The Canopy Of Time Part 14

Djjckett nodded sagely.

"I know what you mean," he said. "For anyone who elects to compete in modern life, the compet.i.tion is indeed stiff and merciless. But no provocation can ever be great enough to allow the meddling with human life that you are doing here. Animal life is different, it exists for man's purpose. On ethical grounds, and even on biological grounds, your experiments are not permissible. Our bodies have achieved a balance . . . we-we blas-pheme by trying to alter them. After all, there were experiments in the past; you will remember the sleepless men of Krokazoa."

"That particular experiment failed. Others have suc-ceeded. And I particularly regret hearing a moral tone taken to EAMH attempts to enn.o.ble human life by any group capable of degrading animal life.

Allow me to say that you and I hold very opposed views on the sacred-ness of animal existence. Ah well. . . . We constantly 'meddle with human life', as you call it. Every surgical operation, every anaesthetic, every dose of cough stuff you take represents such an experiment."

"What has all this to do with the babies you showed me upstairs, Tedden Male? Human gene-shift is altogether a more serious matter than a dose of cough mixture."

Tedden got up and thrust his hands into his swathe. He began to walk about, avoiding the vicinity of the portcase. Djjckett's eyes never left him.

"All that's happened to those babies is this," the geneti-cist said slowly. "We operated on their 'genetic dies', the primal cell moulds from which all subsequent cells are modelled in the building of an individual.

As you will know, the whole inheritance quota of any individual is contained in these dies. One gene was removed from their chromosomes before birth-before conception. As a result, the babies are able to stand almost as soon as they are born."

"It isn't natural," Djjckett said.

"It is for a baby animal."

"Moderator, these are human beings!"

Ignoring the remark, Tedden turned to a cabinet under the wide windows, and shuffled in a drawer. He pulled a microacath out, studied it for a moment, and pa.s.sed it over for Djjckett to look at.

Round the glossy print trailed something resembling raffia, knotted at intervals with differently shaped knots; it formed an eccentric spiral, the middle of which was distinctly darker than the edges. Round the outside of the knots, a tendrilled haze gathered. Djjckett gazed at it in silence, twisting the print first one way, then the other.

"Is it a chromosome?" he asked.

"It's a jell taken by our infra-electronic micro-camera of a human chromosome. Those knotty points on it are the large molecules we call genes, which are the bearers of heredity, and carry certain characteristics over from one generation to another. There are one thousand two hundred and five of them. The outer ones are what we call negative or 'damper' genes.

"What we are doing is to shift off some of the damper genes from the chromosomes of unborn children, before they leave the gametangiurn of the parent. It's a fairly simple freezing process, not even painful to the father. The operation must be far less drastic than the ones which produced the abortion at your feet."

"I don't know, I don't know!" Djjckett said, standing up and scratching his head in an agony of perplexity. "You must see that from my point of view, the more you say the worse you make matters.

What reasonable man would co-operate with you to have his children-well, made abnormal?"

Slowly Tedden pulled at his nose, as if he could con-trol another outburst of irritation that way.

"Any reasonable man," he answered, heavily emphasiz-ing each word.

He took the microacath back to the cabinet.

"Any reasonable man," he repeated, "would give his child the chance to get a head start over its contem-poraries. Blessed are the first come, for they shall be first served! Children don't normally stand up till they're about a year old, Djjckett Male; ours stand when they are a day old. That is progress, say what you will.

"Knock off other of the damper genes and you get other advances." He smiled briefly. "Of course I admit we had a few failures at first-babies born covered in hair, others with fully developed-well, no matter; the point is that through a few mishaps the EAMH may have gained a bad name among the ill-informed. Un-fortunately, you see, we cannot try this sort of thing on animals first. Animals haven't got damper genes; from the few elementary jells you people have produced concerning your ... . er, work, I gather you work on the mammal's stimulator genes, which is a very different matter. Strange. I suspect humans developed their damper system as a safeguard against precocity-hence, compared with animals, the long period required to mature. Now that the world is long past its adolescence, precocity is exactly what we need. Once it was wiser that we did not learn too fast; now circ.u.mstances demand that we learn as quickly as possible. As I said the world's a rat race. Ah, it's a burden. . . ."

He came and sat down at the desk again. Again he pa.s.sed his hand over his face. His eyes remained blank, as if focused on something beyond the discussion, as he fingered his mask.

"You claim to have the world's interests at heart." Djjckett said, not without sympathy, for he found him-self liking this odd man, "yet you think exceedingly little of it."

For the first time, Tedden looked deeply into Djjckett's eyes. He saw there, not the scarecrow he had imagined he was dealing with, but a shrewd man whose awkward-ness of manner did not entirely cover his firmness of purpose. Tedden looked away, drumming his fingers on the desk.

"What is there but the world?!" he exclaimed almost in a groan.

"I am a religious man, Dr. Tedden, a Theorist,' I have a positive answer to that question."

"Ah, to, you mean? Sorry, Djjckett, count me out. I've never seen him on my microcaths," Tedden said bleakly.

They looked at each other again, neither much enjoying what they saw, in one of those dead moments in men's lives when even hope seems hopeless.

"You would naturally be disinclined to believe in a creator, because you are playing creator yourself,"

Djjckett said, in an apologetic tone. "I take it your future intentions are to knock more damper genes off, as more volunteer parents appear?"

"Yes."

"But can you predict results? I mean, do you know certainly what change you will effect before the baby is born?"

Tedden was sweating; suddenly he looked a lesser man. Seeing Djjckett glance at his forehead, he brought out a tissue and mopped it abstractedly.

"No," he said. "Not exactly. In Life there are no cer-tainties."

"Not exactly! You are madly irresponsible, Modera-tor, for all your talk of the common"

Djjckett had risen to his feet now, shaking off the enveloper, his collar in disarray, his hands clenching.

The portcase rose with him and stretched its legs. His speech was cut off by the jangle of the vibroduct.

Tedden flipped it on with terrible eagerness, almost crouching over the instrument. The face of the female who had appeared before flared into view; she had one hand up to her mouth, in a sort of nervous excitement.

"Oh, Moderator Senior Tedden," she exclaimed. "It's Tunnice-your partner, I mean. She's-the pains have started again. I think you'd better come up. Quickly, please."

"At once, Mingra, coming at once."

Tedden switched off. He was already out of his en-veloper, apologizing, moving towards the door, saying good-bye to Djjckett.

"You'll have to excuse me now, Djjckett. My partner is up in the labour ward-I must go to her. There have been unfortunate complications. I'm afraid it's an awk-ward case, premature. ... Excuse me."

Instinctively, Djjckett was following, out of the room, into the corridor, going through the formal and perfectly sincere phrases of regret, keeping pace with Tedden as his portcase cantered behind them.

"Terribly sorry to hear. . . . Wouldn't have kept you if I had known. . . . You should have told me, intruding at such a time.... You've been so patient. ... It really embarra.s.ses me to think that I...."

Tedden could not shake him off. Djjckett pressed into the lift with him. Tedden closed the gates, thumbed the b.u.t.ton, and they slid upwards. The portcase was left behind.

"What has brought the birth on prematurely, Modera-tor, may I ask?"

"My wife had a fall last night," Tedden said abstractedly, glancing upwards, biting his thumb.

"I am so sorry. ... I know how these things happen.

It must be a great comfort to her to know her husband's a"

Djjckett stopped in mid-sentence as his throat con-stricted.

"There's no danger, is there?" he asked, in a small voice.

"Danger? What do you mean, danger?"

"Tedden Male. . . . You've been-you've carried out one of these gene experiments on your own partner!"

The other man's face, now pale above its partial mask, told him he had guessed rightly. They glared at each other as the lift purred up through the heart of the build-ing, two men of different planets who would never understand each other's viewpoints. Tedden looked away first.

"You use the word 'experiment' as if it were synony-mous with torture," he snapped. "You're just a super-st.i.tious layman, Djjckett, in this particular matter. My partner enters whole-heartedly and co-operatively into this great venture with me. It's only natural we should want our child to share the fruits of our researches."

"Natural!" Djjckett echoed, as the lift stopped. "It's anything but natural, man! What's this child going to be like?"

The gates opened, they stepped into another sound-proof corridor, Djjckett found himself shaking with a horrid agitation.

"What's it going to be like?" he repeated, plucking at the other's sleeve, hurrying after him. "You don't know, do you?"

A nurse stood at the far end of the corridor by an open door, her face almost covered by mask, the mask expressionless. She beckoned anxiously. Tedden was running now, his mouth open, his powerful face blank. Djjckett ran beside him, caught in a general feeling of tension. Tedden's face terrified him; the nurse's face terrified him; what had she seen?

"I'm in the rat race," he thought. "I shouldn't be running. Why am I running? I shouldn't be running!"

"We didn't like to tell you on the vib," the nurse said, in a high, nervous voice. "The-the baby has just this moment arrived. Your wife will be all right. The baby"

Just for a second, Tedden paused on the threshold of the ward, as if willing himself to go in. Then he entered, floundering through the door.

Dithering behind him, the frightened Djjckett caught a glimpse of half a dozen uniformed figures round a bed. Their backs were to him. The smell of disinfectant drifted to him.

Then the new-born child's cry came to him, a thin, mewling cry full of fear and rage; it was saying, "Let me get back! Oh, let me get back!"

Again we say simply, Time pa.s.sed. Every planet was civilized. Every world bore a mighty crowd of people, but the crowd no longer jostled or shouted. Each individual remained by choice to himself, an individual. It was the, silver period of an age of starlight and splendour. Soon only the starlight would remain.

Visiting Amoeba.

I.

You never knew the beginning of that train of events which led you to Yinnisfar and a world of shadows.

You never knew the Shouter by name. To you he was just a man who shouted and died as you reached him, but before that the Shouter possessed a long, tarnished history. He operated far from what most men reckoned as civilization, right out on the rim of the galaxy, so that on his frequent flits from one planet to another he rarely saw stars on both sides of his cabin. There they would be, a whole galaxy full on one side, burning bright and high, and on the other-a cliff of emptiness that stretched from eternity to eternity, the distant island universes only accentuating the gulf.

The Shouter generally kept his eyes on the stars.

But not on this trip. The Shouter was a spoolseller by trade; his little craft was packed with racks upon racks of microspools. He stocked all kinds, new and anti-quarian; philosophical, sociological, mathematical; if you went through them systematically, you could almost piece together the eon-old history of the galaxy. It was not, however, on these learned spools that the Shouter made his best money; they paid for the fuel, but not the drinks. The spools which really brought in the profits dealt with a subject older than history, and with figures more ineluctable than any in the mathematician's vocabulary; their subject was Desire. Erotic spools depicting the devices of l.u.s.t formed the Shouter's stock in trade; and because such items were illegal, Shouter stood in perpetual fear of the customs officials of a hundred worlds.

Now he was elated. He had just neatly outwitted the petty guardians of morality and sold about half his hold-ings under their very eyes. Well stocked with drink, he was heading for fresh fields of commerce.

That he took too much drink in celebration was to influence your entire life. An empty merrit bottle rolled by his feet. It was hot in the small cabin of his ship, and he dozed off, sprawling over the controls. One or two little switches were pressed forward by his sleeping head. . . .

Shouter woke muzzily. He sensed something was wrong and his head cleared at once as he peered anxiously into the forward vision tanks. No clouds of accustomed stars were in view. He yelped in dismay. Hurriedly, he flipped on rear vision: there lay the galaxy like a tinsel egg on a plate, far behind him. Shouter swallowed, and checked fuel. Low: but enough to get back on. Fuel, however, was in better supply than air. His oxygen tanks had not been replenished in the hurry of his last departure. He would never get back to the galaxy alive on the thimble-ful that remained.

With an abyss opening in his stomach, Shouter turned to the forward ports again to examine an object he had previously ignored. Apart from the distant phantoms of other galaxies, it was the only object to relieve the inane ubiquity of vacuum: and it was showing a disc. He checked with his instruments.

Undoubtedly, it was a small sun.

It puzzled Shouter. His astronomical knowledge was negligible, but he knew that according to the laws there was nothing between galaxies; that long funnel of night shut off galaxy from galaxy as surely as the living were cut off from the dead. He could only suppose this sun ahead to be a tramp star; such things were known, but they naturally roved inside the giant lens of the home galaxy, in conformity with its gravitational pull. Shouter threw the problem aside unsolved. All that vitally con-cerned him was if the sun-wherever it came from-had one or more oxygen-type planets in attendance.

He prayed it might have, as shakily he trained his instruments on it.

It had. The sun was a white dwarf with one planet almost as big as itself. A quick stratospheric test as Shouter glided into a breaking orbit showed a breathable nitrogen-oxygen balance. Blessing his luck, the spool-seller sped down and landed. A valley fringed by hills and woods embraced him.

He walked out of the airlock in good fettle, leaving the compressor-a.n.a.lyser systems working; that would ensure full tanks of purified oxygen within half an hour, drawn from the planet's air.

It was hot outside. Shouter had an immediate impres-sion of newness everywhere. Everything seemed fresh, gleaming. His eyes ached at the vividness of everything. Rea.s.suringly, there were no signs of animal life. The trees were of species he failed to recognize, although to Shouter one tree was much like another.

Silence tur-banned his head till he felt giddy.

The sh.o.r.es of a lake lay only a few yards away. He began to walk towards it, conscious at the same time of a vague discomfort in his breathing. With deliberate effort, he inhaled more slowly, thinking the air might be too rich for him.

Something rose to the surface of the lake a distance away. It looked like a man's head, but Shouter could not be sure of that; a mist rising from the surface of the lake, as if the waters were hot, obscured detail. That a man should be swimming there seemed unlikely.

The hurt in his lungs became more definite. He was conscious, too of a smart spreading across his limbs, almost as if the air were too harsh for them. In his eyes, all things acquired a fluttering spectrum round them. He had the a.s.surance of his instruments that all was well; suddenly that a.s.surance meant nothing: he was in pain.

All in a panic, Shouter turned to get back to his ship. He coughed and fell, dizziness overcoming him.

Now he saw it was indeed a man in the misty lake. He shouted for help once only.

You looked across at him, and at once started to swim in his direction.

But Shouter was dying. His cry brought blood up into his throat, splashing out over one hand. He choked, attempting to rise again. You climbed naked out of the lake towards him. He saw you, turning his head heavily, and flung one arm out gesturing towards the ship with its imagined safety. As you got to him, he died.

For a while you knelt by him, considering. Then you turned away and regarded the s.p.a.ce ship for the first time. You went over to it, your eyes full of wonder.

The sun rose and set twenty-five times before you mastered all that Shouter's ship contained. You touched everything gently, almost reverently. Those microspools meant little individually to you at first, but you were able to refer back to them and piece the jigsaw of their secrets together, until the picture they gave you formed a whole picture. Shouter's projector was almost worn out before you finished.

Then you investigated the ship itself, sucking out its meaning like a thirsty man. You sipped Shouter's firewater. You read his log. You tried on his clothes. You saw yourself in his mirror.

Your thoughts must have moved strangely in those twenty-five days, like sluice gates for the first time, as you became yourself.

All you learnt then was already knowledge; the way in which you pieced it together was pure genius, but nevertheless it was knowledge already held by many men, the results of research and experience. Only after-wards, when you integrated that knowledge, did you make a deduction on your own behalf. The deduction, involving as it did all the myriad lives in the galaxy, was so aweing, so overwhelming, that you tried to evade it.

You could not; it was inescapable. One clinching fact was the death of Shouter; you knew why he had died. So, you had to act, obeying your first moral imperative just for a moment, you looked at your bright world. You would return to it when duty had been done. You climbed up into Shouter's ship, punched out a course on the computer, arid headed towards the galaxy.