is?”
“Making the third vital invention, of course. We don’t know what it is because our life-system hasn’t...yet.”
“I see,” he said, again. But perhaps he didn’t, because he retreated to his original point. “So birds will always look like birds. And intelligent creatures will be humanoid at least to the extent of being bipedal.”
“Not necessarily,” I said. “To be intelligent you need a big brain. There’s more than one way to arrange that particular mechanical marvel. Upright stance is one, which also frees the forelimbs of quadruped to grow hands. But another way is to live in the sea, where weight isn’t so desperately important. The amphibians of Wildeblood had it both ways. A marine mammal like a dolphin may not have hands, but he can be pretty bright and can develop a language. Even a marine reptile, or perhaps even a fish, might do as well, if the chances fell right. Even that might be ultra-conservative, particularly with reference to those worlds where there are no vertebrates. There’s no mechanical reason that bans invertebrate nervous systems from growing complex organs and networks. The squid and the octopus are the cleverest Earthly invertebrates, but I don’t find it inconceivable that on some world with lots of warm ocean there might be intelligent invertebrates on just about any model. Submarine life is more versatile than life on land—even on Earth quite unremarkable and utterly unintelligent marine invertebrates have a degree of technological control over their environment that puts proto-human apes to shame. Barnacles and coral-polyps, tube-building worms and such like things show off the potential.
“Sometimes I wonder whether on a galaxy-wide scale that might be where the real potential lies, and that every thing we are and do might be just a useless side-branch in the really basic evolutionary schema. On Earth, life was tempted out of the sea...and maybe life on Earth won’t get back to the evolutionary mainstream until we bizarre land-life experiments abort ourselves with nuclear weapons and a kind of intelligence that may well be self-destructive. Life on Earth—and on all the Earth-type worlds—may hardly have started yet. The oxygen atmosphere might be just a phase that worlds pass through on their way to a maturity we can’t imagine. We may be just part of a brief exploratory digression that can only come to nothing in the end.
“The oceans were there before the particular atmosphere we call natural, and the oceans may still be there when that atmosphere is changed into something else by the ongoing chemical processes of life. When we go out into local space searching out worlds like ours we may be seeking out only those in a particular stage of immaturity, or maybe worlds that have become stuck in a kind of dead end. Maybe the places where the real pattern is—the places where the real story of life in the universe is being acted out—are places very different from this one. Our delusions may be just a cosmic joke. Maybe true alienness does exist at a level of intelligence we can’t comprehend...and we can never come to terms with it; never reach it; never coexist with it; never be a part of it.”
“Bad attack of philosophy you have there,” said Nathan, dismissively.
I was uncomfortably aware of the fact that I was blushing.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “It isn’t catching. Though it was you that started it.”
“Even if it were all true,” he said—oddly enough, I think he was trying to reassure me as though I’d just confessed some terrible existential doubt—“il faut cultiver notre jardin. Quite candidly.”
“I never wanted to suggest anything else,” I told him. “This is where we belong. This and all the worlds like it. This is our universe and all the others don’t matter a damn until we bump into some chlorine-breathing octopodes driving their starship through the vasty deep...and even then we can content ourselves with saying “hello” and passing on our separate ways. The plan of life in the universe and its ultimate destiny is nothing whatsoever to do with us. There isn’t any implication for human existence in anything I’ve said. We’re entitled to be anthropocentric, and we’d be fools to be anything else. But it doesn’t do any harm to speculate. Sometimes...only sometimes...I think it might even do us good. To see ourselves as others might see us, as we really might be in terms of the cosmos itself and its own history. As God might see us, if you like.”
“But He isn’t a bird. He’s a giant squid.”
“I don’t know. Nobody can. I can’t imagine God, but I see no reason why an anthropomorphic God should be any more likely than a crinoid or holothuridean God in terms of what actually might be the pattern and the plan of universal life.”
“You take it too seriously,” he told me.
“No doubt,” I replied. “No doubt.”
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.
