Alien Earth Page 5

  He looked up at John suddenly as he said this, and there was such fervent hope in the man’s face that John drew back from him. Looks like that always meant the same thing. Someone was about to put grapplers on you and hold on, to depend and ask favors and demand promises. It was a look no Mariner could fairly accept or return. To see it on this businessman’s face was doubly unsettling.

  If Deckenson noticed John’s withdrawal, he didn’t comment on it. “The restaurant’s here,” he declared suddenly. “Let’s go in.” Without waiting for John’s response, he ducked into a doorway nearly obscured by a vine trellised over it. John followed, ducking more deeply than Deckenson had.

  Deckenson was already following the host to a table. John fell in behind him. Damn. The whole place was scaled down to the size the Human race had become. The walkways between the tables were narrower, the tables lower, the chairs more spindly than any John had ever seen. All the furniture and screens were of woven tika vine, hardened with tika syrup into a glossy finish. He’d never seen it used for chairs and tables before, and wondered if it would take his weight. He felt disoriented, like the time he had wandered into an older part of Evangeline’s gondola and encountered the formidable couches and work surfaces his ancestors had used. Only this was like being invited into a creche’s playroom. Eyes turned to him as he passed. He hadn’t felt stared at in the corridors, but here the attention was impossible to ignore. His close-cropped hair and traditional orange flight suit were enough to mark him as a Mariner; his hulking size advertised his great age as well. He wasn’t sure which trait was drawing all the attention.

  The host was very smooth about bringing a larger chair for John, but couldn’t do much about how low the table was. John waved off his apologies and accepted a small menu. He was studying its ornate print when he realized Deckenson was looking at him. John met his gaze.

  “Feels odd, doesn’t it? To be so big in a world of tiny people. Like you’re an outmoded piece of equipment. Obsolete. Archaic.”

  “So?” John asked coolly.

  “So I brought you here on purpose. To emphasize it. To get you thinking. What will you find next time you come back from space, John? People that look even more like children? Will you be able to walk among us, to sit in our chairs, to drink from our tiny cups? Look at me, John, and see what we’re doing to ourselves.” Deckenson held out his hands, spread-fingered, as if to emphasize the slenderness of his fingers, the delicacy of his pink nails, the fragility of his white wrist with the pale blue vein pulsing in it.

  John shrugged. “I’m a Mariner, Deckenson. It was my first option, and I’ve been with it for twenty-three years, my wake time. Yeah, every time I come back, things have changed more. But I’m adaptable to it. That’s why Mariner came out number one on my options.”

  “There are also the factors that you don’t form bonds easily, and don’t seem to regret not having any close personal relationships. Are not those also prime personality traits for a Mariner?”

  John took a sip of water from a narrow glass. “Of course. You say it like I should apologize for it.”

  “No. I merely think it odd, in a man whose second option was Poet. One would think a man with a predilection for poetry would be closely enmeshed with humanity. I always thought of Poets as speakers for their species.”

  It irritated John that they had somehow dug out this odd bit about him. Rubbed him worse that Deckenson placed importance on it. He wondered what else they knew about him. How intrusive were these people? His irritation came through in his reply. “Skill with words isn’t chained to love of one’s fellow man.”

  “Poetry is more than skill with words. The option tests for Poet are quite exhausting mentally, and very demanding emotionally. I ought to know. It’s my first option.”

  John should have known. “Really? Well, perhaps times have changed in that, also. When I took the tests, I came away feeling I had been the victim of a scam. All the questions seemed to ask one sort of thing while digging information of a very different sort out of you.”

  “Exactly.” Deckenson took a quick breath as if he were about to go on, then paused abruptly. He let the breath out slowly, then breathed in twice, slower still, through his nostrils. John recognized the calming exercise. Deckenson looked up at him across the table and smiled suddenly, disarmingly. “Look, John. This isn’t going at all the way I’d planned, and I’m not going to let myself get sidetracked. Poet might be my first option, but Executive was my next, and that’s what I have to be right now. For the sake of poetry later. I have so much to convey to you, and such a limited time. And I desperately need to have your commitment.”

  This sounded familiar. It would go like the last two meetings he’d had with Earth Affirmed people. There would be the same old song of their idealistic concept of a Human-centered civilization, usually followed by a monologue about how they had John’s best interests at heart and that was why he should give them cut-rates. It irked him that this time he might have to strike some kind of deal with them.

  He thought about the previous times he’d been approached by Earth Affirmed. The first two times, way back when, he’d taken on consignments from them. Sticky ones. Never again. The last two times they’d approached him had been, oh, about sixty-five of their years ago, and again about thirty-seven years before that. They’d used the same pussyfooting techniques, long talks that hinted at a very profitable and exciting mission, but somehow never came around to making a direct statement of what that mission was. Each time, after protracted talks, John had gotten impatient and taken his option offer from Norwich and gone on his way. He wished it was that easy this time. He was starting to wonder why he even bothered with Earth Affirmed overtures. He hated to think it could be something as prosaic as curiosity.

  The waiter came and hovered. Deckenson looked almost annoyed. “My regular meal. And John will have the same, but double portions. And more water, please. John, anything to drink besides water?”

  “Stim.”

  Deckenson turned to the waiter apologetically. “Do you have stim here?”

  The waiter frowned consideringly. “Not in the old style, no. But I think our chef can come up with something that is both stimulating and refreshing. Will you trust us?”

  “Certainly,” Deckenson replied without consulting John, and the waiter hustled away.

  “So stim isn’t commonly drunk anymore, either?”

  “I’m afraid it’s regarded as a bad habit. The better restaurants don’t encourage it.”

  “I see. Last time I was in port, it was ‘purity of experience.’ Restaurants discouraged patrons from ordering more than one kind of food or drink at a meal. Background music was regarded as distracting one from the immediate experience. Wearing a perfume that could intrude on another’s olfactory experience was regarded as the height of rudeness. All of that seems to have been replaced.”

  “So you see all this as merely another brief change of consciousness, a swing of the pendulum,” Deckenson indicated the whole room with a wave of his diminutive hand.

  “For me, that describes it perfectly. For you, it’s your life.” The words came out more bluntly than John had intended.

  “Exactly. But some things change in one direction, John, and keep changing. You’ve seen it, though you don’t seem to have attached any importance to it. The Conservancy’s ‘guided evolution’ has not swayed an iota from its headlong drive to keep Humans from having any effect on Castor’s and Pollux’s ecologies. They blindly refuse any of Earth Affirmed’s suggestions to integrate us into the ecologies, preferring instead to force us to live as outsiders, as parasites who try to sustain themselves on the natural flows of life here, without either contributing or detracting from that flow.” Deckenson’s voice was beginning to quiver with fervor. John braced himself against the current of fanaticism.

  “Look what their breeding controls have done to us. People keep getting smaller, in an effort to make even less impact on the planet’s ecologies. Puberty
keeps getting pushed back, a side effect of the growth inhibitors. We’re supposed to believe that’s good. The Conservancy talks about an extended juvenile period undistracted by internal hormonal riots, as if sexual maturity were a form of insanity. Our bodies have become little more than mobile containers for our brains.”

  John tried a shrug. It only seemed to electrify Deckenson more.

  “What was puberty when you were generated, John?” he demanded, almost angrily. “Onset at about fifty-two, fifty-five? I see you haven’t made it yet, so that has to be about right. Now it’s sixty-five to seventy, and climbing. Of course, the inhibitors have also pushed our life spans up beyond two hundred years, so that shouldn’t sound so bad. In fact, all the time a Human has before his hormones become obsessed with reproduction is supposed to be why we’ve advanced so far intellectually. We’ve successfully moved a bit farther away from our animal natures. Supposedly.” Deckenson drew breath, and sipped his water.

  “Supposedly?” John was resigned now. The man was a typical poet: he communicated to use words, rather than the other way around. John would just have to ride out the chatter until Deckenson got down to business.

  “Yes, supposedly. Look at me, John. On a scale of twenty, with twenty being the perfect achievement of the Conservancy’s ‘guided evolution,’ I score a seventeen point six-three. We’re not supposed to be able to get casual access to that data, but one can, if one is determined enough. And the interesting thing is that most of us who attain those high scores are determined enough. Perhaps because we, trapped inside these ‘improved’ bodies, sense, more than anyone else, that something is going wrong. Very wrong.”

  “Looks fine to me.” John gave an offhand wave at the restaurant around them. “Things are going better than ever; or at least that’s what the update reports on the Wakeup line told me as we were coming in. Dirty technology is getting cleaner. Use of plastics is almost down to zero, what with the new cell-meld techniques and bacterial information storage system. Waste from harvested asteroids is down to less than six percent, and the on-rock mining techniques do even better than that. The interpopulation of the space stations by the Rabby is obviously a successful venture. The populations on both Castor and Pollux are stabilized at a constant that is ten percent under what was considered the population safety mean for human habitation thirty years ago, and …”

  “Stop there,” Deckenson suggested quietly. “And think about what you just said for a minute.”

  John had more than a minute, as the food arrived just then. John recognized none of it, but it didn’t bother him. Styles in serving food changed just as styles of wearing clothes. There were twenty-two native plants on Castor and seventeen on Pollux that Humans could safely eat. Thirty-nine plants that met all nutritional needs of a Human when eaten in a judicious mix. John had eaten them all, and expected to continue eating them all for his entire life. They could make them look different, and they could vary the flavor somewhat, but what it came down to was that tapa lily was tapa lily, and it was the basis of your diet, whether your gourmet chef prepared it or you ate standard rations from the ship’s dispenser.

  There was a brown rectangle in a brown sauce, a salad, small orange cubes of something, and a tangle of white noodles with pinkish flakes of something in it. The waiter refilled Deckenson’s water glass, and set a small steaming mug in front of John, then departed. John picked up the mug immediately and sipped at it. Stim. Sort of. A little too bitter. He sweetened it with taro syrup from the dispenser on the table and tried it again. Better. But already almost gone. He was beginning to see Deckenson’s point about a world scaled down to smaller people. He set the mug down, but Deckenson had already noticed his wry expression.

  “I’ll order more. For both of us. I think I’d like to try it.”

  “What did you mean, think about what I had just said?” John asked. He found he was hungry, and tried to fork loose some of the brown rectangle, but it clung together stubbornly. Fibrous. Probably tubers from Pollux barber cane, then. He found a small knife by his plate and used it to free a chunk while Deckenson signaled the waiter for more stim.

  “Mostly your population statistic. While the information people are crowing about our population being stable yet self-supporting even if under mean size, others of us are seeing it as a very real danger signal.” Deckenson had been staring past John’s ear as he spoke, his eyes unfocused. Now he suddenly seemed to come back to himself with a start. “Pardon me if I review things you already know,” he said vaguely. “It helps me organize my thoughts.”

  John nodded as the stim arrived. The waiter left a carafe of it this time. John kept sawing at the brown rectangle of food with the small knife as Deckenson talked.

  “Consider this. Human reproduction used to be a simple matter of two people mating. A child was born from the female ten lunar months later. It was easy, it was efficient. No planning was necessary or artificial assistance of any kind. Unplanned reproduction was what the race worried about back then. Well, now it’s the opposite. By the time a female is ready to release a mature egg cell, the cell is actually too old to be viable. The average woman has no possibility of conceiving. So oogonial cells are harvested from females of twenty years or so and carefully pushed into oogenesis. The resulting ovum is fertilized with sperm that has likewise been harvested from young males and pushed into maturity. The zygote is transferred to an artificial womb and nurtured there for six weeks, before it is then implanted in a Mother. The Mother carries it in her Human womb for perhaps another six months. At least, if the embryo is lucky, its mother can carry it that long. At that point, the developing child is usually too large for our ‘improved design’ women to carry or to bear. Our reduced size comes from growth inhibitors, not a true evolution. So our embryos are disproportionately large to the Mother. So the embryo is again surgically harvested and placed in an artificial womb where it is tended until its caretakers decide the baby is mature enough to be born. It is then removed from the artificial womb and introduced to independent life by being placed in a creche with other infants of its generation. There has always been talk of finding a way to produce a child totally outside of a Human womb, but our research in that area is, as they put it, ‘economically unfeasible for the paltry success rate.’”

  John had a piece of the brown rectangle in his mouth and was chewing it slowly as his mind worked through what Deckenson was saying. He swallowed it; slightly bitter flavor, and he still couldn’t identify what it was. But it was good. He started sawing off another piece. “You’re saying women can’t bear living children anymore. That the Human race can no longer reproduce without artificial aids.”

  Deckenson closed his eyes dramatically and sighed. He opened them again. “Exactly. I am saying that the sexual act has become recreational only, totally unrelated to reproduction. I am saying that pregnancy is no longer related to mothering. That may be an even more serious breakdown than the separation of sex from reproduction. There are studies, quite ancient; I am almost afraid to ask if you know of them. The information dates back to Earth life, and was gathered when scientists still had access to other primates. Do you know what is meant by the phrase ‘together-together monkeys’?”

  John shrugged. “Some subspecies of primate, I suppose. What am I eating?”

  “Pseudo-meat. A reconstruction based on chemical analysis. We assemble the vegetable nutrients to resemble the original components, and add fiber to simulate the texture of flesh. Those orange cubes approximate an Earth vegetable called carrots. The noodles are a simulated wheat pasta with artificial sea-life meat, and the salad is a salad. But, to get back to the monkeys, they were deprived of their natural mother, and offered only the companionship of other infants. They developed an unnatural pattern of clinging to one another in groups. Adults from those experiments were incapable of the behavior necessary to successful mating. When they did reproduce, say by artificial insemination, they either neglected or abused their children—I mean offspring, of co
urse.”

  “Of course.” John had managed to swallow what had been in his mouth. He looked at what was left on his plate in distaste. He could eat it. Intellectually, he knew it was only vegetable protein, no matter how they had prepared it. His training in following local customs was good. He could eat it. But. “Isn’t this sort of thing illegal?” He waved his fork at his plate.

  “Not anymore. First, when I was very young, there was a legal decision that one would have to prove intent to stimulate carnivorous interest rather than mere culinary experimentation. And, more recently, there was a legal decision that substance was more important than appearance. As we’re the only animals on Castor or Pollux, any attempt at becoming a true carnivore would have to involve cannibalism of some sort. There are separate and totally adequate laws to prevent that sort of thing. No one’s trying to encourage cannibalism; this is just satisfying a historical curiosity for most of us.”

  “Still.” John poked at the pseudo-meat with his fork, then took a bite of the salad instead. Even it tasted strange. He sampled the noodles, trying to miss the pink flakes of pseudo-meat. It was good, very good. He looked up to find Deckenson pouring himself some stim. John cleared his throat. “There’s a point to all this, I take it. I mean, making me feel like an outmoded, brutish sort, and then feeding me pseudo-meat and telling me that the Human race has improved itself to the brink of extinction.”

  “Of course. I just don’t know that you’re ready to hear it yet.”