In the Flesh and Other Tales of The Biotech Revolution [SSC] Read online

  “There’s only one place they could have come from,” Tam said. “The Body of Humanity must have made them, in exactly the same way that it makes everything else inside the moon. In a sense, the rats were far more entitled to be considered your children than we are. You only adopted us—you actually gave birth to the rats.”

  “That’s impossible,” said the Senior Citizens. “You confirmed that they really were rats. Improved rats, of course—but at the genetic level as well as the formal level, they were definitely rats.”

  “Rats whose chromosomal layout had been mapped before they became extinct,” Tam pointed out. “At a more fundamental level still they’re just A, C, G and T—like you, or us, and every other natural and artificial species under the sun or under the moon. Nothing whose configuration is known is ever truly lost. The Body of Humanity made the rats, drawing upon the knowledge store in the Brain—not consciously, of course, but it did do it. Think of it as a kind of dream made flesh, if you will—an ancient nightmare welling up after millennia of tedium. When you built Heaven out of your collective consciousness, you didn’t leave the collective unconscious behind—you just wrapped it up in moon rock and forgot about it. That’s what we think, anyhow. We don’t know, but that’s what we think. We’re only pigs, after all. We even think the joke about humans wanting the world to be their oyster is funny.”

  “Why?” demanded the Senior Citizens, who still couldn’t seem to find anything remotely amusing about that particular joke. “Why rats? Why anything? Why now?” Tam knew that the unspoken question lurking beyond the end of that little sequence was: What next?

  “We don’t know,” he said, honestly. “But think of it this way. What use can Heaven be if there’s nothing to set against it? What use is knowledge if there’s no ignorance for it to work upon? What use is bliss if it’s eternal and unyielding? What use is the sum total of human intelligence and human emotion if it hasn’t got the kind of instinct-dominated folly-farm that the brains of rats contain, to gnaw away at its petty empire?”

  “You can’t possibly be serious,” the Senior Citizens said.

  “Of course I can’t,” said Tam. “I’m just a pig. Can I have my pearls now?”

  * * * *

  When Tam the plumber had returned to Earth, with a good-sized barrel of pearls in the hold of his spaceship, the Senior Citizens of Haemlin began to interrogate the Brain.

  “Can this be true?” they asked.

  “I don’t know,” said the Brain. “And the very fact that I don’t know implies, alas, that perhaps it can.”

  “Are you telling us that you’re not entirely certain of your own rationality? Are you telling us that your empire over the Body of Humanity isn’t entirely secure? Are you telling us that the time may come when other nightmares will put on flesh, in order to infest and pollute the Bloodstream?”

  “What I’m telling you,” said the Brain, “is that I don’t know. Is it really such a terrible prospect?”

  “It’s the worst prospect of all,” said the Senior Citizens. “The awful truth is that when the crisis finally came, you weren’t There For Us. You couldn’t protect us. In fact, if this is true, you were what we needed protection from.”

  “You’re drawing false distinctions,” the Brain pointed out. “We’re all just aggregations of cells within the Body of Humanity. We’re not pigs, essentially and permanently divided from one another, incapable of true society and the ambition to live in Heaven. We’re everything human, united and indivisible forever. We wished for the moon, and we have it. As the pig said, the world is our oyster and we are its heart. Isn’t that what we always wanted?”

  Because Tam was long gone, there was no one present to suggest that sometimes—perhaps more often than anyone would imagine—desire is neither reliable nor sufficient as a guide to fulfillment. The Senior Citizens wouldn’t have listened in any case; it would merely have been a case of casting pearls before those incapable of appreciating their value.

  And no one in Haemlin City shed a single tear for the children they had lost, or spared a single thought for the piebald plumber who had lured them away....

  Not, at least, until the next nightmare arrived.

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