TECHNOLOGY
TASTER
“We know they first
came here during the Precambrian age.”
Professor Gould is
busy with his viewgraphs, eyes down, trying not to pay too much
attention to his audience. “We have samples of macrofauna,
discovered by paleontologist Charles D. Walcott on his pioneering
expeditions into the Canadian Rockies, near the eastern border of
British Columbia”—a hand-drawing of something indescribably weird
fetches up on the screen—“like this opabina, which died there 640 million years ago.
Fossils of soft-bodied animals that old are rare; the Burgess Shale
deposits are the best record of the Precambrian fauna anyone has
found to date.”
A skinny woman with
big hair and bigger shoulder pads sniffs loudly; she has no truck
with these antediluvian dates. Roger winces sympathy for the
academic. He’d rather she wasn’t here, but somehow she got wind of
the famous paleontologist’s visit—and she’s the colonel’s
administrative assistant. Telling her to leave would be a
career-limiting move.
“The important item
to note”—photograph of a mangled piece of rock, visual echoes of
the opabina—“is the tooth marks. We
find them also—their exact cognates—on the ring segments of the
Z-series specimens returned by the Pabodie Antarctic expedition of
1926. The world of the Precambrian was laid out differently from
our own; most of the landmasses that today are separate continents
were joined into one huge structure. Indeed, these samples were
originally separated by only two thousand miles or thereabouts.
Suggesting that they brought their own parasites with
them.”
“What do tooth marks
tell us about them, that we need to know?” asks the
colonel.
The doctor looks up.
His eyes gleam. “That something liked to eat them when they were
fresh.” There’s a brief rattle of laughter. “Something with jaws
that open and close like the iris in your camera. Something we
thought was extinct.”
Another viewgraph,
this time with a blurry underwater photograph on it. The thing
looks a bit like a weird fish—a turbocharged, armored hagfish with
side-skirts and spoilers, or maybe a squid with not enough
tentacles. The upper head is a flattened disk, fronted by two
bizarre fernlike tentacles drooping over the weird sucker mouth on
its underside. “This snapshot was taken in Lake Vostok last year.
It should be dead: there’s nothing there for it to eat. This,
ladies and gentlemen, is Anomalocaris,
our toothy chewer.” He pauses for a moment. “I’m very grateful to
you for showing it to me,” he adds, “even though it’s going to make
a lot of my colleagues very angry.”
Is that a shy grin?
The professor moves on rapidly, not giving Roger a chance to fathom
his real reaction. “Now this is
interesting in the extreme,” Gould comments. Whatever it is, it
looks like a cauliflower head, or maybe a brain: fractally
branching stalks continuously diminishing in length and diameter,
until they turn into an iridescent fuzzy manifold wrapped around a
central stem. The base of the stem is rooted to a barrel-shaped
structure that stands on four stubby tentacles.
“We had somehow
managed to cram Anomalocaris into our
taxonomy, but this is something that has no precedent. It bears a
striking resemblance to an enlarged body segment of Hallucigena”—here he shows another viewgraph,
something like a stiletto-heeled centipede wearing a war bonnet of
tentacles—“but a year ago we worked out that we had poor
Hallucigena upside down, and it was
actually just a spiny worm. And the high levels of iridium and
diamond in the head here . . . This isn’t a living creature, at
least not within the animal kingdom I’ve been studying for the past
thirty years. There’s no cellular structure at all. I asked one of
my colleagues for help, and they were completely unable to isolate
any DNA or RNA from it at all. It’s more like a machine that
displays biological levels of complexity.”
“Can you put a date
to it?” asks the colonel.
“Yup.” The professor
grins. “It predates the wave of atmospheric atomic testing that
began in 1945; that’s about all. We think it’s from sometime in the
first half of this century, last half of last century. It’s been
dead for years, but there are older people still walking this
earth. In contrast”—he flips to the picture of Anomalocaris—“this specimen we found in rocks that
are roughly 610 million years old.” He whips up another shot:
similar structure, much clearer. “Note how similar it is to the
dead but not decomposed one. They’re obviously still alive
somewhere.”
He looks at the
colonel, suddenly bashful and tongue-tied. “Can I talk about the,
uh, thing we were, like, earlier . . . ?”
“Sure. Go ahead.
Everyone here is cleared for it.” The colonel’s casual wave takes
in the big-haired secretary, and Roger, and the two guys from Big
Black who are taking notes, and the very serious woman from the
Secret Service, and even the balding, worried-looking admiral with
the double chin and Coke-bottle glasses.
“Oh. Alright.”
Bashfulness falls away. “Well, we’ve done some preliminary
dissections on the Anomalocaris tissues
you supplied us with. And we’ve sent some samples for laboratory
analysis—nothing anyone could deduce much from,” he adds hastily.
He straightens up. “What we discovered is quite simple: these
samples didn’t originate in Earth’s ecosystem. Cladistic analysis
of their intracellular characteristics and what we’ve been able to
work out of their biochemistry indicates, not a point of divergence
from our own ancestry, but the absence of common ancestry. A
cabbage is more human, has more in
common with us, than that creature. You can’t tell by looking at
the fossils, 600 million years after it died, but live tissue
samples are something else.
“Item: it’s a
multicellular organism, but each cell appears to have multiple
structures like nuclei—a thing called a syncitium. No DNA, it uses
RNA with a couple of base pairs that aren’t used by terrestrial
biology. We haven’t been able to figure out what most of its
organelles do, what their terrestrial cognates would be, and it
builds proteins using a couple of amino acids that we don’t. That
nothing does. Either it’s descended
from an ancestry that diverged from ours before the
archaeobacteria, or—more probably—it is no relative at all.” He
isn’t smiling anymore. “The gateways, Colonel?”
“Yeah, that’s about
the size of it. The critter you’ve got there was retrieved by one
of our, uh, missions. On the other side of a gate.”
Gould nods. “I don’t
suppose you could get me some more?” he asks
hopefully.
“All missions are
suspended pending an investigation into an accident we had earlier
this year,” the colonel says, with a significant glance at Roger.
Suslowicz died two weeks ago; Gorman is still disastrously sick,
connective tissue rotting in his body, massive radiation exposure
the probable cause. Normal service will not be resumed; the
pipeline will remain empty until someone can figure out a way to
make the deliveries without losing the crew. Roger inclines his
head minutely.
“Oh well.” The
professor shrugs. “Let me know if you do. By the way, do you have
anything approximating a fix on the other end of the
gate?”
“No,” says the
colonel, and this time Roger knows he’s lying. Mission four, before
the colonel diverted their payload capacity to another purpose,
planted a compact radio telescope in an empty courtyard in the city
on the far side of the gate. XK-Masada, where the air’s too thin to
breathe without oxygen; where the sky is indigo, and the buildings
cast razor-sharp shadows across a rocky plain baked to the
consistency of pottery under a blood red sun. Subsequent analysis
of pulsar signals recorded by the station confirmed that it was
nearly six hundred light-years closer to the galactic core, inward
along the same spiral arm. There are glyphs on the alien buildings
that resemble symbols seen in grainy black-and-white Minox photos
of the doors of the bunker in the Ukraine. Symbols behind which the
subject of Project Koschei lies undead and sleeping: something
evil, scraped from a nest in the drowned wreckage of a city on the
Baltic floor. “Why do you want to know where they came
from?”
“Well. We know so
little about the context in which life evolves.” For a moment the
professor looks wistful. “We have—had—only one datum point: Earth,
this world. Now we have a second, a fragment of a second. If we get
a third, we can begin to ask deep questions like, not, ‘Is there
life out there?’—because we know the answer to that one, now—but
questions like ‘What sort of life is
out there?’ and ‘Is there a place for us?’ ”
Roger shudders.
Idiot, he thinks. If only you knew, you wouldn’t be so happy. He
restrains the urge to speak up. Doing so would be another
career-limiting move. More to the point, it might be a
life-expectancy-limiting move for the professor, who certainly
didn’t deserve any such drastic punishment for his cooperation.
Besides, Harvard professors visiting the Executive Office Building
in DC are harder to disappear than comm-symp teachers in some
flyblown jungle village in Nicaragua. Somebody might notice. The
colonel would be annoyed.
Roger realizes that
Professor Gould is staring at him. “Do you have a question for me?”
asks the distinguished paleontologist.
“Uh—in a moment.”
Roger shakes himself. Remembering timesurvivor curves, the captured
Nazi medical-atrocity records mapping the ability of a human brain
to survive in close proximity to the Baltic Singularity. Mengele’s
insanity. The SS’s final attempt to liquidate the survivors, the
witnesses. Koschei, primed and pointed at the American heartland
like a darkly evil gun. The “world-eating mind” adrift in brilliant
dreams of madness, estivating in the absence of its prey: dreaming
of the minds of sapient beings, be they barrel-bodied wing-flying
tentacular things, or their human
inheritors. “Do you think they could have been intelligent,
Professor? Conscious, like us?”
“I’d say so.” Gould’s
eyes glitter. “This one”—he points to a viewgraph—“isn’t alive as
we know it. And this one”—he’s found a
Predecessor, God help him, barrel-bodied and bat-winged—“had what
looks like a lot of very complex ganglia, not a brain as we know
it, but at least as massive as our own. And some specialized
grasping adaptations that might be interpreted as facilitating tool
use. Put the two together, and you have a high-level technological
civilization. Gateways between planets orbiting different stars.
Alien flora, fauna, or whatever. I’d say an interstellar
civilization isn’t out of the picture. One that has been extinct
for deep geological time—ten times as long as the dinosaurs—but
that has left relics that work.” His voice is trembling with
emotion. “We humans, we’ve barely scratched the surface! The
longest lasting of our relics? All our buildings will be dust in
twenty thousand years, even the pyramids. Neil Armstrong’s
footprints in the Sea of Tranquility will crumble under micromete
oroid bombardment in a mere half million years or so. The emptied
oil fields will refill over ten million years, methane percolating
up through the mantle: continental drift will erase everything. But
these people . . . ! They built to
last. There’s so much to learn from them. I wonder if we’re worthy
pretenders to their technological crown?”
“I’m sure we are,
Professor,” the colonel’s secretary says brassily. “Isn’t that
right, Ollie?”
The colonel nods,
grinning. “You betcha, Fawn. You betcha!”