If that should be the case, why all this worry over money? And, thinking that, I didn’t seem to care as much about the money as I had at one time.
That was the hell of it—the human hell of it. I didn’t care. Not about the money, nor the lobsters nor what they’d done to me, nor about the humanity I’d lost. Perhaps that was the way I had been engineered, maybe it was the only way I could survive, the shape that I was in.
I fought against the great uncaring with all the bitterness I had. So you did it, I said to those lousy lobsters. So you pulled it off. You scratched one human who could have been a threat, who would have exploited you down to skin and bones. And you built a model of a new experimental life form you’d been aching to try out, but didn’t have the guts to try on one of your own people. You had to wait until someone else showed up. And now you’ll watch me all the time to see how I’m doing, to figure out the bugs and miscalculations, so that sometime in the future you can build a better one.
I hadn’t known of it before but there it was, naked, in my mind, as naturally in my mind as if I’d always known it, as if from the very beginning I had known I was no more than an experimental model.
They’d taken away my humanity and added a great uncaring, and that uncaring had been the gadget they had thought would be the final factor. But there was some stubbornness still left in me from the almost-vanished humanity of which they’d tried to rob me, so sneakily and smoothly that I never would suspect that it was gone until it was too late to do anything to save it.
Frantically, with panic rising in me, I went hunting down inside myself, scrabbling like a dog digging out a gopher, seeking for any fragment of humanity that might be left to me. Down into the dark, sniffing out the secret places where a fragmented piece of humanity might hide.
And I found it! A nasty piece of me hiding deep and dark, and yet a piece of me that was quite familiar, that I was well acquainted with, that in other times I had hugged close against me for the vicious comfort it had given me.
I found hatred.
It was tough and hard to kill. It resisted routing out. It still clung tenaciously.
As I clasped it hard inside my mind and hugged it close against me, as an old friend, an ancient weapon, I wondered vaguely if the reason it had been left was that the race of lobsters had no concept of hatred, that it might be something of which they were unaware, that what they had done to me might have been done for many reasons, but that hatred of me for what I meant to do to them was not one of the reasons.
That made me one up on them, I thought fiercely as I clutched the hatred at the core of me. It gave me an advantage they would never guess. With hatred to bolster and sustain me, I could hope and wait and plan and the time would never seem too long if revenge could be at the end of it.
They’d taken away my body, my motives, almost all my humanity. They had tinkered with my thinking and my values and my viewpoints. They had taken me; they had taken me but good. They had outfoxed me on every point but one and on that one point they had, unknowingly, outfoxed themselves as badly. Maybe they had seen that little piece of hatred as no more than a minor biochemical imperfection. After all, as the lobster had pointed out, I had been badly made. But in mistaking it, or neglecting it, they had fouled up their project. With a piece of hatred still left in him, a man would never utterly lose his hold upon humanity. What a wondrous thing it is to be a hating creature!
I held the hatred and could feel it turning cold—and cold hatred is the best of all. I know. It drives you, it never lets you be, it keeps on nagging you. Hot hatred flashes up and is over in a moment, but cold hatred lies there, at the heart and gut of you, and you know it all the time. It niggles at your brain and it clenches up your fists even when there is no one there to hit.
But I hadn’t any fists, I thought, I hadn’t any arms. I was just an armor-plated oval with silly caterpillar legs and eyestalks sticking up into the air.
Then, on schedule, as if there might be some sort of biological computer tucked away inside me, feeding in the data that was me, feeding it in slowly so I wouldn’t be overwhelmed by a rush of data, not overloading me, I knew about the arms.
I didn’t have them yet and I wouldn’t have them for a while. But they were there and growing underneath my shell, waiting to be freed. I would have to moult before I had the arms. It wasn’t only arms. There were other things as well—other appendages, other budding senses, other extensions of new abilities, all of them only dimly sensed, fogged in the mist of things-to-come. But the arms I knew about because arms were not new to me. I had had arms before and I knew about them. These other things I didn’t know about, but in time I would. Marvelous additional adjuncts to the performance of a life form’s full abilities, planned most carefully by the lobsters, to be tried out in an experimental model before the lobsters made such bodies for themselves.
They had planned long and hard. They had figured out the angles and then had engineered them. They were aiming at an ideal body. And I would take all that planning and all the engineering and all their dirty scheming and I’d shove it down their throats. As soon as I had arms and all those other appendages and senses and God knows what, I’d cram it down their throats.
I couldn’t go back to the human race, nor to women, nor to money, nor to food and drink. But I didn’t need them any more. I had never needed them—really needed them. The one thing I did need I had, the one last thing that was left to me. It seemed sheer cosmic justice that the one thing that I needed was the one thing I had left—the capacity to get even with the ones who’d done me dirt, to cram it down their throats, to make them mourn the day that saw their spawning.
I was different and I would be more different still. I would, in the end, be human in only one regard. And the important thing, the most important thing of all, was that in this one regard my one remnant of humanity was stronger than all the rest of it. It had come from the bowels of time. It came from that never-dated day when a certain little primate, with a new-found cunning that was stronger than the jungle’s tooth-and-claw, remembered an anger that should have been over in a moment and had waited for a chance to act upon that remembered anger, nursing that cooling anger as a comfort and a prop to dignity, changing it from anger into hatred. Long before anything that could have been called Australopithecine walked the earth, the concept of revenge had been forged and in those millennia it had served the vicious little strain of primates well. It had made them the most deadly creatures that had ever come to life.
It would serve me well, I told myself. I would make it serve me well. It would give me purpose and a certain kind of dignity and self-respect.
A figure came to mind, another piece of information spewed into me from the biochemical computer. A thousand years, it said. A thousand years to moult. A thousand years to wait.
A long time. Ten centuries. Thirty human generations. Empires rose and fell in a thousand years. Were forgotten in another thousand. A thousand years would give me time to think and plan, to harden the coldness of the hatred, to realize and examine the new abilities and capacities that would evolve with moulting.
It called for planning. No simple, easy revenge. No mere physical torture, no killing. By the time I got through with them death would be the height of kindness, physical torture a mere inconvenience. Nor would it merely be an exploitation of them to harvest the resources of the planet. It was the worst day they’d ever known when they had taken from me the need (or desire) for those resources. If I still held that need, normal human greed might have stayed my hand. But now, nothing would stay my hand.