Chapter 14

Even before the Gardener reached orbit, it was evident that there had been changes in the century since the Argo's visit. Dramatic changes.

The rest of the planet—the landscape, the elevations and prominences, the distribution of life, on which most of the ship's scanning equipment was trained—was roughly identical to what the Argo had seen. Even such changes as were detected were more or less to be expected: slightly altered shorelines, minor expansions or contractions of arid desert expanses, differences in ice-cap configuration where variations in erosion and climate exerted their influence.

But one bank of scanners was, from almost the moment Eden became visible as a globe, trained continuously on the site of the Argo's landing and its environs. And there, it became increasingly evident, change had occurred much more drastically.

To the frustration of all on board, the area was frequently obscured by what appeared to be low-lying cloud cover. Out of annoyance and boredom, one technician finally ran a computer analysis of all the planetary scans during the approach; save for a few higher elevations, the results showed that no other part of the world was so steadily cloud-obstructed as this. A few idly wondered why the aliens would choose such a meteorologically unfortunate area as the site for their most major settlement.

For such it was; indeed, so far as the scanners showed, it might against all human experience be their only settlement. The ship's video equipment, for all its sophistication, could detect no other visibly occupied site anywhere else. No artificial structures, no cleared and cultivated fields, no evidence whatever of intelligent habitation. Only at the one site—one technician dubbed it Centerville, a name that quickly stuck aboard ship—were there clear indications of artificial construction.

"Maybe the real estate developer ran out of money before he could expand," remarked one of the scientists sourly as yet another planetwide scan showed nothing but apparently untenanted acreage.

If so, that putative developer had made up for lack of territorial ambition with major activity on his home terrain. At the time of the Argo's visit only a single rectangular structure and one cultivated field had been observed. Now tantalizing glimpses through the steady overcast showed a substantial cluster of buildings near the original site as well as a number of outlying structures. A wide surrounding area had been cleared and subdivided into what appeared to be multiple cropfields. Clearly this was a burgeoning community.

But little detail could be observed through the clouds. With study of Centerville temporarily on hold, most of the scientists devoted their attention to other, more visible areas of the planet. Geological formations, weather patterns, climatological assessments, all drew their share of attention from the specialists in those disciplines; the physicists and chemists focused on spectroscopic analysis, the lone oceanographer on what could be gleaned of the currents and such minor tidal patterns—Eden had no moon to accentuate them—as could be discerned from such a distance.

Among the ship's biological and sociological contingents, though, the matter of greatest interest was the apparent utter absence of any other Edenite settlements. "I can't understand how—" and "It seems impossible that—" were common beginnings of many sentences. At the conclusion of one discussion session, Meiersdottir summed up:

"It appears that the development of intelligent civilization on Eden has taken a sharply different course than our own. On Earth the evidence is that pre-human anthropoids first evolved in Africa but began a diaspora from that continent in their early tool-making days, with their evolution continuing on parallel paths toward agronomic cultures that arose more or less contemporaneously in numerous locales and expanded until the groups came into contact with one another.