“Of course,” George continued, “as the population has expanded, we have spread far beyond the original sitenow very far beyond. There’s only a few thousand of us around in these parts, in three towns.”
“A few thousand of you?” I gasped. “But you said you started with six hundred! You can’t have been down twenty years!”
“That’s true,” he acknowledged. “But, you see, ev-ery single one of the Chozenthat’s what we call this particular animal we areon this planet started with the original six hundred.”
I was stunned anew. “You meanthere were no creatures like this on this planet before you landed? That’s impossible! There must be a billion of you around on all four continents! Not in twenty years!”
George sat up on his tail and gave a shrug. “It’s true. When we surveyed, the largest land animal around was a large rodent, and the largest animal pe-riod was something resembling an aquatic dinosaur. We split into four groups, centered on each continent’s best zone, to check where the best places would be to start out. Seventy-five men and seventy-five women in each commune, each with a whole continent to settle. We had radios and the shuttlecraft, so we could keep in contact, we thought. Well, after we were all down, the dissolution of everything started, so rapidly and so absolutely that we couldn’t do a thing about it. Then the Change came, and, if I can judge by just this col-ony here, when we became the Chozen only one in ten of the men remained a male, the rest became females. In our case, seven of us remained men; the rest, femalessixty-eight in all.
“Breeding iswell, you might say compulsory. You’ll see. A female mates once every two years, I’d guess, and always lays six eggsyes, don’t start. We hatch.
“Well, five are always female and one male. There’s
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no infant mortality to speak of, and instead of the usual ten to thirteen years, the young reach full maturity in just two and start breeding. You can figure out the result.”
It was getting late as we approached the large house, which, as leader, George occupied. It was grass-lined and stocked with tubers, and provided a comfortable place to lie down in. The Chozen relaxed by lying on their sides, feet out, I found. Very comfortable.
My old pilot’s mind did the arithmetic. Let’s see okay, there would be sixty-eight females, seven males, so we’d multiply the first litter by six and the rest by five. That was 408 the first breeding cycle, two years in. Now they all bred, and we’d get 2,040 by the end of the fourth year. Ten thousand two by six, fifty-one thousand by eight, two hundred fifty-five thousand at ten years, over a million two by only twelve years, six million at fourteen, thirty-one million by sixteen, a hundred and sixty or so million by eighteen, and now, at about twenty years, almost eight hundred million from this one colony. Multiplied by the four colonies, the result was even more staggeringover three billion of the Chozen on the planet. And the next cycle
Fifteen billion?
“I don’t believe it,” I whispered. “This world’s about right now. It can’t stand any more inhabitants. You’ll be out of food no matter what in just a couple more years, over the trillion mark before another decade!”
George nodded. “I know. The death rate’s mostly from accident, so it’s rather low. Either that has to increase dramatically in the next year or two, or there has to be a lot of sterility suddenly, or we’ll be up to our tails in people with no increase in food.”
“Starvation will return violence to your perfect world,” I pointed out. “The most dangerous people are starving people.”
37
Five
In the next few days I learned to handle my new body and my odd new sight much better. The fact is, being of the Chozen was not at all unpleasant, like suddenly becoming a child again. No cares, no responsibility, no worries. Most of the Chozen were born this way, and
all but a handful were still children.
The young grew to adulthood in just two years, but they learned very quickly. Parents taught them speech and as much else as possible during the abbreviated childhood. Even as adults, they respected their elders, and listened to the stories of their heritage, their culture, and their ideals and faith. To all but a hundred and fifty of the colony, and those stretched damned thin across the face of the continent, this was their own, their only world, their only form, their only life. Legends, rumors, and the lack of manpower to fill what little need for knowledge of the old ways existed were already causing tremendous gaps between old and young. There were simply too many children, of necessity too spread out. Most were primitive savages, with little or no hint of a link to humanity or civilization.
They played their games, and life was fun and little
else. I could tell that even close in to this village and George’s guiding hand the last links were already breaking. Two years wasn’t enough to teach them their past. Already the majority of the inhabitants were only two to four years old, and far removed from humanity. In a century, providedor, perhaps, even helped by
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the inevitable toll of starvation, they would be so alien, so simple and primitive, that they might as well have no link with humanity whatsoever.
In one way, the originals would have the advantage in a fight. They’d know how to fight, would know about violence and how to defend. But, of course, their Christianity and pacifistic ideals would be shattered in the process; they would have to give up their dream or die for it. Either way, the process of dehumanizing would advance.
I talked to a bunch of young ones, just coming on two but already looking as adult as any of us. George had two daughters and a son from the last breeding cycle. One of the girls seemed brighter and more curious than the others, and I took a liking to her. They called her GuzGeorge explained that after so many kids he just called them simple names he could keep straight.
As I say, we were all children again, playing games like tag and hide-and-seek and such between bouts of eatinga lot had to be consumed each day to support our bulks. Guz was happy and alert, and you would have put her as an ignorant twelve-year-old big for her age if you didn’t know better. Even with a master for a teacher, though, she was one of the new generation.
“Ay! Bar!” she taunted. “No can run quick like girl!”
I took the challenge and started after her; I was getting better every day, sprinting probably twenty kilometers per hour, maybe better. It was a tempting, deceptive paradise, reallyno cares, no worries, all fun and games.
I did catch her and swatted her with my tail. She stopped and laughed, because she’d slowed deliberately to let me catch her and knew that I knew.
After a while of such romping about we ate our fill of grass and tubers, then settled in for the ritual that was part of everybody’s day: people who knew each other would settle down and preen and clean one an-
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other. Basically, the process involved one person’s ly-ing down, while the other went over him, checking for burrs, insects, and the like, and removed them with tongue and teeth. Our mouths secreted an antiseptic saliva that healed rough and raw spots.
I took a couple of minutes, then started doing her.
“Bar?” she asked lazily. “What it like where you come from? What it like to be old people?” By that last she wasn’t referring to age, but to the human form.
“I’m sure your father’s told you all about it,” I responded. “It is quite different.”
“How?” she persisted, as all children must.
“Well, we have hands. We can grasp thingshold things,” I tried to explain, realizing that “grasp” and “hold” might be hard concepts for a handless person. “We use toolsthings that are used to make and shape other things.”
“Why?”
That age-old question seemed a bit harder somehow. Why, indeed?
“Are people more happy than Choz?” she asked, filling the void of my nonreply.
I thought again, of the mindless millions glued to their telescreens and rotting in standard flats. I compared them to the happy primitives of the plains.
“I guess not,” I replied carefully. “It’s not a question of better, only different.”
“What kind of different?” she persisted.
I finished the preen. “Sun’s going down,” I evaded. “Let’s head for town.”
She munched a last tuber and we hop-ran back to the village. The fact was, we couldn’t see the sun only feel it. Some of the groups further off were already worshiping the sensation as God’s touch, I’d heard. Natural enough.
But the sun’s rays were necessary for color refraction. At night it was sonar alone, a strange, eerie land-scape of white outlines against pitch-black, which
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could be extremely deceiving. Best to be in a place you knew well after dark.
No lights or fires illuminated the town at night, but the familiar, simple surroundings were easy to manage with the sonar.
After the kids were asleep in their own rooms I sat down with George Haspinol again. It was the first time in several days we’d had the chance to talk; he was of-ten out and around, telling his tales, teaching whom he could, trying to keep the frail threads which tied the local community together from becoming frayed.
“How’d it go?” I asked him.
“I’m winning a few small battles,” he replied wearily, “but I’m losing the war. You know that. Guz, Gal, and Rum are proof of it. My own children speak like savages, and none of them can count past five. They go through the motions for the old man, but soon they’ll be full-grown and leave to stake out their own houses in new places, have then-own families, which will leam even less of the language and culture. I’m told that already the language just the other side of the hills is about eighty or so words, and so distorted you could hardly make it out. They’re becoming the cows you talked about, Barby multiplication and geography alone.”
I nodded. “But you know it’s coming, the holo-caust,” I responded. “Even with the grass growing again almost overnight, and new tubers sprouting all the time, you’re hoof-deep in feces out there, and just eating is a mob scene.” I had done a narrow-pulse scan that day; on normal, or wide pulse, I could “see” only three or four hundred meters before the sound was too diffuse to return. Each of our pulses was distinctive, individualisticeven with thousands of peo-ple pulsing you always were sensitive to your own. On narrow, though, you shot your full wad at one spot maybe only a few meters wide, but it carried for a cou-ple of kilometers. I never ran out of Choz to count, nor could I count them all.
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“The water’s rising, there’s signs the winter snows have melted at last,” he said evenly. “Breeding sea-son is only weeks away, maybe less. It may be the last one before the whole thing caves in.”
I nodded, and shifted subjects. “George, you promised to explain this all to me. Who they are and what we’re doing here.”
He sighed, and stretched out.
“It’swell, you ran all sorts of tests before coming in, didn’t you?”
“Sure,” I replied. “More sophisticated than yours, I bet. And I found nothing.”
“You didn’t know what to look for. Did you find a virus, a tiny colony of sub-microorganisms that built honeycombs at a fast rate?”
“Yes,” I told him. “Sure. They didn’t affect the test animals, but that’s why I came in with full suit and pack.”
He shifted slightly. “That figures. They didn’t do anything to our test animals, eitheror, for that mat-ter, us. We were extracautious, even had a small group living here for a couple of weeks before we committed the main colony. The things aren’t much more than enzymessimple protein molecules, apparently. The only effect they seemed to have was to replace many of the cellular enzymes. There was a slight narcotic ef-fect at the beginning, and we wondered about it, but they were so firmly lodged that to kill them would be to kill the people. They didn’t seem to do any harm, and, once they’d moved in, actually made the cells work better, not worse. So, after a while, we committed. Thanks to Fitzgerald we’d been subjectively aloft only a little over thirty years, and we’d limited reproduction in that time just in case the voyage would be a long one. This planet seemed heavensent, and so we committed.”
“It’s a simple virus, then?” I asked, incredulous. “Butall this is so planned.”
“A whole new form of life,” he replied. “It thinks
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make no mistake about it. What sort of thoughts, only God knows. Certainly too alien for us to understand. But thought? It got into us, and within days had mutated itself to adapt to our cellular structure. It fitted, it workedand it bided its time, didn’t do much else, except maybe a few favors. It repaired and replaced damaged cells fast, it made you more alert, healthier. What gets me is that it waited until we were all down, supplies, everything, before it struck. It started on everything firstexcept the shuttle. It left that alone, for some reason. When things started to fall apart, a cou-ple of the colonists made it to the shuttle, managed to take off, made the Peace Victory. Without food to fuel the metabolic changes, the new organisms couldn’t act, but the runaways were helpless. They needed a lot more people to run the ship, and most of the supplies they needed to live were now down here.
“Finally, near starvation, they decided to come back, for better or worse. It was that or starve. We’d all changed by that time, so I got to see what it looked like in others, and this time watched the creatures dissolve the ship with secretions of some kind.”
“But why these shapes?” I mused. “Why not just take over people as they were?”
“Oh, some of it you can see right off,” George replied. “First of all, we needed to be strictly herbivores so they could manage the food supply and we wouldn’t louse up their ecosystem by killing the other animals. Tools and artifacts threaten the ecology, too, so you take away hands. Tough, dark skin for protection against the grasses and the sun. The ability to travel long distances, so we’d spread out fast.”
“But why the strange optical system?” I asked. “I don’t know. My best guess is that it’s multipur-pose. The color code eliminates everything except what you have to know about to live and survive. Makes it harder to muck with the environment, makes it easy and convenient to live in it. Also, they can in-duce hormonal flows and guide them with color stimu-43
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lus. You already experienced some of the things they could do when they forced you to stuff yourself during the Change. You’ll see more during the breeding sea-son. They are in every cell of your body, and as long as they understand the cellular function and its place in your schemewhich they designedthey can in-duce almost anything. As for the sonarI suspect that the pulse and return is something they can easily convert to their own terms better than sight. After all, how many eyes does a virus have?”
I nodded. A logical reason for everything, I thought. Intelligent virusesor, perhaps, a single organism with many parts. Surely one of them, even a colony, couldn’t do this alone. There was almost certainly a reason for every component they’d built into us.
“George?” I said suddenly, a thought striking.
“Umh?” he responded sleepily.
“Anything that smart has to know how to count, doesn’t it?”
“I suppose so,” he mumbled.
“And we’re breeding fast to breed the humanity out of usbut also to provide new hosts for the colonies of viruses, right?”
“Urn hum,” came the reply.
“George, they’ve got to know they’re at the limits of their world’s population.”
Suddenly his head lifted a little. “Lord! You’re right! And they’re much too clever to let the situation really get out of hand. That means they have to allow death or no birth, have to!” There was new hope in his voice.
“I don’t think so,” I said, trying to think. “That would mean limiting their own expanding population. Now that they’ve got the means to do it, I don’t think they’ll want to stop. No, there’s something else, something we’re missing.” Another thought struck me.
“They must know we’re intelligent. They must know we think, reason. You know they could lobotomize us in a minute. They have something else up. Otherwise, why not just use their own animals? Why us?”
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“I’ve often wondered about that,” he replied. “I don’t know the answer. I do know that they’re fast approaching a break pointtoo many people, and the bulk of the people naturally and normally a planned creature of their own capable of reasoned intelligence but culturally animalistic.”
“Then, if they can impose behavior, and if the average person considers this normal, what do we have?”
“Organic robots,” George said in a curious tone. “A total merging of the two life forms with the virus in charge.”
“But where does it go from there?” I wondered. There was no clear answer to that, and we could only lie there, awake, trying to figure it all out.
45
Six
Time flowed on, and I tended to fit into the routine existence of Patmos. It’s funny, but the human mind is distinctive not only for its reasoning abilities, but also for its incredible adaptability.
Ship piloting, for example, is difficult to do. It’s done by mental commands that must be instantaneous; life-or-death decisions must be made at all times, particularly in takeoffs, landings, and dockings. The first few weeks in pilot simulation I crashed repeatedly; I thought I would never get the idea of communicating complex instructions with mental nudges while watching sensor data and the like and interpreting them. Yet, within a month, I was not only doing all that fairly routinely, but holding conversations with fellow trainees and copilots at the same time.
Patmos was like that. Here I was, after thirty-six years as a human being, suddenly a four-legged hopping animal that saw by built-in sonar, and yet, by the fifth week doing so was as natural to me as if I had been bom to it. Visions, appearances of other creatures that would have made me laugh or perhaps turn away, now seemed normal, even beautiful and sleek.