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"[Science fiction] is the one literary medium left in which we have a free hand. We can do any damn thing we please."
- Alfred Bester
 |
| Stage Trees | ||
| Genetically modified trees with solid fuel rocket cores. |
| For a time he relived his life on the vast stage-tree plantation where he had become an adult. Kzathit Stage Logs, with its virtual monopoly on solid fuel takeoff logs, now gone forever. If only he were there now. . .
But Kzathit Stage Logs had been a spaceport landing field for almost ten years... Before he was old enough to help, he used to watch the trees go into the stripping plant. They would go in looking like any other mpul tree: perfectly straight, with the giant green flower at the top, and the dark blue stalk ending in a tapering tap root. In the stripping plant the flower and the soft bark and the tap root would be removed. The logs would come out shining in the sun. with nothing left but the solid fuel rocket core and the thin steel-crystal skin beneath the bark. Then the logs would be shipped to all the nearby civilized worlds, in ships which lifted on other stage tree logs... The little tnuctip technicians would be running around setting instruments and looking harried and important. They seemed too small to be intelligent animals, but they were. Their quaint biological science had mutated the stage trees out of useless mpul trees, and created the sunflowers which guarded the house and the gigantic, mindless yeasteating whitefoods which fed the family and the carnivorous tnuctipun themselves. They had been given more freedom than any other slave race, becau.se they had proven the worth of their free-thinking brains. |
| Technovelgy from World of Ptavvs,
by Larry Niven. Published by Worlds of Tomorrow in 1965 Additional resources -
|
Here's another quote from Relic of Empire:
Outlined in sharp black silhouette against the red giant’s bloody disk were three slender, improbably tall spires, unnaturally straight and regular, each with a vivid patch of yellow vegetation surrounding its base...
...The spire exploded all at once.
"I've tracked the stage trees across A twenty light-years of space. God knows where they started. They’re all through the systems around here. The seed pods spend hundreds of thousands of years in space, and when they enter a system they explode. If there’s a habitable world one seed is bound to hit it. If there isn’t, there’s lots more pods where that one came from. It’s immortality, Captain Kidd. This one plant has traveled further than mankind, and it’s much older. A billion and a — ..."
Compare to the balloon tree from The Balloon Tree (1883) by Edward Page Mitchell and the treeships from Hyperion (1989) by Dan Simmons.
Far out across the plain there was fire. A stage tree rose rapidly into the black sky, minus its roots and flower, the wooden flanges at its base holding it in precarious aerodynamic stability. A white rope of smoke followed it up. When the smoke cut off, the tree became invisible... until, much higher, there was a puff of white cloud like a flak burst. Now the seeds would be spreading across the sky...
Richard Mann smiled. Wonderful, how the stage trees had adapted to the loss of their masters. The Slavers had raised them on wide plantations, using the solid fuel rocket cores inside the living bark to lift their ships from places where a fusion drive would have done damage. But the trees used the rockets for reproduction, to scatter their seeds further than any plant before them...
"They used to be tnuctip stage trees. We don’t know what they looked like originally, but the old records say the Slavers stopped using them some decades before the rebellion..."
It sat on the lavender plain in a hemisphere of multicolored fire, engulfing the other spires and the Jinxian ship; and then it began to expand and rise. Mann adjusted his attitude to vertical to get away from the ground. A moment later the shock wave slammed into him and blew him tumbling over the desert.
Two white ropes of smoke rose straight up through the dimming explosion cloud. The other spires were taking off while still green! Fire must have reached the foliage at their bases...
“The big towers are stage trees.”
“Uh?” Half question, half an expression of agony.
“A stage tree has two life cycles. One is the bush, the other is the big multistage form.” Mann talked fast, fearful of losing his audience. “The forms alternate. A stage tree seed lands on a planet and grows into a bush. Later there are lots of bushes. When a seed hits a particularly fertile spot, it grows into a multistage form. You still there?”
“Yuh.”
“In the big form the living part is the tap root and the photosynthetic organs around the base. That way the rocket section doesn’t have to carry so much weight. It grows straight up out of the living part, but it’s as dead as the center of an oak except for the seed at the top. When it’s ripe the rocket takes off. Usually it’ll reach terminal velocity for the system it’s in...
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'Space-sickness is one of the most unpleasant sensations that a human being can experience. Not all are subject to it...'
'...I saw a nice black heavy-looking cloud sailing by just now, and I can get the electrical machine out in five minutes to draw it down.'
'From a distance it could resolve the cosmic rays reflected from various substances.'
'The answer to the dumb student's prayer.'
'He had travelled the space-lanes of the solar system for the greater part of his life...'
'The dinner was excellent. It was completely vegetarian — grown in specially prepared gardens in this Moon base...'
'Telepaths had their sensitiveness enlarged to an immense range by the pin-sets, which were telepathic amplifiers adapted to the mammal mind.'
'It was a relief to enter one of the comfortable autos, whisper a direction down the tube, and just know that you would be taken to your destination in the quickest, safest, and cheapest manner.'
'But he didn't get very far with it before another noise in his ear radio scattered his thoughts. George winced...'
