Ship of Destiny

by Frank Chadwick

  And now this . . . this thing in the genome analyzer. Yes, this would make a sensational story too, if they managed to return to the Cottohazz. And somehow, someone would find a way to have a war about it, because they always did. She had to admit the captain had been right about that: advanced civilizations just meant bigger, shinier machines; there did not seem to be any reduction in their capacities for violence or irrationality, not that his observation set him apart from that, as his murderous reaction on Destie-Four had demonstrated.

  Well, the captain might be a monster, but he was at least our monster. If it took a monster to get them home, so be it. She had never imagined she would ever think such a thought but watching the massacre of the landing party had changed her somehow, hardened her. Her own recognition of the problem did not, apparently, set her apart from it either. She could only hope this “new her” would fade with time, and this new hardness would eventually soften, but she didn’t know that it would.

  In the meantime, she had her answer to the question she had posed six days ago, and news for the captain, news perhaps worth another Nobel prize, if she had still cared about that.

  As Hue sat down in the briefing room, she recognized she was suffering from sleep deprivation and it might be affecting her cognition in subtle ways. The trail of the riddle had simply been too seductive to waste much time on sleep these last few days. There had been a time when she had been able to work for three or four days without anything but brief naps, but those days seemed to have passed and that thought brought a brief wave of melancholy. She put that aside, gathered her thoughts, and looked across the conference table at Captain Bitka. She had asked for this first briefing alone, just the two of them.

  He looks old, she was surprised to find herself thinking. He was twenty years her junior, no more than his mid-thirties, and of course he looked younger than she. Only in his eyes did she see the same weariness and pain she felt. And a new hardness.

  “Captain, my specialty is xenophysiology, but of course I have a solid grounding in microbiology as well and I have kept reasonably abreast of the field. I wish we had an accomplished microbiologist with us.” She paused and thought a moment. “Oh, I know just the man, Dr. Agus Parang. Agus would probably give everything he owns to be—”

  “Dr. Däng,” the captain broke in, “you’re killing me.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. I am wandering a bit, aren’t I? It’s just that I am unused to being overwhelmed, and what I have seen through your medbay’s instruments . . . It’s hard to know where to begin.”

  “Why don’t you start with how our prisoner is able to eat the protein from three different trees of life and not croak?”

  “Yes, that’s where we started, isn’t it? In order to understand that, let me begin by explaining what protein is. Bear with me. You need to know this for anything else to make sense. A protein is a type of large biomolecule which consists mainly of one or more polypeptides, which are long chains of amino acids. There are about twenty amino acids which most terrestrial organisms need in order to live and grow.

  “When we eat food containing protein, our digestive systems break that protein down into its component amino acids, which is what we’re really after. You understand? It’s about the amino acids, not the protein itself. Our digestive system is adapted to the sorts of protein which developed on Earth. Most other species rely on very similar sets of amino acids, but by chance the development of chemical life on their world happens to have different polypeptide chain structures, so their digestive systems are different from ours to break down those different structures. You understand?”

  “Yeah, I think so. That doesn’t really explain why their proteins kill us, though.”

  “Correct. There are harmful proteins in our own environment. Most neurotoxins are protein-based, for example. The most dangerous venoms are protein. In some cases, our digestive system is adapted to segregate and expel harmful proteins in small enough amounts, but evolutionarily there is no reason to go to the trouble of adapting the digestive system to every possible protein in the environment. It is an easier solution to adapt to the most plentiful food sources and simply avoid consuming the poisonous ones. But in the alien environments we have encountered, essentially all of the food proteins are poisonous to us, because of their unfamiliar structure. The animals which have evolved in that ecosystem naturally have digestive systems which can break those proteins down, extract the amino acids they need, and discharge the harmful bits.”

  “Okay, got it,” the captain said and took a drink of coffee. The way he said it made Hue think he really did understand. She hoped so. This part was very simple, secondary school biology. If he couldn’t get past this, he was not going to understand anything else.

  “So,” the captain said, “if there is no reason from an evolutionary point of view to have a digestive system which can tackle every possible protein structure, how do these guys get one?”

  “They did not evolve.”

  “Say again?”

  “Well, Captain, I cannot be certain there was no period in their biological history when their ancestors evolved, but there is no evidence of it in their current genetic material. These beings were, to borrow a rather highly charged phrase, intelligently designed. Very intelligently designed.”

  “Wait,” he said. “Does this have to do with those halos? Because if you’re selling some sort of religious—”

  “No,” she cut him off, “not that. The halos are simply bioluminescence, as much a form of decorative display as the different colors of their plumage. What I mean is that their genes show unmistakable evidence of having been massively altered from their original configuration, to the point that that configuration is no longer possible to reconstruct. Their genes are the way they are because they were carefully and deliberately configured to produce very specific results, among those being the ability to generate a wide variety of enzymes able to break down the proteins from multiple trees of life, and to adapt very rapidly to new proteins.

  “We’ve fed her—it is a female, by the way—food from the Katami, Brand, and Zaschaan protein groups the last few days. We already knew she could digest Human, Varoki and Buran protein. She gobbled it all down and asked for more. We noticed she consumed about forty percent more fluid on the day she ate Zaschaan-compatible protein and she generated more waste, but showed no ill effects. I don’t think it’s possible to poison her in the conventional sense.”

  “So, you’re saying you don’t think she evolved, because there is no reason to evolve in that way?” the captain said.

  “Well, that would be one argument, but the smoking gun is in her genetic material. By the way, did I mention she is immortal?”

  “Immortal?” he said, sitting bolt upright. “What about those three we just killed back on Destie-Four?”

  “They are not invulnerable nor indestructible. They can be killed. If they do not eat, if they receive no oxygen, they will die. They are immortal only in the sense that they do not age, at all.”

  “That’s not possible,” he said.

  “Of course, it is possible! The overwhelming volume of life on Earth, and in every other ecosystem we have ever encountered, is immortal. Higher organisms, plants and animals, most lifeforms you can see with your naked eye are not, but in terms of numbers and even biomass they are far outnumbered by microbes, and microbes are immortal. They reproduce by cellular division. Some get eaten by other organisms, some are damaged or destroyed by environmental hazards, but those which do not never get old and die. They just keep growing and reproducing forever. Only higher organisms age.”

  The captain stood up and for a moment Hue sat back in her chair, unsure what he was going to do, but then she relaxed as he began pacing the length of the conference room. She had to admit, it was a lot to absorb in such a short time.

  “Okay,” he said, “only higher organisms age. But she’s a higher organism, right? So what’s her trick?”

  “There are a number of imp
ortant differences, but the most obvious and significant one is circular chromosomes,” Hue answered.

  The captain stopped pacing and looked at her. “Another biology lecture, right?”

  “I am afraid so.”

  He sighed and sat back down, took another sip of coffee, and gestured for her to start.

  “The principal reason microbes are immortal is they have circular chromosomes. When the chromosomes divide in two for reproduction, the division process starts at one point on the circle, goes around it in both directions until it meets on the opposite side, and so produces two circles, each one side of the original chromosome, which then fill in their missing parts and become the chromosomes of the two new cells. This is a nearly foolproof way of making faithful copies of the genetic material.

  “Higher organisms, however, have much more genetic material to deal with and it has to be packed into the nucleus of a cell not much bigger than that of a microbe. A typical human cell is six one thousandths of a millimeter in diameter, about three times the size of many bacteria cells. But the length of the DNA that makes up the chromosomes in every human cell, if you unwrapped it and laid it out straight, would stretch across this table from me to you, Captain. It is over one meter long.”

  “How does something a meter long fit in a cell that’s . . . how big did you say?” the captain asked.

  “Six one-thousandths of a millimeter. Well, it’s long but very, very thin, so it is bundled into cables which are bundled and rebundled and wound and wrapped. It’s a very lovely thing to see, but it is definitely a difficult engineering problem. So difficult, in fact, that you cannot manage it with a circular DNA strand. You cannot collapse and wrap a circular strand that long tightly enough without breaking the circle, so eukaryotes—which is what we call all the higher organisms from plants on up—instead have linear strands of DNA which are bundled into chromosomes.”

  “So why is that a problem?”

  “Linear strands have ends, and ends fray, lose genetic material, particularly in the act of trying to duplicate them during cellular division. The ends have a component called telomeres which prevent fraying, but the telomeres fray themselves and eventually the linear strands start losing bits of DNA. When those bits are important, the genetic instructions become garbled and the cells made are not the perfect replicas we would like.”

  “So, we start getting wrinkles and bad knees?” the captain asked.

  “Precisely.”

  “Okay,” he said, “this Guardian has circular chromosomes, so no ends to fray, and so no aging. I guess that makes sense. But you said we can’t do that. What’s her trick? Really super-elastic chromosomes or something?”

  “No, although she does use a slightly different sugar in the chromosome bonds than we do, and that may make it more resilient, and each cell nucleus contains numerous chromosomes. But the DNA structure the Guardian possesses would not, so near as I can tell, enable it to compact into its cell nuclei all the DNA we and most other higher organisms carry, without breaking the circles. Instead, she has simply dispensed with most of it.”

  “Okay. I’m supposed to ask how that’s possible, right?”

  “Yes. We do not routinely use most of our DNA. Some of it is legacy material, left over from when we were less advanced organisms, or remnants of retroviruses to which we have been exposed, that sort of thing. Much of that material is considered junk, although some of it is a sort of overview of our evolution path and other parts are useful during gestation and growth from infant to mature adult. After all, a human embryo begins as a single cell and grows through a number of stages as a fetus, some of which bear coincidental resemblance to earlier stages of our evolution. At one point the human fetus has a tail, at another stage gills, although humans have neither. Obviously, the genetic material to produce tails and gills is buried somewhere in the human DNA but no longer used in fully formed adults.

  “Our Guardian prisoner, on the other hand, only has the genetic material necessary to reproduce her existing mature cellular structures. It is about twenty per cent of the material we carry with us, perhaps even less but I’m not sure. As I said, this is not my specialty.”

  “But wait a minute,” the captain said, “if that’s all the DNA they’ve got, and a fetus uses some of that—what did you call it—legacy material to grow, how do they reproduce?”

  “Ah. Very perceptive question, Captain Bitka. They do not, at least not in the old-fashioned way. She has sexual organs, but only the fun ones. She has nothing comparable to a womb. If they are as adept at biogenetic manipulation as this would suggest, and assuming they are the architects of their own genetic structure, I suspect when they need new Guardians they just make some.”

  “Goddamn!”

  “Indeed. Apparently, the price one pays for immortality.”

  Bitka sipped his coffee, momentarily lost in thought.

  “Huh. So, if she has no reproductive organs, how do you know she’s a she?”

  “Informed supposition. Her sexual organs are internal instead of external. That is a fairly common characteristic in female eukaryotes in most trees of life we have encountered.”

  The captain nodded and then straightened in his seat.

  “Okay, guess it’s time to go back to Plan A. I intended to interrogate the prisoner right away, while she was still alive, but your revelation changed all that. Time to have that talk.”

  Hue felt the blood drain from her face as she understood the import of that.

  “While she was still alive? So you were going to torture whatever information you could from her and then kill her? The Guardians and all those New People killed back at the Destie-Four complex weren’t enough vengeance? I suppose you’ll let me examine the corpse post-mortem. How generous of you.”

  Bitka scowled, his face flushed slightly, and he shook his head in anger. “Gee, and we were getting along so well there for a while. You’re being stupid, Dr. Däng.”

  “Oh, it is stupid now to value life, especially that of an enemy.”

  “No. it’s stupid to jump to conclusions just because they fit your dumb stereotypes. I wasn’t going to kill her. Come on, you’re the scientist. You can’t connect these dots?”

  Hue stared at him, unsure what he meant. He shook his head again in annoyance.

  “I knew we were going to have to make a run for it when I ordered our Marines to grab a prisoner. I also knew—or thought I knew—there was no food on this ship an alien prisoner would be able to ingest without being killed by it. What did you think, Doc? That on our way out to the gas giant we’d just pull over at a Destie-Burger stand and get her something to eat? I figured we had a week, maybe two, before our prisoner starved to death. When you told me she could eat our protein, I knew food wasn’t a problem so I let you find out everything you could before talking to her myself.”

  He drained his coffee, put the mug down with a loud clunk, and stood up from the table.

  “Well, now it’s time.”

  Hue sat back in her chair as Bitka walked to the door. She had misjudged him, or rather misjudged his motives in this one case. She didn’t suppose it mattered very much, as she already understood that Bitka’s self-image seemed completely independent of her opinion of him. Still, it was annoying to be wrong.

  “Captain, wait a moment.”

  Bitka stopped at the door and turned to her, his expression inquisitive.

  “If you are going to talk to her, you should know two things. First, her name is Te’Anna. Second, she does not blink.”

  “Meaning I can’t bluff her?” Bitka asked.

  “That’s not what I had in mind, although that is probably also true. No, I mean she physically never blinks her eyes. There is not an intelligent species we have encountered this is true of, and so it is somewhat disconcerting, but less so if you are prepared for it.”

  The captain cocked his head slightly to the side. “Thanks,” he said, and started through the door but then stopped and turned back.


  “Okay, I’ll bite. How come?”

  “We look for life in the liquid water zone of a star system,” Hue said, “the place where the star’s radiant energy is enough to melt ice but not enough to boil it away. It’s not impossible for life to start places other than in liquid water, but it’s hard, and it’s very hard for it to get much more advanced than microbes.

  “Our universal experience of life which ends up producing large organisms is that it begins in liquid water. Every one of the six intelligent species of the Cottohazz evolved from lower forms which evolved in water and then moved onto the land. But the optic sensory organs were already perfected by their aquatic ancestors and they just brought those eyes with them. The problem is those eyes were developed while continually immersed in water, so land animals needed to develop ways to keep them wet. That’s why we have tear ducts and why we blink: to wet our eyes. That’s why everyone blinks and weeps. If I were starting from scratch, that is not the way I would have designed an eye for a creature who was going to spend its life on dry land.

  “Whoever designed her eyes apparently felt the same way.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  One hour later, aboard USS Cam Ranh Bay, running dark,

  outbound to Destie-Seven

  13 April 2134 (fifty-nine days after Incident Seventeen)

  Sam was on his way to his first interrogation session of the alien prisoner but found the Buran linguist, with infant in arms, waiting for him in the broad corridor of the habitat wheel.

  “I apologize Captain Samuel Bitka, but it is important I have a moment of your time.”

  “I have time for you, Councilor Abanna Zhaquaan.”

  Sam still could not tell much about the Buran’s body language but today he noticed it shifted its weight from foot to foot, making a gentle rocking motion. Invariably the Buran stood motionless when they spoke, so whatever the meaning of this difference, he was pretty sure it was significant.