Waiting for the Galactic Bus (3 page)

Killing time: genius ad lib

Barion stood on the brow of a low hill, seven feet tall, idealized in every fine-chiseled feature, a time bomb of idealism. Eons later in the Age of Romance, this likeness would inspire a plethora of sonnets by repressed ladies who played the spinet and reproduced parthenogenically by thinking of England. A little later, Whitman would write much the way Barion presently conceived existence. By then Barion would be more restrained in taste and method, but the errors of early enthusiasm would be irreversible.

He felt buoyant this primal morning, breathing deeply of the oxygen-rich air and the heady impurities exhaled by this fecund planet. On the flatland below, a mild breeze stirred the tall savanna grass — no, not breeze but movement. A small group of the fascinating primates noted yesterday: two males, three females, shambling through the high grass in search of food, physical differences barely discernible under the silky black hair that covered most of their body.

Their stereoscopic vision and acute color perception would register Barion as alien. Yes; they saw him and halted. Barion faded to energy phase, moving closer. With nothing to see or smell, the primates went on foraging. Barion concentrated on one of the males turning over a stone in search of grubs. It had no forehead at all, merely a thick supraorbital ridge of bone. The brain was almost entirely instinct.

Almost, Barion knew, excitement rising. There were possibilities.

The ape’s blunt head swiveled toward a flicker of light, screeching at the others. On the hilltop something like sunlight began to take definite shape. Barion flowed away toward his brother.

Physical but motionless, the brothers watched the wary primates move away from them. “As anthros go,” Barion judged, “these are interesting.”

“Try this for laughs,” Coyul glowered in frustration. “They’ve left us here. Sorlij, Maj, the whole considerate pack of them. We’re stuck.”

Absorbed, Barion said, “Nothing to worry about. Probably a side trip. They’ll be back.”

“I lack your faith in Sorlij.”

There were large differences of temperament between Barion and Coyul, quite obvious in human form. As stated, Barion’s fancy ran to the Byronic. Smaller Coyul looked like an overdressed Dylan Thomas. Where Barion’s costume was thrift shop casual, the fretful Coyul stumped up and down in a gold lame dressing gown that startled his brother as much as it had the retreating apes.

“Left!” Coyul berated the heavens. “Lost, abandoned, ma-
rooned!”

“Relax; they’ll be back. You know Sorlij.”

“I do,” said Coyul, not at all reassured. “I have work at home: a whole new cycle of etudes. Notes for a major orchestral piece.”

Which demonstrated another basic difference in the brothers. Both were trained to the primary work of their kind, genetic seeding. Barion considered himself a scientist with artistic leanings. Coyul was at heart an artist and something of a dilettante, happy only at his music, competent but halfhearted at the discipline into which fate arbitrarily dumped him.

“I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” he brooded. “Remember the way we came?”

“Not really. Toward the outer edge of the galaxy... sort of.”

“Ah — which galaxy?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Barion confessed without much concern. “How many are there?”

“Your complacency boggles the mind. I hope someone knows. Without a ship we are in trouble.”

Relative trouble: in energy form they could streak across short distances, perhaps half the diameter of the present galaxy. Beyond that presented serious dangers of energy dissipation, radiation effects, pollution from star scintillation, all possibly mortal to their electron-cycle life.

“Barion, what can we do?”

“Come on, little brother.” Barion grinned. “Where’s your creativity, your initiative?”

“I’ve got plenty of initiative,” Coyul blazed. “Just wait’ll I use it on you sometime.”

“How about now?”

“This is your kind of place,” Coyul retreated. “What can we do?”

“Oh, well.” Barion looked off after the primates receding across the grassland. “All sorts of things.”

Lost on this mud-ball world while more time passed. Whenever Barion disappeared for long periods, Coyul could always find him indulging his obsession with primates, observing the nearest family group in physical form, allowing them to get used to him. On this unknown, uncharted planet, Coyul feared that Barion would find the lure of experiment irresistible, and therein lay the problem. Penalties for premature seeding were stiff enough; for unauthorized experiment they were virtual death: exile for eons on the Rock, some utterly or near-lifeless planet, until the solitary prisoner gave up and bled his energy out into space and oblivion.

Coyul found it ironic that he should be considered the irresponsible one, but a large part of this general opinion was his own doing. Competent enough at carbon-cycle life studies, he had no interest in science at all. Part of his youthful dilettante pose was an affectation of boredom toward any discipline save art, deriving a perverse pleasure from letting elders and peers alike think him an utter waste of time. He reasoned that by the time he was independent they’d just leave him alone to dabble and compose.

On this unpromising day, he found Barion observing a single primate under a tree. Coyul’s sudden appearance made it start and gibber.

“Soften your colors,” Barion suggested. “The bright confuses it.”

Coyul’s toga-like creation faded from scarlet and silver to buff-green. “What’s it doing that’s worth watching?”

“Found some nuts. Tried to gnaw through one and broke a tooth. Doesn’t feel at all good about that. Now it’ll try that stone.”

The ape raised the stone and hurled it at the nuts, missing them altogether. Coyul stirred restlessly. “I hope this improves —
ow!”

He sprang up, rump stinging, as the offending snake coiled to strike again. “You little —”

The Ur-cobra was evolving a neurotoxin to paralyze its dinner, but the concept was still on the drawing board. Coyul glared murderously, then flowed as energy into the reptile brain, raging, bloating it to grotesque activity. For tortured seconds the snake suffered from conscience, questioned existence, then thrashed away through the undergrowth. Shortly afterward, with suicidal relief, the snake allowed itself to be eaten by a wild dog with fewer scruples.

“Charming place: one huge digestive tract,” Coyul muttered, corporating again. He glanced at the bewildered ape pawing at his gritty nutshells. “Any news from the cutting edge of science?”

Suffering with the broken tooth, the ape scooped up the stone with a scream of frustration and smashed it on a larger one. The missile split evenly along a seam.

“Cutting edge,” Barion mused. “I wonder...”

“Leave the animals alone,” Coyul warned. “Don’t tinker.”

“Obviously on its way to becoming human.”

“With all the implied instabilities. Even if he creates beauty at breakfast — and he’s not exactly expert at simple feeding yet — you can never be sure he won’t murder before sundown.”

But Barion heard the siren song of possibility. “At least I can help him with the nuts. Before that other specimen grabs them away.”

A smaller male, foraging himself, had wandered close. The first male chattered a warning. When the newcomer made a snatch at the nuts, he scooped up the broken stone —

— the difference was subtle but apparent to Coyul: a little more control in the grip, better aim as the cutting edge slammed down on the marauder’s skull. With a shrill scream the smaller male rolled in the grass, clutching its furry head. Reclaiming the prize, the victor laid the nuts on the rock that had shattered and shaped his own missile and pounded at them with the cutting stone.

“Barion, quit messing
around!”

“
I didn’t,” Barion whispered, jubilant. “Well, not much.”

Just a nudge here, a hint there in the small proto-brain, turning it precocious just a little ahead of evolutionary schedule. “Show-off. At least give the loser the same break.”

“What, him?” Barion started away toward the hilltop. “Controlled experiment; always a loser. Smart eats, stupid starves. I have some thinking to do.”

Coyul sat alone, brooding on the grave and very possible consequences of Barion’s impulse, staring morosely at the relative genius picking edible morsels from the mashed shells.

“Congratulations. Try not to get eaten yourself before the day’s out. Now get out of here. Move!”

The sudden thunder of Coyul’s voice sent the ape fleeing away across the savanna. Safe for the moment, the smaller male brandished a stick after him, achieving moral victory at low cost and healthy distance, then rummaged among the nutshells for bits of meat.

Coyul watched him, thinking on balances of power, his brother’s arrogance, the wounded monkey. Blood from its lacerated scalp spattered over the stone missile. The creature hefted the stone in one hand, picked up its stick in the other, looking off after the departed enemy.

“Just this once,” Coyul decided. “Only fair.”

He made no major intrusion in the small brain, just enough to push one fact toward another to make a working combination. Still intent on his distant assailant, the ape’s bright eyes gleamed with new tactical purpose. It remembered dimly making a few tentative swipes at soft wood with harder stone... something stone could do to wood.

The nimble fingers with their unique opposable thumbs began to work — clumsily at first, then more surely through a hundred tries until the ape learned how to strike most effectively with the tool. Until there was a formidable point.

With a scream of triumph, the little creature plunged its weapon again and again into yielding earth, brandished vengeance high overhead, then darted away on a direct course after the enemy who hurt it.

Coyul lingered a moment to wonder which would survive, then put his figurative money on the spear maker. The other ape might be bigger, but this one was vindictive and
mean.

    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.”