Asimov's SF, October-November 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Another species of ant, Lasius flaws, managed large herds of domesticated aphids. The aphids were kept in subterranean corrals where they grazed the roots of plants and were milked for their nutrient-rich honeydew.

  Some termite mounds sprawled more than thirty feet in diameter, housing tens of millions of individuals, all bound up in a single sophisticated caste system. Soldiers of Macrotermes bellicosus had jaws so huge they couldn't feed themselves, but instead relied on lower-caste workers to lift food to their mouths.

  Insects build cities, and farms and superhighways. Slant your eyes and look hard enough, and you'll see a level of organization that can only be described as civilization.

  Bell had often thought that humans had achieved their conspicuous position in the world not because of how perfectly adapted they were, but because of how weak, how clumsy, how fragile they were. How unsuited to existence.

  One species of dairying ant secreted an enzyme from its head that was carefully rubbed onto the aphids during the milking process. The enzyme disrupted wing development, preventing the aphids from ever flying away.

  Where humans came up with external solutions—like building fences—insects often found a more elegant solution. A biological solution.

  They'd had the time to do it.

  * * * *

  Determined and cautious, Bell fed the grubs every day and wrote down his observations.

  But still, Cole was the one who noticed it.

  When Bell finally understood, his mouth dropped open. “Holy shit,” he said.

  He looked at his notes.

  He'd fed the insects one of three different diets. The insects which, as grubs, had eaten bread did not now have wings, but stunted twists of chitin. Their color was dull red, like rust. More beetle-like, less wasp. Now, as adults, they still preferred bread. The fruit-eaters still ate fruit. They were large-bodied and short limbed, with stumpy wings that buzzed loudly as they made awkward flights inside the terrarium. Bell could imagine them making those same flights between distant stands of fruit.

  The meat eater was the most strange. Blood red, with wings like blades—mouth parts huge and angular.

  "They adapted,” Bell said. “They adapted to the food sources they ate as grubs.” Bell shook his head in disbelief.

  "Fast learners,” Cole said. Then he moved as if to stick an experimental finger in the meat-eater cage, but Bell said “Don't."

  Seana, when he showed her the hatchlings, said “Can that happen?"

  "There it is,” he said. But in his heart of hearts, he knew she was right to doubt. Like a million years of evolution in a single generation. No species adapts that quickly. It was a bad movie. Junk science. Not possible.

  "But there it is,” he repeated.

  * * * *

  The insects lived for more than a month. They buzzed, or crawled, or flitted around their cages. Over the course of a single week the following month, they took turns dying.

  The meat eater lived longest. After each die-off, Bell found egg cases. He cleaned the terrariums, and put the egg cases back inside. Then he waited to see what would hatch.

  Late one evening, Seana climbed up the ladder while he was in the barn loft at the petting zoo, checking the hay for rot. Climbed up and stood behind him until he turned around, then stood on her toes and kissed him.

  If the zoo hadn't been closed and nearly deserted, if Bell hadn't known for sure that no one was likely to venture into the petting zoo, let alone climb into the loft, then maybe it would have happened differently. Maybe Bell would have kissed her back, because kissing would have been all that could happen.

  But the zoo was closed. Bell did know. And it did happen the way it happened.

  "I can't,” he said.

  She pulled away.

  "I want to,” he said.

  She looked at him, waiting.

  Beneath them, the horses shuffled. Made noises. Kicked their stall doors and talked to each other in soft equine language.

  He thought of Lin, home in their trailer. “I can't,” he said again.

  * * * *

  A black mood seized Bell on the way home. He drove the darkening highway, following his headlights into space. He pushed the old beater faster, watching the speedometer climb to seventy, then eighty. He took the curves without easing off the accelerator. The tires squealed, but held the road.

  His mind was a movie of loves and hates. He loved and hated his job. Loved the animals, but hated the conditions. Hated that he couldn't afford to live on what he was paid. When you're young, he thought, they tell you that if you get a degree, everything else will fall into place. But it's not that simple, is it?

  Nothing—not one thing—had worked out like it was supposed to.

  He thought of life at home, a second maze of contradiction. He was tired of being alone and together at the same time. He wanted to be free, but there was no freedom. No way out. He felt like an animal with a trapped limb. He understood why animals chew their own legs off. He had a recurring fantasy of being robbed, and putting up a struggle. If he were held up at gunpoint, he had decided, he would not cooperate.

  He didn't know what to think of Seana, yet. So he didn't, at all.

  * * * *

  Red like rupture. Blood squirm, a coagulation of grubs across brown terrarium stones. The egg cases pulsed like clotted hearts, spilling strange new life. Bell stared through the glass. Each cage told the same story.

  The grubs were a centimeter long. Even as small as they were, Bell could see the mouth parts working. Each grub identical. As far as he could see, the differences that had been so apparent from cage to cage in the adult form were now absent from the next generation. The grubs were all the same, as if a reset button had been pushed. It was only the adult form that seemed vulnerable to change. Bell opened his sack lunch. He took out his apple and sliced it into a dozen pieces. He dropped a slice into the first cage. The grubs responded immediately, moving toward the fruit. They swarmed it.

  * * * *

  Bell fed the grubs first thing in the morning.

  He decided to turn it into an experiment. He stole a sheet of sticky-labels from the staff room and stuck a label to the side of six different terrariums. On each label, he wrote a different word.

  The grubs labeled fruit were fed fruit; the grubs labeled meat were fed sliced meat. The grubs labeled control were fed a mixture of foods.

  The grubs with the cool sticker on the side of their terrarium were fed the control diet—but were also placed in the refrigerator for an hour a day while Bell did his chores. An hour wasn't long enough to kill them, but it was long enough to impact their physiology. They grew slower than the grubs in the other cages.

  If these insects could really adapt to their environments, Bell was going to see how far he could push it.

  He'd see if diet was the only pressure they responded to.

  The grubs labeled heat were in a small glass terrarium placed on the floor near a space heater. Bell put his hands against the glass. It was hot to the touch. These grubs, too, seemed stressed by the temperature. But they still grew, doubling in size every week.

  The grubs labeled carrion were fed the occasional discarded rat from the golden eagle enclosure. These were the grubs Bell found most interesting. They burrowed into the dead rat and ate it from the inside out.

  Charles Darwin had believed in God until he studied the parasitic wasp Ibalia. Darwin wrote in a journal: “There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created wasps with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars.” Darwin found it particularly gruesome that the Ibalia grub only gradually consumed the living tissues of its host—taking a full three years to complete its meal, saving the vital organs until last as if to extend the host's suffering. Darwin couldn't imagine a God who would create something like that.

  Bell could imagine it.

  He thought of the r
eset mechanism. He imagined a single insect species with multiple phenotypes already encoded in its genome—a catalogue of different possible adult forms. And all it took was a trigger to set the creature down its path.

  "Maybe it's like blind cave fish,” he told Seana one evening.

  He watched Seana's face as she peered through the glass.

  "Cave fish have most of the genes for eyes still carried in their DNA,” he said. “All the genes required for lenses, and retinas and eyelids, all the genes except for the one crucial ingredient that starts eye development in the first place. If you cross-breed two different populations of blind fish, sometimes you get fish with eyes."

  "That doesn't make sense,” Seana said.

  "It does if the blindness is recessive, and the two populations are blind for different reasons."

  "But you said these things aren't breeding."

  Bell ignored her, lost in thought. “Or they're like stem cells,” he continued, “each carrying the genes for multiple tissue types, multiple potentials, but they specialize as they mature, choosing a path."

  He leaned forward, tapping his finger on the glass.

  "Where do you think they come from?” Seana asked.

  "The fruit maybe. Shipped with the bananas. Central America. I'm not sure."

  "Why can't you find it in books?"

  "There are millions of insect species still un-described by science. Besides, maybe it has been described. Some version of it. I mean, how would you really know?"

  * * * *

  Later, searching for reasons to avoid going home, Bell ran down his closing checklist twice.

  On his second round, he found the outer door to the lemur tunnel wide open.

  He had locked it himself. Checked it himself.

  His inner alarm went off.

  Zookeepers developed inner alarms, or they developed scars.

  He stepped through the door, and let his eyes adjust to the dark, to the long, mildewy tunnel which ran under the moat, to the lemur island.

  At the end of the tunnel, bright light, because the door at the island end was open, too.

  In the middle, a silhouette. Who...?

  "Hey!” Bell shouted.

  Several silhouettes. Sharp, jabbering shadows. Five or six lemurs hopped and shrieked.

  The shadow in the middle wound up like a pitcher and threw something.

  A yelp. The lemurs howled and ran.

  "Cole?” called Bell, starting down the tunnel.

  One lemur didn't run. It whirled in confusion, chattering.

  Bell's eyes had adjusted. The shadow grew details. Cole.

  Cole, with a handful of smooth, white landscaping stones, eyes wide with rage.

  "What the fuck are you doing?” Bell shouted.

  "They threw shit at me. They threw their fucking shit."

  "Jesus Christ—!” Bell yelled, lurching forward.

  Cole turned, arm pistoning in the dark.

  The stone whistled past Bell's ear and struck hard against the outer door. The tunnel echoed.

  Bell froze.

  Cole stepped toward him. “You watch how you talk to me,” he said, and for a moment they stared at each other, waiting to see what would happen. Then Cole's eyes changed—the rage blown out of them like a gust of wind. Cole brushed past him and was gone.

  The lemur groped its way back into the light, back to the island.

  Bell unfroze, closed up, and said nothing. He'd have to say something, wouldn't he? Something would have to be done. Right?

  He made a mental note. In the future, he wouldn't let crazy people into his life. He meant it.

  * * * *

  Metamorphosis is magic. Darwin had known this, too.

  Sometimes it is a dark magic.

  The metamorphosis of a tadpole into a frog. A grub into a wasp. A friend into an enemy.

  Bell watched the grubs feed. By now they'd grown huge. Some approached five inches in length, blood red, large beyond all reason. Soon they would spin their papery cocoons. Turn into whatever they would turn into.

  Bell pondered the advantage of such an adaptive mechanism. Perhaps it was a way to guard against overspecialization, a reservoir of adaptive potential. Evolution is a slow process, and when conditions change, populations take time to react. There is a lag; species that don't change fast enough die out.

  Bell knew of several kinds of island lizard that reproduced parthenogenetically. Such species, when found, were always young, isolated, at risk. They were aberrations outside the main thrust of evolution. Most were doomed, in the long run, because sexual reproduction is a much better way to create the next generation. In sexual reproduction, genes mix and match, new phenotypes arise, gene frequencies shift like tides. Sexual reproduction shuffles the genetic deck from one generation to the next.

  Parthenogenetic species, on the other hand, are locked-in, playing the same card over and over.

  But not the insects in the back room.

  The insects in the back room seemed to have a whole deck from which to deal, parthenogenetic or not. Such insects could adapt quickly, shifting morphotypes in a single generation. And then shift back the next. It was the next logical step—not just evolution, but the evolution of evolution. But how was it possible?

  Bell thought of Cole, of what made men like him. That old argument, nature vs. nuture. In another time, in another place, Cole would have fit in. In another time, maybe Cole would have been a different person entirely.

  The descendents of Vikings and Mongols today wore suits and ran corporations. Were veterinarians, or plumbers, or holy men. Perhaps tomorrow, or a thousand years from now, they'll need to be Vikings and Mongols again.

  Populations change. Needs change. Optimums change. And it all changes faster than selection can track.

  From a biological perspective, it would be easy to produce the same kind of people again and again. Stable people. Good people. Again and again, generation after generation—a one to one correlation between gene set and expression.

  But that's not what you find when you look at humans.

  Instead there is a plasticity in human nature. A carefully calibrated susceptibility to trauma.

  What looks like a weak point in our species is in fact design.

  Because the truth is that certain childhoods are supposed to fuck you up.

  It is an adaptive response. Wired into us.

  The ones who couldn't adapt died out. Those gene sets that always produced the same kind of people—stable people, good people—no matter the environment, no matter the violence—those gene sets that always played the same card, again and again—

  —died out.

  Leaving behind only the ones who could metamorphose.

  We were not so different from these bugs.

  Bell unloaded all this on Seana one day during lunch. They sat across from each other, sipping soft drinks. “The evolution of evolution?"

  "Yeah,” he said.

  "Why would this happen in insects?” she asked.

  "Because they've been here longest,” he said. But it was more than that. He thought of the ants and their aphids. The enzyme that clipped their wings. He thought of the different ways that insects solved their problems. “Because insects always choose the biological solution."

  * * * *

  Bell avoided Cole for days.

  He told himself he was waiting for a good time to see the director, to tell her what had happened in the lemur tunnel. Told himself he wasn't afraid that Cole would retaliate by telling about drinking together on zoo time, zoo property. Both were lies, but what he had the toughest time with was pure simple fear of Cole.

  "Ridiculous,” he told himself. “You're a grown man and a professional."

  On the other hand, Cole obviously was dangerous.

  Maybe he could get Cole to leave, to resign his service contract without anyone having to tell the director anything.

  This seemed, on reflection, to be the best bet for an outcome where he, Bel
l, kept his job and got rid of the problem.

  The reflection took place at home, on the sofa, in front of the TV, in his underwear.

  When Lin crossed the room, he saw himself through her eyes. He looked like a bum.

  She was thinking, he knew, what an asshole he was for buying beer.

  He didn't care.

  Neither did she, it seemed.

  She sat down on the couch beside him.

  What was he? When had he turned into a person who said nothing, did nothing? What had he let himself turn into?

  * * * *

  The next day, Bell followed Cole down to the supply shed and said “We're going to have a talk."

  Cole took a set of eight-foot pruning shears down from the wall rack, and turned to face Bell.

  "Yeah,” he said.

  Bell fumbled for a beginning, forgetting what he'd rehearsed.

  Cole began whistling. He leaned on the pruning shears as if they were a wizard's staff.

  "I have to turn you in,” Bell said.

  "For what?"

  "Throwing rocks at the animals."

  Cole stared at him. His grip on the shears tightened. “I lose my temper sometimes. I have a temper, I admit."

  "That's why you can't be here."

  "Listen, I'll work on it. I'll be better."

  Bell shook his head. “I'm just letting you know as a courtesy. I have to report it."

  "You don't have to."

  "The other choice is that you leave today and don't come back."

  "That's not any choice at all."

  "There are other places you can do your service."

  "I like it here."

  "Here doesn't like you anymore."

  "You know what I don't like? I don't think I like you trying to push me around."

  "Today is your last day here, one way or the other,” Bell said. “You can leave on your own, or you can be ushered out."

  "You really don't want to do that."

  "You're right, I don't,” Bell said.

  Cole's face changed. “I'm warning you."

  Bell raised his walkie-talkie, never taking his eyes off Cole. “Garland,” he spoke into the handset. There was a squelch, then a voice, “Yeah."