"Though a Sparrow Fall," "Morality," and "Judas Fish" by Thomas N. Scortia

There are twenty stories in Thomas N. Scortia's 1975 collection Caution! Inflammable!  Back in September we read the five stories from the book that debuted in the 1950s; today let's tackle the next three stories to appear (chronologically.)

"Though a Sparrow Fall" (1965)

This story appeared in the same issue of Analog that had the first half of the serialized version of Poul Anderson's David Falkayn story, "The Trouble Twisters," which we read back in 2013.

"Though a Sparrow Fall" is a trifling filler story, four pages here, an idea rather than an actual story.  A biochemist who is also a cryptography buff decides to run the DNA of a person through a "truly synthetic" computer, and the computer figures out that the pattern of our DNA relates a simple mundane message.  Presumably this means the human race was created by aliens to leave a trivial message for other aliens; the computer even suggests that the message has already been received, which would mean that the human race's purpose has already been accomplished.

The plot of the story is the biochemist telling this to other academics at a party--the truth about humanity saddens some of those who learn of it.

Acceptable--it is just an idea, but the idea is pretty cool.

"Morality" (1969)

Occasionally we run into SF stories that purport to explain the origins of old myths and legends and religions.  MPorcius fave Edmond Hamilton, for example, explained the scientific reality behind Norse myths of Loki, Thor and Freya in 1941's  A Yank at Valhalla.  MPorcius fave A. E. van Vogt explained the origin of the Biblical story of Adam and Eve in his story "Ship of Darkness."  Well, here in "Morality," Scortia explains that the Minotaur who lived in a maze and was killed by Theseus was a psychic alien on a mission to save his people!  Scortia cleverly keeps the fact that he is talking about Crete and King Minos and all that a secret until the end of the story, but you were warned that this blog was spoilertastic, so no complaints!

Glat's people were dying of a plague, so Glat went searching the galaxy for a cure.  He found it on Earth, in lichen, some centuries before the birth of Christ (or as I am supposed to say now, "before the common era.")  But his spaceship crashed, and, injured, he was taken captive by a Bronze age king.  Glat realized that he can only subsist on one Earth food--human blood!  The cruel king provided him people to exsanguinate in return for Glat's use of his psychic powers to make the island king's armies victorious over his enemies.  Every day Glat sends out psychic messages, hoping that others of his race will enter the solar system and he can tell them of his life-saving discovery.  The plot of this story concerns not only the arrival of Glat's people, but the machinations of the King's daughter that lead to Theseus destroying Glat.

This is a good story, and I was enjoying it long before I realized it was about the Minotaur.  (In what might be a mistake, early in the story the planet Glat landed on is called the "fourth planet of this system," which made me dismiss any possibility it was Earth, which I always think of as the third planet.  Maybe Glat was confused by Luna?)  Not only is it fun to see a sword and sorcery plot from the monster's point of view, but Glat is burdened by an interesting moral dilemma--he feels guilty for murdering all those people in order to stay alive long enough to save his own race, and basically wants to commit suicide as soon as he has transmitted to his comrades the cure for the plague back home.

Thumbs up!  "Morality" appeared first in Fantastic, in the same issue as a discussion of Norman Spinrad's Bug Jack Barron by Fritz Leiber, an essay on The Arabian Nights by Piers Anthony, reviews of books on J. R. R. Tolkien, a story by Thomas Disch, and a drawing by Jeff Jones.  An issue well worth checking out--Ted White ran a good magazine!

"Judas Fish" (1970)

It is the future!  ("The future, Conan?")  The year 2000!  Due to overpopulation, the world faces terrible food shortages.  America is wracked by revolutionary violence.  The Japanese government is euthanizing people by the hundreds of thousands in "the public chambers."  Government and big business are scrambling to develop new food sources, and one strategy is to bend all kinds of sophisticated technology to catch the schools of fish who live deep in the Pacific ocean.  A single operator, living alone in a pressurized dome called a "deep station," can control a squadron of robotic submarine probes to find schools of edible fish, and a "pressure net" to catch them.  Once a school of edible fish is captured, the operator can alter the genetic material of some of them, conditioning them to have leadership abilities and to have an affinity for the pressure net--such "judas fish," once released, will find schools of fish of the same species and lead them right into the pressure net, which is just a few steps away from hungry Americans' dinner tables.

(Jack Vance used this concept of a Judas fish in one of the Magnus Ridolph stories, 1949's "The Sub-Standard Sardines.")

The lion's share of "Judas Fish" is the journal of Jefferson Boyer, one of these guys who operates a deep station and catches fish by the ton with these high-tech techniques.  These jokers live all alone under the waves for two or three months at a time!  Prime conditions for somebody to suffer hallucinations or just go generally bonkers!

Boyer finds that some of the schools of fish he has coaxed into his pressure nets are being hijacked by what look like large squids who act in concert, herding the fish away like sheepdogs or wolves.  These apparently intelligent squid investigate Boyer's dome, then work their way in through an emergency hatch to sabotage Boyer's food supply as well as his communications with the surface!  Boyer is at war with intelligent squid!  Desperately low on food, Boyer manages to capture a squid and he eats from it.
        
The "squid" are in fact space aliens who carry racial memory in their DNA, and can read the racial memory of other creatures by eating them.  By eating part of an alien himself, Boyer gains access to those racial memories, and learns the history of these E.T.s, how they fled their home world because of climate change and colonized the deep ocean of Earth, where food was plentiful.  But now humans are eating all the fish, putting the alien colonists at risk.

Boyer, his body now full of alien genetic material, comes to understand and identify with the aliens, and he joins them.  Is Boyer going to be like a Judas fish himself, leading the human race to destruction at the tentacles of these aquatic aliens?  Or can we put a positive spin on this unexpected revolution in human biology and society and welcome the development of a new hybrid race, half human and half alien, which can solve the food shortage problem by mass cannibalism?  Because those eaten live on in the racial memory passed down from the eaters to their progeny, perhaps there is no reason to fear death!  (This is another idea used by Vance, this one in 1951's "Crusade to Maxus.")

This is a good story, well-written and full of classic SF elements: overpopulation, high-technology, aliens, a species of immortality, and a paradigm shift that will revolutionize society.

"Judas Fish" first was published in Harry Harrison's anthology The Year 2000.

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I'm quite happy with this batch of Scortia tales.  More Scortia in the future, but first another detour into horror fiction!