"Ah, but the manner of that life?' Trent shook his head as if perceiving something too vast to be expressed. He got up and moved to a shelf behind him. He took down a book and riffled carefully through its creaking old pages. He set it down before Bink, open. "What is that picture?"
"A dragon," Bink said promptly.
Trent flipped a page. "And this?"
"A manticora." What was the point? The pictures were very nice, though they did not coincide precisely with contemporary creatures. The proportions and details were subtly wrong.
"And this?"
It was a picture of a human-headed quadruped, with hoofs, a horse's tail, and catlike forelegs. "A lamia."
"And this?"
"A centaur. Look-we can admire pictures all day, but-"
"What do these creatures have in common?" Trent asked.
"They have human heads or foreparts-except the dragon, though the one in this book has an almost human shortness of snout. Some have human intelligence. But-"
"Exactly! Consider the sequence. Trace a dragon back through similar species, and it becomes increasingly manlike. Does that suggest anything to you?"
"Just that some creatures are more manlike than others. But that's no threat to Xanth. Anyway, most of these pictures are out of date; the actual creatures don't look quite like that any more."
"Did the centaurs teach you the Theory of Evolution?"
"Oh, sure. That today's creatures are evolved from more primitive ones, selected for survival. Go back far enough and you find a common ancestor."
"Right. But in Mundania creatures like the lamia, manticora, and dragon never evolved."
"Of course not. They're magic. They evolve by magic selection. Only in Xanth can-"
"Yet obviously Xanth creatures started from Mundane ancestors. They have so many affinities-"
"All right!" Bink said impatiently. "They descended from Mundanes. What has that got to do with your conquering Xanth?"
"According to conventional centaur history, man has been in Xanth only a thousand years," Trent said. "In that period there have been ten major Waves of immigration from Mundania."
"Twelve," Bink said.
"That depends on how you count them. At any rate, this continued for nine hundred years, until the Shield cut off those migrations. Yet there are many partially human forms that predate the supposed arrival of human beings. Does that seem to be significant?"
Bink was increasingly worried that Chameleon would foul up, or that the castle would figure out a way to neutralize the cherry bombs. He was not certain that Castle Roogna could not think for itself. Was the Evil Magician stalling to make time for this? "I'll give you one more minute to make your case. Then we're going, regardless."
"How could partially human forms have evolved-unless they had human ancestors? Convergent evolution doesn't create the unnatural mishmash monsters we have here. It creates creatures adapted to their ecological niches, and human features fit few niches. There had to have been people in Xanth many thousands of years ago."
"All right," Bink agreed. "Thirty seconds."
"These people must have interbred with animals to form the composites we know-the centaurs, manticoras, merfolk, harpies, and all. And the creatures crossbred among themselves, and the composites interbred with other composites, producing things like the chimera-"
Bink turned to go. "I think your minute is up," he said. Then he froze. "They what?"
"The species mated with other species to create hybrids. Man-headed beasts, beast-headed men-"
"Impossible! Men can only mate with men. I mean with women. It would be unnatural to--"
"Xanth is an unnatural land, Bink. Magic makes remarkable things possible."
Bink saw that logic defied emotion. "But even if they did," he said with difficulty, "that still doesn't justify your conquering Xanth. What's past is past; a change of government won't-"
"I think this background does justify my assumption of power, Bink. Because the accelerated evolution and mutation produced by magic and interspecies miscegenation is changing Xanth. If we remain cut off from the Mundane world, there will in time be no human beings left--only crossbreeds. Only the constant influx of pure stock in the last millennium has enabled man to maintain his type-and there really are not too many human beings here now. Our population is diminishing-not through famine, disease, or war, but through the attrition of crossbreeding. When a man mates with a harpy, the result is not a manchild."
"No!" Bink cried, horrified. "No one would-would breed with a filthy harpy."
"Filthy harpy, perhaps not. But how about a clean, pretty harpy?" Trent inquired with a lift of his eyebrow. "They aren't all alike, you know; we see only their outcasts, not their fresh young-"
"No!"
"Suppose he had drunk from a love spring, accidentally-and the next to drink there was a harpy?"
