“You mean you’re a doctor?”
“Absolutely.”
“And what, exactly, are you treating me for?”
“You’re not the patient, I’m afraid,” it said, in what might have been a crude attempt to fake an apologetic tone. “You’re the treatment.”
I looked at the thing in the cradle. “That’s your patient?” I said.
“Yes it is. Perhaps I should have said that your blood is the treatment—but I assure you that our using it won’t do you any harm at all. Blood is essentially a carrier, you see. At the risk of stretching the metaphor, you might say that we’re using your hemoglobin and its associated cofactors as a kind of catalyst, which facilitates certain chemical reactions but is then regenerated, so that it can be used over and over again in an endless cycle.”
The bug said all this rather blandly, as if it didn’t expect me to understand, and didn’t really care whether I did or not, but wanted for some reason to put on a show of honesty. It obviously didn’t know that I was a nurse, or that I’d been desperately revising my anatomy and physiology of late.
“Isn’t there an easier way to pump oxygen into the damn thing?” I asked it. “Taking an interstellar trip, then using a tractor beam to kidnap human beings from their bedrooms, merely in order to use the hemoglobin in their blood as a means of infusing an egg with oxygen, strikes me as the most ludicrously uneconomic project imaginable.”
“It probably would be,” the pseudonymous Imhotep agreed. “As it happens, though, we’ve disguised our apparatus as a spaceship for reasons of convenience. We haven’t had to take an interstellar trip, or even an interplanetary one. And yes, if it were only a matter of oxygenation, we could find simpler ways to do the job. Unfortunately, it isn’t. It’s a much subtler process of catalysis—which, I have to admit, we don’t fully understand ourselves. Also, it’s not an egg; it’s a chrysalis.”
It took me a minute or two to work my way through the complexities of the triple denial, but I got there in the end. I figured that I ought to take things a little more slowly.
“You’re not from another planet, then?” I said.
“No,” it said. “The little silver-skinned guys with the big eyes apparently claim to be extraterrestrial, and they’re probably not alone, but we don’t socialize with them any more than we socialize with others of our own kind. We often disguise our vessels as theirs, though, in order not to attract overmuch attention from other travelers. Everyone’s used to seeing the little guys hanging around this era.”
“So where do you come from?” I wanted to know.
“Earth, about three hundred million years downstream.”
“Downstream?”
“Down the time-stream—about three hundred million years in the future. The Third Arthropod Era. The insects of your world are our remote ancestors. Some of our scientists think that might have something to do with the fact that we still have a vestigial dependence on—or, at least, a vestigial affinity with—human blood. Personally, I don’t believe it. The hypothesis that we’re descended from human parasitic lice is at best unproven and at worst silly. The chain of evidence is broken in half a dozen places—global catastrophes and their consequential extinction events tend to mess up the fossil record somewhat. On the other hand, our adults do seem to need the catalytic infusion of mammalian blood if they’re to pupate successfully, and human blood does seem to work far better than any other kind. Whatever the explanation is for that, it’s bound to be at least a little crazy.”
By the time Imhotep had finished that speech I had several things on my mind, and it wasn’t easy to figure out which to tackle first. “So you got to be the way you are by having human blood pumped into you when you were a chrysalis?” I said, figuring that I really ought to demonstrate that I was capable of keeping up with his arguments.
“That’s a neat inference,” the bug conceded, “but I’m afraid it’s mistaken. I know that I look something like an adult, with the wing-cases and the legs and all, but actually I’m the result of what we call pedogenetic pseudometamorphosis. I never pupated—which might be regarded as a blessing, or as a lost opportunity, according to your point of view.”
I was now way out of my depth. Rather than ask it what the hell pedogenetic meant, though, I thought it might be more productive to change tack.
“You don’t have any humans in your world,” I inferred, “so you have to travel back in time to acquire human blood.”
“That’s right,” it said. “I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but your species becomes extinct in the not-too-distant future, when global warming causes a catastrophic release of methane from sea-bed clathrates. Most vertebrate species go with you, although a handful of rodents get through. The insects do better—though not as well as the worms, of course. The worms always pull through. Arthropodan Eras are relatively rare events, although they might be more common downstream of our time. As I said, we don’t socialize with time-travelers from our past or our future. It’s too dangerous. Nobody wants to create an unhealable rift in the fabric of history.”
“But snatching twentieth-century humans from their beds doesn’t count as changing history?”
“No. It happens all the time, thanks to the little silver-grey guys, and it never changes anything, even though their memory-wipes are always liable to go awry. Not that ours are perfect, mind—but our timing’s much better. The silvers are always returning people hours, or even months, later. With us, you can be sure that you won’t lose a single minute. You’ll be back in your bed within a few seconds of getting out of it, no matter how long you’re here. You won’t have aged measurably either—that cocktail we’re pumping into you to keep you healthy and happy is good stuff.”
“That’s good to know,” I told it. “Even so, you’re not exactly observing the principle of informed consent, are you? I know you’re calling yourself Imhotep rather than Hippocrates, but that doesn’t free you from the demands of medical ethics. Or do you think that just because you’re a giant bug, who isn’t even a true adult, while I’m only a long-extinct mammal, you don’t owe me any ethical consideration at all?”
“That’s fair comment,” the bug conceded. “To tell you the truth, we have occasionally tried to observe the principle of informed consent, but we’ve found that it leads to a drastic shortage of volunteers. Time travel isn’t as impractical as space travel, by any means, but it’s not so convenient as to allow us to waste a great deal of energy and effort. It’s an ethical compromise, I know, but we tend to skip the consent part—and I have to confess that even the information component is a bit of a swizz, considering that the memory-wipe will surgically remove all the information I’m currently giving you. The odds are a thousand to one against your actually remembering any of this when we put you back—and even if you do, the fact that you’ll only have been gone for five or six seconds will make it very difficult for you to believe that it was anything but a wacky dream. In that event, your brain will probably do its own memory-wipe, just as it does when you wake up every morning, to protect you from the possibility of mistaking your dreams for real experiences.”
“Actually,” I told it, “I’m quite good at remembering my dreams—and my nightmares too—although I rarely mistake them for real experiences.”
“That’s unfortunate,” Imhotep said, with all apparent sincerity. “I’d offer to treat you for it if I could, but it’s not my specialty. I’m a metamorphologist.”
“Right,” I said. “The overgrown football is your patient. I’m just the unconsenting blood donor. So what’s the problem you guys have with pupation? Why does your average chrysalis need a three hundred million year time trip if it’s to produce a healthy adult?”
I got the impression that it had been asked the question a dozen times before. Its answer was as