There's been no chance from the beginning, he told himself severely. The radiation will he a hazard for another 10,000 years and no race can survive that. The ability to become immune to the radiation has not shown up. The mutations have been too extensive …
Even in Enoch and Noah's lines. Even there … though there'd been for a while a hope of immunity.
But why grieve, he asked himself. The race of man had survived; the crew of the Vaheva will be sufficient to recreate the race again…
But the grief was there. Grief for his people, he thought; grief for the new-man, who had not yet grown up; who would now never grow up, because they would be overrun; displaced before they had a chance to finish the fast re-evolution; before they show that with a new chance, the race could … might … would, possibly, produce something more mature…
The small craft made planetfall in the bay less than a kilocubit away, and was taxiing over easily. The first one to step from the lock was Captain Gavarel; immediately behind were Zad Shara and Memph Luce.
He watched them emerge and strap on their light helijets for the trip across to the Juheda with growing amazement.
The eye forgets, he thought. How very different they were—are—from my people.
They came aboard, and he welcomed them gladly and with a pleasure that grew more intense in their company. Zad's lithe easiness; Jeris Gavarel's nearly ponderous humor, out of place in the compact, medium-sized body; Memph Luce, as handsome of dark face and flashing eye as before. Such familiar strangers, he thought, striving to force himself back into the old communications patterns.
The grief was gone now. He had let it play itself out, during the hours before they were to arrive. Now he could fully allow himself the pleasure of their company.
Yet—they seemed so young. Not in their faces or bodies, but in their attitudes; he found himself deeply amused. Twenty-two hundred years make a difference in the attitudes of living, he decided wryly.
He was trying to explain what had happened without taking forever to do it. He found himself picking and choosing between words, between facets of the problems that he'd faced; between nuances and direct threads.
At his feet the faun lay, its slender legs delicately curved for relaxation or the quick spring of flight; its soft nose sniffing the new odors with delight.
"We were nine that survived the seven days. Do you know," he interrupted himself with sudden pleasure, "that since you landed you have told me more of what happened than I had learned in twenty-two hundred years? Of course, we surmised and extrapolated—but we were underseas, which is what saved us during the whole thing. We had to surmise the rest, for we are confined to a small part of the surface. We knew the day had changed length, and that the planet had rolled—we could tell that from the stars." He paused, and the pause lengthened.
Zad was watching him intently from an easy chair, shadowed in the corner. Now she spoke softly. "You were nine left.. ."
"Yes," he said, "Nine. Not for long, though. The others left in the first few decades. All but Bon. Bon Hindra. The other Atalamans—they must explore. They must … do anything except that which had to be done."
He took a deep breath. There was really no use trying to tell them—the years; the hopes; the fears; the … "We had regeneration. Perfecting that took only a few more years. I had been wrong about the need for a closed ecology. Regeneration is a memory-tap function. Chemical assists are helpful, especially the ones I worked out for animals, where they develop a shell and regenerate, like Faunus, here. But in the main, it's a problem of re-defining the acquired information at the level of cellular function; memory-tap handling of electronic/bio-chemical patterns. …"
He paused a moment. Then, "But … we thought we were the last of the race of man, you know. We were pretty sure we were the last on the planet. Even if some had survived, the radiation was so intense… We were sure we were the last," he ended quietly.
"Tell us about your people. They're so lovely and light. They're so delicate—like your faun." It was Zad's voice again. David was glad the others were letting her do the speaking. Her voice was a chord of music to an ear too long denied.
"The people of the Juheda." He smiled. "It took nearly six hundred years before we got Adam, our first new-man." He nudged the faun gently with his toe and was rewarded with a tiny whinny. "This one's ancestors," he said, "were a great help in that work. We tried all sorts of techniques for getting a viable species from cells of males, by-passing what we didn't have, a capable female. After the preliminary work we developed an entirely new strain from the faun—a much larger animal, still affectionate to man but large enough to be a help too.
"Then we had the techniques and could develop the new-man from our own cells as we had developed the new-faun from faun cells."
David caught a questioning look on Zad's face, and shook his head. "This one," he indicated the faun again, "… no. He's neither an original descendent or the new-faun I was speaking of. He's been with me for more than a thousand years, the only successful animal experiment in regeneration."
His voice stopped, and there was silence. But if I make it sound this way, he thought, the whole thing becomes portentous and melodramatic. These are children yet, to whom I speak. How shall I tell them of the wonder of life reborn? Of the true magnificence of those years spent in search of a result—and the result achieved? Of the race of man with a new chance—a future?
"Then," he said, "we had a bit more know-how, but not much. But we had to have a woman. This was the new race, the new-man race. How we worked!" His voice boomed back at him through the room, and he realized the surge of feeling was too powerful. He quieted a moment, and then went on. "At last we decided to take cells from our male's body, and use those.
"There was, you see, an additional problem to that of merely producing a woman. And this you must understand. The male was a throwback in some ways—not so much to an earlier evolutionary form as to an emptier mind than that with which the normal man-child is born; and a much less rapidly maturing body. It was as though the mind had been wiped clear of all the idiocies and the stupidities and the cantankerous bits and pieces that mankind has built into himself.
"The full cerebrum was present; of that we were sure. But it was a clean slate, or a much more nearly clean slate, on which the evolution of man was to be rewritten. That evolution would be rapid, in terms of normal evolution. The development of millenia could be compacted into a few centuries.
"But I felt… we felt … that something much better might develop, since mankind seemed to have been given a second chance, to develop as a sentient, self-aware animal. And this chance we must not lose.
"I hoped—and we succeeded—in getting a woman from the patterns inherent in the cell structure of the male."
He stopped again, but there was no sound in the big lounge room of the Juheda. He looked from one to the other of them—Jeris Gavarel, listening with a quiet that made his body seem immobile, even its breathing hushed. Memph Luce leaning forward, his handsome face intent, his eyes brilliant with interest. And Zad, fingers clutched in her lap, curled like a kitten into her chair, her eyes never leaving him…
"Our intent," David continued softly into the stillness, "was to keep them regenerative until they matured as sentient beings. Regeneration and reproduction are not mutually exclusive properties, you know—of course, you don't know. But the reproductive function interferes with the emotional stability necessary to learn, to develop, the regenerative ability.
"Then, too, it was necessary, I thought, for them to learn and evolve considerably more than normal between generations so as to decrease the overall evolutionary period. The more experience an individual passes on to his children, the more evolved those children become—each generation that makes real progress, rather than replaying the same old record, adds something vital to the evolutionary trend.
"So we hoped to keep them regenerative, and to work with them through the centuries until we found what the c
erebral evolutionary result would be.
"Anyhow, we could obviously not keep a reproductive group of people aboard the Juheda and under ideal laboratory conditions. But they didn't wait for us to decide when the change should take place.
"I was shocked when I finally noticed the girl was pregnant." Lord David smiled. "I teased her about swallowing an apple seed, but of course we had to put them ashore."
Then he chuckled to himself. "Such lovely children—and such children: I asked Eve how she had known how to make love. She said that Adam's little snake had told her." He chuckled again. "I don't doubt it," he said. "Adam was a right lusty young male. I asked him how he'd known, and he said that his snake had taught Eve, and Eve had taught him. He seemed to feel no responsibility at all for his 'snake'. " David relaxed and a distant look came into his eyes.
"Eve gave us quite a scare about then. All of her curiosities were coming into full flood at the same time, and she was an inquisitive little bit—as inquisitive and as lovely as Faunus, here. She got hold of one of the wires of what they called my 'tree of light' and knocked herself out. Bon and I were frantic, but it was just a small electrical shock, and I don't think did much harm. But she never touched the tree of light again.
"However, she was pregnant, and it was time for them to fly the nest. It was time for separation. We showed them films—they called our projector the 'tree of knowledge'. We showed them training films on child birth and farming and animal husbandry. I think it was a mistake. I think those films were too far beyond their understanding, and that they frightened them rather than teaching them. But we were trying to give them all the knowledges we could. We couldn't make tools for them, or farm for them, or take care of their animals. That would have been against the pattern. We had to let them grow up their own way. But we could show them how. I think the things we showed them personally, the how-to's that we demonstrated ourselves, were effective. But the films just scared them.
"Then we put them in a safe place. They didn't know we guarded or helped them; they had to think they were completely on their own. But of course we did."
He looked at their serious faces. Were they understanding the problem—the tremendous opportunity—that had been given into the hands of those aboard the Juheda? A new chance for man to develop, to evolve as an ethical creature, clean, without the quarrelsome, built-in ego-blocks that had come so near destroying the race of man so frequently? To evolve with respect for his body as a healthy, functioning organism; and for his mind as an intelligence with a potential much greater than had ever been achieved? As an intelligence with knowledge as its conscious goal? A clean slate—a re-birth at an evolutionary point where the cerebrum was intact, but not discolored?
They must understand! But Bon hadn't; apparently couldn't understand; and if they didn't grasp the factor intuitively, then he, David, knew—knew by the bitterest of experience—that it would not be grasped.
"When they became reproductive, it became a question of the people evolving as versus those who would be needed to guide that evolution. There had to be separation, a minimum of contact; a minimum of influence or rules or guidance of any sort.
"So we built a guarded area for them ashore, at the confluence of the three rivers. And we put them ashore. The radiation, we knew, would be a mutation hazard. It was one to which we thought they might—they still might—develop an immunity. But there was no other chance. So we created for them domestic animals, in the manner in which we created for you the babustin and the cannus; and we picked a spot where the mutated animal life forms were scarce; and we gave them protection. And we put them ashore."
Jeris Gavarel spoke then; softly, as though not wanting to interrupt David's train of thought. "We saw their fields and their grazing animals as we came down. They've reproduced, I gather, quite successfully? There must have been several thousand …"
"Yes. Several thousand of the ones here. I have the genealogies." David paused then. "The ones here in the guarded area are not all," he said.
"The first disruption of the Juheda came as the first two male children matured. One of the two turned out to retain the murderous instincts that I had hoped were now gone from the race. He killed his brother. Over a preference he thought I had shown for his brother!" He smiled grimly, and then went on.
"You could hardly be expected to understand the depths of the emotions that swept the Juheda then, and divided us. Think. We'd lived and worked together then for several centuries. We'd created together. And now we were torn asunder. For if man was to re-evolve as an ethical animal—and the evolution, this time, should not take more than a few thousand years—then this … throw-forward? Yes, I think you could call it a throw-forward, rather than a throw-back … to the murderous instincts with which man had survived before must not be allowed to breed into the race. Yet Bon—you remember him, Zad? He felt as strongly that this was the survival instinct at work, and that if there were to be a race of man again, it must be bred into the race.
"It was an open-and-shut choice. There could be no compromise on a choice like that. The experiment proceeded one way or the other; and no starships had returned. They should have returned from the shorter voyages within decades after the avalanche, and either they did not return or they did not find us. But because they had not returned, we were convinced that we were the last remaining members of our race, custodians of its survival, with the responsibility for seeing that that survival proceeded in the best interests of the race. So you can see, there could be no compromise.
"It was not a question that we decided hastily; and we were divided. Finally, Bon took the one carapet that we had. He took the murderous male and two females; and they left. He planned to go into the mountains far to the east, where we felt the radiation might be less intense. He had atomic batteries and could have gone great distances. We had hoped to keep in touch by radio, but we have never made radio contact, and I can only assume that he met with an accident."
"You've been alone? For hundreds of years?" It was Memph who spoke now, slowly, his deep attachment for the biologist evident in his tone.
"More than fifteen hundred years. Yes. But not quite alone all the time. Twice, I have taken one of my people aboard to live with me, to train, to teach. They must school themselves to the sciences of the lordorate as rapidly as possible. I have taught them that when they grow up, as soon as they can understand, that they will come into the knowledge of the lord. That it is theirs. That I am only their father, guarding that knowledge for them which is their heritage. That they must grow into it, must school themselves until they can understand it.
"And when I have had one of them with me, it has been not only for my own solace, to have a living sentient being here; but in order that the fact of the knowledge which is theirs may have reality to them; that they can know it as a fact, that it is here, that it will not be lost. That they shall have physical contact with the appurtenances of knowledge through members of their tribes.
"Of course I can't take one of them in until he has raised many children; for I must select of the best, and those genes and that gentleness must not be lost to the race. Their normal life-span is as many centuries as mankind's is decades, however, so that it's a small problem."
"Their normal life-span is what?" Jeris Gavarel asked.
David looked up. Of all the account that he had given them, this one thing seemed to have gotten a startle-reaction. Children, he thought. These, too, are children.
"Oh, yes," he said casually. "They do not mature physically—do not enter puberty—in less than one hundred years. And normally they live six to eight hundred years beyond that. I have the records here," he said.
VIII
The engineer stood up abruptly. "That's a pretty strong story you're telling," he said fiercely.
The archaeologist nodded. "I find that truth is stronger than fiction," he said quietly. "I find truth far harder to swallow than … than the pap we have been fed across the various credibility gaps."
<
br /> Then, abruptly fierce himself, he added, "But the biologist refused to feed pap across the credibility gap. The pap comes later. He never, not once, told his people other than that he was their guardian, their father. He told them that health and knowledge—a sound mind in a sound body—were the ideal; and that the knowledge of the lord—the knowledge of the civilization and its universities that had been before—was theirs by right. That it was theirs just as fast as they could comprehend and absorb it.
"He never, by thought or deed or implication, set himself up as a god. That was the Cha-Ra—the trans-power people. That began around 2300—and when he came back and found that it had happened, he threw the transposer people back to their planets and cut the connection; and he did his level best to wipe out the effects of what they had done—physically and mentally.
"That's when he selected out the tribe of Abraham and tried to put it back on the evolutionary track again; clean it up, physically and morally. He'd thrown the Cha-ras off the planet, and he tried to wipe out the damage they'd done. He couldn't handle what had become nearly a planetfull of people, but he could get one tribe back.
"Then he had to leave again, because he had had Enoch and his family growing up on another planet…"
He paused, then ended abruptly, "Yes. It's a pretty strong story. And it took intelligence and gentleness and love … and a lot of other qualities … to …" His voice ran down, and he sat silent for a long time.
"You get all this out of the Bible?" the engineer asked finally.
The archaeologist's sudden shout of laughter startled him. "Ye gods and little fishes, no! This is one planet, with one, coherent, readable geological and archaeological record. It is one people—the new-man race, with admixtures that have been thrown in from time to time, mostly violently. Every history and every mythology shows variations on the same theme. The dates I've used may be inexact—you should read them as plus or minus a couple of centuries—but the pattern of dates, the sequence of events shows everywhere, from Egypt to the Andes, from India to England, from China through Samoa and Hawaii, North America and England and Africa. Aesland. It's a consistent, graphable sequence, and each subdivision of the human race shows it.
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