Tales of Known Space: The Universe of Larry Niven

by Larry Niven

  "Jilson, if they're intelligent, why are they in cages?"

  "If you think that's bad, wait'll you see the lab. Look, Garvey, what you've got to keep in mind is that nobody's proven they're intelligent. Until somebody does, they're experimental animals."

  They had an odd, almost pleasant, odor, faint enough so that you stopped noticing it in two or three seconds. I peered in at the snapping motile-stage female. "What happens then? Does everyone suddenly get ashamed of himself?"

  "I doubt it. Do you happen to know what humans did to dolphins while trying to prove they were intelligent?"

  "Brain probes and imprisonment. But that was a long time ago."

  "The scientists were trying to prove dolphins were intelligent, so they had to be treated like experimental animals. Why not? It makes sense: In the end they did the species a service. If their assumption had been wrong, they'd only have wasted time on animals. And it gave the dolphins a hell of an incentive to prove they were intelligent."

  We reached the lab shortly after noon. It was the Laboratory for Xenobiological Research, a rectangular building beyond the outskirts of the city, surrounded by brown fields marked with rectangular arrays of ultraviolet lamps on tall poles. In the distance we could see the Ho River, with flocks of water skiers skimming across its muddy surface behind puller units.

  A Dr. Fuller showed us through the lab. He was an obvious crashlander: a towering albino, seven feet tall, with a slender torso and tapering, almost skeletal, limbs. "You're interested in the Grogs? I don't blame you. They're very difficult to study, you know. Their behavior tells nothing. They sit. When something comes by, they eat it. And they bear young."

  He had several presessile cones, the bulldog-sized quadrupeds, in cages. There was another cage containing two of the little males. They didn't bark at him, and he treated them with tenderness and something like love. It seemed to me that he was a happy man. I could sympathize with him. Down must look like paradise to an albino from We Made It. You can walk around outside all year, the soil grows things, and you don't need tannin pills under the red sun.

  "They learn fast," he said earnestly, "that is, they do well in mazes. But they certainly aren't intelligent. About as intelligent as a dog. They grow fast, and they eat horrendously. Look at this one." He picked up a very fat, round-bottomed female. "In a few days she'll be looking for a place to anchor."

  "What will you do then? Turn her loose?"

  "We're going to raise her just outside the lab. We've picked her a good anchor rock and built a cage around it. She'll go into the cage until she changes form, and then we can remove the cage. We've tried this before," he added, "but it hasn't worked out. They die. They won't eat, even when we offer them live meat."

  "What makes you think this one will live?"

  "We have to keep trying. Perhaps we'll find out what we're doing wrong."

  "Has a Grog ever attacked a human being?"

  "To the best of my knowledge, never."

  To me, that was as good an answer as No, because I was trying to find out if they were intelligent.

  Consider the days when it was first suspected that the cetaceans were Earth's second sentient order of life. It was known, then, that dolphins had many times helped swimmers out of difficulty and that no dolphin had ever been known to attack a human being. Well, what difference did it make whether they had not attacked humans or whether they had done so only when there was no risk of being caught at it? Either statement was proof of intelligence.

  "Of course, a man may simply be too big for a Grog to eat. Look at this," said Dr. Fuller, turning on a microscope screen. The screen showed a section of a nerve cell. "From a Grog's brain. We've done some work on the Grog's nervous system. The nerves transmit impulses more slowly than human nerves, but not much more. We've found that a strongly stimulated nerve can fire off the nerve next to it, just as in terrestrial chordates."

  "Are the cones intelligent, in your opinion?"

  Dr. Fuller didn't know. He took a long time saying it, but that's what it boiled down to. It distressed him; his ears turned red beneath the transparent skin. He wanted to know. Perhaps he felt he had a right to know.

  "Then tell me this. Is there any evolutionary reason for them to have developed intelligence?"

  "That's a much better question." But he hesitated over the answer. "I'll tell you this. There is a terrestrial marine animal which starts life as a free-swimming worm with a notochord. It later settles down as a sessile animal, and it gives up the notochord at the same time."

  "Amazing! What's a notochord?"

  He laughed. "Like your spinal cord. A notochord is a rope of nervous connection which branches into the trunk nerves of the body. More primitive forms have sensory connections, but arranged without order. More advanced forms wrap a spine around the notochord and become vertebrates."

  "And this beast gives up its notochord?"

  "Yes. It's retrograde development."

  "But the Grogs are different."

  "That's right. They don't develop their large brains until after they settle down. And, no, I can't imagine an evolutionary reason. They shouldn't need a brain. They shouldn't have a brain. All they do in life is sit and wait for morsels of food to hop by."

  "You speak almost poetically when you turn your mind to it."

  "Thank you - I think. Mr. Garvey, will you come this way? You too, Jil. I want to show you a Grog central nervous system. Then you'll be as confused as I am."

  The brain was big, as advertised, and globular, and a strange color: almost the gray of human gray matter but with a yellow tinge. It might have been the preservative. The hindbrain was almost unnoticeable, and the spinal cord was a limp white string, uselessly thin, tapering almost to a thread before it ended in a multiple branching. What could that monstrous brain control, with practically no spinal cord to carry its messages?

  "I gather most of the nerves to the body don't go through the spinal cord."

  "I believe you're wrong, Mr. Garvey. I've tried without success to find supplementary nerves." He was smiling slightly. Now I had a piece of the problem. We could both stay awake nights."

  "Is the nervous material any different from the motile form's brain?"

  "No. The motile form has a smaller brain and a thicker spinal cord. As I said, its intelligence is about that of a dog. Its brain is somewhat larger, which is to be expected when you consider the slower rate of propagation of the nerve impulse."

  "Right. Does it help you to know that you've ruined my day?"

  "It does, yes." He smiled down at me. We were friends. He was flattered to know that I understood what he was talking about. Otherwise I wouldn't have looked so puzzled.

  The big soft sun was halfway down the sky when we got out. We stopped to look at the anchor pen Dr. Fuller had set up outside: one big flat rock with sand heaped around it, all enclosed in a wide fence with a gate. A smaller pen against the fence housed a colony of white rabbits.

  "One last question, Doctor. How do they eat? They can't just sit and wait for food to pop into their mouths."

  "No, they have a very long, slender tongue. I wish I could see it in use sometime. They won't eat in captivity; they won't eat when a human being is anywhere near."

  We said our good-byes and took our skycycles up.

  "It's only fifteen ten," said Jilson. "Do you want another look at a wild Grog before you leave Down?"

  "I think so, yes."

  "We could get out into the desert and back before sunset."

  And so we turned west The Ho River slipped beneath us and then a long stretch of cultivated fields. Long pink clouds striped the sky.

  IV

  They can't be intelligent, I was thinking. They can't.

  "What?"

  "Sorry, Jilson. Was I talking out loud?"

  "Yah. You saw that brain, didn't you?"

  "I did."

  "Then how can you say they're not intelligent?"

  "They've got no use for intelligence."r />
  "Does a dolphin? Or a sperm whale, or a bandersnatch?"

  "Yes, yes, no. Think it through. A dolphin has to hunt down its food. It has to outwit hungry killer-whales. A sperm whale also has the killer-whale problem, or used to. Then there were whaling ships. The smarter they were, the longer they could live.

  "Remember, cetaceans are mammals. They developed some brains on land. When they went back to the sea, they grew, and their brains grew too. The better their brains were, the better they could control their muscles, and the more agile they were in water. They needed brains, and they had a head start."

  "What about bandersnatchi?"

  "You know perfectly well that evolution didn't produce the bandersnatch."

  A moment of silence. Then, "What?"

  "You really don't know?"

  "I've never heard of a life form being produced without evolution. How did it happen?"

  I told him.

  Once upon a time, a billion and a half years ago, there was an intelligent biped species. Intelligent - but not very. But they had a natural ability to control the minds of any sentient race they came across. Today we call them Slavers. At its peak the Slaver Empire included most of the galaxy.

  One of their slave races had been the tnuctip, a highly advanced, highly intelligent species already practicing biological engineering when the Slavers found them. The Slavers gave them limited freedom, after they found the worth of those freethinking brains. In return the tnuctipun had built them biological tools. Air plants for their spacecraft, stage trees with shaped solid-fuel rocket cores, racing animals, bandersnatchi. The bandersnatch was a meat animal. It would eat anything, and everything but its skeleton was edible.

  There had come a day, a billion and a half years ago, when the Slavers found that most of the tnuctip gifts were traps. The rebellion had been a long time building, and the Slavers had underestimated their slaves. To win that war they had been forced to use a weapon which exterminated not only the tnuctipun, but every other sentient species then in the galaxy. Then, without slaves, the Slavers too had died.

  Scattered through known space, on odd worlds and between stars, were the relics of the Slaver Empire. Some were Slaver artifacts, protected against time by stasis fields. Others were more or less mutated tnuctip creations: sunflowers, stage trees, ships' air plants floating naked in space in cellophane bubbles; and bandersnatchi.

  The bandersnatch had been a tnuctip trap. It had been built sentient so that it could be used as a spy. Somehow the tnuctipun had made it immune to the Slaver power. Thus it had lived through the revolution.

  For what?

  The Jinxian bandersnatchi spent their lives in a soupy, pressurized fog, browsing off the ancient food yeast that still covered the ocean a foot deep in cheesy gray scum. No data reached their senses but for the taste of yeast and the everlasting gray mist. They had brains to think with but nothing to think about.. . until the coming of man.

  "And it can't mutate," I concluded. "So you can forget the bandersnatch. He's the exception that proves the rule. All other known Handicapped needed brains before their brains developed."

  "And they're all cetaceans from Earth's oceans."

  "Well--"

  Jilson made a razzing noise. Hell, he was right. They were all cetaceans.

  We'd left the plowed lands far behind. Gradually the plains became a desert. I was beginning to feel more comfortable with the beast under me - this platform with a saddle, and an oversized lift-belt motor, an air pump, and a force-field generator to stop the wind. Feeling less likely to make a mistake, I could fly lower, with less room to correct before I hit sand. From this close the desert was alive. There, rolling before the wind, was a wild cousin to the tumbleweeds I'd seen in the Zoo of Earth. There, a straight stalk with orange leaves around the base, fleshy leaves with knife-sharp edges to discourage herbivores. There, another, and a fox-sized herbivore cleverly eating out the center of a leaf. It looked up, saw us, and disappeared into motion. There, a vivid flash of scarlet, some desert plant which had picked an odd time to bloom.

  The soft red sun made everything look like the decor in a nightclub I know. It's decorated as Mars ought to be, as Mars was before space flight. A distance illusion: red sand; straight canals running with improbably clear, pure water; crystal towers reaching high, high, toward big fat crescent moons. Suddenly I wanted a drink.

  I dug in my saddlebags, hoping to find a flask. It was there, and it was heavy with fluid. I pinched the top open, tilted it to my lips-and almost choked. Martini! A halfpint martini, a little too sweet, but far colder than ice cold. I sipped at it, twice, and put it away. "I like Downers," I said.

  "Good. Why?"

  "No flatlander would think to put a martini in a rental skycycle unless he was asked to."

  "Harry's a nice guy. Woop, there's a cone."

  I looked down and right, searching for sand-colored hair against sand. The cone was in its own shadow; it practically jumped at me. And equally suddenly, I knew what had awakened me in the dark morning.

  "What's wrong?" asked Jilson. I realized that I'd gasped.

  "Nothing. Jilson, I don't know all I should about Downer animals. Do they excrete solids?"

  "Do they-? Hey, that was nicely put. Yes, they do." He tilted his vehicle down toward the cone.

  It sat firmly on a tilted flat rock, which lifted one edge out of the sand. The rock was absolutely clean.

  "Then Grogs do too."

  "Right." Jilson landed.

  I drifted in beside him, dropping the skycycle joltingly hard. The Grog sat facing us, faintly smiling.

  "Well, where's the evidence? Who cleans up after this thing?"

  Jilson scratched his head. He walked around the base of the Grog and came back, looking puzzled. "Funny, I never thought of that. Scavengers?"

  "Maybe."

  "Is it important?"

  "Maybe. Most sessile animals live in water. The water carries everything away."

  "There's a sessile thing from Gummidgy-"

  "I've got one. But the orchid-thing lives in trees. It attaches itself to a nice thick horizontal tree-branch, with its tail hanging over the edge."

  "Mmm." He seemed uninterested. No doubt he was right; some scavenger cleaned up after the Grog. But it didn't sound right. Why would the parasite animal do such a good job?

  The Grog and I faced each other.

  As a rule the Handicapped seem to suffer from sensory deprivation. Cetaceans live underwater; bandersnatchi live in heated, pressurized fog. Maybe it's too early to make such rules, but it's for sure that a Handicapped will have trouble experimenting with his environment. Experiments generally require tools.

  But the Grog had real troubles. Blind, numb in all its extremities - due to the nearly useless spinal cord - unable even to move to a different location, what could be its picture of the universe?

  Somehow I found myself staring at its hands.

  Hands. Useless, of course, but still hands. Four fingers with tiny claws set around the tiny palm like the fingers of a mechanical grab.

  "It didn't evolve at all. It devolved!"

  Jilson looked up. He was using his skycycle as the only convenient thing to sit on for miles around. "What are you talking about?"

  "The Grog. It's got vestigial hands. Once it must have been a higher form of life."

  "Or a climbing animal, like a monkey."

  "I don't think so. I think it had a brain and hands and mobility. Then something happened, and it lost its civilization. Now it's lost its mobility and its hands."

  "Why would it stop moving?"

  "Maybe there was a shortage of food. Not moving conserved energy." And because that was the sheerest guesswork, I added, "Or maybe it got in the habit of watching too much tridee. I know people who don't move for weeks."

  "During the Interworid Playoffs my cousin Bernie - Hell with it! You think that's the answer, do you?"

  "Yes. It's in a trap. No eyes, no sensory input, no way to do anything
with what it does think about. It's like blind, deaf, and dumb baby with glove anesthesia all over."

  "It's still got the brain."

  "Like our appendix. It'll lose that too."

  "You're the one who was worried about the Handicapped. Can't you do anything for it?"

  "Euthanasia, maybe. No, not even that. Let's go back to Downtown." I walked through sand toward my cycle sick with discouragement. Bandersnatchi had needed me to tell them about the stars. But what could you tell a hairy cone?

  No, it was back to Downtown for me, and then back to Earth. There are people no doctor and no psychiatrist can help, and there are species equally beyond aid. With the Grogs there was no place to start.

  A few feet from the cycle I sat down cross-legged in the sand. Jilson got down beside me. We faced the Grog, waiting.

  V

  By and by Jilson said, "What are we waiting for?"

  I shrugged. I didn't know. But Jilson didn't move, and neither did I. I knew with a crystalline certainty that we were doing the right thing.

  Simultaneously, we turned from the Grog to look into the desert.

  Something the size of a rat came hopping toward us, kicking up dust. Behind it, another and another. They hopped laboriously across the sand, springing high, and stopped in an arc facing the Grog.

  The Grog turned toward them - not the way you'd turn your neck, but turning all over. It looked sightlessly at the sand rats, and the sand rats perched on their hind legs and looked back.

  The Grog's mouth opened. It was a cavern, and the tongue was coiled on its pink floor. The tongue moved like a lash, invisibly fast, flick, flick. Two of the rats were gone. The mouth (not too small for a man) dropped shut, smiling gently.

  The third rat was there on its hind legs. None of them had tried to run. They might just as well have --

  Again the Grog's mouth dropped open. The last sand rat took a running leap and landed on the coiled tongue. The mouth closed for the last time, and the cone turned back to face us.