“I have been—” Silence hummed for a second. “I have been wondering how to tell you. Any phrasing, any inflection, could strike you as something I computed to produce an effect. I am only a machine.”
Though unease prickled him, he leaned forward to touch a bulkhead. It trembled a little with her engine energy. “And I, old girl,” he said. “Or else you also are an organism. Were both people.”
“Thank you,” said the ship, almost too low to be heard.
Laure braced himself. “What did you have to tell me?” She forgot about keeping her voice humanized. The words clipped forth: “I finished the chromosome analysis some time ago. Thereafter I tried to discourage certain tendencies I noticed in you. But now I have no way to avoid giving you the plain truth. They are not human on that planet.”
“What?” he yelled. The glass slipped from his hand and splashed red wine across the deck. “You’re crazy! Records, traditions, artifacts, appearance, behavior—”
The ship’s voice came striding across his. “Yes, they are human descended. But their ancestors had to make an enormous adaptation. The loss of night vision is merely indicative. The fact that they can, for example, ingest heavy metals like arsenic unharmed might be interpreted as simple immunity. But you will recall that they find unarsenated food tasteless. Did that never suggest to you that they have developed a metabolic requirement for the element? And you should have drawn a conclusion from their high tolerance for ionizing radiation. It cannot be due to their having stronger proteins, can it? No, it must be because they have evolved a capacity for extremely rapid and error-free repair of chemical damage from that source. This in turn is another measure of how different their enzyme system is from yours.
“Now the enzymes, of course, are governed by the DNA of the cells, which is the molecule of heredity—”
“Stop,” Laure said. His speech was as flat as hers. “I see what you’re at. You are about to report that your chromosome study proved the matter. My kind of people and hers can’t reproduce with each other.”
“Correct,” Jaccavrie said.
Laure shook himself, as if he were cold. He continued to look at the glowing fog. “You can’t call them nonhuman on that account.”
“A question of semantics. Hardly an important one.
Except for the fact that Kirkasanters apparently are under an instinctual compulsion to have children.”
“I know,” Laure said.
And after a time: “Good thing, really. They’re a high-class breed. We could use a lot of them.”
“Your own genes are above average,” Jaccavrie said. “Maybe. What of it?”
Her voice turned alive again. “I’d like to have grandchildren,” she said wistfully.
Laure laughed. “All right,” he said. “No doubt one day you will.” The laughter was somewhat of a victory.
And now a new cycle turns on Fortune’s cosmic wheel. Another brilliant era races to its apogee. What hidden flaws will send the Commonalty spinning downward into darkness like the Empire and the League before it? Let its free and lively people prosper while they may, for as a proverb handed down from Old Earth puts it,
Shines the sun ne’er so bright,
In the end must come the night.
FB2 document info
Document ID: fbd-7d6391-45b4-f740-5a92-1618-dd10-9afcbf
Document version: 1
Document creation date: 19.10.2010
Created using: Fiction Book Designer, FictionBook Editor 2.4 software
Document authors :
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The Long Night df-10 Page 31
