Charles Sheffield - Tomorrow and Tomorrow

On the other hand, if that huge Snark aggressiveness had been coupled with high intelligence…

Drake sat in the flier and stared down at his own heavily built body. “I want to try one more thing.”

“Very well.” Milton did not sigh. Servitors did not sigh.

“You took my somatic DNA and incorporated changes to give me a body suited to this planet. Where did you get those changes from?”

“From the genetic codes of certain life-forms native to this world — not, of course, from the Snarks.”

“So it ought to be easy to perform a small variation to the procedure. Use my genetic material. We have a complete record of that. In particular, use the elements in me that code for intelligence. Merge them with Snark genetic material — and produce a smart Snark.”

Milton received that suggestion with all the enthusiasm of a being who has been swallowed and disgorged half a dozen times in the past half hour. After a few seconds, the Servitor said, “I do not think that is possible.”

“Why not? The technology sounds quite routine. No harder than what you did to put me in this body.”

“The technology, perhaps. But we do not know the Snark genetic code.”

“Not yet. But we’ll find out all about it.”

“How?”

“That’s the easiest part,” Drake snapped the fingers of his scaly paw. “Tomorrow we’ll come back to the nests and kidnap one.”

“When half-gods go, the gods arrive.”

The syncarpal synthesis was a surprise to Drake. A merger of human and Snark genetic materials suggested many possible outcomes: a four-limbed sting-tailed caterpillar that stood upright; a faceless segmented cylinder with hair and hands; or maybe a bright-eyed human worm, using dozens of scaly protolimbs to grasp, to lift, and to walk.

The creature in the imager resembled none of these. The syncarpal synthesis — shortened to the carp, or usually just Carp, by Drake and Milton, could have walked among a crowd of humans and passed unnoticed. Drake, looking hard, could observe a few minor differences. The temples bulged too much, only partly concealed by long brown hair. There was something odd about the hips, as though the socket for the upper end of the thigh bone lay outside the pelvis. The bare skin was coarse and rough, protected by a dense layer of gray bristles (but Drake had seen hairier humans). Suitable clothing would hide all this, just as it would cover the unusual genitals. Those were hidden, withdrawn into the pelvic cavity, making sex determination impossible by observation. Drake thought of the carp as “him,” but that probably reflected his own sense of identification with the naked being on the surface.

“And you, of course, are looking for differences,” Milton said. Drake was seeing Carp in action for the first time, and the Servitor sounded defensive. Most of this was Milton’s work, and no one else’s. “In any case, outward appearance is of less importance than the modified inner features. And those are invisible to you.”

The Servitor was not present in person. Drake, embodied in the scaled form designed for use on Graybill, had insisted on three levels of separation. He knew what he had asked for: extreme aggression combined with great intelligence; but neither he nor anyone else yet knew what they had.

So Drake and the only ship that could carry them to orbit sat in one location, close to the Graybill equator. Milton and an aircar were in another, on a long peninsula of the south polar continent; and Carp had been set free and remotely animated in a third place, on the shore close to the nests where Drake himself had narrowly escaped the Snarks.

Carp was independently monitored by both Drake and Milton. Drake zoomed in for a close-up of the face as Carp walked steadily toward the nests. The heavy features wore a placid and relaxed expression. The broad mouth was humming softly and tunelessly, and the eyes glanced from side to side, like a walker on a pleasant summer stroll.

Maybe that was the way Carp felt. Graybill’s polar summer was ending in a lingering twilight, and already the

temperature on the island of the Snarks was falling fast. The dusting of snow on the boulders and gravel was made of solid carbon dioxide. Carp’s physical structure, however, had been optimized to its local conditions. In spite of his naked skin he probably felt right at home.

If only Drake could read the dark eyes hidden beneath bony and prominent brow ridges! What did Carp know? What did he feel? In many ways, Carp was Drake himself; all the human genetic material had come from him. In biological terms, this was his child.

His only child, in so many billion years. Yet how far from their dreams, when they bought the old brick Colonial with its four bedrooms and shady fenced yard, and made their happy plans. One moment in annihilation’s waste. One moment of the well of life to taste. But one moment together. Now he walked through eternity alone. Oh, Ana…

Carp was heading confidently inland, toward the location of the Snark nests. Going home. The Snark from which Milton extracted the nonhuman part of Carp’s genetic material had been taken from this very set of nests. When that Snark had been released and returned, unharmed and apparently unchanged, the others had torn it to pieces. Maybe, like a migrating bird, Carp carried the homing instinct in every cell of his body; maybe that would prove fatal when he arrived home.

They would know soon enough. Carp was walking steadily across blue-green vegetation that soaked up a last dribble of sunlight before digging down below-ground and hibernating until spring. The nest was in view, with its broad pipes. As before, dozens of Snarks were creeping around them, stacking piles of plant life against their sides.

Carp walked right into their midst. They did not turn or attack or crawl away. They went on exactly as before, taking no more notice of him than they did of each other. He squatted down by one of the heaps of dead plants, and did not move for many minutes.

“There is no sign that the others are stalking him,” Milton said at last. “In your own case, they by this time had you close to surrounded. And had you approached the nests themselves, as you did in one previous embodiment, you would have been attacked. It seems that in spite of his appearance, they accept Carp as one of their own. What now?”

It was a good question. Drake was seeking evidence that Carp was a prototype for the fighting machine that humanity needed so desperately. Everything that he had tried against the Shiva had led to failure; every day the Silent Zone grew like a cancer, eating its way in a growing arc across the Galaxy.

The Snarks themselves had seemed like a good first test. The action would take place in a remote location, far from interference or assistance from Milton. If Carp so much as survived, he would be doing a lot better than Drake. In fact, he had already done better.

Drake zoomed in closer, studying Carp’s face. It was thoughtful, as thoughtful as Drake himself. And quite unreadable.

“Milton, do you know how the Snarks decide what they’ll attack, and what they’ll leave alone?”

“Not from observation. However, if they are like most animals who form nesting colonies, the principal sense and signal is olfactory. It seems probable that Carp smells right to them.”

Just as Drake had smelled wrong. He still had no answer to his old question: From what distance could a Snark detect a strange animal from its scent? But even if Carp smelled right to the Snarks, he certainly looked wrong. And Milton, who presumably smelled nothing at all like anything organic, had been attacked and swallowed mindlessly. Why hadn’t the Snarks given Carp at least a test swallow?