by Eric Flint
"Give me half-assed, and you have a deal."
Helen snorted. "No one gets half my ass."
A.J. should have made another comment at that point, but he was silent instead. Giving him a sideways glance, Helen saw a rather dramatic blush just starting to recede.
Well, now, that's cute. I guess a wiseass answer occurred to him that took him in a direction he wasn't ready to go.
She paused mentally at that point. It dawned on her that she was skirting an area that she wasn't ready to go. She been working alongside A.J. for three days, ever since she'd agreed to participate in the planned expedition to Mars. Almost every waking hour, in fact. The experience, she now realized, had just driven home the impressions she had gotten in the two years since she'd first met the man.
Don't kid yourself, woman. For whatever reasons-God only knows how and why it works-A.J. Baker really and truly turns you on.
She shook her head slightly. She was still twelve years older than he was-always would be-and she was still not ready to go there. Probably never would be.
Before she could start blushing herself-at her age!-she hurriedly went back to the subject at hand. "Are there any other rooms you can get into other than this one and the water room?"
A.J.'s tone seemed just a bit hurried, too. "A few, yeah. There's only one major room we haven't looked into yet. Its door is opened a little bit less than this one, but it was clearly jammed tight and no way we were going to lever it open. So now that we've done all the heavy work we can with the Faeries, I'll probably be trying to get one of them into that room. It might get stuck, though; it's going to be really, really tight. That's why I hadn't tried until now. And we've got a few more side corridors to go into first."
"What do you make of those things over there, that look like, oh, triangular plaques?"
A.J. studied the thirty or so glittering bronze-tinted plates that were piled in ages-old shallow drifts against the wall, probably due to Phobos' rotation. "My guess? Printouts of important data."
"Printouts? But they're metal. And they don't appear to be stamped or inscribed in any way. So why do you think they're printouts?"
"Hard to prove it right now, but on some wavelengths, just at the edge of maximum enhancement, I get hints of structure. Remember, these guys were sitting in a pretty limited environment here, so you gotta think about it. If they did prefer using hard copy, like we do, how're they going to do it? It'd be insane to bring along masses of paper, and it's not like you're going to be growing trees here. Or papyrus reeds. So you need something else.
"What would be ideal would be something sorta like an Etch-a-Sketch that doesn't go away at a shake but only at a specific signal. It'd be a physical display, but one you could use over and over again. And with a lot better resolution and control than an Etch-a-Sketch, of course."
Helen nodded. "Okay. But how would that work?"
"Remember when you first met me? My halo?"
"Yes. So?"
"Well, if you have miniature active agents like my sensor motes, only a lot smaller-real nanotech like they've been working on for years-you could make the surface of some object, like those plates, be composed of these agent-motes. They'd be networked together on the local level and could rearrange the surface physically to conform to whatever you wanted to display. Then, when you wanted to change the surface, you'd send another code to have them move around again. Properly designed, it could be pretty energy efficient. Everyone would be able to have a few of these little babies and they'd have permanent records without physical waste. If you ever really decided that a book or whatever wasn't needed any more, you just erase it."
He pondered a moment. "The things probably would scavenge power from transmissions in the air. You might even be beaming out some signal that was harmless to you and that didn't interfere with your other devices, just in order to keep 'em powered. Of course, once the power failed, the motes shut down. And by now, they're almost certainly vacuum-welded into a single mass. Not to mention that with sixty-five megayears having gone by since then, radiation probably hasn't done 'em any good either."
Helen thought about the bronze-colored tablets having a surface mutable as water, changing and freezing on command. It was a nice image, and it did make sense the way A.J. put it. But it was awfully speculative, based just on a faint trace of microstructure.
"Do you always jump to conclusions on that little evidence?"
"Well, yeah," he said, grinning a little sheepishly. "I like having a guess at anything I run into. Besides, I have a reputation to maintain." More seriously: "But they do seem to have a lot of the symbols on the keyboards and signs, and other things that might be sketches or something. So the tablets look a lot to me like sorta triangular clipboard type things, but they're also pretty much solid."
"I think I understand you," Helen said slowly. "Unless we postulate some odd religious requirement, it's hard to imagine they were spending their time carving or casting metal symbol-plates like this. It's not like they had to write in cuneiform. So you're saying that if they used these things as you're guessing, then obviously the tablets couldn't be as simple as they look."
"Right in one, Doc. Hey, here we go, the first stereo imaging of the interior of a Bemmie."
The combination of wavelengths the Faeries could scan in had given A.J. an extensive array of methods for analyzing the interior of just about anything. Helen didn't understand how it worked, but she knew that when A.J. was dealing with an organic, mummified target, he could tailor the approach for exactly that sort of object.
The image that materialized on-screen was a detailed, layered outline of structures down to a fraction of an inch in size, all done without having to touch the specimen. That was a good thing, too. It was quite possible that at least parts of the sixty-five-million-year-old Bemmie would disintegrate at a touch.
"There it is!"
The "it" Helen referred to was a large, three-lobed organ protected by the bony structure they had long since decided was effectively a skull combined with part of a rib cage-sort of a cephalothorax. The tripartite object bulged towards the front of Bemmie and extended back a considerable distance. Lines of tissue branched from it at regular intervals, and it swelled again about halfway down the body and then trailed off.
"Well, no one doubted Bemmie was smart," A.J. commented. "Still, that's a hell of a brain. Great for zombies, though. Brrraiiiiins!"
The idea of a Bemmie zombie was creepy, Helen thought, since they were actually looking at a mummified corpse. "Look at all these other organs. That must be the digestive tract. Right there at the mouth and going down-"
"How do you know that's not his respiratory system?"
Helen could tell that was just a contrarian question. But she answered anyway, tracing the complexities revealed with her eyes, trying to wring every last bit of information from the image.
"First, because the area it comes through has a number of structures that look like they were made for cutting and crushing-a mouth, just like we thought when we looked at the fossil. Second, because the structures trailing down here look an awful lot like flattened intestines. And, third, because I think these are his respiratory system."
A.J. looked at "these," which were a pair of structures extending from slitlike areas on each side of Bemmie. "Okay, yeah, I'd probably agree, at least at a first guess."
"You'd damn well better. Who's the professional reconstruction expert and who's the glorified photographer here?"
"Fine, lemme give you another daguerreotype for your collection."
Another view of Bemmie shimmered into view next to the first, this one done in different wavelengths.
"Oh, now there's some nice structure! That must be the equivalent of cartilage and connective tissue. Look how it layers along the shoehorns. Weird, it seems very heavily set, though. A lot more than I remember the limbs of the fossil being."
Helen gnawed on her lower lip for a few seconds. "I think I know what caused that. Drying
out retracted the arms. I'll bet the extension and contraction tissue was pretty hydrophilic, even for living tissue."
"I dunno. Depends on the mechanism. As I recall, you've been arguing with yourself for the past couple of years on just how it managed the 'extend' part of that movement. Memory molecules, crystal structure, all that kind of thing."
He glanced back at the other view. "Getting back to the digestive and respiration systems, there's one area he was built better than us, if you're right. Bemmie never choked to death on a chicken bone. If they ate chickens. I wonder what he did eat? Was Bemmie vegetarian?"
"I severely doubt it, unless it was from personal conviction or ideology. His eating mechanism doesn't look all that much like ours at first glance, naturally. But my gut reaction-pardon the pun-looking at his, um, dentition, and the internal structure you've got here, is that Bemmie was an omnivore, like us."
"Just a guess though, right?"
"Yeah. An educated one, but still a guess. We don't have any idea what plants or their equivalent were like on his homeworld, or what other species existed besides themselves. But there are also these structures on the arms. I found some of them in our fossil Bemmie, but I couldn't be sure what they were. Looks like one of my guesses was right, however. They exist on the inside of the arms or tentacles in the front, and I'll bet the lumps of tissue under them indicate that they can be raised and lowered. Sort of like a cat's retractable claws."
"They do look kinda like claws. Or shark teeth even, or thorns."
"And where they're located indicates they were used to grab something and prevent it from moving away. And not gently, either. That looks to me like a predatory creature's design. Squid have some similar hooked structures on their tentacles. The length of the digestive system, though, is really over the top for something that's an obligate carnivore. At least here on Earth, the digestive tracts of meat eaters tend to be significantly less complex because, well, you're trying to convert meat into meat, rather than plants into meat."
"And that funnel sort of thing around the mouth. Like lips?"
"Yes, I think so. It's got more structure around it, though, from what I can tell. I'm not sure, but I think that it might not look so simple if it were still alive. Maybe not like pedipalps or other side organs, but not just a smooth funnel of tissue, either."
A.J. was studying other external features. "They didn't wear clothes, exactly, but they did have sort of harnesses and other things. I'll bet that's either jewelry or else some kind of communicator badge up there."
"Embedded in the skin? Well, I guess that tells us that they did have pretty tough skin."
"Not necessarily. After all, we get ears and other body parts pierced just for vanity. Still, at that size it probably did have pretty tough skin, like a rhino or elephant."
"Ugly things, weren't they?" Diane said from over their shoulders.
Helen opened her mouth to defend Bemmie reflexively, then grinned. "I did name him Bemmius for a reason, you know."
Diane frowned.
"From the old science fiction term, Diane," A.J. explained. "Bug-Eyed Monster, BEM."
Diane laughed at that, and smiled at A.J.
Helen wasn't surprised. She'd noticed already that when Diane acted just a bit clueless, it was whenever A.J. was nearby-and always about something A.J. could explain.
That annoyed her intensely, for some reason. Perhaps just the natural feminism of a woman in a man's profession. Or… She chewed on the problem for a moment, and was a little disturbed when she realized that the annoyance was something very old-fashioned. Archaic, even.
Pure and simple jealousy. Argh!
She shook it off. "Yes, I don't think I'd have wanted to meet Bemmie in a dark alley, to be honest."
"Or even in a lighted one," A.J. concurred. "He would've weighed in at, um-"
"Something over a ton," Helen supplied.
"-right, something over a ton, and had a hell of a reach to boot. If you're right about those thorn things… Well, the thought gets ucky. He could do quite a number on you."
Diane winced. "And probably eat you afterwards."
"Doubtful," A.J. said. "If he could catch you in the first placeBemmie was obviously not built for speed-he probably didn't have chemistry within light-years of ours. Couldn't eat us, anyway."
"You never know," Helen said, getting a surprised glance from
A.J. "Preliminary analyses from the fossil site… well, it's hard to be certain, given all the time that's passed, bacteria, and so on. But it appears that Bemmie was based on DNA or RNA rather like our own. We eat an awful lot of things that aren't very closely related to us-mushrooms, for instance-and some of them are pretty darn nutritious. But I'd agree that there's a matter of more orders of magnitude involved in this probability."
"That argument didn't go over with you well a few years ago, Helen," Glendale pointed out from the consultant's station he'd been given at Helen's insistence. "What's a few orders of magnitude between friends?"
"Well, to turn your own argument back-and hope that I have to eat my words, so to speak, like you-if you can find a set of dinosaur bones with knife and fork marks on them, I'll agree that Bemmie's people could've found us tasty eating."
Glendale laughed. "Fair enough. And I agree, it's damned unlikely."
"I wonder if they were hostile or friendly types?" Diane mused. "I mean, if we'd been able to meet them."
"Maybe we still can," A.J. replied. "They certainly didn't come from this solar system."
Diane looked at him. "What? How can you be sure? Maybe they were Martians."
"Because-oh, let's let the expert explain." He glanced at astrophysicist Larry Conley. "Larry?"
The big, slightly portly scientist shook his head. "No way."
"But I thought Mars had tons of water way back then."
"Not that recently, Diane. Hundreds of millions of years-and please note the plural-back to maybe a billion or two. Mars wasn't much different in the age of the dinosaurs than it is now. And if Dr. Sutter's right, Bemmie started out aquatic, so… No. I doubt very much that even if we had magic space drives we could meet any of them today. It's been sixty-five million years, remember. If they still had any interest in this place, they'd not only have been here, they'd have taken everything over. No, by now, they've evolved into something completely different, or gone extinct altogether."
Despite the fact that he'd summoned the expert opinion himself, A.J. choked at it. "Hey, now, that's a couple of big-ass assumptions. I thought evolution stopped once we started controlling the environment."
Conley raised an eyebrow and ran his fingers through unruly dark hair-which, unfortunately for him, looked much more sloppy and less "artistic genius" than did A.J.'s mop.
"That's one theory-we came along, invented civilization, and when we found out about Darwin said 'oh, we won't be having any more of that!' But, as other people have pointed out, what we've really done is just created a new environment with new pressures. And even tiny, tiny pressures, over sixty-plus million years, will add up to one hell of a lot of change. And so far no civilization we've had has lasted recognizably more than a few thousand years. You want me to believe these aliens made one that lasted ten thousand times longer than that? I don't think so."
He pointed to the screen. "That shows they had not just intelligence, but curiosity and the energy and focus to want to go to other solar systems. I'd have to assume that they'd probably have completely colonized this solar system long before now. And we definitely would've found traces of an advanced civilization from even that far back. If they stayed on Earth at all, they only built a few relatively small bases. Otherwise we'd have found something."
"Still, I wonder what they would've been like. Maybe they were really peaceful types, having worked out all the crap that we still have to deal with. Crossing light-years of space would take a hell of a lot of work."
"Ah, the old 'more advanced and wiser civilization,' eh, A.J.?" Glendale's voice was amu
sed. "I don't believe so, and I think your image there proves it."
"Huh?" A.J. glanced back at the image. "Um, he's kinda dead. And just because he wasn't a vegetarian doesn't prove anything. Dogs are carnivores, but they're pretty friendly most of the time. And if they overcame any violent impulses, like Helen said, they could all be vegetarians at this point. Well, at the point this guy got freeze-dried, anyway."
"They could indeed," Glendale conceded. "Yet not, I think, through being tremendously peaceful. Consider that object shown under the, ah, left arm. It wasn't easily visible in the earlier images, being so close and under the arm that it was in permanent shadow."
The object in question looked something like a large laundry detergent bottle with the bottom cut off combined with a ridged bowling ball stuck on the end of a plunger, the handle of the plunger stuck through the bottleneck. It was made mostly of metal with some odd ceramic and possibly plasticlike bits and held by some kind of strap or holster affair with the open "bottom" end out. Rotating the model showed that the "plunger handle" was a hollow pipe or tube with fairly thick walls.
"My fossilized shotgun," Helen finally said, after a long silence.
"Well, I would say it is more of a pistol. Possibly also a shotgun in terms of its operation, but if I understand the nature of the cutouts on the side there, essentially what you have is a weapon intended to be used one-handed. If we may use the term broadly."
"So what?" A.J. demanded. "We knew they had weapons. That's no surprise. And the original Bemmie needed 'em, too. If he'd had a few friends with guns along, he might have gotten out alive."
Glendale smiled, a bit sadly. "A.J., you're quite right he needed one where he died. But our friend here-where was he?"
The sensor specialist froze for a moment, then sighed. "Yeah."
"Exactly. Our specimen is armed while in the control room of a base on an airless rock, uncountable miles from any possible hostile wild creatures. Why would he be carrying a weapon in such circumstances? It seems to me obvious that it was considered possible that he might need one, even there. One does not ship something across light years which one does not expect to need at some point. Now, it may be that he is something like a security officer, and that most of his people are not armed. But the need for such an officer still points to the potential for violent disagreements."
