“But if you split them up so completely, how is that possible?” demanded Tenthag.
“Because you can’t split them up completely. Enough cells from each of the components enter the common circulation to preserve a trace of the whole in every segment, but they remain dormant so long as suppressor chemicals are circulating too. When they stop, the cells multiply until they once again reach equilibrium. I’ll show you under the microscope.”
Sometimes dazed, sometimes dazzled, Tenthag thereupon suffered through a crash course in modern biology. On the way he learned about the invention of musculators and nervograps—a web of the latter, connected to various sensitive plants, reported results from outlying pens and plots and pools—and about the buoyancy of cloudcrawlers, whose gas-distended bladders had furnished the earliest proof that air was not one substance, but a mixture, and about a score of other matters he had previously felt no interest in.
Clacking his mandibles dolefully, he said at last, “And this incredibly complex, interlocking system could be put in danger by something happening out there in the sky?”
“Ridiculous, isn’t it?” agreed Pletrow. “Almost enough to drive one back to astrology! But every line we pursue leads us to the same conclusion. Now we think it may have to do with the fact that some kinds of light can burn. You’ve used burning-glasses?”
“Well, naturally! I grew up with them.”
“But do you realize there are kinds of light too wide to see, and also too narrow?”
After proving her point with a small fire and a black filter that allowed no visible light to pass, yet transmitted heat without any direct contact, she introduced him to mutated creatures from the rest of the Lugomannic Archipelago. This was her specialty, and she waxed eloquent over the creatures she kept in pens on the north shore: vulps, snaqs and jenneqs all somehow wrong—lopsided, or looking as though one end of an individual did not belong with the other, or missing some external organ, or boasting an excess of them. Tenthag found the sight repulsive, and with difficulty steered her away from the subject, back towards the crisis facing the folk.
If anything, what she told him next was even more disturbing, for she illustrated it with cells cultured from his own mantle, and invited him to compare them with those recovered from Prefs—and then calmly took a sample of her own tegument to complete the argument. All his life, like virtually everyone in the world, Tenthag had been conditioned against bringing anything sharp towards his own, or anyone’s, body. A claw-scratch, such as she had inflicted on him, was nothing, but the risk of having a major tubule punctured, with consequent loss of pressure, was terrifying; it could lead to being permanently crippled. Among glass-workers this was a particularly constant danger. Yet here she was applying a ferociously keen blade to her own side—to judge by the scars already surrounding the area, not for the first time!
Sensing his disquiet, she gave a harsh chuckle.
“They say Jing’s Rainbow was deformed, don’t they? It can’t be too disastrous to lose a little pressure … but in any case I’ve had a lot of practice. There we are! Now you can compare one of my cells with one from the female they found at Prefs. You’ll notice it’s far more like the male’s, or, come to that, your own, than it is like hers.”
Struggling to interpret the unfamiliar details exposed to him, Tenthag sighed.
“I’m going to have to take your word for it, I’m afraid. I simply don’t know what to look for. Can’t you tell me, though, what became of our original—uh—females?”
“There never were any,” was the prompt response.
“What?”
“Females—that’s to say, versions of what we’re used to thinking of as females—seem to have occurred very early in the evolutionary process. But prior to their appearance, as is shown by primitive creatures like the brollican, the standard pattern was well established: clusters of simple organisms banded together for mutual advantage and shared a circulation, a chemical bath, which controlled the reproduction of them all. That, though, works only up to a certain level of complexity. If I chopped a claw off you, you couldn’t regrow it, could you? And reproduction is only an elaborate version of regrowth. But—and here’s the main problem—within any single organism there’s always decay going on. To renew the stock, without aging, and to evolve, calls for some sort of stimulus, some infusion of variety; what, we don’t yet know, but we’re sure about the principle. We assume it comes from the use of the symbiotic species, whose chemical makeup is much more unlike the donor’s than outward appearance would suggest. Or at least it used to be. Now we’re back to the change dating from the New Star, and the latest outburst of mimicry, which seems now to be going clear to the cellular level. At all events”—Pletrow briskened, evading the subject that was closest to her pith—”there never were specific females for the folk. Our species evolved together from that stage, craws of years ago, when it became impossible for either of us to continue providing the necessary variant stimuli from our own internal resources. So to say, we’d become so completely efficient as a single organism that we could no longer be peeled apart, and identity had supplanted variety. Probably you males”—with a wry twitch of her mantle—”were essentially parasitic, but you must have been amazingly successful, or you’d never have attracted such a promising species as us females into dependence!”