The Anguished Dawn

by James P. Hogan

  It had long been known that species genera, and whole families appeared suddenly in the fossil record, fully differentiated and specialized, with no traces of the transitional and intermediary forms that gradualist theory said should be present in abundance; but in keeping with what had become so much the practice on Earth, only that which accorded with the theory had been deemed acceptable as fact, and so the difficulty was ignored. Hence, the billions of years required to make the traditional account of things sound plausible were not needed. That fitted well with the general picture the Kronians were putting together of things happening much more quickly and far more recently than had previously been believed. And this was just as well, since according to Vicki, the view among the Kronian scientists whom she worked with was that the traditional account wasn't plausible in any case, even given billions of years. The improbabilities involved were simply so huge as to be indistinguishable from miracles.

  "So, do you think we'll be seeing new animals and things coming out of all this?" Keene asked curiously.

  Naarmegen screwed up his face and peered into the distance, as if trying to read the answer off the wall at the far end of the room. "It's early days to say yet. But a lot of the niches are vacant now. It will be interesting to see what emerges to fill them. If I had to guess, I'd say we'll probably know within a few generations. Blind trial and error didn't remodel the whole biosphere in a few centuries after the Disruption and the Detachment. But if I had to guess, I'd say that Athena wasn't extreme enough to bring about anything that radical. I think what we'll get will be pretty much variations on what we know"

  "Not extreme enough? Hell, it only just about wiped out life as we knew it."

  "Not life. Civilization. Look around. I know it might sound crazy just at the moment, but Athena really wasn't the last word."

  Despite his sarcasm, Keene knew what Naarmegen meant. The Kronians' current reconstruction put the detachment of Earth from Saturn configuration at around 10,000 years Before the Present, and identified it also as the event that had triggered the replacement of the giant Pleistocene mammals by the more familiar types of modern times. An even greater upheaval at some earlier date was believed to have ended the age of the giant reptiles—involving a large impacting body as known since the twentieth century, but with more yet to the story. Whatever the exact mechanisms responsible, it was fairly generally accepted that on both these occasions Earth's gravity had increased significantly, changing the biological environment sufficiently to induce the appearance of totally new forms of life, not just variations of what had gone before. If such complete adaptations to the new conditions had expressed themselves in the short time scales that the Kronians maintained, then, as with the coloring of the plant specimens that Keene had commented on, the genetic coding must already have been present as components of programs that were immensely more complex than anything that had been suspected before.

  Keene asked the obvious question: "So where did the programs come from? How did they get in there?" He had meant it to be flippant, but Naarmegen didn't reply until they had walked back out through the doors and into the open again.

  "Answering that is one of the greatest tasks that Kronia has set itself for the generations ahead," he said. "Some say it's the most important single mystery confronting us."

  It took Keene back to his meeting with Jon Foy in Foundation. So much to think about. "I often used to wonder why leaves were green and not black," he said, stopping to take in the scene of the hills around the base. "You'd think they'd have optimized by going for all the wavelengths available, wouldn't you?" He gestured. "Like those out there. And then, why settle for the lowest-energy end, the red?" Actually, it had been Robin who'd brought it up, but it made easier telling this way.

  "Maybe it was something that hung over from the Saturn era," Naarmegen suggested. "When the Sun was remote. Maybe something near red was all there was." It was a possibility, Keene supposed.

  He was about to say something more, when an alert tone sounded from the speakers commanding the area, signaling an announcement. "Attention. Attention. Descent vehicle due down in the Landing Zone in ten minutes. All personnel are requested to vacate the outside area. Descent due in ten minutes." It was a nuisance, but something they'd have to live with until sufficient ground transportation was available to service the larger landing area being cleared farther away. Until then, everyone had to be under cover during landings and launches. "I need to park the truck," Naarmegen said. "I'll see you inside."

  "Sure. I'll be in Ops."

  Keene walked across to the OpCom dome on the edge of the landing area between the ends of the lab block and the workshop buildings, and let himself in via a side door to the lower level. A steel-railed stairway took him up to the operations floor, with its clutter of consoles and equipment, and windows giving an all-round view of the landing area in front and the base complex to the sides and rear. Kurt Zeigler was down from the Varuna, supervising, standing behind one of the console operators. As was typical of the Kronian way of doing things, the routine was light on rules and restrictions, and a number of others who didn't strictly belong were also present, either having wandered in to see what was going on while taking a break, or using the operations center as a social gathering point until the general messroom adjoining the two dormitory blocks was completed. The operator in front of Zeigler was talking to a screen showing the head and shoulders of a man in a flight suit, with instrument panels and a figure at another crew station visible behind. Keene took it to be from the incoming shuttle.

  "Retros to max. Commencing final. Vector coming around onto . . . ah, three-three-zero."

  "You're on the beam, looking good. Wind at the pad is gusting twenty-five to thirty from the east. We're putting you down in slot G-3."

  "G-3. Got it. Roger. Any coffee going down there?"

  Keene spotted Sariena sitting with Adreya Laelye, the senior SOE representative, on a bench seat by one of the windows on the landing area side and went over. With the work involved in seeing Agni landed and brought online, he'd had hardly a moment to talk to Sariena since she came down from the Surya. She smiled tiredly at him as he joined them. "Lan, so they've let you have some time off at last. I'd forgotten what it was like on Earth. We're glued to the seat. I don't want to get up."

  "Coming up those stairs was enough," Adreya said. "Zeigler took them two at a time. He's kept in good shape while on Kronia. It's obscene."

  "You'll be doing it too in a couple of months," Keene told her, although he didn't believe it. He looked at Sariena. "Managed to rest up after the voyage?"

  "Yes, finally. It was a very different feeling from last time. But I wanted to come down here, even if we're not in a position to get much work done yet. Damien and the others are staying up in the Surya until they've got proper working space set up down here." Sariena had brought a team of planetary scientists from Kronia. Damien was her assistant, left in charge of things up in orbit for the time being, by the sound of things.

  "Gallian isn't down yet?" Keene queried.

  "Not yet. I think he's still finishing some business with Kronia up in the Varuna." Communications delay to Saturn was a little under seventy-five minutes each way.

  "We saw you coming out of the labs with Pieter," Adreya said. "Was that another load of specimens that he just brought in? His lab isn't even finished yet."

  Keene shrugged. "I know. He can't wait to get started. Can't blame him, I guess." He paused, running an eye around to take in the other things that were going on. "He says he's already seeing signs of what could be catastrophic evolution."

  "New genetic programs expressing themselves?" Sariena said.

  "Exactly."

  "Well, either they wrote themselves or something wrote them. Which exhausts all of Aristotle's logical possibilities." Sariena's tone conveyed that she didn't give much credence to the first.

  "Touchdown in thirty-six seconds. She should be just breaking through," the operator in contact with t
he shuttle announced to the room. A screen beside the one still showing the flight deck brought the view outside the shuttle, of solid grayness dissolving into wisps and streamers suddenly, and then the blurred image of an already expanding landscape with a superposed circular grid centered on the plateau region where Serengeti base was situated. Several figures got up and moved to the windows on the front side of the dome. After several seconds somebody pointed.

  "There."

  Keene followed the direction and picked out a speck of bright light against the overcast. As it enlarged and grew brighter, the sound came of engines braking at full thrust.

  The light elongated into the shuttle's exhaust plume with the ship taking shape and growing above as it slowed in its descent. It touched down a short distance from the other craft on the ground, and after a final flare of flame and smoke the engines cut.

  "Switch to local tower frequency five-five-six. Serengeti control out," the operator said. Outside the window, the reception vehicles that had been waiting below on the edge of the landing area began moving out.

  Adreya sighed. "You'd think I'd have seen enough of things like that, wouldn't you. But I never get tired of watching ships come in. It's so strange to be able to hear it! I'm still getting used to just walking out into air through a door, without a suit or anything. It doesn't feel natural."

  "You might not appreciate it so much if the vaccinations don't work," Sariena cautioned. In the previous visit by Gallian's delegation, all of the first-time Kronians had suffered badly from infections and allergic reactions.

  "You might not be the only ones this time," Keene told them. He could feel his own eyes and skin smarting from something he'd encountered outside. The atmosphere still carried sulphurous and hydrocarbon contaminants from Athena's tail.

  While they were talking, he noticed that Zeigler, having seen the shuttle safely down and into its berthing slot, had noticed Keene with the two women and was on his way over. For the most part Keene had found Zeigler to be a remote kind of personality, giving a feeling of detachment and never quite mixing in with the confined community aboard the Varuna. It could have been that he took his position as Executive Officer a little too conscientiously—although things like that didn't seem to inhibit Gallian from being his old jovial and informal self. Maybe it was just that Keene wasn't used to Europeans. He looked up inquiringly as Zeigler joined them.

  "How are we doing with the power?" he asked Keene.

  "Connecting to the distribution system now. Shayle's handling that part of it. I talked to her about a half hour ago. We should be running before tonight if they get the shielding finished." Keene made an open-handed gesture. "So, what do you know? I might actually have some spare time on my hands for a change."

  "I'm sure we'll find some way to fill it. There's plenty to do. In fact, I was meaning to ask—"

  Just then, an operator at one of the other consoles in a different part of the room leaned forward abruptly to follow something on a screen, and then turned her head to call crisply across to Zeigler.

  "Sir!" The tone was enough to bring immediate silence to the whole room. Zeigler strode across to see what was happening. His body stiffened, and all heard his sharp intake of breath, followed by a slow exhalation of astonishment. Keene was already over there along with several others before he realized he had reacted.

  The screen was showing a transmission from one of the probe drones that had been sent out to reconnoiter the surrounding regions. It was looking down over a chaotic area of rocky slopes, piled boulders, and tangles of vegetation with a creek running down the just-visible edge of what looked like a larger body of water below. In several places, crude shelters had been made from roofs of thatch built over crevices among the boulders. And as the probe moved, changing the angle, several simple thatched huts appeared. Human figures were outside, looking up, including several children. Two more figures were just in sight at one edge of the view, mounted on animals that seemed to be about donkey-size. The probe was being directed from Survey Control up in the Varuna. A zoom-in commanded by the operator up there revealed them as both dark-skinned. One appeared to be fairly young, fierce in appearance, wearing a tied headdress, and brandishing some kind of weapon. The one riding next to him was older, white-haired and wrinkled.

  "What is it, Lan?" Sariena called from where she was still sitting with Adreya by the window.

  "It's coming in from one of the probes," Keene said. He found it was taking him a moment or two to absorb the message. After all the wondering . . . "It's found some, Sariena! It's found people out there! There were survivors!"

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  It was a small world—or worlds. Vicki had moved from Dione to Titan for a week of familiarization and briefings at Foundation before going up to join the orbiting Aztec, now back from its trials and taking on supplies and equipment in preparation for liftout. With her was a Kronian molecular biologist called Luthis, also from Kropotkin's Polysophic Academy, who would be going as the senior member among the Aztec's scientific complement. Aztec would be the first vessel to incorporate decks fitted with experimental Artificial Gravity "Yarbat arrays" on a long-range mission. In the course of their week with SOE's Training Division at Foundation, Vicki and Luthis met a former Terran petrological technician named Tanya, who had worked for a while on excavations at one of the construction sites at Omsk, on Rhea. After the meteorite strike there, Tanya had transferred to Essen on Titan to learn about the new AG-based methods being developed for cutting and shaping rock masses of large dimensions—termed "lithofracture" and "lithoforming"—developed from the technology that Lan had helped pioneer at the Tesla Center.

  Aztec would be carrying heavy-duty prototype equipment to Earth to test its efficacy on Terran materials and under Terran conditions, and hopefully to exploit its unique potential as a way of building large-scale structures using the only form of material readily available there. Tanya would be traveling back as part of the engineering-construction team being sent to get the pilot scheme up and running. Two others, going with them as AG consultants, were Jansinick Wernstecki and Merlin Friet—both of them former Tesla Center colleagues of Lan's that Vicki had heard him talk about often in the earlier days, but never met before.

  * * *

  Vicki and Luthis stood watching Tanya in a workroom in a subsurface part of Foundation, where a small-scale demonstration had been installed some time ago for the benefit of government officials and others curious about the new technology. In fact, a couple of news journalists had been recording here that morning for a science-interest piece being made for general circulation.

  "What it does is create a high-frequency shearing force across a surface that literally splits the grain structure all the way through," Tanya said, tracking a cursor across the screen to define a wire-frame plane passing through a graphical representation of a piece of Titan rock. The rock itself, about the size of a soccer ball, was clamped in a metal frame on top of the bench beside. Three thick disks maybe a couple of inches across, attached to narrower cylinders, painted red, looking like small top hats, were cemented to the rock at strategic points. Heavy cables from the top hats connected to a rack of equipment by the bench. Tanya continued, "Basically, we use a g-wave to agitate the molecular structure on one side of the plane, and generate an interference pattern to neutralize it on the other." She kept her eyes on the screen, making a few final adjustments as she spoke. "It's like holding one half rigid while you twist the other half off—except that it's not twisted free; it's vibrated free." She was somewhat pasty in complexion and pudgy—not uncommon for Terrans who had moved to Kronia. Tanya had been among those rescued from the Terran scientific bases on Mars, and had suffered some kind of nervous breakdown after the incident on Rhea.

  Luthis nodded toward the image that Tanya was manipulating on the screen. "The surface that you're showing there. Does it have to be a flat plane like that? Or can you make it different shapes?"

  "In principle it could be sh
aped, yes. But that's still in the future."

  "Is it good with any material?" Vicki asked.

  "As of now, we're limited to brittle things like rock, glasses, ceramics. . . . Metals are too ductile. But we're working on it."

  "Okay.

  Tanya checked one last time over the readings. "And we should be all set." She brought up a button on the screen, with a query requesting confirmation to proceed. Tanya confirmed the instruction. . . . And nothing happened except that a faint crack sounded from somewhere seemingly inside the piece of rock. Vicki stared at it, waited a few seconds, then looked up.

  "That's it?"

  Tanya smiled, evidently expecting it, as she leaned over to loosen the securing clamps. "What did you expect? A nuclear explosion?" She removed the restraint, and one half of the rock fell away in her hand to reveal a cleaving plane as flat and smooth as cheese cut by a fine wire.

  "I'm impressed," Luthis said.

  Tanya gestured at a larger mural screen overlooking the bench, which she had been referring to earlier. It showed the proving area about fifty miles from Essen, where the full-scale equipment had been developed and tested. A series of unnatural gouges formed by straight cuts and variously angled surfaces had been cut into the sides of a rock ridge on the surface, with the slabs and forms that had been extracted from them scattered about and in some places piled like gigantic play blocks. "When you get up to that kind of size, the exciters need to be solidly bolted in, not glued. But it works the same way."

  "So if we ever have to abandon Saturn and need big shelters back on Earth, is that how we build them?" Luthis asked.