Masters of Evolution

by Damon Knight

  She looked at him oddly. “We work. We make things, or watch things grow. But maybe that’s not the kind of excitement you mean.”

  “It isn’t, but let it go.”

  “Our simple pleasures probably wouldn’t interest you,” she said reflectively. “They’re pretty dull. We dance, go riding, swim in the lake …”

  So they swam.

  It wasn’t bad. It was unsettling to have no place to swim to—you had to head out from the shore, gauging your distance, and then turn around to go back—but the lake, to Alvah’s considerable surprise, was clearer and better-tasting than any pool he’d ever been in.

  Lying on the grass afterward was a novel sensation, too. It was comfortable—no, it was nothing of the sort; the grass blades prickled and the ground was lumpy. Not comfortable, but—comforting. It was the weight, he thought lazily, the massive mother-weight of the whole Earth cradling you—the endless slow pendulum-swing you felt when you closed your eyes.

  He sat up, feeling cheerfully torpid. B.J. was lying on her back beside him, eyes shut, one arm flung back behind her head. It was a graceful pose. In a detached way, he admired it, first in general and then in particular—the fine texture of her skin, the firmness of her bosom under the halter that half-covered it, the delicate tint of her closed eyelids— the catalogue prolonged itself, and he realized that B.J., when you got a good look at her, was a lovely girl. He wondered, in passing, how he had missed noticing it before.

  She opened her eyes and looked at him. There was a ground-swell of some sort and, without particular surprise, Alvah found himself kissing her.

  “Beej,” he said some time later, “when I go back to New York—I don’t suppose you’d want to come with me? I mean —you’re different from the others. You’re educated, you can read; even your grammar is good.”

  “I know you mean it as a compliment and I’m doing my best not to sound ungrateful or hurt your feelings, but …” She made a frustrated gesture. “Take the reading— that’s a hobby of Doc’s and I picked it up from him. It’s a primitive skill, Alvah, something like manuscript illuminating. We have better ways now. We don’t need it any more. Then the grammar—didn’t it ever strike you that I might be using your kind just to make’ things easier for you?”

  She frowned. “I guess that was a mistake. As of now, I quit. No, listen a minute! The only difference between your grammar and our is that yours is sixty years out of date. You still use T am, you are, he is’ and all that archaic nonsense of person and number. What for? If that’s good, suppose we hunted up somebody who said ‘1 am, thou art, he is,’ would his grammar be better than yours?”

  “Well—” said Alvah.

  “And about New York, I appreciate that. But the Cities are done for, Alvah. In ten years there won’t be one left. They’re finished.”

  Alvah stiffened. “That’s the most ridiculous—”

  “Is it? Then why you here?”

  “Well, we’re in a crisis period now, but we’ve come through them before. You can’t—”

  “This crisis of yours started a long while ago. If I remember, it was around 1927 that Muller first changed the genes in fruit flies with X-ray bombardment. That was the first step —over a hundred years before you was even born. Then came colchicine and the electron microscope and microsurgery, all in the next thirty years. But the day biological engineering really grew up—1962, Jenkins’ and Scripture’s gene charts and techniques—the Cities began to go. Little by little, people drifted out to the land again, raising the new crops, growing the new animals.

  “The big Cities cannibalized the little ones, like an insect eating its own body when its food supply runs out. Now that’s gone as far as it can, and you think it’s just another crisis, but it isn’t. It’s the end.”

  Alvah heard a chill echo of Wytak’s words: “Rome fell. Babylon fell. The same thing can happen to New York …”

  He said, “What am I supposed to be, the rat that leaves the sinking ship?”

  She sighed. “Alvah, you got a better brain than that. You don’t have to think in metaphors or slogans, like a moron. I not asking you to join the winning side. That don’t matter. In a few years there won’t be but one side, no matter which way you jump.”

  “What do you want then?” he asked.

  She looked dispirited. “Nothing, I guess. Let’s go home.”

  It was a series of little things after that. There was the time he and Beej, out walking in the cool of the morning, stopped to rest at an isolated house that turned out to be occupied by George Allister of the Coffin clan, the shy little man who’d tried to show Alvah how to make his marks the day he landed.

  George, Alvah believed—and questioning of Beef afterward confirmed it—was about as low on the social scale as a Muck-foot could get. But he was his own master. He had a wife and three children and neat fields, with his own animals grazing in them. His house was big and cool and clean. He poured them lemonade—which Alvah wistfully had to decline—from a sweating peacock-blue pitcher, while sitting at his ease on the broad front porch.

  There were no servants among the Muckfeet. Alvah remembered an ancient fear of his, something that had cropped up in the old days every time he got seriously interested in a girl—that his children, if any, might relapse into the labor-pool category from which he had risen, or—it was hard to say which would be worse—into the servants’ estate.

  He went back from that outing very silent and thoughtful.

  There was the time, a few days later, when Beej was working, and Alvah, at loose ends, wandered into a room in the laboratory building where two of Bither’s assistants, girls he knew by sight, were sitting with two large, leathery-woody, pod-shaped boxes open on the bench between them.

  Being hungry for company and preoccupied with himself at the same time, he didn’t notice what should have been obvious, that the girls were busy at something private and personal. Even when they closed the boxes between them, he wasn’t warned. “What’s this?” he said cheerfully. “Can I see?”

  They glanced at each other uncertainly. “These is our bride boxes,” said the brunette. “We don’t usual show them to singletons—”

  They exchanged another glance.

  “He’s spoke for anyhow,” said the redhead, with an enigmatic look at Alvah.

  They opened the boxes. Inside each was a multitude of tiny compartments, each with a bit of something wrapped in cloth or paper tissue. The brunette chose one of the largest and unwrapped it with exaggerated care—an amorphous reddish-brown lump.

  “Houseplant,” she said, and wrapped it up again.

  The redhead showed him a vial full of minuscule white spheres. “Weaver eggs. Two hundred of them. That’s a lot, but I like more curtains and things than most.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Alvah, perplexed. “What does a houseplant do?”

  “Grow a house, of course,” the brunette said. She held up another vial full of eggs. “Scavengers.”

  The redhead had a translucent sac with dark specks in it. “Utility trees.”

  “Garbage converter.”

  “This grow into a bed and these is chairbushes.”

  And so on, interminably, while the girls’ eyes glittered and their cheeks flushed with enthusiasm.

  The boxes, Alvah gathered, contained the germs of everything that would be needed to set up a Muckfoot household—beginning with the house itself. A thought struck him: “Does Beej have one of these outfits?”

  Wide-eyed stares from both girls. “Well, of course!”

  Alvah shifted uncomfortably. “Funny, she never mentioned it.”

  The girls exchanged another of those enigmatic glances and said nothing. Alvah, for some reason, grew more uncomfortable still. He tried once more. “What about the man —doesn’t he have to put up anything?”

  Yes, the man was expected to supply all the brutes and the seeds for outbuildings and all the crops except the bride’s kitchen-garden. Everything in and around the home w
as her province, everything outside was his.

  “Oh,” said Alvah.

  “But if a young fellow don’t have all that through no fault of his own, his clan put up for him and let him pay back when he able.”

  “Ah,” said Alvah and turned to make his escape.

  The redhead called after him, “You thought any about what clan you like to get adopted into, Alvah?”

  “Uh, no,” said Alvah. “I don’t think-”

  “You talk to Doc Bither. He a elder of the Steins. Mighty good clan I”

  Alvah bolted.

  Then there was the Shakespeare business. It began in his third week in the Sticks, when he was already carrying a fleshy Muckfoot vegetable around with him—a radnip, B.J. called it. He hadn’t had the nerve yet to bite into it, but he knew the time was coming when he would. Beej came to him and said, “Alvah, the Rinaldos’ drama group is doing Hamlet next Saturday, and they short a Polonius. Do you think you could study it up by then?”

  “What’s Hamlet? And who’s Polonius?”

  She got the bird out of the library for him and he listened to the play, which turned out to be an archaic version of The Manager of Copenhagen. The text was nothing like the modernized abridgment he was used to, or the Muckfeet’s slovenly speech either. It was full of words like down-gyved and unkennel. It was three-quarters incomprehensible until he began to get the hang of it, but it had a curious power. For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, the oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, the pangs of despised love, and so on and so on. It rumbled, but it rumbled well.

  Polonius, however, was the character Alvah knew as Paul Amson, an inconsequential old man who only existed in the play to foul up the love affair between the principals and get killed in the third act. Alvah ventured to suggest that he might be of more use as Hamlet, but the director, a dry little man with a surprising boom to his voice, stubbornly insisted that all he needed was a Polonius—and seemed to intimate, without actually saying so that Alvah was a dim prospect even for that.

  Alvah, with blood in his eye, accepted the part.

  The rehearsals were a nightmare. The lines themselves gave him no trouble—Alvah was a quick study; in the realies, you had to be—and neither, at first, did the rustic crudity of the stage he was asked to perform on. Letter-perfect when the other actors were still stuttering and blowing their lines, he walked through the part with quiet competence and put the director’s sour looks down to a witless hayseed hostility— until, three days before the performance, he suddenly awoke to the realization that everyone else in the cast was acting rings around him.

  This wasn’t the realies. There were no microphones to amplify his voice, no cameras to record every change in his expression. And the audience, what there was of it, was going to be right—out—there.

  Alvah went to pieces. Trying to emulate the others’ wide gestures and declamatory delivery only threw him further off his stride. He had never had stagefright in his life, but by curtain time on Saturday night, he was a pale and quivering wreck.

  Dead and dragged off the stage at the end of act three, he got listlessly back into his own clothes and headed for an inconspicuous exit, but the director waylaid him. “Gus-tad,” he said abruptly, “you ever thought of yourself as a professional actor?”

  “I had some such idea at one time,” Alvah said. “Why?”

  “Well, I don’t see why you shouldn’t. If you work at it. I never see a man pick up so fast.”

  “What?” cried Alvah, thunderstruck.

  “You wasn’t bad,” said the director. “A few rough edges, but a good performance. Now I happen to know some people in a few repertory companies—the Mondrillo Troupe, the Kalfoglou Repertory, one or two more. If you interested, I’ll bird them and see if there’s an opening. Don’t thank me.”

  He moved off a few steps, then turned. “Oh, and, Gustad—get back into your costume, will you?”

  “Uh,” said Alvah. “But I’m dead. I mean—”

  “For the curtain calls,” said the director. “You don’t want to miss those.” He waved and walked back into the wings.

  Alvah absently drew out his radnip and crunched off a bite of it. The taste was faintly unpleasant, like that of old protein paste or the wrong variety of culture-cheese, but he chewed and swallowed it.

  VII

  That was when he realized that he had to get out. He didn’t put on his costume again. Instead, he rummaged through the property boxes until he found an old pair of moleskin trousers and a stained squareweb shirt. He put them on, left by the rear door and headed south.

  South for two reasons. First, because, he hoped, no one would look for him in that direction. Second, because he remembered what Beej had said that first day when they passed the display of tools: “The metal comes from Iron Pits, just a few miles south of here.”

  There might be some slender chance still that he could get the metal he needed, delouse the floater and go home in style—without the painful necessity of explaining to Wytak what had happened to the floater and all his goods and equipment. If not, he would simply keep on walking.

  He had to do it now. He had almost waited too long as it was.

  They had laid out the pattern of a before him—to marry Beej, settle down in a house that would grow from a seed Beej kept in a pod-shaped box, be a rustic repertory actor, raise little Muckfeet. And the devil of it was, some unreasonable part of him wanted all of that!

  A good thing he hadn’t stayed for the curtain calls …

  The Sun declined as he went, until he was walking down a ghost-dim road under the stars, with all the cool cricket-shrill world to himself.

  He spent the night uncomfortably huddled under a hedge. Birds woke him with a great clamor in the tree-tops shortly after dawn. He washed himself and drank from a stream that crossed the fields, ate a purplish-red fruit he found growing nearby, then moved on.

  Two hours later, he topped a ridge and found his way barred by a miles-long shallow depression in the Earth. Like the rest of the visible landscape, it was filled with an orderly checkerwork of growing plants.

  There was nothing for it but to go through if he could. But surely he had gone more than “a few miles” by now?

  The road slanted down the embankment to a gate in a high thorn hedge. Behind the gate was a kind of miniature domed kiosk and, in the kiosk, a sunburned man was dozing with a green-and-purple bird on his shoulder.

  Alvah inspected a signboard that was entangled somehow in the hedge next to the gate. He was familiar enough by now with the Muckfeet’s picture-writing to be fairly sure of what it said. The first symbol was a nail with an ax-head attached to it. That was iron. The second was a few stylized things that resembled fruit seeds. Pits?

  He stared through the gate in mounting perplexity. You might call a place like this “Pits,” all right but imagination boggled at calling it a mine. Still …

  The kiosk, he noticed now, bore a scrawled symbol in orange pigment. He recognized that one, too; it was one of the common name-signs.

  “Jerry!” he called.

  “Rrk,” remarked the bird on the sleeping man’s shoulder. “Kerry brogue; but the degradation of speech that occurs in London, Glasgow—”

  “Oh, damn!” said Alvah. “You, there. Jerry!”

  “Rrk. Kerry brogue; but the—”

  “Jerry!”

  “Kerry brogue!” shrieked the bird. The sunburned man sat up with a start and seized it by the beak, choking it off in the middle of “degradation.”

  “Oh, hello,” he said. “Don’t know what it is about a Shaw bird, but they all alike. Can’t shut them up.”

  “I’d like,” said Alvah, “to look through the—uh—Pits. Would that be all right?”

  “Sure,” the man said cheerfully. He opened the gate and led the way down a long avenue between foot-high rows of plants.

  “I Jerry Finch,” he said. “Littleton clan. Don’t believe you said your name.”

  �
��Harris,” Alvah supplied at random. “I visiting from up north.”

  “Yukes?” the man inquired.

  Alvah nodded, hoping for the best, and pointed at the plants they were passing. “What these?”

  “Hinge blanks. Let them to forage last month. Won’t have another crop here till August, and a poor one then. I telled Angus—he’s the Pit boss—I telled him this soil’s wore out, but he’s a pincher—squeeze the last ton out and then go after the pounds and ounces. You should of saw what come off the ringbushes in the east hundred this April. Pitiful. Had to sell them for eyelets.”

  A cold feeling was running up Alvah’s spine. He cleared his throat. “Got any knife blades?” he inquired with careful casualness.

  “Mean bowies? Well, sure—right over yonder.”

  Alvah followed him to the end of the field and down three steps into the next. The plants here were much taller and darker, with stems thick and gnarled out of all proportion to their height. Here and there among the glossy leaves were incongruous glints of silvery steel.

  Alvah stooped and peered into the foliage.

  The silvery glints were perfectly formed six-inch chrome-steel knife blades. Each was attached to—growing from— the plant by way .of a hard brown stem, exactly the right size and shape to serve as a handle.

  He straightened carefully. “We do things a little different up north. You mind explaining briefly how the Pits works?”

  Jerry looked surprised, but began readily enough. “These is like any other ferropositors. They extract the metal from the ores and deposit it in the bowie shape, or whatever it might be. Work from the outside in, of course, so you don’t have no wood core to weaken it. We get a year’s crops, average, before the ore used up. Then we bring the Earth-movers in, deepen the Pit a few feet, reseed and start over. Ain’t much more to it.”

  Alvah stared at the fantastic growths. Well, why not? Plants that grew into knives or doorknobs or …

  “What about alloys?” he asked.

  “We got iron, lead and zinc. Carbon from the air. Other metals we got to import in granules. Like we get chrome from the Northwest Federation, mostly. They getting too big for their britches, though. Greedy. I think we going to switch over to you Yukes before long. Not that you fellows is any better, if you ask me, but at least—”