Alien Abduction, page 8
“So where do you come from?” I wanted to know.
“Earth, about three hundred million years downstream.”
“Downstream?”
“Down the time-stream—about three hundred million years in the future. The Third Arthropod Era. The insects of your world are our remote ancestors. Some of our scientists think that might have something to do with the fact that we still have a vestigial dependence on—or, at least, a vestigial affinity with—human blood. Personally, I don’t believe it. The hypothesis that we’re descended from human parasitic lice is at best unproven and at worst silly. The chain of evidence is broken in half a dozen places—global catastrophes and their consequential extinction events tend to mess up the fossil record somewhat. On the other hand, our adults do seem to need the catalytic infusion of mammalian blood if they’re to pupate successfully, and human blood does seem to work far better than any other kind. Whatever the explanation is for that, it’s bound to be at least a little crazy.”
By the time Imhotep had finished that speech I had several things on my mind, and it wasn’t easy to figure out which to tackle first. “So you got to be the way you are by having human blood pumped into you when you were a chrysalis?” I said, figuring that I really ought to demonstrate that I was capable of keeping up with his arguments.
“That’s a neat inference,” the bug conceded, “but I’m afraid it’s mistaken. I know that I look something like an adult, with the wing-cases and the legs and all, but actually I’m the result of what we call pedogenetic pseudometamorphosis. I never pupated—which might be regarded as a blessing, or as a lost opportunity, according to your point of view.”
I was now way out of my depth. Rather than ask it what the hell pedogenetic meant, though, I thought it might be more productive to change tack.
“You don’t have any humans in your world,” I inferred, “so you have to travel back in time to acquire human blood.”
“That’s right,” it said. “I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but your species becomes extinct in the not-too-distant future, when global warming causes a catastrophic release of methane from sea-bed clathrates. Most vertebrate species go with you, although a handful of rodents get through. The insects do better—though not as well as the worms, of course. The worms always pull through. Arthropodan Eras are relatively rare events, although they might be more common downstream of our time. As I said, we don’t socialize with time-travelers from our past or our future. It’s too dangerous. Nobody wants to create an unhealable rift in the fabric of history.”
“But snatching twentieth-century humans from their beds doesn’t count as changing history?”
“No. It happens all the time, thanks to the little silver-grey guys, and it never changes anything, even though their memory-wipes are always liable to go awry. Not that ours are perfect, mind—but our timing’s much better. The silvers are always returning people hours, or even months, later. With us, you can be sure that you won’t lose a single minute. You’ll be back in your bed within a few seconds of getting out of it, no matter how long you’re here. You won’t have aged measurably either—that cocktail we’re pumping into you to keep you healthy and happy is good stuff.”
“That’s good to know,” I told it. “Even so, you’re not exactly observing the principle of informed consent, are you? I know you’re calling yourself Imhotep rather than Hippocrates, but that doesn’t free you from the demands of medical ethics. Or do you think that just because you’re a giant bug, who isn’t even a true adult, while I’m only a long-extinct mammal, you don’t owe me any ethical consideration at all?”
“That’s fair comment,” the bug conceded. “To tell you the truth, we have occasionally tried to observe the principle of informed consent, but we’ve found that it leads to a drastic shortage of volunteers. Time travel isn’t as impractical as space travel, by any means, but it’s not so convenient as to allow us to waste a great deal of energy and effort. It’s an ethical compromise, I know, but we tend to skip the consent part—and I have to confess that even the information component is a bit of a swizz, considering that the memory-wipe will surgically remove all the information I’m currently giving you. The odds are a thousand to one against your actually remembering any of this when we put you back—and even if you do, the fact that you’ll only have been gone for five or six seconds will make it very difficult for you to believe that it was anything but a wacky dream. In that event, your brain will probably do its own memory-wipe, just as it does when you wake up every morning, to protect you from the possibility of mistaking your dreams for real experiences.”
“Actually,” I told it, “I’m quite good at remembering my dreams—and my nightmares too—although I rarely mistake them for real experiences.”
“That’s unfortunate,” Imhotep said, with all apparent sincerity. “I’d offer to treat you for it if I could, but it’s not my specialty. I’m a metamorphologist.”
“Right,” I said. “The overgrown football is your patient. I’m just the unconsenting blood donor. So what’s the problem you guys have with pupation? Why does your average chrysalis need a three hundred million year time trip if it’s to produce a healthy adult?”
I got the impression that it had been asked the question a dozen times before. Its answer was as casual and as practiced as the rest of his spiel. “It’s a question of pedogenesis,” it said. “There are a few pedogenetic insects around in your era, but they don’t get the same kind of publicity that ants and bees get, so the idea isn’t exactly common knowledge. You might be familiar with the general notion, though, in an amphibian context. Do you know what an axolotl is?”
“No,” I said.
“Pity. Well, briefly, an axolotl is a kind of tadpole, which has the genetic apparatus to metamorphose into a kind of salamander—but if there’s plenty of water around, it doesn’t bother. It grows sexual organs while remaining a tadpole, and breeds without ever producing a true adult. We think it’s a fairly common reproductive pattern in certain evolutionary phases—lots of new species seem to emerge during phases of rapid adaptive radiation by taking neotenic short cuts, so that larval forms begin reproducing themselves rather than completing their supposedly-full life-cycles.
“In your world, some insect larvae that feed on material that’s rare in general terms but tends to crop up in massive quantities when it does occur—the rotting wood from falling trees, say—have the option of developing sex organs as larvae and breeding as juveniles, often going through twenty or thirty generations like that before finally running short of food, pupating, and producing flies that hurtle off in every direction looking for another juicy fallen tree. Do you see the logic of the situation?”
“Yes,” I claimed, bravely.
“Well then,” Imhotep said, settling down on his oddly-jointed legs as if for a long lecture, “imagine what might happen to an insect species that developed intelligence in its larval form—and developed agriculture along with it. Agriculture provides the means to secure a permanent food supply, while the prospect of a reversion to idiocy provides a strong motive for trying very hard to avoid metamorphosis. My ancestors—like the ancestors of most of the species that developed self-conscious intelligence in our era—had the pedogenetic option, and they took it. Adults became very rare, and then almost mythical. Pupation came to be regarded as a fate worse than death, and for centuries those individuals unlucky enough to pupate were ritually destroyed. After a long period of time, though—during which our fledgling civilization flourished, and eventually gave rise to science—attitudes began to change. Pupation became a mystery to be solved, and an opportunity to be explored. We began to produce adults again—but the adults our nearer ancestors produced seemed to be defective, even by comparison with our modest expectations.
“We had to go back to our myths and legends to figure out exactly what we ought to expect of our adults, and why we didn’t seem to be getting it. We gradually began to realize that we’d lost something vital. Like most intelligent species, our early emergence from animal stupidity had corresponded with a massive extinction event, during which we’d wiped out a great many potential competitors. Our larval form was vegetarian, but our adults had been blood-drinkers, and the species we’d killed off included almost all of those from which blood could be drawn in any quantity on a regular basis.
“We realized, too, that blood-drinking hadn’t just been a matter of adult nutrition. Long before our larvae developed self-conscious intelligence our adults had developed a number of parental care strategies, which not only involved the protection of eggs and larvae but also the boosting of pupal metamorphosis by injections of blood. Over the course of time, our pupal form had got so much benefit from those injections that it became heavily dependent on them—a process whose interruption might well have been another key factor encouraging the development of pedogenesis.
“Now, of course—our now, that is, not yours—we don’t actually need to produce adults at all, and some of our people think that we shouldn’t even try. If we don’t, though, that leaves us with an awkward ethical problem in disposing of the chrysalides that occasional result when individuals spontaneously pupate. Another school of thought holds that if we are, in fact, morally or practically compelled to produce adults, then we ought to do everything possible to produce the best adults we can. Some of those individuals hold to a quasi-religious faith that if only we can find the right sanguinary catalyst, we might produce adults far better than those that nature used to produce in the remoter eras of our evolution. The ultimate goal, I suppose, would be an adult that retains, or even improves on, larval self-consciousness and intelligence.
“In the meantime, of course, a combination of natural mutations, selective breeding and—more recently—genetic engineering has allowed us to reproduce various aspects of adult form within essentially larval bodies. That’s what I meant by pedogenetic pseudometamorphosis. Some of us, inevitably, think that’s the way to go to produce something resembling an intelligent adult. Others, especially those inclined to various versions of evolutionary mysticism, disagree. Our explorations in time revealed soon enough that antique blood is better for our pupae than contemporary blood, and that blood from the mammals of much earlier eras than ours seems to be better still.
“The present experimental run—that’s your present, of course, although it’s ours too, in a peculiar sense—is only part-way through, but the results so far have proved astonishingly variable. There’s something in human blood, especially late twentieth-century human blood, which encourages mutational metamorphoses. Some of us entertain high hopes as to what the run might ultimately produce. Others, admittedly, see the project as a matter of mad scientists running amok and producing monsters—but you ought to understand that little disagreement well enough, if what I’ve seen in your movies is anything to go by.
“That’s the whole story in a nutshell. That’s why I’m here, and why you’re here, and why you’re hooked up in this admittedly undignified fashion. I’d say I’m sorry if I thought you’d believe me, but the fact is that I’m doing what I’m doing because I think it needs to be done, and you’re just one of the means that I believe the end justifies. Such is life—and now I have to go.”
The bug doctor didn’t wait for any further questions, but turned and made its exit. I got the impression that it was embarrassed by what it had told me, and that it really was a little bit sorry for the way I was being treated—but it didn’t come back again before I went to sleep. I have no idea how long that was, or how long I slept, but I didn’t get bored and I woke up feeling better than I had for some considerable time. It was a holiday of sorts, and—to tell the truth—it was a relief simply to be free of Mike’s increasingly resentful and accusatory presence.
Imhotep came in again on the second “day” of my confinement, and we talked again for what seemed like an hour or more. It filled in a bit more detail about the nature of the Third Arthropodan Era and the politics of time travel, but didn’t add much to the basics of his explanation. I got the impression that it was distracted, and that its heart was no longer in our conversation now that it had done what it considered to be its explanatory duty.
On that second day I put Imhotep’s distraction down to concern for the progress of his experiment. It certainly spent a lot of time hovering over the bloated football and making unobtrusive measurements of its progress. On the third “day”, however, Imhotep wasn’t alone when it came in. The newcomer didn’t introduce itself, and ignored me completely while it inspected the chrysalis with the utmost care, but it was easy enough to see that it and Imhotep were at odds. They clicked and whistled at one another incessantly, in what was obviously their native tongue, but Imhotep didn’t translate any of what was said for my benefit. Indeed, it seemed to be ignoring me, just as its adversary was—but it came back later to explain and apologize.
“As you probably noticed,” it said, “you’ve become the object of a minor controversy. Well, not you exactly, but the effect that your blood is having on the chrysalis.”
“Why?” I asked. “Am I turning it into something horrible? Something from the Outer Limits of the Third Arthropodan Era?”
“In your situation,” Imhotep observed, “I’m not sure I’d be able to see the funny side of that particular joke. But yes, something like that—something, at least, that we haven’t seen before.”
“But you don’t think it’s horrible,” I guessed. “You’re the crazy optimist who thinks it might just be the messiah you’ve all been waiting for: the superadult with brains as well as legs and a fancy carapace.”
“Let’s just say that I’m hopeful,” the bug said. “Hopeful, at least, that the thing won’t rip me to pieces and gobble me up when it hatches. I’m the one who’ll have to be here, you see, when it does emerge. I’m the metamorphologist. On the other hand, if it does rip me to pieces and devour me, I won’t have to listen to anyone saying I told you so.”
“That’s monster movies for you,” I said. “Don’t expect any sympathy from me—I’m just the nubile underdressed starlet supinely helpless on the mad scientist’s operating table. According to the script, all I have to do is scream. Given what you’ve been feeding that thing these last three days, isn’t it more likely to devour me than you.”
“You blood isn’t feeding it,” Imhotep reminded me. “It’s just a catalyst. It provides oxygen, and that mysterious something extra—something, I presume, that the immunoglobulins do, or maybe the clotting factors.…”
“You need to find out, then pop back in time to tell yourself how to do the job properly,” I said. “What’s the point of time travel is you can’t tip yourself off when you need a helping hand?”
“It doesn’t work like that,” it said. “You can’t socialize with other time-travelers, and that goes double for yourself. This is the finding out part of the story all right—but once we have the information, we’ll only be able to carry it forward. Trying to tie time in knots is worse than making material changes in history. It’s the sort of thing that’s likely to lead to elimination.”
It sounded genuinely anxious—almost as if it were worried about the possibility that it had already shot some kind of hole in the continuity of history—not, of course, by removing me from the cold marital bed to which it would ultimately return me, but by using my blood as a transtemporal catalyst to produce a kind of adult that its species had never known before, and might not like very much.
Personally, of course, I didn’t need to care—except, maybe, about the slim possibility that the damn thing would turn on me and do horrible things to me. Whether Imhotep and its snooty buddy regarded the product of my catalysis as a monster or messiah was all the same to me. To me, it would just be another bug, a louse writ large.
I couldn’t help being interested, though. Even if I wasn’t really the damn thing’s mother, or even its midwife, I was doing my bit. It would owe its form—and perhaps even its thoughts, if it were capable of having any—to me.
Imhotep’s adversary came back repeatedly on the fourth day and the fifth, sometimes on its own—but even when it didn’t have Imhotep around it pointedly refused to look at me or talk to me. It obviously had a very different view of medical ethics, or the degree of ethical consideration owed to a mere extinct mammal. Imhotep apologized for its colleague’s behavior, but I could tell that its heart wasn’t in the apology.
On the sixth day, the chrysalis began to crack. As soon as that happened, Imhotep came in with no less than three others of its own kind, two of them far more obviously larval in aspect than it or its familiar adversary was. The three others soon cleared out, though, leaving Imhotep to supervise the emergence solo. I soon developed a nagging pain in my neck straining for a better view, but I never gave up no matter how irksome it became. This was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and I didn’t want to miss a thing. Nor did I.
Bit by bit, the thing emerged, and I watched every moment of the process. I had been harboring the vague hope that my catalytic blood might produce something more human than bug, but that hope was dashed as soon as the thing began to ease itself out, wing-cases first. The ground color of the wing-cases was yellow rather than red, and its ladybird spots were very faint, but there was nothing particularly unusual about them. The wings themselves, when it had stretched them to their full extremity and dried them, were beautifully diaphanous, but very obviously insectile. The legs, which it poked out one at a time, were darker in hue and somewhat sturdier than Imhotep’s, but they too were exactly the sort of thing one might expect to see on a giant grasshopper, save for the forefeet ingeniously modified as manipulative hands, which looked exactly like Imhotep’s.
“This thing’s related to you, isn’t it?” I guessed, as I watched Imhotep busy itself obsessively with its machines and various items of movable apparatus. “Not just in a species sense, but in a kin sense. Is it a sibling?”
