Great-great-grandpa called himself tactical, he called himself thorough, he called himself logical. He was a problem-solver.
There’s a difference.
Can I have another drink? I’ll tell you the story if I’ve had another drink. Don’t worry, it’s not the sort of story you forget after having another drink.
***
So. Okay.
Great-great-grandpa was a Very Important Man. The kind of guy where you’re so important you don’t have a title beyond ‘Mister’ with a capital M and you get invited to things without being an expert or a politician.
But he had opinions, and he had a little knowledge, which of course is always the most dangerous amount of knowledge, and he had a few fascinations and fixations. And one of his was spaceflight, and in particular space colonization, and in VERY SPECIFIC our continual failure to get our cryogenics program off the ground.
It kept killing the mice, you see. It kept killing the mice.
Look, cryogenics is important, you know. Unless you can break the universe over your knee, light speed is the fastest speed there is, and it takes a LOT of work to get up to it. So you’ve got to go slow, and if at light speed a trip in space takes years at ‘slow’ it takes DECADES. Decades of time you need to make a ship hold together in. Decades of time it has to keep an entire population of humans happy in! Which is hard, but then there’s the hardest part of all: not only does your ship have to keep tons – literal, measurable, tons – of humanity alive and functional for decades; THEN it has to provide them with the material they need to build a functioning society on the spot. Prefabricated cities! Prefabricated power plants! Prefabricated factories! It’s like trying to fit three identical dolls inside each other.
So instead you freeze ‘em solid, pack the ship with on-arrival supplies – no in-flight meals needed – and thaw ‘em on arrival. Simple. Tidy. Straightforward!
But it kept killing the mice. Which was a bit worrying, obviously. Somehow-or-another they’d worked out how to prevent cell ruptures from microscopic ice crystals, and that old stumbling block was gone, it was fine, fine, fine. But it kept killing the mice. They injected them and treated them and monitored them and it killed them all. Their sad mice bodies couldn’t handle the rise and fall of heat; it was always too much for them, however gently they were chilled and thawed.
But grandpa was there at the budget meeting when the program’s fate was being decided, grandpa was listening when someone said the dead mice were PRECISELY why they were cutting the program, and grandpa had the balls to open his mouth and say in front of EVERYONE ‘the problem is the process is too metabolically stressful for obligate homeotherms. Why not use gene splicing and turn the colonists poikilothermic?’
Which for every scientist in the room – who’d spent half their lives working on the cryogenics problem – was like asking ‘jumping over a tall building seems hard; why not grow wings instead?’
But as I said: great-great-grandpa was a Very Important Man. Too important to dismiss, or mock, or even politely explain that’s-not-how-it-works to. Especially when the chief budget secretary is sitting next to him and is his best friend and says ‘exactly! Brilliant! Do it!’
There’s not really any other choice after that.
***
Now there was one itty bitty problem with the project, with the notion, with the whole conceit my great-great-grandpa had provided. Namely, it was inhumane and impossible. Which sounds like two things but really the ‘inhumane’ part was just window dressing. It turns out it’s awfully hard to change the basic metabolic structure of a complex multicellular organism from the cell to the cerebral aftereffects, even one as well-known and well-trodden as a human being. And of course people objected. Often strenuously! And finally and most crucially, all of the people desperate enough to volunteer weren’t necessarily the people that were most qualified to build a new society from the ground up. Or so it was argued. Or assumed. Or both.
So it was much easier and cheaper and more economically sensible to start from nonhuman scratch.
They considered hibernating mammals first, then ruled it out. Trying to properly sort the hibernating response from seasonal triggers and the like was too fiddly, and the public likes cute fuzzy things that sleep too much. You know what they don’t care about? Lizards. And since they’re habitually low-metabolism rather than situationally, they need less food per capita. Lower average metabolic rate but who cares, how much energy do you need to run robotics and do programming and run basic maintenance routines, especially when the low food and space requirements mean you can stock TWENTY of them for every human you would’ve had to pack?
So they took some lizards and gave them antifreeze proteins and made them big enough to hold tools and hold big brains and they froze the lizards and eventually after many years of dead frozen lizards they had living frozen lizards and the world was good.
After that they had to teach the living lizards to talk and learn and obey. That took a bit longer, I think because some of the tutors kept teaching the lizards philosophical concepts like ‘personal autonomy’ and ‘elected leadership’ or other such troubles. Then they froze them, stuffed them in a rocket, and off it went, off to establish a home base away from home for humanity.
***
The flight was long, but great-great-grandpa lived long enough to see it end. Not just the time-as-we-knew-it, but to receive the ‘journey successful’ notice from the far end. The ship had made it. The cargo had thawed successfully. The lizards had disembarked and unpacked a base camp. They were living on a horrible wreck of a place with a barely-there atmosphere and no native life that might – with a lot of work – one day let you breathe without a spacesuit. And they were working on making it better, particularly for ship number two, which would be faster and less heavily weighted with cargo and would keep the actual humans happy and alive until they got there and could take over things.
The lizards worked hard. They worked very hard. In fact they worked so hard that by the time ship two arrived – long after great-great-grandpa had passed away, blissfully content with his impact on the universe – the lizards had gone a little off-spec and had filled the entire planet with tunnels and those tunnels with lizards. Apparently it’s easier to have a population boom when you eat twenty times less than a human your size and you lay multiple eggs and you grow up fast. Who knew? So the world was full of lizards and although they said they were very happy to see the colonists and welcomed them as beloved fellow hatchlings they said they felt it wasn’t fair to turn over the entire planet to them and take their place as subservient biological drones.
The second ship had been equipped for this sort of argument and was willing to dispute it, which might have been successful had part of the lizard ship’s own equipment not included an asteroid mining rig that everyone had agreed could not possibly be retrofitted for use into a giant turbolaser. There were few casualties, but it put an end to our side of the debate.
They sent the second ship home, fully laden with gifts, supplies, everyone who’d been a bit too eager to press the debate and had no interest in remaining as equal citizens, and a polite request that we stay at home, since humans were uniquely ill-suited to the rigors of space colonization, which they were already tentatively beginning within their own system.
***
And that’s how my great-great-grandfather became the man who gave the stars to lizard people.
It’s not all bad though. I think they’ve named something like twelve space stations after him, and I believe I’m on the shortlist of for an intersystem shuttle’s title, as of the last courtesy missive I received. They say that heroes are never welcomed in their own hometowns, right?
Hey, do I still have an open tab?