Chromosome Quest Read online

  Moments later, he wiped his eyes and shook his head. Then still suppressing laughter, he explained. “You're wrong on two counts. First, these people are as fully human as you and I. Don't let their lovely fur covering fool you. That is merely an insignificant genetic expression of genes we both possess. A competent geneticist could tweak your genes and in a week have you grow a coat just as luxurious.

  Second,” he continued, “I am not an earth-man, I am not from your planet at all. Yes, I have lived on Earth for a long time and studied your culture. Not well enough, apparently, however.”

  He sighed and clapped me on the back, “Boy, the fault is not yours, it is mine. I misjudged you and the culture from which you come, a culture I have studied extensively. I should have understood the position I was putting you in, and yet I did not. I have committed a grievous error. It is for me to fix things. If I can.

  “I often seem to fail at grasping taboos. I failed to comprehend the taboo you faced when confronted with a very young lover. The concept of 'jailbait' is very different, even nonexistent in other places. No mature culture condones harming children, of course. Only uncivilized, brutal savages would permit the kind of abuse you imagine, not that there are not a few of those around, but the boundary between what constitutes a child, and what constitutes abuse can vary widely, and this one is a bit of an outlier I admit.

  “I simply never considered that a man of your obvious virility and sexuality, so long without a sexual partner, would for a moment hesitate when with a very willing and attractive female, furred or not. That you would consider her a child and balk at violating your taboos was something I failed to anticipate. You did nothing wrong. Still, we are in quite a pickle.”

  I released a small ironic laugh. “She was indeed very willing, and very attractive. I think she would have had me right there at dinner. I was exerting every ounce of self-control I could muster to avoid embarrassing myself with a massive erection in front of the whole dinner crowd.

  “But what do you mean by that remark about how long it has been for me. We only met today. Or is today still today?”

  “I suppose we did skip a few time zones. But no, I have been observing you your entire life. The present contretemps notwithstanding, I think I know you most ways better than you know yourself.” My eyebrows shot up at that. He motioned me back, “Time enough to explain later; I promise I will tell all in due time. If we survive.

  “Trust me, son, had you not only aroused but blatantly pinned your Lolita against the table smack in the midst of dinner, there would have been no shock or embarrassment in the audience. Resounding applause, most likely. Sex is a spectator sport here. Your taboos are not their taboos!”

  At the expression on my face, he went on, “These people are dying. You no doubt noticed a paucity of males. And children. It has been over a decade since a child was born in this house. Their few remaining men no longer produce the y-chromosome in any useful quantity. If they can make a baby at all, it is invariably female. They have not had a male child in this house in several decades. When we first met, Stapleya mentioned, and I translated, that she was delighted to receive your boon.

  “That was no idle chatter.

  “They desperately need male babies with healthy heterogametic determinants. That is part of your mission here. Yes, Williya is very young, but she is a fully adult woman in her culture in every way that matters. More importantly, she is a fertile female, an extraordinarily important detail. She wants, desperately needs your seed. She and as many of her sisters as you can manage. By denying her, you insulted her, you hurt her badly, not just her, but her entire people. I need to go see if I can repair that hurt.”

  Sitting in stunned silence, my mouth opening and closing soundlessly, “I had no idea....” I stammered.

  He stood, and put his hand on my shoulder, and looked me in the eye. “Do I have your word that if I can fix this, you will bang the living daylights out of every fertile female they make available?” Glumly, I nodded.

  With that Petchy left me alone. I sat in silence, contemplating.

  Somewhere in the distance, I heard screaming and shouting. Ominous language became louder and louder, becoming a virtual brawl. I don't know how long the altercation went on, but after a time, the noise subsided and all was quiet. For a long, long time, things were very, very quiet.

  Then Petch reappeared, disheveled, sweaty and spent.

  “That woman would wear out a bronze statue!” he expostulated. “I won't bore you with the details. I'm too whipped to do any more boring right now. But your apology is accepted. Their desperate need for your healthy y-chromosome outweighs the hurt and insult you unwittingly inflicted. We don't die this night!” He seemed relieved.

  Well, so was I.

  I suppose commutation of a death sentence will do that for a man.

  He added, “Your little Lolita is determined to have you to herself tonight. She is already planning the coming birth. She will be here as soon as she finishes bragging to her sisters.

  “Tomorrow they will be queued up outside your door, taking numbers to stand in line for your seed. Talk about the labors of Hercules; he got off easy. He only had to perform twelve! Oh, and by the way, I had to explain the story of Lolita, and she likes the name. You might call her that in the heat of passion.”

  With that parting shot and a wink, he left.

  Training

  I didn't sleep much that night, and while Petchy's comment about my suitors queuing up and taking numbers was hyperbole, it was only slightly so. They didn't draw numbers.

  In between bouts of copulatory calisthenics, I soon learned I had other duties. Topmost was learning the language. Or ‘Language’ as they think of it. For the most part, they have little concept of other languages, and zero incentive to give their own a special designation. Stapleya, to my surprise, was my teacher. I discovered that she already knew some English. Not much, almost none in fact. A few words here and there, although I would later learn she had been playing possum. Petchy had been here many times over the years, and she had absorbed a lot through osmosis, I presumed. Only much later would I learn that she was playing dumb, and understood far more English than she would admit.

  With the little of Language I had picked up vocamotically and the little she admitted of English, we soon began to communicate. By the end of the week, I had a passable dictionary of common terms and was starting to focus on pronunciation and syntax. I was surprised to recognize that the two years of Latin, the year of French, and the year of German I had studied in school were all helpful. I resolved that I must ask Petch about possible cross-pollination between worlds.

  Although unlike any Earthly language I knew, theirs was recognizably a 'Romance' language, seeming derived from the same common root as Latin. Learning it was difficult, but there was enough commonality to ease the difficulty.

  Along the way, I learned that they do, in fact, have a written language. I had wondered about that. What they lacked were proper materials with which to construct books. She showed me the family library. Roughly two dozen huge volumes consisting of thin sheets of copper, with letters stamped into the surface, quite a number of linen scrolls with the letters burned into the fabric. They had a very crude sort of paper that seemed to be made from vegetable matter, but which was fragile and delicate, and disintegrated rapidly when handled. And chiseled stone tablets. Hundreds and hundreds of them. They did not have viable inks. They had carbon, some chalks, and a few pigments, which had permitted the paintings I had seen. Real paper, proper inks, and other common bibliographic items were not abundant.

  This was indeed a stone-age culture and about all they had to work with was stone. They had a lot of stone, precious little metal, mostly copper and a minute amount of bronze. They understood the basics of metallurgy, what they lacked was raw materials. It seems this planet is incredibly parsimonious with natural bounty.

  Standing at stud and studying Language occupied most of my time, especially in the first w
eeks. Except for two hours in the morning, and two hours in the afternoon. This time was devoted to physical training. If I had been shocked by what I had seen up until now, I was positively stupefied when I received my first lesson. Frankly though, my shock circuits were in overload. I never had much practice doing so before, but now I regularly believed the impossible. Some days I believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast!

  I had noted before that Petchy was rather muscular. I had no clue! It was the third morning of our sojourn on this 'Planet Oz.' Petchy had thus far declined to tell me the name of the planet, or much of anything else. When I asked, he kept saying he would explain all in due time, but I should relax and take things one day at a time.

  Petchy took me to a large clearing some distance from the residence and explained this was to be my training field. The first goal, he stated, was strength training.

  I told him I was admittedly no jock, but I was quite trim and fit and had once had some formal strength training. Despite a career path that kept me seated in front of a computer many long hours at a time, I felt I was in pretty good shape for a computer engineer.

  He guffawed loudly at that!

  I was, he explained, too sedentary in my lifestyle, and lacked the proper nutrition. Any strength I had developed on Earth would pale in comparison to what I was about to achieve. As he talked, we had walked into the training field, and I was surprised to see some quite reasonable barbells on display, ready for use. They were of polished stone, not metal, but serviceable.

  He demonstrated his point by walking over to and hoisting with one hand a rather formidable weight. With little visible strain, he casually picked it up with one hand and handed it to me. I reached out to take it and quickly realized that this was much too heavy for me to hoist one-handed easily. I took it with both hands and found even then I was overwhelmed. With a loud grunt and overloaded muscles, I lowered it to the ground, straining with the unexpected effort.

  “Point taken” I conceded. “What sort of training do you have in mind. I know many athletes develop great strength by using anabolic steroids at a profound cost to their health. Is something like that what you're suggesting?”

  He smiled, “Yes, and no. That is, yes, we are going to augment your Earth-developed physique with a combination of nutrients and training, but the nutrients are natural to this world and have none of the harmful side-effects of steroids. They are also much more effective. Steroids on steroids, it will seem.”

  “Really?” I asked. “Every drug I know has severe negative side-effects.”

  “True! Of every drug you know. Perhaps it will help if you merely think of this as taking natural nutrients. Trust me, my boy, this is like Viagra for the Biceps. You're gonna love it!”

  “So when do I start this vitamin regimen?” I asked.

  “You already have” he answered. “The nutrients in question occur naturally in the soil, and in the vegetables. Especially root vegetables. All you need to do is eat your veggies and work out.”

  “That doesn't sound too dramatic,” I allowed. “What is the exercise regimen that is going to yield all of these results?”

  “It will vary. For starters, you are going to do pushups. A lot of pushups. Pointing to a square stone pad before us, he commanded, “Start now.”

  “How many?” I asked.

  “Let's not set a number. Just start and let's see how it goes.”

  And so it began...

  That first session he let me off with one hundred push-ups. I was winded when I stopped. I was proud of being able to do it, although I found my muscles screaming in pain from the unaccustomed effort. I guess I had been somewhat sedentary of late. That afternoon he pulled out a crude hourglass and challenged me to do 100 pushups before the sand all fell through the hole. I made it to 90 and got chastised for being a sluggard.

  Petch demonstrated what he expected by resetting the hourglass and then smartly counting out 250 pushups, with some grains of sand still to fall when he stopped. I was surprised and impressed. I thought of the earlier evening when I had angrily gotten in his face. Perhaps I was closer to death that night than I had been told!

  One thing I realized is that there is a rhythm at which pushups become much easier. Done slowly, you are supporting your whole body weight on your arms for an extended time. Done quickly and rhythmically, you are only giving short, rapid pushes with your body's inertia doing the rest, and your arms rest between strokes.

  Suddenly motivated, massaging my biceps, I fell-to and gave my best shot at equaling his feat. I failed, although I improved on my first try by a fair amount .

  Not all of our exercises were traditional, formal exercises with no purpose other than muscle-building. A stone-age society has endless jobs that are perfect for strength-training workouts. I had noticed how firmly muscled the fur-folk were from our first meeting, and I soon came to understand why. A primitive lifestyle is a lot of work!

  The first exercise I was introduced to which had a more practical bent than merely doing pushups was swinging a maul! A large household, even in this hot tropical climate, needs lots and lots of firewood. Heating water, cooking, cleaning and so on require heat, which in turn requires fuel. Without any form of fossil fuels, fuel means wood. Lots and lots of wood.

  There is an art to swinging a maul, to splitting the wood just right. I came to love that satisfying thunk! You must put your whole body into it if you are going to get it right.

  The proper tool for splitting wood is not an axe, a common misconception. The appropriate tool is a maul! A maul is much heavier, larger and has a broader head. Sharpness isn't a huge factor; you're not cutting wood, or chopping it. You're splitting it! A maul ends in a point, but it need not be especially sharp. Even if it is sharp at some point, it will quickly dull, and if the edge is too thin, it will chip and break easily.

  The challenge then is not to break it or damage the edge and keep it smooth and somewhat pointy.

  Chopping wood is effective for muscle-building. First, you take a large piece of seasoned wood. If the wood is green, leave it a few months. The fur-people had a huge stack of wood from trees previously felled, sitting in the sun to that end. Had, as in past tense, before we came here to train.

  Trees are felled, cut into rounds, slices about 18 inches long and left in the sun to dry. Then when they have become seasoned, these rounds are split into fireplace sized chunks.

  You set your large piece of seasoned wood on a chopping block. You then position yourself such that when you swing with straight arms, your maul hits the wood right in the center. Be very careful not to miss. If you must miss, miss on the side closest to you. Missing on the far side risks breaking the handle. Better to hit dirt than break the handle. The fur-people were miffed at me until I got the hang of it.

  Swinging the maul takes practice to get right. Make sure there is nothing nearby you might damage, especially humans and animals. Stand and face the wood, lift the maul straight over your head with both arms. Let the maul pull back behind your head as far as you can and still control it, and then swing it forward using the strong muscles of the upper back, bringing the shoulders and biceps into the act as it arcs over your head and descends, finally going lax as the maul impacts the wood.

  Build up your speed and let the momentum and weight of the maul do the work, not your brute muscles. As the maul strikes the wood, relax your arms so as to dissipate the shock without carrying it up into your shoulders. Keeping your arms and muscles stiff, powering into the wood with your muscles adds little to the impact and is very stressful on your arms and shoulders. Limp muscles do not transmit the shock.

  Do it right, and the wood splits with a roundly satisfying crack. Do it often, and you build tremendous strength in the shoulder and back muscles. I did it often until the wood ran out.

  Many other tasks of the stone-age household were similarly good exercise. Carrying water was a good stand-in for lifting weights. I also pulled a plow, which is a hilarious story of
itself. I was shocked to learn there were no large draft animals on Planet Oz. Horses, oxen and such simply were not available, the best draft animal being humans!

  I spent the next several weeks in this manner, doing pushups, lifting weights, splitting wood, carrying water, and learning Language, lifting more weights, and baby-making gymnastics. At least I hoped I was making babies. I would hate to think I was straining my poor body so many times per day for nothing. Not exactly an onerous duty, I conceded, and good exercise too. But still, it was an activity with a definite purpose, and I wanted to do well at it.

  During our first session, something most curious happened. One of the fur-people carrying a small drum appeared at the edge of our training field. She stopped at the end of the path and stood at attention for a moment as if waiting to be noticed, or acknowledged, then began banging the drum and reciting something rhythmic that I did not then understand. Then she started reeling off a litany of pronouncements. Of course, this was then incomprehensible to me, and I looked to Petchy to translate.

  Petchy explained that this was the 'Crier,' a person whose role was to keep the residents appraised of important news and activities. The stone-age society version of 'social media' I presumed. I came to realize that the Crier made regular rounds amongst all the areas where people would be working, coming around at least once a day, often twice, morning and afternoon. She would announce various news items, the menu for evening feast, progress of crops, anything that the population needed to know. She would also carry personal messages, doubling as a sort of ersatz postman. This society had seemingly not yet conceived the need for a real postal service type of function, but in many ways, the Crier was close, at least within the castle. Communications with other castles was another matter, one I would learn more about later.

  During the coming months I came to welcome the Crier's visits, and along with the other residents, we would arrange to take a short break, absorb the news the Crier brought, and sometimes give the Crier a message to deliver to someone for us. I would frequently send brief messages to my Lolita.