In Trouble – Page 1160
KOR LACHNIS: <So – how does it satisfy thy hatred now, my son? To see her thus?>
GORSHASH: <I think that God has delivered her into our hands for His own purposes. And my hatred delights in it. >
KOR LACHNIS: < Speak to her. See if she understands what has happened.>
IPOLA: *sigh,,,* I understand. Everything – and now so many things make more sense.
KOR LACHNIS: <What says she?>
GORSHASH: <She says, Lord, that she does understand.>
KOR LACHNIS: <Ah, so she hath speech in thy tongue. I had forgot that thou didst so say.> <Ahh yes. And how old art thou, woman? By my reck thou dost seem younger than the years that should hang on thee, from what I am told.>
IPOLA: (In Erogenian) <Eat. Shit..>
KOR LACHNIS: <Ahah! Now we see the true Erogenian spirit! It pleases me that, after all these ages, our tongue is still known well enough for thee to curse at me in it.> <But my interest in thy years is professional, nothing more. Let us see. By the account I have of thee, thou shouldst be … some few years shy of two score and ten, and yet seem so much more fit and young. Thou may’st thank me for that. > (In Urttish) < Oh, Owner Gorshash, didst thou know that we, in our experiments, did not merely create all the servants and slaves of Erogenia, but did naturally improve our own seed. <We had only begun cautiously, of course – improving appearance – such attributes as thou seest which were pleasing to us in our women, naturally. <But also strength, life span, resistance to disease and so forth.> In time, uninterrupted, we could have made ours a race of immortal gods. But, foolishly, the followers of the Moon rebelled and interrupted our work. >
IPOLA: <And when we defeated you, ultimately you decided to run like a coward.>
KOR LACHNIS: <Have a care, woman. I ->
IPOLA: <Gosh! I’d better be careful, otherwise I might get in trouble. >
Oh, Kory is coping a feel. I mean, Ipola is, what, fifty years old? Fifty-five?
Man, being that fit at this age is quite a thing.
Nice sass, too.
two-score and ten IS 50, he just said she should be a bit short of 50 by his information. Maybe 47. A score is 20. “four score and seven” is 87.
Oh? I did not know a score meant twenty years. Thanks, Sean.
As SeanR noted, a score is twenty. Lincoln used it in reference to years, but it could be twenty anything.
A couple years shy of 50, if Kor’s estimate is correct.
Okay, Kor is officially the creepiest creep in the story. And those genetic experiments are something I do not wish to dwell upon.
Well, it made many Erogenians incredibly tall, strong, enduring, and well-endowed.
Yet, the concept of manipulation Kor Lachnis refers to is indeed most-disturbing, to say the least.
Actually, we are very close to much of what we see in the Erogenians, today. The genes for Myostatin can already be silenced using CRISPR. Myostatin is what disassembles unused muscle fiber in muscle cells. Muscle fiber eats calories faster than other tissues, even when you aren’t using it. Disassembling muscle fiber means, when the next famine comes along, the person doesn’t starve faster than his buddy, and leave them around to produce all the grandchildren. Famine was the normal course of events for most of the last 2 million years, …so, … Myostatin wins.
Now, with famine a fading memory for most humans, and obesity a growing problem around the world, Myostatin blocking is a big research topic. There are people who naturally have their Myostatin gene blocked, and some of them are already Olympic Gold Medal winners. So, the behavior is creepy, but the genetic experiments are being duplicated, today.
Oh, I know. And I also think we should be very careful about how much we fiddle with our genes; we might end up with unpredictable results and side effects we didn’t anticipate.
But that comment about starting out with ‘improving’ their women aka giving them bigger breasts? Yeah, not what science should be used for in any society. (And at any rate most big breasted women are not a fan of having big breasts anyway; too much weight and trouble).
I think we can infer from Kor’s content and tone that it didn’t matter to the leaders of ancient Erogenia what women wanted didn’t matter to them. The signs we have so far is that extreme patriarchy was the order of the day.
The scary thin is, there is some evidence in our genepool that suggests it has already been tampered with once. (hence theories of ancient aliens) However recent evidence shows that Atlantis might in fact have been real and part of a global civilisation. And we have no idea how far their technology went.
Ah, yes. Big breasts can be quite a pain in the back. Literaly.
In any discussion of Genetic Engineering of humans, I bring up the setup Heinlein had in the novel ‘Beyond this Horizon’.
It is set some centuries after GE techniques are developed, and after some severe abuses, the decision is that the only GE techniques to be used on humans is: the parents get to choose which variants of the genes they carry get into their children. Eg: i you carry the gene for cystic fibrosis or sickle cell anemia, you can make sure the non-defective version gets into the child. There is the further restriction that if there isn’t a clear benefit or detriment eg: in eye color, that must be left to chance so we maintain diversity.
Would you do anything different from this system?
@Jim Baerg
The caveats you mentioned seem pretty sound to me.
This sound fine to me. The course we’ve been following so far is to unintentionally breed people who, due to improved medical science, compensating for many medical flaws, might not survive very well without it.
It would be better, in my opinion, to eliminate any genetic trait which would tend to make a person less able to survive in austere circumstances, but ban, outright, tinkering with people to make them better suited for their designated role in society.
We really don’t need the “Ritalin Kid” phase to extend to gene tampering.
We absolutely do not need a genetic caste system, recreating feudalism on actual in-bred differences which actually do make the offspring of the nobility better suited to rule, and those of the serfs better suited to serve.
Ipola, you haven’t SEEN “in trouble” yet. This is a guy who happily turns his lover into a feral monster and leaves her locked up in a cave, WANTING TO DIE. And that was for the “crime” of wanting to be loved by him. You don’t want to see what he’s like when he’s gone from “professional scientific detachment” to straight-up ANGRY.
@Uhl
Fair enough. :-S