“Why don’t the creatures bite farborns?”
“Oh—creatures. Little beasts, too small to see. I could only show ’em to you with a special glass, like that one in the case over there. They live nearly everywhere; they’re on the weapon, in the air, on the skin. If they get into the blood, the body resists ’em and the battle is what causes the swelling and all that. So the books say. It’s nothing that ever concerned me as a doctor.”
“Why don’t the creatures bite farborns?”
“Because they don’t like foreigners.” Wattock snorted at his small joke. “We are foreign, you know. We can’t even digest food here unless we take periodic doses of certain enzymoids. We have a chemical structure that’s very slightly different from the local organic norm, and it shows up in the cytoplasm— You don’t know what that is. Well, what it means is, we’re made of slightly different stuff than you hilfs are.”
“So that you’re dark-skinned and we light?”
“No, that’s unimportant. Totally superficial variations, color and eye-structure and all that. No, the difference is on a lower level, and is very small—one molecule in the hereditary chain,” Wattock said with relish, warming to his lecture. “It causes no major divergence from the Common Hominid Type in you hilfs; so the first colonists wrote, and they knew. But it means that we can’t interbreed with you; or digest local organic food without help; or react to your viruses.… Though as a matter of fact, this enzymoid business is a bit overdone. Part of the effort to do exactly as the First Generation did. Pure superstition, some of that. I’ve seen people come in from long hunting-trips, or the Atlantika refugees last Spring, who hadn’t taken an enzymoid shot or pill for two or three moonphases, but weren’t failing to digest. Life tends to adapt, after all.” As he said this Wattock got a very odd expression, and stared at her. She felt guilty, since she had no idea what he had been explaining to her: none of the key words were words in her language.
“Life what?” she inquired timidly.
“Adapts. Reacts. Changes! Given enough pressure, and enough generations, the favorable adaptation tends to prevail.… Would the solar radiation work in the long run towards a sort of local biochemical norm? … All the stillbirths and miscarriages then would be overadaptations, or maybe incompatibility between the mother and a normalized fetus.…” Wattock stopped waving his scissors and bent to his work again, but in a moment he was looking up again in his unseeing, intense way and muttering, “Strange, strange, strange!… That would imply, you know, that cross-fertilization might take place.”
“I listen again,” Rolery murmured.
“That men and hilfs could breed together!”
This she understood at last, but did not understand whether he said it as a fact or a wish or a dread. “Elder, I am too stupid to hear you,” she said.
“You understand him well enough,” said a weak voice nearby: Pilotson Alterra, lying awake. “So you think we’ve finally turned into a drop in the bucket, Wattock?” Pilotson had raised up on his elbow. His dark eyes glittered in his gaunt, hot, dark face.
“If you and several of the others do have infected wounds, then the fact’s got to be explained somehow.”
“Damn adaptation then. Damn your crossbreeding and fertility!” the sick man said, and looked at Rolery. “So long as we’ve bred true we’ve been Man. Exiles, Alterrans, humans. Faithful to the knowledge and the Laws of Man. Now, if we can breed with the hilfs, the drop of our human blood will be lost before another Year’s past. Diluted, thinned out to nothing. Nobody will set these instruments, or read these books. Jakob Agat’s grandsons will sit pounding two rocks together and yelling, till the end of time.… Damn you stupid barbarians, can’t you leave men alone—alone!” He was shaking with fever and fury. Old Wattock, who had been fiddling with one of his little hollow darts, filling it up, now reached over in his smooth doctorly way and shot poor Pilotson in the forearm. “Lie down, Huru,” he said, and with a puzzled expression the wounded man obeyed. “I don’t care if I die of your filthy infections,” he said in a thickening voice, “but your filthy brats, keep them away from here, keep ’em out of the … out of the City.…”
