Free Steel Beach by John Varley Page B

select for? For a billion years the selection was done naturally. I wonder if it’s wise to junk a system that worked for so long.”
    “Depends on what you mean by ‘worked,’ ” I said.
    “Are you a nihilist?”
    I shrugged.
    “All right. Worked, in the sense that life forms got more complex. Biology seemed to be working toward something. We know it wasn’t us—the Invaders proved there are things out there a lot smarter than we are. But the Invaders were gas giant beings, they must have evolved on a planet like Jupiter. We’re hardly even related. It’s commonly accepted that the Invaders came to Earth to save the dolphins and whales from our pollution. I don’t know of any proof of that, but what the hell. Suppose it’s true. That means the aquatic mammals have brains organized more like the Invaders than like us. The Invaders don’t see us as truly intelligent, any more than other engineering species, like bees, or corals, or birds. True or not, the Invaders don’t really have to concern us anymore. Our paths don’t cross; we have no interests in common. We’re free to pursue our own destiny…  but if we don’t evolve, we don’t have a destiny.”
    He looked from one of us to the other and back again. This seemed pretty important to him. Personally, I’d never given much thought to the matter.
    “There’s something else,” he went on. “We know there are aliens out there. We know space travel is possible. The next time we meet aliens they could be even worse than the Invaders. They might want to exterminate us, rather than just evict us. I think we ought to keep some fighting skills alive in case we meet some disagreeable critters we can fight.”
    Brenda sat up, wide-eyed.
    “You’re a Heinleiner,” she said.
    It was MacDonald’s turn to shrug.
    “I don’t attend services, but I agree with a lot of what they say. But we were talking about martial arts.”
    Is that what we were talking about? I’d lost track.
    “Those arts were lost for almost a century. I spent ten years studying thousands of films from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and I pieced them back together. I spent another twenty years teaching myself until I felt I was adept. Then I became a slash boxer. So far, I’m undefeated. I expect to remain that way until someone else duplicates my techniques.”
    “That would be a good subject for an article,” Brenda suggested. “Fighting, then and now. People used to have all kinds of weapons, right? Projectile weapons, I mean. Ordinary citizens could own them.”
    “There was one country in the twentieth century that made their possession almost mandatory. It was a civil right, the right to own firearms. One of the weirder civil rights in human history, I always thought. But I’d have owned one, if I’d lived there. In an armed society, the unarmed man must be a pretty nervous fellow.”
    “It’s not that I don’t find all this perfectly fascinating,” I said, standing and stretching my arms and legs to get the circulation going again. “I don’t, but that’s beside the point. We’ve been here about half an hour, and already Brenda has suggested plenty of topics you could be helpful with. Hell, you could write them yourself, if you remember how. So how about it? Are you interested, or should we start looking for someone else?”
    He leaned his elbows on his knees and looked at me.
    Before long I began to wonder when the theremin music would begin. A look like that belonged in a horror holo. Eyes like that should be set in a face that begins to sprout hair and fangs, or twist like putty into some Nameless Evil Thing. I mentioned before how deep his eyes seemed. They had been reflecting pools compared to this.
    I don’t wish to be superstitious. I don’t wish to attribute powers to MacDonald simply because he had attained a venerable age. But, looking at those eyes, one could not help but think of all the things they had seen, and wonder at the wisdom that