Ready or not, he thought, not even frightened any more. Ready or not, here I—
Could experience be inherited? Lysenko, the Russian scientist of yore, had argued that it could. His theory of environment above heredity had seemingly been discredited by his own malfeasance and the winds of political change — but later researches had thrown the issue open again.
The alien beam melted down functional flesh and reduced it to quiescent cells that required little nourishment, surviving during their estivation largely upon their internal nutrient resources. The reconstitution would re-create the original individual — along with all his memories. All of it had to be in the cell — the lifetime of experience as well as the physical form. Only if that experience, right down to the most evanescent flicker of thought, were recorded in the chromosomes, the genes, or somewhere in the nucleus, of every tiny cell of the body — only thus could the complete physique and personality be restored.
The alien presentation said it could be done. The alien intellect was in a position to know.
Unless the flesh of Earthly creatures were not quite typical of that of the rest of the planetary species in the universe…
“Put up or shut up!” Ivo thought somewhere — before, after, during? — and waited for his answer.
What a joke if the alien were mistaken!
Here I—
Swimming through a thick warm sea, an ocean of blood, smooth, delicious, eternal.
Here—
Climbing on the cruel heavy land, a continent of bone, hot, chill, transient.
How to speak without a lung? To think, without a brain?
A jumble of sensation: curiosity, terror, hunger, passion, satiation, lethargy.
An eon passing.
“…come.” Ivo opened his eyes.
He was lying in the container, uncovered, bathed in lukewarm water. He felt fine. Even his hand was whole again.
He sat up, shook himself dry, and donned his clothing. Then he brought over the next coffin, able to tell by its weight and his own that gravity was 1-G, and removed the cover.
Inside was an attractive, vaguely layered semifluid. No bones showed. He withdrew.
The beam came on, illuminating the jellylike substance. The protoplasm quivered, but nothing obvious happened at first.
Patience, he told himself. It worked before.
Gradually a speck developed within its translucent upper layer; a mote, a tiny eye, a nucleus. It drifted about; it expanded into a marble, a golf-ball. It opened into a flexing cup that sucked in liquid and spewed it out through the same opening, propelling it cautiously through the medium. The walls of it became muscular, until it resembled an animate womb perpetually searching for an occupant. Then the spout folded over, sealed across the center, and became two: an intake and an outgo. The fluid funneled through more efficiently, and the creature grew.
It lengthened, and ridges along its side developed into fins, and one hole gravitated to the nether area. Patches manifested near the front and became true eyes, and it was a fish.
The fins thickened; the body became stout, less streamlined. The fish gulped air through an ugly, horrendously-toothed mouth and heaved its snout momentarily out of the fluid, taking in a bubble of air. It continued to grow, and its head came into the air to stay. Its near eye fixed on Ivo disconcertingly. Now it was almost reptilian, with a substantial fleshy tail in place of the flukes, and claws on well-articulated feet. The mouth opened to show the teeth again, fewer than before, but still too many. It was large; its mass took up half the fluid at this stage.
Then it shrank to the size of a rodent, casting off flesh in a quick reliquefication. Hair sprouted where scales had been, and the teeth became differentiated. Ratlike, it peered at him, switching its thin tail.
It grew again, as though a suppressant had been eliminated. It developed powerful limbs, heavy fur, a large head. The snout receded, the eyes came forward, the ears flattened onto the sides of the head. The limbs lengthened and began to shed their hair; the tail shriveled; the forehead swelled.
It was beginning to resemble a man.
Rather, a woman: multiple teats assembled into two, traveling up along the belly to the chest. The hairy face became clear, the muscular limbs slim. The pelvis broadened, the midsection shrank. The hair of the head reached down; the breasts swelled invitingly.
Goddess of fertility, she lay upon her back and contemplated him through half-lidded eyes.
Age set in. Her middle plumpened; her fine mammaries lost their resiliency; her face became round.
The beam cut off.
“Is it over, Ivo?”
He started, ashamed to be caught staring. “Yes.”
He turned his back upon Beatryx so that she could dress in privacy. The reconstitution had not been as alarming as the dissolution, but it had had its moments. Worst was his impression of awareness throughout. The entire evolution of the species recapitulated in—
He checked the time.
— four hours. It had seemed like four minutes.
“I will fix lunch,” she said. That was how he knew that she did not want to watch any other reconstitutions.
Groton revived next, and this time Ivo knew it was four hours. Finally Afra, and it seemed like eight.
“Check me,” she said immediately. She had not forgotten.
The two men handled her in turn, hardly embarrassed this time around, and pronounced her real. “Yes,” she said. “I was sure I was.” The transformation was a subjective success.
Nothing was said about Brad. By mutual unspoken consent they let him remain as he was, in suspended animation or storage. What point reviving him now?
CHAPTER 6
They sped toward Neptune, a scant two million miles distant. Ivo needed no instrument to contemplate its grandeur. From this point in space the planet had an apparent diameter twice that of Luna as seen from Earth, or a full degree. It was a great-banded disk of green speckled with dots and slashes, as though a godlike entity had played a careless game of sprouts upon its surface.
They were in free-fall, with Brad’s container sealed and aerated by an electric pump.
“Dull,” Afra murmured facetiously. “Just a minor gas-giant nobody would miss.”
Dull? Ivo appreciated the irony, for he had never seen a more impressive object. As he concentrated he was able to discern more detaiclass="underline" the comparatively bright, yellowish equatorial belt, blue-gray bands enclosing it above and below, mottled green “temperate” sections merging into the black poles — a rather attractive effect. Earth, compared to this, was a bleak white nonentity. Neptune’s spots were concentrated in the central zone and were mostly dark brown or black, and he almost thought they moved, though he had no objective evidence. A single dark blue oval showed near the horizon in what he thought of as the northern hemisphere. The planet was not visibly oblate, yet his eye filled in what he thought was there. He imagined a celestial pair of hands compressing the planet so that its midriff bulged, the belt taut.
Now he studied the surrounding “sky.” It was seemingly sunless, with fiercely bright and crowded stars. The largest object, apart from Neptune itself, was a disk several diameters to the left.
“Triton,” Afra said, observing the direction of his glance. “Neptune’s major moon. There’s a smaller one, Nereid, that’s farther out than we are now. Nereid’s orbit is cometlike; very unusual for a planetary satellite. Of course, there may be other moons we haven’t discovered yet; new ones keep popping up around the major planets.”
“This is all very interesting,” Beatryx said, obviously only marginally interested. Ivo suspected that she still suffered from the shock of the melting procedure, but tended to internalize it. “But now that we’re here, what do we do?”