“The sea is about the same,” Eunice said. “I’ve found some of the larger simple metazoans—jellyfish and so on— and some Palinuridae almost as big as lobsters. But it’s normal to find salt-water species running larger than fresh-water. And there’s the usual plankton and nanno-plankton population.”
“In short,” Chatvieux said, “we’ll survive if we fight.”
“Wait a minute,” la Ventura said. “You’ve just finished telling me that we wouldn’t survive. And you were talking about us, the seven of us here, not about the genus Man, because we don’t have our germ-cell banks any more.”
“We don’t have the banks. But we ourselves can contribute germ-cells, Paul. I’ll get to that in a moment.” Chatvieux turned to Saltonstall. “Martin, what would you think of taking to the sea? We came out of it once.”
“No good,” Saltonstall said immediately. “I like the idea, but I don’t think this planet ever heard of Swinburne, or Homer either. Looking at it as a colonization problem alone, as if we weren’t involved in it ourselves, I wouldn’t give you an Oc dollar for epi oinopa ponton. The evolutionary pressure there is too high; the competition from other species is prohibitive; seeding the sea should be the last thing we attempt. The colonists wouldn’t learn a thing before they’d be gobbled up.”
“Why?” la Ventura said. Once more, the death in his stomach was becoming hard to placate.
“Eunice, do your sea-going Coelenterates include anything like the Portuguese man-of-war?”
The ecologist nodded.
“There’s your answer, Paul,” Saltonstall said. “The sea is out. It’s got to be fresh water, where the competition is less formidable and there are more places to hide.”
“We can’t compete with a jellyfish?” la Ventura asked.
“No, Paul,” Chatvieux said. “Not with one that formidable. The panatropes make adaptations, not gods. They take human germ-cells—in this case, our own, since our bank was wiped out in the crash—and modify them genetically toward those of creatures who can live in any reasonable environment. The result will be manlike, and intelligent. It usually shows the donors’ personality patterns, too, since the modifications are usually made in the morphology, not mind, of the resulting individual.
“But we can’t transmit memory. The adapted man is worse than a child in his new environment. He has no history, no techniques, no precedents, not even a language. In the usual colonization project, the seeding teams more or less take him through elementary school before they leave the planet to him, but we won’t survive long enough to give such instruction. We’ll have to design our colonists with plenty of built-in protections and locate them in the most favorable environment possible, so that some of them will survive learning by experience alone.”
The pilot thought about it, but nothing occurred to him which did not make the disaster seem realer and more intimate with each passing second. Joan Heath moved slightly closer to him. “One of the new creatures can have my personality pattern, but it won’t be able to remember being me. Is that right?”
“That’s right. In the present situation we’ll probably make our colonists haploid, so that some of them, perhaps many, will have a heredity traceable to you alone. There may be just the faintest of residuums of identity—panatropy’s given us some data to support the old Jungian notion of ancestral memory. But we’re all going to die on Hydrot, Paul, as self-conscious persons. There’s no avoiding that. Somewhere we’ll leave behind people who behave as we would, think and feel as we would, but who won’t remember us—or the Earth.”
The pilot said nothing more.
“Saltonstall, what do you recommend as a form?”
The panatropist pulled reflectively at his nose. “Webbed extremities, of course, with thumbs and big toes heavy and thornlike for defense until the creature has had a chance to learn. Smaller external ears, and the eardrum larger and closer to the outer end of the ear-canal. We’re going to have to reorganize the water-conservation system, I think; the glomerular kidney is perfectly suitable for living in fresh water, but the business of living immersed in fresh water, inside and out, for a creature with a salty inside means that the osmotic pressure inside is going to be higher than outside, so that the kidneys are going to have to be pumping virtually all the time. Under the circumstances we’d best step up production of urine, and that means the antidiuretic function of the pituitary gland is going to have to be abrogated.”
“What about respiration?”
“Hmm,” Saltonstall said. “I suppose book-lungs, like some of the arachnids have. They can be supplied by intercostal spiracles. They’re gradually adaptable to atmosphere-breathing, if our colonist ever decides to come out of the water. Just to provide for that possibility, I’d suggest retaining the nose, maintaining the nasal cavity as a part of the otological system, but cutting off the cavity from the larynx with a membrane of cells that are supplied with oxygen by direct irrigation, rather than by the respiratory system. Such a membrane wouldn’t survive for many generations, once the creature took to living out of the water even for part of its life time; it’d go through two or three generations as an amphibian, and then one day it’d suddenly find itself breathing through its larynx again.
“Also, Dr. Chatvieux, I’d suggest that we have it adopt sporulation. As an aquatic animal, our colonist is going to have an indefinite life-span, but we’ll have to give it a breeding cycle of about six weeks to keep up its numbers during the learning period; so there’ll have to be a definite break of some duration in its active year. Otherwise it’ll hit overpopulation before it’s learned to cope with it.”
“Also, it’d be better if our colonists could winter over inside a good, hard shell,” Eunice Wagner added in agreement. “So sporulation’s the obvious answer. Many other microscopic creatures have it.”
“Microscopic?” Phil said incredulously.
“Certainly,” Chatvieux said, amused. “We can’t very well crowd a six-foot man into a two-foot puddle. But that raises a question. We’ll have tough competition from the rotifers, and some of them aren’t strictly microscopic; for that matter even some of the protozoa can be seen with the naked eye, just barely, with dark-field illumination. I don’t think your average colonist should run much under 250 microns. Give them a chance to slug it out.”
“I was thinking of making them twice that big.”
“Then they’d be the biggest animals in their environment,” Eunice Wagner pointed out, “and won’t ever develop any skills. Besides, if you make them about rotifer size, it will give them an incentive for pushing out the castle-building rotifers, and occupying the castles.”
Chatvieux nodded. “All right, let’s get started. While the panatropes are being calibrated, the rest of us can put our heads together on leaving a record for these people. We’ll micro-engrave the record on a set of corrosion-proof metal leaves, of a size our colonists can handle conveniently. We can tell them, very simply, what happened, and plant a few suggestions that there’s more to the universe than their puddles. Some day they may puzzle it out.”
“Question,” Eunice Wagner said. “Are we going to tell them they’re microscopic? I’m opposed to it. It may saddle their entire early history with a gods-and-demons mythology that they’d be better off without.”
“Yes, we are,” Chatvieux said; and la Ventura could tell by the change in the tone of his voice that he was speaking now as their senior on the expedition. “These people will be of the race of men, Eunice. We want them to win their way back into the community of men. They are not toys, to be protected from the truth forever in a fresh-water womb.”
“Besides,” Saltonstall observed, “they won’t get the record translated at any time in their early history. They’ll have to develop a written language of their own, and it will be impossible for us to leave them any sort of Rosetta Stone or other key. By the time they can decipher the truth, they should be ready for it.”
“I’ll make that official,” Venezuelos s
aid unexpectedly.
And then, essentially, it was all over. They contributed the cells that the panatropes would need. Privately, la Ventura and Joan Heath went to Chatvieux and asked to contribute jointly; but the scientist said that the microscopic men were to be haploid, in order to give them a minute cellular structure, with nuclei as small as Earthly rickettsiae, and therefore each person had to give germ-cells individually—there would be no use for zygotes. So even that consolation was denied them: in death they would have no children, but be instead as alone as ever.
They helped, as far as they could, in the text of the message which was to go on the metal leaves. They had their personality patterns recorded. They went through the motions. Already they were beginning to be hungry, but there was nothing on Hydrot big enough to eat.
After la Ventura had set his control board to rights—a useless gesture, but a habit he had been taught to respect, and which in an obscure way made things a little easier to bear—he was out of it. He sat by himself at the far end of the rock ledge, watching Tau Ceti go redly down.
After a while Joan Heath came silently up behind him, and sat down too. He took her hand. The glare of the red sun was almost extinguished now, and together they watched it go, with la Ventura, at least, wondering somberly which nameless puddle was to be his Lethe.
He never found out, of course. None of them did.
~ * ~
Old Shar set down the thick, ragged-edged metal plate at last, and gazed instead out the window of the castle, apparently resting his eyes on the glowing green-gold obscurity of the summer waters. In the soft fluorescence which played down upon him, from the Noc dozing impassively in the groined vault of the chamber, Lavon could see that he was in fact a young man. His face was so delicately formed as to suggest that it had not been many seasons since he had first emerged from his spore.
But of course there had been no real reason to have expected an old man. All the Shars had been referred to traditionally as “old” Shar. The reason, like the reasons for everything else, had been forgotten, but the custom had persisted. The adjective at least gave weight and dignity to the office—that of the center of wisdom of all the people, as each Lavon had been the center of authority.
The present Shar belonged to the generation XVI, and hence would have to be at least two seasons younger than Lavon himself. If he was old, it was only in knowledge.
“Lavon, I’m going to have to be honest with you,” Shar said at last, still looking out of the tall, irregular window. “You’ve come to me at your maturity for the secrets on the metal plates, just as your predecessors did to mine. I can give some of them to you—but for the most part, I don’t know what they mean.”
“After so many generations?” Lavon asked, surprised. “Wasn’t it Shar III who first found out how to read them?”
The young man turned and looked at Lavon with eyes made dark and wide by the depths into which they had been staring. “I can read what’s on the plates, but most of it seems to make no sense. Worst of all, the plates are incomplete. You didn’t know that? They are. One of them was lost in a battle during the final war with the Eaters, while these castles were still in their hands.”
“What am I here for, then?” Lavon said. “Isn’t there anything of value on the remaining plates? Do they really contain ‘the wisdom of the Creators’, or is that myth?”
“No. No, it’s true,” Shar said slowly, “as far as it goes.”
He paused, and both men turned and gazed at the ghostly creature which had appeared suddenly outside the window. Then Shar said gravely, “Come in, Para.”
The slipper-shaped organism, nearly transparent except for the thousands of black-and-silver granules and frothy bubbles which packed its interior, glided into the chamber and hovered, with a muted whirring of cilia. For a moment it remained silent, probably speaking telepathically to the Noc floating in the vault, after the ceremoifious fashion of all the protos. No human had ever intercepted one of these colloquies, but there was no doubt about their reality; humans had used protos for long-range communication for generations.
Then the Para’s cilia buzzed once more. Each separate hair-like process vibrated at an independent, changing rate; the resulting sound waves spread through the water, intermodulating, reinforcing or cancelling each other. The aggregate wave-front, by the time it reached human ears, was eerie but recognizable human speech.
“We are arrived, according to the custom.”
“And welcome,” said Shar. “Lavon, let’s leave this matter of the plates for a while, until you hear what Para has to say; that’s a part of the knowledge Lavons must have as they come into their office, and it comes before the plates. I can give you some hints of what we are. First Para has to tell you something about what we aren’t.”
Lavon nodded, willingly enough, and watched the proto as it settled gently to the surface of the hewn table at which Shar had been sitting. There was in the entity such a perfection and economy of organization, such a grace and surety of movement, that he could hardly believe in his own new-won maturity. Para, like all the protos, made him feel unfinished.
“We know that in this universe there is logically no place for man,” the gleaming, now immobile cylinder upon the table droned abruptly. “Our memory is the common property of all our races. It reaches back to a time when there were no such creatures as men here, nor any even remotely like men. It remembers also that once upon a day there were men here, suddenly, and in some numbers. Their spores littered the bottom; we found the spores only a short time after our season’s Awakening, and inside them we saw the forms of men, slumbering.
“Then men shattered their spores and emerged. At first they seemed helpless, and the Eaters devoured them by scores, as in those days they devoured anything that moved. But that soon ended. Men were intelligent, active. And they were gifted with a trait, a character, possessed by no other creature in this world. Not even the savage Eaters had it. Men organized us to exterminate the Eaters, and therein lay the difference. Men had initiative. We have the word now, which you gave us, and we apply it, but we still do not know what the thing is that it labels.”
“You fought beside us,” Lavon said.
“Gladly. We would never have thought of that war by ourselves, but it was good and brought good. Yet we wondered. We saw that men were poor swimmers, poor walkers, poor crawlers, poor climbers. We saw that men were formed to make and use tools, a concept we still do not understand, for so wonderful a gift is largely wasted in this universe, and there is no other. What good are tool-useful members such as the hands of men? We do not know. It seems plain that so radical a thing should lead to a much greater rulership over the world than has, in fact, proven to be possible for men.”
Lavon’s head was spinning. “Para, I had no notion that you people were philosophers.”
“The protos are old,” Shar said. He had again turned to look out the window, his hands locked behind his back. “They aren’t philosophers, Lavon, but they are remorseless logicians. Listen to Para.”
“To this reasoning there could be but one outcome,” the Para said. “Our strange ally, Man, was like nothing else in this universe. He was and is unfitted for it. He does not belong here; he has been—adopted. This drives us to think that there are other universes besides this one, but where these universes might lie, and what their properties might be, it is impossible to imagine. We have no imagination, as men know.”
Was the creature being ironic? Lavon could not tell. He said slowly: “Other universes? How could that be true?”
“We do not know,” the Para’s uninfected voice hummed.
Shar had resumed sitting on the window sill, clasping his knees, watching the come and go of dim shapes in the lighted gulf. “It is quite true,” he said. “What is written on the plates makes it plain. I’ll tell you what they say.
“We were made, Lavon. We were made by men who were not as we are, but men who were our ancestors all the same. They were caught in s
ome disaster, and they made us, and put us here in our universe—so that, even though they had to die, the race of men would live.”
Lavon surged up from the woven spyrogyra mat upon which he had been sitting. “You must think I’m a fool!”
“No. You’re our Lavon; you have a right to know the facts. Make what you like of them.” Shar swung his webbed toes back into the chamber. “What I’ve told you may be hard to believe, but it seems to be so; what Para says backs it up. Out unfitness to live here is self-evident:
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