“That’s monster movies for you,” I said. “Don’t expect any sympathy from me—I’m just the nubile underdressed starlet supinely helpless on the mad scientist’s operating table. According to the script, all I have to do is scream. Given what you’ve been feeding that thing these last three days, isn’t it more likely to devour me than you.”
“You blood isn’t feeding it,” Imhotep reminded me. “It’s just a catalyst. It provides oxygen, and that mysterious something extra—something, I presume, that the immunoglobulins do, or maybe the clotting factors.…”
“You need to find out, then pop back in time to tell yourself how to do the job properly,” I said. “What’s the point of time travel is you can’t tip yourself off when you need a helping hand?”
“It doesn’t work like that,” it said. “You can’t socialize with other time-travelers, and that goes double for yourself. This is the finding out part of the story all right—but once we have the information, we’ll only be able to carry it forward. Trying to tie time in knots is worse than making material changes in history. It’s the sort of thing that’s likely to lead to elimination.”
It sounded genuinely anxious—almost as if it were worried about the possibility that it had already shot some kind of hole in the continuity of history—not, of course, by removing me from the cold marital bed to which it would ultimately return me, but by using my blood as a transtemporal catalyst to produce a kind of adult that its species had never known before, and might not like very much.
Personally, of course, I didn’t need to care—except, maybe, about the slim possibility that the damn thing would turn on me and do horrible things to me. Whether Imhotep and its snooty buddy regarded the product of my catalysis as a monster or messiah was all the same to me. To me, it would just be another bug, a louse writ large.
I couldn’t help being interested, though. Even if I wasn’t really the damn thing’s mother, or even its midwife, I was doing my bit. It would owe its form—and perhaps even its thoughts, if it were capable of having any—to me.
Imhotep’s adversary came back repeatedly on the fourth day and the fifth, sometimes on its own—but even when it didn’t have Imhotep around it pointedly refused to look at me or talk to me. It obviously had a very different view of medical ethics, or the degree of ethical consideration owed to a mere extinct mammal. Imhotep apologized for its colleague’s behavior, but I could tell that its heart wasn’t in the apology.
On the sixth day, the chrysalis began to crack. As soon as that happened, Imhotep came in with no less than three others of its own kind, two of them far more obviously larval in aspect than it or its familiar adversary was. The three others soon cleared out, though, leaving Imhotep to supervise the emergence solo. I soon developed a nagging pain in my neck straining for a better view, but I never gave up no matter how irksome it became. This was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and I didn’t want to miss a thing. Nor did I.
Bit by bit, the thing emerged, and I watched every moment of the process. I had been harboring the vague hope that my catalytic blood might produce something more human than bug, but that hope was dashed as soon as the thing began to ease itself out, wing-cases first. The ground color of the wing-cases was yellow rather than red, and its ladybird spots were very faint, but there was nothing particularly unusual about them. The wings themselves, when it had stretched them to their full extremity and dried them, were beautifully diaphanous, but very obviously insectile. The legs, which it poked out one at a time, were darker in hue and somewhat sturdier than Imhotep’s, but they too were exactly the sort of thing one might expect to see on a giant grasshopper, save for the forefeet ingeniously modified as manipulative hands, which looked exactly like Imhotep’s.
“This thing’s related to you, isn’t it?” I guessed, as I watched Imhotep busy itself obsessively with its machines and various items of movable apparatus. “Not just in a species sense, but in a kin sense. Is it a sibling?”
For a moment, it seemed that Imhotep would refuse to answer the question, but then it thought better of it. “My offspring,” it said, shortly.
It was the first time I had cause to wonder whether I was really correct to think of it as “it”. “Are you its mother or its father?” I asked.
“Neither,” it said. “Sex is the prerogative of adults. Pedogenetic reproduction is a short cut in more ways than one. It’s my clone—or was. It still would be, if it weren’t for its capacity for mutation. Thus far, though, it doesn’t seem.…”
The reason Imhotep stopped was that the head of the adult had finally appeared. Imhotep’s own head, I remembered, was the result of pedogenetic pseudometamorphosis. There was no reason to expect the head of its clone-sibling’s adult incarnation to resemble it closely. It did resemble it very closely, though; it had similar big dark eyes, and a similar mouth with similar teeth and a tongue, shaped for pronouncing the syllables of human languages as well as well as those of its own species.
Except, of course, that it didn’t know any human languages. Imhotep’s clone-sibling had not had the same opportunity, or the same motive, to learn any language that Imhotep had learned while it was a larva. Imhotep’s larval clone-sibling had only known its own language—a language it ought to have forgotten, if the normal course of specific development had been followed.
Once the monster’s head was free, it was able to stand up slowly on its four hind legs, and to use its hand-like forefeet to free itself of the debris of its cocoon. While it did so, it looked down. Not until it had finished did it look up—not at Imhotep, but at me.
It looked at me with intelligence in its eyes, and with compassion. It looked at me with love. It didn’t say a word, because it couldn’t, but I understood. Imhotep understood too. Imhotep understood that I had worked the miracle, that I had catalyzed the production of the first self-consciously intelligent adult that its species had ever produced.
Imhotep spoke to its recently-metamorphosed clone-sibling, but the clone-sibling made no reply. It continued looking at me, and its silent gaze told me everything I needed to know.
I’m not claiming that we exchanged ideas telepathically, or even that there was any kind of quasi-magical empathy between us, but there was a bond, and there was understanding. I knew it, and so did Imhotep.
The monster took a single step towards me, which brought it close enough to be able to reach out with one of its vast and clumsy hands to caress my throat. All the while it was looking directly into my eyes—and now it came close enough to be able to do so without my having to strain my neck.
I was able to lie back, and make myself more comfortable, while the creature from the chrysalis moved its head to a position directly above mine, so that it could look down at me gratefully, fondly and admiringly. It didn’t matter, just then, that I was a long-extinct mammal, while it was a God-knows-what from the Third Arthropod Era. There was a bond between us more intimate than that between any Earthly mother and child, or between any Earthly pedogenetic clone-parent and clone-sibling.
I felt perfectly happy, for the first time in my adult life.
Then the others burst in, all armed with ugly ray guns, and shot the thing to pieces.
Imhotep tried to stop them, and was gunned down too.
That was when I started screaming.
I must have blacked out soon afterwards, presumably because whatever was in charge of my drip feed doctored the input with a powerful narcotic. When I woke up, I was back in my own bed.
The clock on my bedside table said that it was twenty past three, but it wasn’t—not so far as I was concerned.
It wasn’t the end of the world, either, but it certainly wasn’t twenty past three—not for me.
I remembered everything, probably because the confusion aboard the alien timeship had been too great to allow them to do the memory-wipe properly. My brain might have attempted its own