The Best of Both Worlds and Other Ambiguous Tales. Brian Stableford
“So this is a hive rather than a community of cenobites,” I said, lightly, “and your mother superior is a queen. I understand the significance of your pseudonym now. Why have you brought me here?”
“I brought you here because you seemed lonely and desolate,” she said, “and because you have a status and abilities that might be useful to us.”
I took no offence at the first part of this answer, nor was I moved to any keen curiosity by the second. “How might I be of service?” I asked.
“I shall explain momentarily,” she said, “but I must emphasize first that you are quite free to refuse our offer. While you are here you will be able to exercise a purer kind of reason than the one to which human beings are normally heir, in order that you might be unswayed by instinctive animal revulsion, but it is not our intention to compel your cooperation.”
“That’s very kind of you, I’m sure,” I said. “Am I right in assuming that your species is not part of the Earth’s Divine Plan, and no evidence of any aspect of the mind of our Creator?”
“We are not native to this planet,” Mary McQueen confirmed, “nor even this solar system—but if you believe in a Creator, you may take my word for the fact that we are far more representative of the common state of his mind and the apparent ambition of his Divine Plan than your own species.”
The notion that I was dealing with the intelligent indigenes of another world intrigued me; I was as incapable of reflexive incredulity as I was of instinctive terror. “How many other human beings have you and your sisters brought here before me?” I asked, interestedly. “How many have accepted the offer that you are about to make to me, and how many have refused it?”
“Our form of governance is far from democracy,” she retorted, “although I think, on due reflection, that you might have been wise to think in terms of a Mother Superior rather than a queen. At any rate, we are uninterested in matters of majority. Since you ask, though, you are the nineteenth person to be welcomed into this particular nest. If all our Earthly nests are taken into consideration, the number of our human recruits is presently something over a thousand. We have only been on your planet for little more than seven centuries. Of all the humans to whom we have made the offer of recruitment, not one has yet refused.”
There seemed nothing startling in any of these figures, in my newly-remade estimation.
“Very well, then,” I said, with perfect equanimity. “Explain what you want from me.”
My seducer explained, very patiently, that I might be useful to her species’ long-term plans by virtue of my education and my nascent vocation as a writer. It was, she told me, highly desirable that her sisters might infiltrate themselves by slow degrees into the upper echelons of human society, recruiting human males who might confer useful socially status by means of the institution of marriage, and might serve as prudently-deployed instruments of political and ideological influence. There was, however, a much more intimate function that I might serve in the first instance, whose fulfillment would equip me far better to serve in other ways and would provide highly desirable existential rewards.
I would, my guide informed me, be asked to serve as a foster-parent to one of the infants of her species, and to nourish it with the utmost care. The vermiform infant would live within me—not merely in my gut, like an ascarid worm or a tapeworm, but actually within my abdomen, sharing the circulation of my blood like any other organ and deriving its nutrition therefrom. While there, it would grow slowly, undergoing the first phase of a long and complex process of maturation.
The infant would not merely integrate itself into my circulatory system, however; it would also integrate itself into my nervous system. It would gradually take on the form and functions of a massive ganglion: a second brain, equal in complexity and capability to my own, and capable of exchanging information with my own. I would, in some measure, become responsible for the elementary education of the nascent mind within that brain, assisting its gradual transformation from a creature of pure appetite to a creature of considerable intelligence.
In order that this metamorphosis might be achieved, Mary McQueen told me, it would be necessary for the original infant to be gradually transformed, molecule by molecule and cell by cell, into a kind of flesh more closely akin to mine. By the same token, though, it would assist me—and, in particular, my brain—in a similar metamorphosis, so that my flesh would become more akin to that of the extraterrestrial visitors. Although the continuity of my consciousness would be perfectly preserved, allowing for the normal and inevitable lapses of sleep, its containing vessel would be strengthened in various ways.
The visitors could not offer me immortality, but they could offer me a much-extended lifespan, potentially measurable in tens of thousands of years. Although I would always remain vulnerable to the possibility of destruction by catastrophic injury, my body would acquire much greater powers of self-repair, and would become virtually invulnerable to the ravages of disease. In addition to these vulgar material benefits, the quality of my experience of the world would be altered in several ways.
In the first place, the ataraxia that I was now experiencing would become a perennially and voluntarily recoverable state of mind. I would remain able to savor the existential rewards of emotion, if and when I so wished, but I would also be able to rid myself of its more exacting claims. The empire of reason would be secured, not by the extermination of emotion but by its careful subjugation; emotions would become my loyal and contented servants, no longer bidding for mastery of my consciousness or posing any anarchic threat to my peace of mind.
In the second place, my mind would no longer be isolated, capable of making contact with other minds only through the media of sight and sound, by means of language and image-making. The intimate connection that I would gradually establish with the infant to which I was playing host would eventually be severed when the time came for the child to move on to the next phase in its development, but that link would be replaced, initially by another infant of the same sort, but eventually—as my own slow metamorphosis moved into other phases—by a series of children that were already more advanced in their development. I would never again be without companionship of the most intimate sort imaginable, nor would I be restricted to the company of new-borns.
When the time came for me to play foster-parent to children of a more advanced sort, I would be able to take the opportunity to leave my homeworld, because I would then be capable of the kind of dormancy required by long interstellar journeys. I would become a citizen of a vast interstellar culture, capable of the kinds of radical metamorphosis that were frequently necessary to facilitate life on other worlds. In time, perhaps, I might even be equipped for intergalactic travel.
My interlocutor also took the opportunity to explain the logic of this way of life, in evolutionary terms. Among the books in my father’s library was the Chevalier de Lamarck’s Philosophie zoologique, which my father had acquired from a French acquaintance, who had received it from the author’s own hand after attending one of his lectures in the Jardin des Plantes. I was, therefore, aware of the Chevalier’s assertion that every living creature is possessed of an innate urge to improvement, whose cumulative effects, expressed across the generations, result in the gradual progressive evolution of new species. Mary McQueen told me that the sense in which this was true of Earthly species was more metaphorical than literal, but that there was indeed a universal process of natural selection that tended to favor the survival and reproduction of some individuals in every generation of every species, while others less fitted for survival and successful reproduction made proportionately less contribution to the following generation.
Although such vulgar modifications as fleshly resilience, the ability to avoid predators and efficiency in gathering food were all favored by natural selection, my informant told me, the most important factors thus favored—and hence the most progressive, in Lamarckian terms—were those promoting better parental care. Humans, she said, deserve to be reckoned the most advanced members of the native biosphere because their infants benefit from far better and more varied parental care, and are thus enabled to embrace much slower and far more intricate processes of maturation.
By comparison with the extraterrestrial visitors,