Page 11 - Fables volume 3

The Vacancy Chain

“Go away, Son. You bother me.”
From within, the Hermit King balefully regarded the tiny crab
scratching at his huge seashell. But the youngster persisted.
“What? I told you to leave. Now move it, or I’ll nip you in half.”
“Please, sir, I just want to ask you something,” begged the
immature crustacean after involuntarily ducking into the flimsy
security of a small cracked snail shell. “I don’t want to evict you.”
“Ha! Don’t make me laugh—I’m in no mood for jokes. I’ve got to
save my strength for some serious challengers.” The massive crab
barely poked his head out of the shell long enough to verify that his
harmless interlocutor was not a decoy for some real competition.
“But, wait: that’s what I want to know about. You see, I’ve just had
my first taste of life in the vacancy chain. It will be years before I get
anywhere near as big as you—presuming I beat the odds and live that
long. Chances are I won’t make it, of course, so I wanted to make
some sense of this strange existence.”
“So be it. Just don’t give me a lot of nonsense. And don’t blame
me if you become disillusioned: your precocity may lead you to
knowledge for which you are not ready.”
The little one was earnest. “I promise I won’t. After hatching, our
instinct is to start growing, right? And to avoid getting eaten: thanks
to our guts not being inside our own shell, we need to take refuge in
an empty one created by another creature. But we cannot stop
growing! Even if we would rather stay right where we are, soon we
cannot fit in our old home, and we have to join the competition for a
new one. Or, even if we aren’t too big for where we live, some other
crab almost as big, and extremely desperate to find shelter will try to
pull us out and take possession. Either way, we must fight our own
kind simply to remain safe and secure; and that condition is inevitably
temporary and unpredictably terminated in violence. Why must we
keep growing? Why haven’t we evolved to be content with what we
have?”
The old crab snorted. “Why, indeed! It is an arms race, Junior. Our
external enemies come in all sizes. As a group we have a far better
chance of survival if we are not all the same size: that ought to be
obvious. So our growth is unchecked. The supply of other species’
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