There Will Be Dragons tcw-1 Read online

  “I am human, you ignorant gorilla,” Cantor replied. “And, no, I don’t care to have humanity disappear. But I don’t agree that it’s a problem. And even if it is, I haven’t heard a suggestion how to fix it. And I can’t imagine a suggestion that wouldn’t require the Council to step outside its clear authority. So I don’t understand why we’re having this meeting.”

  “As I stated, we are the only authority left,” Paul interjected. “If I may continue? We are all aware of the fact that as quality of life improves, birthrate declines.”

  “Except under conditions of cultural imprinting,” Cantor interjected.

  “But there are no longer any cultures that have a positive birthrate,” Bowman snapped back. “So that’s a red herring. The fact is that everyone on Earth has more than ample resources. Between the power plants and replication…”

  “Everyone livesss as godsss,” Ungphakorn said. “Or dolphinsss or bearsss or dragonsss. And nobody hasss children becaussse they’re a pain in the asss to take care of. Tell usss sssomething we don’t know.”

  “The answer is to ration power,” Chansa said bluntly.

  “WHAT?” Cantor bellowed.

  As the argument exploded, Sheida glanced around the room, looking at the faces and trying to guess who knew about the bombshell Chansa had just dropped. She suspected from the pained expression on Bowman’s face that he had intended to work up to the conclusion.

  “It is the only way!” Paul shouted. “No! Listen for a moment! Just hear me out!”

  He waited until the shouting and muttering had died then gestured around. “We are a dying race. If we continue as we have been, the last human, of whatever form, will close a door in a few thousand years and that will be it. I’m not talking about shutting everything down and dropping the world into chaos, I’m just talking about… reinstituting cultural items that will strengthen the interest in children, in discovery and advancement! And, at the same time, strengthen us as a species! We have descended into lotus-eating, all of our virtue lost to the sink of endless games and delights! We must regain our virtue as humans, so that we can take our true birthright and continue to thrive as a species!”

  “So you would end the games and delights?”

  It was the first that Aikawa Gouvois had spoken and Sheida didn’t know if he was on Paul’s side or not. He was fully humanoform, but also perfectly Asiatic in features. Thousands of years of crossbreeding and genetic tinkering meant that most humans naturally tended to be a light brown in color and have very few noticeable features, other than striking beauty, perhaps one of the reasons that so many chose wild body forms. Aikawa, however, had the broad face and epicanthic fold of a classic Son of Han. His appearance was so true to standard that it actually detracted from his looks; the flattened nose, broad cheekbones and epicanthic folds being decidedly nonstandard.

  Without doing a DNA scan and violating privacy, Sheida couldn’t tell if his appearance was natural or artificial. Whichever it was, the appearance was a personal statement, like Bowman’s height. However, it was a far more ambiguous one. And Aikawa had also cultivated a poker face to make any of the rest of the Council envious.

  “Frankly, I would make them work for the games and delights, yes,” Paul said. “I think that we need to reinstitute work. For those of you who don’t know what that word means…”

  “Ssspare usss, Paul,” Ungphakorn said. “What we do now isss ‘work,’ at leassst when it comesss to talking to you. And mossst of usss have no more children than any of the ressst of the world.”

  “I don’t see you raising a huge brood, Paul,” Ishtar interjected.

  “I have five children,” Bowman replied, proudly.

  “Yes, and you have dumped the actual job of raising them off on five separate females,” Ishtar snapped. “What you don’t understand, you stupid little man, is that since each of them only had one child, and since by law you have to have both a male and female genetics to produce a child, all of your ‘work’ to produce multiple children has been in vain. As long as women control reproduction, men are nothing but a source of DNA.”

  “Perhaps that should be changed as well,” Paul snapped. “Why should women control reproduction? If I want to have a child which is mine and another male’s, the choice should be mine. Or three children by my own genetics. What is wrong with that?”

  “Law and history,” Sheida interjected with a sigh. She looked at his surprised face and laughed out loud. “What? You thought because I didn’t object to your statements and that I have had minimal Change that I agreed with you? Far from it. Let us discuss your suggestion.”

  She leaned back, called up some texts for a moment’s review, then nodded. “In the… twenty-first century, the Iron Brotherhood was founded. Its stated intention was to ‘eliminate the scourge of womankind by replacing them.’ Using the relatively new DNA structuring abilities of the time, they grew children in early-model uterine replicators, ‘all male children from all male genetics.’ They only existed as a functional group for about three generations. The children were dysfunctional in the extreme since the average male has all the maternal instincts of a male leopard. By and large they were raised with minimal positive input and minimal interaction because males are lousy mothers.”

  “So you say,” Bowman snarled. “That is history so old that it’s practically fable!”

  “There are at least four similar failures in history, Paul,” she said with a thin smile. “Many of them closer in time. Individual males may be excellent mothers, but letting any old male uncork a child ‘just because’ is a route to another dysfunctional generation. And we’ve had far too many of those over the years. You really should do some research for a change instead of just listening to the voices in your head. Speaking of which, what sort of ‘work’ were you intending to enforce?”

  “I said nothing of ‘enforce,’ ” Bowman snapped.

  “As you wish. I’m not sure what other term to use for making people do things they don’t want to do and don’t have to do. But I’d like an answer to the question.”

  “It would be up to the individual,” Paul said. “But attainment of goods and energy would be dependent upon work. Manufacturing, services, that sort of thing. I have a five-year plan to shift from full replication to a work-based economy.”

  “ ‘A five-year plan,’ ” Sheida said with a groan. “Do you know how horrifying those words are to even a casual student of that history you dismiss as fable?”

  “What?”

  “Never mind,” she sighed. “The one thing we learn from history is that we’re doomed to repeat it. So you are discussing industrial work? For males and females? Or information technology work?”

  “It would be open to both,” Paul agreed. “And both.”

  “You do realize that in anything but a low-tech agricultural environment, there is no surety of population increase, right? That population growth is a market-based factor? And that it’s only low-tech agriculture that has a market for children? More hands to do the chores. That is not the case in an industrial society. Especially one where both sexes work.”

  “There have been plenty of industrial societies that had high population growth rates,” Celine Reinshafen said. The woman was dark and almost skeletally thin, her long black hair drawn back in a bun. She shrugged at Sheida and smiled thinly. “I know that much history.”

  “Generalities that you learned from your nanny are not what we’re dealing with here,” Sheida said. “All of those societies were in postagriculture adjustment or had a strong cultural emphasis on children. If we had a few million members of the Church of Latter Day Saints, Reform Zoroastrian or Islam we wouldn’t be in this situation.”

  “So you agree that there is a problem?” Chansa said. “Then why are you arguing?”

  “As Abraham Lincoln once said, ‘my esteemed colleague has his facts in order but his conclusions are in error.’ That’s why. Among other things, the rate of decrease is decreasing. Yes, Paul, I’ve b
een looking at the same thing for nearly a hundred years. It just occurred to you! Congratulations!”

  “So what is the answer?” Bowman asked. “And who in the hell is Abraham Lincoln?”

  “Give me strength,” she replied, looking upward. “Skip the literary allusions. The answer, as usual, is to leave it alone.

  “Look, there are more differences between men and women than plumbing. Something I don’t think you understand. We were talking about maternal instincts a moment ago. On a scale of one to ten, men average about four. Whereas women average about eight. There are women who can’t stand children or babies. Still most women think that babies are just adorable, but let other things get in the way of having them. Men, on the other hand, rarely think that babies are great. Women tend to coo and ooh and ahh over babies; men tend to give them a wide berth.

  “Some of this is still cultural, but most of it is genetic and the reason it’s cultural is that the genetics pressure the culture. If you want, I can get my sister to show you the individual genes. They express whether there is a general positive response to babies and children. Or, for that matter, small, furry animals. These responses can be masked by culture, but they are expressed much more aggressively in females than in males. With me so far?”

  “So why aren’t there enough children?” Aikawa asked.

  “Because, as Ungphakorn pointed out, children are a pain in the ass,” Sheida replied. “There isn’t a nanny yet designed that can give children the right kind of love and attention for maximum positive development; that takes a human and preferably a female. One female can do a decent job, especially with the quality of life in this era. One female and one male work okay, better than just a female. Multiple females and a male work pretty well, possibly better than straight monogamy. Multiple males and one female is suboptimum. One male depends on an unusual male. That’s all ‘in general’ and there is some flex on individuals. But those are the best patterns overall as proven by repeated and reproducible studies. End of child-rearing lecture.

  “But if you have kids, and are raising them well, they take up time, lots of it. So you end up spending time on your children that you could be using… other ways. And the world is filled with other things to do. Most people would rather surf or mass-game than answer ‘why, why, why’ questions all day long.

  “Most women realize this and realize that they are going to be doing most of the rearing. Those that don’t, learn after the first child. And if they give the kid away, the Net won’t let them replicate another; they lose the right.”

  “Another thing we could change,” Celine said. “Producing large numbers of fully viable human children is a trivial exercise. Indeed, there are still improvements that could be made to the human genome, despite the work that has been done over the centuries.”

  “Who is going to raise them?” Ishtar snapped. “What she just said is that most people don’t want to go to the trouble. We already have a slight surplus of unwanted children. Are you saying that we should have more?”

  “There’s also a cultural conditioning aspect,” Sheida said. “Human populations tipped over in the mid-twenty-first century and have been tending downward ever since. But our society still has a cultural mythos that ‘Gaea is wounded.’ Which is why nearly fifteen percent of total energy usage goes to repairing ‘environmental damage’ on a world where the last strip mine shut down a thousand years ago! People still think we have a population problem, so having passels of kids is societally frowned upon.”

  “And your point is?” Paul asked.

  “Women aren’t all the same, either,” Sheida continued. “There are women who through a combination of genetics and culture adore children. You can find them out there, the women who have had three, four, five children, despite the cultural prohibitions. Their bodies say ‘make babies.’ They don’t use their bodies anymore, thank God, what a God awful mess that would be, but they still raise the kids.”

  “One of the reasons that the rate of population decrease has been decreasing is an increasing trend towards those genes. Basically, women who didn’t want babies haven’t reproduced for the last two to three thousand years. I think we’re leveling off, or will in the next two, three hundred years. Also, we’re always pushing the boundaries of life extension. We’re up to five hundred years now. We could be over a thousand in the next century or so. That, right there, will change the premises.”

  “If we gain at all,” Paul said. “You have your trends to show, I have mine. The rate of scientific progress has dropped to nothing. Quantum jumping and replication were developed nearly five centuries ago and they were the last significant scientific breakthrough. Despite your pronouncements, the population rate is crashing and we are stagnating and falling into sloth and lotus-eating. We’re becoming less and less human every year and if we don’t do something, there may be no humans left. A crisis is upon us and you stick your head in the sand and prattle about ‘maternal genetics’!”

  “It’s not prattle, Bowman, it’s science,” Sheida said. “But logic seems to have left you behind. You want to make people ‘work,’ but at work that has never, historically, enhanced reproduction, work that has, in fact, tended to detract from it. I have to ask: can all of this work be done by those who have chosen to Change?”

  “The program may necessitate some adjustments to the Change… fad,” Paul said with a distasteful expression.

  “Oh, ho!” Cantor said. “Now we come to it! You want me to be a nice little humanoform and work in a… what’s the word, a place where things were made?”

  “Factory,” Sheida supplied.

  “You want me to be a nice little humanoform ‘working’ in a factory instead of what I choose to be!” He stood up, kicked back the chair and transformed. Suddenly, in the place of the large, hirsute “man,” a four-meter-high grizzly bear reared.

  “I doooo’ ’hin’ soooo,” the grizzly growled. He leaned forward and rested on the table, his long claws gouging the natural wood of the tabletop, as his head transformed back to human. “I’m not giving up my form for you, Paul Bowman! Nor am I going to force any of the Changed!”

  Ishtar caught Sheida’s eye and threw a Whisper into her ear. “Makes me glad he’s not a dragon.”

  “I think we’re done here,” Ungphakorn said. “The Finn isssn’t going to ssside with you, if he even bothersss to find out what the dissscusssion wasss about. The Demon might, but only for the chaosss that would ensssue. Ssso you need ssseven to implement.”

  “Nine,” Sheida said. “Revocation of the Change rules will require nine; they were implemented with eight votes. Actually, one of them was implemented with a unanimous vote of Council so you’ll have to get one of the Hacks to agree to override that one.”

  “Which was?” Ishtar asked.

  “ ‘No revocation of Change under conditions in which the Changed would be placed in mortal peril.’ So you’d have to recover all the mer-people, delphinos, whalers and all the rest before you could change them back. And the logistics of changing back all the mer and delphinos, alone, boggles the mind; it requires human intervention because of the risk factors. And then there would be the genetic flaws that would creep in during the process. Just what we need: more wild gene faults.”

  “Not to mention make sssure no one wasss flying when you took away their ability,” Ungphakorn added dryly. “You don’t have enough votesss to implement, Bowman, even with the Demon. Give it up.”

  “Never,” Paul said, getting to his feet. “The future of humanity is in our hands, and you are throwing it away. For fantasies of a race of maternal females arising from nowhere and…” he stopped and just gestured wordlessly at the quetzacoatl.

  “I do believe that you’re looking for the word ‘abomination,’ ” Ishtar said lightly. “Aren’t you?”

  “Yes!” Chansa snapped, his patience apparently gone. “Abominations! Dragons and unicorns and your precious mer-people! These are not humans! They are filth, nothing but degenerate FILTH
!”

  “Oh, my,” Ishtar said. “I do believe that we’ve annoyed our good Chansa. And let me ask you, boy, do your natural genetics indicate that you should be three meters tall and two hundred kilos?”

  “That is beside the point,” the council member growled. “At least I am human.”

  “Yes, well, I think that about sssettlesss that,” Ungphakorn said. “Thanksss for clearing up that little point. Time for a voiccce vote. I motion that the dissscusssion of waysss to forccce people to ‘work’ ssso that they begin breeding fassster and dissscusssionsss of forsss-able end to the ‘abominable’ Changed be permanently tabled.”

  “We haven’t heard from a few of the council members,” Sheida pointed out. “Minjie? Tetzacola? You’ve been unusually silent.”

  “That’s because we’re with Paul.” The answerer was Said Dracovich, but she gestured at the rest. “We six think that the best action to take is to enforce some restrictions. To… put pressure on the human race again so it can be strong. Expose it to the fire for a while to temper the steel.”

  “Oh, deary, deary, deary,” Ishtar said. “First we’re abominations and now we’re simple knife blades to be tinkered with.”

  “All of us do not consider the Changed to be abominations,” Celine said. “I have assisted too many Changes to consider it abomination. But Change is resource intensive and support of the Changed is more so; just look at Cantor for example. Such resource overuse redirects it from important projects.”

  She paused and smiled ingratiatingly at Ishtar. “I will add, though, that Change among the leadership would, of course, be fully acceptable. So no one in this room has anything to fear from this program.”

  “Riiigh’,” Cantor growled skeptically. He had shifted back to full bear form when Chansa started talking. “So no’ ’ere we’re being bribe’. I secon’!”

  “All in favor?” Ishtar asked.

  “A’,” Cantor said.

  “Aye,” Sheida.