“Well, yes, but we can’t just give them away. Once one species starts depending on another, they become parasites.”
“How about bandersnatchi? Do you build Hands for bandersnatchi?”
“Yes. Lots bigger, of course.” A bandersnatch is twice the size of a brontosaur. Its skeleton is flexible but has no joints; the only breaks in its smooth white skin are the tufts of sensory bristles on either side of its tapering blank head. It moves on a rippling belly foot. Bandersnatchi live in the lowlands of Jinx, browsing off the gray yeast along the shorelines. You’d think they were the most helpless things in known space … until you saw one bearing down on you like a charging mountain. Once I saw an ancient armored-car crushed flat across a lowlands rock, straddled by the broken bones of the beast that ran it down.”
“Okay. How do they pay for their machines?”
“Hunting privileges.”
Jilson looked horrified. “I don’t believe you.”
“I hardly believed it myself, but it’s true.” I hunched forward across the tiny table. “Here’s how it works. The bandersnatchi have to control their population; there’s only so much shoreline to feed on in the lowlands. They also have to control boredom. Can you imagine how bored they must have been before men came to Jinx? So what they’ve done is, they’ve made a treaty with the Jinx government. Now, say a man wants a bandersnatchi skeleton, he’s going to build a trophy room under it. He goes to the Jinx government and gets a license. The license tells him what equipment he can take down to the lowlands, which is inhabited only by bandersnatchi because the atmospheric pressure is enough to crush a man’s lungs and the temperature is enough to cook him. If he gets caught taking extra weapons, he goes to prison for a long time.
“Maybe he makes it back with a body; maybe he doesn’t come back. His equipment gives him odds of about sixty-forty. But either way, the bandersnatchi get eighty percent of the license fee, which is a thousand stars flat. With that, they buy things.”
“Like Hands.”
“Right. Oh, one more thing. A dolphin can control his Hands with his tongue, but a bandersnatch can’t. We have to build the control setup directly into the nerves, by surgery. It’s not difficult.”
Jilson shook his head and dialed for another bottle.
“They do other things,” I said. “The Institute of Knowledge has instruments in the lowlands—laboratories and such. There are things the Institute wants to know about what happens under lowland pressures and temperatures. The bandersnatchi run all the experiments, using the Hands.”
“So you came here for a new market.”
“I was told there was a new sentient life-form on Down, one that doesn’t use tools.”
“You’ve changed your mind?”
“Just about. Jilson, what makes you think they’re sentient?”
“The brains. They’re huge.”
“Nothing else?”
“No.”
“Their brains might not work like ours. The nerve cells might be different.”
“Look, we’re about to get technical. Let’s drop it for tonight.” And with that, Jilson pushed the bottles and glasses to one side and stood up on the table. He peered around Cziller’s House of Irish Coffee, swinging his head in a slow arc. “Hah! Garvey, I’ve spotted a cousin and one of her friends. Let’s join ’em. It’s almost dinnertime.”
I thought we’d be taking them to dinner. Not at all. Sharon and Lois built our dinner, handmade, starting with raw materials we picked up in a special store. Seeing raw food for the first time, practically in the state in which it had emerged from the ground or been cut from a dead beast, made me a little queasy. I hope I didn’t show it. But dinner tasted fine.
After dinner and some polite drinking and talk, back to the hotel. I went to sleep planning to hop a ship the next morning.
I woke in total darkness around oh four hundred, staring at the invisible ceiling and seeing a round-topped cone with reddish lank hair and a faintly smiling mouth. Smiling at me in gentle derision. The cone had secrets. I’d come that close to guessing one this afternoon; I’d seen something without noticing it.
Don’t ask me how I knew. With a crystalline certainty that I could not doubt, I knew.
But I couldn’t remember what I’d seen.
I got up and dialed the kitchen for some hot chocolate and a tuna sandwich.
Why should they be intelligent? Why would sedentary cones evolve a brain?
I wondered how they reproduced. Not bisexually; they couldn’t get to each other. Unless—but of course there must be a motile stage. Those leftover paws…
What would they eat? They couldn’t find food; they’d have to wait for it to come to them, like any sessile animal: clams, sea anemones, or the Gummidgy “orchid” I keep in my living room so I can shock hell out of guests.
They had a brain. Why? What did they do with it, sit and think about all they were missing?
I needed data. Tomorrow I’d contact Jilson.
At eleven the next morning we were in the Downtown Zoo.
Behind a repulsor field something snapped and snarled at us: something like an idiot god’s attempt to make a hairy bulldog. The animal had no nose, and its mouth was a flat, lipless slit hiding two serrated horseshoe-shaped cutting surfaces. Its long, coarse hair was the color of sand lit by red sunlight. The forepaws had four long, spreading toes, so that they looked like chicken feet.
“I recognize those feet.”
“Yah,” said Jilson. “It’s a young Grog. In this stage they mate. Then the female finds a rock and settles down. When she’s big enough, she starts having children. That’s the theory, anyway. They won’t do it in captivity.”
“What about the males?”
“In the next cage.”
The males, two of them, were the size of Chihuahuas, with about the same temperament. But they had the serrated horseshoe teeth and the coarse reddish hair.
“Jilson, if they’re intelligent, why are they in cages?”
“If you think that’s bad, wait’ll you see the lab. Look, Garvey, what you’ve got to keep in mind is that nobody’s proven they’re intelligent. Until somebody does, they’re experimental animals.”
They had an odd, almost pleasant, odor, faint enough so that you stopped noticing it in two or three seconds. I peered in at the snapping motile-stage female. “What happens then? Does everyone suddenly get ashamed of himself?”
“I doubt it. Do you happen to know what humans did to dolphins while trying to prove they were intelligent?”
“Brain probes and imprisonment. But that was a long time ago.”
“The scientists were trying to prove dolphins were intelligent, so they had to be treated like experimental animals. Why not? It makes sense. In the end they did the species a service. If their assumption had been wrong, they’d only have wasted time on animals. And it gave the dolphins a hell of an incentive to prove they were intelligent.”
We reached the lab shortly after noon. It was the Laboratory for Xenobiological Research, a rectangular building beyond the outskirts of the city, surrounded by brown fields marked with rectangular arrays of ultraviolet lamps on tall poles. In the distance we could see the Ho River, with flocks of water skiers skimming across its muddy surface behind puller units.
A Dr. Fuller showed us through the lab. He was an obvious crashlander: a towering albino, seven feet tall, with a slender torso and tapering, almost skeletal, limbs. “You’re interested in the Grogs? I don’t blame you. They’re very difficult to study, you know. Their behavior tells nothing. They sit. When something comes by, they eat it. And they bear young.”
He had several presessile cones, the bulldog-sized quadrupeds, in cages. There was another cage containing two of the little males. They didn’t bark at him, and he treated them with tenderness and something like love. It seemed to me that he was a happy man. I could sympathize with him. Down must look like paradise to an albino from We Made It. You can walk around outside all year, the
soil grows things, and you don’t need tannin pills under the red sun.
“They learn fast,” he said earnestly, “that is, they do well in mazes. But they certainly aren’t intelligent. About as intelligent as a dog. They grow fast, and they eat horrendously. Look at this one.” He picked up a very fat, round-bottomed female. “In a few days she’ll be looking for a place to anchor.”
“What will you do then? Turn her loose?”
“We’re going to raise her just outside the lab. We’ve picked her a good anchor rock and built a cage around it. She’ll go into the cage until she changes form, and then we can remove the cage. We’ve tried this before,” he added, “but it hasn’t worked out. They die. They won’t eat, even when we offer them live meat.”
“What makes you think this one will live?”
“We have to keep trying. Perhaps we’ll find out what we’re doing wrong.”
“Has a Grog ever attacked a human being?”
“To the best of my knowledge, never.”
To me, that was as good an answer as No, because I was trying to find out if they were intelligent.
Consider the days when it was first suspected that the cetaceans were Earth’s second sentient order of life. It was known, then, that dolphins had many times helped swimmers out of difficulty and that no dolphin had ever been known to attack a human being. Well, what difference did it make whether they had not attacked humans or whether they had done so only when there was no risk of being caught at it? Either statement was proof of intelligence.
“Of course, a man may simply be too big for a Grog to eat. Look at this,” said Dr. Fuller, turning on a microscope screen. The screen showed a section of a nerve cell. “From a Grog’s brain. We’ve done some work on the Grog’s nervous system. The nerves transmit impulses more slowly than human nerves, but not much more. We’ve found that a strongly stimulated nerve can fire off the nerve next to it, just as in terrestrial chordates.”
“Are the cones intelligent, in your opinion?”
Dr. Fuller didn’t know. He took a long time saying it, but that’s what it boiled down to. It distressed him; his ears turned red beneath the transparent skin. He wanted to know. Perhaps he felt he had a right to know.
“Then tell me this. Is there any evolutionary reason for them to have developed intelligence?”
“That’s a much better question.” But he hesitated over the answer. “I’ll tell you this. There is a terrestrial marine animal which starts life as a free-swimming worm with a notochord. It later settles down as a sessile animal, and it gives up the notochord at the same time.”
“Amazing! What’s a notochord?”
He laughed. “Like your spinal cord. A notochord is a rope of nervous connection which branches into the trunk nerves of the body. More primitive forms have sensory connections, but arranged without order. More advanced forms wrap a spine around the notochord and become vertebrates.”
“And this beast gives up its notochord?”
“Yes. It’s retrograde development.”
“But the Grogs are different.”
“That’s right. They don’t develop their large brains until after they settle down. And, no, I can’t imagine an evolutionary reason. They shouldn’t need a brain. They shouldn’t have a brain. All they do in life is sit and wait for morsels of food to hop by.”
“You speak almost poetically when you turn your mind to it.”
“Thank you—I think. Mr. Garvey, will you come this way? You too, Jil. I want to show you a Grog central nervous system. Then you’ll be as confused as I am.”
The brain was big, as advertised, and globular, and a strange color: almost the gray of human gray matter but with a yellow tinge. It might have been the preservative. The hindbrain was almost unnoticeable, and the spinal cord was a limp white string, uselessly thin, tapering almost to a thread before it ended in a multiple branching. What could that monstrous brain control, with practically no spinal cord to carry its messages?
“I gather most of the nerves to the body don’t go through the spinal cord.”
“I believe you’re wrong, Mr. Garvey. I’ve tried without success to find supplementary nerves.” He was smiling slightly. Now I had a piece of the problem. We could both stay awake nights.
“Is the nervous material any different from the motile form’s brain?”
“No. The motile form has a smaller brain and a thicker spinal cord. As I said, its intelligence is about that of a dog. Its brain is somewhat larger, which is to be expected when you consider the slower rate of propagation of the nerve impulse.”
“Right. Does it help you to know that you’ve ruined my day?”
“It does, yes.” He smiled down at me. We were friends. He was flattered to know that I understood what he was talking about. Otherwise I wouldn’t have looked so puzzled.
The big soft sun was halfway down the sky when we got out. We stopped to look at the anchor pen Dr. Fuller had set up outside: one big flat rock with sand heaped around it, all enclosed in a wide fence with a gate. A smaller pen against the fence housed a colony of white rabbits.
“One last question, Doctor. How do they eat? They can’t just sit and wait for food to pop into their mouths.”
“No, they have a very long, slender tongue. I wish I could see it in use sometime. They won’t eat in captivity; they won’t eat when a human being is anywhere near.”
We said our good-byes and took our skycycles up.
“It’s only fifteen ten,” said Jilson. “Do you want another look at a wild Grog before you leave Down?”
“I think so, yes.”
“We could get out into the desert and back before sunset.”
And so we turned west. The Ho River slipped beneath us and then a long stretch of cultivated fields. Long pink clouds striped the sky.
They can’t be intelligent, I was thinking. They can’t.
“What?”
“Sorry, Jilson. Was I talking out loud?”
“Yah. You saw that brain, didn’t you?”
“I did.”
“Then how can you say they’re not intelligent?”
“They’ve got no use for intelligence.”
“Does a dolphin? Or a sperm whale, or a bandersnatch?”
“Yes, yes, no. Think it through. A dolphin has to hunt down its food. It has to outwit hungry killer-whales. A sperm whale also has the killer-whale problem, or used to. Then there were whaling ships. The smarter they were, the longer they could live.
“Remember, cetaceans are mammals. They developed some brains on land. When they went back to the sea, they grew, and their brains grew too. The better their brains were, the better they could control their muscles, and the more agile they were in water. They needed brains, and they had a head start.”
“What about bandersnatchi?”
“You know perfectly well that evolution didn’t produce the bandersnatch.”
A moment of silence. Then, “What?”
“You really don’t know?”
“I’ve never heard of a life form being produced without evolution. How did it happen?”
I told him.
Once upon a time, a billion and a half years ago, there was an intelligent biped species. Intelligent—but not very. But they had a natural ability to control the minds of any sentient race they came across. Today we call them Slavers. At its peak the Slaver Empire included most of the galaxy.
One of their slave races had been the tnuctip, a highly advanced, highly intelligent species already practicing biological engineering when the Slavers found them. The Slavers gave them limited freedom, after they found the worth of those freethinking brains. In return the tnuctipun had built them biological tools. Air plants for their spacecraft, stage trees with shaped solid-fuel rocket cores, racing animals, bandersnatchi. The bandersnatch was a meat animal. It would eat anything, and everything but its skeleton was edible.
There had come a day, a billion and a half years ago, when the Slavers found that most o
f the tnuctip gifts were traps. The rebellion had been a long time building, and the Slavers had underestimated their slaves. To win that war they had been forced to use a weapon which exterminated not only the tnuctipun, but every other sentient species then in the galaxy. Then, without slaves, the Slavers too had died.
Scattered through known space, on odd worlds and between stars, were the relics of the Slaver Empire. Some were Slaver artifacts, protected against time by stasis fields. Others were more or less mutated tnuctip creations: sunflowers, stage trees, ships’ air plants floating naked in space in cellophane bubbles; and bandersnatchi.
The bandersnatch had been a tnuctip trap. It had been built sentient so that it could be used as a spy. Somehow the tnuctipun had made it immune to the Slaver power. Thus it had lived through the revolution.
For what?
The Jinxian bandersnatchi spent their lives in a soupy, pressurized fog, browsing off the ancient food yeast that still covered the ocean a foot deep in cheesy gray scum. No data reached their senses but for the taste of yeast and the everlasting gray mist. They had brains to think with but nothing to think about… until the coming of man.
“And it can’t mutate,” I concluded. “So you can forget the bandersnatch. He’s the exception that proves the rule. All other known Handicapped needed brains before their brains developed.”
“And they’re all cetaceans from Earth’s oceans.”
“Well—”
Jilson made a razzing noise. Hell, he was right. They were all cetaceans.
We’d left the plowed lands far behind. Gradually the plains became a desert. I was beginning to feel more comfortable with the beast under me—this platform with a saddle, and an oversized lift-belt motor, an air pump, and a force-field generator to stop the wind. Feeling less likely to make a mistake, I could fly lower, with less room to correct before I hit sand. From this close the desert was alive. There, rolling before the wind, was a wild Cousin to the tumbleweeds I’d seen in the Zoo of Earth. There, a straight stalk with orange leaves around the base, fleshy leaves with knife-sharp edges to discourage herbivores. There, another, and a fox-sized herbivore cleverly eating out the center of a leaf. It looked up, saw us, and disappeared into motion. There, a vivid flash of scarlet, some desert plant which had picked an odd time to bloom.