Donald Moffitt - Genesis 01

“It had six legs. But they were paired.”
    Voth sighed: a rush of wind and a relaxation of muscle. “It is called a nymph.”
    The word, as Voth pronounced it, had an Inglex ring to it. After a moment, Bram remembered. It came from the translation of Homer. A nymph had held Odysseus prisoner in a cave.
    “It is a stage in the development of a particular terrestrial life form,” Voth went on, as if the words were painful. “The adult form is quite different—an air breather with wings. It lives for only a brief mating season. But the immature nymph form may persist for two or three years. It is one of the most dangerous creatures in its particular ecological niche. It exists only to eat other life forms—some of them as large as itself. Swimmers, crawlers, even small manlike amphibians.” Voth broke off, as if the subject were distasteful.
    “What was the adult form called?” Bram asked.
    “A dragonfly.”
    Bram knew about dragons. He shivered. The adult form must have been a fearsome creature indeed.
    “Why … why would the message senders have expended data time on such an organism?”
    “As a warning.”
    “Warning?” So the source of all those danger flags had been Original Man himself. The Nar records would have amplified them, adapted them for Nar sensibilities, and spread them through the associated data frames.
    “A warning to whomever might have received the first cycle of the message.”
    “It was in the codicil, then?”
    “Yes.” A fountaining wave front of cilia movement showed that Voth was uncomfortable with the subject. “The dragonfly genetic information—not complete, fortunately—had been sent earlier as part of a particular genetic exposition. Fifty years later, they had … cause to regret it. They decided to communicate their … second thoughts.”
    Handle with care. That was the meaning of the warning flags that had kept Bram at arm’s length from the data.
    “May I know the nature of this genetic exposition, Voth-shr-voth?” Bram asked formally.
    “Of course.” Voth’s fibrillar membranes dilated contritely. “When have I kept anything from you, even as a child? You are entitled to the information available to any junior of good sense and judgment.”
    The juniors in the department were at least a couple of centuries old. The implicit meaning of what Voth had just said was best passed over, and he went on quickly.
    “The dragonfly was one of a number of earthly life forms with extended immature stages. Only the imago— the adult form—reproduced. The humans conducted experiments to modify the cellular timing mechanism, to see if sexual maturity could be induced in the aquatic form.”
    “Heterochronic genes,” Bram said, beginning to understand.
    “Their purpose was to make the arctic regions of their home planet more habitable. A modified nymph, they thought, would control small biting insects called blackflies and mosquitoes that still inhibited full exploitation of these regions, even at the height of man’s technological prowess. Such organisms, it seems, were also water-breeding. And the nymph devoured anything that swam.”
    Voth’s sensitive tentacle lining fluttered in a manner that in a human being would have been called a shudder.
    Bram could empathize with Voth’s instinctive revulsion. Voth was visualizing the tiny swimmers that would be his own children, after he had expended his life in mating—and imagining a creature like a dragonfly nymph gobbling them up.
    “The key to a synthetic heterochronic gene was found in a peculiar creature called an axolotl,” Voth went on. “The axolotl was the larval form of a kind of animal known to humans as a salamander. But unlike other salamanders, the axolotl spent its entire life as a larva. It was able to reproduce without undergoing metamorphosis to its adult stage. It retained its gills and lived and died as an aquatic form. Human scientists believed it to be a separate species until, by chance, some axolotls on exhibition changed into air-breathing adults, as axolotls cut off from water will sometimes do.”
    Bram furrowed his brow. “The heterochronic mutation would have to be a dominant one. But if it could be turned off, it means—”
    “Dominant heterochronic mutations cause particular cell lines to repeat immature patterns instead of developing. Recessive heterochronic mutations, on the other hand, cause premature development of other cell lines.”
    “Yes, I see. Axolotls were a