The Paradox of the Sets. Brian Stableford

with sterile suits should their filters be faced with an impossible job, but we had to use the oxygen sparingly, and it really offered only temporary relief. The carbon pills had little enough effect—I’d never really believed in them on Earth, on the occasions when I’d had to do high-altitude work. If anything were to stop us getting to the crater in one day it was surely going to be the atmospheric pressure.

      We tramped on across a wasteland of grass-knotted gravel that lasted for three or four miles, and finally got to the bottom of the saucer, where the thickness of the vegetation finally got to the point where it might impede us. But there was little enough of the thorny stuff here—much of the plant life consisted of brittle-stemmed things like ferns and small flowering plants. We found that the only significant nuisance was caused by tiny insects which settled on our faces and the backs of our hands—attracted perhaps by the moisture or the salt in our sweat. They didn’t bite, but one or two of the species apparently went through life secreting or excreting some irritant substance that made us itch.

      We found numerous small pools where the water of melted snows or spring rains had collected—some of them quite deep and obviously permanent. They tended to be long and narrow, often curved into thin crescents. The water was murky and rather foul in the small pools, and even the larger ones had a scum of vegetable debris and skimming creatures that might have been larvae of one kind and another. I saw water snails and rafts of eggs and shrimp-like invertebrates. We filtered some water and boiled it to replenish our own supply late in the morning, though it wasn’t necessary. It just gave us something to do while we were taking it easy. I calculated how far we’d come and found we were only a few minutes behind schedule.

      “They’re always the same,” said Nathan, who was watching a small flock of birds in the branches of a tree growing by the bank of the pool. “On every world we go to. The plants are different, to some extent, but not the birds. Even large animals are sometimes quite bizarre, but the birds are always the same. It almost asks you to believe that there’s a pattern in it all somewhere. When you come down to it, the differences in the intelligent forms are more striking than the similarities...especially with the species like the salamen. But you can always find sparrows made in the image of sparrows on Earth. Maybe God’s a sparrow.”

      “Whenever different cultures invent certain things they do it the same way,” I pointed out. “Whether it’s made by human or alien a wheel is always round. A bow and arrow is always a bow and arrow—even quite complicated things like saddles are made to fit an animal’s back one way and a human arse the other. An organism is a kind of technology too. It’s an egg’s way of making another egg. All eggs look pretty much the same—they’re either round or egg shaped. The ways they have of reproducing themselves are pretty much akin, too. An organism is a device; an invention. There are certain forms which are up to the job, and some that are capable of a certain amount of variability on a basic theme. Birds are one of the possibilities where there’s relatively little variation possible, and where virtually every possibility tends to be worked out in any one life system. Flying’s a good trick. It usually makes for evolutionary security, so what variation there is tends to come out. See?”

      “I think so,” he replied.

      “In the whole of evolutionary history here and on all the Earth-type worlds we’ve tried to colonize eggs have made exactly two vital inventions,” I went on. “The eggshell and the womb. All else is variation on a very few anatomical themes. You could count the internal skeleton as well, I guess, but on some worlds that are pretty far removed from the Earth model but still hospitable enough for us to investigate, animal life has got along without that particular invention. It still developed shelled eggs and wombs though. So there is a pattern—a stage-by-stage developmental process—just as there’s a pattern of sorts in technological progress. A truly alien world that is nevertheless habitable for man is alien in just one or two respects. Either it missed out on inventing wombs or it missed out on inventing eggshells, or maybe both. We haven’t yet found a world that shows us the other possibility.”

      “Which 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