Wildeblood's Empire
Page 17
And, of course, there was more to it still. This is not the sum of what we did on Poseidon or its end. There remain another set of priorities, another set of ambitions. There was something accomplished there which needs not be tainted in the memory by guilt or shame or any other shadow of the conscience....
CHAPTER TWENTY
“We’re in the home stretch,” said Conrad. “We have a vocabulary of a hundred and eighty signs. We’re adding more every day. It’s derived principally from their own language, of course, but we’re modifying it somewhat. We’ll be able to introduce new concepts and new constructions very soon. Mariel knows it all, of course, and it’s all due to her that we’re progressing so quickly. Linda is trying to keep up. The only one of us who can’t attempt a decent conversation is me—and that’s because I have to spend all my time collating the information, making a proper record and idly chatting to you.”
“How many of them are involved?” I asked.
“Six or seven of them seem to have been allowed to work with us full time. How many in total know what’s going on and have shown an interest I don’t know. Maybe twenty or thirty. All ages, both sexes. Mariel reckons we’ll be reaching the linguistic standard of first-season first-time terrestrial juvenile any day now. The parallel won’t be exact, of course, but approximately. They don’t use a vast number of words—maybe four hundred are in everyday use by the adults, and there isn’t a great deal of esoteric extension to that. But by the time we start talking in earnest...who can tell how much expansion they can take?
“Linda is teaching three of them to draw the signs. She’s working out a series of pictographs. The idea has caught on. We’ve given them writing. We have no inkling yet of how much they’ll want to say...how much they can discover to say.
“Mariel’s been with them into the interior. They’re showing her their territory, letting her see how they live. In her head, she’s half gone native. She can imagine, somehow, the way they see the world, the natural avenues of their thought processes. She’s becoming, in part of her mind, genuinely alien...and she can take it. She can control it. It isn’t hurting her. She’s right, Alex...this is the real meaning of her talent. This is what it’s for.
“What we’re doing here is big, Alex. It’s interference on a scale we’d only imagined might be possible. We’re altering the social evolution of this species. We’re creating them, in a historical sense. Maybe that’s not entirely right...we run the risk of making this particular group into aliens among their own kind. Maybe we have no moral right to interfere. But it’s marvelous. It’s the most important thing that has happened on any of the worlds we’ve visited. Here, we’re proving something. We’re proving that we can talk, we can meet, we can think and act together. Man and alien. Not even man and humanoid...man and amphibian.
“We’ve succeeded here, Alex. Over and beyond anything that the colony ever does or can do. We’ve achieved something that means a lot in a much greater context than human political affairs. We’ve opened up a new avenue in the whole scheme of universal existence....
“In the evenings, you know, when it’s twilight, they go down into the shallows, to meet the others—the aquatics. I’ve watched them. Soon, I’m going with them; they’ll introduce me. Isn’t that something? A salamander introducing me to a tadpole...the effect that we’re having on the terrestrials is being passed on. Back into the sea, into the cycle. Round and round...phase to phase, birth to birth. From now on, all the salamen, maybe, will be a little bit human. Earth has put a colony here, but maybe the significant colonization, in the long run, will be the colonization of ideas...that means something...on the evolutionary timescale.”
“Sure,” I said, trying to bring him down a little. “You like Playing God. So did God. And look where it got us.”
He wasn’t listening. He was immune from sarcasm, from clever words and cynical thoughts. He was thinking on another plane—not a divine plane, but a plane where there was a different kind of importance, a different order of magnitude in action and ambition.
He, too, had manufactured a virus that would infect a world. A virus of thought, of ways of thinking, of ideas. From now on, he had said, all salamen might become a little bit human....
Philip Wildeblood might rule another forty years. His sons and their sons—the whole dynastic sequence—might last a couple of hundred or a thousand. In historical terms, Philip’s guilt or innocence, his whole effect on the pattern of life, would become meaningless in the blink of an eye. He’d been prevented from performing what might have proved to be the only meaningful and consequential action available to him—the initiation of a particularly nasty form of parasitism, human on native. Now that possibility was averted, he was nothing...or almost nothing. (There was still the margin, still the taint.)
But what Mariel and Conrad were doing might be meaningful a million years from now. It might change the very face of creation on this world we had named Poseidon. They could do in a year what the whole Poseidon colony had not done in a century.
And there was the converse, too. What was happening was an exchange, not a gift. Perhaps, if the salamen were to be a little bit human from now until forever, we, too, must become a little bit alien. Mariel already was, and always would be. Must that infection spread, like a manufactured virus, from mind to mind, from now on...?
Conrad thought that because of what was happening on Poseidon, man’s place in the universe was no longer the same—that it had not merely changed, but changed in some definite and ultimately significant way.
And if he was right....
So much for the art of the attainable.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Brian Stableford was born in Yorkshire in 1948. He taught at the University of Reading for several years, but is now a full-time writer. He has written many science-fiction and fantasy novels, including The Empire of Fear, The Werewolves of London, Year Zero, The Curse of the Coral Bride, The Stones of Camelot, and Prelude to Eternity. Collections of his short stories include a long series of Tales of the Biotech Revolution, and such idiosyncratic items as Sheena and Other Gothic Tales and The Innsmouth Heritage and Other Sequels. He has written numerous nonfiction books, including Scientific Romance in Britain, 1890-1950; Glorious Perversity: The Decline and Fall of Literary Decadence; Science Fact and Science Fiction: An Encyclopedia; and The Devil’s Party: A Brief History of Satanic Abuse. He has contributed to hundreds of biographical and critical articles to reference books, and has also translated numerous novels from the French language, including books by Paul Féval, Albert Robida, Maurice Renard, and J. H. Rosny the Elder.
BORGO PRESS FICTION BY BRIAN STABLEFORD
Alien Abduction: The Wiltshire Revelations
The Best of Both Worlds and Other Ambiguous Tales
Beyond the Colors of Darkness and Other Exotica
Changelings and Other Metaphoric Tales
Complications and Other Science Fiction Stories
The Cosmic Perspective and Other Black Comedies
Critical Threshold (Daedalus Mission #2)
The Cthulhu Encryption: A Romance of Piracy
The Cure for Love and Other Tales of the Biotech Revolution
The Dragon Man: A Novel of the Future
The Eleventh Hour
The Fenris Device (Hooded Swan #5)
Firefly: A Novel of the Far Future
Les Fleurs du Mal: A Tale of the Biotech Revolution
The Florians (Daedalus Mission #1)
The Gardens of Tantalus and Other Delusions
The Great Chain of Being and Other Tales of the Biotech Revolution
Halycon Drift (Hooded Swan #1)
The Haunted Bookshop and Other Apparitions
In the Flesh and Other Tales of the Biotech Revolution
The Innsmouth Heritage and Other Sequels
Kiss the Goat: A Twenty-First-Century Ghost Story
Luscinia: A Romance of Nightingales and Roses
The Mad Trist: A Romance of Bib
liomania
The Moment of Truth: A Novel of the Future
Nature’s Shift: A Tale of the Biotech Revolution
An Oasis of Horror: Decadent Tales and Contes Cruels
The Paradise Game (Hooded Swan #4)
The Plurality of Worlds: A Sixteenth-Century Space Opera
Prelude to Eternity: A Romance of the First Time Machine
Promised Land (Hooded Swan #3)
The Quintessence of August: A Romance of Possession
The Return of the Djinn and Other Black Melodramas
Rhapsody in Black (Hooded Swan #2)
Salome and Other Decadent Fantasies
Streaking: A Novel of Probability
Swan Song (Hooded Swan #6)
The Tree of Life and Other Tales of the Biotech Revolution
The Undead: A Tale of the Biotech Revolution
Valdemar’s Daughter: A Romance of Mesmerism
Wildeblood’s Empire (Daedalus Mission #3)
The World Beyond: A Sequel to S. Fowler Wright’s The World Below
Xeno’s Paradox: A Tale of the Biotech Revolution
Zombies Don’t Cry: A Tale of the Biotech Revolution