Earth

Nelson watched, fascinated, as flows of color spread out from each secretion site. Here red and white merged to form a distinct pink blending. Elsewhere a blue stimulant overlapped a green one and formed complex swirls, like stirred paint.

“Also,” Dr. Wolling went on, “the cells secrete chemicals of their own, to suppress their neighbors, a lot like the quiet chemical warfare waged by plants…”

Nelson grabbed his own set of controls and zoomed in for a closer look. He saw cells writhe and jostle, striving to soak where the colors shone brightest. Different chemical combinations seemed to trigger different behaviors… here a frenzy of growth leading to tight bundles of successful nerves. Over there, a sparser network with only a few wi

“It’s like… as if the different mixes make different environments, eh? Like how different amounts of sunshine and water make a desert here, a jungle there? Like… ecological niches?”

“Very good. And we know what happens when one niche is damaged or fails. Inevitably it affects the whole, even far away. But go on. How do the cells deal with the different demands of the different environments?”

“They adapt, I guess. So it’s…” Nelson turned to face his teacher. “It’s survival of the fittest, isn’t it?”

“Never did like that expression.” But she nodded. “You’re right again. Only here, the ‘food’ they compete for isn’t really food. It’s a brew of substances needed for further development. If a cell gets too little it dies, in a ma

“Amazing,” Nelson muttered. “Then, the arrangement of nerves in our brain, it comes about because of those scattered little glands, all giving out different chemicals?”

“Not just scattered, Nelson. Well placed. Later I’ll show you how just one small difference in the amount of testosterone boys get before birth can make crucial changes. Of course, after birth learning takes over, fully as important as anything that came before. But yes… this part really is amazing.”

Dr. Wolling shut off the display. Nelson rubbed his eyes.

“Evolution and competition go on inside us,” he said in awe.

She smiled. “You really are a bright young fellow. I can’t tell you how many of my students fail to make that leap. But when you think about it, it makes perfect sense to use inside us the same techniques that helped perfect life on the planet as a whole.”

“Then our bodies are just like…”

She stopped him. “That’s enough for now. More than enough. Go feed your pets. Get some exercise. I slipped some readings into your plaque. Go over them by next time. And don’t be late.”

Still blinking, his mind awhirl, Nelson stood up to go. It wasn’t until much later that he seemed to recollect her standing on her toes to kiss his cheek before he left. But by then he was sure he must have imagined it.

As his duties expanded, taking him from the regulated pools and fountains of the recycling dome to the rain forest habitat to the enclosed plain where elands stretched their legs under reinforced crystal panes, the two baboons accompanied Nelson like courtiers escorting a prince. Or more likely, apprentices attending their wizard. For wherever Nelson strode, magical things happened.

I speak a word, and light streams forth, he thought as he made his nightly rounds. Another, and water rises for animals to drink.

Voice-sensitive computers made it possible, of course. But even sophisticated systems weren’t good enough to manage a place like this. Not without human expertise.

Or where that ain’t available, let blind guesswork substitute, eh?

Nelson’s reaction to his spate of promotions had been pleasure mixed with irritation.

After all, I don’t really know anything!

True, he seemed able to tell when certain animals were about to get sick, or when something needed fixing in the air or water. He had a knack for setting overhead filters so the grass grew properly, but guesswork was all it was. He had talents never imagined back in the crowded Yukon, but talent was a poor substitute for knowing what you were doing!

So Nelson went about his duties a troubled wizard, pointing at ducts and commanding them to open, sending squat robots off on errands, rubbing and tasting leaves… worrying all along that he hadn’t earned this gift. It was like a big joke perpetrated by some capricious fairy godmother. Not knowing where it came from made it seem revokable at any time.

In his reading he encountered another phrase — “idiot savant” — and felt a burning shame, suspecting it referred to him.

A human being knows what he’s doin’. Otherwise, what’s the point in being human?

So he walked his rounds nodding, listening to the button player in his left ear. Every spare moment, Nelson studied. And the more he learned, the more painfully aware he grew of his ignorance.

Shig and Nell helped. He’d point at a piece of fruit, and they would scurry to bring back the sample. What genetic magic had made them so quick to understand? he wondered.

Or maybe it’s just me. Maybe I’m part monkey.

This evening both baboons were subdued as he led them on rounds with unusual intensity. In his head, Nelson’s thoughts roiled.

With images of high school… the sports teams and the gangs… cooperation and competition.

Images of his parents, hard at work side by side, striving for long hours to make their business thrive… competition and cooperation.

Images of cells and bodies, species and planets.

Cooperation and competition. Are they really the same? How can they be?

To some, the conflict seemed inherent. Take economics. The white immigrant, Dr. B’Keli, had given Nelson texts praising enterprise capitalism, in which striving for individual success delivered efficient goods and services. “The invisible hand” was the phrase coined long ago by a Scotsman, Adam Smith.

In contrast, some still promoted the visible hand of socialism. In Southern Africa, cosmopolitans like B’Keli were rare. More often, Nelson heard derision of the “soullessness” of money-based economies, and speeches extolling paternalistic equality.

The debate sounded eerily like the one raging in biology, over the supposed sentience of Gaia. “The blind watchmaker” was how some agnostics referred to the putative designer of the world. To them, creation required no conscious intervention. It was a process, with competition the essential element.

Religious Caians retorted furiously that their goddess was far from blind or indifferent. They spoke of a world in which too many things meshed too well to have come about by any means but teamwork.

Again and again, the same dichotomy. The conflict of opposites. But what if they’re two sides of the same coin?

He hoped some of Dr. Wolling’s, references would offer answers. Usually, though, the readings only left him with more questions. Endless questions.

At last he closed the final reinforced airtight door and led Shig and Nell home, leaving behind all the animals he half envied for their lack of complex cares. They didn’t know they were locked inside a fragile rescue craft, aground and anchored to the soil of an ailing, perhaps dying, continent. They didn’t know of the other arks in this flotilla of salvation, scattered across the Earth like grails, holding in trust what could never be replaced.

They didn’t have to try to understand the why of anything, and certainly not the how.

Those worries, Nelson knew, were reserved for the captain and crew. They were the special concerns of those who must stand watch.

□ … Although a body’s cells all carry the same inheritance, they aren’t identical. Specialists do their separate jobs, each crucial to the whole. If this weren’t so, if all cells were the same, you would have just an undifferentiated blob.

On the other hand, whenever a small group of cells strives, unrestricted, for its own supremacy, you get another familiar catastrophe, known as cancer.

What does any of this have to do with social theory?

Nations are often likened to living bodies. And so, oldtime state socialism may be said to have turned many a body politic into lazy, unproductive blobs. Likewise, inherited wealth and aristocracy were egoistic cancers that ate the hearts out of countless other great nations.

To carry the analogy further — what these two pervasive and ruinous social diseases had in common was that each could flourish only when a commonwealth’s immune system was weakened. In this case we refer to the free flow of information. Light is the scourge of error, and so both aristocracy and blob-socialism thrived on secrecy. Each fought to maintain it at all costs.

But the ideal living structure, whether creature or ecosystem, is self-regulating. It must breathe. Blood and accurate data must course through all corners, or it can never thrive.

So it is, especially, in the complex interactions among human beings.