Our civilization has its technological advances, primarily in physics—hence our FTL ships—but all those years ago the Firsters knew much about bioscience we still do not. We could never have gotten to the stars by slowboat—we couldn’t keep a shipboard biosphere viable for generations, not for even one slowboat crossing. The ancestors of these Stone Age primitives had sustained an ecology in their slowboat for four.
I shared, for a moment, my lover’s awe in the colonists’ accomplishments. That emotion demanded suppression of the misgivings Paradise continued to generate.
“Do you agree?”
An amused tone of voice revealed I had missed an earlier iteration of a question. “Sorry?”
“Do you agree it’s time to lose the envirosuit? The lab mice outside are still fine.”
What could I say? That I had a bad feeling about this? Again? “I can’t think of a reason why you shouldn’t.”
By the time I was ready once more to consider sleep, Amanda was outside, casually dressed, pitching a tent.
Amanda grew up in an Earth megalopolis with, if it were possible, less vegetation than most asteroid habitats. At one level, that’s why she went into the life sciences. She is an expert by modern standards, if not those of the Firsters. Her parents are interplanetary traders, and, from my between-mission contacts with them, egotistical, self-centered, and greedy.
The popular image of the Reunification Corps is of a band of romantics. The truth is very different. Most members enlist for the adventure, the fame of discovering a lost civilization, or the rewards of recovering a lost Firster technology. Amanda, and I love her for it, was idealistic. Sure, a part of her recognized her selfless behavior as rebellion. Independence is another part of her charm.
Sudden interest in gardening was no more surprising than many of her whims, and unshielded immersion in Paradise’s environment was the last phase of eco-safety assessment. I would be joining her soon. I took her new hobby as an indirect compliment, a way for her to fill the time until our reunion.
Finally, the regulation quarantine period was complete. Amanda suggested that I delay joining her. “I just have a bad feeling.” The lopsided grin was like her, if the words were not.
Days laboring outside had left her tanned and toned. Sunshine had bleached brown hair almost blonde. We had been having steamy radio sex since she landed. I wanted to land immediately. What was happening?
The radio sex had become a bit routine, I realized. That was surely from repetition. What to many people would have been the obvious explanation never crossed my mind. There was no way Amanda had become involved with someone else—I know her. And Brian, still the only other human in the area, kept his distance more than ever since she had shucked the envirosuit. Only Patches was a frequent caller.
Hurt, I redoubled my own cultivation: of techno-archeological insights coaxed and reconstructed from the slowboat’s balky computers. Why was Paradise so much greener than upon the colonists’ arrival? Why were the animal populations so well balanced? How had the colonists accomplished their genetic adaptation?
Those questions were no more tractable than the one that most troubled me. Besides being my wife, Amanda was the mission’s commander and biologist—and she had ordered me to stay where I was.
Why?
Adrenaline coursing, I startled awake. I had not been sleeping well. My body coped by springing catnaps on me.
A half-heard shout still rang in my mind’s ears. On a nearby screen, Amanda stared at me, wide-eyed. The sensors that surrounded the landing site read uniformly normal. “Are you all right?”
She swallowed loudly. Her forehead furrowed. “I am.”
I needed to be down there to comfort and support, as well as to see and hear. If not her, then who? There were few choices. “Did something happen to Brian?”
A shiver ruined her shrug of denial.
“Amanda! What is it?”
She stepped aside, revealing a mouse cage suspended by steel cable from a local tree at about her shoulder level. She shivered again.
Within the wholly intact wire-mesh cage, the scarcely recognizable remains of two mice lay bloody and still.
Perimeter sensors had detected nothing approaching. The lander’s cameras had not been watching the cage. Brian, whom she sought out, reacted to the bloody cage with an inscrutable comment about the weather. He kept his distance from her.
Amanda’s bad feeling suddenly was not so implausible.
For lack of other ideas, we deployed more sensors and camera drones. We encountered a plethora of local species, both predators and herbivores. I have described this world as Earth-like, but I should clarify: I refer to a much younger Earth than knew humans. None of the indigenous forms was as advanced as a cockroach; Paradise had yet to evolve endoskeletons, multi-chambered hearts, or lungs. At great separations, we saw several cats, a dog, a goat, and two rabbits. Nothing had the incredibly thin claws that would have been required to reach into the still-intact mouse cage.
What kept down the human population? Did something invisible shred them unawares, like the mice? Brian did not understand the question, let alone have an answer.
We closely observed Brian, and, far around the periphery of the forest-fire zone, his closest human neighbor: a woman. Both spent their time thinning underbrush, pruning weather-damaged fronds, and doing other pastoral tasks. Don’t expect details: On my home rock, we cultured our food in vats.
To meet that newly revealed neighbor meant leaving line-of-sight of the lander and its automatic gun turret. Stun rifle in hand, camera on her shoulder, and translator in her backpack, Amanda trekked to see her. Myra’s vocabulary was as limited as Brian’s; her curiosity, if anything, even less. Her attitude, which I once again chose to infer from body language, was hostile.
Once more, I was left to wonder: Why?
Three days after the first incident, more mice set outside were slaughtered. This time, the cages had been under constant video surveillance. We replayed the episode, time and again, in confusion and horror.
The mice tore each other apart.
I kept sifting through the digital detritus of a lost civilization, as Amanda grew ever more restless at the landing site. Neither of us found answers.
Amanda started taking long hikes, gleaning samples from the scattered flora poking up through nearby ashes and specimens from the periphery of the native forest. Studying the local plant life was unsurprising enough for a biologist, but, “It seems like the thing to do,” was not the answer I expected to her planting and nurturing far more seedlings than she analyzed. What I had called a garden now evolved, by my standards, into a farm. A restful pastime, I supposed. One I would try to get into after I joined her.
Brian, meanwhile, had become openly sullen. He was curt, even belligerent, whenever she approached the fringe of new growth that separated the fire-scarred region from his forest. Without quite knowing why, Amanda found herself taking an unprofessional disliking to him.
There was a Firster expression that applied: about how the cobbler’s children went barefoot. Mining the data of an ancient slowboat was second nature to me. Analyzing our own situation—that it had not occurred to me to do. Data about the present was Amanda’s purview. When I finally did a correlation, two things stood out. Brian only visited when the wind came from his forested home region. Both mice incidents followed weather shifts such that the wind blew briskly from the inland sea.
Brian’s ever-cryptic references to wind and weather suddenly took on importance.
“Cameron!”
My heart instantly pounding, I looked up from a dissected Firster computer. On-screen, Amanda shuddered. I was relieved to see her safe inside the lander. Behind her, visible through open airlock doors, stretched the still unnamed inland sea. I could hear the surf. “What is it?”
Still shaking, she pointed to her left; a ship-con
trolled camera panned to follow the gesture. Two more caged mice, dead. Other mice scurried frantically around their own cages, squealing. The survivors were scant inches from the enclosure of the latest victims.
“Cameron.” Sweat beaded on her forehead, ran down her face and neck. An eyelid twitched uncontrollably. “Cameron, if it can strike in here . . .”
It: The madness that made creatures kill each other. No need to finish the thought.
Unable to concentrate on my work, I watched her autopsy and analyze the dead rodents. She soon had an answer of sorts. “The enzymes from Patches’s and Brian’s saliva . . . they’re also in the dead mice’s stomachs.”
I asked the one question whose answer might have negated my sense of doom. It did not. “Have you fed these mice any local food?”
“No.”
Which suggested that whatever caused these deaths was transmitted by air. But what could it be?
Patches mostly disdained Amanda’s offered snacks. It was a small surprise that local descendants of Earth mice, when caught and caged, would, once they got hungry enough, eat ship’s food. It was a far bigger surprise when Earth-bred lab mice ate local food. So far, they were doing fine on a diet of it. I watched her peel a piece of native fruit and feed slivers to mice in their cages. They were delighted.
Then she popped a piece into her mouth. “Spit it out!” I yelled.
She swallowed instead, and licked her lips. “It smelled good,” she said, as though that were a justification.
The final lab mice were gone, their self-destructive struggles captured on video. The early deaths had involved pairs of mice, who killed each other. Separating them, attempted more for lack of ideas than a theory, accomplished little. Solitary mice fatally injured themselves in a frenzy of failed escape attempts. The one thing we learned was that mice did not die before puberty.
Amanda refused to quicken any more mice from frozen embryos. “I have no theories to test, no experiments to perform. Creating new mice would be wanton, pointless cruelty.”
Misery and fear had us speaking almost constantly; stress made us snap and snarl at each other. When would the self-destructive insanity strike Amanda? I respected the wisdom of Corps protocols, the reasons for her quarantine below . . . all the while hating them.
Meanwhile, she endlessly cultivated her ever-expanding fields. Dirt streaked her face where she had, distractedly, brushed at trickles of sweat. Her bare arms and legs grew filthy, as though she dare not pause to rinse the caked, dried mud.
So we dug, side by virtual side, Amanda in her garden and I, in my own way, in the vast, gap-filled digital archives of the slowboat. “What,” I finally asked, on repeatedly encountering the same exotic term, “is an eco-pheromone? Our colonist friends were fascinated with them.” On-screen, she shivered. “What? Is that significant?”
“Don’t know. A bit of a breeze here, is all.” She was kneeling; her attention fixed on the ground until she had tamped down the soil and moistened mulch around the most recent bit of transplanted greenery. It took her a long time; I couldn’t imagine what she found so interesting. Finally, she looked up to wink at the camera. “Some pheromones would be welcome.”
“Hmm.” It had been a very long time, even by radio. “I could be talked into that.”
“That has never required rhetorical skill.” She cackled at my mock glower. “What do you say? Give me a while to wash up, and I’ll call you from,” and she batted her eyes, “my private chambers.”
“Hmm,” I repeated enthusiastically. This time we both laughed.
We met at the appointed time, each in our own cabin. The only alcohol on the lander was in the form of lab supplies, pure but without character. Amanda named a brandy we both favored, suggesting that I enjoy for two.
Then, touchingly, she called up one of my compositions, the first she had ever experienced. Arpeggios from a thousand synthesized instruments rippled and interlaced in counterpoint to a spectacular video from Alpha Centauri A 4. Snowcapped mountains glittered in countless colors. Shadows cast by three suns lengthened and blended. One by one, the suns set, until only a warm red twilight glow remained. Music and dusk faded together into an infinite sea of stars.
What we said and did . . . those are important only to us. Afterward, I slept soundly for the first time in a long while.
Yet again, strident alarms made me jump. System after system aboard the lander screamed electronically: catastrophic failure. Text scrolled faster than I could absorb it: alerts and warnings. Mostly obscured on screen by the blur of dire notifications was a frenzied, axe-wielding figure. Amanda. Sparks, flame, and black smoke spewed from shattered consoles.
“Stop!” Had she heard me over alarms shrieking in the lander and echoed here? “Amanda, stop!” My shouts had no effect. “Please,” I implored. Why was she doing this? From orbit, I could only send an acknowledgement of the alarms. Electronic warbling faded. Great sobs became audible between crunching thuds of the fire axe. “Amanda!”
Either my yelling or sheer exhaustion finally stopped her. She tottered, leaning against the wooden haft of the axe. Sooty garments clung to her, sodden with sweat. Her eyes glinted insanely. “I . . . I . . .” she coughed.
“Please,” I pleaded again. I fell silent in confusion. Please what? Stop? She already had. Tell me I’m going mad, that I’m imagining things? “Please tell me why you are doing this.”
The choking sobs subsided a bit. Her eyes streamed tears, whether from smoke or emotion I did not know—and that I couldn’t distinguish was bitter. “I . . . I had to do this before I lost the will.”
“Do what, Amanda?” Coughing preempted any answer. The crackling of the flames grew louder. Alarms rang anew, as fire suppressant sputtered futilely from ceiling nozzles. “Get off the lander.” She nodded and stumbled to the open airlock.
Outdoor sensors imaged her from all sides as she stood, stoop-shouldered and weeping. Wordlessly we watched the lander vanish in a geyser of flames. Comsats relayed the scene, low-res and shimmery for lack of landing-site amplification. “Amanda.” No response. “Why?!”
“I can never leave. I made certain that, if my resolve weakens, I never do.” It had to be blisteringly hot so near the still-burning wreckage, but she was shivering.
My mind raced. Whatever momentary lunacy had made her wreck the lander need not doom her. Our starship was fine—if unbearably empty. I could go for help, for a team of biologists to somehow make things right. “At least tell me what this is about.”
She explained a lot now, with one word.
Replaying the video, the fronds of the seedlings all around Amanda had been perfectly still. There had been no breeze; her spontaneous trembling in reaction to my question about eco-pheromones had been horrified insight. The long time she had spent puttering with the plant, staring at the ground and away from the camera, masked frantic thinking.
“For some reason, you feel you can’t leave.” I could not yet imagine what the reason might be. I did not care. It was Amanda. “Then I’ll join you. I’ll come down in the other lander.”
“No!” Tears that had subsided welled anew. Mucus bubbled from her nostrils and ran down her chin. “Don’t you see, Cameron? That would be worse. If I see you in person, I’ll be repelled.” A shudder made her pause.
“If you leave, at least we’ll have our memories.”
Pheromones, it turns out, are much more than sexual attractants. More broadly, they are biochemical stimulants of behavior, like the scent trails left by ant scouts to lead worker ants to food. Not only animals secrete pheromones; so do some algae, slime molds, and fungi. But pheromonal effects were largely intra-species—on Earth. Eco-pheromones, Amanda had realized, must involve wide-ranging biochemical signaling among species.
And that mechanism resolved so many of the unanswered questions about Paradise.
Only science far beyond even the
Firsters’ usual unattainable standards had kept the ship’s biosphere viable long enough to reach Paradise. With the scattered and incomplete records that were recoverable, we had not a chance in several lifetimes of recreating their achievement. By we, I mean the Corps and all its resources.
I did not have several lifetimes.
Still, what had happened was finally clear, if only in barest outline. The Firsters had synthesized two of what they called retroviruses. These molecular machines were benign as far as the immune system was concerned, which made them invisible to our biohazard sensors. Both retroviruses implanted designer genes into terrestrial mammals. The spliced genes from the first retrovirus expressed the proteins that, by allowing the colonists to digest local life forms, enabled survival. Given that adaptation, however, there was nothing to stop the highly evolved immigrant species from out-competing all native fauna—which the colonists were unwilling to permit.
Hence the second retrovirus: It implanted the genes that let the survivors live with themselves.
“We will not prolong our time through the wanton extinction of those who belong on this beautiful world,” declared the slowboat’s log, in an entry recorded as the shipboard biosphere was in its death throes. “Nor will we abandon to their fate those who have been such loyal shipboard companions.
“We will co-exist, or we will perish.”
Perhaps they knew what they were doing. I prefer to think they ran out of time before testing could be completed. Either way, the crew descended to Paradise’s surface, committed to being stewards of the land.
They had succeeded brilliantly. Earth animals coexisted everywhere with native forms, and, as the records from planetfall proved, the indigenous biosphere was now far lusher than before humanity’s arrival.
But genius does not preclude unintended consequences. Such as: Biological imperatives that made caged mice, their enforced proximity unbearable, fight to the death once a fickle wind stopped wafting plant and animal scents, eco-pheromones, from the nearby forest. The same imperatives that drove uncaged cats and dogs—and humans—far apart.
A Stranger in Paradise Page 10
