What’s All This Brouhaha? Ha Ha…
[With insincere apologies to my esteemed colleague Silver Donald Cameron (www.islemadame.com/sdc/) and to legendary Vancouver bluesman Long John Baldry]
DOCTOR SILVER,” I SAID, “I’d like you to meet Donald Q. Public. Don, allow me to present Dr. Hyland Orenthal Silver. Dr. Silver was a distinguished oncologist for many years before becoming Canada’s leading specialist in cloning.”
Dr. Silver rose behind his desk and extended his hand. “Good afternoon, Mr. Public. Do you have a mi—I’m sorry, is something wrong?”
Don was staring, awestruck. “It just hit me,” he said. “You’re Hy O. Silver, the clone arranger, in T’ronto…”
There was a stillness, as complete as that which must exist on the moon now that the tourist season is past. I could hear dust motes collide. Dr. Silver took his hand back and sat down.
Well, I have a certain reputation to uphold, myself. “And if I were a great Nova Scotian writer videotaping you both,” I said finally, “I’d call the result ‘Silver/Donald, Camera On.’” Now I could hear dust mote near-misses. “I’m sorry, Doc, I should have warned you: Don here’s a fellow paronomasiac. Look, can we move things along a little, here? We’re already 182 words into this column with little sign of a theme yet.”
“Certainly, Spider,” he agreed. “As I was saying: Mr. Public, do you have a million dollars?”
Don blinked. “As a matter of fact, I do. Won a lottery.”
“Good. Then you’re not wasting my time. Continue.”
“A megabuck is table stakes in your game?”
Dr. Silver merely nodded.
Don looked impressed. “Okay. I just turned fifty, I have this million bucks and since I have no family responsibilities I’ve decided to blow the whole wad on something eye-poppingly evil. Ideally I’d like to make the hair of everyone alive stand on end. All technology is intrinsically vile, of course…so I asked around, and everyone seems to agree that this cloning is simply the most horrifyingly wicked, morally revolting and ethically dangerous technology around. So t—”
“Wait a minute,” I objected. “What about the time that Frankencarrot snapped its chains, killed its maker and raged around the countryside strangling little girls and raping the Burgomeister, and we all had to get our torches and pitchforks and march on the—”
I trailed off, and Don put the knife away. “—ell me, Doctor,” he went on as if he had not been interrupted, “how can cloning help me subvert basic human decency and shock the world? Let’s talk abomination, here.”
Dr. Silver pursed his lips, then took out a wallet made of marzipan and lipped his purse. “First, of course, we can clone you.”
“Walk me through that one.”
“You give us a DNA sample and go away for a long time. We make a few hundred clones, of which a few will become viable—and non-mutated—blastocysts.”
“So I could create several of me?”
“Maybe—at a million dollars per attempt. Turning an invisibly small clump of stem cells into a live baby is a nontrivial problem. Nobody’s ever done it yet. Stick with one is my advice, unless your financial condition improves.”
“Okay. So then…what?”
“With luck, a year or so from now, I hand you a squawling infant with no birth certificate to raise by yourself.”
Don frowned. “But he’d be absolutely identical to me? To me when I was a baby, I mean?”
“No more than an identical twin. Different fingerprints, for example.”
“But he’d be real close, right?”
Dr. Silver nodded. “Close enough that if you found him parents identical to yours, raised him like the kid in The Truman Show in an artificial environment that perfectly reproduced the one you grew up in, and arranged for his life to play out exactly as yours did—”
“—then in only fifty years, I’d have—”
“—someone very much like you are now. A man with no loved ones who feels a powerful yearning to do something really evil, but has not won a million dollar lottery. And who doesn’t know anything that’s happened in the real world since 1951.”
“If he ever meets you,” I added, “and finds out what you did to him, he’ll kill you.”
Don suddenly got a sinister look. “Hey…what if I got hold of some of Hitler’s DNA, somehow, and recreated him in his prime?”
This time Dr. Silver pursed his teeth. “Pretty much the same result…except you end up with a man perfectly designed to flourish in 1930s Germany. He’d end up playing bass in a Goth band, I expect.”
“At a cost approaching forty megabucks,” I added. “Clone Vancouver’s greatest bluesman, instead: then at least you’ve got a terrific pair of Long Johns.”
Neither heard me. “I must say I’m a little discouraged,” Don said.
“It’s not the cost,” Dr. Silver agreed. “It’s the upkeep.”
“If all you want is genetic copies of you, fifty years younger, and you don’t mind if they think or behave differently than you,” I offered, “grow as many as you can afford, and just leave them outside orphanages. Social services fraud: now that’s evil.”
Not enough for Don. “Suppose I cloned an army, Doctor? A thousand copies of some great warrior?”
“Then for the price of a hundred submarines you get an army whose every action is utterly predictable and every weakness magnified a thousandfold. Every private will think he’s as competent as his officers—and be right. But their uniforms should all fit perfectly.”
Don frowned. “Not very frightening.” He brightened. “Wait. What about cloning my organs for transplant?”
Dr. Silver looked puzzled. “It’d be infinitely cheaper to bribe your way to the top of the transplant list, or buy organs from the Third World, like other millionaires do. Seems to me cloned organs would be far less immoral. And better for you.”
Don was visibly disappointed. “I don’t get it. What’s so evil about cloning?”
“Beats me,” the doctor confessed.
Suddenly Don grinned broadly, leaped to his feet and pointed at the doctor. “Spider said you used to be an oncologist,” he said accusingly.
“Yes, why?”
“You’re the clone arranger in T’ronto—chemo savvy!”
That’s when he threw us out of his office. Apparently scientists do have at least some scruples about who they clone.
The Yoomins of Sol III
JOIN ME NOW as we beam down to a strange new planet. Our five-minute mission: to determine whether intelligent life exists here. And since we only have five minutes, there is no time for a proper study of the large-scale organization or behavior of the planet’s dominant species—we must simply drop in, take one quick technology sample at random, assume it is representative and draw the best conclusions we can. Ready? CUE THE SPECIAL EFFECTS—
God, that always tickles.
Okay. We’re in a typical dwelling of this race—yoomins, they’re called. We’ve tried to bias the test in their favor as much as possible, by choosing our sample from one of the most affluent regions of the planet; surely here will be found their most intelligent technology. Tricorders ready? Let’s look around.
The room we’re presently in—the name sounds like a sneeze—is the one in which yoomins store and prepare their food. The largest two items in the room are a heat-making machine and a heat-losing machine. They sit side by side—yet careful sensor readings indicate they are not connected in any way. Hmmm.
Let’s look closer. The heat-loser is—bafflingly—designed to stand on its end, so that you must spill money on the floor every time you open it to access or even inspect its contents. And they put the coldest part on top.
The heat-maker is complementarily designed to spill money on the ceiling. Not just the four elements on top (one of which is always defective): the central module, called an uvvin, has a door which—inexplicably—opens from the top, so that you cannot touch the contents during cooking, even momentarily,
without wasting all the heat. The whole unit is utterly unprogrammable, and lacks even the simplest temperature readouts: everything is done by guess.
Perhaps some sort of cultural blind-spot is at work here. Let’s examine the water-recycling facilities.
Uh, there are none. Yoomins throw potable water away. They throw hot water away. And look at the temperature control system: there is none. No sensors, no thermocouples, taps completely uncalibrated—though all these technologies are trivially cheap here. They keep a large, almost-uninsulated tank full of water heated at all times to skin-scalding temperature (using none of the waste heat to warm the pipe, so that hot water will always be slow in arriving when needed), and then mix it with cold water to a safe temperature, by hand, adjusting the result by testing it with their own skin. With every use.
Well, perhaps yoomins customarily eat in restaurants, and this room is only intended as a fallback—in case, let us say, a wave of psychosis passes through the restaurant industry and they all start turning away a quarter of their customers rather than run a fan. Let’s try another room.
And let’s make it as fundamental and essential a room as we can. A yoomin need not necessarily sleep in its bedroom, nor relax in its living room, nor work in its study—but there is one room in which every yoomin must spend some time at least twice a day. Surely there, if anywhere, we will find the most thoughtful applications of intelligence.
The first and largest thing we find is a combination shower and bath. It cannot be used comfortably to bathe and cannot be used safely to shower. Its principal purpose appears to be to kill the elderly, unfit and unlucky, which it does with ruthless efficiency. The shower head is generally fixed, impossible to train on the areas where it is most needed. It has worse temperature control than the sink in the other room and is tested with the whole body. No provision is made for hair accumulation in the drain—or, usually, for venting of steam or gradual equalization of ambient temperature after a shower.
Let’s move on to the central fixture: the commode. It enforces an unnatural, inefficient and uncomfortable posture, presents about the most uncomfortable sitting surface possible, has absolutely no facilities for cleansing or disinfecting either the user or itself—and after use, it takes the precious irreplaceable fertilizer and throws it away, using gallons of potable water to do so with no attempt at recycling. The obvious one-way valve, to prevent it backing up, is not present. And for a full 25 percent of its purported purpose—as a male urinal—it is completely and manifestly worthless, a constant source of domestic strife.
But if you think that’s odd, keep going. There is a perfect, rationally designed male urinal, right here in this room—less than a meter away—but for some reason, no male human will admit to ever having used it for that purpose. That would somehow desecrate it, soil it. Officially it is reserved for saliva, nasal mucus, toothpaste spit-up, beard-hairs, blood, assorted skin-paints worn by females and the truly disgusting things humans seem to have to rinse off their hands all the time. Needless to say, it too must have its water-temperature laboriously reset by guess with each use.
Above it, on the wall, hangs another curious thing: a cabinet designed to spill its contents. The spice-rack in the last room, meant to hold items of uniform size and shape, has retaining walls for them—but these shelves, intended to hold items of varied size and shape, do not. And they are always too small and shallow to hold what is required; the overflow goes under the sink where it can grow mold faster.
Let’s go back to the commode. Does it come with a reading lamp? No? Not even a magazine rack? Good God, Spock, are these creatures savages?
There are stereo speakers built in, surely? Power and data-feeds for a laptop? At least tell me there’s a built-in deodorizer—
Let’s stop. It’s time to beam back up. These hominids may have developed some clever technology—but they are obviously not bright enough to have given the slightest thought to applying it to their own most basic personal comfort, and so they cannot possibly be regarded as sentient.
We’ll check back in another century or so. It’s possible yoomins are going through some sort of temporary cyclical madness—every adolescent species has its Crazy Years.
Yoomins Reconsidered
TO:
Kames T. Jerk, Commander, Starship ExitPrize
FROM:
Academician Npolfz Tuvefou, University of Aldeberan
SUBJECT:
Your Report on Sol III
Dear Captain,
I don’t think you’re being entirely fair to the yoomins of Sol III. I’ve read your recent assessment of their intelligence, as exemplified by the personal-comfort technology found in their fuel-intake and -exhaust chambers, and I cannot fault your data. But I think you’ve missed a subtle point, which colors your conclusion.
There is about yoomins a quality so profoundly strange that it renders questions of intelligence or stupidity simply irrelevant. I have spent some time in that sector of the Lesser Magellanic Cloud—not by choice, of course; a breakdown—and ask you to believe that this is true, however improbable it may seem.
Yoomins believe at their core that life is not tough enough.
A primary example: like any sentient species, they recognized a need to transmit information nonverbally with high reliability over distance. Like most, they developed a symbol system: in their case, dark stains on leaves of whitened plant matter. (An unstable medium—but then, their lives are short.) They called theirs an “alphabet.”
So far so good. But yoomins believe life is not hard enough; they could not stop there. The most advanced tribe of them developed not two but three alphabets, almost but not quite identical—called “upper case,” “lower case,” and “script”—for absolutely no reason at all. These yoomins require their young to master all three, and an endless series of self-contradictory rules for when each may/must be used. The largest tribe of yoomins, on the other hand, uses an alphabet that has endured, essentially unchanged, for millennia…which contains hundreds of characters, of surpassing complexity, and is nearly impossible for most yoomins (even of that tribe) to learn, write, type or translate.
Consider language itself. The purpose of language is to encode reality and communicate useful observations regarding it. Obviously, the more languages you construct, the more ways you have of looking at reality; integrate enough of them, and the noise should filter out, leaving a refined approximation. Yoomins have a reassuring plethora of languages—and much urgent reason to want to communicate with one another. But almost no yoomin learns more than one language. Bitter emotional debates often rage on whether it should be permissible for the young to be schooled in as many as two. This requires that every message between different tribes be laboriously translated by a single freak-expert, whose work can not practically be checked. Attempts at establishing a planetary pidgin—the very first sign of a civilization—have been made, but never seriously; yet yoomins maintain a planetary civilization. They do not believe life is hard enough.
The yoomin ecosystem teems with substances containing neurochemicals which induce pleasure in them. Nearly all yoomins show clear need for at least some such pleasure above that provided by simple successful survival. Most of these chemicals have societally-damaging side effects, some great, some small. Dealing with those would be a large but entirely manageable problem.
But yoomins don’t think life is tough enough. Their response is to absolutely forbid use of any such substance, punishing violators with death, torture, imprisonment and disgrace. I swear. Excepted, of course, are substances that do not make a yoomin feel good enough to arouse anyone else’s envy (e.g., “sugar,” “chocolate,” “caffeine”). But the only other exception—one made almost universally around the planet—is for the single substance which demonstrably and unmistakably has the most destructive effects (ethanol). All substances in between tend to be demonized in direct proportion to their relative harmlessness, and the strength of the user’s need for them.
Yoomins reproduce sexually, and at high efficiency. At present, they are confined to a single planet (for no explicable reason; apparently by choice), and thus suffer an overpopulation problem so intense it must be immediately apparent to the meanest intelligence among them. They are extremely blessed by nature in that a) contraception itself is trivially simple for them, and b) there are a number of alternative sexual recreations that offer no possibility of impregnation and are even more pleasurable than the procreative act itself. So what do yoomins do? They deify ignorance. They do their level best—knowing in advance that they cannot possibly succeed—to ensure that their young learn nothing about sex (not even simple hygiene) for as long as possible. Indeed, sexual ignorance in children is given the special name “innocence,” and considered not only a virtue, but the ultimate virtue. Yoomins deliberately go to enormous trouble to guarantee that their own young will begin their sex lives incompetently, with maximum possible emotional trauma, just as they are most fertile.
Recently yoomins developed technology which makes unintended conception a correctable mistake, long before a developing fetus could possibly possess a single functioning nerve cell or pain receptor—and so now, inevitably, the most revered and popular religious leader in the history of their planet tells them such technology is evil. He himself is a celibate. Life is nowhere near tough enough for the inhabitants of Sol III.
Yoomins made a terrible historical mistake. They destroyed or tamed every single predator that threatened them, from sabertooth to smallpox, and gained control over most natural catastrophes—long before they were emotionally prepared to do without them. They have become too accustomed to the regular sound of ringing alarm bells in their heads, and so will manufacture emergency if none arises naturally. In between emergencies, they fantasize about them. They are addicted to fear, and for some reason cannot admit it. They are neurologically wired up to deal with a more hostile environment than presently presents itself…and are undone by the lack of competition. They turn their own intelligence to making life difficult enough for their own comfort, for their innate sense of the rightness of things.
The Crazy Years Page 31
