Spider Robinson: Orphans of Eden

“I think I see where you’re going,” I said. “I was just about to write a story about—”

“I know,” he interrupted. “And you were going to screw it up.”

We’ll never know, will we? “Go on.”

“Well, I think you know the only possible solution. Let’s do a thought experiment—I know you won’t mind the pun. Hypothetically: put a bunch of preverbal children—infants, for preference—in a congenial artificial environment. Plenty of room, plenty of food for the taking, mild climate, no predators, an adequate supply of useful materials and appropriate technology for later. Immunize them against all disease, and give them doctor-robots that will see them into adulthood and then fall apart. Provide AI packages to teach language skills and basic hygiene—both carefully vetted to be as semantically value-free as possible—”

“Have the AI design the language,” I suggested.

“Yes. Open-ended, but with just enough given vocabulary to sustain a complicated thought: let ’em invent their own. A clean foundation. When they’re ready to handle it, have the machines teach them the basic principles of mathematics and science, using numbers rather than words wherever possible, and just enough philosophy to keep them from brewing up organized religion. And not a damned word of history. Then you go away, and come back in a thousand years.”

“To find them knifing each other over which one has the right to sacrifice a peasant to the teaching machines,” I said.

“You are not really that cynical.”

“Of course I am. Why do you think I have to keep writing those happy endings? You know, another writer wrote a story years ago with the same basic theme as your thought experiment—”

“Yes,” he said, “and what was the first thing his protagonist did? Saddled the poor little bastards with the author’s own religion! Gifted them with shame and sin and an angry but bribable paternalistic God and a lot of other moral’ mumbo jumbo. Phooey. He had greatness in his hands and he blew it. That time.”

I didn’t quite agree, but the differences were quibbles. And I had something else to think about. This wasn’t a science fiction story Daniel was describing, or any cockamamie “thought experiment”...

I once heard a black woman use some memorable language: she described someone as having been “as ugly as Death backin’ out of a outhouse, readin’ Mad magazine; ugly enough to make a freight train take a dirt road.”

All at once a thought uglier than that was slithering around under my hair.

“Talk about cynical,” I went on, “why don’t we get down to the crucial problem with this little thought experiment, as you call it?”

I was looking him in the eye, and he did not look away. But he didn’t answer me either. So I did.

“The problem is, where do you get the infants?”

“Yes,” he said slowly, “that was the problem.”

I poured more Irish coffee, omitting coffee, cream and sugar. When it was gone I said, “So you’re the guy that laid the bad rap on all those gypsies.” I was trying hard not to hate him. I try not to hate anybody, no matter how much it seems indicated, until I’ve walked around it a little while. And he hadn’t said he was through talking yet. But so far I really hated this....

He looked confused for the first time since I’d met him; then he got the reference. “No, no. That wasn’t me, any more than it was gypsies. As far as I know, all that child-stealing gossip was sheer wishful thinking on the part of parents, combined with a natural hatred of anyone who didn’t have to stay in the village they were bom in. I’ve never stolen a baby, anywhere in Time.”

“Then where did you get them? Roll your own? In a test-tube or a Petri dish or whatever? Were the donors informed volunteers?” Even if the answer was yes, I didn’t like this one any better. Call up human beings out of nothingness, to be born (or decanted or whatever) and suffer and die, for purely scientific reasons? At least the first generation of them compelled to grow up without parents or role models, forced to reinvent love and law and humor and a trillion other things I took for granted? If they could? Grow babies as guinea pigs?

“I’ve never made a baby either,” he said. “Not even with someone else’s genes.”

I frowned. “Den ah give up, Mr. Bones—how did dat time-traveler... oh.” Then I said: “Oh!” And finally: “Oh!”

“A lot of infants have been abandoned on a lot of windy hillsides or left in dumpsters since time began,” he said sadly. “If Pharaoh’s daughter had happened to miss Moses, she probably could have picked up another one the next day. It tends to happen most in places and times where, even if the child had somehow miraculously been found and taken in by some contemporary, it would have had a maximum life expectancy of about thirty years. So I denied some of them the comfort of a nice quick death by exposure or predator, brought them to a safe place and gave them to means to live in good health for hundreds of years.”

“And used them as guinea pigs,” I said, but without any real heat in it. I was beginning to see his logic.

He didn’t duck it. “That’s right. Now you tell me: are my actions forgivable?”

“Give me a minute,” I said, and poured more whiskey and thought.

Thou shalt not use human beings as guinea pigs.

Don’t be silly, Spider. Accept that and you’ve just tossed out most of medicine. Certainly all the vaccines. First you use guinea pigs, sure… but sooner or later you have to try it on a human or you’re just a veterinarian. And meanwhile people are dying, in pain....

Thou shalt not experiment on human beings without their informed consent.

Many valuable psych experiments collapse with informed consent. You can’t experiment with the brain chemistry of a schizophrenic without endangering his life. You can’t find out whether slapping an hysteric will calm him down by asking him: you have to try it and see what happens. Daniel’s too is an experiment which by definition may not have informed consent: informing the subject destroys the experiment. Is there, Written anywhere, some fundamental law forbidding a man to withhold information, even if he believes it to be potentially harmful?

Thou shalt not use infants as guinea pigs.

Hogwash, for the same reasons as number one above. How do you test an infant-mortality preventative, if not on an infant? Should we not have learned how to do fetal heart surgery? Do not the benefits of amniocentesis outweigh the (please God) few who will inevitably be accidentally skewered? Would Daniel’s orphans really be better off dead than in Eden?

Thou shalt not play God.

God knows someone has to. Especially if the future is as grim as Daniel says. And She hasn’t been answering Her phone lately. When it comes down to the crunch, humans have always tried to play God, if they thought they could pull it off...

Ah, there was the crux.

“And what kind of results have you gotten?” I asked.

His face split in a broad grin. “Ah, there’s the crux, isn’t it? If you examine the data that came out of the Nazi death camps, and profit from that terrible knowledge… are you any better than Dr. Mengele?”

I winced.

“That is the question I want you to answer,” he said. “You are completely insulated from any possible backlash to your answer—the people who will ultimately judge me will never know you were consulted, even after the fact. There is no stick to be applied to you as a result of your answer. And now I will offer the carrot. The same carrot that got me into this.”

I was already reaching for the whiskey. Dammit, I thought, this isn’t fair. All I ever tried to do was entertain people.... Balls, came the answer from deep inside.