Mutants

by Robert Silverberg

  “Yes, an abysmal step off a two-4nch curb, Dismas, backward and around the world, and standing on one’s head and turning into a howling monkey in the process. It isn’t a simple step. If I am correct, Dismas, then our descent from the Xauens was by an incredible, sudden and single mutation; one that has been misunderstood both as to effect and direction.”

  “I’ve never been quite satisfied with Xauens myself. There is something misshapen about the whole business. Of course we know the Xauens only by the skeletons of ninety-six children, three adolescents, and two adults. We are bound to find more.”

  “If we do, we will find them in the same proportion. Oh, we will not recognize them at all. But does it not seem an odd proportion to you? How come there were so many kids? And how come—think about this a long, long time, will you?—that eighty-six of those kids were of the same size and apparently of the same age? The Xauen skeletons came out of nine digs, close together both in location and age. And of the total of one hundred and one skeletons, eighty-six of them are of four-year-old kids. Sure the Xauens are modern man! Sure they are ourselves chin to chin. But eighty-six four-year-old kids out of a hundred and one people is not a modern proportion.”

  “You explain it then, Minden. I suppose that your paper attempts to. Oh, scatter-boned ancestors! Here come the religious nuts!”

  Drs. Dismas and Minden had been sitting in the open parkland in campesino chairs, in their own fine neighborhood between Doolen’s Mountain and the lower brushland. Dr. Dismas drew a hog-nosed pistol from under his arm at the sight of the nuts who had shuffled up that way several times before.

  “Be off!” Dismas barked as the nuts crowded and shuffled up closer from the lower brushland. “There’s nothing around here you want. You’ve been here a dozen times with your silly questions.”

  “No, only three times,” the nut leader said. He was clean-shaven and short-haired in the old manner still affected by fanatics, and he had fool written in every line of him. “It’s a simple thing we seek,” the leader sniffled. “We only want to find the woman and kill her. I believe that you could help us find the woman.”

  “There is no woman here except my wife!” Dr. Dismas said angrily. “You have said yourselves that she isn’t the woman. Be gone now, and don’t come back here again.”

  “But everything that we know tells us that the woman is somewhere near this place,” the nut leader insisted. “She is the woman who will bear the weird seed.”

  “Oh, well, there are some w 10 say that my daughter Ginny is a weird seed. Be off now.”

  “We know Ginny. She comej down sometimes to mock us. Ginny is not the seed, but there is son ething of it about her. Ginny is born and already four years old. The *eed that we are seeking to kill is still in the womb. Are you sure that y my wife—”

  “Damnit, do you want a publi: pregnancy test? No, my wife is not!”

  Dr. Dismas shot a couple of t mes around the feet of the nut leader, and the whole gaggle of the nut i shuffled off again. “It is only a little thing we seek, to find and kill the woman,” they snuffled as they went.

  “They may be right, Dismas,” Dr. Minden said. “I’ve been expecting the weird seed myself. I believe that it may already have appeared several times, and such nuts have killed it several times. The contingent mutation can come unhinged at any time. It always could. And when it does, the human world can well pass away. But this time they won’t be able to find the woman to kill her.”

  “This is fishier than Edward’s Ichthyology, as we used to say in school. I begin to understand why you’re afraid of the reception that your paper might get. And you. as well as I, seem to have developed a little weird seed lately.”

  “Yes, my young and my older son are both acting most peculiarly lately, particularly in their relation to the Dismas family. My son Dall has been jilted by your daughter Agar, or is it the other way around? Or have they both been jilted ty your small daughter Ginny? As far as I can arrive at it, Ginny told them that that sort of stuff is out, no longer necessary, not even wanted on their parts. She is obsoleting them, she says.

  “And my four-year-old son Krios is about out of his mind over your Ginny. He is so advanced in some ways and so retarded in others. It seems as though he grew unevenly and then stopped growing. I worry about him.”

  “Yes, Ginny has acquired several more small boyfriends now. She says that you break the fort with a big ram and you break the ram at the same time and throw it away. And then you find better tools to take it over. I don’t know what she’s talking about. But Krios is jealous as only a passionate foui -year-old can be.”

  “Krios says that Ginny is bad and she made him bad. He says that he doesn’t know the words for the way they were bad, but that he will go to Hell for it.”

  “I had no idea that children were still taught about Hell.”

  “They aren’t. But they have either intuitive knowledge of the place, or a continuing childhood folk legend of it. Oh, here comes bad Ginny and her mother, and they both have that stubborn look on them. You have two strong women in your house, at least. I wish that Agar were; for my son Dall isn’t, and one of them should be.”

  Ginny and her mother Sally came hand in hand with the air of something needing to be settled.

  “I want to be fair about this, Father,” Ginny called solidly. “What I like about me is that I am always so fair.”

  “That’s also what I like about you, Ginny,” said Dr. Dismas, “and what is the argument?”

  “All I asked of Mother is that she make me three thousand seven hundred and eighty peanut-butter sandwiches. Isn’t that a fair request?”

  “I’m not sure that it is, Ginny,” Dr. Dismas said. “It would take you a long time to eat that many.”

  “Of course it will, twelve hundred and sixty days. But that makes only three a day for the time I have to stay hidden in my nest up in the rocks. I figured that out by myself without paper. A lot of kids that have been to school already can’t figure as well as I can.”

  “I know. A precocious daughter is a mixed blessing,” her father said.

  “Oh, Ginny, you’re going to get a paddling,” her mother said. “I made you three of them, and you said that you weren’t even hungry for them.”

  “Father, who is this woman who talks to me so brusquely?” Ginny demanded.

  “She is your mother, Ginny. You have been with her every day of your life and before. You have just come out of the house with her, and you still stand hand in hand with her.”

  “Funny I never saw her before,” Ginny said. “I don’t believe that this woman is my mother at all. Well, I will get my servants to make the sandwiches for me. Serpents kill you, woman!—Oh, no, no, nobody touches me like that!”

  Musical screaming! Wailing of a resonance too deep for so small an instrument, as Ginny was dragged of by her mother to get paddied. Howling to high Heaven, and the plainting of wild hogs and damned goblins!

  “She is in good voice,” Dr. Minden said. “When she speaks of her servants, she means your daughter Agar and my son Dall. It scares me, for I almost know what she means. It is eerie that two compatible young people say they will not marry because a four-year-old child forbids them to do it. It scares me still more when I begin to understand the mechanism at work.”

  “What is the mechanism, Minden?”

  “The mutational inhibitions. It’s quite a tangled affair. Do you remember the screaming monkeys of boondocks Rhodesia twenty years ago?”

  “Vaguely. Bothersome little destructive monkeys that had to be hunted down and killed—hunted down by a sort of religious crusade, as I remember it. Yes, a mutation, I suppose. A sudden wildness appearing in a species. What is the connection?”

  “Dismas, they were the first, the initial probe that failed. Others are on the way, and one of them will not fail. The story is that the religious crusaders said that no human child could be born while the howling monkeys flourished, for the monkeys themselves were human children. Well,
they were. Well, no, they weren’t children. And they weren’t human. But, in a way, they had been both. Or at least—”

  “Minden, do you know what you do mean?”

  “I hardly do, Dismas. Here come the ‘servants.’”

  Dall Minden and Agar Dismas drove up in a little roustabout car and stopped.

  “What is this nonsense I hear that you two are not going to get married?” Dr. Dismas demanded.

  “Not unless Ginny changes her mind, Father,” Agar said. “Oh, don’t ask us to explain it. We don’t understand it either.”

  “You are a pair of damned useless drones,” Dismas growled.

  “Don’t say that, Dismas,” Dr. Minden gasped. “Everything begins to scare me now. ‘Drones’ has a technical meaning in this case.”

  “Ginny has just suffered an ignominy past bearing.” Agar grinned. She was a nice pleasant girl. “Now she is sulking in her cave up in Doolen’s Mountain and has sent word for us to come at once.”

  “How has she sent word?” Dr. Dismas demanded. “You two have just driven up.”

  “Oh, don’t ask us to explain, Father. She sends us word when she wants us. We don’t understand it either. We’ll go up on foot,”

  “Where is all this going to end?” Dr. Dismas asked when the two grinning young drones had left them and were ambling up the mountain.

  “I don’t know, Dismas,” Minden told him. “But I believe it may as well begin with a verse:

  Salamanders do it, Tadpoles and newts do it. Why can’t me and you do it?

  “It’s a verse that the four-year-olds have been chanting, and you may not be tuned in on them. And the peculiar thing is that the salamanders and newts and tadpoles are doing it now, more than ever before. It’s worldwide. See Higgleton’s recent paper if you don’t take my word for it.”

  “Oh, great blithering biologists! What are the squigglers doing more than ever before?”

  “Engaging in neotic reproduction, of course. In many pocket areas, tadpoles have been reproducing as tadpoles for several years now, and the adult frog species is disappearing. There have always been cases of it, of course, but now it is becoming a pattern. The same is true of the newts and salamanders. And remember that all three are, like man, contingent mutations. But how do the four-year-old children know about it when it is still one of the best-kept secrets of the biologists?…„ Here comes my wife. Is it more family trouble, Clarinda?,,

  “Oh, Krios has locked himself in the bathroom, and he won’t come out or answer. He’s been acting abominable all morning. Have you that emergency key you made?”

  “Here. Now get the boy out, whip him gently but painfully, then explain to him that we love him very much and that his troubles are our troubles. Then get dinner. This family here never eats, unless it is peanut butter sandwiches, and has not thought to ask me to dine with them. Get back next door and with it, Clarinda, and stop bubbling.”

  “There is something really bothering Krios,” Clarinda Minden bubbled yet, but she got herself back next door.

  “Where shall we take it up, Dismas?” Doctor Minden asked. “With the howling monkeys of boondocks Rhodesia who may once have been human children? But nobody believes that. With the neotic salamanders and newts and pollywogs? With the Xauens who were either our grandparents or our grandchildren? Or with ourselves?”

  “Roost on the Xauens a vhile,” Dr. Dismas said. “You didn’t quite finish your screed on then .”

  “Humans descend from the Xauens. Australopithecus, no. Sinan-thropus, no. They were creati res of another line. But Neanderthal, Cro-Magnon, Grimaldi and oi rselves are all of one species, and we descend from the Xauens. It i: not true, however, that we have only one hundred and one skeletor s of the Xauens. We have more than twenty thousand of them, bu; most of them are called Ouezzane monkeys.”

  “Minden, you’re crazy.”

  “I am talking about the th ee-foot-tall, big-headed running monkeys who were mature and fu 1 grown at four years of age and very old at fourteen. They threw a ew sports, steers and freemartins, who passed the puberty age without effect and continued to grow. They were gangling drones, servants of the active species, and of course sterile. They were the one in < me hundred occurrence and of no importance. And one day they bred, set up a mutational inhibition against the normal; and mankind—the privileged mutation—was born.

  “The Ouezzane monkeys, of whom the Xauens were the transitional state, were the same as the howling monkeys of boondocks Rhodesia—going in the other direction. They had no speech, they had no fire, and they made no tcols. Then one morning they were the Xauens, and the next morning they were humans. They passed all the highly developed apes in an instant. They were the privileged mutation, which is not, I believs, permanent.

  “Dismas, the one hundred and one recognized Xauen skeletons that we possess are not of ninety-six children (eighty-six of them apparent four-year-olds), three adolescents, and two adults. They are of ten infants and children, eighty-six adults, two mutants and three filial-twos.

  “Let’s take it from the flank. A few years ago, a biologist amused himself by making a table of heartbeat life lengths. All the mammals but one, he found, live about the same number of heartbeats, the longer-living species having correspondingly slower heartbeats. But one species, man, lives four or five times as long as he should by this criterion. I forget whether the biologist implied that this makes man a contingent species living on borrowed time. I do imply it. In any case, since the biologist was also involved in science fiction, his implications were not taken seriously.

  “From the other flank. Even before Freud there were studies made of false puberty, the sudden hot interest and activity that appears about age four and then goes away for another ten years. It’s been many times guessed that back in our ancestry our true puberty was at such an early age.”

  “Minden, no species can change noticeably in less than fifty thousand years.”

  “Dismas, it can change in between three and nine months, depending on the direction traveled. Here they come back! Well, drones, did you settle Ginny down? Where are you going now?”

  Agar Dismas and Dall Minden had sauntered down from Doolen’s Mountain.

  “We’re going to get four hundred and seventy-three loaves of bread and four hundred and seventy-three jars of peanut butter,” Agar said rather nervously.

  “Yes, Ginny says to use Crispy-Crusty bread,” Dall Minden detailed. “She says it has sixteen slices to a loaf, so we can make eight sandwiches to a loaf and to a jar. There will be four sandwiches left over, and Ginny says we can have them for our work. She’s going to stay in her cave for twelve hundred and sixty days. She says it will take that long to get her thing going good so nobody can bust it up. I think she’s a numerologist at heart. This is going to take more than four hundred dollars. That’s more than Agar and myself have saved up together. Ginny says to do it, though, even if we have to steal the money for it. And she says to be quick about it.”

  “Here come the religious nuts again,” Doctor Dismas said. “I may have to kill one of the fools if they keep coming back.”

  “They won’t come here this time,” Agar said. “They’ll prowl Doolen’s Mountain from now on. They know it’ll be there. But I don’t think they’ll kill Ginny. They don’t understand what she is. They didn’t understand the first time either; they didn’t guess that it could possibly be one of the big ones. We are all hoping that they will kill me and be satisfied and think that they have done it. They will find me there where they think the woman should be, and that may fool them. Well, tootle! We have to hurry with everything or Ginny will be angry.”

  “No species can count itself secure that has not endured for ten million years,” said Dr. Minden. “We still hear the old saying that evolution is irreversible. Hogwash! I have myself studied seven species of hogs washed away before one endured. The human race is so new that it has no stability. The majority of species do not survive, and we have lived only one tenth of t
he span that would tilt the odds for survival in our favor. Even the species that finally survive will commonly revert several times before acquiring stability. We could revert at any time.”

  “Revert to what?”

  “To what we were, to what we still are basically, little three-foot-high, big-headed, howling monkeys, without tools, and with only a fifth of our present life span.”

  “Reversions are like cosmic disasters, Minden. They take a few thousand years to happen, and by that time we’ll be gone.”

  “No, this can happen instantly, Dismas, by a single neotic conception. And then it becomes the norm by the mechanics of mutational inhibition. The reversion will inhibit the old normal. We have already seen that inhibition at work.”

  The very stones crying out like demented rooks! Bushes barking like coyotes! Green-colored yowling, and laughter that sang like a bandsaw. And Ginny was in the middle of them again.

  She was the howlingest kid ever pupped.

  “I don’t think that I will talk any more after today, Father,” she said solemnly after she had cut off her other noises. “I think I’ll just forget how. Ill just holler and hoot and carry on. That’s more fun anyhow.

  “Why aren’t my servants back with my provisions? They’ve had almost time to get back if they did everything at breakneck speed and had good luck. They might have had to go to more than one place to get that much bread and peanut butter, though. I doubt if I’ll eat it. I just want to have it if I need it, and I wanted to teach them obedience. I’ll probably start to eat meadow mice and ground squirrels tomorrow.

  “Here comes Mrs. Minden crying over that Krios. What’s the good of that?”