Ontogeny

Chapter 12b

     Alfornus led Malone and the Brigadiet through a door into the next room, which contained gardening and farming implements, and the through one containing utterly strange and unfamiliar objects that Alfornus said were communications devices. “They found a way to send messages through the air, without the need for wires,” he explained.

     “Could you include a few of these in the objects you lend us?” asked the Brigadier.

     Alfornus cocked his head to one side again, as if listening. “I'm afraid not,” he said. “The Radiants fear that, if you learned their secrets, it would affect the balance of power in the human world and lead to even more war than there is now. They don’t want to be responsible for that many human deaths.”

     The Brigadier nodded. It was the answer he'd expected.

     “Here we are,” he said a moment later as they entered a room at the extreme end of the museum. “Weapons. These here, as you can see, are firearms, little different from those you use today, and we know they also had cannons, mortars, howitzers. All basically larger versions of hand guns. We think that the shells they fired were filled with explosives, though, and that they exploded when they hit their target.”

     The Brigadier nodded. The Helberion military was experimenting with the same thing but hadn't yet found a design that could exit the gun barrel before exploding. Most of his attention was taken by the Radiant that floated in the middle of the room, though. It was the closest he'd ever been to one, and he and Malone stared at details of its body that they'd never noticed before, squinting their eyes against the brightness of the light that emanated from it. It had a beak on the underside of its body, they saw, in the middle of the cluster of tentacles that surrounded it; some fat and strong, others as fine as hairs. Above, a ring of small, primitive looking eyes were dotted throughout the less luminous stripe that circled its bulging gas bag. Its outer skin was partially transparent, allowing them to see hints of movement beneath as tubes and organs performed their various bodily functions.

     It was holding a pointed white cylinder in one of the smaller tentacles that hung between the larger ones, and was holding it up in front of the eyes on that side of its body. The eyes facing the cylinder, which they assumed was a weapon of some kind, widened and the pupils narrowed as they focused on it. The Brigadier was amused to see that the eyes facing him and Malone were doing the same thing. It was apparently studying them as well, and he wondered whether it was capable of following two trains of thought at the same time.

     “Please don’t be alarmed,” said Alfornus. “Radiants often come here to see the collection. It's just curious about you.”

     “I had no idea they were so big,” breathed Malone, backing away until he was up against the wall. He breathed a sigh of relief as the eyes facing him lost their focus and it returned all its attention to the object it was holding,

     “Amazing that a human can physically change into something like that,” said the Brigadier, voicing a thought that had crossed his mind many times. “The creatures we adopt are much more similar, whether they be horses, dogs, goats or whatever. They have four limbs, a head with two eyes and a mouth. That, though...”

     Alfornus nodded. “It does seem like quite a leap,” he admitted. “That's probably why the change from human to Radiant takes so much longer than any other change. Up to ten years in most cases.”

     “Yes, but such a dramatic change in basic body shape... If you'd never seen a Radiant and had to guess what the next organism up the rungs of life from human would look like, you'd probably guess that it would be basically man shaped, but bigger and with a larger brain.”