With a mild climate and gravity of only point seven gees, Jabesh-Gilead was an attractive destination for tourists and retirees. The air was breathable; only the relatively high concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere kept it from being the home of many millions more. Some also found the near-constant cloud cover depressing. The low level of ultraviolet light given off by the planet’s sun could be either a blessing or a curse: it was nearly impossible to get a tan, but those at risk for skin cancer could spend all day outside with little danger.
Although the Collapse had occurred more than a hundred years earlier and the Concordat planets were no longer dependent on hyperspace gates, due to the invention of hyperdrive-enabled spaceships, the breakdown of all travel and communications between all the planets inhabited by descendants of the Truscans had been sufficiently traumatic that the Concordat required all member planets to have enough food and supplies on hand for their populations to survive for a year without imports. The privations of the war with the Izarians, however, had prompted many planetary governments, including that of Jabesh-Gilead, to dip into their reserves. So when Jabesh-Gilead lost contact with the other worlds of the Concordat, it had only twelve weeks of food on hand.
The people of Jabesh-Gilead had no way to know that every other known human world had been destroyed by the Izarians, but it soon became clear that something very bad had happened. Jabesh-Gilead had no hyperdrive-enabled ships of its own, so it had no way to determine what had happened, but as weeks wore on with no ships arriving from other Concordat worlds, the populace became convinced that the Izarians had won the war and that it was only a matter of time before Jabesh-Gilead was attacked. So they waited.
They did not know that the ship that was supposed to deliver the last planet-killer to Jabesh-Gilead had been blown to pieces, nor that the planet-killer itself was now safely hidden far underground on a remote planet. They did not know that the factories that produced the Izarian war machines had been destroyed, nor that the few machines still scattered across the galaxy drifted aimlessly in space, lacking any controlling intelligence to direct them.
Not that it would have mattered. Two facts were obvious to all: Jabesh-Gilead was alone, and the vast majority of its people would soon die. The awareness that they were facing another Collapse would not help them avert it. Those with means and foresight survived a little longer than the others, but in the end almost everyone died.
Almost.
In a grassy valley far from the main population centers of Jabesh-Gilead was a settlement established by a wealthy entrepreneur who had dreams of making the planet more attractive to settlers by eliminating the need for imported food. Hiram Telus had made his fortune in real estate, and he dreamed of dramatically increasing the value of his holdings on Jabesh-Gilead. He intended to do this by engineering food crops that could thrive on Jabesh-Gilead despite its nutrient-poor soil, minimal rainfall and overcast skies. To this end, he had built a small town and hired a small army of scientists and laborers to fill it. He called the place Elim. Because of the settlement’s remote location, Telus had stocked a warehouse with enough food to sustain his employees for over a year.
When news of the crisis reached Elim, its residents redoubled their efforts to develop a renewable food supply for people on Jabesh-Gilead. They couldn’t possibly save everyone, but they might keep enough people alive that their children or grandchildren might still be alive when contact was reestablished with the other planets. Having studied the events of the Collapse—and being an optimist by nature—Hiram Telus was convinced that their predicament was temporary. Even years later, when his people had finally managed to develop crops that provided enough nutrition to replenish the settlement’s food supply as fast as it was being depleted, he never dreamed that his little group of overworked farmers was the last remaining hope of humanity.
Over the next ten years, the community of Elim survived, but it hardly thrived. No matter how they rearranged plant DNA and no matter how efficiently they farmed, it took nearly all their time and energy just to stay alive. Few babies were born, because the community could ill afford to feed people who didn’t work. The few children who did come into the settlement would be cursed to a lifetime of hard labor, with no time for either leisure or education. The realization gradually dawned that no help from offworld was ever going to come.
Even so, hope persisted. Marginal improvements continued to be made to farming methods and bioengineered crops, suggesting that their grandchildren or great-grandchildren might experience a less punishing existence. This hope, however, was tempered by another fear: when the crisis began, Elim’s population had been one hundred twenty-seven men and eighty women. Of the women, sixty-two were still of childbearing age. That simply wasn’t a big enough gene pool for the community survive long-term. Their great-grandchildren might have better lives, but they would also find it difficult to find mates who weren’t close relatives. Due to the dangers of inbreeding and genetic drift, the long-term chances of the community surviving without an influx of DNA from the outside were virtually nil.
“Something’s got to be done, Hiram,” said Rufio Ceder, the erstwhile chief scientist at Elim. These days Rufio spent nearly all his time laboring on the farm, like most of the rest of the settlement’s inhabitants. The two talked as they made their way back to the single men’s barracks. Hiram had lived there since his house had been torched by desperate refugees from the nearby city of Cardenas ten years earlier.
“We’re doing it, Rufio,” said Hiram tiredly. “I know you didn’t have as much time as you would have liked to work on the new strain of carrots, but I think next year’s harvest is going to finally give us a little breathing room. If you and Amira can go back to half-days in the lab, we can figure out why the alfalfa keeps dying and—”
“That’s not what I’m talking about and you know it.”
“You’re still preoccupied with our great-grandchildren marrying their cousins?”
“I am, and you should be too.”
“We’ve got more pressing concerns.”
“What we’ve got is a rapidly aging population and a corresponding diminishing of genetic variation, not to mention a people who are losing hope. For all we know, we could be the last human beings in the galaxy.”
“There’s no reason to think that,” Hiram chided him.
“There’s no reason to think anybody else is still out there either,” said Rufio. “And even if they are, they’re taking their sweet time in getting here. We could be looking at another ten years, or a hundred, or a thousand. We need to prepare for the possibility that no one is coming.”
“Prepare how?”
“Make sure our offspring are genetically fit. And their offspring, and their offspring. So that in a thousand years, if no one does come, somebody is still here. Humanity survives on Jabesh-Gilead, if nowhere else.”
“You’re talking about the Sentinels all over again. An authoritarian regime with control over breeding.”
“Not necessarily. We have access to gene editing technology that the Sentinels did not.”
“What are you suggesting?”
“I’m suggesting that we forget about controlling behavior and take a more targeted approach. Frankly, I think the sort of regime the Sentinels implemented is unnecessary. There’s already a strong cultural proscription against incest. We can use that.”
“What do you mean, a ‘targeted approach’?”
“I mean we deal with genetic problems as they arise.”
“In other words,” said Hiram, “if a union produces a child with a congenital defect….”
“We repair the child.”
“By reprogramming the child’s DNA.”
“Correct.”
“You think that would work?”
“We have the equipment and expertise to eliminate most genetic defects that might occur, and eventually we could develop the means to address genetic drift as well. Of course, that would require universal screeni
ng in utero.”
“You would need total buy-in from everybody in Elim.”
“We would need a consensus,” said Rufio. They had passed the barracks and continued walking. This was not the sort of conversation they could have around the other men. “The same sort of consensus that is required for any societal norm to take hold. These things are malleable, to a large degree. One norm takes hold and the other loses its grip.”
“You mean you’re planning on discarding the norm prohibiting incest?”
“It’s not up to me. Norms that are no longer useful tend to be discarded. If we subject all fetuses to genetic screening and repair, the prohibition against incest will cease to be useful. Under ordinary circumstances, incest might remain taboo indefinitely, but our descendants will also find themselves in a situation where inbreeding is increasingly difficult to avoid. If any defects can be corrected, there’s no reason to prohibit any unions on the grounds of genetic fitness. Cousins, siblings, fathers and daughters….”
“Lord preserve us,” Hiram said, shaking his head. “Perhaps it would be better if humanity died out.”
The Truscans had inherited from their ancestors two sets of supernatural beliefs: one that centered on the gods of Olympus and one on Yahweh, the God of the Jews. An uneasy syncretism had developed over the generations, with Yahweh gradually being subsumed into the Olympic pantheon. A small group of ardent monotheists remained, however, and as the scientific understanding of nature developed, more and more people discarded the unnecessarily complex polytheism of the Romans in favor of a belief system that required fewer starting axioms. The stories of the ancient Jewish people’s enslavement and flight from Egypt certainly resonated with the Truscans. Thus for a number of reasons the predominant religion of the Truscans at the start of the war with the Izarians was Yahwehism, but nearly a quarter of the people had rejected religion altogether and embraced agnosticism or, in rarer cases, atheism.
“That’s certainly one option. If we do nothing, in four or five generations we’re going to have a population increasingly made up of physically and mentally unfit individuals. If you think life is hard now, just wait until half the population can’t work and nobody has enough brains to remember how birth control works. If we’re lucky, our offspring lose the capacity to reproduce before they lose everything else that makes them human.”
“Then we sterilize everyone.”
Chapter Twenty-four
H iram Telus and Rufio Ceder continued their walk, rounding the corner of one of the fields where they were trying to grow genetically modified beets.
“You think you can get buy-in on universal sterilization?” Rufio said. “The children are the only hope these people have. We’ve largely stopped reproducing, but only out of necessity. You see how the children are treated. They get the best food, the best accommodations, the best everything. Because people care about their children more than they care about themselves. That’s how it’s always been, because if the race doesn’t survive, nothing we do matters. You want to take that hope away from them? You may as well recommend mass suicide. It would be a lot less painful.”
“There’s got to be a better solution,” Hiram insisted.
“None that I’m aware of. You can sterilize everyone against their will, you can let inbreeding take its inevitable course, you can implement Sentinel-style breeding controls, or you can use the technology we have to fix problems as they arise. And frankly, I doubt the Sentinel option is viable. The Sentinels are thought to have had a larger and more sex-balanced and genetically diverse population to work with. If they’d had only sixty-two females to work with, we wouldn’t be here.”
“Who decides what counts as a ‘defect’? And how it should be fixed? I mean, if we decide green eyes are a defect, do we give everybody brown eyes? What if we decide intelligence below a certain threshold is a defect? Or, for that matter, a certain height or skin color? What if we decide that we have too many males and need to turn a few baby boys into girls?”
“We’ll have to have some kind of panel, of course. But this gets into matters of government. At present we’re a benign dictatorship. Perhaps we’ll transition to some form of republic at some point. Political philosophy is neither my area of expertise nor concern at the present moment. The point is, whoever is in charge is going to have to appoint people to make these decisions.”
“And those decisions will be based on what? What will the criteria be for selection to this panel?”
“I wouldn’t presume to say.”
“If you can’t tell me what criteria the panel are using, why even have one? A panel with no guiding principles or barrier to entry is just a mob.”
“I don’t disagree. But the mob is the ultimate arbiter of norms in any society. We punish incest because that’s what the mob wants. Why not change green eyes to brown if the mob demands it? The mob will choose what is in the mob’s best interest. That may not align with our preferences, but it will be strongly biased toward survival of the race.”
“Putting aside the ethical problems, there are limits to what we can do with such a limited population, even with universal genetic screening. As you say, we have very few children, and our population is aging. At the rate we’re increasing crop yields, it’s not going to be economical for our people to start having children in large numbers for at least another twenty years. So we’re going to be starting out with an even smaller population of child-bearing age. You know more about minimum viable populations than I do, but I don’t see how this can work with a population of a few dozen unrelated individuals. In a few generations you’re going to have so many defects that trying to fix them with gene editing is going to be like patching a sieve. Maybe if we started storing sperm and eggs, but then we’d be getting into the business of deciding who gets to reproduce with whom. In other words, a Sentinel-like breeding program. And that’s not a road I want to go down.”
“I agree. That’s why, in addition to screening infants for defects, we need to implement a new policy to encourage as many pregnancies as possible.”
“More births just means more mouths to feed.”
“Yes, but we can take advantage of economies of scale.”
“You mean have one person care for ten children rather than caring for two or three? Even if we could get buy-in, there’s no way the increase in food production would cover the additional demand.”
“I’ve run the numbers. Children between six and eight consume less than half the calories as an adult, and very young children consume even less than that. Currently we’re running a small food surplus, and we’re estimating that yields will increase by three to five percent per year for the next ten years. We can sustain birth rates of three hundred percent of the current level, at least for a while.”
“How long is a ‘while’?” Hiram asked.
“Eighteen to twenty years.”
“And then what? Mass starvation?”
“In about eighteen years, the rate of population growth will overtake the rate that we’re increasing the food supply. And yes, there will be some difficult times—unless we find a way to eat less or produce more.”
“I suppose you’re going to tell me you know of a way to do that?”
“No. Not yet. But there’s no reason it can’t be done. There are things about this planet—the high level of carbon dioxide in the air, the poor quality of sunlight, the low gravity—that human beings aren’t well-adapted for. If we had a million years, we could wait for natural selection to produce people better suited to this place, but we don’t. So why not jump-start the process?”
“You’re talking about genetically engineering human beings.”
“Think about it. We’re handicapping ourselves by addressing only one side of the equation. We alter our food to make it more useful to us. Why not alter ourselves to make better use of the food we have? Think about how many calories we consume just to fuel muscles that are too bulky for the gravity here. We hop around on our awkward little
legs when we could be lithe and graceful. We work at a suboptimal pace because if we breathe too hard, we black out from the CO2. We waste energy producing melanin and hair to protect our bodies from a sun that we’ve never even seen. With a few tweaks, we could easily increase our efficiency by thirty percent while decreasing our food consumption per person by at least as much. Increased productivity and lower consumption means less time spent in the fields and more time working on new breeds of crops or labor-saving tools.”
“Or finding ways to make our children even less like ourselves.”
“If it means our children survive and don’t have to spend every waking moment working in the fields,” Rufio said, “why not?”
Hiram shook his head. “With this power, even the most benign dictator would be tempted to meddle with things better left alone. We’re talking about changing the very nature of our species. This is the purview of God himself.”
“God has abandoned us, Commander. We can step up and take His place, or we can allow the race to die out.”
“I don’t appreciate your blasphemy, Rufio.”
“I’m sorry if I offended. I am only trying to be honest in my assessment.”
“Just be grateful that I’m a benevolent dictator.”
“Trust me, I am. If it helps, although there are many wonderful things we can do with genetic editing, we are still a long way from being able to create an entirely new species. So while we can cure many diseases and make what you might call aesthetic changes, there’s no reason to think that our descendants will be anything but human.”
“Even if each generation gets progressively less human-like?”
“It doesn’t really work like that. For the most part, gene editing is just a matter of flipping switches. If you want to change eye color from green to brown, you flip that switch. If you want to change olive skin to pink, you flip that switch. Usually it’s more than a single switch, of course, and complex changes require more switches to be flipped, but it’s still flipping switches that are already there. If you flip enough switches, you might be able to create offspring similar to some evolutionary forebear of humans. Some believe, for example, that on Earth there was a whole family of animals, called primates, to which humans belonged. Perhaps with a great deal of genetic modification you could turn a human into something resembling one of these other primates. But you wouldn’t be able to turn a human into a sheep or a dog. The information just isn’t there. Similarly, we could create super-intelligent humans or super-tall humans, because very intelligent people and very tall people already exist. But it’s very unlikely we could, for example, create a human being who could breathe underwater or fly. Manipulating DNA on that level is far beyond our ability.”
The War of the Iron Dragon: An Alternate History Viking Epic (Saga of the Iron Dragon Book 5) Page 19