Ascending - James Alan Gardner [149]
“Of course,” Immu said, as if that should be obvious to anyone. “But Oar is our species. Haven’t you figured that out by now?”
The Stupidest Creatures In The Universe
“I am not a villainous Shaddill!” I replied hotly. “Not even a little bit.”
“You are,” Esticus said, his voice cloud sliding a short distance toward me. “Your genome is 99.999 percent the same as ours.”
“The differences between you and us,” Immu said, “are no greater than the differences between your Freep and Tye-Tye companions out in the corridor. Or between female Zaretts, who are large and spherical, versus males, who are small and cloudy. External looks are insignificant compared to what’s in your chromosomes and cytoplasm. We made your race to be just like us.”
“But I am beautiful glass! Not fur at all. And I have five fingers, without claws…and no tail or mouth attachments…”
“All trivialities,” Immu said. Her translation mist shaped itself briefly into an approximation of me, pleasantly tall and humanoid—then the image shifted into something more squat and beetle-ish. “Inside,” she said, “you have the same organs that let you go without food for long periods of time, the same cellular structures that prevent you from aging, the same defensive systems that make you practically impossible to kill. We’ve lived more than five thousand of your years. Your people have the potential to live that long too.”
“But it is five thousand years with Tired Brains!” I snapped. “That is another difference between you and me.”
“It was necessary,” Esticus said. “To make sure you didn’t get too…” His golden cloud broke into a large number of thready wisps surrounding two little lumps—perhaps suggesting a horde of my people vastly outnumbering the two Shaddill.
“We wanted children,” Esticus continued, “but the Soft Ones changed us somehow so we couldn’t…it didn’t happen naturally. They wanted to be sure we were Tahpo: the last of our kind. Lucky for us, this was originally a colony-building ship; it still had full terraforming capabilities and a supply of frozen fertilized ova. We altered the DNA in the ova just a bit to create a human-shaped race and…well. You really are like us, Oar, even if there isn’t much external resemblance.”
I still did not think it could possibly be true; but Festina was nodding to herself. In a quiet voice, she said, “If we get out of this, Oar, I’ll show you pictures of a Chihuahua and an Irish Wolfhound—unquestionably the same species, but different as night and day. External appearance just isn’t a reliable guide to cellular composition.” She turned back to the Shaddill. “So you wanted Oar’s corpse to test the Blood Honey. Just out of curiosity. You had absolutely no thought you might take the big step.”
Esticus turned his eyes toward Immu; she looked back at him. For a moment, they did not speak…and although they were horrid fur-beetles, the image arose in my mind of lovers from some tale of romantic misapprehension: the kind of lovers who fervently want the same thing but believe the other does not want such a thing, so they say, “No, no, I do not want that either.”
Fools! I thought. They both wish to transform, but they fear to admit it. I could see it in their eyes—as if some deep-down Shaddillish part of me knew instinctively how to read such googly insect expressions. Perhaps Immu and Esticus had once feared the honey fountain, but now they longed for it. Even if it meant death, they wanted release…but each was holding back for the sake of the other.
“You are both quite absurd,” I told them. “Are you not secretly eager to jellify yourselves? I believe you have been so for years. Yet you each think the other person is afraid, so you say nothing—never mentioning what you feel, for fear of upsetting your mate. Is that not the case? You have been shielding one another needlessly for five thousand years, because you are the stupidest creatures in the universe.” I pointed to the