His clarity of expression was usually much better than that. Long association with humans was obviously leading him into bad habits.
“Do things like that happen on Calicos?” I inquired.
“Where there is intelligence,” he said, “there is also evil. Where there is consciousness, there are nightmares. Where there is strength, there is violence.”
“Here, too?”
“I am sure of it.”
“Hell,” I said, “think what nightmares they might have.”
“They will fear as we fear,” he went on, now firmly fixed in his philosophical rut. “Death, dissolution, depersonalization.”
“Shapeshifting frogmen are just as vulnerable to angst and panic as the rest of us,” I mused, refusing to take it quite as seriously as he intended it. “That’s good to know. Even though they’ve invented a new biology, they’re stuck with the same old existentialism. Good for God, I say. Original sin is a great leveler.”
He didn’t say “you should know,” which demonstrated his sensitivity to the feelings of others, and proved that he was just a little more discreet than most human beings. Not superhuman, though—not like the Adam and Eve of Naxos.
For the first time (or so it seemed) in a very long time, luck was on our side. Simon Norton had come down with the shuttlecraft, and my name—or maybe the mention of the central enigma—was bait enough to make him come along.
“How are you, Dr. Caretta?” he asked, like the well-brought-up boy he undoubtedly was.
“As well as can be expected,” I told him. “My name’s Lee, by the way. Have a seat.”
When he’d sat down he glanced around at Zeno and Angelina, who were so unmistakably waiting that he must have known something was up.
“Don’t tell me you solved it,” he said. “Just by thinking about it.”
“No,” I said, “I haven’t solved it. But I have found the ideal laboratory for studying it. If you want to know about the control of structure, and the heritability of that control, you may learn far more in ten years on Naxos than in a century back on Earth. There’s only one problem.”
“What’s that?” he asked.
“The problem is that the very thing that makes Naxos such an ideal laboratory for that kind of research also makes it an extremely dangerous place.” I paused, for effect, and then went on: “Naxos is too dangerous even to think of colonizing, Simon. If Juhasz tries to move in here, all his people will be wiped out, and three hundred and fifty years will be thrown away just like that.”
I snapped my fingers.
I had tried to sound so confident that I couldn’t be disbelieved. I had tried to fill my words with a flat certainty of tone that would permit no disagreement. It worked—almost.
“You’ll have to convince me of that,” he said.
“I know,” I said. “Because after I’ve convinced you, you’ll have to convince Catherine D’Orsay, who will in turn have to convince Juhasz. If the chain breaks down, people are going to die.”
“Go on,” he said.
“Do you know what Haeckel’s law is?”
“Of course. ‘Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.’ Only it’s false, at least in the sense that Haeckel intended it. He thought that embryos literally passed through phases representative of the evolutionary ancestry of their species. It’s not as simple as that.”
“Nevertheless,” I said, “the human embryo does at one stage grow structures that resemble gills. There’s a sense in which the adult human being doesn’t incorporate all the potential contained in its genetic apparatus. By the time the human baby is born, it’s pretty much a copy in miniature of what it’s going to be when it reaches its final form. The same is true, more or less, of birds and reptiles, and even fish. But the amphibians, which came between fish and reptiles, cultivated a different kind of...call it ‘ontological philosophy.’”
“I know all this, Dr. Caretta.”
“I know,” I assured him. “But there’s an argument in it. The information you have—it’s the rhetoric that I’m trying to get across. Bear with me. What do you know about axolotls?”
“They’re extinct.”
“Apart from that.”
“The axolotl was the larval stage of a kind of salamander. But it didn’t have to undergo metamorphosis to the adult form before breeding. If its habitat stayed wet enough, it could grow reproductive organs while still a larva, and breed without bothering with the adult form at all.”
“That’s right. It kept its ontological options open. Now, just suppose that things had been a little different on the ancient Earth. Suppose physical conditions and climate had been much more stable. Suppose water had been much more generously distributed across the surface. Suppose the selective pressure which encouraged the amphibians to develop the cleidoic egg, so that a favored few of their number could become reptiles, wasn’t very strong. Suppose the evolutionary story had therefore taken a different tack, investing heavily in the kind of strategies that we can see palely foreshadowed in the axolotl, with the emphasis not only on metamorphosis but on extending the range of possible metamorphoses and the degree of control that an organism’s nervous system could exert over processes of metamorphosis. Do you see where the argument heads?”
He sighed, and I could tell that he was getting impatient. He wanted to get to the punch line, but I had my reasons for going one step at a time. The speculative part of the argument had to be as nearly seamless as was possible—compelling in its plausibility.
“It leads to a world like Naxos,” he said, “where the amphibians never gave way to reptiles, and where the higher animals have several possible forms and can change from one to another as circumstances demand. When they swim, they can shape themselves for swimming; when they walk, they can shape themselves for walking; when they’re attacked they can grow some kind of defensive apparatus if they’re not taken too much by surprise; when they’re asleep they can make themselves well-nigh invulnerable by turning themselves into hard-shelled pseudo-rocks. We’ve heard from Dr. Hesse about your adventures in the everglades.” He paused, and grinned, and then said: “By the way, is it true that you recited John of Gaunt’s speech from Richard II while the aliens were torturing you?”
“Only a bit of it,” I replied dryly. “And it was before they started hitting me. Can I get back to the argument?”
He nodded.
“We’re about to move beyond the bit that’s as easy as ABC,” I said. “So try to concentrate. What the swamp monsters do is interesting, but it’s not terribly exciting, even to paratellurian biologists who have carefully cultivated and nurtured a sense of wonder. If the indigenes couldn’t do anything more exciting than that, they’d be freaks, but not particularly exciting freaks. I think they can do more. I think that they’re unique even within this life-system, for very good evolutionary reasons.
“Doesn’t it seem odd to you that all the other animal species, apart from the aliens who captured me, seem fairly primitive? Doesn’t it seem to you that there’s a yawning gap in the diversity of vertebrate forms?”
“Well,” he said, “I suppose so. But it seems to me that perhaps the aliens are a bit more primitive than we assume. I don’t doubt that they have a certain intelligence, at a very low level, but the artifacts they have aren’t very much more sophisticated than the tools used by certain animal species on Earth. The fact that their nervous systems are complicated enough and sophisticated enough to have developed large brains is already accounted for in what you’ve said about investing in control over processes of metamorphosis. It seems to me that the aliens might be much more closely related to what you call the swamp monsters than is immediately obvious.”
“That’s reasonably good thinking,” I told him, careful to keep him sweet. “But there’s one thing that you aren’t really taking into account—and that’s your beloved central enigma: the question of how this facultative metamorphosis and multiple-structure potential is organized.”
“I don’t see any particular
difficulty,” he said. “It’s just a matter of increased genetic potential. Like axolotls—only more so.”
“In the case of the primitive animals—the swamp monsters—that may be so,” I said. “But I think the higher vertebrates, a long time ago in the evolutionary past, developed a neater trick—a trick which increased their potential quite markedly.”
“It can’t have been much of a trick,” he said, “if the higher vertebrates all died out except for the aliens themselves.”
“That,” I said confidently, “is where you’re wrong. It’s because it was such a neat trick that only one species of higher vertebrate exists today; and it’s because it was such a neat trick that the lone species of higher vertebrate is much more dangerous than you imagine. The aliens may not be very sophisticated in technological terms, but in the sense that really matters—in terms of their biology—the indigenes aren’t the primitives you imagine them to be. In a sense, they’re more advanced than we are, and more advanced than we can ever become. So advanced that here on Naxos we couldn’t even begin to compete with them.”
“Go on,” he said.
“Your central enigma,” I reminded him, “wonders how it is that bodies come to have the complex structures that they do. It wonders how cells, which all have the same set of genes, become differentiated into hundreds of different types, all specifically located for collaboration in the organization of function. It wonders how an egg which has one set of coded instructions can divide repeatedly so that the bundle of cells it becomes get steadily more complicated and more highly-organized. The swamp-monsters seem to be even cleverer than we are, because their genetic systems not only have to organize the development of one organized structure but of several. That implies that their genetic apparatus must become more extensive and more highly organized itself. Presumably, there’s a limit to that extension and organization, which means that swamp monsters can’t really be all that versatile. Three or four stereotyped forms is probably all they can manage.
“But there’s another kind of organization that a life-system like this one might be able to go in for. Suppose it was possible not simply to hold one genetic system complex enough to embody four different possible morphs. Suppose it was possible to have two different genetic systems, each one coding for a different morph, so that the organization of the manifest form could be passed from one integrated system to another.”
“Okay,” he said, “I’ve supposed it. So what?”
“It’s not just a different kind of organization,” I said. “It’s a whole new ball game. Because along with it comes a whole new way for the organism to increase its metamorphic range. It no longer has to develop new forms by trial and error. It can work by co-opting new potentials. It can absorb new genetic systems whole. Your new brand of organism only has to develop one special trick—the trick which allows it to absorb other species and their genetic potentials into itself, to become gradually omnicompetent. The development of the ‘higher vertebrates’ here on Naxos was, in part, a matter of adaptive radiation and the development of new specializations. But there came a time when diversification was no longer a matter of the production of different species, because those species learned to fuse and recombine themselves into one single species that incorporated all the potentials the separate species had developed. It had to be that way—no other outcome was possible.
“The indigenes aren’t just one more swamp-monster species, Simon. They’re not just intelligent frogs. They’re hundreds of species all rolled into one, and they have the capability to absorb into their own genetic potential the genetic potential of any new species that comes along—including the genetic potential of a species from another life-system! Because you see, Simon, although life here evolved in a way very different from life on Earth, there’s still a very high degree of biochemical compatibility. At a fundamental level, our genetic material is very similar to theirs.”
I stopped then, to let him work through the implications in his own mind. He wasn’t quite as quick as me—after all, I’d a much fuller background in paratellurian biology than he had, and was better adapted in consequence to seeing possibilities—but he was clever enough.
“You mean,” he said, “that those creatures could absorb the potentials of the human genetic system. They could add human form to their repertoire of metamorphoses.”
“It’s worse than that,” I told him. “What I’m trying to get across to you is the fact that they’ve already done it!”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Catherine d’Orsay, needless to say, was much less ready to go for it. Even with the help of Simon Norton, we had a difficult job convincing her that what we were saying made sense. She tested its strength in every way she could.
“You’re telling me,” she said, “that the nineteen people in the dome were killed by an alien wearing human form.”
“It’s the one way that it all makes sense,” said Angelina. “The woman whose corpse we never found must have been killed out there in the forest. They took her sterile suit, carved her up the way they carved Lee up, to drink blood and torn tissue through their fingertips. Then, having added her form to their repertoire, they sent one of their number back to the dome wearing her face and her suit.”
“But even if I concede the physical transformation, this alien in disguise wouldn’t be able to pass for human. It wouldn’t be able to talk. It wouldn’t even know how to open the dome.”
“Think about it, captain,” said Angelina, her voice almost pleading. “Opening the airlock doors is simple. There’s no lock on them—nobody worries about the dome being invaded because they know that in order to get through both doors an invader has to pass through the sterilizing chamber. Anything not wearing a sterile suit is rendered very dead by the shower process. A child could open the doors. There doesn’t have to be anyone else present, to issue a challenge or offer a greeting. All the alien had to do was pick its moment. Once inside the living quarters, the water tank is conveniently at hand. All it had to do was lift the lid and spit. Among their many other talents, the aliens have absorbed a defense mechanism which involves spitting venom. Once that was done, all it had to do was seal its suit up and walk out the same way it walked in. The aliens may be savages, but they’re not stupid. Nothing we’re attributing to them is outside their behavioral compass.”
“Why did they do it?” asked the captain.
“Because it’s their modus operandi. Absorb and destroy. Co-opt the potential of the enemy, and then destroy him, lest ye shall find thyself co-opted in thy turn. That’s the law of life here. You could never make a peace treaty with natives like these—they’re programmed for a war of extinction.”
“They didn’t attempt to absorb the other members of the party. Why not?”
“They were betrayed by their assumptions. They thought they didn’t have to. Once they’d used the poison, they couldn’t—like some snakes back on Earth they’re not immune to their own venom. They couldn’t take in poisoned blood. They took for granted the fact that they only needed to absorb one set of genes—because, you see, there’s no sexual differentiation on this world. There doesn’t need to be, because the advantages it confers on Earthly species aren’t applicable in this life-system, so far as the amphibians are concerned. The aliens are hermaphrodites, and they assumed that once they could make multiple copies of one human individual, they’d have the ability to breed in that particular morph, recombining and redistributing the genes. Incestuous, certainly, but possible—these individuals don’t need to worry about hereditary defects in their offspring.... Their offspring just drop the defective morph from their repertoire. They didn’t realize that in order to play recombination games with human genes, they’d need two complementary sets. By the time that became clear to them, it was too late for them to go after an Adam to pair with their Eve. Too late...until we arrived.
“Now they have everything they need. They can not only assume the appearance of human beings—they can breed in th
at morphological state. You see, captain, in a sense you—or rather we—have already colonized Naxos, in the only way that is or ever will be possible.”
Catherine d’Orsay looked at me, and then at Zeno, as if to make sure that we were all in accord. Then she looked at Simon Norton, with an expression on her face which suggested that she believed him guilty of a terrible betrayal.
“This is crazy,” she said.
“This is an alien life-system,” I informed her. “It doesn’t have to abide by our version of sanity.”
“You don’t have a single atom of proof that this is anything but a fantastic story.”
“All we have,” said Angelina steadily, “is the knowledge that it fits. And the conviction that it makes sense, genetically.”
“You still have no proof. I have to have proof—you do see that, don’t you?”
“Yes,” I said sadly. “But you know what your proof is going to have to be, don’t you?”
She considered, and then said, “If we could capture an alien....”
“Difficult,” I said. “And maybe we could watch him for half a year without his turning into anything more homely than a big frog. If we could hold him that long.”
She continued thinking, searching her imagination for a way to prove us wrong—if we were wrong—or to convince herself that we were right, if right we were.
“Captain,” I said, “your people are walking around now in sterile suits. That gives them a measure of protection. How is it ever going to be possible to have people living normally on a world like this, if there’s even a possibility that we might be right about the capabilities of this life-system? There may be no infectious diseases that we can’t handle, no deadly biochemical incompatibility between the local fruits and human stomachs. That isn’t what counts here—it isn’t what matters. You can’t fight these aliens. If you meet them head on in a war of extermination, the probability is that you’ll lose. They hold all the important advantages, and you have only firepower. You can’t fight shape changers, captain...and the war has already started. You know full well that if we’re right, the proof will make itself manifest very shortly, when your people start getting killed. Are you going to wait for that to happen?”
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