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CHAPTER ELEVEN - MEETING

Loudest Beast had approached the large, shiny, Person with nothing more than curiosity. An elder had little to fear, other than the drought, and this silver creature didn't seem hungry. Certainly it hadn't eaten anything. But it was sitting on the mating hill even though it had already given up an arm. That didn't make any sense and Loudest Beast was puzzled. Then, the pouch opened up on the silvery Person, but instead of releasing one youngling, several odd-shaped animals came out. This was most perplexing! Loudest Beast reacted to their upright stance the only way he knew how.

<<Cower down before me, you insignificant vermin!>> he cried out, identifying himself.

"Get back to the ship!" Shirley called out to the others from the cockpit. "I can get you off the ground the moment you are inside the airlock!"

"No!" Reiki voice came to them from Prometheus. "Don't let it intimidate you. It won't respect you if you run. Roar back at it and hold your ground."

"Nix that," Jinjur ordered. "Everyone in the airlock and hold onto the safety bars!"

But Little Red didn't hear her. Already he had extended his three pseudopods to the fullest and roared out an inarticulate challenge. The red flouwen looked small next to the gummie, but the animal didn't advance. Only a few yards separated them as they faced each other, neither of them moving. Obeying Jinjur, the humans climbed into the airlock, while Little Purple and Little White ignored her and rolled forward in their drysuits to back up their podmate.

Loudest Beast was bemused that the little silver deformed one with the reddish head had showed bravery. Even though it lacked two of its legs, the red one still had more gumption than Gigantic Grabber. Loudest Beast took a step forward and roared again. This time all three of the visitors moved forward together and roared in unison.

Loudest Beast was confused by the joint action. Three acting together to threaten a foe? Was that acceptable? How do you counter someone who can call on others to help? Still, these small ones had more wrong with them than their lack of legs. Although they talked, they made no sense and babbled like a captured Squeaky-Sneak. Loudest Beast felt his new pouchling stir within him. Touched by the overwhelming joy of parenthood, Loudest Beast felt a pang of pity for these deformed People. Perhaps that was why they helped each other. Loudest Beast rather like the idea. Forgetting his challenge, he lowered himself down onto his four legs, the stubby fifth leg protectively held over the opening to his pouch, and waited.

*What now?*

"Try offering it something," suggested Reiki.

«A gingersnap?»

"The whole biology might be different," Richard objected. "You could poison it."

"They share a common ocean," George insisted. "I'm sure they must have encountered gingersnaps that were swept up in the tidal bore and tossed over in the interplanetary waterfall. If the food won't agree with it, it wont take it."

"I have a supply of dried gingersnaps in a pouch in case the flouwen get hungry on our exploration walks," said Cinnamon. She stepped down from the airlock and walked out to where the three flouwen were facing off the large gummie.

Little Red took one of the dried animals from Cinnamon and pulled it in half. Opening the zipper end near his helmet, he stuck it in and they all watched as it started to dissolve in the red flesh that made up his "head" in the helmet. He then placed the other half halfway between himself and the gummie.

Loudest Beast reached out, stretching his arm to the fullest so as not to have to come any closer to the united newcomers. Carefully, he tasted the flaky bit of dried flesh with the tip of his arm. The texture was odd but the taste was familiar, it was one of the manna foods that came from Everwet in the floodwaters. Feeling safer, Loudest Beast picked up the gift of food and shoved it into his feeding hole. Even as he ate, Loudest Beast was amazed. No Person would ever feed another Person. Once you were out of the pouch, you were on your own. Protecting the weak only led to new weak ones. Why would these three offer food? Was it a show of how strong they were, that they had food to spare? Well, this wasn't Loudest Beast's territory, so he could afford to be generous in return. Loudest Beast stomped sideways into a small Person's territory that bordered the hilltop. The owner tried to rear and challenge, but he had his child to protect and Loudest Beast was almost twice his size. He decided to ignore the elder's infringement on his territory.

Loudest Beast dug for a moment in the muddy soil. This youngling's site was poor, but this was the middle of the wet season and after a little bit of digging he unearthed a Sharp-Sneaky. Loudest Beast held the snarling, snapping creature up as high as he could and slammed it down on to the ground. Then he picked up the stilled body, and left it in the same spot that Little Red had left the dried manna. By this time most of the gummies had come to the edges of their territories closest to the hill and were watching as Loud Red approached the food.

*Do I eat it?*

«I have never seen anything like that .»

‡You had better taste it first.‡

*I notice none of you volunteering.* Little Red picked up the limp, grey, gummy, snake-like thing, opened the zipper near his neckring and dipped the tail of the carrion into himself. After tasting for a moment, Little Red dropped in the whole thing.

*Tasty* hooted Little Red in surprise . *Watch out for the sharp parts though!* A cascade of needle-sharp crystalline teeth shot out from the zipper opening and fell to the ground where they tinkled against the stony hilltop. The watching gummies started with surprise at first, and then began to make a sound that was a haunting imitation of flouwen laughter.

"They laugh just like the flouwen! Could they share other language similarities?" Jinjur asked.

Little Red extended a short red pseudopod out of his zipper opening toward the gummie. The gummie stretched out one arm in response, letting it grow thinner and thinner until the tip just touched the wet tip of the flouwen's arm. It absorbed the taste of information it found there. Reassured by what it tasted, it came closer to Little Red and reached the tip of its arm through the zipper opening and directly into the body of the red flouwen. For several moments, the two of them stood together, linked, both strangely silent during the exchange.

Finally, Little Red spoke. *Let him taste you two. I have to think.*

"He's rocking up!" said Richard in surprise, as Little Red's body turned darker red and disappeared below the neckring, leaving the helmet filled with water.

The other two flouwen repeated Little Red's actions, and soon they too were rocked up, thinking. It only took a short while, however, before Little Red's drysuit started to wriggle and Little Red was back in the helmet, communicating once again over the laser link to the humans. Soon the other two flouwen were also back from their short intense period of thinking about what they had absorbed from the gummie. They reported what they had learned from their interaction with the gummie.

*We exchanged memories. They are much like us.*

«But the flood time is so short, they have no time to think, just eat and make young ones.»

‡Very sad. Alone, buried in the ground, from one passage near Hot to the next. No friends. No talking. No games. No fun .‡

*Not even surfing!*

‡No stimulation. No learning. No studying. Very sad.‡

"Does that mean that you can understand them?" asked Richard, amazed.

*Of course! We can now understand their talk and he can understand our talk.*

"Exchanging memory juices must be something like chemical telepathy," said Cinnamon, herself amazed.

"Well, that solves the language problem," said Richard. "This gummie can now understand flouwen, and our chest pack computers already know how to convert human into flouwen."

*Since we now understand the gummie language, we can translate what they say to you,* offered Little Red.

"That should suffice for now," interjected Juno through their imps. "After a number of conversations, I will have developed sufficient vocabulary to carry out the translations directly."

«They really have very few words,» Little White said sadly.

"Most primitive people have limited vocabularies," Reiki explained. "It's not that they don't have to capacity, they simply haven't the need. Each member knows what it is expected to do and has know since before it became vocal. Words are used for stories and social contact, not for day-to-day actions. If these people are as isolated as you say ."

*They do not even talk to their mates. The only ones they talk to are their younglings.*

«There has to be something we can do for them!» Little White was infuriated by the gummie's lack of opportunity. «I can taste that Loudest Beast is smart, but I know that he can not understand even such a simple thing as our working together. He has never been exposed to cooperation before!»

"Life must be tough here. Survival of the fittest means that it's every gummie for himself," Cinnamon explained.

«But they need not have such a tough life! Can we take them back with us to Eau? Surely that is where they must have developed?»

<<Where is this "Eau"? Do you come from the land of Everwet?>>

‡Tell us of this land of "Everwet",‡ Little Purple asked. While the elder flouwen carried on the conversation with the gummie, Little Red took his translation promise seriously, and he brought both sides of the conversation to the humans.

*<<Long ago, the first gummies swam in the waters of Everwet. There were streams of nourishing warm water bubbling up from cracks in the earth and there was soft ground to dig in and take root. Water was always on each gummie's territory, and elders could swim with the yearlings even as they taught them all the taboos of the colony. But the younglings would not listen to the elders. They wanted to travel further in the waters and never take root in the ground. They did not come and rest on the land when the elders called to them, but went swimming and playing in the bouncing of the water's surface.>>*

*I think he means waves,* Little Red added, *But he has forgotten what they are. The sense I get is of small ripples formed by splashing.* He continued translating the story.

*<<The younglings would not let the water rest. The younglings pestered the water and would not sleep on the land. The water got mad, and rose up against the younglings. It carried the younglings to a land far from their elders and left them there. That was the beginning of the People. Now the People have to wait for the water to return. It comes back and visits us and sees if we have become good. It is said that if we are strong and survive, if we have learned the lessons from our parents and have learned to live with both the land and the water, we may go Everwet and live by the shore of an never dry lake and never need to be hungry again.>>*

"Sounds like the sort of story a parent might tell a youngster in order to make it behave," Jinjur said doubtfully.

"But the flouwen have chemical racial memories. They can remember all the way back to then they first started adding!" Cinnamon insisted. "They don't have any fables about creation or heaven. This could well be based on a memory and distorted as it was verbalized between generations."

‡If these gummies are the descendants of flouwen then it is up to us to rescue them from this life of hunger and hardship. We should take them back with us to Eau.‡

<<Can you take me and my youngling to Everwet? This time we will behave! Please, please, we will be good!>> Loudest Beast lowered itself in submission, heedless of its reputation with the rest of the colony.

The People's side of the conversation could be heard by all, and a ripple of interest spread over the island as the conversation between Loudest Beast and the strangers was passed on from territory to territory. People that had not talked to anyone except for their young in generations, were taking an interest in something other than food. Except for a few of the craftier individuals, who were quietly shifting boundary stones during the commotion, all in the colony had their attentions fixed on Loudest Beast and the conversation on the hill.

It was a complete surprise to all, when the huge, swollen adolescent reared itself out of the waters of the lake. No Person on the shore was anywhere near as large as this monster; and monster it was. Even as it beached itself, it killed and consumed one of the yearlings, only hours out of its parent's pouch.

<<Mine, Mine, Mine!>> The huge murderous gummie roared, <<I will never, never, never be hungry again!>>

For a few moments, the gigantic monster lay on the beach in Loudest Beast's unguarded territory. It muttered and whined incoherently as it finished absorbing the yearling it had killed.

"My God! What is that thing?" Jinjur asked.

‡It appears to be a cancerous gummie. Occasionally a flouwen goes insane and starts to grow uncontrollably, although usually only in response to extreme stress.‡

«The cancerous person loses his sense of community. He forgets that the others in the pod are his family, and treats them like prey.»

*This monster will eat everything in sight unless it is stopped,* said Little Red. He began to advance toward the insane gummie.

<<What are you doing?>> Loudest Beast asked the flouwen, puzzled.

*I am going to kill that mistake in addition!* bellowed little Red, exasperated.

<<How can you kill it? It is so much bigger than you.>> The gummie was clearly at a loss. <<Such monsters can not be stopped! Nothing can be done! You just have to hope that they will not attack you, or that you might run away from them. The only thing that kills them is the drought. They always die when things dry up.>>

*You mean you just let it go until it drys!? Why don't you kill it? If the whole colony fought together, they could easily overwhelm it!*

<<Fight together? Overwhelm it?>>

‡Surely you are not thinking that it is still a Person, that it still has a soul?‡ Little Purple didn't understand the gummie's hesitance either. He struggled to understand why the elder was not running to kill this obvious threat. ‡Was it part of the colony? Is that the problem?‡

<<It was once my child, Gigantic Grabber, but now my child is gone. I just do not know how you plan to kill .>>

The humans had only heard the flouwen side of the conversation, but they had been following along as best they could. "Wait! Don't you see?" said Jinjur. "He doesn't understand the concept of uniting with the others to conquer the cancer-gummie. The gummies don't practice cooperation. After all, those that survive the cancer attack, will only have less competition next year."

‡But they cannot just let that . thing, kill the others!‡

«How can we interfere? We cannot kill the thing ourselves, we do not have the mass.»

"Besides, you are in your suits," Jinjur reminded them. "If you were in the water you might have a chance, but out here . Well, at least in your suits, you won't be hurt if it should try to attack us."

Almost as if the monster had understood her, the huge beast reared up and charged up the hill. All the gummies that had been so bravely defending their territories before, now ran in terror before the raging giant. In its confusion, the mutated gummie had lost control of its body. New arms budded off Gigantic Grabber's swollen belly, and water poured out of its pouch, but in some part of its warped mind, it still remembered.

Gigantic Grabber moved up the mating hill. This was the year. This year Gigantic Grabber would be able to mate here in the colony of its parent. It would give up an arm . it seemed to have plenty of them, and it would put out roots .

The cancer-gummie had reached to top of the hill. It towered over the explorers, its long roots, sprouting like Medusan hair, thrashed around it wildly. The humans, trusting their nearly impervious glassy-foil suits, but knowing the power of the gummie, had retreated into the airlock on the Dragonfly and had secured themselves to the safety bars inside. The flouwen were more secure with the extra protection of their fluid makeup, and the Littles lingered outside. But between the monster and the others, trapped between the cancer and the aeroplane, was Loudest Beast.

With what was left of its mind, Gigantic Grabber recognized the Person who stood on the mating hill to meet it. At the sight of its loving parent, Gigantic Grabber's need to eat, and its confused desire to mate, vanished. All it wanted was to be back in the warmth and love and safety of its parent's pouch. It stretched out all its long arms and entangled Loudest Beast in its grasp. Gigantic Grabber's tendrils felt the new youngling, hardly formed, buried deeply in the pouch that had once held him. Almost tenderly, Gigantic Grabber forced open the pouch, and took out the mewling child. He ate it casually.

<<No, no, no!>> screamed Loudest Beast as the child was torn from its body. Fury wiped out fear, and spreading itself as thinly as possible, Loudest Beast began to fight back. With frantic energy, it ripped off thin roots and half formed legs, throwing them away, only to attack again. Loudest Beast drew energy from despair and only wondered why Gigantic Grabber hadn't engulfed him completely.

*Attack!* yelled Little Red as he entered the fray. Surrounded with the glassy-foil suit, the flouwen couldn't absorb and digest this enemy as he would normally have done. He could only use his pseudopods to rip and tear at the misshapen gummie as Loudest Beast was doing. The vicious scavengers, that had been hiding all around the colony, hovered at the fringes of the battleground, collecting the bits and pieces that had been torn from the enemy.

‡Right!‡ said Little Purple, and he rolled into battle.

«Can I not take you people anywhere without you getting into trouble?» sighed Little White, but he too, tried to rescue their new friend. Sharing tastes with Loudest Beast had made the gummie a part of their pod, and they would not lose a podmate without a fight.

Still, they were greatly outmatched. Gigantic Grabber could not assimilate the flouwen in their suits, but neither could they do too much damage to it. The handfuls of flesh that they could rip out with their weak pseudopods were like drops in the bucket. The monster picked up Loudest Beast and lifted him high above them. Little Red, fearing that Gigantic Grabber was about to slam Loudest Beast on the ground, decided that it was time to do something drastic. Opening the zipper of his suit, Little Red guided one of Gigantic Grabber's many legs into the hole and started digesting it.

Gigantic Grabber, however, was really trying to crawl back into Loudest Beast's pouch. Its parent was complaining loudly and was very thin, so Gigantic Grabber held Loudest Beast up, hoping to slide into the pouch underneath. When the shocking, burning, pain in its arm finally reached its insane brain, Gigantic Grabber's first reaction was to show its parent the source of its pain. Whimpering pitifully, Gigantic Grabber used two spare legs to lift up the hot silvery bulb that was still ingesting its leg. As Gigantic Grabber held Little Red high, it squeezed.

"NO!" shouted all the humans together, but it was too late. The zipper gave way and Little Red squirted out the opening in his drysuit and sprayed all over the cancerous gummie and its prey.

The fluid Roaring*Hot*Vermillion was no longer constrained by the suit or by the desire of self-preservation. All the tiny cells that made up Roaring*Hot*Vermillion knew that they now had no chance of returning to swim in the oceans of their home. But they could still do what they had set out to do. The cells of Roaring*Hot*Vermillion would fight this last fight with all of their being.

Pain lanced through Gigantic Grabber. All over its body, the burning, twisting, pain of another person trying to digest it shocked Gigantic Grabber into fighting back. Dropping Loudest Beast, Gigantic Grabber rolled back and forth on the ground in agony, desperately trying to encircle this fluid being that was trying to gain control of his cells. Wherever they touched him, Roaring*Hot*Vermillion's single-minded cellular units dissolved and converted the cells in Gigantic Grabber's confused flesh.

Cinnamon, anxious to save as much of Little Red as she could, ran from the airlock with a large collecting bottle and began to fill it from one of the red puddles struggling to crawl through the mud to the scene of the battle.

*Lemme at em!* squawked the grimy red blob through her bottle.

"LOOK OUT!" yelled Richard, just as Gigantic Grabber, half-blinded with the screaming painful red coating of Little Red, rolled across the ground and landed on top of Cinnamon, pinning her underneath. Pausing only to push a seldom-used button on the handle of his geologist's tool to change the memory-metal head from a hammer to an axe, Richard rushed into the fray like a silver-armored Perseus and started hacking away at the Gorgon-like monster.

So occupied was the insane gummie in this struggle, that it didn't even notice that the other two flouwen had stopped their harassment. They had collected Loudest Beast and had dragged the wounded elder away to a safe distance.

Jinjur was impressed with the amount of damage that Richard was able to do with his axe, but it obviously wasn't going to be enough.

"Oof! Hurry up! He's heavy," came Cinnamon's voice, carried by the laser link through the translucent flesh of the monster. Although Cinnamon's tough glassy-foil suit was still protecting her, she remained trapped under the red coated monster.

Jinjur, relieved that Cinnamon was still all right, looked around the airlock for another weapon so that she could join in the fray. "What I need is a flame-thrower," she said loudly.

"I've got one," came Shirley's voice through her imp. "Right in the Dragonfly's tail."

"So you do!" shouted Jinjur, jumping out of the airlock. "Give him a good dose, then Richard and I will rush in and try to pull Cinnamon free." She ran toward the battle. "Cinnamon!" she commanded. "Switch your suit to maximum cooling!"

Shirley lifted the Dragonfly from the ground, and transitioning artfully from VTOL fans to monopropellant jet, she pulled the aeroplane into a tailstand and bathed the gigantic monster with a short blast of superheated air. All over the colony, the island was showered with small, cooked, pieces of Gigantic Grabber's arms and roots, some bits still colored with a thin coating of red.

 

"Damn!" said Nels as he started to topple to one side after tripping over the drysuited Sweet•Green•Fizz. The green flouwen was spread out on the floor of the engineering deck of the Falcon, busily operating the console that controlled the scanning tunneling array microscope and manipulator, using it to assigning mathematical values to the genetic patterns impressed on a flouwen unit cell he was mapping. Sweet•Green•Fizz had moved the touchscreen to the floor where he could more easily manipulate it with his glassy-foil-sleeved boneless pseudopods.

The Falcon's lab was not designed to accommodate Nels's particularities and Nels needed to wear prosthetics in order to reach some of the analysis machines in the workwall. Having lived all his life in space, Nels was more used to the powered legs in his specially designed spacesuit than he was to the thin metal legs he needed within the ship. Still, they were in only one-tenth gee and Nels was able to catch himself before he fell.

•I have made a simple model of the genetic code of the flouwen.• The flouwen's "fingers" called up the design on the screen and together they looked it over.

•As you can see, the flouwen all pretty much share the same patterns on this half of the unit cell. These patterns are the genetic code that determines the physical makeup of a typical flouwen body. This other half seems to be different in each of the flouwen and varies with time. The variable part of the patterns act as the long term memory, while the more stable patterns encode for the enzymes that produce the tiny chemical differences that seem to be the reason for all the different personalities of the flouwen.•

"So you think the flouwen personality is purely chemical?" Nels asked.

•Well, all the samples I have analyzed came from our pod and all of us have very similar experiences. We literally share each other's experiences through the chemical tastes we give each other, yet we are all very distinct individuals and have been since our formation.•

"Hmm," Nels muttered. "What happens each time you share tastes of each other?"

•It seems that for a few moments the taste causes a ripple of chemical imbalance that runs throughout the whole body of the receiving flouwen, but the change is only momentary. Unlike when eating, where the larger body changes the smaller into replicas of its own cells, the taste just passes its information to the variable portion of the receiver cells. The variable section of the patterns change slightly, indicating that the information has been stored in the long term memory. Then the body assimilates the taste just like food.•

"Similarities?" He was answered by Little Curiosity, who was operating another touchscreen at the computer console.

?You mean chemical similarities between similar flouwen? I am having the computer sort out the variables using color as a constant. Only none of the flouwen are exactly the same color really. The closest color matches in the pod are myself and Sweet•Green•Fizz, and Dainty~Blue~Warbler and Sour#Sapphire#Coo.¿ Flouwen had often wondered at the similarity in temperament between those of similar color. Now Shining?¿Chartreuse?¿Query would see if this basis for old jokes had any basis in facts.

"How long, Jupiter?" Nels called to the computer through his imp.

"The computation will take several minutes . unless this is a priority task?"

"No." said Nels shortly. He knew that the computer was also busy running of the ship, and operating the communication links between the Falcon, Dragonfly, and Prometheus. The discovery of life on Roche, only to be so quickly followed with the death of Little Red, had sobered the away team. So many of the assumptions they had made back when they first planned this mission had been knocked for a loop, and all of them were hurting with their fallibility. A simple experiment in genetics just didn't seem too important.

Little Fizzer noticed the human's defeated tone and attitude. Although flouwen rarely suffered anything approaching depression, Little Fizzer did his best to cheer the geneticist up. •I did try applying my theory of genetics to the human DNA and I think there are several things you haven't labeled. Is it because that they is common knowledge?•

"What?" it was a sign of Nels' fatigue that he did not pounce on this news.

Little Fizzer changed the display to one that showed a section of human DNA coded in its four molecules, and highlighted one segment of the screen. •There is this portion here, that controls human coloring. This section, clearly indicates how tall the human will grow, although weight seem to be completely variable.•

Amazed, Nels looked at the screen with renewed interest. "Are you sure?"

Shining?¿Chartreuse?¿Query answered. ?Well, we had a lot of trouble with that last part—but Jupiter showed us how to adjust for the differing gravities under which some of you humans grew up? Then, for your case, Jupiter told us to ignore your actual height. Did we make a mistake?¿

"I don't know . I hadn't gotten that specific!" Nels was startled at the ease with which these flouwen applied their superior intellect to everything. They were ruthless in insisting that no theory violated the laws of mathematical logic and in every instance they were proved right. "Yes, you'd have to keep my height out of the equation ."

?Why is that anyway? All the other humans have warm thick legs and you have only thin metal ones. If you need to be tall to operate the equipment, why don't you just grow legs like the others?¿

"I though you understood that we humans can't change our shapes the way you flouwen can."

•We know that! But your DNA indicates that you should be quite a tall man. If you want flesh legs why don't you cut your short ones off and grow new long ones?•

"Humans have often experimented with tissue regeneration, but it has never worked successfully. If it is tried after a recent accident on a very young person, sometimes there is a little regrowth, but often the cells become confused. Usually all they manage is a useless mass that lacks all feeling and has to be shaped surgically. Cloning and grafting we have mastered, but regeneration is still the stuff of fiction."

Little Fizzer turned back to the screen. •Jupiter? Leave the other computations for a moment and help me with this. Priority.•

"Confirm?" the computer asked Nels.

"Confirm." Nels was curious to see what the flouwen thought it had discovered.

On the screen Little Fizzer called up a string of As, Gs, Cs, and Ts, some of which were in opposing color. Nels knew the pattern well. He had looked at it over and over, on and off, his whole life. It was the double helix that had ordered his hair to be blond and his eyes to be blue, but the chemical imbalances in his mothers womb had blocked the string of code that would have given him legs and feet instead of flippers.

For several minutes the flouwen and computer worked on the pattern, the colors and symbols changing at the touch of a pseudopod. Finally the flouwen stopped and pointed at the screen. •If we reset this section and suppress that section, then the walking appendages will grow as they were supposed to.•

Nels was astounded. The second of the segments that they had highlighted was in the middle of what was called "junk" DNA. Everyone knew that this section of genetic code had nothing to do with the forming of the body . but the flouwen was so sure.

"Jupiter! Is there any validity to this?"

"It seems logical. The first strand we have long suspected as being the timekeeper that judges the whole body's age and regulates growth timing accordingly. The other could well be the DNA that produced your flippers. It must have been activated when your mother was exposed to chemicals, and it dominated your normal leg DNA. If the cells in your stumps could be tricked into believing that you were still a young embryo in a normal womb, and the flipper DNA could be turned off, it is possible that new legs would develop in the proper fashion."

"No," said Nels thinking out loud. "It would mean staying in an artificial womb for nine months. And then if it did work, I'd have to relearn how to walk, and build up the muscle just like a newborn. It could be years before they would even stop growing."

"It should be easy to speed up the growth so the whole process only took a few months," Jupiter offered.

"But if it didn't work, I would have no feet at all ."

Nels left the lab, leaving the flouwen alone with their experiments.

 

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