Friends, Reread "When in the Course--" on the plane to Cleveland on Friday. Here are all of the relevant passages on the "parallel evolution" question: When the *Stellex* crew first sit down with Rylla's patrol and serve them Terran fermented apple-juice, Roger Baron (the former Venusian politician from whose point of view the story is told, btw) notes that the Terrans' surveys of Freya had "settled the point that the biochemistry of this planet was entirely Terra-type. . . ." Once the Terrans are quartered at Tarr-Hostigos, Charley Clifford (a medical doctor) makes his first objection (Baron describes it as "pontificating") to the purported humanity of the Freyans, "No, we simply mustn't speak of them as 'human;' that is reserved for *Homo sapiens terra*. They're sapient beings, so we can call them people, but they are utterly alien to us, descended from a different though remarkably parallel line of evolution. We just can't call them human." Baron, who has taken quite a liking to Rylla by now, characterizes Clifford's opinion (to himself and the reader) as "*Phooie!*" At the feast that evening, Baron notes that the Terrans "knew from the tests made . . . that the food of the planet was edible by Terrans, without deficiencies of any essential vitamins or trace- elements." Later, Clifford offers an explanation for the similarity of Freyan firearms to early Terran versions, "Well, that's like the physical resemblance of the people to Terran humans [note the qualification of "humans" at this point]. . . . Well, environmental conditions being the same here and on Terra, the same physical structure is the most efficient for a race of sapient beings." Baron, of course, finds Clifford's continued insistence on the non-humanity of Freyans to be "a trifle tiresome." When pressed by Baron to offer "one characteristic among these people that differentiates them from us" Clifford is unable to do so yet protests, "But they can't be human! They evolved here on Freya; there's no genetic connection at all between them and us." When the Terrans learn that Nancy Patterson plans to wed Harmakros, Clifford offers his explanation for why they will be unsuccessful in conceiving children, "Life here originated and evolved independently of life on Terra. We and the Freyans started from two different puddles of slime, seven hundred light-years apart (another TFH distance tag, btw). You know the mechanism of reproduction. The sperm and the ovum are way up the structural ladder. Each contains twenty-four chromosomes, with us; I don't know how many for the Freyans. Each of them contains thousands of genes. Here, for a simplified example, suppose a Terran locksmith made a lock, and a locksmith here on Freya made a key, neither knowing what the other was doing. What odds would you give against the key working in the lock? Well, that's almost an even-money bet beside the odds against a Terran spermatozoon fertilizing a Freyan ovum, of vice versa." Baron finds this "reasonable" for a moment but then counters, "Every physical characteristic stems, originally, from the gene for it; that's correct, isn't it? And you, yourself, have admitted that Freyans do not posses any non-human characteristics, or lack any human ones." Clifford remains unconvinced, but less assuredly so. The story ends, of course, with the news that Patterson and Harmakros have conceived. Baron suggests to himself that Clifford "really seemed relieved that it was settled." It seems to me that Beam clearly meant for the parallel evolution discussion to be central to this story. It also seems to me that Beam comes down on the side of parallel evolution. The conflict is clearly between Baron and Clifford who offer the arguments for and against. Both sides seem to be presented fairly (although Baron does belittle Clifford to some degree in his narrative comments) but the story ends with clear evidence in favor of Baron's position. (Perhaps Beam needed to do this to explain the interfertile Freyans mentioned earlier in *Uller Uprising*.) There's also considerable evidence arguing *against* an "extraterrestrial transplant" explanation for Freyan interfertility. Not only are the Freyans Terran-like but so is all of the other flora and fauna of the Freyan ecosphere. Indeed, this allows the *Stellex* crew to make their first profit by trading Freyan foodstuffs on Yggdrasil where the ecosphere, including a sapient, non-human race, is completely alien to Terrans--suggesting that Beam was quite conscious about the explanation he was offering for Freya. (Of course, in the Paratime series, all of Fourth Level civilization resulted from the "lost" Martian colonization of Terra 75,000 years ago which leads us to infer that Beam believed 75,000 years was "adequate time" for a transpanted sapient race to appear to be "native" in its transplanted ecosphere. So, possibly, the Freyans might have been "transplanted" some seven hundred light-years from Terra--or vice-versa--75,000 or more years ago in TFH.) Still, in my view, the case for a "parallel evolution" explanation for Freyan interfertility is much more strongly supported by the evidence in "When in the Course--" than is an "extraterrestrial transplant" explanation (which can only be inferred by analogy to the Paratime series). One final piece of information to stoke the "Future History or Paratime" controversy of "When in the Course--." Note that the Freyan characters retain the pseudo-Greek names that Calvin/Kalvan notices in *Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen* (the *Stellex* crew make no such connection). This suggests to me that the Paratime version of this story must have come first. (Btw, one of the words my spell-checker suggested for "Freyan" was "Aryan." Of course, this must be merely coincidental. . . .) David Johnson Net: -- redeacted -- Arlington, Virginia, North America Web: http://gwis2.circ.gwu.edu/~david -------------------------------------------------------------------------- "There have been great changes, and none of us can guess what greater changes will come. Why talk now of things that may happen in a world the very shape of which we cannot guess?" -H. Beam Piper, "When in the Course-"