know as intelligent. Until, that is, from the death of a member of an expeditionary team on an unnamed world, a puzzle presents itself. A biological mystery of a nature so finely masked that to fail to solve it might be to deny ourselves the knowledge that we are not alone. Through deduction, insight, and perseverance, Levinson shows us that the subtlest remnants of a civilization might be its most revealing legacy. A fine bit of speculation."--Dave Truesdale, "Editor's Choice," Tangent Online (Learn more about Tangent Online, the Internet's leading SF&F short fiction review website)
"...a story of a scout team looking for signs of intelligent life on a new planet. They don't find any, at least not at first, but are presented with a problem which requires solving. This is one of those stories where the solution is right in front of you almost the whole time and it is to the writer's credit to keep it there but to distract you enough that you don't get to the answer until the characters do."--Steve Sawicki, Tangent Online (Learn more about Tangent Online, the Internet's leading SF&F short fiction review website)
The wind blew through the fruiting trees on the hill. Branches sagged with their burden, scenting the air with invitation, attracting mouths 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 hill, 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 counter-measures, 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 rotation 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 worm holes 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-lightyear 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 dolphins 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.
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