DNA

by Laurence Dahners

  Still, it was good to see her old friends. Although the team had expanded and subsequently had some turnover since it had originally gotten started, Wheat, Piscova and Norris were all still active members. As they happily greeted one another, Ell found it hard to believe that the team had first formed to study the aliens on Tau Ceti nearly 9 years ago.

  Goldie, Silver, their kids and their tribe all seemed to be doing fairly well at their new location. Dr. Wheat reported concern about what the volcanic ash occluding the upper atmosphere was doing to the vegetation. The parabolic reflectors D5R had put up in the region around the Yetany tribe’s new location were doing a good job of greening up the vegetation in that area and were probably even keeping the temperatures a little warmer. However, this wasn’t helping the rest of the continent where global cooling induced by the dust in the stratosphere was making the plants, and therefore the animals higher in that food chain, somewhat sick.

  They argued for a while about whether they should bring in more parabolic reflectors to help a bigger area or whether they should interfere at all in a change that Mother Nature had wrought. This led to a disagreement about whether they should try to establish a system to warn against or even prevent asteroid impacts in the future.

  Ell mostly listened, but when things had calmed down a little, she cleared her throat and said, “I’ve got some news…”

  Most of the people in the room turned to look curiously at her, but Harold Wheat’s head turned sharply and his eyes widened with excitement, “Another living planet!”

  Ell nodded, still feeling guilty that she’d never told them about the sigmas. “The fourth planet around Beta Canum Venaticorum.”

  Piscova brightened, “Do they speak?”

  “No, sorry. No signs of intelligent life that I’ve seen. Let me tell you what I do know.” As she spoke Allan put up some of the video clips she’d prepared showing the riotous jungle greenery of BC4. “The atmosphere sounds breathable at sixteen percent oxygen, seventy-five percent nitrogen, and five percent argon, but carbon dioxide’s too high at four percent. Unfortunately the pressure is about 188 times that of Earth, so we couldn’t possibly live there in anything but an extremely hard shelled suit or an indoor environment. The gravity’s 0.78 G so it’d be comfortable if it weren’t for the density and CO2 concentration of the atmosphere.

  The animals,” here Allan began putting up images of the fauna, “are quite a lot like we imagine the dinosaurs to have been. Well, except for the fact they don’t have a head and neck separate from their body. Their mouthparts are right on the trunk like a crab’s. They’re immense and they have some huge flyers,” she waved at the big screen where an enormous flyer sailed across, “this particularly big one’s ten meters, wingtip to wingtip.

  “As with Tau Ceti and Alpha Centauri, the biome is DNA-based, giving further support to the panspermia hypothesis…”

  Ell weathered a storm of questions, though the people in the room had a hard time tearing their eyes away from the screen. When the queries started to die down, she said, “So, I was wondering if you guys would like to take over investigating BC4, or, whether you’d like for me to try to find a new group to study this place.”

  She turned to look at them and found shocked expressions on their faces. “Of course we want to study this planet,” Wheat said for the group.

  When Ell had finished turning over control of the rockets on BC4, she stopped in her office to take care of a few small things that needed her personal presence and then started for home. Once she was in her car, she said, “Okay Allan, show me what you’re seeing at Virginis 3.”

  Because he knew she was riding in a car and didn’t need to see the world around her, Allan put up a full binocular 3-D view of the planet through her HUD contacts. She once again saw a blue and white world. With the closer view this time she saw quite a bit more green than before. Oxygen, water, and chlorophyll green, Ell thought. I’d imagine life on this planet must be DNA-based as well. It’d be interesting to encounter life with some other basis, but I’ll have to admit I’m still hoping for a world where we might be able to live.

  To Allan, she said, “Any radio transmissions?”

  “No.”

  So, Ell thought, either no intelligent life, or they’re not advanced enough to use radio. Or… they exclusively use something better than radio such as PGR. “Have you seen any regular structures?”

  “Yes.”

  A shiver shot over Ell. Intelligent life! I hope they’re not like the Sigmas… “Show me what you’ve found.”

  Allan zoomed the picture in from space in order to give Ell a perspective as to where on the planet she was looking. It looked like she was flying in toward a point at a latitude of about thirty degrees. The zoom shot in toward the coast of one of the landmasses. Ell’s breath caught as it approached what appeared to be a natural harbor, a classic location for a city here on earth. A regular grid-like appearance became evident, but everything looked monochromatically green. The grid wasn’t as straight and perfectly regular as you might see with a modern human city. Things wavered back and forth. Mostly she saw hexagons like a honeycomb, other times triangles, very occasionally the kinds of rectangles you saw commonly in human construction. She wondered if it could be some kind of non-intelligent organic construction like insects created, or intelligent construction not rigidly constrained to ninety degree angles like so much of humanity.

  The zoom had stopped approaching so Ell said, “closer.”

  Allan said, “We’ve reached the current limits of resolution.”

  Sure enough, he did zoom in further, but the image pixelated and Ell really couldn’t tell much more. Sadly, she said, “It looks as if… as if there was a city there, but it’s overgrown.”

  “That’s possible,” Allan said. He didn’t venture anything more, evidently feeling that he didn’t have enough evidence.

  “Can you show me any more of them?”

  The overgrown city in the natural harbor vanished out of Ell’s HUD to be replaced by another one, and another, and another…

  Was there intelligent life that’s since died out? Or, could they be building their cities out of green materials? This didn’t seem likely since the edges of the structures looked fuzzy and rounded as if they were covered with vegetation. Maybe those are living cities, but the people there like to grow plants over everything? Or, maybe there’s a natural, non-intelligent cause for this semi-regular honeycomb arrangement of the vegetation?

  She didn’t want to have Allan land the rocket while there was any possibility that an advanced but hostile intelligent race lived on the planet. She didn’t want them detecting the rocket during its descent. “Keep orbiting and observing for now. Don’t adjust the rocket’s position with anything stronger than low velocity hydrogen jets. Let me know immediately if you see anything moving that might be a vehicle. Otherwise record any other findings that might indicate intelligent life.” She thought for a moment, “Go ahead and deploy another rocket with a high end optical package on a course that will also be captured into V3’s orbit. We’ll want to examine those structures at higher resolution before we even think about landing.”

  She thought for a while longer, then said, “Send another rocket to capture into orbit with a small and a human sized waldo. I have a feeling we’re going to want to land and poke around this place with something that has hands.”

  Chapter Two

  “Mom!” Zage said, “You aren’t really going to make me go to kindergarten, are you?”

  His mother gave him an impatient look, “We’ve talked about this before Zage.”

  “That was about preschool! I’ve looked at the kindergarten curriculums. They don’t teach anything I don’t already know!

  “They teach you how to interact with kids your age. Besides, this is a school for gifted kids. They’ll be ahead of the kids in your preschool.”

  Zage narrowed his eyes, “You really think they’ll be learning at a college level like I am?�
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  “Well… probably not. But they’ll be very smart kids and they’ll be your age. It’s really important for you to learn how to get along with your peers.”

  Zage rolled his eyes emphatically, “Why would I need to know how to deal with children who are of my chronologic age?! If I do need to learn to interact with people, it’d make more sense for me to learn to interact with ones who have a similar degree of maturity.”

  “Just because you know more than kids your age doesn’t mean you’re emotionally more mature. Besides, if we throw you in with kids who’re chronologically a lot older than you… they might be mean. That’s certainly happened to a lot of other precocious kids. Human beings have a long history of cruelly treating those who are different from them for any reason.” She sighed, “It’s just as true of adults as it is of children.”

  “But I’m not going to learn anything!”

  “You can educate yourself with online classes. There no one’ll know how old you are. You’re only going to go to kindergarten for a few hours a day—there you can work on learning to get along with people.” Ell gave him a serious look, “At the very least, you should try to learn how kids your age normally act. That way, if you ever have the need, you’ll be able to fool people into thinking you’re just an ordinary kid.”

  Zage gave an exasperated sigh, “I don’t know why you couldn’t have just sent me to some kind of summer camp! All their brochures talk about ‘socialization.’”

  His mom grinned, “Next summer.”

  Zage stared at her in horror. “Nooo…”

  ***

  Carol and the rest of the Martians gathered around the big port Phil had been sent home to Earth through. For a moment she thought wistfully about how she wished her husband was being sent back through the port to join them again on Mars. Unfortunately, though Phil was healing okay from his hip fracture and testing hadn’t shown any serious neurologic problems, pretty much everyone had concluded that sending people through ports should remain an emergency procedure for now.

  What they really meant, she thought, was that they wanted to wait and make sure the guinea pig, Phil, stayed healthy before they put anyone else through it.

  However, as long as they had the large port they’d built for Phil there on Mars, they’d decided to send some more large items through it. First of all, they needed some big things there on Mars and didn’t want to wait for them to be flown from earth by rocket. Second, before they sent another person through a port across interplanetary distances, everyone thought it would be a good idea to have cycled a lot of material through the big port to be sure those kinds of large high-energy ports weren’t going to fail with a person halfway through them.

  Major Epstein had been talking to the people on earth through his AI and now he said, “Okay folks they’re about ready to send it through. Stand by.”

  The yellow light started flashing on top of the big port. A minute later the port and its radiator fins turned frosty as liquid nitrogen circulated through to prepare it for the excess heat of activation. The light started flashing red and a second later the same big titanium can that they’d used to send Phil back to earth came shooting out of the port, sliding down the rails and out onto the floor.

  The frost that had gathered on the radiators had flashed to steam and Carol felt a brief wave of heat from the big port. Then she was moving with the rest of the team over to the can. Diane and Mark popped the latches and they opened it up to look at the big gray pile of filmy fabric lying inside. Dan plucked at the fabric, making its gossamer nature evident. He said, “I think we should carry it outside in the canister. If we lift it out of the can in here, it’s going to flop everywhere and be a huge pain in the ass to handle.”

  A little while later, four of them had suited up and were carrying the canister out past the last of the three—now deflated—graphene spheres that plugged the tunnel and functioned as an airlock. Once they had the canister outside, they attached some ropes and dragged it up onto the relatively flat plain at the top of the Valles Marineres.

  They unlatched the canister and dumped out its contents, then quickly latched it up to keep the dust out of it. The filmy fabric had thoughtfully been folded so a couple of the tie-down straps were immediately available and they staked those out. Because the atmosphere was so thin, the Martian winds couldn’t generate much force. However, once this thing was inflated it’d weigh very little in comparison to its enormous cross-section. Even those wimpy winds would easily be able to blow it away then. The Major held a brief conversation with people back on earth and a few minutes later the fabric started bulging, twisting and unrolling as gas poured into it through ports.

  As it unfolded, and unfolded, and unfolded, gradually spreading across the plain, Carol’s eyes widened. She turned to Lindy Thompson, “I know they said this dome thing was going to be big, but holy crap, how big?”

  Lindy looked at her, “The multilayer graphene it’s made out of is only 120 nanometers thick. In theory they could have packed a graphene dome big enough to cover nearly 2 square kilometers into the canister. In practice, it was too difficult to fold the material up that tightly so the dome’s diameter is only a little over a kilometer.”

  “That’s still huge!” Carol breathed.

  Lindy said, “I’m supposed to do an interview with one of the news services back on Earth once we’ve got it inflated. Do you mind capturing the video with your AI?”

  Carol shrugged, “Sure.”

  Once the dome had extended itself fully, they had to rotate it a little around the first stakes because part of it was hanging out over the Valles. Then Lindy had them open some of the ports that connected into the oceans of Europa. Those filled the bottom of the dome with about a foot of water. Even though the water would pretty securely hold the dome in place, they walked around and staked down the rest of the dome’s circumference while it continued swelling up into the air.

  Lindy stood in front of the enormous, somewhat translucent dome and Carol adjusted her position so that both Lindy and the dome were well framed in the image obtained by her AI. Rupert Alton, the newsie from Earth who was doing the interview, cleared his throat and said, “You ready ladies?”

  Lindy and Carol both nodded.

  Rupert said, “Carol, I’ve got to remind you not to move your head. We need our image to stay stable for the viewers.” He gave a little laugh, “Don’t want our audience getting seasick.”

  “Oops, sorry,” Carol said, reminding herself to move only her eyes.

  “Okay then.” Rupert said, “Folks, this is Rupert Alton, bringing you an interview with Dr. Lindy Thompson, NASA’s botanist on the Mars mission. Dr. Thompson, framed in the picture behind you is what appears to be an enormous dome, or perhaps the top half of a balloon. Can you tell us about this new project you ‘Martians’ are undertaking?”

  “I’d be happy to Mr. Alton. What you just said is essentially correct. What you’re looking at is an enormous dome shaped balloon with graphene walls. As you know, graphene is astonishingly strong and so the material of our dome can be very thin leading to its translucent appearance. The dome’s about a kilometer in diameter and a couple hundred meters high.”

  “And what’s its purpose?” Alton asked. “I see what looks like an airlock there on the side facing us. Are you Martians planning to move out of your tunnels and into the dome?”

  “Oh, no! We’re living in the tunnels because there’s so much radiation here on Mars. We still need to live underground most of the time or we’d quickly accumulate an overdose in this environment. In the dome the radiation level would still be high so it’d be just as unsafe to live in it as it is on the surface. No, this is an experiment aimed towards determining whether it might be possible to terraform Mars someday.”

  “By ‘terraform’ I understand you mean endeavoring to make Mars more like Earth so that people could possibly live there?”

  “Yes Sir,” Lindy said, reverting to her military speech patterns.
“What we’ve been doing so far is using ports donated by Portal Technology to bring carbon dioxide into the dome from balloons floating in the atmosphere of Venus and nitrogen from the atmosphere of Titan. We also have ports bringing in water from the ocean underneath the icy surface of Europa, the sixth moon of Jupiter.”

  Rupert said, “I can understand why you might want to bring water to Mars, but why would you be bringing carbon dioxide?”

  “Well,” Lindy said, “the only place in the solar system that has a lot of free oxygen is earth. We don’t want to steal Earth’s atmosphere to create an atmosphere here, so what we need is something we can convert into an atmosphere using photosynthesis. For that, we need four things—light, photosynthetic organisms, carbon dioxide and water. Back home on earth, the oxygen we breathe is created by plants that use sunlight to make carbohydrates and oxygen out of carbon dioxide and water. If we can get photosynthesis going here on Mars, conceivably we can use CO2 from Venus and water from Europa to make both food, i.e. carbohydrates, and oxygen for our colonists.”

  “That sounds like a great way to do it. What kind of plants are you going to start growing? Potatoes?”

  “Well, as you know, we’re already growing potatoes in underground tunnels here on Mars. But, what we’re expecting to use to create atmosphere will be cyanobacteria, which are often called blue-green algae. It’s thought that cyanobacteria may be what originally converted Earth’s atmosphere from carbon dioxide to oxygen about six hundred million years ago. Potatoes and other plants that are more familiar to us need oxygen themselves, so they won’t do well in an atmosphere that has high concentrations of carbon dioxide and virtually no oxygen. We won’t be able to grow those kinds of plants until the cyanobacteria have done their job. Also, remember we’re doing this on the surface of Mars where there’s a lot of radiation. Bacteria tolerate radiation a lot better than multicellular plants.”