apexeno vol 1

11. Splitting Heads

As with pregnancy, would people behave any differently if they knew their actions would directly impact another human soul? Binge-eating, drug abuse, and bad habits could no longer be considered just self-harming behaviors. A drinking spree would render one's alter brain disoriented and hungover. What might they do in retaliation?

—Stigel, reflections

"I worked out the procedure for separating a Janux into independent halves," Nalla said proudly. "It's not so different from separating Siamese twins. Since the middle segment evolved through the fusion of two sections, it can be split apart by running evolution in reverse. A little plastic surgery and an end cap—voila! Instead of a single Janux with two, alternating brains, you now have a pair of Janux precisely half the original size. The hardest part is disabling the neural switching mechanism and recalibrating the circadian rhythm. The body has to be taught to sleep when the brain does."

"So Camrak can't be saved?" Stigel asked.

Nalla shook her head cobra-like.

"You think splitting them would give Karmak a fighting chance?"

"This is about more than saving one Janux. Think about how individual-ness could transform their entire culture." Nalla's arms slithered to their full, expansive range. "How can they embark upon a path of technological progress when the two societies live on top of each other like that? Neither can make a move without the other's tacit agreement. To make matters worse, they are confined to the equatorial zone because the mist forests alone provide equal support for both day and night-sides. Their climate band has been shrinking for millions of years. The Janux are over-adapted. As two races, they could go their separate ways and colonize the rest of the planet."

"They might not appreciate it if we went around cutting them in half," Stigel pointed out.

"We could engineer a gene drive," Nalla said, "so that grubs would come out of the egg with only one head. Within a few generations, two-headedness would be nothing more than a myth the old ones tell their grandchildren."

Stigel's mind spun with the ethical implications. The plan was brilliant in its simplicity and dangerously seductive. It violated every non-interventionist principle of the CU. If Arjun even heard them talking this way, he would be within his rights to have them suspended and packed into hiber.

Nalla laughed. Despite her viperish looks, it was a very girlish sound. "Relax. You didn't think I was serious, did you? The bit about the surgery was true, but the rest was just..." She waved a hand. "Harebrained speculation."

Nalla's speculation had given Stigel an idea that was only slightly less crazy. "You didn't answer my question. If Karmak was surgically separated, could he be saved?"

"That's child's play. With the night-half dead, there'll be no need to bi-sect the center. We can cut along the junction." She drew a red slash on the hologram of the centipedex right after the mid-section. "But I don't see the point. We can't take him with us. Even if we were to suspend his metabolism, the ship doesn't have a stasis chamber anywhere near large enough. Not to mention all the extra mass."

"We wouldn't be transporting him," Stigel said.

"You can't just return it to its village after a modification like that." Nalla said. "Can you?"

Returning Karmak as a solo organism to his home village was exactly what Stigel had in mind. Would the village accept him? Like most primitive cultures, the Janux could at various times be both parochial and superstitious as well as forward-thinking and open-minded. Without the benefit of knowing their history, it was impossible to tell how they would react.

Was it worth taking the risk? Perhaps Karmak had inflated his importance and the village could get along fine without his tree-carving expertise. But Stigel's observations seemed to bear him out. The other mist catchers were becoming less productive, and a couple had already died. The mists were indeed rising beyond the reach of most boughs.

Would such blatant interference violate the CU Charter? Maybe not in this case. Technically, the CU had interfered the moment it brought the Janux aboard. Left to his own circumstances, Karmak might have survived long enough to oversee his final and greatest project. The moral argument came down to this: by interfering, the CU had changed the future course of the village in ways that were impossible to know after the fact; was it now justified to offset those consequences through re-interference? Stigel thought so. But there was one more person he had to convince. It looked like he would be paying MeiWei another visit.