The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (116 page)

“Impossible,” he muttered. They couldn’t all be the same species.

His first instinct was to call the university. Then he remembered their note about mud daubers. Screw the university.

Besides, instincts were for animals. He’d solve this on his own.

He could figure it out, Bell was certain. He knew a lot about insects.

He knew insects had been among the first living things to walk dry land; they’d seen the rise and fall of dinosaurs, the birth of flowering plants. Humans weren’t the first species to farm, or to domesticate animals, or to war. Those milestones belonged to insects. When humanity first began its clumsy, ongoing experiment in agriculture, the Attine ants of South America had already long since perfected it – cultivating vast fungus beds in underground chambers in their nests, seeding carefully tended gardens with the clones of a fungus that linked back more than thirty million years.

Another species of ant, Lasius flaws, managed large flocks of domesticated aphids. The aphids were kept in subterranean corrals where they grew mature and succulent, grazing the roots of plants. And were then milked for their nutrient-rich honeydew.

Some termite mounds sprawled more than thirty feet in diameter, housing tens of millions of individuals, all bound up in a single sophisticated caste system. Soldiers of Macrotermes bellicosus developed jaws so huge that they could no longer be used in feeding; instead they relied on teams of lower-caste workers to lift sustenance to their mouths.

Insects build cities, and farms and superhighways. Slant your eyes and look hard enough, and you’ll see a level of social sophistication that can only be described as civilization.

Bell had often thought that humans had achieved their conspicuous position in the world not because of how perfectly adapted they were, but because of how weak, how clumsy, how fragile they were. How unsuited to existence.

One species of dairying ant secreted an enzyme from their heads that was carefully rubbed onto each aphid during the milking process. The enzyme disrupted wing development, preventing their aphids from ever flying away.

Where humans came up with external solutions – like building fences – insects often found a more elegant solution. A biological solution.

They’d had the time to do it.

Determined and cautious, Bell fed the grubs every day and wrote down his observations.

But still, Cole was the one who noticed it.

When Bell finally understood, his mouth dropped open. “Holy shit,” he said.

He looked at his notes.

He’d fed the insects one of three different diets. The insects which, as grubs, had eaten bread did not now have wings, but stunted twists of chitin. Their color was dull red, like rust. More beetle-like, less wasp. Now, as adults, they still preferred bread. The fruit-eaters still ate fruit. They were large-bodied and short limbed, with stumpy wings that buzzed loudly as it made awkward flights inside the terrarium. Bell could imagine them making those same flights between distant stands of fruit.

The meat eater was the most strange. Blood red, with wings like blades – mouth parts huge and angular.

“They adapted,” Bell said. “They adapted to the food sources they ate as grubs.” Bell shook his head in disbelief.

“Fast learners,” Cole said. Then he moved as if to stick an experimental finger in the meat-eater cage, but Bell said, “Don’t.”

Seana, when he showed her the hatchlings, said, “Can that happen?”

“There it is,” he said. But in his heart of hearts, he knew she was right to doubt. Like a million years of evolution in a single generation. No species adapts that quickly. It was a bad movie. Junk science. Not possible.

“But there it is,” he repeated.

The insects lived for more than a month. They buzzed, or crawled of flitted around their cages. Over the course of a single week the following month, they took turns dying.

The meat eater lived longest. After each die-off, Bell found egg-cases. He cleaned the terrariums, and put the egg cases back inside. Then he waited to see what would hatch.

*  *  *

Late one evening, Seana climbed up the ladder while he was in the barn loft at the petting zoo, checking the hay for rot. Climbed up and stood behind him until he turned around, then stood on her toes and kissed him.

If the zoo hadn’t been closed and nearly deserted, if Bell hadn’t known for sure that no one was likely to venture into the petting zoo, let alone climb into the loft, then maybe it would have happened differently. Maybe Bell would have kissed her back, because kissing would have been all that could happen.

But the zoo was closed. Bell did know. And it did happen the way it happened.

“I can’t,” he said.

She pulled away.

“I want to,” he said.

She looked at him, waiting.

Beneath them, the horses shuffled. Made noises. Kicked their stall doors and talked to each other in soft equine language.

He thought of Lin, home in their trailer. “I can’t,” he said again.

A black mood seized Bell on the way home. He drove the darkening highway, following his headlights into space. He pushed the old beater faster, watching the speedometer climb to seventy, then eighty. He took the curves without easing off the accelerator. The tires squealed, but held the road.

His mind was a movie of loves and hates. He loved and hated his job. Loved the animals, but hated the conditions. Hated that he couldn’t afford to live on what he was paid. When you’re young, he thought, they tell you that if you get a degree, everything else will fall into place. But it’s not that simple, is it?

Nothing – not one thing – had worked out like it was supposed to.

He thought of life at home, a second maze of contradiction. He was tired of being alone and together at the same time. He wanted to be free, but there was no freedom. No way out. He felt like an animal with a trapped limb. He understood why animals chew their own legs off. He had a recurring fantasy of being robbed, and putting up a struggle. If he were held up at gunpoint, he had decided, he would not cooperate.

He didn’t know what to think of Seana, yet. So he didn’t, at all.

Red like rupture. Blood squirm, a coagulation of grubs across brown terrarium stones. The egg cases pulsed like clotted hearts, spilling strange new life. Bell stared through the glass. Each cage told the same story.

The grubs were a centimeter long. Even as small as they were, Bell could see the mouth parts working. Each grub identical. As far as he could see, the differences which had been so apparent from cage to cage in the adult form were now absent from the next generation. The grubs were all the same, as if a reset button had been pushed. It was only the adult form that seemed vulnerable to change. Bell opened his sack lunch. He took out his apple and sliced it into a dozen pieces. He dropped a slice into the first cage. The grubs responded immediately, moving toward the fruit. They swarmed it.

Bell fed the grubs first thing in the morning.

He decided to turn it into an experiment. He stole a sheet of sticky-labels from the staff room and stuck a label to the side of six different terrariums. On each label, he wrote a different word.

The grubs labeled fruit were fed fruit; the grubs labeled meat were fed sliced-meat. The grubs labeled control were fed a mixture of foods.

The grubs with the cool sticker on the side of their terrarium were fed the control diet – but were also placed in refrigerator for an hour a day while Bell did his chores. An hour wasn’t long enough to kill them, but it was long enough to impact their physiology. They grew slower than the grubs in the other cages.

If these insects could really adapt to their environments, Bell was going to see how far he could push it.

He’d see if diet was the only pressure they responded to.

The grubs labeled heat were in a small glass aquarium placed on the floor near a space heater. Bell put his hands against the glass. It was hot to the touch. These grubs, too, seemed stressed by the temperature. But they still grew, doubling in size every week.

The grubs labeled carrion were fed the occasional discarded rat from the golden eagle enclosure. These were the grubs Bell found most interesting. They borrowed into the dead rat and ate it from the inside out.

Charles Darwin had believed in God until he studied the parasitic wasp Ibalia. Darwin wrote in a journal: “There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created wasps with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars.” Darwin found particularly gruesome that the Ibalia grub only gradually consumed the living tissues of its host – taking a full three years to complete its meal, saving the vital organs until last as if to extend the host’s suffering. Darwin couldn’t imagine a God who would create something like that.

Bell could imagine it.

He thought of the reset mechanism. He imagined a single insect species with multiple phenotypes already encoded in its genome – a catalogue of different possible adult forms. And all it took was a trigger to set the creature down its path.

“Maybe it’s like blind cave fish,” he told Seana one evening.

He watched Seana’s face as she peered through the glass.

“Cave fish have most of the genes for eyes still carried in their DNA,” he said. “All the genes required for lenses, and retinas and eyelids, all the genes except for the one crucial ingredient that starts eye development in the first place. If you cross-breed two different populations of blind fish, sometimes you get fish with eyes.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” Seana said.

“It does if the blindness is recessive, and the two populations are blind for different reasons.”

“But you said these things aren’t breeding.”

Bell ignored her, lost in thought. “Or they’re like stem cells,” he continued, “each carrying the genes for multiple tissue types, multiple potentials, but they specialize as they mature, choosing a path.”

He leaned forward, tapping his finger on the glass.

“Where do you think they come from?” Seana asked.

“The fruit maybe. The bananas. Central America. I’m not sure.”

“Why can’t you find it in books?”

“There are millions of insect species still un-described by science. Besides, maybe it has been described. Some version of it. I mean, how would you really know?”

Later, searching for reasons to avoid going home, Bell ran down his closing checklist twice.

On his second round, he found the outer door to the lemur tunnel wide open.

He had locked it himself Checked it himself.

His inner alarm went off.

Zookeepers developed inner alarms, or they developed scars.

He stepped through the door, and let his eyes adjust to the dark, to the long, mildewy tunnel which ran under the moat, to the lemur island.

At the end of the tunnel, bright light, because the door at the island end was open, too.

In the middle, a silhouette. Who . . . ?

“Hey!” Bell shouted.

Several silhouettes. Sharp, jabbering shadows. Five or six lemurs hopped and shrieked.

The shadow in the middle wound up like a pitcher and threw something.

A yelp. The lemurs howled and ran.

“Cole?” called Bell, starting down the tunnel.

One lemur didn’t run. It whirled in confusion, chattering.

Bell’s eyes had adjusted. The shadow grew details. Cole.

Cole, with a handful of smooth, white landscaping stones, eyes wide with rage.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Bell shouted.

“They threw shit at me. They threw their fucking shit.”

“Jesus Christ—!” Bell yelled, lurching forward.

Cole turned, arm pistoning in the dark.

The stone whistled past Bell’s ear and struck hard against the outer door. The tunnel echoed.

Bell froze.

Cole stepped toward him. “You watch how you talk to me,” he said, and for a moment they stared at each other, waiting to see what would happen. Then Cole’s eyes changed – the rage blown out of them like a gust of wind. Cole brushed past him and was gone.

The lemur groped its way back into the light, back to the island.

Bell unfroze, closed up, and said nothing. He’d have to say something, wouldn’t he? Something would have to be done. Right?

He made a mental note. In the future, he wouldn’t let crazy people into his life. He meant it.

Metamorphosis is magic. Darwin had know this, too.

Sometimes it is a dark magic.

The metamorphosis of a tadpole into a frog. A grub into a wasp. A friend into an enemy.

Bell watched the grubs feed. By now they’d grown huge. Some approached five inches in length, blood red, large beyond all reason. Soon they would spin their papery cocoons. Turn into whatever they would turn into.

Bell pondered the advantage of such an adaptive mechanism. Perhaps it was a way to guard against overspecialization, a reservoir of adaptive potential. Evolution is a slow process, and when conditions change, populations take time to react. There is a lag; species that don’t change fast enough die out.