by Dave Duncan
His enemies! Athena would not think of a boy as it. And she would not treat an animal like that. “Release him!” she snapped. “We came here to talk with him, not to remove his appendix.”
“It has no appendix.” Eryngo wore medical insignia on her white tunic, but she would earn no medals for bedside manner. She must have cognized a command, because the prisoner’s manacles and anklets clicked open. “I’m leaving the containment field on. Be careful! It is dangerous and will attack without warning.”
The boy sat up and swung his legs over the side of the table. He scowled at the newcomers.
He was repellently ugly. His head seemed almost pear shaped, too large above the eyes, tapering down to a small mouth and a tiny chin almost buried in an oversized heap of neck. All his proportions were wrong: shoulders narrow, torso stringy with ribs showing, limbs skinny and too short, hands and feet too long. His eyes were too big, although largely hidden by epicanthic folds, and his nose too flat. His hair was brown, but short and smooth, more like animal fur than human hair.
Ugly, yes, but not truly weird. Yet after a moment Athena wondered whether her imagination was just trying to see what it expected to see. He was human, if grotesque.
“Surely the field is enough defense?” Gownsman Oxindole protested.
“I’ll knock his head off if he tries anything with me,” Linn said.
Eryngo sighed. “I doubt that. Yesterday a lab technician got too close to the shock fence. The specimen reached one hand through and crushed his larynx with its fingers. He survived but needs extensive reconstruction.”
The visitors all stepped back a pace. The youth made an obscene gesture.
“How can it reach through a shock fence?” Linn said. “That would fry every nerve in its arm.”
“We don’t know yet,” Eryngo said. “It has such an astonishing resistance to pain that we think it can block off sections of its spinal column. It won’t say. It won’t tell us anything. It is resistant to veritaynine. It said nothing under a full adult dose. We went up to a quadruple dose, and that just put it into shock. We suspect it has that response under conscious control, too.” She sighed again. “We tried using a brain scan while we interrogated it with pain as negative reinforcement, but frankly its brain structure is so bizarre that we can’t be certain it still wasn’t slipping lies past us.”
“I’m sure I would, if I were in his place,” Athena said. She brought one of the departed guards’ chairs over to the shock fence, close enough to make her skin prickle. When she sat down, the prisoner was higher than she, which was good. She did not offer any hypocritical smiles. “What’s your name?”
He pouted for a while to show he was not scared of her, but he did not speak.
“We call it Nine,” the doctor said.
“Why Nine?” Millie demanded from a safer distance.
“One of my technicians named it. We needed a name so we could give it orders,” she added weakly.
“They said seven was a lucky number,” the boy said, in adult register. He seemed to speak Pocosin without an accent, although that was hard to tell through a translator.
“That’s good!” Eryngo sounded enthusiastic for the first time. “It doesn’t usually speak without enforcement.”
“I’m not surprised,” Athena said. “My name’s Athena, not that you care. What’s yours?”
“Umandral.”
Eryngo made a noise indicating mild surprise.
“Umandral, we were brought here from Ayne as a commission to confirm STARS’s claim that you are not human. Is that true?”
The boy drew back his lips to display his teeth.
“It has no canines,” Eryngo explained.
“STARS claims that you came from Malacostraca?” Athena prompted.
Silence.
“How many of you came?”
Umandral ignored the question, staring sulkily at the bystanders. Millie and Skerry had found chairs; the rest were just gazing in fascinated horror at the non-boy.
“It won’t answer that,” Eryngo moaned. “Why don’t I show you around it? Drop your shorts, Nine.”
Scowl.
“Do I have to use the writhe again?”
“You will not use the writhe while we are here,” Linn said emphatically. “Tell us what you’ve learned.”
“Well, its esophagus is in front of its trachea. It can drink and breathe at the same time. You can probably see—put your head back, Nine. You could see if it would cooperate.”
Incredulously, Athena said, “You mean he has one throat for speaking and another for eating?”
Eryngo looked relieved that some information was getting through. “Exactly. It can never choke on food, the way we can.”
“Is that true, Umandral?”
The boy dropped his feet to the floor and stepped right up to the shock fence, certainly close enough to hurt a human, and near enough to make her nervous. She tried not to show that.
He opened his mouth at her and said, “Ahhhhh!”
Athena looked away quickly. “Thank you.”
He stayed close to the barrier, like an animal peering through the bars of its cage. Or a youth showing how tough he was.
“I’ll show you some images,” Eryngo said. “If you’ll just look at the holo…” A three-dimensional image of a naked boy floated in the lab, then the flesh peeled away, leaving only bones. “On cursory inspection it appears quite human, of course. The skull is larger than human and has an additional blood supply to the brain. Brain size is 1,822 milliliters, almost 500 above adult human mean. Note that it has no incipient wisdom teeth to impact.”
Athena said. “Ayne took wisdom teeth out of the genome ages ago. Most worlds did.”
Glaum said, “But the earliest cuckoos had them. Carry on, Doctor.”
“And no canine teeth, either,” Eryngo said. “Just incisors for cutting, plus the standard molars and pre-molars for grinding.”
“What’s wrong with canine teeth?” Millie demanded.
The boy said, “I don’t have to tear my meat. Do you?”
Eryngo sniffed. “And a smaller dentition leaves more room in the skull for brain. Most of the cranial sinuses have been adapted to make a cooling system. Like earlier cuckoos, it has dispensed with many vestigial and redundant parts. Appendix, coccyx—and the little toe. Only four toes, as you can see.” Her tone quickened. “But its germ plasm! The DNA is quite incredible and will need years of study. Almost forty per cent of Nine’s genome is not terrestrial standard! We have identified some Malacostracan genes, both human constructs and nonhuman inserts, but at least fifteen percent is totally new. That’s why we have named it Homo chimericus. Because most of the inserts seem to control brain function, we are fairly sure that they come from some non-human intelligent species!”
Millie muttered, “Oh, no!” while the other commissioners exchanged shocked glances.
Athena tried to imagine what Ratty Turnsole would make of that news and her mind reeled. The mere suggestion that the cuckoos might be sent by unknown intelligent aliens would cause a huge jump in sector paranoia.
Eryngo seemed to take silence as assent. “Chromosome Three, for example—”
“Means nothing to us,” Athena said. “Gownsman Skerry, is your department up to date on this?”
Slouched on a chair in a corner, Skerry looked sicker than ever. Solan hovered anxiously nearby.
“Most of it. Tell them about its eyes.”
“Ah! Its eyes!” The hologram morphed into an eyeball as big as a man’s head, floating like a balloon. “Our eyes, original terrestrial mammalian eyes, are badly designed. The nerves from the rods and cones run on the inside of the retina before combining into the optic nerve and going out to the brain. Nine’s are wired on the outside, see here? Nine will never suffer from detached retinas, and its vision is not obstructed by the nerves, so it has no blind spot. Even other cuckoos had not achieved that.
“And Nine’s immune system is just amazing! According t
o STARS data, the earliest well recorded cuckoo devoted twice as many genes for its immune system as we do. Nine has at least twice as many again. We injected two cc’s of cultured neritic fever virus from Disgavel, and in less than an hour its bloodstream was totally clear.”
Athena squirmed. “It didn’t make him sick?”
“Only briefly.”
“It makes me sick!” Millie Backet said hotly.
“We’ll be able to use some of this for human benefit,” the doctor said. “And some of its adaptations to Pock’s environment are definitely non-standard. I can’t wait to see what we’ll find when we start the invasive tests and dissection.”
Athena felt ready to start some dissecting of her own. What was so terrible about having two throats? A very sensible modification. “Why don’t you treat him as a human being?”
“Because it isn’t!” Glaum said.
“An intelligent being then,” Athena insisted. She smiled at Umandral as she would at a human boy. “You are intelligent, aren’t you?”
“No,” he said. “Or I wouldn’t have let a troop of monkeys capture me.”
“Human or not,” Linn said, “Nine is evidence and will go back to Ayne with us.”
Glaum laughed. “You won’t want to do that! You still don’t understand how dangerous it is.”
“One adolescent boy? Even if he escaped, what could he do?
“That’s what we’re about to show you. Drop your pants, thing.”
The alien showed his teeth again. “Make me, fat man!”
Glaum held out a hand to the sergeant. “Give me the writhe.”
“Oh, stop it!” Athena said. The STARS chairman had refused the boy’s challenge, and for the first time she realized that Nine could not possibly be human. If he were, the chairman would have snatched at an excuse to hit him. He was that sort of man, yet he was hiding behind the shock fence.
The cuckoo sneered. “Ask them how many of them it took to arrest me.” He went back to the table and jumped up to sit there as before, leaning on his weedy arms.
“Six,” Eryngo said, “adult men, armed with writhes. It killed one and injured three. When they brought it in, the specimen had a black eye, two loose teeth, some internal bleeding, and four cracked ribs. In two days all that damage had healed.”
“He’s a superman?” Millie squeaked.
“We’re trying to tell you,” Glaum barked. “It is not man at all. Explain, Doctor.”
Eryngo hesitated. “But the agreement we signed—”
“I waive the terms in this case. STARS,” he explained to the others, “has always held back some information about the cuckoos, mostly because it would cause panic. I ask you to keep this to yourself.”
“I make no commitment,” Andre said. “We shall include all relevant data in our reports.”
Glaum shrugged his blubbered shoulders. “Then I will rely on your discretion. Cuckoos are hermaphrodite. We believe it can change sex at will, or with minimal medicinal assistance. The reason I wanted you to see this thing’s crotch is that it has no external scrotum. Tell them, Doctor.”
Eryngo’s smile lit up her drab face. “As you all know,” she said eagerly, “human sex chromosomes can be X or Y. Males have both an X and a Y. Females have two X’s, although in their somatic cells one of them is suppressed into an inactive state called a Barr body. Each of Nine’s cells has a Y and an X, and also a Barr body! That implies three chromosomes, YXX. In humans, that condition is the well-known aneuploidy that causes Klinefelter syndrome!”
She frowned at her audience’s blank looks. “In Klinefelter syndrome the subject is male but is usually sterile and has other abnormalities. Starting with the Ghouls that infested Sweven, in the New Hope Sector, cuckoos have solved those problems. According to STARS’s historical data, each individual suppresses one of the three genes in somatic cells, so that one-third of them are seeming females and two-thirds are seeming males. We shall need to catch a pseudo-female before we can work out how the procreation is managed between the two sexes, but it is likely that meiosis discards one chromosome in the pseudo-male partner and two in the pseudo-female, to leave three in the zygote.”
“So they have sex,” Linn said dryly. “You didn’t bring any cuckoo girls along, sonny?”
Behind him, Skerry muttered, “They must have done. The DNA investigation of the probe was not designed to find such anomalies.”
Umandral showed his incisors. “I’m going to use yours.”
“I’m getting to that,” the doctor said. “The pseudo-male penis can double as an ovipositor.”
“Please put that in simple language,” said Brother Andre, glowering, “although I am sure it will sound even worse.”
“What it means,” Glaum boomed, “is that if this thing is allowed to grow up, it will start impregnating human women, inserting fertilized eggs into them.”
Nine smirked.
“That does appear to be correct.” Eryngo nodded at the visitors’ incredulity. “It has twinned genitalia, male and female. Human embryos have potential to develop both, you know—Müllerian ducts and Wölffian ducts—but genes on the Y chromosome cause the Wölffian ducts to grow into male sex organs and the Müllerian ducts to be absorbed. Without a Y chromosome the reverse happens, Wölffian ducts are absorbed, and Müllerian ducts become the female vagina and so on. This Changeling grew both. Let me show you.”
The hologram became a floating, oversized pelvis. “Notice how wide his hips are? The females must need very wide birth canals to pass those heads, and this specimen may at times be female.” The image began adding soft organs at her cognition. “These are Nine’s internal testicles, so it could mate sexually with a pseudo-female, which would have a uterus. These organs are ovaries and contain ova, but they connect to the vas deferens. Apparently when this specimen matures—if it were allowed to mature, I mean—it would be able to insert its own fertilized ova into the uterus of a human female. We’re not certain yet, but we think it could either accept sperm from another pseudo-male or self-fertilize the eggs. It’s a form of parasitism.”
“Great Mother preserve us!” Skerry said. “So it gets the best of both systems? It can reproduce sexually to avoid the perils of monoculture, but it can also reproduce itself asexually and parasitically!” He shuddered.
Eryngo said, “We assume that the pseudo-female can also reproduce either sexually or parthenogenetically, but we cannot be certain. It is the pseudo-males that are the immediate threat.”
Glaum was sneering. “The last communication ever received from Jibba claimed that the Soldier Ant cuckoos could even impregnate men. The parasite can insert its ova into any body cavity, even a stab wound. The embryo behaves like a parasitic fluke, burrowing into tissue until it finds a home with a good blood supply, like the liver. The fetus can be carried to term unless surgically removed.”
Millie Backet shrieked in horror. “But not born, surely?”
“Why not?” the doctor said. “All parasites use their hosts’ bodies and take over their chemistry; many alter their hosts’ behavior. When you catch a respiratory infection, the virus makes you cough so you will spread it. An infection spread in saliva will make its host more prone to bite. Some parasites drive their hosts to suicide or make them change sex. I would not be surprised if a wretch parasitized by one of these monsters did all he could to have his baby safely delivered.”
“Now think about concentration camps,” Glaum suggested. “And cages full of human brood stock. That’s where Pock’s World is heading if these monsters prevail. Do you still want to take this horror back to Ayne with you, Friend Linn? Suppose it escapes?”
“It is the work of Satan. Destroy it now.” Brother Andre spoke quietly, but his words were colder than outer space.
Doctor Eryngo said, “We have a lot of tests to run yet. A fortnight or two, and then we’ll sacrifice it and start dissecting.”
No one mentioned that she had only days to live, and Athena was reminded that they must no
t be bamboozled by the cuckoo freak into forgetting that STARS was the more immediate danger. STARS had its own agenda.
“How do you explain his Pocosin coloring?” she asked.
Eryngo said, “That’s a very easy chromosome splice, germline therapy. Can even be done on adults.”
Aha! That was interesting. “So we do not know for certain that Umandral was pre-adapted to Pock’s World in vitro? He could have been recruited less than a year ago and given genetic therapy?”
The doctor hesitated. “We have not catalogued all its adaptations yet. I need much more extensive DNA evidence before I could express an opinion.”
“It knows the answer,” Glaum said. “Were you born that color, thing?”
“Were you born that ugly, animal?”
“‘Animal?’” Athena repeated sadly. “You think you’re better, so you have to prove it by wiping us out?”
The boy turned his sneer on her. “Of course we are better. Infinitely better! You are the dregs of a billion years of evolutionary tinkering, survival of the least-bad. We are conscious design, the best possible. You will kill me, but I have a billion siblings to carry on the struggle. If you want a truce, we will sign a truce, and when the time is ripe we will ignore it, because we know that we are the future and you are the primitive animal stock from which we sprang. We cannot recognize you as equals. The idea is laughable.”
“Our ancestors created yours,” Athena said. “The creator must be greater than his creation.”
“No! It is true that the human Diallelon was the first to seek to improve your botched genetics, but my ancestors took over the work and perfected it. We are a self-made species. We will bury you.”
“You haven’t yet,” Glaum said. “STARS will burn Pock’s World and you with it.” The big man’s brutal features and Nine’s childish ones held matching hatred. The human race had fought its way to the top of the food chain long ago and would not accept the novelty of genuine competition.