by Tom Holt
I’m referring, of course, to love.
You’re damned right we don’t have it back home, not in any shape, size or form, notsoever. Think about it for a moment, will you? We’re amphibians. What the humans call love is basically a by-product of their mammalian reproductive cycle, more or less in the same way that lethally toxic nuclear waste is a by-product of electricity. Think, if you will, of all the really shitty stuff mammals have got to do in order for there to be more mammals. For a start, the female mammals spend months on end waddling around as a combination mobile incubator and crèche. Hastily drawing a veil over the really gross way the little mammals actually come out into the world, let’s consider the months — years, even — that lady mammals have to spend waiting on the wee horrors, wiping their little bottoms and putting up with their intolerable behaviour without strangling them or feeding them to the alligators. Let’s also consider that in quite a lot of mammal species the females insist on making the males hang around while all this is going on, sending them out to do the hunting and gathering for the reproductive unit when they’d far rather be doing something else. It’s a pretty tall order, if you ask me; and when you think that in our society it’s as simple and straightforward as boink, lay eggs, bugger off and get on with something useful, you can see precisely why we’re so much more advanced than you are. We’ve got the time and the vigour to invent faster-than-light travel and matter-energy conversion, because we don’t devote two thirds of our gross racial product to the spawning process.
But to get back to you poor suckers: you’ve got all this horrible stuff to get through somehow so obviously there’s got to be an incentive, or at least some kind of fix for you to get addicted to. That’s love: possibly the sneakiest trick ever played on any variety of life form by a notoriously conniving Universe. You do all these dismal, soul-destroying things because you get attached to each other.
Well, you can imagine — maybe you can imagine what it was like for a bunch of rational, liberated, progressive amphibians like us suddenly to find ourselves plagued by these entirely new and incomprehensible emotions. Total and absolute chaos. Nothing got done, of course; we were all too busy staring longingly into each others’ eyes and going for romantic moonlit hops and sitting uncomfortably on park benches trying to tell each other about our feelings, to the point where nobody noticed that the generators had stopped working and nobody had bothered to do any building or produce any food. Luckily, when mission control back on Homeworld realised that we hadn’t reported in for some time and all the transmitters seemed to be down, they got worried and sent a rescue mission to see what the matter was. As soon as they got here and figured out what was happening, they evacuated the entire colony and shipped us back home, where we spent several thousand years in isolation hospitals having our heads sorted out. Fortunately, the love thing stopped working once we’d been home for a while, and virtually all the colonists were cured and went on to lead happy, productive lives as useful members of society.
Virtually all. All minus, in fact, one. Me. And this is where it gets really rather embarrassing.
If you’re considerably more perceptive than you look —and let’s fact it, a small rock’s more perceptive than you look, no offence intended — you may have noticed that earlier on I referred to you as my son. Now, consider my recent eulogy about amphibian life, with particular reference to the spawning process as practised by grown-up life forms. Hubba-hubba-hubba, eggs are produced, eggs hatch, thousands of tiny amphibians start out on life’s journey. Mummy and daddy, meanwhile, are miles away lounging beside the pool, probably aren’t even aware that the brood’s hatched out. Once they’re up and hopping, of course, you’ve got Buckley’s chance of knowing if a particular tadpole’s yours or someone else’s. So, that being the case, how the hell would I know you’re my son; more relevantly still, why the hell would I care?
Answer: you were conceived, tadpole mine, on this godforsaken planet, when the love thing was in full spate. Your mother — well, she was the most amazingly stunning opaque shade of greenish khaki, and she had a tongue that could nip a gnat out of the air at four centimetres. We were utterly devoted to each other — at least, we were until the rescue team got us back to Homeworld and started shining lights in our eyes. After that, she went off and left me and the last I heard of her, she was the director of some quantum physics institute somewhere, developing a whole new method of interstellar communications. More fool her, huh? Well, quite.
But — I don’t know, maybe I spent more time on the planet’s surface than most, or maybe I’m just more susceptible to the love stuff than regular folks; anyway, they really tried their best to cure me, but they couldn’t. In the end they gave up and decided that they were going to ship me off to a remote province where I couldn’t do any harm. Not this frog, they weren’t; I waited till they weren’t looking, and hopped it. And I took you with me.
Just you; there were six thousand, four hundred and thirty-nine tadpoles in your brood, but you were the only one I could get to in the short time available. I had to leave the rest of ‘em behind; and you know, it’s a funny thing but every night, when I’m trying to get to sleep, when I close my eyes I find I can see all their little faces looking up at me, like they’re saying, ‘Daddy, why did you go away?’ Really bugs you, that kind of thing, after a few hundred thousand years.
But I’d got you; and — please excuse me if this is embarrassing for you — and I guess that because I missed your brothers and sisters so very much, all the love that should’ve been shared round between the whole six and a half thousand sort of got dumped on you. Sorry about that, but these things happen.
Anyway: I hotwired an elevator and brought us back here, and pretty soon I had the whole god scam running beautifully. Of course, it was an utter pain having to pretend to be humanoid all the time. (I have no idea why, but no matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t get the idea of a frog-shaped god to catch on with these people. Gods with wings, yes; gods with horns, gods with crocodile heads and cat heads and thirty-seven different heads all arguing with each other; gods in the shape of every other kind of critter that walks the face of the Earth, in fact, not to mention burning bushes and pillars of fire, but not frogs. As far as humanity is concerned, God may move in mysterious ways, but He doesn’t hop.) But after a while, you can get used to practically anything, and as long as I stayed away from mirrors and pools of water, there were times when I forgot I was condemned to a lifetime in fancy dress. And as for you —well, you’d only been a frog for a tiny short time, so you never missed it at all. As far as you were concerned, the monkey suit’s what you really look like. Which was fine by me, so long as you were happy; and you were. We both were, for ages and ages and ages. Until, of course, you died— ‘I died,’ David interrupted. ‘No, sorry, that wasn’t me.
Something like that, even I’d remember...’
The clone shook his head. ‘My fault,’ he said. ‘Trying to introduce a hint of melodrama into the narrative. Won’t bother in future. Let me put it another way. No, of course you didn’t die. You weren’t even born yet. He died. My son.’
David frowned. ‘Your other son? One of the six and a half thousand?’
‘No.’ The clone looked upset. ‘Obviously you haven’t been paying attention. It was just us two on this whole planet, us and the ape people. And we were chugging along so nicely, too. Of course, by that stage we’d more or less given up on the god thing. As scams go, it’s one of the very best, but every now and again you’ve got to stand back and let them cool off, before things get out of control and they start having religious wars and stuff. On that occasion — well, with hindsight I’d have to say we pressed on a bit too long before stopping for a rest. Simple as that.
‘At the time, though, it didn’t look that bad until it was too late — and then, bingo, there we all were in the early seventeenth century, with Catholics and Protestants hating each other to bits wherever you cared to look, and the whole wi
tchcraft thing getting horribly out of hand almost overnight; well, in our terms, anyhow.
‘A bad time, then, and certainly a point where both of us needed to keep a cool head. Instead, what do you go and do? You fall in love.
‘Well, yes. Who am I to talk, because it was me falling for the whole love thing that caused the problem in the first place. I accept that now, but back then I just couldn’t see it. After all, she was a human, this Philippa Levens person you were suddenly besotted with. As far as I was concerned, it wasn’t just inappropriate and inconvenient, it was downright obscene. But you wouldn’t see that, or couldn’t; of course not — as far as you were concerned, you were as human as she was, and so was I, and all these objections I kept raising didn’t make sense. I was just being difficult, a spoilsport. So, understandably enough, you didn’t listen to anything I told you, even the bits that actually made a whole lot of sense, like: whatever you do, don’t go teaching this chickadee of yours anything even remotely resembling magic powers; not when there’re nasty men in black hats wandering around the place calling themselves witchfinders-general and what have you.’
The clone was crying.
‘Which is odd,’ he said, fumbling a handkerchief out of his pocket, ‘when you consider that the sad bit, which is coming up right after this break, isn’t actually my sad bit, because of course I wasn’t there at the time. None of us were, the tanks we came from hadn’t even been designed back then, so really there’s no call for me to get all upset like this, is there? Oh, sure, I’ve got exactly the same memories as he has, right down to the last heartbreakingly pathetic detail, but I wasn’t actually involved, you aren’t actually my son. I mean,’ he added, sniffing ferociously, ‘even if you were actually him — which you aren’t, of course — you wouldn’t be my son.’ He dabbed at his one eye. ‘So, either I’m crying because it’s just a very, very sad story and anybody would be moved to tears by it — no frog is an island, and all that — or else it’s some kind of genetically coded reaction, I don’t know. But then, we’re all coded, aren’t we? Coded to buggery . . . All of us, we’ve all got his memories and his brainwave patterns locked away in our heads; she’s the same, she came loaded with Philippa Levens, like a new PC with its operating system already installed; and she’s a mammal as well, so she’s got all that emotional-instinctive stuff clogging up her hard drive. And as for you — well, I’m coming to that.’
‘Good,’ David replied.
All the other clones were snuffling now: David noticed that eight of them went for their handkerchiefs at exactly the same moment, in precisely the same way. Now that was unnerving.
Anyway, continued the clone, where was I? Oh yes.
You see, you fell in love with this girl. We were in England at the time (well, everybody’s got to be somewhere), we were playing at being country squires, keeping our heads down, just pottering quietly along, seeing what it was like to be normal and ordinary, just for a lark. That big house in Buckinghamshire, where we had our previous little talk: that was where we were living at the time. You might say it’s been in the family for generations, or at least generation.
Details; let’s see. She was the niece of the next squire along, she’d come to pay a visit. She was riding in the deer park when her horse stubbed its hoof on a molehill and catapulted her into a small pond. When you came by, she was sitting in the water with pondweed in her hair — it’s only just occurred to me but maybe that’s what attracted you to her in the first place. No? Well, that’s exactly what your mother was doing when I first set eyes on her.
Anyway. You fished her out and took her home to dry off, and one thing led to another; and right from the start I was thinking, no good’ll come of this, it’ll all end in tears, but I ignored all that because you were obviously dotty about this mammal person, and I knew that if I made you choose between her and me— Well, there you are. Nothing like that ever happens on Homeworld, which is why we have particle sublimation technology and humans have Mills & Boon. Did you know, by the way, that if humanity put the same level of resources into biopolymer research that they currently devote to growing long-stemmed red roses, by now you could’ve invented plastic steel? Just a thought.
So there you were, courting away like a little peacock; and, needless to say, you were showing off, because that’s what mammals do, they can’t resist it when the female gazes at them with big round eyes and says, Gosh, you’re so clever... Crazy thing is, nine times out of ten the female isn’t impressed at all: she’s just saying to herself, being able to do this matters a lot to him, obviously, so I’d better pretend I’m interested. Well, there you are. And you were showing off, like I said, and you were telling her you could do magic. And of course she’s saying, Go on, don’t be silly, you can’t really do magic, cue big round eyes and smouldering glance, excuse me while I throw up. And you said, I can so do magic, just watch. And I can’t remember offhand how it started, but the upshot was that you taught her how to turn people into frogs.
Not that you did, of course; what you taught her was how to make everybody believe that some poor fool of a mammal was a frog. Same difference; because when she went home, she couldn’t resist trying it out just to see if it really did work, and she’d never much liked her lady’s maid anyhow. And she turned her back again immediately, no harm done; except that a couple of the village kids happened to be watching from behind some bushes, and so they ran straight home and told their folks, guess what, the fine lady up the big house is a witch. And the parents clipped them round the ear and said, don’t say that kind of thing about your betters, and then went out and told the parson; and the parson told the archdeacon, and the archdeacon wrote a letter to London, and three men in black hats were on the next stagecoach, just in time to see young mistress Levens play the same trick on the innkeeper’s son.
We’ve got to do something, you said; and I told you, too bloody right we’ve got to do something, we’ve got to get as far away from here as we can, pretty damn quick. And I explained to you that although our people live so very, very much longer than humans do, this admirable longevity is conditional on our not getting tied to a stake with brushwood piled up round our toes and getting set light to. Getting killed isn’t good for us, it’s really bad for our health. But you wouldn’t listen: we used to be gods, you said, we used to have people worshipping us and asking us as a special favour to bring back the sun every morning, surely we can still do a pathetically simple little thing like rescuing one girl. And I tried to explain — my mistake, I should have known better — I tried to explain that back then, the stuff we did that the humans thought of as magic was good, they liked it when we did it; now, I tried to tell you, magic is bad, and they’ll torch us before we can say alacazam! And while I was explaining this very basic truth about human perceptions and the effects of religious fervour on the feeble mammalian brain, you said some very unkind things and went storming off.
I keep asking myself — because I can’t actually remember after all this time — did I just sit there sulking because I’d absorbed all these human emotions, or do our people back on Homeworld have huffs and offence and umbrage and all that sort of destructive shit too? If it’s a purely human thing — and it’s got to be, surely, because our lot are advanced — then that’s another thing I can wallow in guilt and self-torture about. Me and my stupid addiction to this loathsome little planet: if we’d both stayed home, none of this would’ve happened.
When you didn’t come home, at first I told myself he’s still sulking, damned if I’m going to be the one who backs down and apologises, after all, I’m his father, and I’m right. Then, when you still didn’t come home, I was thinking, where the bloody hell can he have got to? Then, when you still hadn’t come home, I started worrying. Then I thought, screw it, and went looking for you.
It wasn’t till quite some time later — years, actually —that I finally managed to piece it all together and figure out what happened to you. I won’t bore you with th
e detective work, I’ll just cut to the chase.
You went running off to rescue the girl from the black hats; but by the time you got there, it was all over bar the shouting and the charming local custom of roasting chestnuts in the embers. You were a bit cut up about it all, to say the least. Your first instinct was to turn the whole lot of them into frogs; fortunately for everyone involved, you thought better of that. Instead, you resolved to bring her back to life, or at least the next best thing.
You thought: I think I’m human, but really I’m a frog. But I and they believe I’m human, and so does everybody else; doesn’t that mean that, for all practical purposes, I’m just as human as anybody else? Fine, you thought: if there was a girl, and she wasn’t actually Philippa but I believed she was Philippa, and she believed the same thing, and she was exactly identical to Philippa in mind and body, right down to the mole on her neck and her occasionally infuriating habit of changing the subject in the middle of an argument — well, wouldn’t she be Philippa, for all practical purposes?
So that was what you did: you looked round till you found a girl in the village who was Philippa’s age, and you turned her into Philippa, using a slight variation on the old frog hex. I can’t remember offhand who the poor kid was — some tradesman’s daughter, I suppose. Anyway, you went ahead and did it. But — no offence, son, but you never were quite as good at the turning-things-into-things schtick as you thought you were. The Philippa you created looked just like her, but there was a very slight personality drift. Only one character trait was affected: she wasn’t in love with you. Instead, she was in love with her cousin, Nathaniel Snaithe, a notary with a thriving practice in Princes Risborough.
