Read King of the Worlds Online
Authors: M. Thomas Gammarino
He called in to the department chair and told her the news. He said it didn't matter who subbed for him because he/she could just let the kids work on their Shakespeare scenes. Then he began the laborious project of getting the kids ready to go. Once they were buckled into the levicar, he supported Erin on his arm to the passenger seat and manifested the door behind her. Then they were off to the New Taiwan Medical Center Earthling Annex. They decided that Dylan would drop Erin at the ER and then take the kids to daycare and hover right back.
He dropped her off and watched her waddle through the foglet doors, and then hovered along the roundabout and back over the street. He was just in time for rush-hour traffic, but the daycare center wasn't far away and he was back at the hospital in twenty minutes flat. He let the car self-park and hustled inside. As he rode the elevator on the way up to maternity, he checked his omni to find out what room Erin was in, and was surprised to find a new message waiting for him.
How awesome! Of course I remember you! And yes! Triple yes! I would love to get together. I wonder when would be a good time for you? I am still in the Baltimore area. It's tough for me to get away. Maybe you can meet me at the Inner Harbor sometime for lunch?
Looking forward to hearing from you,
Ashley
How deeply unsettling to have his spheres cross like this, not to mention being reminded of what a fool he was, how in matters of the heart/balls he was really not much wiser than the adolescents he pontificated to on a daily basis.
He ignored the message, which, some part of him must have realized, was not the same as deleting it.
Erin, his omni informed him, was in room 342, just around the corner from the elevator bank. He found it easily enough and knocked on the door. A native nurse (you could tell natives by their
double-jointed elbows and knees
16
) swiped it away. Over her left shoulder, he could see Erin lying in bed. Inexplicably, she appeared to be holding a baby.
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_____________
The discovery that complex life was so similar throughout the galaxy had served as a real buzzkill for those Terrans given to a sense of cosmic exhilaration. Yes, there were now hundreds of new cultures to discover, and no doubt each had its fascinating quirks and eccentricities, but there were no bug-eyed monsters or Wellsian juggernauts, no parasites or dream beasts, angels or telepaths. Tentacles remained a water thing. Eating, drinking, breathing and sleeping were practiced by hominids everywhere. Bicameral eyes appeared to be universal, as were mouths, anuses, and dimorphic sex. No civilization had yet been found that did not rely to a large degree on spoken language. In fact, most of these newly discovered life forms were more than 99.4 percent identical to Earth humans at the genetic level. Virtually no one had expected this, and there was a whole new cottage industry devoted to finding out how indeed it had happened. Some scientists adopted a determinist view, arguing in essence that the real surprise would have been if things had turned out otherwise
â
if, for instance, there were natural life forms out there on Earth-like planets that were
not
carbon-based. They created simulation after simulation on their omnis, inputting all the variables
â
chemical elements born of the big bang and the furnaces of sun-like stars; mass, gravity, rotation, orbital period, composition, magnetism, atmosphere, geology, topography, and climate of each respective planet
â
and time and again they showed remarkably little deviation. As long as life had at least 3.8 billion years to evolve on one of these planets, it invariably produced something an awful lot like a human being
â
”convergent evolution,” they called this
â
and once a certain threshold of intelligence was reached, selection pressures eased and adaptation leveled off. New Taiwanese scientists, for instance, claimed that life had existed on their planet for upwards of 6 billion years, and carbon dating conducted by Terran scientists so far supported that hypothesis. The bone of contention between the Determinists and the (unfortunately named) Panspermists was that the former believed it plausible that life had come about
independently
on each of these planets and then evolved, whereas the Panspermists, despite the Determinists' simulations
â
which they dismissed as being reverse-engineered in some way or other
â
held that chance, if it were truly chance, could not possibly have behaved so uniformly. In the face of the demonstrable fact that intelligent life on Super Earths throughout the Milky Way was indeed so humanlike that some races could not even be usefully classed as other species, they were left to conclude that life had originated in one place and one place only and then made its colonial voyage around the galaxy inside of comets, thereby seeding hospitable planets where they would then take their own slightly divergent evolutionary paths until meeting up again some billions of years in the future. For the Panspermists, the race was on to see who could identify the one and only place in the galaxy, or indeed in the wider universe, where a host of elements first pooled their resources, developed membranes and learned to reproduce. In addition to these two camps inside the scientific community, there was of course one further possibility
â
namely, the religious hypothesis. God had made intelligent life in his own image and therefore, unless he was a shape-shifter, the standard deviation could not be large by definition. One Catholic bishop had even undertaken the project of compiling photos of every humanoid face in the galaxy inside his omni and “averaging” them out into a single image, which he believed would reveal the face of God at last. As it turned out, God looked uncannily like Val Kilmer's portrayal of Jim Morrison in Oliver Stone's
The Doors
â
so much so, in fact, that a certain fundamentalist contingent began watching that movie on repeat in search of eschatological clues. In general these spiritualists made no attempt at addressing the materialist claims of the Determinists and the Panspermists. They did not purport to know where or how many times life had originated, only that the mechanism behind whatever had happened was God, whom they had been calling “The Creator” for a pretty long time now after all.
“You must be the father?” the nurse said in flawless English.
“I am.”
“Congratulations! Erin did beautifully.”
“What, you mean it's done?”
“Come meet your son.”
“But I was only gone twenty minutes.”
“Your wife's a pro at this. A real trooper.”
“I guess so.”
He walked over to Erin's bedside.
“It's really over already?”
“It really is.”
She looked happy. She held up the bundle of swaddling clothes, and there it was, the bruised fruit of a human infant. They'd put a little blue snowcap on him.
“I want to call him Dylan Jr.,” Erin said.
“I thought you wanted to call him Earth?”
“I did until I saw him. He looks just like you, don't you think?”
“Like me? I'd say he looks more like Gollum.”
“Here, take him.”
Dylan took the bundle in his arms. Feelings competed inside of him. He felt happy, of course. He'd begotten a son. A clean, pink, anatomically correct son.
And yet he felt guilty too. Having grown up bombarded with cautionary tales and harrowing facts about Earth's imminent
overpopulation,
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he couldn't help but notice, knee-jerkilyâor maybe just jerkilyâthat what he'd begotten was
another
son; and did you need two sons really? And then there were all the practical concerns. How many insipid papers would he have to grade to fund this kid's education? Those little fingers, though: they were pretty sweet. Already Dylan Jr. was holding out one pinky like some tea-drinking aristocrat. Maybe this kid could be a better version of him someday? Dylan's father had never given him much advice or dispensed much wisdom. He seemed to think words were just words and you had to learn through trials. The Buddha said something like that too, as Dylan recalled. Dylan, however, thought words could be pretty importantâhe taught literature after allâand he intended to give his children millions of the best ones he could come up with. His own life had not gone as he had hoped, but he would do everything in his power to ensure that theirs would.
17
_____________
Indeed, it was by and large the threat of food shortages, peak oil, and other depleted resources, coupled with the sense of wonder engendered in all but the most hard-hearted Americans by Carl Sagan's
Cosmos
series on PBS in 1980, that had led to the terraforming projects on Mars and Io that began in the early eighties
â
still very much works in progress
â
and, more successfully, to the search for habitable exoplanets, of which, at last count, some 4,696 had been identified, and, thanks to the refinement of QT in the mid-90s, 78 successfully settled. Overpopulation, it turned out, was
not
a major concern throughout the galaxy. Thousands of Super Earths had been probed and found to house at least some form of life. Most, like New Taiwan, were found to have given rise to life forms remarkably like
Homo sapiens
, but unlike humans, none had been subjected to so ruthless a process of natural selection that their reproductive instincts trumped their ecological ones. They had DNA, but for whatever reason
â
as yet undiscovered
â
it just didn't seem to be as mean or shortsighted as the Terran variety. They were adept, in other words, at striking an equilibrium with their environment
â
humans, not so much. It probably didn't hurt that, while many of these civilizations had some form of religion, most seemed to recognize their systems of belief for the psychocosmological metaphors they perforce were.
⢠⢠â¢
Dylan began his two weeks of paternity leave. Erin stayed at the hospital for a couple of days, and he and the kids went to stay with her and the new baby much of the time. Arthur was great with his new brother. Already he enjoyed holding him and petting his bald head. Poor Tavi, though, had a new distance in her eyes. She seemed to understand, with peculiar clarity, that she'd been usurped, that she was no longer the baby in the family but destined to be lost in that gray middle between her two siblings. At least she was the only girl, special in that sense, but it was clear she resented Mommy for holding this new baby and giving it suck, so instead of going to her, she cleaved, rather touchingly, to Daddy, who for lack of other viable candidates became her new best friend. Barely three years old and her paradise was already lost.
Join the club
.
Back at home, Dylan bathed the kids, put them to bed, and then set to work on Junior's sleeping quarters in what would no longer be his office. He and Erin had been so busy that they'd hardly done any nesting in advance; fortunately the shed was filled with hand-me-downs. Dylan even let Arthur and Tavi decorate the walls with markers. Arthur drew spaceships and dinosaurs. Tavi worked in a rather more abstract mode, rendering varicolored plasmoids and blobules.
For the first week or so after Erin and Junior's return, Dylan felt quite happy. He forbade himself to do, or even think about, anything related to work, and focused on enjoying the company of his kin. He and the kids prepared meals for Mommy. They played vintage Terran board games, painted one another's faces, and watched all the
Toy Story
films, the third of which choked Dylan up beyond all reason. They played hopscotch and flew a kite in the New Taiwanese wind. And they got to know their new family member. Dylan Junior's face seemed to change by the minute, and while Dylan still thought he looked pretty much like Gollum, he was beginning to see what Erin meant: Junior did take after him in some respects, more obviously than he did his mother anyway. It was mainly the eyes. They were Dylan's eyes, really, just popped into a smaller skull. He had not quite realized before how a gene is a gene is a gene. It made for quite an affinity, and one night while the other two kids were sleeping, Dylan cradled the baby in his arms and walked him outside to the deck to peer at the stars. He told him, unabashedly, how he loved him andâ
screw overpopulation, the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate in all directions anyway
âhe was glad to have him join them. Then he waxed philosophical and possibly nutty and asked the kid what it had been like in the womb. What was it like when that first spark of mental life kicked in? What was it like before that? How far back could he go? Was there anything important back there that his old man had forgotten? He looked out at the Milky Way, showed his son the pale evening star their species had once been trapped around. All those worlds, and yetâhe spared his son now and kept his thoughts to himselfâwas there nothing truly strange out there? Nothing so exotic and marvelous that it would stymie our human frames of reference, mock our languages, confound our metaphors?
Because that was the thing about being young, wasn't it? Everything was still new? Dylan sometimes briefed his students on one of the more interesting tidbits he'd picked up in graduate school: The Russian formalist poet Viktor Shlovsky identified
ostranenie
âusually translated as “defamiliarization,” though literally “strange-making”âas the basic function of art. “Habituation,” Shlovsky wrote, “devours work, clothes, furniture, one's wife, and the fear of war.⦠Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony.” His students usually gave him blank stares when he recited this, so he'd translate it for them: “Art exists to make you babies again.”