“We had to go back to our myths and legends to figure out exactly what we ought to expect of our adults, and why we didn’t seem to be getting it. We gradually began to realize that we’d lost something vital. Like most intelligent species, our early emergence from animal stupidity had corresponded with a massive extinction event, during which we’d wiped out a great many potential competitors. Our larval form was vegetarian, but our adults had been blood-drinkers, and the species we’d killed off included almost all of those from which blood could be drawn in any quantity on a regular basis.
“We realized, too, that blood-drinking hadn’t just been a matter of adult nutrition. Long before our larvae developed self-conscious intelligence our adults had developed a number of parental care strategies, which not only involved the protection of eggs and larvae but also the boosting of pupal metamorphosis by injections of blood. Over the course of time, our pupal form had got so much benefit from those injections that it became heavily dependent on them—a process whose interruption might well have been another key factor encouraging the development of pedogenesis.
“Now, of course—our now, that is, not yours—we don’t actually need to produce adults at all, and some of our people think that we shouldn’t even try. If we don’t, though, that leaves us with an awkward ethical problem in disposing of the chrysalides that occasional result when individuals spontaneously pupate. Another school of thought holds that if we are, in fact, morally or practically compelled to produce adults, then we ought to do everything possible to produce the best adults we can. Some of those individuals hold to a quasi-religious faith that if only we can find the right sanguinary catalyst, we might produce adults far better than those that nature used to produce in the remoter eras of our evolution. The ultimate goal, I suppose, would be an adult that retains, or even improves on, larval self-consciousness and intelligence.
“In the meantime, of course, a combination of natural mutations, selective breeding and—more recently—genetic engineering has allowed us to reproduce various aspects of adult form within essentially larval bodies. That’s what I meant by pedogenetic pseudo-metamorphosis. Some of us, inevitably, think that’s the way to go to produce something resembling an intelligent adult. Others, especially those inclined to various versions of evolutionary mysticism, disagree. Our explorations in time revealed soon enough that antique blood is better for our pupae than contemporary blood, and that blood from the mammals of much earlier eras than ours seems to be better still.
“The present experimental run—that’s your present, of course, although it’s ours too, in a peculiar sense—is only part-way through, but the results so far have proved astonishingly variable. There’s something in human blood, especially late twentieth-century human blood, which encourages mutational metamorphoses. Some of us entertain high hopes as to what the run might ultimately produce. Others, admittedly, see the project as a matter of mad scientists running amok and producing monsters—but you ought to understand that little disagreement well enough, if what I’ve seen in your movies is anything to go by.
“That’s the whole story in a nutshell. That’s why I’m here, and why you’re here, and why you’re hooked up in this admittedly undignified fashion. I’d say I’m sorry if I thought you’d believe me, but the fact is that I’m doing what I’m doing because I think it needs to be done, and you’re just one of the means that I believe the end justifies. Such is life—and now I have to go.”
The bug doctor didn’t wait for any further questions, but turned and made its exit. I got the impression that it was embarrassed by what it had told me, and that it really was a little bit sorry for the way I was being treated—but it didn’t come back again before I went to sleep. I have no idea how long that was, or how long I slept, but I didn’t get bored and I woke up feeling better than I had for some considerable time. It was a holiday of sorts, and—to tell the truth—it was a relief simply to be free of Mike’s increasingly resentful and accusatory presence.
Imhotep came in again on the second “day” of my confinement, and we talked again for what seemed like an hour or more. It filled in a bit more detail about the nature of the Third Arthropodan Era and the politics of time travel, but didn’t add much to the basics of his explanation. I got the impression that it was distracted, and that its heart was no longer in our conversation now that it had done what it considered to be its explanatory duty.
On that second day I put Imhotep’s distraction down to concern for the progress of his experiment. It certainly spent a lot of time hovering over the bloated football and making unobtrusive measurements of its progress. On the third “day”, however, Imhotep wasn’t alone when it came in. The newcomer didn’t introduce itself, and ignored me completely while it inspected the chrysalis with the utmost care, but it was easy enough to see that it and Imhotep were at odds. They clicked and whistled at one another incessantly, in what was obviously their native tongue, but Imhotep didn’t translate any of what was said for my benefit. Indeed, it seemed to be ignoring me, just as its adversary was—but it came back later to explain and apologize.
“As you probably noticed,” it said, “you’ve become the object of a minor controversy. Well, not you exactly, but the effect that your blood is having on the chrysalis.”
“Why?” I asked. “Am I turning it into something horrible? Something from the Outer Limits of the Third Arthropodan Era?”
“In your situation,” Imhotep observed, “I’m not sure I’d be able to see the funny side of that particular joke. But yes, something like that—something, at least, that we haven’t seen before.”
“But you don’t think it’s horrible,” I guessed. “You’re the crazy optimist who thinks it might just be the messiah you’ve all been waiting for: the superadult with brains as well as legs and a fancy carapace.”
“Let’s just say that I’m hopeful,” the bug said. “Hopeful, at least, that the thing won’t rip me to pieces and gobble me up when it hatches. I’m the one who’ll have to be here, you see, when it does emerge. I’m the metamorphologist. On the other hand, if it does rip me to pieces and devour me, I won’t have to listen to anyone saying I told you so.”
“That’s monster movies for you,” I said. “Don’t expect any sympathy from me—I’m just the nubile underdressed starlet supinely helpless on the mad scientist’s operating table. According to the script, all I have to do is scream. Given what you’ve been feeding that thing these last three days, isn’t it more likely to devour me than you.”
“You blood isn’t feeding it,” Imhotep reminded me. “It’s just a catalyst. It provides oxygen, and that mysterious something extra— something, I presume, that the immunoglobulins do, or maybe the clotting factors....”
“You need to find out, then pop back in time to tell yourself how to do the job properly,” I said. “What’s the point of time travel is you can’t tip yourself off when you need a helping hand?”
“It doesn’t work like that,” it said. “You can’t socialize with other time-travelers, and that goes double for yourself. This is the finding out part of the story all right—but once we have the information, we’ll only be able to carry it forward. Trying to tie time in knots is worse than making material changes in history. It’s the sort of thing that’s likely to lead to elimination.”
It sounded genuinely anxious—almost as if it were worried about the possibility that it had already shot some kind of hole in the continuity of history—not, of course, by removing me from the cold marital bed to which it would ultimately return me, but by using my blood as a transtemporal catalyst to produce a kind of adult that its species had never known before, and might not like very much.
Personally, of course, I didn’t need to care—except, maybe, about the slim possibility that the damn thing would turn on me and do horrible things to me. Whether Imhotep and its snooty buddy regarded the product of my catalysis as a monster or messiah was all the same to me. To me, it would just be another bug, a louse writ large
.
I couldn’t help being interested, though. Even if I wasn’t really the damn thing’s mother, or even its midwife, I was doing my bit. It would owe its form—and perhaps even its thoughts, if it were capable of having any—to me.
* * * *
Imhotep’s adversary came back repeatedly on the fourth day and the fifth, sometimes on its own—but even when it didn’t have Imhotep around it pointedly refused to look at me or talk to me. It obviously had a very different view of medical ethics, or the degree of ethical consideration owed to a mere extinct mammal. Imhotep apologized for its colleague’s behavior, but I could tell that its heart wasn’t in the apology.
On the sixth day, the chrysalis began to crack. As soon as that happened, Imhotep came in with no less than three others of its own kind, two of them far more obviously larval in aspect than it or its familiar adversary was. The three others soon cleared out, though, leaving Imhotep to supervise the emergence solo. I soon developed a nagging pain in my neck straining for a better view, but I never gave up no matter how irksome it became. This was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and I didn’t want to miss a thing. Nor did I.
Bit by bit, the thing emerged, and 1 watched every moment of the process. I had been harboring the vague hope that my catalytic blood might produce something more human than bug, but that hope was dashed as soon as the thing began to ease itself out, wing-cases first. The ground color of the wing-cases was yellow rather than red, and its ladybird spots were very faint, but there was nothing particularly unusual about them. The wings themselves, when it had stretched them to their full extremity and dried them, were beautifully diaphanous, but very obviously insectile. The legs, which it poked out one at a time, were darker in hue and somewhat sturdier than Imhotep’s, but they too were exactly the sort of thing one might expect to see on a giant grasshopper, save for the forefeet ingeniously modified as manipulative hands, which looked exactly like Imhotep’s.
“This thing’s related to you, isn’t it?” I guessed, as I watched Imhotep busy itself obsessively with its machines and various items of movable apparatus. “Not just in a species sense, but in a kin sense. Is it a sibling?”
For a moment, it seemed that Imhotep would refuse to answer the question, but then it thought better of it. “My offspring,” it said, shortly.
It was the first time I had cause to wonder whether I was really correct to think of it as “it”. “Are you its mother or its father?” I asked.
“Neither,” it said. “Sex is the prerogative of adults. Pedogenetic reproduction is a short cut in more ways than one. It’s my clone—or was. It still would be, if it weren’t for its capacity for mutation. Thus far, though, it doesn’t seem....”
The reason Imhotep stopped was that the head of the adult had finally appeared. Imhotep’s own head, I remembered, was the result of pedogenetic pseudometamorphosis. There was no reason to expect the head of its clone-sibling’s adult incarnation to resemble it closely. It did resemble it very closely, though; it had similar big dark eyes, and a similar mouth with similar teeth and a tongue, shaped for pronouncing the syllables of human languages as well as well as those of its own species.
Except, of course, that it didn’t know any human languages. Imhotep’s clone-sibling had not had the same opportunity, or the same motive, to learn any language that Imhotep had learned while it was a larva. Imhotep’s larval clone-sibling had only known its own language—a language it ought to have forgotten, if the normal course of specific development had been followed.
Once the monster’s head was free, it was able to stand up slowly on its four hind legs, and to use its hand-like forefeet to free itself of the debris of its cocoon. While it did so, it looked down. Not until it had finished did it look up—not at Imhotep, but at me.
It looked at me with intelligence in its eyes, and with compassion. It looked at me with love. It didn’t say a word, because it couldn’t, but I understood. Imhotep understood too. Imhotep understood that I had worked the miracle, that I had catalyzed the production of the first self-consciously intelligent adult that its species had ever produced.
Imhotep spoke to its recently-metamorphosed clone-sibling, but the clone-sibling made no reply. It continued looking at me, and its silent gaze told me everything I needed to know.
I’m not claiming that we exchanged ideas telepathically, or even that there was any kind of quasi-magical empathy between us, but there was a bond, and there was understanding. I knew it, and so did Imhotep.
The monster took a single step towards me, which brought it close enough to be able to reach out with one of its vast and clumsy hands to caress my throat. All the while it was looking directly into my eyes—and now it came close enough to be able to do so without my having to strain my neck.
I was able to lie back, and make myself more comfortable, while the creature from the chrysalis moved its head to a position directly above mine, so that it could look down at me gratefully, fondly and admiringly. It didn’t matter, just then, that I was a long-extinct mammal, while it was a God-knows-what from the Third Arthropod Era. There was a bond between us more intimate than that between any Earthly mother and child, or between any Earthly pedogenetic clone-parent and clone-sibling.
I felt perfectly happy, for the first time in my adult life.
Then the others burst in, all armed with ugly ray guns, and shot the thing to pieces.
Imhotep tried to stop them, and was gunned down too.
That was when I started screaming.
I must have blacked out soon afterwards, presumably because whatever was in charge of my drip feed doctored the input with a powerful narcotic. When I woke up, I was back in my own bed.
The clock on my bedside table said that it was twenty past three, but it wasn’t—not so far as I was concerned.
It wasn’t the end of the world, either, but it certainly wasn’t twenty past three—not for me.
I remembered everything, probably because the confusion aboard the alien timeship had been too great to allow them to do the memory-wipe properly. My brain might have attempted its own kind of memory-wipe, but there was never any possibility of it taking effect. Nor was there any possibility of my confusing the experience with a dream or a nightmare. It was real. It took no time, according to the clock, but it was real. It was more real than Mike, more real than the divorce, more real than the ovarian cysts, more real than the hysterectomy, more real than any of the thousand diseases and hundred deaths I witnessed week by week and year by year at the hospital. It was the realest thing I ever experienced, or ever will.
It’s possible, I suppose, that the time-travelers got the wrong idea. It’s possible that they thought that the adult was attacking me, and that the hand it put to my throat was about to strangle me. It’s just about conceivable that they thought they were doing the right thing, the ethical thing. They were, after all, afraid of what Imhotep and I might have wrought...and, for that matter, of anything and everything else that their project might yet produce.
They didn’t understand. They couldn’t understand.
They were not, after all, adults themselves.
I am an adult. I do understand. I understand better than they did, and better than Imhotep did. Nothing can ever take that away from me, even though it’s no longer my secret, my private torment, my heaven and hell on Earth. Whatever anyone says, it wasn’t twenty past three to me.
<
* * * *
CHAPTER FIVE
Revealing the Truth
Steve thought that Mary’s story was even more interesting than Jim’s, in terms of potential psychological insights. He couldn’t be certain whether the elements of coincidence between the stories were just that, or aspects of a pattern, but he was enthusiastic to find out. He was tempted to ask Walter Wainwright whether the coincidental aspects had cropped up before—and how frequently they recurred, if so—but he knew that the chairman wouldn’t appreciate a question like that being raised in a meeting, even in
the casual chat phase that preceded the general retreat.
In any case, Steve thought, even if it were to be confirmed that the coincidental resemblances were more than merely coincidental, that would only open up a new set of questions. The overwhelming likelihood was that AlAbAn members borrowed from one another in reconstructing their own stories, perhaps unconsciously—a turn of phrase here, an interpretative guess there. It was entirely natural, he supposed, that some such process should occur; every AlAbAn group, and perhaps every other group remotely like it, must develop its own idiosyncratic culture as its particular membership formed a social microcosm, which newcomers learned and then passed on. The mild sensation of intoxication that the group was able to conjure up in its meetings probably had more to do with that petty kind of creationism than with the exotic content of the stories that were told, although the particular stories told by Jim and Mary certainly lent a distinctive flavor to the experience.
Alien Abduction - The Wiltshire Revelations Page 9
