Page 74 - An Evening with Maxwell's Daemons

Homo Aquatilis

parody, and even that requires a situation familiar to readers. How
you would maintain suspense is indeed a problem. All I can suggest
is that as a narrative device, you might consider alternating human
and gill-man descriptions of what is going on. Then you could take
advantage of misunderstandings based on extremely different
cultural expectations. Humorous? Not necessarily.”
“Why not tell it completely from the frogman’s viewpoint?” It
was Cyril Kornfleck, seeming to emerge from the doldrums of
contemplating his water glass. “Then the reader would be able to
infer the humans’ real motives in offering a trip to Mars, while
getting a privileged view of what the aquatic negotiators were hiding
or plotting, in turn? If I were a member of H. aquatilis, I would
have to be very desperate indeed to trust the terrestrials. And I
might be thinking ahead of how to turn the tables once my people
were turned loose in the Martian seas. It would be David versus
Goliath: to mix mythologies, H. sapiens must have some Achilles’
heel that could be exploited to put the water-dwellers in the driver’s
seat. Water-related, of course: if, as you say, our colonists would
depend on their submarine counterparts to aid in finding or
providing fresh water, they could easily gum up the works or
blackmail the aerobic bipeds.”
“Duplicity and revenge, eh?” Rutger Schlager’s eyes gleamed. “A
fight to the finish for supremacy on a barren and hostile outpost of
empire! I like it. The whole idea of mutual aid between, if not
species, then subspecies, without thousands of years of evolution
into symbiosis, is indeed a tough one to swallow. Brevity and
dramatic unity befit a tale of emergent catastrophe and the hazards
of trust between strange bedfellows. Manifest destiny on Mars?
Where are the Russians and Chinese in this mix? I can’t imagine
them staying out of this top-secret project. You know, maybe this
isn’t a satire, but it sure has parallels with Western civilization’s mad
quest to conquer, subdue and exploit the globe, assisted repeatedly
by diseases to which our people were immune thanks to living for
centuries among barnyard animals. These fish people are the last to
taste our steel and the lash of our whip—if our poxes don’t get
them first! So I would let your story go swimmingly all the way to a

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