Rogue Powers

by Roger MacBride Allen

  "You want the war ended so it won't expand any more than it has. You want the killing to stop. I understand that. But this—it's not directly related. Why are you doing it? Why are you risking so much for this?"

  For the first time, Gustav looked down, and stared straight at Cynthia. "Because," he said, "she's down there."

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO Outpost, Refiner Camp

  Everything was a bit stuck until Pete got stronger. He was the only one of the League group empowered to discuss much of anything with any real authority. He was prepared to discuss technology trades, exchanges of ambassadors (or whatever the local equivalent was), and most importantly, a mutual assistance pact against the Guards and the Nihilists. But it would have to wait—and the flap over the transfusion made the situation that much more delicate.

  All the humans were dumbfounded by the way L'awdasi, by all accounts a mere hobbyist in such things, had duplicated human blood overnight, but Charlie Sisulu was hit much harder by it than the rest. He knew better than the others just how complicated blood was. And if one amateur Outposter could do that overnight, what could a team of crack professionals do in a week, given the raw materials of a few human cells to work with? Clone a man? Clone an army of men? If they could make blood, surely they could make diseases, nightmare plagues. And none of them had even seen a human before last year. And with such biological power, what could they do to each other? With a biological science that powerful, Charlie could almost understand the medical tabu. Better the thousand natural shocks than the unnatural horrors a thousand L'awdasis might accidentally whip up any weekend.

  And yet, it didn't quite play. Any element of human medicine could be abused, used to kill, from a scalpel used to slash a throat to an overdose of aspirin. Humankind had had the knowledge to unleash plagues at will for one hundred fifty years—but that didn't make anyone want to ban doctors.

  Well, no percentage in playing until he understood the game. And Charlie did not yet know enough.

  Lucy had mentioned to C'astille that Charlie was a biologist, and C'astille had instantly wanted to talk with him. There were a hundred questions she wanted to ask. Charlie, needless to say, was delighted with the chance himself. So, an hour or two after getting the message safely off to Ariadne, C'astille met the two humans by the entrance of their wagon and the three of them went for a walk. C'astille led them to a quiet corner of the clearing. The two humans sat down on the ground, a bit awkward in their pressure suits. C'astille folded her legs up beneath herself and curled her long tail around her body. Lucy thought the moment proper to offer her gift, the big picture book of Earth and the solar system. She pulled it out of her carrypack. "Here you go, C'astille," she said. "Take a look at this and you'll be all set to play tourist when you get there."

  C'astille took the book eagerly, and spent a half hour with the humans, pointing to the pictures and asking endless questions. Lucy was pleased to have chosen a gift her friend enjoyed so much. It was good to get to safety, to the protection of the Refiners. The biggest part of her duty seemed to have been done. Charlie seemed far less relaxed. He found it very strange and incongruous to sit back in the grasslands, here on this world, with the sun shining, the sky blue, the area cleared of rapacious animals. To Charlie, Outpost would always be that deadly trek through the forest, and all the planet's other moods mere trickery and misdirection.

  It was stranger still to sit with a six-limbed thinking creature nearly the size of a small horse, with a long reptilian tail, and big doll's eyes set in the front of that strange, egg-on-its-side-shaped skull—a creature who thought nothing of creating whole human blood from scratch overnight.

  He found himself watching her hands most of all. Four long, slender fingers, all opposable to each other. Those were graceful, toolmakers' hands, strange to watch in their fluid motions that did what human hands did, but in a radically different way.

  Finally, he got a bit tired of Lucy and the 'Poster oohing and aahing over pictures of Paris and the Outback and the space colonies. "C'astille," he said at last, in as cheerful a tone as he could manage. "We need to get started. I am so curious about you and your world! You said you wished to ask me questions, and I promise you I can match you, bafflement for bafflement. Time is short, so perhaps we might begin?"

  C'astille nodded and regretfully closed the picture book. "You are right. The lovely pictures must wait until later. You have travelled far, at great risk, and the time might come quickly when we will need knowledge of each other."

  "Good!" Charlie replied. "But let me say one more thing. Our peoples are quite strange to each other, and there is much we would Know. Some questions might be delicate, but we have no way of knowing which ones. So if I speak rudely, I do not mean to, and I ask that you excuse me. Lucy and I will likewise not take offense, for we know none is meant."

  "Thank you!" C'astille said. "I have been hunting the words to say that to you. I am glad you found them for me. And I'll test your promise about taking offense at once," she said with a cheerful tone. "L'awdasi, in the non-incident of this morning, noted something about your genes. Due to their structure, they are far less liable to mutation than our own. That would suggest that your species should look much more like one another than ours does—and yet just the opposite is true."

  Charlie smiled thinly. He thought of a lot of people back home on Earth who would say otherwise—"they all look the same to me." Black, yellow, white, whatever, he had heard people of every color say that about people of every other color. "Let me save you some time, C'astille. You're leading up to asking why I in particular look so much more different than the other humans you have seen. Why is my skin so dark, why is my hair curly, why are my nose and lips wider?"

  "Yes, I suppose that you're one example. But this Mac M'Larson must be twice the size of Lucy here, and she and Joslyn have quite different proportions than the rest of you."

  Charlie found himself vaguely embarrassed. What could this extraterrestrial know of racial tension, of guilt and anger for deeds done a hundred, a thousand years before? She asked about variation in a population and he got his back up on the old prejudices. "Hmmm. Well, let me explain my case. Maybe that would help illustrate the others. Forgive me if I simplify a bit, but here is the basic explanation.

  "All our people probably started out looking pretty much alike, when they all lived in one place, one climate. But our race, homo sapiens, humankind, had settled over pretty much all of our home world, Earth, by about forty thousand years ago, maybe a bit earlier. Some people lived in cold parts that didn't get much sun. Mac's ancestors came from such a place. Light-skinned people can absorb a lot of something in sunlight that humans need to stay healthy, because their skin is transparent enough to let in a large fraction of the light. My ancestors grew up in a place with very strong sunlight. Their skin needed to be dark to protect them from getting too much light.

  "In Mac's part of the world, if your skin was too dark, you were likely to get sick and die from a lack of this special thing in sunlight. So mostly light-skinned people, with genes for light skin, survived to pass on their genes. In my part of the world, if you were too light-skinned the sun was so strong it could kill you. So only darker people, with genes for dark skin, survived. People in temperate climates survived best with a skin color somewhere in the middle. Once people had invented civilization, and could control their environments more, it didn't really matter what color you were, so there were no selection pressures for one shade over another and people moved about as they wished. The other differences between us have similar explanations. The people who survived in various spots on the globe and lived to have children were the ones who, by chance, had traits and genes for those traits that gave them a little edge over everyone else. Obviously, they passed their genes on to their children. But in terms of evolution, these differences are trivial. We are all one species, but with each individual still carrying around adaptations to whatever climate his or her ancestors lived in.'

  The e
xplanation didn't seem to satisfy C'astille altogether. "I see. But while she was with us, Lucy's skin grew darker, and she explained this was a reaction to the sunlight. Suppose that she bore children while she was here and her skin was dark. Wouldn't those children start out darker, inheriting the tendency for darker skin?"

  "No, no, of course not. That would be inheritance of acquired traits. Let's see. What would be a clearer example? Okay. There's an animal on Earth called a giraffe. It has a very long neck, perhaps two meters long, and the long neck helps it eat leaves at the tops of trees no other animal can reach.

  "Long ago, it used to be thought that some short-necked proto-giraffe managed to stretch its neck through exercise, and passed that slightly longer neck along to its offspring, and the offspring did the same, and so on. The theory had the physical shape of the body affecting the genes, and not the other way around. That's the classic example of inheritance of acquired characteristics, or Lamarckism, after the man who thought of it. But it doesn't work."

  C'astille looked straight at Charlie, and pulled her head in toward her body in surprise. "On Outpost, it does work," she said, in a strange, querulous voice. "If I cut off my finger, within a month the regulator cells of my body will record the change and implant it in my ovaries. My children, and their children, and theirs, will have a finger missing. Or perhaps they will carry the gene for a missing finger from one generation to the next, until it shows up again, after skipping many generations."

  Charlie stared back at her, astonished. Real, honest-to-God Lamarckian biology? It was incredible, but it explained so much. He was tempted to contradict her, to say that it must be a superstition, that she had to be wrong. But these people were master biologists. They would know. The implications went reeling through his head. It was a revelation of the greatest importance. Lamarckism! It must have shaped their skill in modifying and creating life forms. It must have been easy to create a new and different animal with simple surgery. They would have been past masters at bio-engineering before they even invented the microscope and learned to manipulate genes directly.

  All of that shot through his mind in a moment. "That's fantastic, C'astille," he almost shouted. "It's so unexpected, so astonishing I don't know what to say. The implications— my God, they're endless!"

  Lucy looked from her human companion to the Ourposter and back. There was a strange sense in the air, a feeling of being on the edge of a terrible truth. "Charlie—C'astille. What's the big deal? You both look so shocked. So Outposters and humans evolve in different ways. So what?"

  "Lucy," C'astille said, speaking with a cautious precision. "Charlie and I have just stumbled across a fact that explains many of the differences between our peoples. It makes you more different from us than I had ever imagined. We Z'ensam wondered at your lack of skill in shaping life. Now I understand. It must take a dozen generation to shape even the slightest modification of Earth life. Given the restraint you have worked under, I am amazed that you have learned as much as you have."

  Charlie wasn't listening. A thousand new ideas were racing through his head. "Medicine!" he cried out, so wrapped up in his own amazement that he didn't consider the results of what he was saying. "Given Lamarckian biology, the tabu against medicine makes sense! A clumsy doctor's mistake could cripple not just one person, but all the generations unborn. An early experiment, say equivalent to boring a hole in the skull to let evil spirits out, could literally leave scars that would last forever. If the genes were recessive, old artificial genetic flaws like that lie dormant and could pop up anywhere, anytime, dozens of generations later!"

  They do 'pop up,' " C'astille said grimly, "to the present generation. We pay the price for the mischief the body-carvers made thousands of years ago. There are endless folktales of the too-proud fool who promised to 'solve' an illness and left a hideous wreck of a creature behind, one who would pass her deformities down through the genes of all her descendants." C'astille's powerful tail lashed angrily back and forth through the grass. She suddenly seemed much larger, much fiercer, more alien, more unknowable, more unreadable to Lucy than she ever had before. "Lucy, you must answer a most distasteful question. This Charlie has implied that medicine in not tabu among humans. Is this true? Does your kind willingly and shamelessly allow the body-carvers, the animal-healers, to play God with your bodies?"

  Lucy was tempted to lie. There was nothing but trouble in an honest answer. But she thought of Peter Gesseti and his bandaged arm. It would be hard to hide that. Worse, C'astille counted Lucy as trustworthy, and being worthy of trust required that Lucy speak truly when the truth could but hurt her. She spoke at last, and spoke slowly, choosing each word. "There is no tabu against medicine. We call our body-carvers 'doctors' and hold their profession in the highest esteem. In its own way, the skill of our healers is as great as the skill of your bio-engineers. They have eliminated many diseases and causes of death. Our race has benefited greatly from medicine, and for creatures made as we are, there is no cause to ban the practice of healing."

  To C'astille, it was as if Lucy had claimed there was no harm in being a child molester, or a murderer. "Revulsion is within me,' the native said in her own tongue.

  Lucy almost switched to O-l as well to placate C'astille. But no, then Charlie would be left in the dark. And Lucy knew C'astille well enough to know that shifting away from English was a way of rejecting things human. She couldn't let her get away with that. Lucy replied in English. "C'astille! Judge not. My ways are not yours. Your culture and mine were shaped by our biology. I have heard time and time again about frequent, even routine, death by suicide and murder among your elderly. No words of this have been spoken between us, for one must not judge what one does not understand. / still have no understanding. Yet, among humans, such things would be grave crimes, sins of the darkest kind. Your complaints against the Nihilists are subdued, as if you mildly objected to some of their techniques. To me, they are merciless, amoral killers.

  "The early would-be healers among the Z'ensam killed and maimed, and so you banned healing. So be it. Very well. It must be that your clinging to that tabu means your people die of infection and injury and illness, though with your current skill you could save them. But I will not judge.

  "Our healers save our lives, and our children's lives, and do great good. I do not apologize for them, or for us."

  C'astille grunted, a deep, guttural, non-committal noise, before she replied. "You say that you do not condone suicide and mercy killing for those humans near Division, 'elderly' as you say. You call it amoral. What honor, what morality, in letting them go their way to foolishness and idiocy?'

  "You make my point for me. Foolishness and idiocy rarely come to an elder human. Some small number, yes. But the risk is small."

  "Then humans remain sane after Division, after becoming implanters?" There was shocked surprise in C'astille's voice.

  Lucy opened her mouth to reply, shut it, and stared at C'astille. It all fell into place. It was in that moment that Lucy finally understood. The cryptic remarks, the Out-poster's confusion over pronouns, the obsession with "Division" made sense. Terrible, nightmare sense. She wished desperately for time to think, but there was none. This was the moment. "Charlie, I've just figured it out! C'astille, there is a horrible, ghastly misunderstanding here, and it's all my fault, because all the human understanding of your culture is based on my work, my initial translation of your language. And I made a terrible mistake. From the first time I heard the term 'Division* I assumed it was a euphemism, a prettied-up, polite word for 'death.' But that's wrong. It means something else, doesn't it?"

  "Death!" C'astille said in amazement. "No! Division is—Division is the revenge Life takes on us for our intelligence. That is what the Nihilists, and all the other similar Groups of the past, have had as a starting point. To them, death is a welcome means of escape from Division. Our studiers of society say that our population has never been large enough to support a city-based culture because so many escape i
nto death."

  Lucy nodded emphatically. "This is all suddenly making sense in my mind. Let me ask you another question. The English terms 'male' and 'female,' 'man' and 'woman'—what do they mean to you?"

  C'astille clenched and unclenched her fingers, the Outposter equivalent of a shrug. "They refer to the two basic body shapes for humans. You are female, and Charlie is male. That much I understand. But you have always attached great importance to the concepts, and to using the proper pronoun for male and female. I've never quite understood why. Why do your pronouns focus on that minor a difference? Why not a pronoun-set based on height, or eye color? Such would make as much sense."

  "Did you ever get the idea that the reason might have something to do with—Jesus, Charlie, me and my bloody Baptist upbringing! I don't think I ever got around to explaining the words 'sex' or 'reproduction. C'astille, did you ever get the idea 'male' and 'female' might refer to the way humans make more humans?"

  "No, not really. Perhaps in the vaguest little way, some slight hint, but I did not wish to ask about such a distasteful thing."

  "Ah!” Charlie couldn't contain himself anymore. "Excuse us a minute, C'astille. I think I just need to have Lucy bring me up to date." He pulled the phono jack from his suit and plugged it into the comm panel on Lucy's suit. Both of them cut their external mikes and radio. "Lucy, what's going on here?" he demanded. "How could they not have the concepts of male and female? I got a good look at C'astille and that L'awdasi. They were both obviously female. And I saw some little ones around the camp."

  "Charlie. Take a look around at all the Z'ensam when we're back at camp. All of them look to be obviously female.' Until now I took it to mean that appearances were deceiving, or else they had some sort of divided society. I never figured it out. Until now. Shut up and listen. And for God's sake, if you have to talk, be careful what you say." Lucy pulled the connection, and switched her radio back on.