by Greg Bear
This was not news to the crew, of course. Heads nodded around the circle. Meissner, standing with arms folded two meters away from me, shook his head emphatically and said, “The queens protect their own.”
More crew gathered closer as dusk deepened. The piscid seemed to hold a fascination even for those disinterested in the ship's scientific mission. “Where's the brain?” asked a tall, nervous A.B. named Wernhard.
Salap turned to the piscid's “head” and took out a small bowed saw with a thin blade. He cut around the head between the beak and fins and pulled the skin aside. “No brain like ours,” he said. “Networks of tubules carrying free amino acids, chiefly lysine, and mildly acidic fluids, may act as primitive processing centers. Do they think? Not as we do. Do they see? This one has no eyes ... It probably tastes with its entire skin.
“No brain, and no digestive system. Its only source of energy, once it is set free upon the ocean, is photoreceptive pigment, an advanced form of rhodopsin, in translucent membranes just beneath the skin of its back and fins. Not as concentrated as similar membranes in phytids and arborids ... Its main function may be to gather dead sister scions or scraps from other ecoi, and return them to some central analyzer or digester, which then rewards the piscid by replenishing its energy stores, or absorbs it and makes more. Then again, maybe it is a thief or spy ... a kind of enlarged sampler, like some piscids in the rivers. In some ways, it is simpler than a planarian worm.”
Salap pushed his lips out as if about to kiss someone, eyes going slightly out of focus, an expression I had learned meant he was deep in some speculation. “Maybe this is a one-of-a-kind specimen, drawn from some past catalog of designs, sent out on a specific mission. Now it's worn and lost and useless.”
I wondered if that could ever describe me.
Salap cut away a grayish membrane and revealed a startling rainbow of components within the piscid's central cavity. The captain became involved. “As Ser Salap tells us,” he said, pulling on gloves and examining the organelles before dropping them in jars of water dosed with potassium salts, “scions are more like single cells than multicelled organisms. They have evolved—if I may use that word, with its Earthly connotations—to a condition that has been called megacytic.”
The captain stepped around the table and dug his hand deep into the cavity, felt for a moment with a squint at the starry sky, and pulled out a marble-sized lump. Smoothing away nacreous connective tissue, he held it up in the lantern light. “Scions carry their genetic material in stony nodules. Ser Salap is famous for being the first to analyze this material, and to discover its chemical and structural relationship to our own RNA and DNA. However, the amounts of genetic material—roughly one tenth of one percent of the DNA in our own cells—and the genetic grammar, even the ancillary support structures, differ from our own.
“Each ecos attempts to hide and protect its genetic material, perhaps with ornate codes or decoys, yet, for the most part, I believe ecoi can sample and analyze scions with fair efficiency. We have seen new scions quickly imitated by other ecoi, and that leads us to believe the ecoi spy on each other, and that they are master genetic engineers.”
Salap pulled forth a long translucent tube filled with a gelatinous fluid. “Swim bladder, very fine oily substance,” he commented, passing the tube to the captain, who lifted it, weighed it on a scale, and let it slide into a pan for later examination.
“Can anyone tell us why ecoi would want to disguise or encode their genetic information?” the captain asked, treating his crew once again as a class of students.
The A.B.s and apprentices shrugged, glanced at each other, smiled sheepishly. Finally, A.B. Talya Ry Diem ventured her opinion in a gruff voice. “Don't want others stealing their designs.”
“Precisely.” The captain smiled at Ry Diem, and she beamed like a little girl. “An efficient form requires much effort to design and create, much trial and error. Theft is easier. Baker witnessed scion kidnapping in Thonessa's Zone, a small zone on Tasman, near Kandinsky. He never saw actual analysis—no one has—but found the discarded carcasses in Kandinsky later. Shortly after, adapted copies of these scions from Thonessa were produced by Kandinsky.”
Salap lifted his slime-covered hands. “I suggest we name this form Elizabethae Macropisces Vigilans—though the connection with Elizabeth's Zone is unproved.” He pulling a cloth over the dead piscid. “We have so many questions to answer. How does an ecos deal with death? What is the nature of its energy cycle, its feeding and respiration? Why have the ecoi created an oxygenated atmosphere, yet rely primarily on a non-respiratory photosynthetic cycle? Do ecoi in fact reproduce over long periods of time, or do they merely sex and flux—merge with valuable sub-zones, or with each other? If they do reproduce, since virtually all the land and most of the ocean are already populated by ecoi, where do young ecoi go to grow and mature? Is it possible the young exist within the ecos, and we do not recognize them?” He bathed his hands in a tub of seawater, then removed his gloves. “Many mysteries indeed, and I for one am eager to solve them.”
Twenty-three days out from Calcutta, one of the younger apprentices, Cham, standing watch on the foretree top, spotted what he thought were ships to the southeast. The captain came up from the cabin, followed by Randall. Thornwheel and Cassir emerged, then Shatro. Salap came last, and binoculars were passed between them on the forecastle deck near the bow.
“They're coming closer,” Randall observed.
Ry Diem was helping me repair a net on the quarterdeck. “Fates and breath of us all,” she murmured, lifting her eyes. “Brionists.”
“Not ships,” the captain said, loudly enough for all of us to hear. “Moving quite fast, however.”
Salap took the binoculars eagerly. He seemed ready to leap into the water.
“Wonderful,” he cried. “Speeders, racers ... largest I've ever seen.”
“From where?” the captain asked.
“Petain, perhaps,” Thornwheel suggested.
“No way of knowing,” Salap said, binoculars focused on the objects, now visible to everyone about a mile from the ship and bearing down rapidly. “They are moving faster than thirty knots.”
The captain took the binoculars again. “Pelagic scions big as longboats. Biggest I've seen except for river whales.”
Four of the creatures zipped across the ocean's choppy surface, sending up spray from wavetops, bouncing like speedboats and alternately singing and droning. “Baker observed these,” the captain said, as if that might make them less interesting.
“I have seen smaller ones myself,” Salap said.
“What do they do?” the captain asked. “Where are they from?”
Throwing long rooster-tails, the high-speed scions circled the Vigilant at fifty or sixty meters. They seemed little more than a tall sail or stabilizer mounted on a flat body. The forward part of the body dropped two limbs or fins into the water, where they spread to form hydroplanes. The aft section of the body whirled long-bladed cilia like propellers, driving the animals over the ocean at high speed, at least compared to the Vigilant. They circled us for ten minutes, then one darted closer, flashing by the port beam. Its colors were blue and dark purple across the stabilizer, gray and white along the body and fins, with red trim on all forward edges. It was breathtakingly beautiful.
Shirla took my arm as we watched. I glanced at her and saw her face flushed with an emotion I knew I shared, but which was difficult for either of us to express.
“Blessings upon Lenk for bringing us here,” she said. She held my hand to her lips and kissed it, biting a knuckle gently, and ran aft to trim the maintree skysail with other A.B.s.
The captain and Salap argued over the sighting for hours after, reaching no conclusions they could agree upon.
Meissner spread a sail across the main deck to check his repairs. “Messengers, tattletales,” he muttered for the benefit of no one in particular. “Checking things out across the Darwin, reporting back to their queens.”
/> 11
At the end of the fourth week, Martha's Island lay three miles off the port bow, due north, visible beneath puffs of gray evening cloud as a sawtooth of six jagged mountains. Dark spits of lowland connected the rugged main island to headlands east and west, giving the broader mass the look of a bird with a feathery head prostrate upon the sea, its wings spread flat with tips raised weakly for flight. The Vigilant proceeded slowly over shallow sandy banks devoid of apparent life, topsails and spanker taut in a steady breeze and all others furled. The sea spread calm and deep blue for miles around.
We had entered the protected void of Martha's Island, and approached the island's southeastern shore, the only safe place to land a boat on the mountainous main body. If we had tried to land on the lowland beaches or the headlands and hike inland, we would have encountered extremely rugged and barren terrain; so Jiddermeyer had learned on his first visit, and Baker and Shulago had confirmed.
Most of the crew watched our approach to the island, evenly spaced in the middle and port side on the shrouds, masts, quarterdeck, and on the forecastle deck with the master and researchers. The captain had unfolded his portable chair on the quarterdeck and surveyed the coast and mountains through binoculars. Shirla and Shimchisko and Ibert watched with somber expressions.
“What's wrong?” I asked.
Shimchisko hitched up his shoulders and shook his head with a whistling release of breath. “Martha's Island doesn't know us,” he said. “We'll be getting acquainted.”
Ibert nodded grim agreement. “Samplers aren't always the same,” he said. “Not always small. Not always gentle.”
“Nonsense,” Shirla countered. “Every ecos is ‘polite.'”
That expression found favor among a certain large segment of the immigrants, who idealized the landscape and ecos. A kind of mythology had sprung up. The “many mothers of life,” it was said, were “polite, always nurturing.”
“That's not what my father says,” Kissbegh observed. He had descended from the maintree shrouds with Riddle. Both had pushed their way through the crew to the port rail and stood beside us. “Jiddermeyer lost three of his crew here. Nobody ever found them. My father sailed with Jiddermeyer.”
We wondered why he had not mentioned this before.
“He did. Two men and a woman vanished and my father said they were sampled.”
“Why didn't you tell us about your father before?” Ibert asked.
“He wasn't proud of me. I'm a clown.”
Shimchisko snorted. Riddle and Ibert seemed more sympathetic.
“No, I know what I am, and so did he,” Kissbegh said. “But that's how I got my berth on the Vigilant. Not every zone need be as sweet as Liz,” he concluded portentously. “We should listen to experience.”
Shirla shook her head, unconvinced.
Rumors passed quickly. The crew's anxiety increased as we approached the eastern headland and sailed through more stretches of shallow, dead water. We could not make out any scions, even from a few hundred meters; the spits between the island's center and headlands were sandy desert.
As we prepared for our stay on the island, I helped Salap arrange his equipment in the longboat.
“I hear you do not have a strong family,” Salap said, helping me carry two crates of specimen jars to the boat.
“No,” I said. “I don't.”
He was a small man with a face that seemed suited to sardonic opinions, dark eyes set unevenly above strong cheekbones smeared with blackrouge, a finely trimmed, graying black goatee, and square patches of hair trimmed free, like islands, at his temples. He wore loose-fitting black pants and a long black coat that seemed to fill out his thin body. “The master tells me you learn quickly.” He gave me a look that seemed at once both unconcerned and challenging, as if daring me to disagree—or trying to provoke me. “So I have agreed to take you on.”
“I am honored,” I said, climbing the ladder to the longboat in its chocks and carefully lowering the box of bottles.
We loaded a wire-wrapped cube of stacked folding lizboo-mesh cages, for capturing small scions alive.
“Still,” he continued, “there could be resentment. If you boast, I will send you back to the apprentices. And your duties will remain those of a sailor when we are not ashore and I have no use for you. Does that seem fair?”
I nodded.
“Good. We will accompany the first party to go ashore.” He wiped his hands on a towel and looked across the blue sea to Martha's Island. “Shulago and Baker said the central island and Mount Jiddermeyer were covered with thick silva. Something has changed. Perhaps we won't need so many cages...”
The Vigilant weighed anchor in a small cove just below the tallest of the island's central peaks, Mount Jiddermeyer. The sun had dropped behind the western headland and the mountains were black against the yellow twilight sky. Electric lanterns were switched on and the deck became a patch of bright stars against the gray-blue ocean and the silhouette of the island beyond. The apprentices and A.B.s were relieved of their duties and sat on deck at leisure, enjoying the warm evening air, yet still keeping nervous eyes on the looming blackness of Mount Jiddermeyer, outlined by stars and faint ribbons of moonlit cloud. Dinner was served on deck as a kind of celebration, and the captain and officers and researchers joined the crew topside.
The other researchers took my promotion from the ranks with fated nonchalance. “It's only what I expect from Randall and Salap,” Shatro said to Thornwheel, just within my hearing. “Nine days out of ten, Ser Salap's a martinet and by the rules this, by the rules that. On the tenth he's as generous as a bottomless bucket.”
After dinner, a keg of mat fiber beer was shared out on the main deck. I sat on the port gunwale with Ibert, Meissner, Shimchisko, and Shirla. We dangled our feet over the side, backs to the light, facing the darkness and listening to the waves as we sipped the weak, bitter brew, with its faint ginger-garlic tang. From the nightbound shore came the soft grumble of breakers on the black lava sand beaches.
We had not seen any scions at all so far, even on the mountain slopes, and that worried the captain. “It's wrong,” he said from his chair as Randall brought him a mug. “Martha's Island had a rich and lively ecos when Baker and Shulago last explored, a full silva both sides of the island. We haven't seen anything. It looks as if the whole island is dead.” That seemed to excite him. He turned to Salap, who stood with arms folded a few steps away. “It'll be primary science, pure and direct, eh, Mansur?”
“It will, sir,” Salap replied, smiling calmly.
“By the Good Man it will,” the captain murmured, eyes glittering, and sipped from his mug. He licked his lips with broad satisfaction. “Think of it, friends...” He swept the deck with his happy gaze, taking in those of us who sat on the gunwale, his researchers, the other apprentices where they lounged and ate or drank. “How many scientists, how many humans over the years, have had a chance to do primary science?”
“We will not just clean up little details,” Salap said, echoing the captain's enthusiasm.
He rubbed his chin. “Here's to Ser Korzenowski, designer of the Way,” he said, lifting his mug. “To his audacity.”
The crew sat in silence, all conversations stopped in uncertain embarrassment. Salap's gaze met mine. He was as interested in my reaction as I was in his.
Randall broke the silence. “And to Good Lenk, who used the Way as it was meant to be used, and broke the evil slide of fate and pneuma.”
“Hear, hear!” the captain said, his face flushing deeper red. He lifted his mug. “To Good Lenk, who guides us all!”
The crew joined the toast. The awkward moment did not pass completely, however. The mood of the evening, set by the warm breezes and the comfortable bright glow of electric lights, the keg of mat fiber beer, broke, and the crew wandered about the deck, finishing up small chores, preparing to sling hammocks abovedecks and sleep in the warm night air.
When the others were settled, Shirla and I still stood by the g
unwale, listening to the breakers. “We're awfully confused, you know,” she murmured. “I wish I knew what to think, sometimes.”
The longboat set out with first light, commanded by Salap; the captain stayed aboard for this first sortie, in case the island might prove dangerous. He clearly did not enjoy this precaution, and gave Salap detailed instructions on what to look for, what to record on both of their slates, and when to return with a preliminary report. On the boat were two apprentices, Scop and An Sking—low-profile types who seldom volunteered, but were picked by Randall for this reconnaissance—and Randall himself. Shatro, Thornwheel, and I filled out the complement.
The boat crossed the few hundred meters to the shore, a narrow black-sand beach scattered with lumps of pumice and broken bits of toughened scion fiber. We dragged the boat from the shallows up onto the beach, then walked up and down the strip of sand, the smooth glassy grains squeaking beneath our feet. Salap ordered us to gather several boxes of samples—the flotsam and jetsam of ecoi from around the Darwin Sea. “The ocean brings them to us for free,” he said.
Beyond the beach, a storm-eroded cliff ten meters high revealed layer upon layer of volcanic ash fall, alternating gray and black. Buried within the layers, Randall and Shatro found dessicated remnants of scions, perhaps centuries old. We dug out these delicate specimens with small rock picks and shovels—shriveled brown husks, victims of ancient eruptions from the same volcanoes that pushed up from the sea and gave birth to the island thousands of years ago.
“This much we know about Lamarckia,” Salap said, kicking at the black scoria capping the cliff. “It is younger than Earth by a billion years, more active volcanically—but five hundred kilometers less in diameter. There has been much less continental weathering of deposited crust from the era of lime testates, shelly microfossils. Nearly all the metallic ores are volcanic in origin. Likely if we really wish to find rich veins of metal ores, we will have to look five thousand meters beneath the continents, or deep beneath the waves.”
