Tomorrow's Alternatives

by Roger Elwood

  Downing what was left of her drink in one quick gulp, she got up from the table. “Thanks. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have an appointment with my fiance at the registrar’s office.” I nodded an “of course.”

  She practically ran out of the restaurant.

  I sat back in my chair and ordered a drink of my own. Just one. That’s all I allow myself now. Another woman, who might as well have been Lisa Rogers’ double, immediately rushed over and grabbed the empty chair.

  I took off the old man’s ring and looked at it. In the dim restaurant, it was difficult to see how battered it really was. The gold reflected the feeble light like a shiny yellow mirror and the jade almost glowed with a milky-green luminescence.

  My drink came, and I put the ring down on the table. It looked even more like a hideous serpent eating its own tail. As I sipped slowly, I could feel the ring watching me with a fixed, unblinking stare. I stared back at it. For some reason, the design reminded me of the client who’d just left.

  My drink seemed to be lacking its customary lift, so I dropped the plastic tumbler, still half-full, into the disposal unit set in the center of the table.

  As I stood up, I found a stinging in my eyes, though the inside of the snack shop wasn’t particularly smoggy. I blinked, trying to stop the smarting, as I dropped the old man’s ring into the maw of the disposal unit, inserted my nose-plugs, and walked out into the sulphur-yellow sunlight.

  Mutation Planet

  BARRINGTON J. BAYLEY

  The vast and brooding landscape, filled with ominous mutterings, ground-trembling rumblings, stretched all around in an infinity of gloom. The mountainous form of Dominus moved across this landscape at speed, like a massy shadow, heavy with power and sullenly majestic. Above him the opaque sky, lurid and oppressively close, flared intermittently and discharged sheets of lightning that were engulfed in the distant hills. In the instant before some creature fed on the electric glare, the dimness would be relieved, outlining endless, uneven expanses of near-barren soil. Dominus, however, took no sensory advantage of these flashes; his inputs covered a wider, more reliable range of impressions.

  As he sped through his domain he scattered genetic materials to either side of him. These would dampen down evolutionary activity for miles around and ensure that no lifeform would arise that could inconvenience him or interfere with the roadway over which he moved. Built by himself as one of the main instruments of his control over his environment, this roadway spanned the whole eight thousand miles of the planet’s single continent, and was a uniform quarter of a mile wide; side roads diverged, at irregular intervals, into the larger peninsulas. Since the substance of the roadbed was quasi-organic, having been extruded by organs he possessed for that purpose, Dominus could, moreover, sense instantly any attack, damage, or unacceptable occurrence taking place on any part of it.

  After leaving the interminable plain the road undulated over a series of hills, clinging always to the profile of the land, and swept down into a gigantic bowl-like valley. Here the gloom took on the darkness of a pit, but lifeforms were more copious. By the light of the flickering lightning flashes, or by that of the more diffuse radiations employed by Dominus, they could be seen skulking out there in the valley, a scattering of unique shapes. They were absolutely motionless, since none dared to move while Dominus passed by. Leagues further afield lights winked and radio pulses beamed out as the more powerful entities living up the slopes of the valley signalled their submission.

  Dominus dosed the valley heavily with genetic mist, then surged up the opposite wall. As he swept over onto a table-land a highly-charged lightning bolt came sizzling down, very close; he caught it in one of his conductors and stored the charge in his accumulators. It was then, while he raced away from the valley, that his radar sense spotted the unidentifiable object descending through the cloud blanket. Puzzled, Dominus slowed down to scarcely a hundred miles per hour. This was the first unusual event for several millennia. He could not, at first, account for it.

  The strangeness lay in the fact that the object was so large: not very much smaller than Dominus himself. (Its shape, though new to him, was of no account—even at the low, controlled level of mutation thousands of different lifeforms continued to evolve.) Also, it was moving through the air without the visible benefit of wings of any kind. Come to that, a creature of such bulk could not be lifted by wings at all.

  Where had it evolved? In the sky? Most unlikely. The plethora of flying forms that had once spent their lives winging through the black, static-drenched cloud layer had almost—thanks to Dominus—died out. Over the ages his mutation-damping mist, rising on the winds, had accumulated there, and without a steady mutation rate the flying forms had been unable to survive the ravages of their environment and each other.

  Then from where? Some part of the continent receiving only scant surveillance from Dominus? He was inclined to doubt this also. The entity he observed could not have developed without many generations of mutation, which would have come to his notice before now.

  Neither was the ocean any more likely a source. True, Dominus carried out no surveillance there. But a great deal of genetic experience was required to survive on the land surface. Emergent amphibia lacked that experience and were unable to gain a foothold. For that reason oceanic evolution seemed to have resigned itself to a purely submarine existence.

  One other possibility remained: the emptiness beyond the atmospheric covering. For Dominus this possibility was theoretical only, carrying no emotional ambience. Up to now this world had absorbed his psychic energies: this was life and existence.

  Due to this ambiguity Dominus did not act immediately but kept in check the strong instinctive urges that were triggered off. Interrupting his pan-continental patrol for the first time in millennia, he followed the object to its landing place. Then he settled down patiently to await developments.

  Eliot Harst knew exactly where to find Balbain. He climbed the curving ramp to the upper part of the domeshaped spaceship and opened a door. The alien was standing at the big observation window, looking out on to Five’s (whatever system they were in, they always named the planets in order from their primary) blustering semi-night.

  The clouds glowed patchily as though bombs were being let off among them; the lightning boomed and crashed. The tall, thin alien ignored all this, however. His attention was fixed on the gigantic organism they had already named Dominus, which was slumped scarcely more than a mile away. Eliot had known him to gaze at it, unmoving, for hours.

  "The experiment has worked out after all,” he said. "Do you want to take a look?”

  Balbain tore his gaze from the window and looked at Eliot. He came from a star which, to Eliot, was only a number in Solsystem’s catalogs. His face was partly obscured by the light breathing mask he wore to supplement ship atmosphere. (The aliens all seemed to think that human beings were more sensitive to discomfort than themselves: everything on the ship was biased towards the convenience of Eliot and his assistant Alanie.) But over the mask Balbain’s bright bird-like eyes were visible, darting from his bony, fragile and quite unhuman skull.

  "The result is positive?” he intoned in an oddly hollow, resonant voice.

  "It would seem so.”

  "It is as we already knew. I do not wish to see the offspring at present, but thank you for informing me.”

  With that he returned to the window and seemed to become abruptly unaware of Eliot’s presence.

  Sighing, the Earthman left the chamber. A few yards further along the gallery he stopped at a second door. Jingling a bell to announce his presence, he entered a small bare cell and gave the same message as before to its occupant.

  Abrak came from a star as far from Balbain’s as the latter was from Solsystem. When fully erect he stood less than five feet in height and had a skin like corded cloth: full of neat folds and wavy grains. At the moment he squatted on the naked floor, his skeletal legs folded under him in an extraordinary double-jointed way that
Eliot found quite grotesque.

  Abrak’s voice was crooning and smooth, and contained unnerving infra-sound beats that made a human listener feel uneasy and slightly dizzy—Eliot already knew, in fact, that Abrak could, if he wished, kill him merely by speaking: by voicing quiet vibrations of just the right frequency to cripple his internal organs.

  “So the picture we have built is vindicated?” he replied to Eliot’s announcement, pointing a masked, dog-like face towards the Earthman.

  “There can be little doubt of it.”

  “I will view the offspring.” The alien rose in one swift motion.

  Eliot had already decided that there was no point in reporting to the fifth member of the team: Zeed, the third of the non-humans. He appeared to take no more interest in their researches.

  He led the way back down the connecting ramps, through the interior of the spaceship which he had been finding increasingly depressing of late. More and more it reminded him of a hurriedly-built air-raid shelter, devoid of decoration, rough-hewn, dreary and echoing.

  Balbain’s people had built the ship. Eliot could recall his excitement on learning of its purpose, an excitement that doubled when it transpired he had a chance of joining it. For the ship was travelling from star to star on a quest for knowledge. And as it journeyed it occasionally recruited another scientist from a civilization sufficiently advanced, if he would make a useful member of the team. So far, in addition to the original Balbain, there had been Zeed, Abrak (none of these being their real, unpronounceable names, but convenience names for human benefit: transliterations or syllabic equivalents), and, of course, Elliot and Alanie.

  Alanie had been, for Eliot, one of the fringe benefits —another being that when they returned to Solsystem they would take back with them a prodigious mass of data, a countless number of discoveries, and would become immortally famous. The aliens, recognizing that human sexuality is more than usually needful, had offered to allow a male-female pair as Solsystem’s contribution. Eliot had discovered that his prospect of a noble ordeal was considerably mitigated by the thought of spending that time alone with his selected team-mate: Alanie Leitner, vivacious, companionable, with an I.Q. of 190 (slightly better than Eliot’s own, in fact) and an experienced all-round researcher. The perfect assistant for him, the selection board had assured him, and he had found little in their verdict to disagree with, then or since.

  But the real thrill had been in the thing itself: in being part of a voyage of discovery that transcended racial barriers, in the uplifting demonstration that wherever intelligence arose it formed the same aspiration: to know, to examine, to reveal the universe.

  Mind was mind: a universal constant.

  Unfortunately he and Alanie seemed to be drifting apart from their alien travelling companions, to understand them less and less. The truth was that he and Alanie were doing all the work. They would arrive at a system and begin a survey; yet very quickly the interest of the others would die off and the humans would be left to carry out all the real research, draw the conclusions and write up the reports completely unaided. As a matter of fact Zeed now took scarcely any interest at all and did not stir from his quarters for months on end.

  Eliot found it quite inexplicable, especially since Balbain and Abrak, both of whom impressed one by the strength of their intellects, admitted that since leaving Solsystem much had been discovered that was novel.

  At the bottom of the ramp he led Abrak into the laboratory section. And there to greet them was Alanie Leitner: a wide, slightly sulky mouth in a pale face; a strong nose, steady brown eyes and auburn, nearly reddish hair cut squarely on the nape of the neck. And even in her white laboratory smock the qualities of her figure were evident.

  Though constructed of the same concrete-like stuff as the rest of the spaceship, the laboratory was made more cheerful by being a place of work. At the far end was the test chamber. Abrak made his way there and peered through the thick window. The parent specimen they had begun with lay up against the wall of the circular chamber, apparently dying after its birth-giving exertions. It was about the size of a dog, but spider-like, with the addition of a rearward clump of tissue that sprouted an untidy bunch of antenna-type sensors.

  Its offspring, lying inert a few yards away, offered absolutely no resemblance to the spider-beast. A dense-looking, slipper-shaped object, somewhat smaller than the parent, it could have been no more than a lump of wood or metal.

  “Its too soon yet to be able to say what it can do,” Alanie said, joining them at the window.

  Abrak was silent for a while. “Is it not possible that this is a larval, immature stage, thus accounting for the absence of likeness?’' he suggested then.

  “It’s conceivable, certainly,” Eliot answered. “But we think the possibility is remote. For one thing we are pretty certain that the offspring was already adult and fully grown, or practically so, when it was born. For another, the fact that the parent reproduced at all is pretty convincing confirmation of our theory. Added to everything else we know, I don't feel disposed towards accepting any other explanation.”

  “Agreed,” Abrak replied. “Then we must finally accept that the Basic Polarity does not obtain here on Five.”

  “That’s right.”

  Although he should have become accustomed to the idea by now Eliot’s brain still went spinning when he thought of it and all it entailed.

  Scientifically speaking the notion of the Basic Polarity went back, as far as Solsystem was concerned, to the Central Dogma* In a negative sense, it also went back to the related Koestler’s Question, posed late in the 20th Century.

  The Central Dogma expressed the keystone of genetics: that the interaction between gene and soma was a oneway traffic. The genes formed the body. But nothing belonging to the body, or anything that it experienced, could modify the genes or have any effect on the next generation. Thus there was no inheritance of acquired characteristics; evolution was conducted over immensely long periods of time through random mutations resulting from cosmic radiation, or through chemical accidents in the gene substance itself.

  Why, Koestler asked, should this be so? A creature that could refashion its genes, endowing its offspring with the means to cope with the hazards it had experienced, would have a great advantage in the struggle for survival. Going further, a creature that could lift itself by its bootstraps and produce a superior type in this way would have an even greater advantage. Furthermore, Koestler argued that direct reshaping of the genes should be perfectly within the capabilities of organic life, using chemical agents.

  So the absence of such a policy in organic life was counter-survival, a curious, glaring neglect on the part of nature. The riddle was answered, by Koestler’s own contemporaries, in the following manner: if the soma, on the basis of its experiences, was to modify the genecarrying DNA, then the modification would have to be planned and executed by the instinctive functions of the nervous system, or by whatever corresponded to those functions in any conceivable creature. But neither the instinctive brains of the higher orders, nor the primitive ganglia of the lower orders, had the competence to carry out this work: acting purely by past-conditioned responses, they had no apprehension of the future and would not have been able to relate experience to genetic alteration. Hence life had been dependent on random influences: radiation and accident.

  For direct gene alteration to be successful, Koestler’s rebuttors maintained, some form of intellect would be needed. Primitive animals did not have this; if the genechanging animal existed, then that animal was man, and man worked not through innate bodily powers but by artificial manipulation of the chromosomes. Even then, his efforts had been partial and inept: the eradication of defective genes to rectify the increasing incidence of deformity; the creation of a few new animals that had quickly sickened and died.

  And with that the whole matter of Koestler’s Question had been quietly forgotten. The Central Dogma was reinstated, not merely as an arbitrary fact but as a necessary
principle. If Koestler’s Question had any outcome, then it was in the recognition of the Basic Polarity: the polarity between individual and species. Because the species, not the individual, had to be the instrument of evolution. If the Central Dogma did not hold, then species would not need to exist at all (and neither, incidentally, would sex). The rate of change would be so swift that there would be nothing to hold them together—and any that did exist, because of some old-fashioned immutability of their genes, would rapidly be wiped out. And indeed the Basic Polarity seemed to be the fundamental form of life everywhere in the universe, as Balbain, Abrak and Zeed all confirmed.

  Eliot was thinking of renaming Five “Koestler s Planet.”

  On a world where all traces of the past could be wiped out overnight, they would probably never know exactly what had happened early in Five’s biological evolution to overthrow the Central Dogma. Presumably the instinctive functions had developed, not intelligence exactly, but a unique kind of telegraph between their experience of the external world and the microscopic coding of the germ plasm. It would, as Alanie pointed out, only have to happen once, and that once could even be at the bacterial level. The progeny of a single individual would rapidly supplant all other fauna. In the explosion of organic development that followed it would be but a short step before gene alteration became truly inventive; intellectual abilities would soon arise to serve this need.

  It had been some time before the idea had dawned on them that Five might be a planet of single-instance species; in other words, of no species at all. There was one four-eyed stoat; one elephantine terror; one leaping prong; one blanket (their name for a creature of that description which spent most of its time merely lying on the ground). In fact there was a bewildering variety of forms of which only one example could be found. But there were one or two exceptions to the rule—or so they had thought. They had videotaped six specimens of a type of multilegged snake. Only later had they discovered that the resemblance between them was a case of imitation, of convergent evolution among animals otherwise unrelated.