Meanwhile, a small miracle was taking place before our eyes. Maybe it was a big miracle, I don’t know. It was hard to notice at the beginning. I guess the first thing that caught my attention was how Yuri was starting to behave, like the hollow shell of fatalism that had kept him propped up for so long was filling up with something wonderful. Even in the crushing gravity of Brainard’s Planet, he seemed to have a lighter step; his head seemed closer to the sky. His eyes, which had always been friendly, now projected a warm approval of the universe that seemed unbounded. And then there was what Alice was starting to do to the bunk she was sharing with him. It wasn’t anything much at first. She was taking the material that our supplies had been packed in and making stuff with it. The first thing was a little kind of drape or shade that she put over the lamp in their bunk alcove. Then a few woven garlands appeared that she hung like bunting over the bed. After that she made a curtain that she could pull closed, giving them a little private cave to sleep in.
We all noticed this going on but we didn’t think much about it until, at the end of a long, hard day in the lab, Arch turned to Yuri as she might have to any of us and said, “Well, I’m beat. You want to go have some sex?”
Alice moved to Yuri’s side with surprising alacrity and put her arm through the crook of his elbow. She gave Archie a look that I swear could have kept the plague at bay. Arch was a little stunned. She actually retreated a step, saying, “I’m— I’m sorry. I didn’t— I mean, um, what’s going—?” Then she recovered a little and turned to me with a small smile on her face and said, “Hey, Mo, you wanna go have some sex?”
Moving adroitly to the rescue, I said, “Sure. Sounds good to me. Shall we?” I gestured to the hatches that led to our suits and thence to the hab.
But what brought it home to me was the time we were working late in the lab and Alice and Yuri had already called it a day. Archie asked me to get something from the habitat so I suited up and went over there. When I de-suited into the hab I could hear soft music playing, some old ballad from the thirty-fifth century maybe. I turned around and saw Yuri and Alice slowly dancing with each other in the middle of the room. They were wrapped around each other and just gently swaying, their eyes closed. I decided that Archie could do without the item she had requested and slipped back into my suit.
In an odd way, none of us were surprised. If Alice had chosen someone, we couldn’t think of anyone we would want for her more than Yuri. On the other hand, we were confronted by pure monogamy. In our culture it was just strange. We recognized it, but we weren’t quite sure what to do with it. We treated it a little reverently. We didn’t talk about it, just gave each other a quick glance now and then to confirm that we were all witnessing the same thing. But it was unmistakable, inevitable in a way. After all, Alice had spent the first half of her life in a place where this was how it worked.
How can you want to save someone’s life ‘even more’? But we did; we all wanted to save Alice even more than we had before. We worked harder and longer, but the Brainardites got no less baffling. Archie kept looking for cell division actually occurring in Brainardite life, but she never caught it. We didn’t know if it was happening when we weren’t looking or if it just wasn’t happening.
Then one day the slime arrived at the lab. We hadn’t encountered much of it; we hadn’t been close enough to the slugs yet. So it surprised us. On the way back one evening we saw a little trail of it reaching from the tube fields all the way to the base of the lab. It went up to the wall where the specimen trays were. Yuri’s field obviously worked; the slime got right up to the inflated wall of the lab but was repelled by it. It didn’t actually touch it. The same with our suits: if we accidentally stepped in it the slime beaded up and slid off, leaving no trace. But Archie was excited. She didn’t think she was going to have any slime to look at until we went into the colony, or at least onto the slug trail leading to the colony. She produced a little special scoop that Yuri had designed, powered it up, and scraped some of the most dangerous stuff in the universe off of the rock. She placed it in a special tray designed to hold it. We looked at it for a moment.
[It’s like it followed us out here,] said Marcus.
[It’s not sentient. It can’t make decisions,] answered Archie.
[Then why is it here?] Tamika asked.
[I don’t know. Maybe there’s some pheromonal signal that it’s following, some chemical signature ...] She looked back toward the belt of life to the south of us. [Let’s go inside and take a look at it.]
Steel said, [Yuri, what are you doing?]
We all looked around for him. He’d wandered off north of the lab, toward the canyon. He bent over and picked something up. [I was just looking for another meteorite.]
I laughed, “You know the odds against finding the first one? You really don’t think—”
[I just thought Alice might like one.] He examined what he’d picked up.
[Did you find one?] Alice asked.
[No,] he said, [this is just a little piece of obsidian.]
Archie said, [Bring it back anyway. I’ll do some radiometric dating on it. As far as we know, Brainard’s Planet has been geologically inert for a long time. But if that’s obsidian, it had to come from one of the extinct volcanoes here. We may be able to get a read on when everything calmed down.]
When we got inside, Yuri’s rock was forgotten as we all wanted to examine the slime with the new tools we had. We were actually going to find out what this stuff was made of— the stuff that had mowed us down so mercilessly.
Observed from orbit, the slime was an enigma. There seemed to be lots of organic chemicals present, but there was other stuff that no one had been able to figure out. The absorption lines were shifted somehow; it was too heavy. Everything about it was just wrong. We were hoping that some of the mysteries could be resolved close up, but no dice. Archie looked up from her instruments and said, “It’s still too heavy. It’s just too, too heavy for what I’m seeing. I mean it’s basically a saline solution full of different proteins, lots of different proteins. I’ve recorded over forty thousand.”
“That is a lot,” said Steel. “Do you think any of them might be able to—”
“Help Alice? I don’t know. There’s RNA in there, a bunch of stuff, but that’s not all. Some of the things I was expecting to find aren’t there. I can’t figure out how it gets into our cells. There aren’t any viruses or anything at all larger than the various proteins. How does it get through the cell walls? How does it get through everything? Brainard’s environmental suits? Everything. There’s got to be something else there but I can’t find it. It’s just too heavy and I can’t figure out why.” She sighed and pushed her chair back. “Let’s take a look at Yuri’s obsidian.”
“Okay, look,” Steel said, “this is getting out of hand. We’re looking for pharmaceuticals, not minerals. There’s nothing mysterious about obsidian. We’re not going to find anything useful in a piece of rock. I think we need to keep pounding away at the slime. That’s our best hope of—”
“Captain, do you know how to cure Alice?”
“What?”
“Neither do I. Do you know which piece of the puzzle is going to let us figure out this place? Neither do I.” Archie rubbed her face. “If I spend another minute staring at that slime I’m going to ... well, I won’t get anything useful accomplished, let’s put it that way. I need a break. Let me just test this rock for radioisotopes. It won’t take long.”
Steel fumed, but let Archie walk over to the workstation that connected to the tray where Yuri’s little stone resided. She did a couple of things to it, then stopped. She looked at the screen closer, then said, “Well, Yuri, it looks like obsidian. I can see how you would have thought that. But it’s not obsidian.” She turned to us. “It’s anthracite.”
We stared at her like she’d brought up one of Yuri’s movie stars. “Anthracite?” Tamika said. “You mean ... you mean ... coal?”
“That’s right, coal. Ladies an
d gentlemen,” she turned back to the screen, “this is the first thing we’ve found here that used to be alive but isn’t anymore.”
Chapter 35
Needless to say, the discovery of coal sent everyone into an uproar. It changed our picture of the place completely. Archie tested for carbon-14 and found not a trace. That meant that Yuri’s find had to be at least seventy thousand years old, almost fifty times older than I was. But if it was older than that—even much, much older—we couldn’t tell; once you run out of carbon-14 you have no way to judge. This meant we needed to find some actual obsidian, or something igneous. Igneous rocks have radioisotopes in them that have much longer half-lives. If we could find where the coal came from and place it between two layers of igneous rock that we knew the ages of, we could more closely guess how old the coal was. We knew that Brainard’s Planet was much older than Earth, more than twice as old. Its star was in late middle age with only another billion years or so before it swelled into a red giant and destroyed all life there.
What we needed to examine were exposed geologic strata, and the nearest ones at hand were in the canyon walls to the north of us. But the nearest wall of the canyon was a good hundred kilometers away—quite a hike in double gravity. Yuri suggested we use one of the ultra-lights to get there and Steel just about went pan-dimensional on us. First, we were here to study biology, not geology. Second, flying around on Brainard’s Planet was dangerous. What if we crashed and compromised the e-suits? What if we wrecked the ultra-light beyond repair? How would we get back up to the ship? And third, we were here to study BIOLOGY!
Archie pleaded with her, “Captain, this is the first thing we’ve found that makes this place make any sense at all. We have to follow it up. We have to.”
Yuri said, “We have two ultra-lights. Surely we can risk one on this.”
Steel was frantic, “We don’t even understand the slime yet! We don’t, we don’t— there are so many things right here to, to, to— We have to, we have to— we can’t just—”
“Captain, I don’t know what else to do with the slime,” Arch said. “It’s too heavy and I can’t figure out why. I’ve analyzed it every way I know how. I can give you a complete list of the organics present in it but I can’t tell you how it does what it does.”
“Then let’s go into the colony. Get some slime directly from the slugs. Maybe this sample is polluted, or— or—”
Steel’s mention of the colony had a chilling effect on everyone. Contemplating actual contact with the slugs scared the skag out of me. I could see it in everyone else’s faces, too. I don’t think we were scared for ourselves so much as we didn’t want to lose anyone else. Human perspectives are so precious, so utterly irreplaceable.
“Why can’t we do both?” Alice asked. “Send a couple of people to the canyon and the rest of us go to the colony?”
Alice’s solution added another layer of tension. We had a procedure in place. It hadn’t really been tested yet—nothing had even looked like it was thinking about assaulting us—but it was the only procedure we had. Could we afford to mess with it? I had no idea. None of us did. We didn’t even know if it would work as it was. I hadn’t realized how much comfort we took in staying together until I saw us contemplate splitting up.
Steel’s glare was impenetrable. She wanted to be able to solve this with sheer strength, force of will. But a decision had to be made and none of us knew what the right decision was.
“We’ve been here for four weeks,” Yuri said. “We have enough consumables to last us for another month.”
Steel paced like a caged tiger, but there was no escape. Finally she said, “Daimler, have you been following this?”
[Yes.]
Great. Our eye in the sky. The man who cloned his wife. And killed mine.
“What do you think we should do?” Steel asked. I couldn’t wait to hear what he said, then ignore it. There was a long pause, then:
[What do you want to accomplish here, Estelle?]
“You know what I want to accomplish,” She snapped. “I want to find a— I want to have a—”
[What do you want to accomplish?]
Steel thought for a moment. “I want to have a cure in hand before we leave this place. I don’t want to have to come back here again!”
[And what if you run out of consumables before that happens?]
Steel didn’t like this question, but she had no answer for it. Yuri said, “We do have the capability to transport Brainardite organic materials now. We could continue our research someplace else.”
Steel practically yelled at him, “Where? Who would take it? How could we get it through customs?”
“We couldn’t. You’re right.” Yuri looked at the floor, thinking. “It’s just that coal changes everything. We’re no longer dealing with a static system. It’s dynamic. I think we need to know how dynamic it is. What kind of time frame are we dealing with? How long has the present population been here? How did things move from dynamism to stasis? Are they really static now or are we just looking at very long lives? I think these are things that are going to affect any cure we try to come up with. I want to know what we’re doing to Alice before we do it.”
That last sentence resonated with all of us, even Steel. What did we need to know before we could actually try something on Alice? We had all assumed that we would find something that we understood, test it by running mathematical models, simulations, then take whatever we found back to Circe to have Alice worked on there. But how well did we need to understand it? How much information did we need to have? And what information? Which information? We were dealing with an entire biosphere, an entire planet. I understood more deeply than ever Steel’s constant drive for speed. How long would it take to really find something that would work? And then there was the question we couldn’t even ask ourselves: what if we couldn’t find anything that worked?
[Answer the questions you can answer. The more answers you have the more efficient you’ll be.]
“But what if we—”
[Estelle, you presented this to me as a legitimate corporate enterprise. If what we are doing here is to research the best way to exploit this biosphere, then we need to follow where the research leads us.]
“Captain, we have to understand this place better to even know the right questions to ask.” Archie’s voice was even, restrained, but we could all feel the seconds tick past, each one a lost opportunity. The merciless universe was unfolding as it would while our Captain grappled with it, looking for a way to bend it to her will.
Finally she said as if it was torn out of her, “Tamika, Yuri, you fly to the canyon tomorrow.”
Alice started. “Yuri?”
Steel looked at Alice coldly. “You two have been spending too much time together anyway,” I couldn’t tell if she was angry or just tired. “This will give you a chance to ... to ...”
Alice moved to Yuri’s side, took his hand in hers. Yuri smiled down at her, “Tamika and I will be okay. We’ll be fine. We’re just dealing with rocks. You’re the ones going into slug central. If you promise to be careful, so will I.”
Alice smiled back, but she wrapped her arms around him and leaned her head on his shoulder.
The next morning Yuri and Tamika broke out one of the ultra-lights and headed north while the rest of us headed south. Instead of three people collecting specimens, there would be only two—Archie and Alice. Steel and I would still act as lookouts and Marcus would cover us from the rear. Would one laser cannon be enough to save us if the slugs did something unexpected? Would two be enough? We kept walking.
Through tube fields and groves of spider-plane trees over gently rolling country, we eventually came to the sculptures. Brainard had called them that because he had seen the slugs sculpt them. They were always to be found anywhere near a colony. Great, weaving dykes of iron or stone, like flags or wings or ship’s rudders, sinuous barriers that wove and joined and separated again. Anywhere from ten to twenty meters tall and hundreds of me
ters long, they sometimes helped to define where the trails went, but other than that no one knew what they were for.
“Sculpt” might be too strong a term, but Brainard had been hoping to find intelligence. He’d been hoping to have the first conversation between a human being and something else. What the slugs did was repeatedly rub up against these weaving dykes and erode them with the mild acid they secreted, the same acid that had compromised Drake’s suit. But the end result was so beautiful it was hard to believe the slugs didn’t want them to look that way. The proportion and flow and, I’d have to call it composition was exquisite.
It had been clouding up as we moved farther into the inhabited zone, and now we heard the gentle rumble of distant thunder followed by the percussive patter of raindrops on our helmets. We passed between a patch of weaving tubes and a trio of spider-plane trees onto the edge of the slug trail that led to the colony nearby. No slugs could be seen on the short stretch of trail that was visible. We turned left, heading for town.
[We’ve found a little seam on the south wall,] Yuri’s voice intruded into our very different reality. [It’s thin, but we can see it. We’re going to land on the rim and climb down to take a look.] I saw Alice jerk upright when we heard his voice. She couldn’t save him by worrying about him, but that didn’t matter. Worry was all she could do.
[Very good,] Marcus said. [Keep us apprised of your progress.]
[Will do.]
Moving along the trail, we shifted to a three-pointed star. Slugs could show up from either direction so Steel and I covered our front and Marcus our rear. Alice and Arch kept watch, too, but none of us really knew what we were doing. We just tried to stay alert. For a quarter of an hour we traveled that way, the rain strengthening to a downpour. It poured off of our visors and made the rock slick. A fair-sized freshet was forming down the middle of the trail.
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