Analog Science Fiction and Fact - Jan-Feb 2014

by Penny Publications

  There was silence for a time, and then Ursule spoke. "Kent—or Henrick—have either of you determined whether these cones have any internal structure or organization?"

  Kent started to speak, hesitated, looking at Henrick, and then continued. "They, um, fall apart, whenever any significant mass comes close to them. The static charge holding them together..."

  "They don't like being touched," Henrick said. "They're shy. They're afraid. Or rather, I think, it's afraid."

  "Henrick," Ursule said, "what is it you're proposing?"

  Henrick changed the on-screen image again. "With enough magnif ication, it appears that each one of these cones has an opening at its peak. They're small—small enough for a pinhole camera, for example. And according to videos I've made when they disperse, the amount of dust that blows away indicates that the cones are hollow."

  "Henrick," Ursule said again, her voice hard. "What exactly—"

  "I've been looking at Kent's data," Henrick said, "at the models he's made of dust-particle interactions. It's not my field, but the implications are clear when you look at them the right way." He tapped some controls on the table and a schematic animation appeared. "Watch. Here's a single dust particle, statically charged. This one happens to be a dipole, positive on one side and negative on the other. Now another particle comes along, a negative monopole. It attaches itself to the positive end of the larger first particle. Now another dipole, and it happens to attach its positive end to the negative end of the first dipole." He waved a hand as the animation continued to run. "And so on and so on. Different shapes of particles with different charges drift along and join the structure. As the clump grows, it occasionally becomes unstable and collapses into a new configuration, and that in turn affects what new particles can be drawn in and become a part of the nodule. The process continues, and the nodule grows, until eventually the static charges holding it all together bleed away into the air, and it collapses and blows away."

  Henrick looked at Ursule, who was frowning down at the screen. "Anyway," he said, wiping the screen blank with a tap, "the point is that the unusual characteristics of the dust on this planet result in ongoing processes like that. As the dust is blown about by the wind, different configurations are constantly being created and destroyed, and some of those configurations are more stable than others. Kent's findings show that the dust particles exist predominantly in a fixed number of sizes, shapes and charges. This means that there are a fixed number of rules governing these interactions and the configurations that result, so the system is nonchaotic." He took a slow breath. "And finally, some of these configurations exhibit logic-gate behavior, and this results in dynamic structures comparable to the mathematical constructions known as cellular automata."

  He paused again, this time looking down at the blank screen. "I propose," he said, putting exaggerated stress on the word, "that beginning in the distant past, out of the millions of configurations of charged granules that were created, configurations would eventually arise that were capable of dynamically sustaining themselves indefinitely."

  Ursule's frown deepened. "Dynamically..." she said slowly.

  "Indeed," Henrick answered. "That's the key word. I'm not talking about a lump of accreted dust becoming sandstone. I'm talking about a dynamic system that maintains itself by constantly cycling through changes. By drawing in needed material, using it, constantly reassembling itself at its fringes as its core loses energy and crumbles away. In other words, something analogous to life."

  Emilie puffed out a breath through her nose. Kent said, "That's... a damned interesting theory, Henrick, but it seems rather a leap."

  "Is that what you think the dust cones are?" Ursule asked. "Instances of these dynamically stable configurations?"

  "No, not exactly," Henrick said. "You see, the thing about being analogous to life is that life evolves. There would be many different types of these dust-things at first. And all of them would be drawing on a finite supply of free, statically charged dust particles needed for their continued existence. That means there would be competition for resources, and the more complex and flexible... um... entities... would be at an advantage. There would be evolution, and that evolution must have begun billions of years ago."

  "So where is the result of all this evolution?" Ursule said quickly. "Even if you're right, all there is to this dust-life are some little cones."

  "No, those are all we see of it. All it allows us to see of it. And I expect that those will be gone soon, once it realizes we've become aware of them. I'm sure it can come up with more subtle ways to keep an eye on us." He leaned forward, putting both hands on the table. "This thing is watching us; that's clear. That means it's intelligent enough to be curious about us, to recognize that we are something out of the ordinary, and to want to observe us. That's the established minimum. At a maximum—who knows? We have no way of calculating the processing power or the intelligence of the total entity."

  "You're saying 'it,'" Emilie said. "I thought you imagined these to be multiple creatures or entities, evolving through competition."

  "Originally it must have been multiple entities. But we're not talking about biological life. The rules would be different for our dust. The individuals would have no skin, no bones, no fixed morphology. So there's no reason why multiple entities couldn't merge together. And once it learned to communicate by radio, it could exist as any number of discrete units, distributed all over the planet."

  "Radio?" Kent said. "Oh... the radio noise from the static discharges."

  "One man's noise is another man's signal," Henrick said. "Edward Ng, nineteen-something."

  Several thousand kilometers away, on the shoreline of the planet's single continent, a small crustacean-like sea creature found itself stranded on a mudflat by the withdrawing tide. It was a female, and she carried a host of fertilized eggs in her body. Her species had evolved to scuttle the floor of coastal shallows, scavenging on dead plankton. They hadn't evolved to live out of the water, but an absence of water wasn't instantly fatal. This individual was familiar with the push and pull of small waves as she roamed the shallows, and on this day she was feeding at a place where the receding waves left her body exposed to the air for seconds at a time. Her instincts told her to retreat back to deeper water, but the feeding was good here, and she resisted the command of that instinct. This was not because the retreat-from-shallow-water instinct was weaker in her, nor because her hunger was greater. It was because, somewhere in her tiny proto-brain, there was something like courage: a resistance to fear and an attraction to new sensations. With no social group to compare herself to, she had no awareness of her own courage, any more than she was aware that half of her offspring would carry this tropism of bravery.

  The waves came and went, and she fed, moving while her body was immersed, immobile under her own weight in the intervals between waves. Then there was an especially large wave that lifted her and carried her half a meter up the beach. There the wave dropped her, and after that there were no more waves. There would be no waves and no sea for her until the tide returned, hours later.

  With her feeble awareness, she knew something was wrong. She could barely move without the sea's buoyancy, and there was no longer any water flowing over the patches of permeable skin that kept her blood oxygenated. She didn't know that she would probably die before the tide came in again, but she knew she was not in a good place, and she was afraid. She tried desperately to move, but her feeble limbs had almost no effect. Still she struggled, and over several minutes managed to shift herself a little way toward the sea. The probability of her survival was increasing.

  Some meters away, on the dry sand, a particle of carbonaceous mineral settled to the ground. Soon another particle drifted by and was drawn in by the electrostatic attraction of the first. Another followed, and many more. The particles clustered, moving against one another, driven partly by the shifting dynamic of their own static charges and partly by the whisper-soft influences of the radio w
aves that shimmered across the surface of the planet. The nodule of black dust grew. In a few minutes it was an airy spherical shell several centimeters across, bristling and crackling under the influence of tens of thousands of volts of electrostatic charge. Then a thread anchoring this sphere to the ground parted, and it began to roll, pushed by the prevailing breeze. Seconds later it collided with the little crustacean, and the impact triggered a cascading release of pent-up static charge. The sphere flew apart with a shower of sparks and a loud crackle. A wisp of smoke rose from the crustacean, and she, with all her unborn eggs, was dead.

  Henrick climbed up the ramp and through the hatch into the longboat's main cabin. It was early in the third day of the mission, and Emilie was the only one in the longboat. She sat at one of the small screens, monitoring a video feed from a flying drone. "Don't mind me," he said. "I just want to use the big screen."

  A few minutes later he was leaning over the table, where an image showed a panoramic swath of countryside. He grunted thoughtfully, straightening his back. "When all at once I saw a crowd," he recited loudly. "A host, of golden daffodils; Beside the lake, beneath the trees; Fluttering and dancing in the breeze. " A moment passed in silence, and then he turned to where Emilie was sitting at her console. "I'm sorry Emilie. I shouldn't tease you like that. But in fact there is something interesting here. Would you like to take a look?"

  Emilie got up from her station without answering and stood at the table, looking down at the screen.

  "This is a view from the peak of one of the small mountains east of here. I sent a rover up to take this picture from ground-level, looking down into the valley. It's quite a beautiful view, don't you think?"

  "You didn't need to send a rover up a mountain to take a picture, Henrick. We have satellite and aerial images covering the whole planet."

  "I thought the view from a mountain, from ground level and looking down into a valley, would be particularly interesting," Henrick answered. "And I was right; it's a spectacular image. Notice the variation in the colors and textures of the vegetation. The forest on the eastern and southern slopes, then the darker greens of the ground-hugging vines, blending into yellow grasslands on the southern slope, with the stream cutting through the meadow, the sunlight catching on the water..." Henrick stopped, running his hand over the back of his head and through his tangle of gray hair. He grinned, glancing briefly in Emilie's direction. "I do have a point here, Emilie, as difficult as that may be to believe." He tapped some controls on the table, and other images appeared on the screen, stacked in rows and columns. "These are all pictures of similar valleys, the pictures taken from similar angles and altitudes. The difference is that I used flying drones to take these, because they're all situated in places where there are no tall mountains overlooking these valleys. In other words, these pictures could only be taken from the air. Do you see the difference?"

  Emily pondered the screen. "The vegetation is more uniform in all of these. The soil conditions, the microclimate, must be—"

  "Exactly," Henrick said. "The vegetation is boring. And in several of these views, there are streams flowing down the hills, but you can barely make them out because they're overgrown by forest. No grassy meadow around the stream, no sunlight sparkling on the water..." He switched the screen back to the first image. "My wife... she died long ago, back on Earth, before the mission. She was a gardener. She loved growing things, and she had a real sense of esthetics, an eye for beautiful landscaping. I was always growing obscure plants so I could put them under a microscope, but she was the one who could really see plants. She could see the beauty of them, and she knew how to work with that beauty; which plants would look good against which others, how to use similarity, contrast, accent. She was always changing things around in our garden, always refining, always had plans for the next season." His voice became soft, barely audible. "My wife would have approved of this valley. She would have loved it."

  Emilie stood looking at Henrick for a time, and then turned to go back to her work. "This first view is more beautiful because it was designed to be beautiful," Henrick said. "It was crafted and molded to be viewed from that particular vantage point; from that face of that mountain. It's a garden, designed and maintained by the dust. Indeed, the surface of this whole planet is a garden; parts of it are more deliberately designed that other parts, but it's all one garden."

  "I've been mapping the radio noise coming from the surface," Kent said at the team meeting that evening. "The most active areas of the planet are the deserts to the south and east. I haven't been able to show that there's any information in the signals, but I did find an interesting anomaly. By any model I could come up with, the total energy of the radio waves appears to be more than can be accounted for by wind-generated electrostatics. There must be some other energy source."

  "Interesting," said Henrick. "It hadn't occurred to me, but it makes sense. Computation takes energy, so it stands to reason that the dust would learn to use solar energy. It must do most of its thinking out on those deserts."

  Ursule sighed. "But meanwhile, we haven't been able to find any evidence that this... sentient dust of yours even exists, Henrick. And your notion that it has some kind of control over all the plant life is—"

  "Insupportable at this time," Henrick finished for her. "I agree. As is the notion of the sentient dust in the first place. In the time available to us, I don't think there's much chance at all of finding definitive supporting evidence."

  "Then we'll just gather as much information as we can, and analyze it later," Ursule said. "We'll take samples—"

  Henrick waved a hand impatiently. "Once any sample of dust is cut off from the world, from the rest of the entity, it will just be dust. Interesting dust perhaps, but just dust. The equivalent of a few neurons from a human brain. The most we can hope to prove back on the ship is that what I'm proposing is theoretically possible."

  "Well then that's all we can do," Ursule said with finality. "We have all our other work to attend to. In particular, we need to focus on the question of the lack of nonaquatic animal life."

  "Oh, that," said Henrick. "That's the dust, too. I'm sorry, I thought I'd made it clear that that was part of my hypothesis. You see, there aren't any land animals because the dust hasn't allowed any to evolve." He had been standing, but now he went to one of the chairs and sat, grimacing briefly as he did so. "The gravity here isn't agreeing with my knee," he said, rubbing his left knee with both hands. "I guess I'm due for another cartilage replacement. Or maybe I'm just getting too old for these missions. ... old and gray and full of sleep... " He looked up at the others with a fleeting smile. "Animals are very destructive," he said, facing Ursule. "Imagine that you're made of dust. Imagine the prospect of hordes of animals stomping around through your brain, crushing your eyes with a careless bump. Imagine the prospect of all that chaos and disruption in a world that you're used to having all to yourself." He waved in the direction of the table, as if to indicate the image that was no longer there. "And I'll bet it doesn't like the idea of animals interfering with its landscaping, with the way it's arranged the plant life in vistas like the one from the mountain." He slouched into his chair, his eyes half-closing. "When Isako was alive, when she had her garden, there was this groundhog that used to plague her year after year. It dug tunnels all over the property, ate the buds off of her phlox, her cornflowers, her black-eyed susans.... She'd go out in the morning and a whole flowerbed would be nothing but nipped-off stems. Of course she never considered trying to kill the thing; she was a very gentle woman...."

  "Henrick," Ursule began, "we need you to—"

  "Oh," Henrick interrupted, his eyes suddenly sharp. "That's another interesting thing I hadn't thought of. A very interesting thing indeed."

  "What?"

  "It hasn't killed us. It's aware of us, it's interested in us, it must recognize us as animal life, and yet it hasn't killed us. That really is very interesting."

  "Killed us?" Emilie said. "How could
it—"

  "Fill our noses and mouths with dust, I imagine," Henrick said. "Or perhaps electrocute us, and probably there are other ways too. It's had hundreds of millions of years of practice in killing animals."

  Ursule put a hand to her face and was silent for several seconds. "All right," she said finally. "On the chance that you're right, and there is a danger, from now on the ship stays sealed and uses its own atmosphere. Entry and exit by airlock only, and everyone off-vessel carries a full-mask respirator and air supply with them."

  "I don't think it will change its mind," Henrick said. "It's fascinating to imagine what it must be thinking because of us—what a revelation and a shock the simple fact of our existence must be to it. And yet it adjusted to that shock; instead of just reacting in the way that would most obviously protect itself, it decided to let us live, so it could study us. You have to admire a mind like that."

  It was the afternoon of the fourth day of the mission. "Henrick!" Ursule was shouting into her com. "Where the hell are you? You need to report back to the longboat. Now!"

  "Please don't upset yourself, Ursule," Henrick's voice answered. "I'll be fine. If you would do me the favor of leaving behind the long-term survival supplies, I'll have a foodsynth, power, shelter. And with the radio I'll be able to transmit my findings to the Kahutara for as long as it's in range."