“No,” I said.
“Pity. Well, briefly, an axolotl is a kind of tadpole, which has the genetic apparatus to metamorphose into a kind of salamander—but if there’s plenty of water around, it doesn’t bother. It grows sexual organs while remaining a tadpole, and breeds without ever producing a true adult. We think it’s a fairly common reproductive pattern in certain evolutionary phases—lots of new species seem to emerge during phases of rapid adaptive radiation by taking neotenic short cuts, so that larval forms begin reproducing themselves rather than completing their supposedly-full life-cycles.
“In your world, some insect larvae that feed on material that’s rare in general terms but tends to crop up in massive quantities when it does occur—the rotting wood from falling trees, say—have the option of developing sex organs as larvae and breeding as juveniles, often going through twenty or thirty generations like that before finally running short of food, pupating, and producing flies that hurtle off in every direction looking for another juicy fallen tree. Do you see the logic of the situation?”
“Yes,” I claimed, bravely.
“Well then,” Imhotep said, settling down on his oddly-jointed legs as if for a long lecture, “imagine what might happen to an insect species that developed intelligence in its larval form—and developed agriculture along with it. Agriculture provides the means to secure a permanent food supply, while the prospect of a reversion to idiocy provides a strong motive for trying very hard to avoid metamorphosis. My ancestors—like the ancestors of most of the species that developed self-conscious intelligence in our era—had the pedogenetic option, and they took it. Adults became very rare, and then almost mythical. Pupation came to be regarded as a fate worse than death, and for centuries those individuals unlucky enough to pupate were ritually destroyed. After a long period of time, though—during which our fledgling civilization flourished, and eventually gave rise to science—attitudes began to change. Pupation became a mystery to be solved, and an opportunity to be explored. We began to produce adults again—but the adults our nearer ancestors produced seemed to be defective, even by comparison with our modest expectations.
“We had to go back to our myths and legends to figure out exactly what we ought to expect of our adults, and why we didn’t seem to be getting it. We gradually began to realize that we’d lost something vital. Like most intelligent species, our early emergence from animal stupidity had corresponded with a massive extinction event, during which we’d wiped out a great many potential competitors. Our larval form was vegetarian, but our adults had been blood-drinkers, and the species we’d killed off included almost all of those from which blood could be drawn in any quantity on a regular basis.
“We realized, too, that blood-drinking hadn’t just been a matter of adult nutrition. Long before our larvae developed self-conscious intelligence our adults had developed a number of parental care strategies, which not only involved the protection of eggs and larvae but also the boosting of pupal metamorphosis by injections of blood. Over the course of time, our pupal form had got so much benefit from those injections that it became heavily dependent on them—a process whose interruption might well have been another key factor encouraging the development of pedogenesis.
“Now, of course—our now, that is, not yours—we don’t actually need to produce adults at all, and some of our people think that we shouldn’t even try. If we don’t, though, that leaves us with an awkward ethical problem in disposing of the chrysalides that occasional result when individuals spontaneously pupate. Another school of thought holds that if we are, in fact, morally or practically compelled to produce adults, then we ought to do everything possible to produce the best adults we can. Some of those individuals hold to a quasi-religious faith that if only we can find the right sanguinary catalyst, we might produce adults far better than those that nature used to produce in the remoter eras of our evolution. The ultimate goal, I suppose, would be an adult that retains, or even improves on, larval self-consciousness and intelligence.
“In the meantime, of course, a combination of natural mutations, selective breeding and—more recently—genetic engineering has allowed us to reproduce various aspects of adult form within essentially larval bodies. That’s what I meant by pedogenetic pseudometamorphosis. Some of us, inevitably, think that’s the way to go to produce something resembling an intelligent adult. Others, especially those inclined to various versions of evolutionary mysticism, disagree. Our explorations in time revealed soon enough that antique blood is better for our pupae than contemporary blood, and that blood from the mammals of much earlier eras than ours seems to be better still.
“The present experimental run—that’s your present, of course, although it’s ours too, in a peculiar sense—is only part-way through, but the results so far have proved astonishingly variable. There’s something in human blood, especially late twentieth-century human blood, which encourages mutational metamorphoses. Some of us entertain high hopes as to what the run might ultimately produce. Others, admittedly, see the project as a matter of mad scientists running amok and producing monsters—but you ought to understand that little disagreement well enough, if what I’ve seen in your movies is anything to go by.
“That’s the whole story in a nutshell. That’s why I’m here, and why you’re here, and why you’re hooked up in this admittedly undignified fashion. I’d say I’m sorry if I thought you’d believe me, but the fact is that I’m doing what I’m doing because I think it needs to be done, and you’re just one of the means that I believe the end justifies. Such is life—and now I have to go.”
The bug doctor didn’t wait for any further questions, but turned and made its exit. I got the impression that it was embarrassed by what it had told me, and that it really was a little bit sorry for the way I was being treated—but it didn’t come back again before I went to sleep. I have no idea how long that was, or how long I slept, but I didn’t get bored and I woke up feeling better than I had for some considerable time. It was a holiday of sorts, and—to tell the truth—it was a relief simply to be free of Mike’s increasingly resentful and accusatory presence.
Imhotep came in again on the second “day” of my confinement, and we talked again for what seemed like an hour or more. It filled in a bit more detail about the nature of the Third Arthropodan Era and the politics of time travel, but didn’t add much to the basics of his explanation. I got the impression that it was distracted, and that its heart was no longer in our conversation now that it had done what it considered to be its explanatory duty.
On that second day I put Imhotep’s distraction down to concern for the progress of his experiment. It certainly spent a lot of time hovering over the bloated football and making unobtrusive measurements of its progress. On the third “day”, however, Imhotep wasn’t alone when it came in. The newcomer didn’t introduce itself, and ignored me completely while it inspected the chrysalis with the utmost care, but it was easy enough to see that it and Imhotep were at odds. They clicked and whistled at one another incessantly, in what was obviously their native tongue, but Imhotep didn’t translate any of what was said for my benefit. Indeed, it seemed to be ignoring me, just as its adversary was—but it came back later to explain and apologize.
“As you probably noticed,” it said, “you’ve become the object of a minor controversy. Well, not you exactly, but the effect that your blood is having on the chrysalis.”
“Why?” I asked. “Am I turning it into something horrible? Something from the Outer Limits of the Third Arthropodan Era?”
“In your situation,” Imhotep observed, “I’m not sure I’d be able to see the funny side of that particular joke. But yes, something like that—something, at least, that we haven’t seen before.”
“But you don’t think it’s horrible,” I guessed. “You’re the crazy optimist who thinks it might just be the messiah you’ve all been waiting for: the superadult with brains as well as legs and a fancy carapace.”
“Let’s just say that I’m hopeful,” the bug said. “Hopeful, at least, that the thing