“Damn it all, that really hurt!” Jim said.
“This was the ordeal that boy Arthur failed, only he got away,” Leo said. “Mrs. Cordice kept him on the screen until I could rescue him.”
“How’d he act?” Jim asked.
“Trusted me, right off. Willa said he was very affectionate and they taught him all kinds of tricks. But never speech— he got wild when they tried to make him talk, Willa told me.
I’m affectionate. I know all kinds of tricks, Cordice thought. Downslope the torches went out and the priests were singing with the boys. White Bar, seated again beside Cordice on the outcrop, sang softly too. It was a new song of formed words and it disturbed Cordice. Then he heard footsteps behind his head and Jim spoke harshly.
“Hello, Featherface, we’re still around,” Jim said. “Mrs. Cordice called you a name. Krebs, wasn’t it? Just who in hell are you?”
“Roland Krebs. I’m an anthropologist,” the devil’s voice said. “I almost married Martha once, but she began calling me Rollio just in time.”
That guy? Cordice opened his mouth, then closed it. Damn him. He’d pretend a faint, try not to hear.
“You can’t share the next phase of the ritual and it’s your great loss,” Krebs said. “Now each boy is learning the name that he will claim for his own in the last phase, if he survives. The men have a crude language and the boys long ago picked up the words like parrots. Now, as they sing with the priests, the words come alive in them.”
“How do you mean?” Jim asked.
“Just that. The words assort together and for the first time mean. That’s the Robadurian creation myth they’re singing.” Krebs lowered his voice. “They’re not here now like you are, Andries. They’re present in the immediacy of all their senses at the primal creation of their human world.”
“Our loss? Yes... our great loss.” Jim sounded bemused.
“Yes. For a long time words have been only a sickness in our kind,” Krebs said. “But ideas can still assort and mean. Take this thought: we’ve found hominids on thousands of planets, but none more than barely entered on the symbol-using stage. Paleontology proves native hominids have been stuck on the threshold of evolving human minds for as long as two hundred million years. But on Earth our own symbol-using minds evolved in about three hundred thousand years.”
“Does mind evolve?” Jim asked softly.
“Brain evolves, like fins change to feet,” Krebs said. “The hominids can’t evolve a central nervous system adequate for symbols. But on Earth, in no time at all, something worked a structural change in one animal’s central nervous system greater than the gross, outward change from reptile to mammal.”
“I’m an engineer,” Jim said. “The zoologists know what worked it.”
“Zoologists always felt natural selection couldn’t have worked it so fast,” Krebs said. “What we’ve learned on the hominid planets proves it can’t. Natural selection might take half a billion years. Our fathers took a short cut.”
“All right,” Jim said. “All right. Our fathers were their own selective factor, in rituals like this one. They were animals and they bred themselves into men. Is that what you want me to say?”
“I want you to feel a little of what the boys feel now,” Krebs said. “Yes. Our fathers invented ritual as an artificial extension of instinct. They invented a ritual to detect and conserve all mutations in a human direction and eliminate regressions toward the animal norm. They devised ordeals in which normal animal-instinctive behavior meant death and only those able to sin against instinct could survive to be human and father the next generation.” His voice shook slightly. “Think on that, Andries! Human and animal brothers born of the same mother and the animals killed at puberty when they failed certain ordeals only human minds could bear.”
“Yes. Our secret. Our real secret.” Jim’s voice shook too. “Cain killing Abel through ten thousand generations. That created me.”
Cordice shivered and the rock gouged his short ribs.
“Dark Robadur’s sin is Light Robadur’s grace and the two are one,” Krebs said. “You know, the Institute has made a science of myth. Dark Robadur is the species personality, instinct personified. Light Robadur is the human potential of these people. He binds Dark Robadur with symbols and coerces him with ritual. He does it in love, to make his people human.”
“In love and fear and pain and death,” Jim said.
“In pain and death. Those who died tonight were animals. Those who die tomorrow will be failed humans who know they die,” Krebs said. “But hear their song.”
“I hear it. I know how they feel and thank you for that, Krebs,” Jim said. “And it’s only the boys?”
“Yes. The girls will get half their chromosomes from their fathers. They will get all the effect of the selection except that portion on the peculiarly male Y-chromosome,” Krebs said. “They will remain without guilt, sealed to Dark Robadur. It will make a psychic difference.”
“Ah. And you Institute people start these rituals on the hominid planets, make them self-continuing, like kindling a fire already laid,” Jim said slowly. “Culture shock is a lie.”
“It’s no lie, but it does make a useful smoke screen.”
“Ah. Krebs, thank you. Krebs—” Jim lowered his voice and Cordice strained to hear. “—would you say Light Robadur might be a transhuman potential?”
“I hope he may go on to become so,” Krebs said. “Now you know the full measure of our treason. And now I’ll leave you.”
His footsteps died away. Leo spoke for the first time.
“Jim, I’m scared. I don’t like this. Is this ritual going to make us transhuman? What does that mean?”
“We can’t know. Would you ask an ape what human means?” Jim said. “Our fathers bred themselves through a difference in kind. Then they stopped, but they didn’t have to. I hope one of these hominid planets will breed on through the human to another difference in kind.” He laughed. “That possibility is the secret we have to keep.”
“I don’t like it. I don’t want to be transhuman,” Leo said, “Mr. Cordice! Mr. Cordice, what do you think?”
Cordice didn’t answer. Why let that damned Andries insult him again? Besides, he didn’t know what to think.
“He’s fainted or dead, poor fat old bastard,” Jim said. “Leo, all this ritual is doing to you is forcing you to prove your human manhood, just like the boys have to. We have our manhood now only by accident of fertilization.”
“I don’t like it,” Leo said. “That transhuman stuff. It’s ... immoral.”
“It’s a hundred thousand years away yet,” Jim said. “But I like it. What I don’t like is to think that the history of galactic life is going to head up and halt forever in the likes of old Wally Toes there.”
“He’s not so bad,” Leo said. “I hope he’s still alive.”
I am, God damn you both! Cordice thought. They stopped talking.
Downslope the priest voices faded and the boys sang their worded Creation song alone. White Bar went away. The sky paled above the great rock and bright planets climbed to view. Cordice felt feverish. He lapsed into a half-dream.
He saw a fanned network of golden lines. Nodes thickened to become fish, lizards and men. A voice whispered: All life is a continuum in time. Son to father, the germ worldline runs back unbroken to the primordial ocean. For you life bowed to sex and death. For you it gasped sharp air with feeble lungs. For you it bore the pain of gravity in bones too weak to bear it. Ten thousand of your hairy fathers, each in his turn, won through this test of pain and terror to make you a man.