Grave predictions : tales of mankind’s post-apocalyptic, dystopian and disastrous destiny

by Drew Ford

  The terms are strict and absolute; there may not even be a kind word spoken to the child.

  Often the young people go home in tears, or in a tearless rage, when they have seen the child and faced this terrible paradox. They may brood over it for weeks or years. But as time goes on they begin to realize that even if the child could be released, it would not get much good of its freedom: a little vague pleasure of warmth and food, no doubt, but little more. It is too degraded and imbecile to know any real joy. It has been afraid too long ever to be free of fear. Its habits are too uncouth for it to respond to humane treatment. Indeed after so long it would probably be wretched without walls about it to protect it, and darkness for its eyes, and its own excrement to sit in. Their tears at the bitter injustice dry when they begin to perceive the terrible justice of reality, and to accept it. Yet it is their tears and anger, the trying of their generosity and the acceptance of their helplessness, which are perhaps the true source of the splendor of their lives. Theirs is no vapid, irresponsible happiness. They know that they, like the child, are not free. They know compassion. It is the existence of the child, and their knowledge of its existence, that makes possible the nobility of their architecture, the poignancy of their music, the profundity of their science. It is because of the child that they are so gentle with children. They know that if the wretched one were not there sniveling in the dark, the other one, the flute player, could make no joyful music as the young riders line up in their beauty for the race in the sunlight of the first morning of summer.

  Now do you believe in them? Are they not more credible? But there is one more thing to tell, and this is quite incredible.

  At times one of the adolescent girls or boys who go to see the child does not go home to weep or rage, does not, in fact, go home at all. Sometimes also a man or woman much older falls silent for a day or two, and then leaves home. These people go out into the street, and walk down the street alone. They keep walking, and walk straight out of the city of Omelas, through the beautiful gates. They keep walking across the farmlands of Omelas. Each one goes alone, youth or girl, man or woman. Night falls; the traveler must pass down village streets, between the houses with yellow-lit windows, and on out into the darkness of the fields. Each alone, they go west or north, toward the mountains. They go on. They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go toward is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

  THE ENGINEER AND THE EXECUTIONER

  BRIAN M. STABLEFORD

  “MY LIFE,” said the engineer. “It’s mine. Can you understand that?”

  “I understand,” replied the executioner calmly.

  “I created it,” persisted the little man with the spectacles and the unsteady eyes. “I made it, with my own hands. It wasn’t all the creation of my own imagination. Other men can take credit for the actual plan, and the theory which allowed them to make the plan. But I made it. It was me who put the genes together, sculptured the chromosomes, put the initial cell together. Mine was the real job. I gave the time, the concentration, the determination. The others played with ideas, but I actually built their life-system. I made a dream come true. But you can’t understand how I feel about it.”

  “I understand,” repeated the robot. His red eyes shone unblinking from its angular head. He really did understand.

  “Look at it,” said the little man, waving an arm towards the great concave window that was one wall of the room. “Look at it and tell me it’s not worth anything. It’s mine, remember. It all grew from what I built. It all evolved from the cells I created. It’s going its own way now. It has been for years. But I put it on that road.”

  The man and the robot stared through the glass. Beyond the window was the hollow interior of Asteroid Lamarck. From space, Lamarck looked like any other asteroid. It had crater-scars and boulders and lots of dust. But it was hollow, and inside it was a tightly-sealed, carefully controlled, Earth-simulation environment. It had air, and water—carefully transported from Earth—and light from the great batteries which trapped solar energy on the outside of the planetoid and released it again on the inside.

  The light was pale and pearly. It waxed and waned as the asteroid turned on its axis. At this particular moment it shone bright and clear—it was the middle of inner-Lamarck’s day.

  It showed the edge of a great forest of silver, shimmering things like wisps of cobweb. The things were so slight and filmy that it seemed as though one ought to be able to see a long way, but in fact clear vision was lost within a hundred metres of the observation window.

  Half-hidden by the silvery web-work were other growths of different colours and species. There were red ones like sea anemones that moved their tentacles in a slow, rhythmic dance, as though fishing for prey too tiny to be seen by human eyes. There were pale spheres of lemon yellow mottled with darker colours, suspended within the framework of the silver filaments. There were tall, ramrod-straight spikes of varying colours which grew in geometrically regular clumps at random intervals.

  There were things which moved too—airborne puffballs and tiny beings like tropical fish which floated in the gigantic bowl of air. There seemed to be no crawling life, nothing that walked. Everything mobile flew or floated. The shell of the asteroid was so thin that there was practically no gravity in the vast chamber. There was no up and down. There was only surface and lumen.

  “The life-system is somewhere between community, organism and cell,” said the engineer. “It possesses certain characteristics of each. The method of reproduction employed by the life system is so unique as to make its strict classification impossible by means of the terms we apply to types of Earth organic material. It is completely closed. Light is the only thing which comes in from the outside, to provide the energy winch keeps the system in operation. Water, air, minerals are all recycled. There is no more organic matter there than there has ever been. Everything is used and reused as the life-system evolves and improves. As it grows, it changes, day by day it evolves. It was designed to evolve, to mutate and adapt at a terrific pace. The cycle of its elements is a spiral rather than a circle. Nothing ever returns to a former state. Every generation is a new species, nothing ever reproduces itself. What I have built here is ultra-evolution—evolution which is not caused by natural selection. My life-system exhibits true Lamarckian evolution. My life is better than the life which was spawned on Earth. Don’t you see why it’s so important, so wonderful?”

  “I do,” said the robot.

  “It’s the most wonderful thing we have ever made,” continued the little man dreamily. “It is the greatest of our achievements. And I built it. It’s mine.”

  “I know,” said the executioner, irrelevantly.

  “You don’t know,” said the little man. “What can you know? You’re metal. Hard, cold metal You don’t reproduce. Your kind has no evolution. What do you know about life-systems? You can’t know what it’s like to live and change, to dream and build. How can you claim to know what I mean?”

  “I try to understand.”

  “You came to destroy it all! You came to send Lamarck toppling into the sun, to burn my world and my life into cinders. You were sent to commit murder. How can a murderer claim to understand life? Life is sacred.”

  “I am not the murderer,” said the robot calmly. “It was the people who sent me who made the decision. Real, live people. They must have understood, but they took the decision. Metal doesn’t make decision. Metal doesn’t murder. I only came to do what I was told to do.”

  “They can’t tell you to kill me,” said the bespectacled man, in a low, petulant voice. “They can’t make you destroy my work. They can’t throw me into the sun. It is against the law to commit murder. Robots can’t break the law.”

  “Sometimes the law has to be ignored,” quoted the
robot. “It was considered too dangerous to permit Asteroid Lamarck to exist. It was held that the dangerous experiment begun here should be obliterated with all possible speed, and that no possibility of contamination should be tolerated.

  “It was held that Asteroid Lamarck held a danger which threatens the existence of life on Earth. It was considered that there was a danger of spores leaking from within the planetoid which were capable of crossing space. It was pointed out that if such an eventuality were to come about, there would be absolutely no way of preventing the Lamarck life-system from destroying all life on Earth.

  “It was concluded that, however small the probability of such an occurrence, the potential loss was too great for any such risk to be taken. It was therefore ordered that Asteroid Lamarck should be tipped into the sun, and that nothing which had been in contact with the asteroid should be allowed to return to Earth.”

  The little man wasn’t really listening. He had heard it before. He was staring hard through the window, at the silver forest. His unsteady eyes were leaking little teardrops into the corners of his eyes. He was not crying for himself, but for the life he had created in Lamarck.

  “But why?” he complained. “My life—it’s wonderful, beautiful. It means more to science than anything else we’ve made or discovered. Who took this decision? Who wants to destroy it?”

  “It is dangerous,” stated the executioner, obstinately. “It must be destroyed.”

  “You’ve been programmed to secrecy,” said the engineer.

  “They are afraid. They are even afraid to tell me who they are. That’s not the work of honest men—responsible men. It was politicians who sent you, not scientists.

  “What are they really afraid of? Afraid that my life might evolve intelligence? That it might become cleverer, better in every way than a man? But that is foolishness.”

  “I know nothing about fear,” said the robot. “I know what I have been told, and I know what you think of it. But the facts are unalterable. There is a danger of infection from Asteroid Lamarck. The consequences of such a danger are so terrible that no such danger can be allowed to exist for a moment longer than is inevitable.”

  “My life could never reach Earth.”

  “It is felt that there is a danger of the evolution of Arrhenius spores.”

  “Arrhenius spores,” sneered the little man. “What could Arrhenius know? He died hundreds of years ago. His speculations are nonsense. His concept of life-spores seeding new planets was naive and ridiculous. There is no evidence that such spores could ever exist. If the men who sent you used Arrhenius spores as an excuse, then they are fools.”

  “No risk, however slight, is worthwhile,” persisted the robot.

  “There is no danger,” stressed the genetic engineer. “We are separated from my life forms by a wall of glass. In all the years I have worked here, my life has never breached that wall. What you are suggesting involves breaking through the crust of a planetoid and crossing a hundred and eighty million miles of space, then finding a relatively small world and becoming established.” The little man’s voice had risen sharply, and he was gabbling.

  “I’m sorry,” said the robot.

  “You’re sorry! How can you be sorry? You aren’t alive. How can you know what life means, let alone feel as I feel about it?”

  “I am alive,” contradicted the executioner. “I am as alive as you, or as the world beyond your window.”

  “You can’t feel sorrow,” snapped the little man. “You’re only metal. You can’t understand.”

  “Your passionate determination to demonstrate my lack of understanding is wrong,” said the robot, with a hint of metallic bitterness. “I know exactly what your life-system is. I know exactly what you are. I know exactly what you feel.”

  “But you can’t feel it yourself.”

  “No.”

  ‘Then you don’t understand.” The little man was quiet again, his anger spent against the executioner’s coldness.

  “I understand exactly what you have done, and why,” said the robot patiently.

  “Then you know there is no danger,” said the engineer.

  “Your life-system, if it ever got to Earth, would destroy the planet. Your life-system does not reproduce by replication. Every organism is unique, and carries two chromosomes, each one of which carries a complete genome. One chromosome determines the organism, the other codes for a virus particle. This second chromosome is dormant until the organism reaches senility, whereupon it pre-empts control of protein synthesis from the organism-chromosome. Billions and billions of virus particles are produced and the organism dies of its inbuilt disease. The virus particles are released and are universally infective. Any protein-synthesizing system is open to their attack. On infection, the organism-chromosome and the organism-chromosome of the host fuse and co-adapt, evolving by a process of directed change. The new chromosome then induces metamorphosis of the host body, into a creature which is at first parasitic, but may later become free-living. The new being carries the dormant virus chromosome in its own cells.

  “The important aspect of the life-system is the fact that the virus may infect absolutely any living creature, irrespective of whether or not it is already a part of the life-system. There is no possible immunization. Thus, eventually, all life in any continuum must inevitably become part of the life-system. And incorporation inevitably means total loss of identity.”

  The little man nodded. “So you know it all,” he conceded. “You know just what it is and how it works. Yet even knowing all the facts you can stand there and accuse me of creating some kind of Frankenstein monster which is just waiting to destroy me and conquer Earth. Can’t you see how childish and ludicrous it is?”

  “There exists a danger,” said the robot obstinately.

  “Utter nonsense! My life-system is absolutely bound to the inside of Asteroid Lamarck. There is no possibility of its ever reaching the exterior. If it did, it could not live. Not even a system as versatile as mine could live out there, without air or water. Only robots can do that. There is no escape from Lamarck, as far as the system is concerned.”

  “If, as you have claimed in your reports, the evolution of the Lamarck life-system is directive and improving, then it would be a mistake to limit the presumed capabilities of the system. There is a finite probability that the system will gain access to outer Lamarck, and will evolve a mechanism of extraplanetary dispersal.”

  “Arrhenius spores!” spat the little man. “How? Just tell me, how? How can a closed system, inside an asteroid, get spores to Earth, against the solar wind? Surely, even the idiots who sent you must realise that Arrhenius spores must drift outwards, away from Earth, even if there were a vanishingly small probability that such spores could be formed.”

  “It is impossible to make predictions about the pattern of drift within the solar system,” stated the robot implacably.

  “Do you think I’m a fool?”

  “No.”

  “Then why do you refuse to concede anything that I say. Robots are essentially logical beings. Surely I have logic on my side.”

  “No amount of logic can save you. The device is already set and activated. Asteroid Lamarck is on its way into the sun. There is no appeal against the decision.”

  “No appeal,” sneered the genetic engineer. “There is no appeal because they did not dare allow me a voice. There is no justice in this decision. There is only fear.”

  “There is fear,” admitted the robot.

  “You try to convince me that there is reason behind this death sentence. You speak in cold, exact terms of probability and danger. You try to tell me, to cover the truth and the guilt.

  “Be honest, if you can. Tell me the truth—that I have been condemned to death by a crazy, irrational fear—the fear of some monstrous ghost which can never evolve from my life-system. That’s all it is—a crazy, stupid, pathological fear of something they can’t begin to understand or appreciate. Fear that can be made to breed f
ear, to infect others with fear. Fear that can be used as a lever to make death sentences. They say that my infective virus might reach Earth. It is there already. Fear infects everything, and its second generation is murder.”

  “Fear is only natural,” said the executioner.

  “Natural!” The little man raised his bespectacled eyes to the ceiling and spread his arms wide. “What sort of nature is afraid of nature?”

  “Human nature,” said the robot, with mechanical glibness.

  “That’s what condemned me,” said the man. “Human nature. Not reason—not finite probabilities. Human nature, human vanity and human fear. But what they are afraid of is only themselves.

  “Humans designed this virus. Biochemists and geneticists conceived it. Genetic engineers and construct surgeons assembled it. The entire system is a product of human inspiration, human ingenuity, human ability.

  “What are you going to quote to me now? There are some things that man was not meant to know? Creation is the prerogative of divinity?”

  “No,” said the executioner. “I will say simply that because a man can do something, there is not an ipse facto reason why he should or must. What you have brought into existence is so potentially dangerous that it cannot be allowed to remain in existence.”

  “They told you to say that.”

  “These are my words,” persisted the robot. “I do as I am told. I say what I am told to say. But I believe. I am metal, but I am alive. I believe in myself. I know what I am doing.”