Orson Card - Wyrms

"What question?" asked Ruin.

" 'All of us who were here before you,' " she said.

"Ask me."

Ruin tried to decide what question she meant. "All right, who was here before the humans?"

Heffiji jumped up and down with delight. "Wyrms!" she shouted. "Wyrms and wyrms and wyrms!"

"What about geblings, then, if we weren't here when humans arrived?" asked Reck.

"What about them? Too vague-you have to ask a better question than that."

"Where did geblings come from?" she asked.

Heffiji jumped up and down again. "My favorite, my favorite! Come and I'll show you! Come and you'll see!"

She led them up a ladderway into a low and musty attic. Even the geblings had to stoop; Patience had to squat down and waddle along to the farthest corner.

Heffiji gave her lantern to Ruin and took a sheaf of papers from a roof beam. She spread them along the attic floor. Taking back the lantern, she began to read the explanations of the drawings, one by one.

"There is no such thing as a native life form left on this world, and no such thing as Earth life, either, except for human beings themselves," she said.

"That's insane," said Ruin. "Everybody knows that the domesticated plants and animals came from Earth-"

Heffiji held the lantern up to his face. "If you already know all the answers, why did you stop at my house?"

Abashed, he fell silent.

Heffiji recited. "Comparing the genetic material of any plant or animal with the records concerning similar plants or animals preserved from the knowledge brought with mankind from Earth, we find that the original genetic code is still preserved, almost perfectly-but as only a tiny part of a single but vastly larger genetic molecule."

Heffiji pointed to a diagram showing the positions of the Earth species' protein patterns within the single chromosome of the present Imakulata version.

"Clearly, the species brought from earth have been taken over or, as is more likely, imitated perfectly by native species that incorporate the genetic material into their own. Since the resulting molecule can theoretically contain hundreds of times as much genetic information as the original Earth species needed, the rest of the genetic material is available for other purposes. Quite possibly, the Imakulata species retain the dormant possibility of adapting again and again to imitate and then replace any competing species. There is even a chance that the Imakulata genetic molecule is complex enough to purposefully control alterations in the genetic material of its own reproductive cells. But whether some rudimentary form of intelligence is present in the genetic molecule or not, our experiments have proven conclusively that in two generations any Imakulata species can perfectly imitate any Earth species. In fact, the Imakulata imitation invariably improves on the Earth original, giving it a competitive edge-shorter gestation or germination times, for example, or markedly faster sexual maturity, or vastly increased numbers of offspring per generation."

Heffiji looked at them piercingly, one at a time. "Well?" she asked. "Do you understand it?"

Patience remembered what Prince Prekeptor had once said to her. "The genetic molecule is the mirror of the will."

Heffiji scowled. "That's religion. I keep those in the cellar."

"We understand," said Ruin.

"You must understand it all. If you have a question, I'll say it again."

They had no questions. Heffiji moved on to a series of drawings of wheat plants and a strange, winged insect.

"Our experiments involved separating the original Earth- species genetic material from common wheat, to see what was left when the currently dominant Earth-genes were gone. The experiments were delicate, and we failed many times, but at last we succeeded in separating the genetic material, and growing Earth wheat and the species that had absorbed and replaced it. The genetic structure of the Earth wheat was identical to the records passed down to us from the original colonists, and yet when it grew we could see no difference in the plant itself from the Imakulata wheat. However, the leftover genetic material from the Imakulata wheat did not produce a plant at all. Instead, it produced a small insectlike flier, with a wormlike body except for three wing-pairs.

It was completely unlike anything we could find in our catalogues from Earth, but possibly similar to what the earliest colony records refer to as 'gnats,' which seemed to disappear from the first colony of Heptam after a few years."

"What does this have to do with geblings?" asked Ruin. "I know more about plants than any human scientist ever did."

Heffiji glared at him. "Go away if you don't want the answers that I give."

Reck touched her brother's cheek. "It isn't that he doesn't understand," she said. "It's that he already understands too well."

Heffiji went on. "We introduced a single Imakulata gnat into a glass box containing a sample of pure Earth wheat that was ready for fertilization. Without a mate, the Imakulata gnat soon began laying thousands of eggs.

The wheat also ripened and dropped seed. But the Imakulata eggs hatched first. A few of them produced gnats, which began attacking each other savagely until only one was left. Most of the seeds, however, produced an incredible array of strange plants, many of them wheatlike, many of them gnatlike, and most of them hopelessly maladaptive. Only a few grew more than a few centimeters in height before they died. Those that thrived, while they were generally somewhat wheatlike, were still easily distinguishable from the Earth species.

By the time the next generation of Earth wheat germinated and grew, they had already gone to seed, and showed every sign of being new and vigorous species.

We immediately began several other experiments to see if the results were identical."

On to the next drawing. "In the meantime, the sole surviving second-generation gnat mated, not with the new Imakulata species, but with the second generation Earth wheat. This time, most of the gnat's offspring were similar to what we call wheat today-completely indistinguishable from Earth wheat, except for the presence of a single immense genetic molecule which contains all the genetic information from the original Earth wheat. We repeated these results at will. When the second-generation gnat was allowed to reproduce with second-generation-or even tenth- or twentieth-generation Earth wheat-the result was always outwardly identical Imakulata wheat, which reproduced faster and grew more vigorously than either the Earth wheat or the new Imakulata plant species.

In fact, the Imakulata wheat seemed particularly inimical to the new Imakulata nonwheat species. They were destroyed as if by poison within two generations.

The Earth wheat sometimes lingered as long as six generations before being utterly replaced. However, when the second-generation gnat was not allowed to reproduce with later Earth wheat, the Imakulata wheat never appeared.

Instead, the new Imakulata species and the Earth wheat continued to breed true to form, with no further cross-breeding between species. This process of complete replacement within two generations may have repeated itself many times with every Earth species brought with the colonists except, of course, humankind itself, which has shown no changes in its chromosomal patterns."

And that was all.

"You never got to the geblings," said Ruin triumphantly.

"We asked you about geblings, but you never got to them."

Heffiji stalked off with the lantern. Of course they followed. But she did not lead them down the stairs.

Instead, she found another few papers and laid them out.

There were four drawings, each drawn and labeled by the same hand. One was labeled "Human Genetic Molecules."

The other three were labeled "humanlike sections" of gebling, dwelt, and gaunt genetic molecules.