by Bill Schutt
Chapter 15
Fear of Pheromones
Each piece, or part of the whole of Nature is always an approximation of the complete truth, or the complete truth so far as we know it. In fact, everything we know is only some kind of approximation because we know that we do not know all the laws yet.
—Richard P. Feynman
Evolution is opportunistic, hence unpredictable.
—Ernst Mayr
Metropolitan Museum of Natural History
New York City
July 15, 1946
Dr. Nora Nesbitt believed no astronomer discovering a new planet beyond Pluto could have been filled more with a sense of wonder than she was every time she translated a newly puzzled-together page from Pliny’s Omega Codex and made a connection no one had made before.
“This is pretty strange,” she said, pushing her chair back from the lab bench where she had been working with Patricia Wynters. “Too strange.”
“Compared to what?” asked Patricia.
“So, you know this apish doctor Pliny mentions?”
“You mean, Severus’s favorite member of the Physician race?”
“That’s the one. What if she infected our centurion with a mind-controlling parasite?”
“Severus?”
Nesbitt nodded, then they both stared in silence at a particularly well-preserved Pliny sketch depicting the Ceran version of a medicus. Although nearly half of the papyrus sheet had been lost to ancient disintegration and modern mishandling, the pair could make out enough to sum the portrait up in a few words: bestial was one they both agreed upon, and yet they also perceived a strange beauty in those barbaric eyes.
According to Pliny, even he eventually had to resist an inexplicable attraction to the little doctors. In one part of the codex, the famed historian/naturalist had dedicated nearly a half page of his near-microscopic penmanship to descriptions of their uniquely disgusting odor—“difficult to relate, how strongly it emanated from sweat-slicked fur.” In a later entry, Pliny recalled that the cavalryman Proculus had developed a tolerance to it, while he himself had first become accustomed to the stench, before claiming to have actually come to like it. To Nesbitt, though, poor Severus seemed hopelessly bound to the musk of a very specific physician, and perhaps even addicted to it.
“Have you ever heard of the cat-rat paradox?” Nesbitt asked at last.
“No, but do tell.”
“Well, you know how much I love protozoa?”
“Don’t we all?” Patricia answered, without a hint of sarcasm.
“So, one of my recent favorites—Toxoplasma gondii—seems to have evolved a particular talent for toying around with the wiring of rat’s brains. Normally, it’s no stretch to infer that rodents must be born with an instinctive fear of cats, and all the smells associated with them.”
“Okay.”
“But in rodents infected with Toxoplasma—”
“Let me guess,” Patricia interjected. “The rats end up being attracted to them.”
Nesbitt smiled. “Yes, though it’s more than just an attraction. Once infected with the parasite, male lab rats respond to cat hair, dander, skin oils, and even urine in the same way they respond to the pheromones female rats release to attract mates.”
“That’s interesting. Go on.”
“And in my lab we’ve even seen the Toxoplasma parasite make the rat run toward the cat.”
Patricia looked at the Pliny drawing with increasing amazement. “So . . . you’re saying Pliny’s man Severus became the lab rat in this equation.”
“Could be,” Nesbitt replied.
Patricia, who was clearly excited, continued the mental exercise. “Then the lab rat gets eaten, right?”
“Yes, and—?”
“And the parasite reproduces in the cat.”
Nesbitt nodded. “It certainly appears so.”
“Incredible.”
The invertebrate biologist continued: “I’m beginning to think Pliny’s Cerae were doing something similar, but of course operating on an even more complex level than a microbe infecting lab animals.”
“You mean, the Cerans were consciously altering the responses normal humans would have had to being in close contact with them?”
“Right,” Nesbitt said. “Maybe this Ceran version of a similar parasite started switching circuits in regions of the human brain that control emotions like fear or anxiety—or even sexual attraction?”
Both of the researchers took another look at Pliny’s figure of the physician, and winced simultaneously.
“Do you realize how nutty this is beginning to sound?”
Nesbitt nodded. “I know, but just because this little hypothesis sounds crazy doesn’t mean it’s not crazy enough to be correct.”
“Scary to imagine, really,” Patricia replied. “A tiny invertebrate puppeteer, pulling Severus’s and Pliny’s strings—yuck.”
“Yuck is right. Like I said, though, for now it’s hypothetical. But the closer you look at our world, the more apparent it becomes that we live in a dancing matrix of hosts, parasites, and symbionts. And if Pliny wasn’t just penning a fantasy, if this codex is more than some ancient myth—”
“You mean the part about a race that could ‘mold life the way we mold clay’?”
Nesbitt took a moment to consider Pliny’s quote again—important enough for him to have repeated at least a half-dozen times up to this point in the manuscript. She nodded her head slowly. “That does seem to be the line that got us into this mess.”
Patricia stood silently for a moment before responding. “Pliny’s physicians could have designed that response themselves—based on something learned from prior encounters with people or animals outside the valley.”
Dr. Nora Nesbitt, who now wore a wry smile, gestured back to the rest of the codex. “So, what does Pliny say finally happened to the centurion?”
“Hard to tell,” Patricia said, and shook her head. “That’s the frustrating thing. The codex breaks away into five or six missing pages, just when that part of Pliny’s story gets most interesting.”
August, a.d. 67
During the weeks since the capture, Pliny noticed that Severus and “Teacher” had become more inseparable than he ever imagined possible—or healthy.
In any case, no matter how far Severus might have pushed long-held taboos, Pliny believed he owed a depth of gratitude to that very same relationship. He had no doubt that Severus and the Ceran physician were the reason he and Proculus were still taking in air through heads that had not been smashed flat against a pillar of ice.
Language-wise, for all of their efforts, the Romans had learned no more than a score of Ceran words. It was, Pliny thought, a maddeningly difficult exercise. Inexplicably, teaching the Cerae Latin was only marginally easier—even basic things like colors. Did they even interpret them in the same way? Pliny wondered.
On some levels, it seemed easy to understand the Cerae—as in their mastery of architecture. On other levels, though, Pliny believed he might have had greater success trying to understand the thoughts of a housefly.
For a time, the Romans were allowed to walk freely through the garden plots, tasting all of their fruits, grains, and meaty gourds at will—and there Pliny learned that the word for each plant seemed to have its own unique series of Ceran whistles and inflections. Each individual plant has its own name?
Pliny guessed that more than two or three weeks must have passed before he began to acclimate, emotionally, to the utter alien nature of this hidden world. The rough treatment—pokes and prods mostly—from their chaperones continued even after they were reunited with Severus. It served to remind him that this was not the tour of wonders he had once hoped for. There were, of course, wondrous sights to behold—the wall of mountains surrounding the valley, the tower of stone and ice rising with intimidating majesty from the center of the fog lake. Despite the often-boorish treatment by their captors, Pliny might have even found some serenity in the view—if not for
a few contrary facts.
The Cerae were clearly disturbed about something. Scores upon scores of them were hurrying up and down through the mist layer. And, fewer than forty paces from Pliny’s overlook, two men staked out for Ceran target practice had been reduced to little more than smears on the ground, their distinctive garb revealing them to be Scythians.
“Though horrible, it brought great relief, to see immediately that they were not my men,” Pliny would write later.
There was little time, however, for relief or reflection. Teacher, two other physicians, and seven members of the race Pliny had come to call “the warrior caste” ushered them along a path that descended below the lake of snow fog. The historian noted that though they usually displayed little emotion, the Cerae now exhibited undeniable signs that indeed something new had intruded upon their well-ordered and strangely lit world—something next of kin to chaos. Briefly, they approached and then passed the base of the central tower.
“There’s something wrong with it,” Pliny thought aloud.
Proculus replied, “It looks like no one is home.”
Pliny shook his head, trying to peer through the floating snow—listening for sounds of a population that was no longer present.
“Severus, ask your friend where everyone went.”
The centurion hesitated.
“Go on,” Proculus urged, employing a tone that Pliny found as surprising as it was lacking in respect.
Severus waved his hands and flicked his fingers in what appeared to be developing into his private language with Teacher, reinforcing hand signals with a series of high-pitched syllables that barely passed for Latin.
The Ceran made a sound that only Severus could begin to understand, accompanied by a sharp hand motion. Once again the officer hesitated.
“Well?” Proculus said, now openly displaying impatience toward his superior.
Severus returned a stern expression that had nothing to do with Proculus’s insubordination. “We would heed well, all of us, not to speak unless spoken to.”
This time both Pliny and Proculus obeyed the order. Neither man had any way of knowing what was really happening. There was too little information available, no basis on which to conclude that the great building’s inhabitants were fanning out into the wilderness—that they were preparing for war.
Ten or twelve stadia beyond the tower, the group came to the edge of an unusually quiet river, from which warm mists were rising and crystallizing in midair. Pliny hypothesized that this process, here and at similar bodies of water, functioned to regenerate the snow fog.
Teacher raised a hand, signaling, Halt.
Two more of the physician caste arrived, along with one of the more spidery-limbed Cerae that Pliny had identified as architects. At Teacher’s urging, Severus unraveled a maplike sheet of unusually flexible paper and spread it out on the ground. It bore a set of immediately recognizable designs, illustrated from multiple angles, and rendered in Severus’s precise hand.
“What?” Proculus asked. “You’re showing them how to build catapults?”
“No,” said Pliny. “This cannot be true!”
A glare from a Ceran physician put an end to the comments while the “architect” unfurled a second sheet on the ground. The Romans could see that this too had been drawn in Severus’s hand. The creature ran her fingers back and forth over both sets, clearly making careful comparisons between the two drawings.
He’s not only showing them how we build our weapons, Pliny realized, he’s improving the designs.
“You treasonous dog!” Proculus cried, and lunged toward his commanding officer and former brother-in-arms.
Teacher appeared between them in a white blur and before Pliny could even begin to track her motion, Proculus was airborne—with his face bleeding and two more teeth flying out of his mouth.
Nightfall, July 15, 1946
Although Mac was still asleep—albeit fitfully—Yanni Thorne found herself in a state of hyperalertness. Something more than the loss of their friend Jerry kept her from eating or sleeping, but she struggled to determine exactly what her instincts were trying to tell her. Certainly, there were the many possibilities. High on the list were the three angry Morlocks who had removed the Chinese helicopter pilot. Complicating this particular issue was Mac’s insistence that one of the giants, a beast he began referring to as “Scarface,” was the same individual who had killed Jerry.
On the other side of their icy window, the Morlock world was an unending parade of strange inhabitants. Even now she was watching a flower-mimicking animal that appeared near the outer edge of the igloo wall. The newly arrived “what-zit” attacked one of the grass-eating crabs they had seen previously, trapping it in a net of glowing red petals. Only a few days earlier she would have looked upon the flower mimic with a sense of wonder. Now, though, her thoughts were dark.
Yanni looked away to where Mac was sleeping, and was reminded of the fact that just a single grass mimic possessed enough toxin in its bite to nearly kill him. There’s widespread lethality here, she concluded, and wondered how many deadly organisms they’d walked by already without any concern at all—the stand of Indian pipes, the strange little creature that darted across their path in the cave.
Yanni understood now that she had been looking at the world of the Morlocks through innocent eyes, but the reality was, There is no innocence here.
Outside, as if to support her newly acquired view, the “flower” was suddenly writhing on the ground like a viper bitten by something even more poisonous. The little crab scuttled away, carrying with it one of the petals.
Yanni reasoned in passing that if evolution were being sped up here, then the arms race between predator and prey had also been sped up. But were the Morlocks controlling any of this? Or had they somehow dropped the reins? From their unease with the grass mimics to their relationship with the little elephants, Yanni believed that any control the locals might have once wielded was now tenuous at best.
In the center of the igloo, R. J. MacCready was finally awake—staring up at the circular opening in the ceiling.
“Did something just scream?” he wondered.
“Yeah, a flower,” she replied.
“Oh, okay.”
“How’s that leg of yours?”
“Feels a lot better, actually,” he reassured her.
Yanni did not continue the conversation. A sudden movement had drawn her attention outside, again.
The world tonight was so black that it was impossible to see beyond the limited range of bioluminescent speckles on the ground. No moonlight filtered down through the fog. Yanni could just barely recognize the shape of a Morlock walking out of the mist, eclipsing the little ground “stars” as it approached. It was Alpha and he was not alone. Trotting beside him were three of the bi-trunked mammoths, still wearing their choke collars but now without leashes.
Very quickly, and with deliberate stealth, Alpha slid the cell door aside and motioned for Yanni to come out. Mac hesitated, then followed her, expecting at any moment to be pushed forcefully back through the opening, but Alpha did not seem to care. The ground around the igloo was strangely free of grass mimics, though the harsh scent of the elephant-generated repellent Yanni had described previously provided an explanation for their absence.
There was no rumbling or snorting from the mini-mammoths, and no loud, whistling Morlock-speak, making it even more apparent that whatever the reason might be for this middle of the night visit, it was happening in secret. Alpha and the mammoths stood in utter silence and Yanni took the hint, signaling Mac to do likewise. Then the Morlock led her and the three little elephants to a spot some thirty feet away, for what R. J. MacCready supposed must be the strangest conference of all time.
Mac checked their surroundings—on the lookout for less friendly visitors. One hairy son of a bitch in particular.
On previous nights, at about this time, phantom shapes, wider than the stretch of his arms, had fluttered overhead. Toni
ght, he noticed, there were no flyers. In fact the only trace of nightlife, besides their mammalian visitors, was the “poisoned flower” Yanni had been watching earlier. Mac felt a sudden unease that its phosphorescent blush was returning and as the minutes passed, the creature had rekindled brightly enough to illuminate a broadening swath of the mist. The meeting participants seemed too busy to notice.
Not so fast there, son, Mac thought, before moving quickly toward the steadily strengthening glow and stamping the bogus flower flat, as a smoker might stamp out a cigarette on a sidewalk. Then he kicked some dirt on top of the glowing red bits.
“Evolve your way out of that one,” he muttered to himself.
Mac’s mind-set was “all mission” now and his only mission was to get Yanni out of this valley alive. He was also starting to hope against hope (something Mac did very rarely) that Yanni’s pals might have the very same thing in mind.
Soon after Mac finished his novel impersonation of “lights out,” the meeting ended. Yanni took a moment to give an approving nod to his handiwork before Alpha motioned them back into the igloo.
“What’s going on?” Mac asked.
“Shhhh,” Yanni whispered. “You’re not gonna believe this.”
They scrambled inside. The seal was closed silently behind them, and the four night visitors disappeared, in perfect silence.
“Okay, spill it,” Mac said.
“Seems that Alpha wants to learn more about the mammoths—and he wants my help.”
“Oh?” Mac replied, unable to hide either his skepticism or his concern.
“Yeah, well, apparently at least one Morlock has discovered that these little elephants are a lot smarter than they’ve been letting on.”
“How smart?”
“Very. Maybe smarter than us.”
Mac shook his head, amazed and incredulous at the same time. “And remind me again how you figured this all out, in what—five minutes?”
“I don’t know how to explain it,” Yanni said. “Trying to understand both of these species is kinda like pounding at a cement wall. At first you don’t get anywhere. Then this little crack appears—and maybe there’s a hint of feelings or a specific emotion. You keep hammerin’ away and suddenly there’s light shining through it. Now when you move closer to that tiny crack of light, you can start to see a whole lot, even stuff on the other side.”
