In the Flesh and Other Tales of The Biotech Revolution [SSC]

by Brian Stableford

  The Senior Citizens could no more argue with Tarn’s ripostes than with those of the Brain of Haemlin. Everything he said was true, especially the observation about their own appearances. In order to meet him face to face, the Senior Citizens had emerged as far from the flesh of their living city as they ever did—displaying not merely faces, but arms, torsos and even a subtle hint of leg—but they were irreversibly bound into the Body of Humanity. The Bloodstream provided their every need—nourishment, emotion and transcendent experience—and they could not isolate themselves from its bounty. The kind of self-containment that their ancestors had suffered for more than a million years would have been intolerable to them, hellish in its isolation. When the human race had come to the Great Existential Crossroads, faced with the choice of sticking with the hard road or embracing universal happiness, people had unanimously decided to Be There For One Another. Humans had wished for the moon, and they had got their wish; they had hollowed it out, so that all that remained of its barren rock became a thick protective shell enclosing the living flesh of the Body of Humanity. Thus had begun the era of Man-in-the-Moon, of Haemlin, the City of the Blood—the era that had been perfect, unalloyed bliss...until now.

  “Now,” said Tam, when he was sure that no more accusations would be forthcoming, “what, exactly, is the problem?”

  “Rats,” said the Senior Citizens, peevishly.

  “Pardon?” said Tam.

  “We have rats in our walls and in our veins, in our cavities and in our guts, in our fibers and on our nerves—rats whose vile secretions are polluting the Bloodstream itself. Rats are our problem. Master Pig: rats, rats, rats.”

  “We were rather under the impression,” Tam observed, with mild astonishment, “that your ancestors had driven rats to extinction, along with cockroaches, wasps, flies and every other little thing that annoyed them.”

  “So were we,” said the Senior Citizens. “The Brain has no idea where these rats have come from, and nor have we. All we know is that our supposedly-infallible defenses have failed. If you can figure out what went wrong, you might care to let the Brain know but the real point at issue is whether you can do something about it. Is there the remotest chance, do you think, that you can?”

  “I’m a plumber,” said Tam, rather haughtily. “There are no depths, even on the moon, that I cannot plumb. There is no leak that I cannot plug, no blockage I cannot clear. To be perfectly honest, I’m delighted that you called me in. No plumber on Earth has had such a challenge to deal with in thirty thousand years—quite probably more, given that your ancestors weren’t such assiduous record-keepers as we pigs. I shall be the first of my kind to venture into these as-yet-unplumbed depths, and I am glad to have the opportunity.”

  “How will you do it?” the Senior Citizens wanted to know.

  “That would be telling,” Tam replied. “First, there’s the small matter of my fee. The call-out charge will be pretty steep, I fear— it’s a long way from home to the far side of the moon.”

  “We weren’t actually thinking of paying you a fee,” said the Senior Citizens of Haemlin. “We rather thought you might do it as a favor, in return for everything that our ancestors gave yours: intelligence, the Earth, etcetera.”

  “That’s not the way I work,” said Tam. “Anyway—what have you done for us lately?”

  The Senior Citizens had no alternative but to refer his request back to the Brain, whose response was typically succinct. “Anything we have that he wants,” it said, “is on offer, just so long as we get what we want: Heaven without the rats. Tell him that if he can get rid of the rats, he can name his own price.”

  “I will,” said Tam, “just as soon as I’ve figured out the parts and labor. But I can tell you now—it’s going to cost you.”

  * * * *

  Behind all this bravado, Tam was actually rather anxious about his prospects of success. Even the largest city on Earth was tiny compared with Haemlin, and the cities of Earth were aggregations of hundreds of thousands of individual sties.

  In principle, of course, a sty was a sty, however big it was—a mere artificial creature of flesh and blood—but he couldn’t be entirely sure that the principle in question could be stretched far enough to embrace an edifice like Haemlin. The cties of Earth were subject to all manner of parasitic infestations, and the relentless march of natural selection was constantly producing new ones that were resistant to traditional plumbing techniques, but they were mostly microbes—worms and bugs at worst. No sty presently occupied by pigs was big enough to provide hiding places for anything the size of a rat.

  The real difference between the cities of Earth and Haemlin, however, was not their size but the manner in which they were inhabited.

  A pig family’s sty provided fresh water, manna and heat. It recycled all their wastes. There were any number of ways a pig could plug into his walls via leads and leeches, for excitement or entertainment, but, at the end of the day, a pig and his family’s sty were just partners in life. Every family could move house. Every pig could die. Every pig, no matter how intrusive his family might be, and however fondly his sty might cosset him, could isolate himself simply by walking away.

  In Haemlin, things were different.

  Humans were permanently plugged in, to their walls and to one another. Humans and their homes had become inseparable, components of the same vast organism. Humans had forsaken mere movement—and mere mortality—in favor of the eternal Quest of Mind. The human race was one vast and irredeemably happy family, forever insulated from the horrors of isolation. Their plumbing was not merely more extensive than the plumbing Tam was used to; it was different in kind. According to the humans, it was better in every possible way: better designed; better built; better organized; better tended.

  Whence, then, came the rats in Haemlin’s walls? How was their presence conceivable—and how was it conceivable that the Brain could do nothing about them? Humans were not pigs, after all; they no longer had to trot along to the doctor every time they picked up a virus or a parasite. Human minds, unlike the minds of pigs, were supposed to have immediate knowledge of the most intimate corners of their own bodily being—and even if the individual brains of the citizens still harbored lacunae of ignorance, the Brain of Haemlin was supposed to know everything that needed to be known.

  Fortunately, Tam was not a pig to waste much time on theoretical considerations. He unshipped his tools, selected out his keenest hookworms, checked with the Senior Citizens to make sure that they would not be harmed by Haemlin’s natural defenses, and sent them off to capture a few rats.

  More than fifty per cent of the hookworms failed to return. The rats of Haemlin were tougher and nastier than anything Tarn’s tools had ever encountered on Earth. A few of the ones that did return, however, achieved what they had been sent to do: they brought a dozen rats out of the Body of Humanity, six dead and six alive.

  Tarn took the rats to the workroom on board his spaceship, and set about subjecting the corpses to rigorous examination and biochemical analysis.

  He quickly confirmed that the invaders of Haemlin’s flesh did indeed seem to be rats. As far as outward appearances were concerned they bore a closer resemblance to their ancestral stock than Tam bore to his. Their sleek black fur was more reminiscent of an otter’s, and their “breathing apparatus” was adapted to draw oxygen directly from Haemlin’s rich red Bloodstream, but their teeth were ratty teeth, shaped for gnawing, and their brains were ratty brains, with so little capacity that they almost certainly had nothing much on their ratty minds but the employment of their ratty teeth. Things were much more complicated at the level of the genome, but when Tam compared the chromosome-maps of his specimens with the pre-uplift records, it did appear that these rats were merely more complicated versions of their ancient counterparts.

  Rats were supposed to have been extinct for thousands of years. Even if a few had survived on Earth, evolving greater genetic complexity all the while, there was surely no way they could
have crossed the quarter million miles of vacuum that separated Earth from the moon, or gnawed their way through the walls of Haemlin’s impregnable citadel.

  Tam designed a range of artificial viruses, every one of which was supposed to be cleverly adapted to attack the rats while leaving the human flesh of their hosts untouched, but the viruses made no headway against the cells in the tissue cultures, let alone the live specimens. The new genes which had been added into the basic rat chromosome-complement had somehow included defenses against that whole line of attack.

  Cyanide worked well enough, and it proved that the rats were indeed mortal, but Tam could hardly flood the Body of Humanity with cyanide just to get rid of the rats. Even if the operation were successful, and the Body of Humanity survived, the level of damage sustained would be intolerable. If he were to use poison against the polluters of humanity’s Bloodstream it would have to be a more selective one.

  He tried to find one.

  He failed.

  The next plan on his list was to use hookworms to hunt the rats down, but when he sent out a second set of tools to gather more specimens the failure rate shot up from fifty per cent to a hundred. The rats had already adapted; if that strategy were to work he would need to produce new tools of an unprecedented efficiency—and if even a few rats were to escape his custom-designed predators the campaign would have to be escalated even further.

  * * * *

  Tam sent all this information back to Earth, bouncing the signal off an ancient communication satellite, which had been installed long before the last humans had retreated to the interior of the moon. While he had been working on site, the Plumbers’ Union had commissioned its best brains to look at the problem from a purely hypothetical perspective. His fellows sent back several more suggestions, and promised to reconsider his own data with all due care.

  By the time a few more signals had been sent back and forth Tam and his colleagues had reached two tentative conclusions, one concerned with the probable origin of the rats—which he now preferred to call neo-rats—and the other with the best way to get rid of them. They both seemed unlikely—so unlikely that the Brain of Haemlin would doubtless have considered them unthinkable—but if there had been a solution that the Brain had considered thinkable, it would presumably have been thought of already.

  Tam went back to the Senior Citizens, to tell them what he intended to do—but he diplomatically refrained from mentioning his current hypothesis as to the origin and true nature of the neo-rats.

  “It’ll never work,” the Senior Citizens said.

  “Let’s try it anyway,” said Tam. “If it doesn’t, there’s no harm done. You can simply disregard the signal—and if you can’t it won’t matter, because you won’t be able to respond to it.”

  The reasoning behind Tarn’s plan of action was this. Unlike humans and uplifted pigs, the neo-rats were creatures of instinct. Having no conscious intelligence, they could not make rational calculations. Their brains were programmed to respond to certain signals in certain ways, and all that had to be done was to deliver the appropriate signal to the appropriate area of the brain. In principle, any perceptive pathway might carry the signal—even sight or sound—-but the one best adapted for the role was the modified olfactory sense of taste that the neo-rats used to navigate their way around the nourishing Bloodstream and to signal to one another that they were ready to mate. All Tam had to do, in effect, was to design two versions of the ultimate neo-rat pheromone, each alloyed with the ultimate neo-rat food-lure. These he could lay down as a trail, extending from the antechamber where he had spoken to the Senior Citizens to the way to the airlock which had admitted his spaceship to the moon’s interior. Once the neo-rats were all in the airlock, it could simply be opened, exposing the entire population to the merciless void.

  “It only requires a pair of rats to be left behind,” the Senor Citizens pointed out. “What if there are a few lame ones, which can’t respond quickly enough to the signal?”

  “Let’s try it and see,” said Tam. He was, of course, refraining from pointing out that the real problem, which was that because the neo-rats appeared to have sprung from nowhere before, they might well be able to do so again, even if there were no lame ones stranded within the Body of Humanity.

  “Okay,” said the Senior Citizens. “Go ahead.”

  So Tam tried it—and he watched it work from the safety of his spaceship. He watched the neo-rats flock past the vessel in their thousands: a sleek and horrible black tide. He waited for a long time before he signaled to the Brain that the airlock should be closed, but not so long that any confused neo-rats had begun to make their drunken way back from the orgy of sensation that he had contrived. He didn’t even try to save a couple of specimens to take back to Earth, although he was well enough aware of the fact that pigs— unlike humans—had so far failed to drive a single rival species to extinction.

  * * * *

  When the Brain reported to the Senior Citizens that it could no longer find any trace of rats within the Body of Humanity they were ecstatic.

  “A deal is a deal,” they said to Tam. “We’ll pay any price you ask. We’ll even welcome you into the Body of Humanity if that’s what you desire; for the kind of service you’ve rendered to us, we’re prepared to contemplate letting pigs into Heaven. All we need in return is a guarantee that it won’t happen again.”

  “Well, said Tam, judiciously, “I appreciate your generosity, but even if I could give you the guarantee you want, I wouldn’t ask a fee of that kind. I’m a pig, you see. We pigs have never been much attracted by the idea of Being Here For One Another. We’re individualists through and through.”

  “Why can’t you give us a guarantee?” the Senior Citizens wanted to know. “Don’t you have any confidence in your workmanship?”

  “I’ve got every faith in my workmanship,” Tam replied, perhaps intemperately. He didn’t say anything further, but the emphasis he’d put on the word “my” didn’t go unnoticed.

  “Are you saying that there’s something wrong with our workmanship?” the Senior Citizens demanded. “Are you telling us that it’s our fault that Haemlin was invaded by rats?”

  Tam realized that the Senior Citizens must have been considering all the possibilities too—even the ones that were unthinkable, until someone dared to think them.

  “I don’t know,” said Tam. “The reason I can’t give you any guarantees is that I simply don’t know what caused the problem. Without knowing that, how could I possibly guarantee that it won’t recur? That’s why I’m prepared to settle for a relatively modest fee, considering the work that I put into the clearance. All I want is a barrel full of pearls.”

  “Pearls?” said the Senior Citizens, not bothering to hide the contempt that as alloyed with their astonishment. “Is that some kind of joke?”

  “In a way,” said Tam, “yes. I know as well as you do, of course, that pearls have no intrinsic value—that once the biochemistry of their manufacture is understood, anyone can make them, with or without oysters. The value attributed to any kind of object in Earth’s present-day economy can hardly depend on the difficulty of manufacture, because manufacture is always easy. It has to depend on some subtler form of scarcity. What gives a pearl—or anything else—economic value nowadays is a certificate of exotic provenance. At present, there aren’t any pearls on Earth that have been mothered by the Body of Humanity. My colleagues and I would have a uniquely tradable asset.”

  “But why pearls?” the Senior Citizens demanded. “Is it just because of the old joke about casting pearls before swine?”

  “Oh!” said Tam. “No—not at all. The joke I had in mind is one you probably haven’t heard. Down on Earth, you see, we never speak of Haemlin, or the Body of Humanity, or even of the moon. We call it—we call you—the oyster.”

  The Senior Citizens didn’t laugh.

  “That was the trouble with humans, we say,” Tam went on, uncomfortably. “They always wanted a world that was their
oyster. Maybe you have to be a pig to get the joke.”

  That seemed more than likely; the Senior Citizens still didn’t laugh—nor had they forgotten the matter from which Tam had sought to distract them.

  “Where did the rats come from?” they asked, bluntly. “How can we make sure that they never return? We know that you don’t know. We just want to know what you think. Tell us that, and the Body of Humanity will nourish all the pearls that you want—but if you won’t tell us, you won’t have completed the job.”

  Tam shrugged his shoulders. He was a pig, after all—why should he take such care to protect humankind from its own failings?