Life Cycle Read online

  Life Cycle

  Poul Anderson

  From Robert Silverberg’s, “Earthmen and Strangers” anthology, 1966:

  Earthly life has developed many methods of reproducing itself. The amoeba is content to split in half; the hydra produces a bud that develops into a new hydra; the small crustacean known as daphnia lays eggs that do not need to be fertilized in order to bring forth young daphnias. Most animals, though, rely on two sexes, female and male, one to produce eggs and the other to fertilize them.

  The variations within this scheme are great—take, for example, the case of the oyster, which is male at one time of the year and female at another. Given such biological variations, it was inevitable that science-fiction writers would begin to speculate about the unearthly aspects reproduction might take among alien beings. Poul Anderson, a lanky chap of Viking descent who lives in California, is better qualified to make scientific speculations than most of his colleagues. He took a degree in physics at the University of Minnesota before turning to science fiction, and keeps abreast of the latest technical developments in a way that gives his stories the solid ring of authenticity.

  In this example, he provides a convincing blend of science and imagination that yields insight into a wholly alien race. But because recent scientific research has given us a view of conditions on Mercury different from the one that was accepted in 1957, when this story was written, Anderson has added his own introduction to the story in the interest of maintaining accuracy.

  Life Cycle

  by Poul Anderson

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  A science-fiction writer may, of course, speculate about things that science has not yet discovered. But whenever he deals with what is already known, he should get his facts straight.

  That’s what I tried to do in this story. The planet Mercury was depicted as accurately as possible by me, according to the best available data and theories, as of 1957.

  The trouble is, scientific “facts” won’t stay put. In the spring of 1965, radar and radio observations indicated that Mercury does not eternally turn the same face toward the sun and that the dark side—even in the course of a very long night—does not get especially cold.

  So perhaps this story should not now be reprinted, or perhaps it should at least have been rewritten. But information is still coming in; we are not quite sure that the new data mean what we think they mean; surely all our ideas are due for another upset or two before we get to Mercury and see for ourselves. It is not yet impossible that the older picture may turn out to have been right after all. Be that as it may, theory at the moment is in such a state of flux that one can’t say with any confidence what Mercury, or any other part of the universe, really is like.

  Let this older story remain unchanged, then, as an intellectual exercise if nothing else.

  —Poul Anderson

  “Well, all right! I’ll go to their temple myself!”

  “You must be crazy even to think of such a tonteria,” said Juan Navarro. He sucked hard on his pipe, decided it was finished, and knocked out the dottle. “They would tear you in pieces.”

  “Quicker than starving to death on this hellhound lump of rock.”

  “Very small pieces.” Navarro sat down on a workbench and swung his legs. He was a Basque, medium-sized, longheaded, dark-haired, with the mountaineer’s bony independence in his face. He was also a biologist of distinction, an amateur violinist, and a hungry man waiting to die. “You don’t understand, Joe. Those Dayside beings are not just another race. They are gods.”

  Joe Kingsbury Thayendanegea, who was a stocky Mohawk from upper New York State, paced the caging space of the room, hands behind his back, and swore. If he had had a tail, he would have lashed it. He was the pilot and engineer, the only other Terrestrial on Mercury. When you dived this far down into the sun’s monstrous gravitational well, you couldn’t take a big crew along.

  “So what else can you think of?” he challenged. “Shall we draw straws and barbecue the loser?”

  Antella, the owl-faced Martian mineralogist, made a harsh cawing in his gray-feathered throat. “Best it be me,” he advised. “Then no one is technically guilty of cannibalism.”

  “Not much meat on that skinny little frame of yours, amigo,” said Navarro. “And a human body would have so many other uses after one was finished with the organic parts. Make the vertebrae into chessmen—the ribs into Venetian blinds for bay windows—yes, and the skulls would make distinctive mousetraps.”

  Kingsbury shook heavy shoulders and thrust his beaky face forward. “What are we yattering about?” he demanded. “We’ve got a week’s slim rations left aboard this clunk. After that we start starving.”

  “So you are going to the temple and confront the gods and convince them of the error of their ways. Ka!”

  Antella clicked his short, curved bill. “Or did you think to threaten them with our one solitary pistol?”

  “I’m going to try and find out what the Twonks—or their gods, if you insist—have against us,” said Kingsbury. “Here’s the idea: It’s getting close to sunrise time, and there’ll be a crowd of ’em at the temple. I’ll go out on Dayside and find me an empty Twonk shell and get into it. With luck, I’ll pass unnoticed long enough to—”

  Antella’s brass-colored eyes widened. “The scheme is a bold one,” he admitted. “As far as I know, there is strict silence during the ceremonies, whatever they are. You just might accomplish it.”

  Navarro leered. “I know exactly what you would accomplish, Joe. Do you remember that story you tell me, oh, last year I think it was? About the tourist in the North forest, and the Canuck guide, and the moose call?”

  “Yeah. ‘Ze moose, she—’ Hey! What do you mean?”

  “Precisely. That temple is a breeding place. They go there to breed.”

  “How do you know? I’ve been tramping around arguing with the Twonks, and you’ve just sat here in the lab.”

  Navarro shrugged. “What else could I do but my research? I studied the biochemistry of Mercurian life. I worked out the life cycle of a few plants and one insectoidal form.”

  “They all look like insects. But go on.”

  “The first expedition established no more than that Mercurian life has a silicate base,” recapitulated Navarro. “Otherwise they were too busy staying alive and teaching English to the natives and making maps. But they brought home specimens, which were analyzed. And one strange fact became evident: Those specimens could not reproduce under Twilight Zone conditions. Yet they live here! And we see the natives lay eggs, which hatch; and lower forms bring forth their own kind in various ways—”

  “I know,” grunted Kingsbury. “But why? I mean, what’s so puzzling about their reproduction?”

  “The cells are totally different, both physically and chemically, from protoplasmic life,” said Navarro. “But there are analogues; there have to be. The basic process is the same, meiosis and mitosis, governed by a molecular ‘blue-print’ not unlike our chromosomes. However, though we know that such processes must take place, the silicate materials involved are too stable to undergo them. The ordinary exothermic reactions which fuel Mercurian life do not produce enough energy for the cell-duplication which is growth. In fact, adult Mercurians are even incapable of self-repair; wounds do not heal, they must depend on being so tough that in this low gravity they suffer few injuries.”

  “So what happens?”

  Navarro shrugged. “I do not know, except this much: that somehow, at breeding time, they must pick up an extra charge of energy. Analyzing small animals, I have identified the compound which is formed to store this energy and release it, by gradually breaking down, as the organism grows. It is all used up at maturity. But where is the temperature necessary to build up this molec
ule? Only on Dayside.

  “Now these gods are said to live, on Dayside and meet the Twonks of Twilight at the temple. You know the breeding ceremonies take place when libration has brought the temple into the sunlight.”

  “Go on,” said Antella thoughtfully.

  “Pues, one of the plants, has this life cycle; it grows in the Twilight Zone, on the sunward side, and its vines are phototropic. Eventually their growth and the libration bring them into the light. The spore-pods burst and the spores are scattered into the air. A few are blown back into Twilight, and they are now fertile; radiation has formed the necessary compound. Or consider one of the small insectoids I studied. It breeds here in the. usual manner, then the female crawls out into the light to lay her eggs. When they hatch, the little ones scurry back to the shade, and some of them reach shelter before they fry. Wasteful, of course, but even on this barren planet nature is a notorious spendthrift.”

  “Wait a minute!” interrupted Kingsbury. Navarre liked to hear himself talk, but there are limits. “Are you implying that the Dayside gods are merely the sun? That because the Twonks have to have light when they breed, they’ve built up a sort of Apollo-cum-fertility cult?”

  “Why not? There are races on Earth and Mars with similar beliefs. To this day, here and there in my own Pyrenees, many women believe the wind can make them pregnant.” Navarro laughed. “It is a good excuse anyhow, no?”

  “But there’s Dayside life too. Life that never comes into Twilight.”

  “Yes, yes, of course. Quite different from Twilight biology—after all, it has to live at a temperature of four hundred degrees Centigrade. Possibly the Twonks regard some Dayside animal as a sort of fertility totem. I am only saying this—that if the gods are actually the sun, you will have Satan’s own time persuading the sun to take back its edict that we must die.”

  In the end, there was a decision. Navarro thought Kings-bury a suicidal idiot… but what choice was there? They would go to the temple together, disguised, and find out what they could; if there were no gods, but only some fanatically conservative priestess behind the death sentence, a .20-caliber Magnum automatic might make her see reason. Antella would stay behind to guard the ship; he couldn’t take heat as well as an Earthling.

  The humans donned their spacesuits and went through the air lock. Navarro had the gun, Kingsbury armed himself with a crowbar; at last and worst, he thought savagely, he’d crack a few Mercurian carapaces.

  They stepped out into desolation. Behind them lay the Explorer, a crippled metal giant, no more to them than a shelter. In the end, perhaps, a coffin. There was no possibility of rescue from Earth—radio communication was out, with the sun so close, and Mercury Expedition Two wasn’t due back for six months. Earth wouldn’t even realize they were in trouble till they had already died.

  To right and left, the dry valley lifted into gaunt ocherous peaks against a dusky sky where a few hard stars glittered. There were bushes scattered about, low things with blue metallic-looking leaves. A small animal bounded from them, its shell agleam in the wan light. The ground was slaty rubble, flaked off in departed ages when Mercury still had weather. Above the peaks to the left hung a white glare, the invisible sun. It would never be seen from here, but a few miles further west the planet’s libration would lift it briefly and unendurably over the near horizon.

  There was a wind blowing; the wind is never quiet on Mercury, where one side is hot enough to melt lead and the other close to absolute zero. It sent a ghostly whirl of dust devils across the valley. There wasn’t much air—a man would have called it a soft vacuum and not fit to breathe at any density. Most of it had long ago escaped into space or frozen on Darkside, but now vapor pressure had struck a balance, and there was some carbon dioxide, nitrogen, ammonia, and inert gas free. Enough to blow fine dust up against the weak gravity and to form an ionosphere which made radio communication possible over the horizon.

  Kingsbury shuddered, remembering green forests and clear streams under the lordly sky of Earth. What the devil had inspired him to come here? Money, he supposed. Earth needed fissionable ores, and Mercury had them, and Expedition Two was sent to negotiate an agreement with the natives. The pay was proportional to the risk—but what use is all the money in the cosmos to a dead man?

  “When I get home,” said Navarro wistfully, “after the parades and banquets—yes, surely there will be parades, with all the pretty girls throwing flowers and kisses at us—after that I shall retire to my own village and sit down before the tavern and order a bottle of the best Amontillado. Three days later I will ask them to sweep the cobwebs off me. A week later I shall go home and sleep.”

  “I’ll settle for a tall cold beer in Gavagan’s,” said Kingsbury. “You ought to let me take you pub crawling in New York sometime—bah!” His gauntleted hand made a vicious gesture at the tumbled ruin of a landscape. “What makes you think we ever will get home?”

  “Nothing,” said Navarro gently, “except that I will not permit myself to think otherwise.”

  They rounded a tall red crag and saw how the valley broadened into cultivated fields, ironberry bushes and flintgrain stalks. On the dusky edge of vision was the Mercurian hive, a giant dome of crushed rock in which several thousand natives dwelt There were hundreds of such barracks, scattered around the Twilight Zone, with a temple for every dozen or so. Apparently there was no variation in language or culture over the whole planet—understandable when the habitable area was so small. And it was an open question how much individual personality a Mercurian had, and how much of her belonged to the hive-mind.

  Close at hand was the hut which held their lives. It was a crude, roofless structure, four stone walls and an open, doorway. The first expedition had erected it with native help, to store supplies and tools—it made the ship roomier. The Explorer’s crew had used it similarly, putting in most of their food and the bulky ion-control rings from the reaction drive. Again the natives had lent a willing hand.

  There were four guards outside the hut. They were armed only with spears and clubs. It would be easy enough to shoot them down. But before anything could be transferred back to the ship, the entire hive would come swarming, and there weren’t that many bullets.

  “Let’s go talk to them,” said Navarro.

  “What’s the use?” asked Kingsbury. “I’ve talked to those animated hulks till my larynx needs a retread.”

  “I have an idea—I want to check on it.” Navarro’s clumsy suit went skimming over the ashen ground. Kingsbury followed with a mumbled oath.

  The nearest guard hefted her spear and swiveled antennae in their direction. Otherwise there was no movement in her. She stood six feet tall, broad as a space-suited man, her exoskeleton shimmering blue, her head featureless except for the glassy eyes. With four three-fingered arms, tightly curled ovipositor, and sliding joints of armor, she looked like a nightmare insect. But she wasn’t; a dragonfly or a beetle was man’s brother beside this creature of silicone cells and silicate blood and shell of beryllium alloy. Kingsbury thought of her as a kind of robot—well, yes, she was alive, but where did you draw the line between the robot and the animal?

  Navarro stopped before her. She waited. None of her sisters moved. It was a disconcerting habit, never to open conversation.

  The Basque cleared his throat. “I have come—oh, wait.” With his teeth he switched his helmet radio to the band the natives could sense. “I wish to ask again why you deny us permission to use our own food.”

  The answer crackled in their earphones. “It is the command of the gods.”

  Kingsbury stood listening to that nonhuman accent and speculating just what sort of religion these entities did have. They had emotions—they must, being alive—but the degree of correspondence to human or Martian feeling was doubtful.

  It wasn’t strange that they communicated by organically generated FM radio pulses. The atmosphere didn’t carry enough sound to make ears worthwhile. But constant submergence in the thoughts of every ot
her Mercurian within ten miles… it must do something to the personality. Make the society as a whole more intelligent, perhaps—the natives had readily learned English from the first expedition, while men hadn’t yet made sense out of the native language. But there was probably little individual awareness. A sort of ant mind—ants collectively did remarkable things but were hopeless when alone.

  Navarro smiled, a meaningless automatic grimace behind his face plate. “Can you not tell my why the gods have so decreed? You were all friendly enough when my race last visited you. What made the gods change their minds?”

  No answer. That probably meant the Twonk didn’t know either.

  “You could at least let us have back our control rings and enough food for the journey home. I assure you, we would leave at once.”

  “No.” The voice was alike empty of rancor and mercy. “It is required that you die. The next strangers to come will, then, not be forewarned, and we can dispose of them too. This land will be shunned.”

  “If we get desperate enough, we will start fighting you. We will kill many.”

  “That I—we do not understand. We are letting you die this way because it is easiest. If you fight us, then we shall fight you and overwhelm you with numbers; so why do you not die without making useless trouble for yourselves?”

  “That isn’t in our nature.”

  “I—we do not know what you mean by ‘nature.’ Every She, when she has laid as many eggs as she can, goes out to the sun and returns to those which you name gods. Death is a correct termination when there is no further use for the organism.”

  “Men think differently,” said Navarro. “Of course, as a more or less good Catholic, I consider my body only a husk—but I still want to keep it as long as possible.”

  No reply, except for some crackling gibberish. The Mercurians were talking to each other. Weaker overtones made Kingsbury suspect that several Twonks within the hive were joining the discussion—or the stream of consciousness, or whatever you wanted to call the rumination of a semicollective mind.