3   

The serpent’s gift

The spear maker became head of his family group by the logical expedient of skewering his larger rival. Barion was peeved at his brother’s interference —

“Keep your hands off, Coyul.”

— but on reflection found aspects of the victor too tempting to pass up. Perfect serendipity: this backwater world would never matter to anyone. Sorlij or someone would pick them up soon enough; meanwhile he could experiment toward results that would surely win him a science prize for seeding in one of the more important galaxies. Barion was young. The urgent rightness of his theories spurred him like a pebble in his shoe.

Suppose...

Ninety-five percent of hominid species never went anywhere. Another three percent did somewhat better but coasted eventually down evolutionary dead ends. The viable two percent were no end of trouble, but only — Barion theorized — because no one was allowed to work them to Cultural Threshold until they’d attained 1050 cc of cranial capacity. At that tardy point, the primal tendencies were too deep-rooted a part of them, the memory of the dark in which their nocturnal ancestors foraged while the great reptiles slept.

“No one has ever tried CT at the level of these subjects.”

“An unencouraging and totally illegal 900 cc,” Coyul reminded him.

But the prospect caught fire in Barion’s imagination. “An expendable world not even on the charts at home. An expendable species that won’t... Look, you know this kind of planet always tends to radical polar tilt sooner or later. They won’t make it through the ice. We’ll be gone by then, but at least I’ll know I’m right.”

Coyul shook his head, resigned to sad truth. “You won’t breed the darkness out of them no matter when you start. It’s part of them.”

“Isn’t.”

“It is when you’re a mind capable of conceiving eternity trapped inside a body that dies. I didn’t sleep through all the lectures, you know.”

“Yes, yes.” Barion waved the objections aside with his usual know-it-all gesture. “Religion, dualism. Predictable stages.”

“Not stages, you idiot! Propensities!”

“Hush, be still. My subject’s coming.”

The ape moved cautiously to the water hole to drink, wary of the two still figures a little distance away, hissing a challenge out of a mouth and throat still limited in the sounds they could produce. Were she of an empirical bent, Charity Stovall might have been edified to know her direct ancestor was the smartest ape on its metaphorical block. Relative to body mass, the brain was already huge. Other survival traits would have sent Charity gibbering back to Genesis for reassurance.

Above all, the ape was marvelously adaptable. Omnivorous as a rodent, thriving on any food available. Three and a half feet tall: the most acquisitive, curious, aggressive, inventively vicious hominid Barion had ever found, and quite the hardiest on this violent world next to the cockroach and the rat. Long after this day’s work the ape would produce Christ, Beethoven, Auschwitz, thumbscrews and philosophy, Magna Carta and White Supremacy, poetry, poison gas, nuclear fission and romantic love. For the moment it crouched by the water hole, munching a succulent grub discovered under a stone, warning off the large creatures that somehow would not be frightened away. They were unclassifiable, therefore a threat. The ape made the brave noises of its kind.

“Good morning,” Barion said softly. “Welcome to evolution.”

The ape jumped at the sound, afraid but curious.

“I may be wrong about you. You and I have a great deal to learn.”

The ape made a clicking sound of puzzlement.

“You won’t understand any of this. Even when your mind is clear enough to send your little cutting stone to the moon and beyond, you’ll still wonder about this moment but never quite forget the truth of it. Wrap it in religion, a hundred flattering myths, in music, painting and exaltation of pure spirit —”

“Why all the lyrics?” Coyul wondered sourly. “You’re only giving it a boot in the evolutionary butt.”

“Can’t you see it? The implications, the greatest of all dramas, when life stands erect to contemplate itself —”

“My brother, the scientific lemming, headlong over the edge of folly. Don’t do it.”

“Shut up. This is his triumph: this one moment of knowing, when the atom contemplates an electron navel and finds worlds within worlds, will stay in that small brain forever. Your nature will always be to believe,” he prophesied to his quivering subject, “but your destiny always to question. I can’t make that any easier for you.”

Barion began to dissolve, flowing toward the creature. Coyul pleaded one last time. “Barion, don’t! It’s —”

Too late. His brother became a brief sparkle in sunlight before pouring into the little ape’s brain.

“— madness.”

Under the beetling brow, it — he — blinked. A great light had flashed somewhere behind his eyes. Blood pounded in his ears. He was alone by the muddy water hole and still thirsty, but now, as he bent to drink, there was a difference. Always before, he’d seen the other creature come up to meet him out of the water, then vanish somehow in the small ripples caused by his drinking. The image had always frightened him; now he knew it was his own. He snarled at it, knowing he existed and would end, rejecting that horrible truth for all time with a howl of terror and rage and a primal loss he would labor through countless eons and creeds to rationalize and define. With all the terrible weight of consciousness, knowing he was. The beginnings of expression in the eyes, a dawn-sense of the tragedy Barion had taxed him with. As for the lost thing never to be found again, even his far-distant daughter Charity would call it the Fall.

Stunned by sentience, the miserable human did what came naturally — growled as Barion reappeared beside Coyul.

“Now you’ve done it,” Coyul reproached him with a full measure of disgust. “I don’t care if you are my brother. You’re a rotten kid.”

“We’ll see.” Barion inspected his handiwork like a critical painter gauging perspective on a canvas. Abruptly he swung away, covering the ground in great strides.

“Where are you off to now? Haven’t you done enough damage?”

“Got to do the same for his group,” Barion Sung back. “Can’t have him maundering around thinking all alone.”

“Fine... just fine.” Coyul dissolved to energy out of compassion for the miserable creature that Barion had just kicked upstairs. Whimpering with a new fear all the sharper for having no clear shape, the creature bowed his besieged head in hairy paws and felt vastly sorry for himself.

“All right,” Coyul sighed. “You’re a self. Suddenly apart where you used to be part of. I’d have left well enough alone.”

The same sympathy kept him from leaving the human, who was weeping now, already trying to make sounds for unguessed meanings.

“It’s not all bad. There’ll be insights now and then. I suppose there’s a chance.”

The pathetic human went on sniffling. He didn’t seem to know where he was anymore.

“Look, it’s not my fault, not up to me to help you at all. He shouldn’t have done it. So many other life forms more suited to sentience than you’ll ever be. Oh, stop whining, will you?”

The weeping human raised his blunt head at the sound of a distinct reluctant sigh. “All right — here: it’s the least I can do.”

Weeping made him feel thirsty again. As he bent to drink once more, knowing the reflected image for himself, fear transmuted to something lighter, the ugly sound of his sadness to an even more alien emotion. He couldn’t help it. The effort strained his throat that barely had the muscles for laughter.

So much for motivations. Barion wanted to win a science prize, Coyul only to go home and write music, but the thing was done. A great deal of bloodshed, art and religion would be perpetrated in both their names, and neither would be understood at all. As they had done to him, the human modified them to a lesser but more flattering truth he could live with.

Dazed, intermittently sobbing and laughing like a squeaky hinge, the creature deserted the water hole and scampered away toward history and other mixed blessings.