by Mike Resnick
“We doubt it.”
The men looked back at the elephants—except that they had evolved yet again. In fact, they had eliminated every physical feature for which they had ever been hunted. Tusks, ears, feet, tails, even scrotums, all had undergone enormous change. The elephants looked exactly like human beings, right down to their spacesuits and helmets.
The men, on the other hand, had burst out of their spacesuits (which had fallen away in shreds and tatters), sprouted tusks, and found themselves conversing by making rumbling noises in their bellies.
“This is very annoying,” said the men who were no longer men. “Now that we seem to have become elephants,” they continued, “perhaps you can tell us what elephants do?”
“Well,” said the elephants who were no longer elephants, “in our spare time, we create new ethical systems based on selflessness, forgiveness, and family values. And we try to synthesize the work of Kant, Descartes, Spinoza, Thomas Aquinas, and Bishop Barkley into something far more sophisticated and logical, while never forgetting to incorporate emotional and aesthetic values at each stage.”
“Well, we suppose that’s pretty interesting,” said the new elephants without much enthusiasm. “Can we do anything else?”
“Oh, yes,” the new spacemen assured them, pulling out their .550 Nitro Expresses and .475 Holland & Holland Magnums and taking aim. “You can die.”
“This can’t be happening! You yourselves were elephants yesterday!”
“True. But we’re men now.”
“But why kill us?” demanded the elephants.
“Force of habit,” said the men as they pulled their triggers.
Then, with nothing left to kill, the men who used to be elephants boarded their ship and went out into space, boldly searching for new life forms.
Neptune has seen many species come and go. Microbes have been spontaneously generated nine times over the eons. It has been visited by aliens 37 different times. It has seen 43 wars, five of them atomic, and the creation of 1,026 religions, none of which possessed any universal truths. More of the vast tapestry of galactic history has been played out on Neptune’s foreboding surface than any other world in Sol’s system.
Planets cannot offer opinions, of course, but if they could, Neptune would almost certainly say that the most interesting creatures it ever hosted were the elephants, whose gentle ways and unique perspectives remain fresh and clear in its memory. It mourns the fact that they became extinct by their own hand. Kind of.
A problem would arise when you asked whether Neptune was referring to the old-new elephants who began life as killers, or the new-old ones who ended life as killers.
Neptune just hates questions like that.
INTRODUCTION TO “OLD MCDONALD HAD A FARM”
Eric Flint
In the course of preparing this introduction to Mike Resnick’s “Old McDonald Had a Farm,” I decided to refresh my memory of some of the classic literary analysts. You know, towering figures in English letters such as Edmund Wilson and Northrop Frye. Not finding any help there, I plunged into the literary theorists of the elder days. Francis Bacon’s The Advancement of Learning; G. W F. Hegel’s The Philosophy of Fine Art; Pierre Corneille’s Of the Three Unities of Action, Time, and Place; and, of course, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment.
Still no help. So, I cast my search far and wide, scrutinizing more exotic texts. Bharata Muni’s Natya Shastra; Wang Changling’s A Discussion of Literature and Meaning; Abdullah ibn al-Mu’tazz’s Kitab al-Badi; and, of course, Plotinus’s On the Intellectual Beauty.
Nothing. The problem is that the writings of Mike Resnick…
How to put it?
He’s tricksy.
Yes, that’s it. Tricksy.
The classic analysts just don’t handle tricksy all that well. I get the feeling they think a tricksy author is …
How to put it?
A cheater.
Yes, that’s it. A cheater. A jackanape, a huckster, a swindler.
And…
They’re right.
You can’t find a better example of Resnick’s literary skullduggery than “Old McDonald Had a Farm.” It’s tricksy from all angles. The plot is tricksy, for starters. Just when you think you’ve figured out where it’s going, it skitters off somewhere else. Then, the characters are tricksy. You can’t exactly tell the good guys from the bad guys—a problem you never have reading Plato. Finally, there’s the moral of the story. I defy any right-thinking person to come up with an ethical summation that would satisfy Spinoza—or Mickey Spillane, for that matter.
Tricksy. Three hundred years ago, they’d have burned this guy.
One day we’re driving around, shopping, eating lunch out, whatever, and Carol keeps humming the opening two lines of this nursery rhyme over and over again. She doesn’t even know she’s doing it. Finally I ask her to please hum some other nursery rhyme, something she knows more than two lines to. And she asks what I want her to hum, and I can only think of one other nursery rhyme, and I say “How about Old MacDonald Had a Farm?”—and because I am a science fiction writer, the second the words left my lips I begin wondering what kind of farm Old MacDonald will have a century or two from now, and by the time we get home I have a story to tell. I write it, I sell it to Asimov’s, and it was a 2002 Hugo nominee for Best Short Story, as well as winning the Homer Award and topping the Asimov’s Readers Poll.
OLD MacDONALD HAD A FARM
I CAME TO PRAISE CAESAR, not to bury him.
Hell, we all did.
The farm spread out before us, green and rolling, dotted with paddocks and water troughs. It looked like the kind of place you wish your parents had taken you when you were a kid and the world was still full of wonders.
Well, the world may not have been full of wonders any longer, but the farm was. Problem was, they weren’t exactly the kind you used to dream of—unless you were coming down from a really bad acid trip.
The farm was the brainchild of Caesar Claudius MacDonald. He’d finally knuckled under to public pressure and agreed to show the place off to the press. That’s where I came in.
My name’s McNair. I used to have a first name, but I dumped it when I decided a one-word byline was more memorable. I work for the SunTrib, the biggest newstape in the Chicago area. I’d just broken the story that put Billy Cheever away after the cops had been after him for years. What I wanted for my efforts was my own syndicated column; what I got was a trip to the farm.
For a guy no one knew much about, one who almost never appeared in public, MacDonald had managed to make his name a household word in something less than two years. Even though one of his corporations owned our publishing company, we didn’t have much on him in our files, just what all the other news bureaus had: he’d earned a couple of Ph.D.s, he was a widower who by all accounts had been faithful to his wife, he’d inherited a bundle and then made a lot more on his own.
MacDonald was a Colorado native who emigrated to New Zealand’s South Island, bought a 40,000-hectare farm, and hired a lot of technicians over the years. If anyone wondered why a huge South Island farm didn’t have any sheep, they probably just figured he had worked out some kind of tax dodge.
Hell, that’s what I thought too. I mean, why else would someone with his money bury himself on the underside of the globe for half a lifetime?
Then, a week after his 66th birthday, MacDonald made The Announcement. That’s the year they had food riots in Calcutta and Rio and Manila, when the world was finding out that it was easier to produce eleven billion living human beings than to feed them.
Some people say he created a new life form. Some say he produced a hybrid (though not a single geneticist agrees with that.) Some—I used to snicker at them—say that he had delved into mysteries that Man Was Not Meant To Know.
According to the glowing little computer cube they handed out, MacDonald and his crew spent close to three decades manipulating DNA molecules in ways no one had ever thought of before. He
did a lot of trial and error work with embryos, until he finally came up with the prototype he sought. Then he spent a few more years making certain that it would breed true. And finally he announced his triumph to the world.
Caesar MacDonald’s masterpiece was the Butterball, a meat animal that matured at six months of age and could reproduce at eight months, with a four-week gestation period. It weighed 400 pounds at maturity, and every portion of its body could be consumed by Earth’s starving masses, even the bones.
That in itself was a work of scientific brilliance—but to me the true stroke of genius was the astonishing efficiency of the Butterballs’ digestive systems. An elephant, back when elephants still existed, would eat about 600 pounds of vegetation per day, but could only use about forty percent of it, and passed the rest as dung. Cattle and pigs, the most common meat animals prior to the Butterballs, were somewhat more efficient, but they, too, wasted a lot of expensive feed.
The Butterballs, on the other hand, utilized one hundred percent of what they were fed. Every pellet of food they ingested went right into building meat that was meticulously bio-engineered to please almost every palate. Anyway, that’s what the endless series of P.R. releases said.
MacDonald had finally consented to allow a handful of pool reporters to come see for themselves.
We were hoping for a look at MacDonald too, maybe even an interview with the Great Man. But when we got there, we learned that he had been in seclusion for months. Turned out he was suffering from depression, which I would have thought would be the last thing to affect humanity’s latest savior, but who knows what depresses a genius? Maybe, like Alexander, he wanted more worlds to conquer, or maybe he was sorry that Butterballs didn’t weigh 800 pounds. Hell, maybe he had just worked too hard for too long, or maybe he realized that he was a lot closer to the end of life than the beginning and didn’t like it much. Most likely, he just didn’t consider us important enough to bother with.
Whatever the reason, we were greeted not by MacDonald himself, but by a flack named Judson Cotter. I figured he had to work in P.R.; his hair was a little too perfect, his suit too up-to-the-minute, his hands too soft for him to have been anything else but a pitchman.
After he apologized for MacDonald’s absence, he launched into a worshipful biography of his boss, not deviating one iota from the holobio they’d shown us on the plane trip.
“But I suspect you’re here to see the farm,” he concluded after paraphrasing the bio for five minutes.
“No,” muttered Julie Balch from NyVid, “we came all this way to stand in this cold wet breeze and admire your clothes.”
A few of us laughed, and Cotter looked just a bit annoyed. I made a mental note to buy her a drink when the tour was done.
“Now let me see a show of hands,” said Cotter. “Has anyone here ever seen a live Butterball?”
Where did they find you? I thought. If we’d seen one, do you really think we’d have flown all the way to hell and gone just to see another?
I looked around. No one had raised a hand. Which figured. To the best of my knowledge, nobody who didn’t work for MacDonald had ever seen a Butterball in the flesh, and only a handful of photos and holos had made it out to the general public. There was even a rumor that all of MacDonald’s employees had to sign a secrecy oath.
“There’s a reason, of course,” continued Cotter smoothly. “Until the international courts verified Mr. MacDonald’s patent, there was always a chance that some unscrupulous individual or even a rogue nation would try to duplicate the Butterball. For that reason, while we have shipped and sold its meat all over the world, always with the inspection and approval of the local food and health authorities, we have not allowed anyone to see or examine the animals themselves. But now that the courts have ruled in our favor, we have opened our doors to the press.” Screaming bloody murder every step of the way, I thought.
“You represent the first group of journalists to tour the farm, but there will be many more, and we will even allow Sir Richard Perigrine to make one of his holographic documentaries here at the farm.” He paused. “We plan to open it to public tours in the next two or three years.”
Suddenly a bunch of bullshit alarms began going off inside my head.
“Why not sooner, now that you’ve won your case?” asked Julie, who looked like she was hearing the same alarms.
“We’d rather that you bring the initial stories and holos of the Butterballs to the public,” answered Cotter.
“That’s very generous of you,” she persisted. “But you still haven’t told us why.”
“We have our reasons,” he said. “They will be made apparent to you before the tour is over.”
My old friend Jake Monfried of the SeattleDisk sidled over to me. “I hope I can stay awake that long,” he said sardonically. “It’s all rubbish anyway.”
“I know,” I said. “Their rivals don’t even need the damned holos. Any high school kid could take a hunk of Butterball steak and come up with a clone.”
“So why haven’t they?” asked Julie.
“Because MacDonald’s got fifty lawyers on his payroll for every scientist,” answered Jake. He paused, his expression troubled. “Still, this guy’s lying to us—and it’s a stupid lie, and he doesn’t look that stupid. I wonder what the hell he’s hiding?”
We were going to have to wait to find out, because Cotter began leading us across a rolling green plain toward a barn. We circled a couple of ponds, where a few dozen birds were wading and drinking. The whole setting looked like something out of a Norman Rockwell or a Grandma Moses painting, it was so wholesome and innocent—and yet every instinct I had screamed at me that something was wrong here, that nothing could be as peaceful and tranquil as it appeared.
“To appreciate what Mr. MacDonald has done here,” said Cotter as we walked toward a large barn on a hillside, “you have to understand the challenge he faced. More than five billion men, women and children have serious protein deficiencies. Three billion of them are quite literally starving to death. And of course the price of meat—any meat—had skyrocketed to the point where only the very wealthy can afford it. So what he had to do was not only create an animal as totally, completely nutritious as the Butterball, he had to also create one that could mature and breed fast enough to meet mankind’s needs now and in the future.”
He stopped until a couple of laggards caught up with the group. “His initial work took the form of computer simulations. Then he hired a bevy of scientists and technicians who, guided by his genius, actually manipulated DNA to the point where the Butterballs existed not just on the screen and in Mr. MacDonald’s mind, but in the flesh.
“It took a few generations for them to breed true, but fortunately a Butterball generation is considerably less than a year. Mr. MacDonald then had his staff spend some years mass-producing Butterballs. They were designed to have multiple births, not single offspring, and average ten to twelve per litter—and all of our specimens were bred and bred again so that when we finally introduced the Butterball to the world two years ago, we felt confident that we could keep up with the demand without running out of Butterballs.”
“How many Butterballs have you got here?” asked the guy from Euro-com International, looking out across the rolling pastures and empty fields.
“We have more than two million at this facility,” came the answer. “Mr. MacDonald owns some twenty-seven farms here and in Australia, each as large or larger than this one, and each devoted to the breeding of Butterballs. Every farm has its own processing plant. We’re proud to note that while we have supplied food for billions, we’ve also created jobs for more than 80,000 men and women.” He paused to make sure we had recorded that number or were jotting it down.
“That many?” mused Julie.
“I know it seems like we sneaked up on the world,” said Cotter with a smile. “But for legal reasons we were compelled to keep the very existence of the Butterballs secret until we were ready to market them—and
once we did go public, we were processing, shipping, and selling hundreds of tons from each farm every month right from the start. We had to have all our people in place to do that.”
“If they give him the Nobel, he can afford to turn the money down,” Jake said wryly.
“I believe Mr. MacDonald is prepared to donate the money to charity should that happy event come to pass,” responded Cotter. He turned and began walking toward the barn, then stopped about eighty feet from of it.
“I must prepare you for what you’re going to—”
“We’ve already seen the holos,” interrupted the French reporter.
Cotter stared at him for a moment, then began again. “As I was saying, I must prepare you for what you’re going to hear.”
“Hear?” I repeated, puzzled.
“It was a fluke,” he explained, trying to look unconcerned and not quite pulling it off. “An accident. An anomaly. But the fact of the matter is that the Butterballs can articulate a few words, just as a parrot can. We could have eliminated that ability, of course, but that would have taken more experimentation and more time, and the world’s hungry masses couldn’t wait.”
“So what do they say?” asked Julie.
Cotter smiled what I’m sure he thought was a comforting smile. “They simply repeat what they hear. There’s no intelligence behind it. None of them has a vocabulary of more than a dozen words. Mostly they articulate their most basic needs.”
He turned to the barn and nodded to a man who stood by the door. The man pushed a button, and the door slid back.
The first big surprise was the total silence that greeted us from within the barn. Then, as they heard us approaching—we weren’t speaking, but coins jingle and feet scuff the ground—a voice, then a hundred, then a thousand, began calling out:
“Feed me!”
It was a cacophony of sound, not quite human, the words repeated again and again and again: “Feed me!”
We entered the barn, and finally got our first glimpse of the Butterballs. Just as in their holos, they were huge and roly-poly, almost laughably cute, looking more like oversized bright pink balloons than anything else. They had four tiny feet, good for balance but barely capable of locomotion. There were no necks to speak of, just a small pink balloon that swiveled atop the larger one. They had large round eyes with wide pupils, ears the size of small coins, two slits for nostrils, and generous mouths without any visible teeth.