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.240 NOT AS WE KNOW ITFrom our experience of higher-level technical civilisation, we wouldexpect more variety in the intelligences, the organisms that run it andare run by it.In today s human society we increasingly find peoplespecialising for different jobs.Today, even the infantry has a differentspeciality for each soldier: no longer are they generalist grunts whosemain job is to die.So our technical cultures are increasingly symbiosesof differently specialised intelligences, with some great branches of ourextelligence rapidly becoming different species : musicians, artists,computer technicians, mathematicians.Our cities need integratedcommunities of these different species of extelligence, just as they arebeginning to thrive on multicultures where there are twenty kinds ofrestaurant and ten kinds of visual entertainment.This trend seemsevident in all affluent societies, but we cannot be certain of the extentto which it will be a universal.However, we ll stick our necks out andguess that alien extelligence will diversify similarly, and that it willgenerate increasingly sophisticated software and hardware perhapsalso wetware, brains with enhanced abilities to do it with.The prospects for our own species were given horrific exposure inBernard Wolfe s Limbo 90.In this story, young men often volunteer tobecome Immobs : their limbs are amputated and replaced with muchbetter nuclear-powered mechanical ones, their eyes are replaced bymuch more sensitive, much wider-ranging and more acute sensors, andso on.The story revolves around two primitives, who have not had thisdone and therefore still have their natural organs and only theirnatural organs.There is a terrifying chase scene, in which they arehunted down by improved humans who can run at 50 miles an hour(80kph) forever, who can see in the dark or see warmth by infra-red,and who have other enhanced abilities like built-in telepathiccommunication (a bit better than mobile phones, that is to say).Bothaspects of this plot have attractions for the reader.We can understandwhy the primitives don t want to lose their legs, eyes, and hands, yet wecan also sympathise with their pursuers who genuinely want to helpthem.It s not like being hunted by inquisitors who want to save yoursoul by (if necessary, that is, if you disagree) destroying your body.Inthis case it really will be better for the primitives if they are caught.What makes this novel so enormously potent is that readers know thatin less than a hundred years their grandchildren will be in just that241 WHAT DOES A MARTIAN LOOK LIKE?position.And this tendency will increase the further we proceed intothe future.So far, with our false teeth, reading-glasses, hearing aids, and woodenlegs, we ve not gone very far along that path.However, we appreciatethat as prostheses improve on nature, there will come a time wheneveryone is a cyborg.So when we meet aliens who are ahead of ustechnologically as very nearly all of them will be their physical formwill mostly be an assembly of technical tricks, and they may have lefttheir organic history behind completely.Or they may have some other,alien, strategy whose pattern we have not begun to guess.Limbo 90puts our minds into a new state, where we would expect any advancedcivilisation one with 20,000 years of technology, say, instead of 200 to be composed of individuals who are enhanced beyond our dreams.(Or possibly no longer individuals at all, but let s not pursue thatdevelopment here.) Considering how far out, from our parochialorganic history, any aliens that we find will be, leads inexorably to theconclusion that we will find them incomprehensible: not only as minds,but also as structures.Their biology won t be relevant, becausewhatever biology they still retain will have been altered beyondrecognition, even by a primitive of their own species.In such circumstance much of this book the parts that argue fordifferences in the biology of alien lineages will be irrelevant to our realmeeting with real aliens if that event is too long delayed.By then they,and probably humanity too, will have left biology behind.But ourspeculations will still apply to the organic stage of development thatbrought them into existence, and that will govern how they acquiredthe technology to rebuild themselves.242 11THE SENSUAL TRIBBLENE OF THE Kleptosporidians has caught a virus, and there is a heatedOargument until its parent insists that it has enough pets already andmust put the poor thing back where it found it.Abel is inspired to make asearch of the younger tourists baggage and confiscates several further itemsof contraband.Their protests are distracted by the announcement that thefinal trip for this bunch of tourists is a party.Cain and Abel have decided to show off the really high-technologyabilities of their St Albans base, and the party is an excuse.The tourists allget processed for the event, and Cain stacks their various bodies in all theproper systems.Then he collects Abel, some of whose particles now havetourist ego-flyers attached.The communication system allows some chat between the variouslifeforms as they head towards the bus.Then, suddenly, they are all caughtup in the most frenzied bit of living they ve yet experienced.All aroundthem are organisms stretched to their limits, adjusting to new conditionsfrom moment to moment, changing the milieu for all the others
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