Mother of Demons by Eric Flint

Molluscs. Of all things—molluscs!

They’re not really molluscs, of course. Hardcore cladists would lynch me for even thinking it. A totally separate evolutionary history. But the convergence is uncanny. It makes you wonder if old Arrhenius was right—all life came from spores drifting through interstellar space. That would make us distant relatives. Very, very, very distant. Even if Arrhenius was right, we’d be more closely related to algae and bacteria than we are to anything on Ishtar.

Indira smiled ruefully. She remembered criticizing Julius once for using the human name for the planet.

“Typical biologist,” she’d said to him. “Arrogant beyond belief.”

“But it’s a great name!” he’d protested. “In most pantheons, the goddess of love and the god of war are separated not only in person but in sex. Ishtar was both. What could be more suited for this planet? A goddess of war and love. I should think you, of all people, would approve.”

That had made her even angrier.

“I am not one of those feminists who thinks it’s an advance for women to participate in slaughter. Anyway, that’s beside the point—and you know it. Throughout history, the first act of aggression on the part of a more advanced society toward a less advanced one is to rename everything. Goes all the way back to your damned Bible. The first thing Adam did was name everything. That gave him the right to do what he pleased with his beasts. Columbus was just following the program. Rhodesia, for God’s sake!”

Julius had grinned. “Egad, I’m exposed. Julius Cohen, slavering imperialist.” He rubbed his hands, cackling with glee. “Wait till I get these natives into the gold mines! Copper mines, rather. Doesn’t seem to be much gold on this planet, curse the luck. Pizarro’ll never forgive me.”

She chuckled, remembering the argument. Julius was the most good-hearted of men, in all truth. And, in the end, he had been proven right. For reasons which would have astonished all of the adult colonists at the time.

Her eyes watered. She and Julius were all that was left, now, of that small group of adults who had survived the first months after the disaster.

She raised her head and stared at the kolo-cluster down in the valley. They were all buried there. Vladimir Koresz. Janet Mbateng. Hector Quintero. Francis Adams. Following owoc customs, the humans had adopted the grove as their own cemetery. The owoc had a particular reverence for the kolo. Indira was not sure why, exactly. The owoc were not good at explaining things. But she thought it was because of the way the kolo always grew in dense clusters, the willowy shoots intertwining and curling about each other like vines. And they were pale green, color of tranquillity.

The Coil of Beauty. It was when she had finally grasped the meaning of that owoc concept that her gratitude toward them had crystallized into a profound love for the gentle creatures. Even Julius, once she had explained it to him, had been shaken out of his normally linear way of thinking. Thereafter, to her relief, he had stopped referring to the owoc as “dimbulbs.”

She shook her head sharply, exorcising the sadness, and resumed reading.

I shouldn’t be all that surprised. How long ago was it that Stephen Jay Gould pointed out how chancy the evolution of vertebrates had been? There was hardly a trace of chordates in the Burgess Shale, after all. Even on Earth, the phylum might have easily disappeared during the Permian extinction, if not sooner. And then what would have happened?

Still, I would have bet on some branch of the arthropods. But perhaps not. Maybe the very success of the arthropod Bauplan militates against them ever evolving into forms suitable of filling the ecological niche of large terrestrial life forms. And why should they? Popular mythology to the contrary, that niche has always been on the outer edge of existence. It’s amazing, really, how the large size of humans prejudices our view of life. To this day, biologists talk of mammals dominating the earth. That’s news to bacteria! Not to mention insects and worms. We, and all our bulky mammal relatives, are just rare clouds drifting over the teeming landscape of life. So were the dinosaurs.