by Roger Elwood
So they had been forced, reluctantly, to accept the evidence of their eyes, and later, of the electron microscope. But only now, in the last hour, was Eliot one hundred percent convinced of it.
Another thing that had made him cautious was the sheer degree of knowledge and intelligence consistent with this level of biological engineering. He would have expected every creature on the planet to display intelligence at least equivalent to the human. Instead the animals here were just that—animals. Clever, ferocious animals, but content to inhabit their ecological niches and evincing no intellectual temperament.
All, that is, except Dominus.
They called him Dominus because he had the aspect of being king of all he surveyed. He must have weighed a thousand tons at least. He was also owner of the road system, which at first they had taken to be evidence of a civilization, or at least the remains of one. It was now clear, however, that the road had been Dominus' own idea —or, more probably, his parent’s idea.
The great beast had demonstrated his understanding when they had gone out and tried to trap specimens for laboratory study. The exercise had proved to be dangerous and nearly impossible. Five’s fauna were the universe’s greatest experts at not getting killed, caught or trapped, and had responded not merely with claw, fang and evasive speed, but with electricity, poison gas, infra-sound (Abrak’s own speciality), corrosives of various types they had still not classified but which had scared them very much, thick strands of unknown substance spun swiftly out from spinnerets and carried on the wind, slugs of pure iron ejected from porcupine-like quills with the velocity of rifle bullets, and—believe it or not—organically generated laser beams.
Retreating after one of their sorties to the shelter of their spaceship’s force shield, the hunters had been about to give up and go back inside.
Alanie had said: “Let’s get off this planet before one of those things throws a fusion beam at us.”
And then Dominus had acted. Rushing down, like a smaller hill himself, from the hill where he had parked himself, he had advanced driving several smaller animals before him. Finally they had delivered themselves almost at the scientists’ feet and promptly fallen unconscious. Dominus had then returned to the hill-top, where he had squatted motionless ever since. And Eliot, blended with his amazement, had felt the same thrill and transcendence that had overwhelmed him at the first arrival of Balbain’s starship.
Dominus understood their wants! He was helping them!
Conceivably he could be communicated with. But that problem had to wait. They got the creatures inside and put them under adequate restraint. Then Eliot and Alanie went immediately to work.
The creatures’ genes followed the standard pattern produced by matter on planetary surfaces everywhere: coded helices forming a group of chromosomes. The code was doublet and not triplet, as it was on Earth, but that in itself was not unusual: Abrak’s genes also were in doublet code. More significantly, the single gonad incorporated a molecular factory, vast by microscopic standards, able to dispatch a chemical operator to any specific gene in a selected germ cell. And, furthermore, a chain of command could be discerned passing into the spinal column (where there was a spinal column) and thence to the brain (where there was a brain).
Eliot had written in his journal:
I get the impression that we are witness to a fairly late stage of Five’s evolutionary development. For one thing, life here is relatively sparse, as though fierce competition has thinned down numbers rather than increased them, leading to a more subdued mode of existence. There are no predators; defensive mutations on the part of a potential prey would no doubt make it unprofitable to be a carnivore. The vegetation on Five conforms to the Basic Polarity and so presumably predates the overthrow of the Central Dogma, but it survives patchily in the form of scrub savannahs and a few small forests, and in many areas does not exist at all. The majority of animals own a patch of vegetation which they defend against all comers with an endless array of natural weapons, but they eat only in order to obtain bodybuilding materials—proteins and trace elements—and not to provide energy, which they obtain by soaking up the ubiquitous lightning discharges. Some animals have altogether abandoned any dependence of an external food chain: they carry out the whole of the anabolic process themselves, taking the requisite elements and minerals from soil and air and metabolizing all their requirements using the energy from this same lightning.
It has occurred to us that all the animals here are potentially immortal. Ageing is a species-characteristic, the life-span being adjusted to the maximum benefit of the species, not of the individual. If all our conclusions are correct, an organism on Five would continue to live a self-contained life until meeting some pressing exigency it was not able to master; only then would it reproduce to create a more talented version of itself and afterwards, perhaps, permit itself to die. This notion suggests that a test may be possible.
The slipper organism was the outcome of that test. They had placed the spider-thing in a chamber and subjected it to stress. They had bombarded it with pressure, heat, missiles, and various other discomforts suggested by the details of its metabolism. And they had waited to see whether it would react by “conceiving” and ultimately giving birth to another creature better than itself.
Of course, the new organism would be designed to accomplish one thing above all: escape. Eliot was curious now to see how the slipper would attempt it.
“Might it not be dangerous?” Abrak questioned mildly. Eliot flipped a switch. A thick slab of dull metal slid down to occlude the window. Instead, they could continue to watch through a vidcamera.
“I'd like to see it get through that,” he boasted. “Carbon and titanium alloy a foot thick. It’s surrounded by it.” “You are being unsubtle,” said Abrak. “Perhaps the beast will rely on trickery.”
Alanie gave a deep sigh that strained her full breasts voluptuously against the fabric of her smock. “Well, what now?” she asked. “We've been here six months. I think weve solved the basic mystery of the place. Isn’t it time we were moving on?”
“I’d like to stay longer,” Eliot said thoughtfully. “I want to see if we can get into communication with Dominus.” “But how?” she asked, sitting down at a bench and waving her hand. “Communication is a species-characteristic. He probably would never understand what language
“And yet already he’s given us help, so we can communicate after a fashion,” Eliot argued.
A warning sound came from Abrak. Something was happening on the screen looking into the test chamber.
The slipper organism had decided to act. Gliding smoothly to the far side of the chamber, nearest the skin of the ship, it pressed its tapered end against the wall. Abruptly the toe of the slipper ignited into an intense glare too bright for the vidcamera to handle. An instant later fumes billowed up and filled the chamber, obscuring everything.
By the time they cleared sufficiently for the onlookers to see anything, the slipper had made its exit through the wall of the chamber, and thence through the ship’s skin, by burning a channel whose edges were still white-hot.
“I think,” said Eliot somberly, “it might just have been a fusion beam, or something just as good.”
He paused uncertainly. Then he flung open a cupboard and began pulling out gear. “Come on,” he said, “We’re going after our specimen.”
“But it will kill us,” Alanie protested.
“Not if Dominus helps us again. And somehow I think he will.”
Dominus is an intelligent being, he told himself. Intelligent beings are motivated by curiosity and a sense of co-operation with other intelligent beings. His hunt for the slipper was, in fact, impelled more by the desire to prompt Dominus into co-operating with them again than by any interest in regaining the slipper itself, which could well be far away by now.
“But, once having recaptured the creature, how will you retain it?” inquired Abrak, looking meaningfully at the gaping hole in the chamber.
“We’ll keep it under sedation,” Eliot said, buckling on a protective suit.
Minutes later he stood at the foot of the spaceship. Besides the protective suit he was armed with a gun that fired recently prepared sleep darts (they had worked on the slipper’s parent, following a biochemical analysis of that creature) and a cylinder that extruded a titanium mesh net.
Though evincing less enthusiasm, Alanie and Abrak had nevertheless followed him, despite his waiver to the girl. Abrak was unprotected, carried no weapons, and relied on his flimsy ship mask to take care of Five’s atmosphere.
The environment boomed, flickered and flashed all around them. To Eliot’s surprise the slipper could be seen less than a hundred yards away, lying quietly in the beams of their torches.
He glanced up towards the bulk of Dominus, then stepped resolutely forward, aware of the footsteps of the others behind him.
Up on the hill, Dominus began to move. Eliot stopped and stared up at him exultantly.
“Eliot,” Abrak crooned at his elbow, “I strongly recommend caution. Specifically, I recommend a return to the ship.”
Eliot made no answer. His mind was racing, wondering what gesture he could make to Dominus when the vast beast recaptured the slipper and returned it to them.
He was quite, quite wrong.
Dominus halted some distance away, and extruded a tongue, or tentacle, travelling at ground level almost too fast for the eye to follow. In little more than a second or two it had flashed across the sandy soil and scrubby grass, seized on Alanie, lifted her bodily from the ground and whisked her away before a scream could form in her throat. Eliot noticed, blurrily, that the entire length of the tentacle was covered with wriggling wormy protuberances.
Even as Alanie was withdrawn into the body of Dominus Eliot was running forward, howling wildly and firing his dart gun. Light footsteps pattered to his rear; surprisingly strong, bony arms restrained his. “It is no use, Eliot. Dominus has taken her. He is not what you thought.”
Early on Dominus had perceived that the massy object, which he now accepted came from beyond the atmosphere, was not itself a lifeform but a lifeform’s construct. The idea was already a familiar one: artifacts were rare on his planet—biological evolution was simpler—but there had been a brief period when they had proliferated, attaining increasing orders of sophistication until they had nearly devastated the continent. Stored in his redundant genes Dominus still retained all the knowledge of his ancestors on that score.
From the construct emerged undoubtedly organic entities, and it was in this that the mystery lay: there were several of them. Dominus spent some time mulling over this inexplicable fact. Who, then, was owner of the construct? He noted that, within limits, all the foreign lifeforms bore a resemblance to one another, and reminded himself that ecological convergence was an occasional phenomenon within his own domain. Could this convergence have been carried further and some kind of ecological common action (he formed the concept with difficulty) have arisen among entities occupying the same ecological niche? He reasoned that he should entertain no preconceptions as to the courses evolution might take under unimaginably alien conditions. Some relationship even more incomprehensible to him might be the case.
So he had been patient, watching jealously as the lifeforms surveyed part of his domain in a flying artifact, but doing nothing. Then they had attempted, but failed, to capture some native organisms. Wanting to see what would take place, Dominus had delivered a few to them.
When he saw the mutated lifeform emerge from the construct on its escape bid, he knew it was as he had anticipated. The aliens must have made a genetic analysis of all their specimens. The massy construct was sealed against Dominus9 mutation-damping genes, and within that isolation they had carried out an experiment, subjecting one of the specimens to a challenge situation and prompting it to reproduce.
Dominus could forbear no longer. He issued the slipper with a stern command to stay fast. It was sufficiently its father’s son to know what the consequences of disobeying him would be. Three alien lifeforms emerged in pursuit. To begin with, Dominus took one of the pair that were so nearly identical.
Alanie Leitner floated, deep within Dominus9 body, in a sort of protein jelly. Mercifully, she was quite dead. Thousands of nerve-thin tendrils entered her body to carry out a brief but adequate somatic exploration. At the same time billions upon billions of RNA operators migrated to her gonads (there were two of them) and sifted down to the genetic level where they analyzed her chromosomes with perfect completeness.
“It killed her,” Eliot was repeating in a stunned, muttering voice. “It killed her.”
Abrak had persuaded him to return to the ship. They found that Balbain had abandoned his vigil and was pacing the central chamber situated over the laboratory. His bird-eyes glittered at them with unusual fervor.
“We can delay no further,” he boomed. €tDominus9 qualities cannot be gainsaid. The sense of him is overpowering. Therefore my quest is at an end. I shall return home.”
“No!” crooned Abrak suddenly, in a hard tone Eliot had not heard him use before. “This planet also holds the promise of answering our requirements.”
“You take second place. 1 originated this expedition, and therefore you are pre-empted.”
“We shall see who will pre-empt whom,” Abrak barked.
While the import of the exchange was lost on Eliot, he was bewildered at seeing these two, whom he had thought of as dispassionate men (beings, anyway) of science, quarreling and snarling like wild dogs. So palpable was the ferocity that he was startled out of his numbness and waved his arms placatingly as though to separate them.
“Gentlemen! Is this any way for a scientific expedition to conduct itself?”
The aliens glanced at him. Balbain’s mask had become wet—perhaps with the exudations of some emotion—and partly transparent. Through it Eliot saw the gaping, square mouth that never closed.
“Let us laugh,” Balbain said, addressing Abrak.
They both gave vent to regular chugging expulsions of air; it was a creaking monotone, devoid of mirth but a weird simulation of human laughter. Neither species, to Eliot’s knowledge, were endowed with a sense of humor at all; once or twice before he had heard them use this travesty to indicate, in human speech, where they believed laughter would be appropriate.
He felt chilled. A feeling of alienness wafted towards him from the two beings, whom previously he had regarded as companions.
Balbain made a vague gesture. “We know that you judge us by your own standards,” he said, “but it is not so. Like you, we each came on this expedition to satisfy cravings inherent in our species. But those cravings are different from yours and from each other. . . .”
His voice softened and became almost caressing. Bending his head slightly, he indicated the wall of the ship, as though to direct Eliot’s attention outside.
“Try to imagine what evolution means here on Five. It takes not eons or millions of years to produce a biological invention, but only a few months. The Basic Polarity is not here to soften life’s blows; competition is so intense that Five is the toughest testing ground in the universe. The result of all this should be obvious. What we have here is the most capable, potentially the most powerful source of life that could possibly exist. And Dominus is the fulfillment of that process. The most intolerant, the most domineering—” he put special emphasis on the word—“entity that the universe can produce!”
“Domineering?” echoed Eliot, frowning.
“But of course! Think for a moment: what special
quality must a creature develop on Five in order to make itself safe? The ability to dominate everything around it! Dominus has that quality to the ultimate degree. He is the Lord, in submission to whom my species can at last find peace of mind.”
Balbain spoke with such passion and in such a strange manner that Eliot could only stand and stare. Abrak spoke softly, turning his fox’s snout towards him.
"I
t is hard for Balbain to convey what he is feeling,” he crooned. "Perhaps I can explain it to your intellect, at least. First, the romantic picture you harbor concerning the fellowship of sentient minds is, I am afraid, quite incorrect. Mentalities are even more diverse in character than are physical forms. What goads us into action is not what goads you.”
"Then we cannot understand one another?” Eliot said.
"Only indirectly. In almost every advanced species there is a central drive that comes from its evolutionary history and overrides all other emotions—in its best specimens. This overriding urge gives the race as a whole its existential meaning. To other races it might look futile or even ridiculous—as, indeed, yours does to us—but to the species concerned it is a universal imperative, self-evident and inescapable.”
He paused to allow Eliot to absorb what he was saying. While Balbain looked on, seeming scarcely any less agitated, he continued calmly: "For reasons too complex to describe, life on Balbain’s world developed a submission-orientation. The physical conditions there, much harsher than what you are accustomed to, caused living beings to enter into an elaborate network of relationships in which each sought, not to dominate, but to he dominated by some other power, the stronger the better. This craving is thus the compass needle that guides Balbain’s species. To them it is self-fulfilment, the inner meaning of the universe itself.”
Eliot glanced at Balbain, The revelation made him feel uncomfortable.
“But how can it be?”
“Every species sees its own fixation as expressing the hidden nature of the universe. Do not you?”
Eliot brushed aside the question, which he did not understand. “But what’s all this about Dominus?”
