Wildeblood's Empire

by Brian Stableford

  The soil was rich in many places, and would support Earthly crops well. And if the local vegetable produce had little to offer in the way of useful comestibles, that deficit was more than made up by the bounty of the sea. The sea was green with algae—not the cloying weeds of Floria’s inshore waters but a rich soup of unicellular species, abundantly spiced with protozoa and complex micro-organisms of all kinds. Over the entire surface of the ocean there was a stratum of plankton some two to ten fathoms deep, which could be dredged and dried to form a nutritious (if somewhat vapid) food in its own right, and which in addition supported great numbers of fish and a host of other creatures, many species of which were eminently edible.

  With such resources Poseidon was obviously ripe for colonization despite the relatively limited usable land surface. The question the surveyors had to ask was whether there was, in the local life-system, anything which might prove inimical to human life. The answering of that question had been largely Wildeblood’s responsibility. He had convinced himself that the world was perfectly safe. And, it seemed, he had been right.

  But it also seemed that in the process of the investigations he had other discoveries—significant ones—which he had most carefully excluded from his reports.

  He had looked at the world, found it good, and decided that it should be his....

  It was not unheard-of for members of successful survey teams to volunteer for the colonies that were to be detached thereto. They were allowed—and in fact given every encouragement—to do so. The UN might lose top-flight scientists, but the colonies gained the services of men who already knew the world as intimately as was possible and who also had faith in it. The fact that a member of a survey team was willing to go out with the colony was straightforward testimony to the fact that the surveyors had confidence in their recommendations.

  And so, Wildeblood returned to Poseidon, already the most important member of the colony, but supposedly as an advisor rather than a leader. He was the man to whom the colonists would bring their problems—a wise man, in many ways a paternal figure, a man people would trust and on whom they would inevitably rely for guidance. But Wildeblood had not been satisfied with that. And he had known the world rather more intimately than anyone supposed.

  Two of the colonies that Kilner had visited had had members of the original survey teams attached to their initial executive bodies. What difference it had made to their chances it was, by the time Kilner came, impossible to judge. The colonies had done badly. Perhaps, without the survey men and their expertise they would have done even worse. Perhaps not. Similarly, it was difficult now to weigh up the positive side of Wildeblood’s contribution to the Poseidon colony. Perhaps, in his absence, it would have done as well. Perhaps, if he had been content to advise and assist a more democratic government, it would have done as well.

  But on the other hand, perhaps not.

  Now, more than a hundred years later, Poseidon—or Wildeblood, as it had become and as it truly was—was still ruled by one man and a small family group: Philip Wildeblood the second and his acknowledged cousins. Whether it is semantically correct to call Philip a tyrant and his government a totalitarian one I am not sure. His was no reign of overt terror, the force he used being subtle and even invisible. But I thought of it as tyranny, and if I were to be proved right about the steroid drug then I would be utterly confirmed in that conviction.

  The colony thrived. It had a larger population than any other colony so far recontacted. Its technological progress compared well with Floria’s. (It boasted no locomotives, but its communicative problems were rather different. It had guns, but again, this arose from a difference in manifest priorities. One could not say that either world was “more advanced”—their achievements were roughly comparable, taking into account social differences and environmental requirements.) There was a high degree of specialization among individuals and communities. Oil and coal measures were being worked on the nearest continent, south of the island chain which still remained the heart of the colony. Conditions on the continents were not inviting, and the mines, at least, were kept supplied with labor largely thanks to the penal system. Manufacturing was largely the prerogative of the islands nearer the mainland. The large island from which the colony was administered, called Jensen Island, was the center of the shipbuilding industry, but also boasted a great deal of arable land and was the most heavily cultivated of all the islands although its neighbors to the north-east were exclusively given over to agricultural development. It all seemed to work, and the plan by which it did work was almost entirely the legacy of James Wildeblood. He had designed the administrative hierarchy, the legal system, the penal system, and plotted the likely course of industrial progress. He had ordained the educational methods and priorities (giving a very high priority to practical considerations) and, unlike the Planners of Floria, had not found it necessary to keep a desperately tight control over who could know what. Anyone could take the trouble to learn anything he had a mind to—but he could only use what James Wildeblood had prescribed for his use. Very few people tried to step outside their allotted roles, it seemed, and no one succeeded.

  The lack of conflict, I thought, had to be a clue to the fact that rebellion was impossible. And it was impossible not because it was unthinkable (as the Planners had tried—and failed—to make it on Floria) but because it was impractical. I suspected it was because there could be no real question of independence on Poseidon/Wildeblood. Everyone was dependent—on the drug, and on the government. That was the way it had to be.

  And that, my investigations into the properties of the white powder informed me, was very probably the way it was.

  So much for James Wildeblood, scientist and Utopian (for the colony was a Utopia, all right—for the man on top).

  But there was more to the planet than the colony. Perhaps there was more to the whole situation than the colony. Certainly we had priorities here above and beyond the scope of our missions on Floria and Dendra. Because Poseidon also had intelligent life.

  Poseidon had no mammals, no birds, and no reptiles. Its life-system had never invested in the evolution of the cleidoic egg. And, indeed, there had been little enough incentive for it to do so. So little of the land surface could possibly provide a viable habitat for animals of any considerable size, and virtually all of it was within spitting distance of the sea.

  Thus, the so-called “higher animals” of Poseidon—the “next step up” from the fishes—belonged exclusively to a group which we must needs call the amphibians.

  They resembled Earthly amphibians in the one important respect that at certain times of their life-cycle they breathed water, and at other times air. In many other ways, too, they were often reminiscent. The largest group, nicknamed “whaleys” by the survey team (perhaps by Wildeblood himself), looked for all the world like giant bloated newts. The land-going phase of the intelligent species and its near relatives could be conveniently imagined as a bipedal salamander (and, true to form, they had been dubbed “salamen”—a term I hated but was constrained to use). All the species laid eggs in colossal batches, underwater, and dressed in sheaths of gel which both protected the eggs and provided the new-born with their vital sustenance during the first few days. Very few specimens of this spawn had ever been discovered, and it was presumed that the larger species deposited it in special breeding grounds, almost certainly in subterranean caves.

  But we must, as always, beware of these inviting comparisons and the habits of nomenclature which inevitably attend them. For if the amphibians of Poseidon were in some ways reminiscent of Earthly forms, they were also—in some very important aspects—crucially different.

  On Earth, the amphibians flourished as a group very briefly, and then went the way of all flesh, into mass-extinction for the majority of species and evolutionary backwaters for the survivors. They were outshone in the evolutionary narrative by the reptiles—who, in their turn, were overtaken as heroes of the drama by the mammals and the birds.
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  But on Poseidon, the day of the amphibians never ended, extending through far greater numbers of millennia and eras. Whereas the Earthly groups had been obliterated or sidetracked the Poseidon families had continued to evolve. Chance had innovated, natural selection had refined. And a route to intelligence rather different from that followed by the life-system of Earth had been discovered.

  There are basically two prerequisites for the evolution of intelligence. One is that the species concerned should be able to develop and carry a brain of sufficient magnitude. Large brains are mechanically viable only for bipeds and for creatures of the sea—at least so far as creatures with “heads” (brain-boxes equipped with arrays of sensors) are concerned. Thus, on Earth intelligence developed to the highest degree in a species of primate that walked erect and a few aquatic species (dolphins and the misnamed killer whales). The other prerequisite is that the species concerned should have a life-cycle into which the learning process may be incorporated. This is a complex factor, involving such things as the capacity for parental influence on the young (greatest, on Earth, in mammal species, because mammals suckle their young) and the mechanical and behavioral capacity of the individual to put learning to good use (hence the priority on limbs adaptable as tools...a lack which put a limit on dolphin evolution). Where these mechanical and behavioral potentials exist along with the capacity for parental influence, evolution will tend to cater for these potentials by encouraging neoteny—the prolongation of the developmental phase of the individual and exposure of the developing organism to external influences, and hence to the acquisition of highly flexible adaptive responses to a wide range of environmental stimuli.

  Now, the amphibians of Poseidon had these prerequisites in what can only be described as remarkable abundance. One phase of their life-cycle was lived under water, the other, in the case of certain medium-sized “salamanders,” proved amenable to an erect position using the tall as an extra support.

  In the cultivation of such an erect posture. the upper limbs were freed (and in the aquatic phases these same limbs were the relatively unfunctional—unfunctional so far as locomotion is concerned—forelimbs) for mechanical development as “hands.” (This potential can still be seen in Earthly newts, which have webbed “fingers” on their forelimbs very similar to human hands.)

  What they lacked, principally, was the degree of parental care which was, on Earth, a necessary encouragement to the evolution of mammal intelligence. Their eggs, though provided with a slightly greater measure of protection than the eggs of the fish from which they had evolved, were still produced in vast quantities, on the assumption that the young must suffer a tremendous mortality rate in their early stages. There was little or no potential in the behavior-patterns of the amphibians to encourage evolutionary modification of this kind of reproductive pattern.

  But the amphibians had a trick up their sleeve. On Earth, mammalian parental care had paved the way for the evolution of neoteny in the potentially-intelligent primates. On Poseidon, the amphibians already had a kind of neoteny, and this was what permitted them to work the trick in reverse.

  On Earth, there is a neotenic amphibian called the axolotl. Its juvenile form, equipped with gills, nay, under different sets of circumstances, either metamorphose into an air-breathing salamander (the “normal” adult/reproductive phase) or remain an aquatic creature equipped with gills and develop reproductive organs as such. This choice of whether or not to metamorphose is genetically transmitted by either reproductive process.

  In the days when the first terrestrial species had appeared on Poseidon, they too had found this facultative metamorphosis a useful device. But while, on Earth, the axolotl remained an evolutionary-freak, the amphibians of Poseidon went in for this curious brand of developmental ambiguity in a big way. It became the key to their evolution of developmental flexibility, which opened the door to intelligence.

  The largest species—the whaleys and their kindred—did not practice neoteny. Their juvenile forms, in growing vast, had to metamorphose into air-breathers. To be as big as a whale you have to breathe air. Gills can’t cope.

  The smallest species, too, did not go in much for the protracted juvenile stage—anything smaller than, say, a rat found little dividend in it, although one or two species could work the trick.

  In the medium range, the species which characteristically weighed, when mature, something between a kilo and a hundred kilos, found neoteny useful. They had to go carefully on land, always in danger of desiccation and—being cold-blooded—always at the mercy of the weather. It was convenient to keep a reservoir of breeders perpetually at sea.

  But it was at the top of the medium range that the potential really lay, for it was here that the potential existed for big brains and hands, along with the kind of mechanical aptitude that something as big as a whale—or even a cow—simply doesn’t have because of excessive overall bulk. Here were the species who could really use neoteny in more ways than one. In these species there was an evolutionary boom. The salamen developed rudimentary temperature control, and evolved physiologically towards a pseudomammalian internal environment. And they developed metamorphic choice into a fine art with one fairly simple modification—they kept their choices open both ways.

  The juveniles hatched out in the sea, probably—as I’ve said—in underwater caves. There they fell prey to fish and all manner of invertebrate carnivores. But enough survived to grow, and ultimately the pre-reproductive aquatic forms would join a herd made up partly of others like themselves and partly of mature aquatic forms with reproductive potential. Then, having learned something of what life in the underwater herd had to teach them, they might either metamorphose into terrestrial forms—still pre-reproductive—or into mature aquatic forms. The mature aquatic forms still retained the potential to metamorphose into mature terrestrial forms, while the juvenile terrestrial forms could go on through a new developmental phase before either developing into mature terrestrials or undergoing remetamorphosis into juvenile aquatic form.

  And so, ad infinitum. Or, to be precise, until death caught up. Mature terrestrial forms could always back-metamorphose into mature aquatic phase. The only switch which couldn’t happen was that no mature reproductive morph could metamorphose (or de-develop) into a juvenile phase. Outside that, no changes were barred. And the potential existed for virtually limitless prolongation of the developmental stage, for as long as that was adaptively productive....

  Mature individuals and juveniles mingled on both land and sea, and varied between themselves as to their experiential histories. It was complex, and maybe untidy. Maybe God could have arranged things a little more simply if he hadn’t been prepared to let natural selection do so much of the work. But then, maybe he could have made a better job of us, too—we don’t quite measure up to any standards of aesthetic perfection no matter how hard we pretend.

  The thing was, that the Poseidon pattern worked. The salamen had intelligence. They communicated with one another by signs (no other way is convenient for both land and underwater). They made use of tools, of clothing. They always operated in groups, co-operating in virtually all endeavors. There was a constant exchange of materials between the part of the tribe that was on land and the part in the sea, which made things easier for both groups. Whenever the proportions got out of balance there would be a consciously ordained metamorphosis by selected members of the larger group to adjust the balance.

  And so it went.

  This was the aspect of Poseidon which seemed to me far more interesting and more important than Wildeblood’s empire. I would rather have been with Conrad and Linda and Mariel, trying out Mariel’s talent for the first time in the circumstances where it might—only might—prove itself of incalculable value.

  At that particular time, Wildeblood’s empire and the salamen seemed worlds apart. But they weren’t. And that was the chief reason why I was at base, working with Nathan, trying to assess the potential of the colony.

  Because o
ne of the questions we had to answer was a long-term question. What happened, or was to happen, when the expanding human population met up, in a meaningful way, with the salamen? It hadn’t happened yet. The colony was wrapped up in its own affairs. In a hundred years and more Wildeblood’s progeny had ignored the aliens completely.

  But there had to come a time....

  And, bearing in mind that the colony was what Wildeblood had made it, what kind of meeting would it be?

  It was a question that worried me. It was a question which, when I thought about James Wildeblood, and Philip, and Zarnecki, also frightened me.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “We’re getting things done,” reported Conrad. “We’ve been working from the base, mapping a region about five miles square and taking census. There are two groups of salamen near to us at the present time. They see us wandering about and they don’t appear to be hostile. They watch us from a distance—and for the moment we’re not ostentatiously watching back. We’ll probably try to make contact with the nearer group, which is slightly larger in any case.”

  “How’s Mariel?” I asked.

  “She’s fine. She hasn’t really been close to them, yet, but she says that she’d know already if there was anything like the kind of disturbance which hit her on Dendra. She says their minds are strange enough not to wrench at hers. We’re taking things pretty easy but I trust her.”

  “No observations yet on the language?”

  “Not the real language. We’ve seen them making signs but until they get used to us we aren’t going to start systematic watching and cataloguing. We hear them, though. I guess you can’t call the sounds they make a language, but they have a small range of whistles and barks to supplement the signs. Obviously this is something unique to the terrestrials. Mariel wants to get going, though—she’s impatient with mapping.”