Dio by Damon Knight

Author:Damon Knight [Knight, Damon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2016-08-06T16:00:00+00:00

SHE IS RESOLVED not to show her revulsion. “What happened to them?” she asks in a voice that does not quite tremble.

“Nothing. The planners left them alone, but changed us. Most of the records have been lost in two thousand years, and of course we have no real science of biology as they knew it. I’m no biologist, only a historian and collector. He rises. “But one thing we know they did was to make our bodies chemically immune to infection. Those things—” he nods to the transparencies above—“are simply irrelevant now, they can’t harm us. They still exist—I’ve seen cultures taken from living animals. But they’re only a curiosity. Various other things were done, to make the body’s chemistry, to put it crudely, more stable. Things that would have killed our ancestors by toxic reactions—poisoned them—don’t harm us. Then there are the protective mechanisms, and the paraphysical powers that homo sapiens had only in potential. Levitation, regeneration of lost organs. Finally, in general we might say that the body was very much more homeostatized than formerly, that is, there’s a cycle of functions which always tends to return to the norm. The cumulative processes that used to impair function don’t happen—the ‘matrix’ doesn’t thicken, progressive dehydration never gets started, and so on. But you see all these are just delaying actions, things to prevent you and me from dying prematurely. The main thing—” he fingers an index stripe, and a linear design springs out on the wall—“was this. Have you ever read a chart, Claire?”

She shakes her head dumbly. The chart is merely an unaesthetic curve drawn on a reticulated background: it means nothing to her. “This is a schematic way of representing the growth of an organism,” says Benarra. “You see here, this up-and-down scale is numbered in one-hundredths of mature weight—from zero here at the bottom, to one hundred per cent here at the top. Understand?”

“Yes,” she says doubtfully. “But what good is that?”

“You’ll see. Now this other scale, along the bottom, is numbered according to the age of the organism. Now: this sharply rising curve here represents all other highly developed species except man. You see, the organism is born, grows very rapidly until it reaches almost its full size, then the curve rounds itself off, becomes almost level. Here it declines. And here it stops: the animal dies.”

He pauses to look at her. The word hangs in the air; she says nothing, but meets his gaze.

“Now this,” says Benarra, “this long shallow curve represents man as he was. You notice it starts far to the left of the animal curve. The planners had this much to work with: man was already unique, in that he had this very long juvenile period before sexual maturity. Here: see what they did.”

With a gesture, he superimposes another chart on the first.

“It looks almost the same,” says Claire.

“Yes. Almost. What they did was quite a simple thing, in principle. They lengthened that juvenile period still further, they made the curve rise still more slowly .

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