Expendable - James Alan Gardner [69]
While we ate, we talked…which is to say, Oar talked and I asked enough questions to keep her going. I wanted to learn all I could about her background, especially what she knew about the history of her planet.
She knew almost nothing. The far past was a blank; even the recent past was vague. Oar couldn’t remember her father—her mother had pointed him out in the Tower of Ancestors, but he had been dormant Oar’s whole life. Sometime during the pregnancy, he had simply decided enough was enough.
That was forty-five years ago.
It unsettled me that Oar was forty-five: she was almost twice as old as me. On the other hand, I had seen that her people didn’t show their age…and why should I think of her as childlike, just because her English was simplistic? How’s your grasp of her language? I asked myself.
It brought up an interesting question.
“Oar,” I said, “how did you learn to talk like Explorers? Did Jelca and Ullis teach you?”
“Yes.”
“They taught you to speak this well…and how long were they here?”
“A spring and a summer, three years ago.”
“You learned this much English in six months? That’s fast, Oar.”
“I am very smart, Festina,” she answered. “Not stupid, like Explorers.”
It struck me she might be right. Bioengineering made her stronger and tougher than me; why not smarter too? Admittedly, Earth’s attempts at building smarter people had seldom met with success: tinkering with the brain was so complex, most intelligence enhancement experiments ended in tragic failure. Even “successful” research projects had a ratio of ten thousand dead or near-vegetable infants for every child who turned out a cut above normal. Still, Melaquin had succeeded in so many other DNA modifications, why not heightened learning ability? It could work with the right approach—nothing crude like a mere increase in skull capacity, but exploring how humans truly differed from other animals….
Neotony. Maybe that was it.
“Neotony” was a biological term related to a prolonged period of childhood. Humans were the winners in that category, at least on Earth; some species took longer to reach sexual maturity, but nothing required parental care as long as Homo sapiens. From time to time, zoologists hypothesized that neotony was a prime factor in human intelligence. After all, children learn enormous quantities of knowledge in a short span of time—much more than the greatest genius manages later in life. Some experts thought that the length of human childhood kept our brains in a state of accelerated learning for years longer than anything else in the animal kingdom…precisely what put us ahead of other species in terms of thinking capacity. If you keep acquiring knowledge at high speed for ten to fifteen years, you’re just naturally going to best animals who his their plateau at two months.
Suppose the Melaquin engineers extended the childlike learning phase even longer—decades past us normal-flesh humans. Suppose a forty-year-old could learn languages with the wide-open ease of a toddler. And keeping these glass people childlike wasn’t a safety hazard: they were practically invulnerable and had all their needs supplied by machines like the food synthesizer.
On the other hand, childlike brains might have their drawbacks in the end; after decades of operating at top speed, burnout might easily set in. Was there a neural chemical responsible for feelings of interest, curiosity, wonder? To construct childlike minds, the engineers may have pumped that chemical up to intense levels—levels that just couldn’t be sustained forever. After years of high-capacity effort, the gland that produced the chemical might simply succumb to overwork. Result? Motivational shutdown. A deep metabolic lethargy.
It was all guesswork, but the logic held together. I gazed at Oar, seated across from me with the campfire’s reflection flickering on her face. A sting of tears burned in my eyes. Pity is stupid, I told myself. Every organism breaks down eventually. My father’s heart broke down…my mother’s liver.