Echoes of an Alien Sky

by James P. Hogan

  Lorili took a look around. "You look busy enough," she remarked.

  "Oh, just staying out of Nostreny's way, really. He's running around in a panic over something." Garki Nostreny was the section chief. "So, anyway . . . what have you got?"

  Lorili set down a sheaf of printouts that she had brought. "The results of those bird DNA studies just came in. The parallels are striking. You can have a look at them for yourself when you get a moment. It's just the kind of pattern you'd expect from a common ancestry." She meant descent from common ancestral genetic seed material in the way she had described to Kyal, that had somehow found its way to both Earth and Venus.

  Iwon was already shaking his head as he immersed a net bag of the crushed beans into a flask to boil. But he didn't smile. Another thing Lorili liked about him was that he wasn't condescending. It was nice to think she was being taken seriously, even when their fundamental premises were at odds. "The time scales just isn't there for anything like that to have happened on Venus," he said. "And it's looking pretty certain now that it wasn't much better on Earth either, whatever else the Terrans thought. Have you seen what's coming in from the geologists? There are fossilized trees here, extending intact through layers of coal and limestone that the Terrans dated as millions of years apart." He turned briefly and tossed up his hands. "How could they be. The trees didn't stand there for millions of years being slowly buried in sediments. They were obviously buried rapidly. . . . And the boundaries between the sediment layers are clean, with no signs of tracks, roots, worm burrows, or any of the other biological activity you'd expect to find if the surfaces had been exposed for any length of time."

  Lorili had expected this much. They had been over it enough times. "But we know that organisms can vary over time." She was simply staking out the ground, not saying anything new.

  "Nobody's disputing it," Iwon agreed. "There has to be some ability to adapt over a range ofchanging conditions. But the same would have to be true whatever its origin. And extrapolating non-controversial variations about a theme to account for major differences between types is an act of faith, not an inference from any evidence. Even the Terrans never stopped arguing over it. The universe doesn't possess enough probabilistic resources for the number of trial combinations it would need."

  Lorili held up her palms in a restraining gesture. "Okay, if it will save time, I accept that the Terran idea of major change through selection of random variations doesn't work. But here's another angle."

  Iwon sat back down and handed her one of the mugs. He looked interested. "What?"

  Lorili separated out several of the sheets that she had laid down. "Twenty-five years ago, a population of finches was introduced into Abarans—they're not native there." The Abaran Islands were a remote group in Venus's embryonic northern ocean, well to the east of Korbisan.

  "Uh-huh."

  "Already, several distinct types of beak morphology and plumage have appeared. See what it means? The programs to produce the different types didn't come together a step at a time through trial and error in twenty-five years. They were already there, in the genome. We know that most DNA doesn't code for protein. It's the same thing as Julow has been saying in Ulange, from those experiments with bacteria. Gene changes aren't random, the way the Terrans insisted. They're cued by changes in the environment."

  Iwon shrugged. "Which fits with what the traditional view has always said. It's what you'd expect from the explanation that we're part of some purposeful scheme that nobody pretends to understand. I can't put it better than what they told us at school: Vizek knows best."

  "It isn't an explanation," Lorili retorted. "It's just a label to hang on not knowing the answer. But what I'm suggesting could give you faster, directed evolution without the label."

  "How so?" Iwon invited, sitting back down and stirring his own drink.

  "We've been hearing a lot of speculation about what the purpose of reverse transcriptase is," Lorili answered. It was an enzyme discovered some years previously that wrote information into DNA. This was in the opposite direction to that believed until then to be the rule for genetic information flow: originating in DNA and ending up in proteins. Hence the name. "The information that it carries seems to originate within other cells of the body."

  "Okay," Iwon agreed. For a while there had been a flurry of activity among researchers on Venus following a false trail that attributed it to an external virus.

  Lorili went on, "Suppose that a lot of DNA coding comes about in this way. Maybe even most of it. What you'd have is a feedback system from the body for creating a repository of acquired survival-related information. Valuable lessons learned in an individual life can be written into the germ-cell DNA for transmission to future generations. So the genome carries an accumulating history of the race that programs the descendants to deal with situations that have been encountered in the past."

  "Like the immune system." Iwon was clearly thinking about it.

  "A good example. So evolution doesn't have to be a process of blind trial-and-error groping over countless generations the way the Terrans thought." Lorili nodded to concede a point. "It is directed, as the traditional view maintains. But not for the reason we were told at school." She concluded, "It's not driven by random factors that would take forever to come up with something useful. And so the long time scales that the Terrans constructed aren't necessary."

  Iwon stared into the distance while he turned the proposition over. Then he sipped his drink experimentally, sucked his teeth, and smacked his lips.

  "What do you think?" Lorili asked.

  "Hm . . . Stronger. But more flavor. I think I like it."

  "About what I was saying."

  "I see your point. . . . But I don't agree there's a need for it. I don't have any personal motive for wanting to put Vizek out of a job. Everything you've said could be true. In fact, it makes a lot of sense. But what I said before is still true too. It's equally compatible with both theories. It doesn't prove one or the other."

  "I never claimed that it did. I was simply making the case that a faster form of natural evolution is plausible without the need for huge, fictitious Terran time scales. And if it takes the form of the same basic genetic program responding to the same kind of environmental cues, it might explain why us and Terrans, and some of the other living things from both places, turn out to be so similar."

  "Okay, I'll grant you that much," Iwon conceded. "But even so, you've still got a huge difference in times. Earth has been around far longer than Venus, even if it isn't as old as the Terrans thought. Maybe the process of evolving from whatever this ancestral genetic material was to humans was somehow telescoped enough to have happened there. But surely it couldn't have happened on Venus. Sometimes I think we've barely cooled from being incandescent."

  Kyal had made the same point. It was a valid one, and Lorili had no delusions otherwise. It was a good place to agree to leave things for now.

  Iwon seemed to read it that way too, and eased back in his chair. "Well, time will no doubt tell, I guess. Anyway, I'll have a look at these papers as soon as the hysteria abates. . . . So , you haven't told me yet how the European cities were, after galloping off and leaving us."

  "Interesting," Lorili said.

  "Worth the trip, then?"

  "Oh yes."

  "Good."

  "Especially Foothills Camp—where a city was, destroyed in the Central Asian War. Some of the things there are amazingly well preserved. They have a wonderful collection of restored Terran images. In some ways I think it's inspiring—the tenacity and resilience they could show against impossible odds and not give up. And sometimes even win."

  Iwon shot her a glance of mock reproach. "Be careful that you're not falling for the official propaganda versions of their history. . . ." He pushed the side of his mouth with his tongue as if he were trying to stop himself, but couldn't resist adding, "like their science."

  Lorili had heard this from Kyal too and ignored it. "We were at th
e nuclear ruins of Moscow too, but there's not a lot to see there. It's just a drilling site."

  "Oh yes. Tell me more about this lucky person who carried you off. The Ulangean space-propulsion expert. What's he doing here?"

  "He was on his way to Luna. In fact he's there now. He and a colleague of his are investigating some Terran constructions on Farside. You'd probably get along with him, Iwon. You remind me of his friend—although I only met him briefly. He's Son of Jarnor Reen."

  "Who, the friend?"

  "No, the person I went to Europe with. His name's Kyal. Kyal Reen."

  "You mean the son of the famous Ulangean statesman—the one who pushed for the Earth program?"

  "Yes."

  "You're joking."

  "No I'm not. They were sent here by the IASS and just arrived on the Melther Jorg. It was their acclimatization break before going on to Luna. The friend had done the same thing as I did and gone off with another group."

  "Hm." Iwon looked as if he were suddenly seeing a new side to her. "I'm surprised you got along," he said. "I'd have thought someone like that would be solidly free-thinking and traditional. Not exactly your authoritarian radical."

  "Well, yes," Lorili agreed. "But he doesn't get defensive and dogmatic about it." She motioned with her half-empty mug. "A bit like you."

  "So what am I doing wrong?" Yorim spread his hands in appeal and grinned unapologetically.

  "Isn't it obvious? You knock down my pet theories." Lorili finished her drink and stood up. "But don't imagine you've heard the last of it. I've been working on some further thoughts that haven't quite crystalized yet."

  "I'll here when you're ready to talk about it," Iwon said.

  It was starting to get dark when Lorili shut down her system for the day, tidied her work space, and left the ISA laboratory buildings. The evening was cool, making her glad she'd brought a coat. After deliberating whether to stop on the way back, she decided on eating in and a quiet evening at home. Although there was a shorter route to the residential sector where her apartment was situated, she detoured via the Central District, both for the lights and the life, and to get a little air and stretch her legs after the day. It also meant she could pick up a few groceries.

  It was a pity that her few days with Kyal had been restricted to archeologists' camps, workmen's trucks, and ruined cities, she reflected. It had to have been a strange itinerary for a member of the IASS who was the son of Jarnor Reen. But he had acted all the way through as if he felt perfectly at home. It made her feel all the warmer toward him. Maybe he would be able to spend some time in Rhombus when the work on Luna was done, she thought to herself. Before he went back to Venus. . . . But Lorili found herself not wanting to dwell on that part of it.

  She came to the block where her apartment unit was located, and followed the path between prickly Terran shrubs to the front door, standing on a small patio beside an outside storage closet. Ufty, a neighbor in an upstairs unit across the way, was cooking something out on the balcony. He saw her in the light above her door and waved. She managed an awkward wave back while balancing the bag of groceries and finding her key, and let herself in. Closing the door with her back, she took the door direct through to the kitchenette to deposit the bag on a worktop, then went on through the arch to the living area to close the drapes.

  "Ahh! . . ."

  It was only when she turned from the window that she saw the figure in the shadows, stretched out in one of the armchairs. In that split-second, the fright had sent her heart pounding. She recoiled into the kitchen archway and fumbled for the light switch.

  Apart from raising his rugged, copper-haired head a fraction to look at her, he didn't move.

  "Hello, Lorili," Jenyn said.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  For the first few seconds, all Lorili could do was stand there, fighting the surge of adrenaline that turned her into a wound spring ready to fly at him or back out the door. The reflexes subsided slowly.

  "How did you get in?" she heard herself whispering. It was a pointless question; more a mechanical reaction while she was still striving to bring herself under control.

  "Oh, come on. You know I have my ways." Jenyn's eyes were mocking, enjoying his moment of domination.

  Lorili braced herself. "I don't care. . . ." Coherent words refused to form. She shook her head violently. "I don't want to know what it's about. Just . . . get out."

  "Hey, aren't we being just a little bit hasty? I mean, do I look threatening or something? And this a long way from home. Don't you even want to know what I'm doing out here?"

  "No. It's not my concern anymore. Please . . . just leave."

  Jenyn shook his head as if disappointed. "That's not really called for, you know. We had a great thing going back there . . . at one time. It's not good to throw it all away the first time there's a problem." He raised a hand and motioned to indicate both of them. "You and me . . . we were never quitters. Remember all those good times? There were a lot of them too." He bunched his face in the kind of expression that says everyone regrets things. "Oh, okay . . . I know I can be a bit overbearing at times. I admit it. But knowing something like that is the first part of fixing it. You get older. Being out here at a place like this makes people see things differently. I've changed now."

  For a moment Lorili felt herself falling under the same charm that had captivated her before. Somewhere inside here there was still a vestige of the raw student who wanted to believe it. Jenyn could cast the kind of spells that on Earth had moved armies. He would have made a good Terran. Maybe that was why he idealized them. The scientist who dealt in realities rescued her.

  "You'll never change, Jenyn. The world and everyone in it exist to serve your ends. I was expendable when it suited you, and that said it all. I'm my own person now. I plan on making my own life, not being an accessory in someone else's. It's all over. Forget it."

  "It's not just me and us. That's the sauce on the meal. There's a whole future too, that's bigger than both of us. Have you forgotten the movement and what it means? It used to be the most important thing in our lives. I've been across in the Americas, just back. It's a different, vibrant feel. You've got a critical mass of younger people here at Earth, open to new ideas and excited by change. A chapter built out here, with this kind of energy, could go back, take over the whole Progressive organization on Venus, and become a real political force there. That's what I'm working on out here. It could use your kind of help. And that's what you could become a part of again." Jenyn was reading Lorili's face while he spoke. "Have you forgotten about things like order, organization, the power of authority to enforce equality for all? Don't those things matter anymore?"

  Lorili didn't want to be drawn in. Arguing politics with Jenyn was like walking into a web. "I still believe any new idea should be tried and not prejudged," she said. "But being out here has clarified a lot of things for me too. Venus does have equality. Of opportunity. If you're good enough, you can make it anywhere. It's not the whims of unregulated institutions that keep people out. It's their own inabilities. You can't demand equality with high performers. You can only earn it. What you really want is an army of followers who believe they can take by force what the world isn't prepared to pay them in any other way. But what that really means is power for you—because you won't get people to follow you in any other way."

  "Boy, who have you been talking to?"

  "What does it matter? The point is, it's a fraud. You tell people it's for them, but it isn't. It's really for you. They don't matter. They never did. Lies, treachery, deceit—anything goes if it might get you what you want."

  "Harsh words, Lorili." Jenyn's tone was assuaging but his brow furrowed uneasily. It was one of the rare moments when Lorili had seen him look taken aback."

  "The world you'd deliver would be very different from the one they thought they were sacrificing themselves for," she said.

  Jenyn shook his head. "Now I don't understand. What would make you say things like this?"


  Something snapped then. The anger flared up that Lorili's initial fright and confusion had been holding in check. "Did you think I'd never know?" she burst out. "That I'd be too stupid to find out? I have eyes and ears and a brain, Jenyn. I do talk to people."

  He made a play of being at a loss, eyes wide, hands upturned. "What? . . . What are you talking about?"

  "That whole scheme of yours to discredit Lemaril Aedua. It was a setup. She never split any payments with writers to run their works."

  "What do you mean?" Still, he was brazening it out. "The evidence was there. You saw the testimonials."

  "Oh, give me a break, Jenyn!" Lorili shouted. "That woman who did the series on game-playing psychology was a former lover of yours. You blackmailed her into giving it. That kind of involvement with a Progressive activist wouldn't have looked very good if it came to the attention of her very traditional patron, would it? And I never believed that guy with the piece on topology and sculpture. He was a plagiarist. He couldn't have written it. He didn't have the credentials. So what does that say for his standards? What was the angle there, Jenyn? A straight cash deal?"