His stomach gurgled and twisted. The bacteria in his gut had been modified to metabolize and neutralize the sulfur, and he swore, as he always did, that he could feel them work. These bacteria were nearly as critical to his survival as his other adaptations, because they carried enzymes that would digest some of the strange amino acids of Indi's Tear, increasing the caloric value of food by almost 40 percent. Newborns had to be fed special cultures that sometimes didn't take to their intestinal tracts. When they didn't, the newborns were euthanized. It was so difficult to survive that the towns had no flexibility to even try to keep the weak alive.
Thoughts of newborns saddened yet satisfied him. In Charlotte's Web, he'd entered the storehouse that held his germ cell stocks and had set them adrift in the ocean. They'd charged him with a crime, but had not dared convict him. He was irreplaceable and, as an adult, he would not let them take any more sperm. They could not use him or his genes for any further failed generations of sacrificial litters. The line of descent and inserted genes that connected Vincent through all his ancestors, back through all of evolution to the dawn of life on Earth, would stop with him. Someone had to say stop. All he had to do was follow Merced, and it frightened him that today he might have the courage.
* * * *
It was not long before the new inhabitants of Indi's Tear had started dying. Fewer meteors reached the surface, but those that did devastated. And three gravities, every hour of every day, was too much. Every task made them dizzy. Every fall broke a bone. Exhausted hearts failed in young and old. Only immersion in water made the fierce gravity bearable. They took to the coastal shallows at first, layered with survival equipment. But this was a temporary solution. Human skin was not built for constant soaking. They became diseased.
Even though no one knew how to genetically modify adults, they could tinker with fertilized eggs. They could try to spare them the ravages of gravity and the rotting diseases of the skin. Mostly they failed.
At first, the changes were small. They had carried the complete DNA sequences of hundreds of thousands of species from Earth with which to terraform and colonize Indi's Eye. They used these on their offspring, toughening and thickening the skin with artificial chromosomes made from walrus and seal DNA and layering fat beneath that skin to keep them warmer. Even so, engineering a new kind of human was a complex thing. Many new genes interfered with one another. For years they had nothing but spontaneous abortions until they figured out how to modify all the genes being interfered with.
Then infants started to survive.
But they'd crossed a line. The children of this new generation were still air-breathing mammals, but they were a new species. With an extra pair of chromosomes and hundreds of modified genes, there was no chance of a successful mating with Homo sapiens. Homo indis was born.
And the line was more than biological. They'd planted a permanent barrier, cultural and emotional, between the two generations. Family and parenting as practiced by Homo sapiens was meaningless in this new context. The gene swapping involved in success meant that those new children belonged both to no one and to everyone. Direct lineage, the unbroken line of descent from parent to offspring that ran from the origin of life to the shores of the oceans of Indi's Tear, ended.
Lack of belonging and descent colored other perceptions. Although the new babies were grown in artificial litters of fifty, only a fraction survived. No one would, or could, invest their emotions in things that were not theirs and were likely to die.
Beauty and sexuality also separated the generations. These new creatures, Homo indis, were hideous to their many parents, and to themselves. The broad standards of beauty, the mate recognition hardware in mammals, were evolved through thousands of generations of gradual change. The genetic engineers had no idea of how it worked or how to change it, and the longing for physical beauty became a torment. In a practical sense, it didn't matter. The Homo indis could not reproduce without technological assistance.
No one foresaw the consequences beyond the goal of this genetic tinkering. Their choices seemed eminently reasonable, if influenced by desperation.
* * * *
Before Amanda opened the door, Vincent felt her electrical signature, the unique pattern of moving charge associated with her. This level of discernment, being able to distinguish one person from another by electrical sense only, was unique to Vincent among the Homo indis.
Amanda slid in and he felt his contempt rise, like the breakfast he'd eaten an hour ago. Since childhood, he'd watched her flounder in every subject in school. She was vacuous and missed the implications of almost every conversation he'd ever had with her. But she was here, for the same reason that he was: she'd survived to maturity. What little pride he took in his abilities and his role in the community bled away in her presence.
“Good morning, Vincent,” she said in lumpy electrical echoes. Her speech was atonal. She had nothing of the musical inflections he used to nuance even his most careless statements. “How long have you been up?”
“Less than an hour.”
“It feels strange being this deep, finally being away from home.”
Nothing she said was wrong, but her presence grated.
“Do you feel the same, Vincent?”
Contempt welled. She knew he could barely stomach her, but she still needed his approval, the approval of others. She was a shell of a person, waiting to be defined, rated, and assigned a role. He fantasized about leaving her alone for months or years. However long the solitude took to give her an identity. He wanted desperately for her to be someone he respected. He didn't speak, but swam away from her, toward the lab. She followed him, as he knew she would.
* * * *
They became better at reproducing. By the time the last of the Homo sapiens had died, the Homo indis had established themselves in murky river zones and along coastlines. They mastered the engineering skills of their dead ancestors. Every generation modified the next, racing against time to spread themselves wherever they could survive. It was now part of their culture. The costs were acceptable, normal.
Meteors rained onto Indi's Tear. Homo indis spread to different continents to minimize their chances of extinction, but even at that, coastal shallows were a grim place to weather the tsunamis following an asteroid impact. The Homo indis were almost wiped out. They fled again, modifying themselves into true water-breathers to colonize the upper layers of the open sea, becoming Homo indis pelagius. But even here, they were not safe. They worried and watched the sky, for the impact that would be inescapable.
* * * *
It was nearly twelve hours later that Renald and Amanda entered the lab for the third time to see how Vincent was doing. Vincent had taken scans and biopsies of all three of them in the morning and now floated in front of screens of data. He turned as they stopped behind him.
Renald was slightly bigger than Vincent, with pale, mottled skin stretched over fatty flesh. He tended to defer to Vincent, but not for lack of competence. Renald had never tried very hard, leaving most problems for Vincent, because everyone knew Vincent was the best. Renald's large, expressionless face, framed by slowly pulsing gills and centered under bulbous black eyes, perused the medical scans.
“It's not an infection,” Vincent said to him. “It looks like cancer, pre-metastatic, many different kinds, all forming now.”
“What does it mean?” Amanda asked. She hadn't Vincent's or Renald's training in molecular biology. She was a technician and mechanic, and not even a good one at that. “Is this something else that they didn't see in our generation?”
Her meaning was clear. They three were the only survivors of a litter of fifty of the new subspecies Homo indis benthus, engineered to live on the floor of the ocean. None of the four preceding litters had survived.
It was a tricky thing, redesigning the development of a whole being. Growth factors, gravity, nutrient concentration, temperature, and pressure interacted with some sixty thousand human genes to produce a person. The comp
lexities of neurology still escaped the genetic engineers, which was why Vincent and the others still ached for human food, human smells, human sights, and human beauty. These were hardwired by hundreds of thousands of years of evolution.
“I don't think so,” Vincent said. “If it was something designed wrong, we would have found it before now and we'd probably all have the same cancer.”
Vincent knew Renald had also guessed the cause as well.
“The change in pressure we've gone through over the last month has been enormous,” Vincent said. “Thousands of proteins in our bodies have been modified so as not to change shape because of the pressure, but it was suspected that there might be some gene products we wouldn't know about, like alternate splices or undiscovered post-translational modifications. You only need a couple dozen of these unknowns to explain all our cancers.”
“What does it mean?” Amanda asked.
“It means our gene engineers have screwed up and that our lives have been thrown away for nothing,” Vincent said. “It means we head back up to town. The pressure change may solve the problem and we can live the rest of our lives with our friends. The next generation can live on the bottom of the ocean, if they decide to keep pushing this stupid plan.”
Vincent observed Renald, not with his eyes, because they could discern no more emotion from Renald's face than he could from a carp's. He listened to the electrical pulses, shielding his own. Renald obviously disagreed with him, but they'd retread those arguments many times. Vincent doubted Renald was interested in repeating them today. But Amanda had no notion of social politics and the concept of unwinnable battles.
“None of us should be here, Vincent,” she said. “The colonists couldn't have known.”
“I don't blame the colonists for arriving,” he said. “I blame them for sacrificing the humanity of their children. They didn't have to live with the consequences. We did and we do. This is not life. It's purgatory, for us and all our children.”
“You have the choice they had, Vincent,” Renald said. “You have the choice of letting this cancer kill you.”
“You know what my choice is,” Vincent snapped. “No more speciation. No more separation of family and friends. We take what we have and build on that. No more of this,” he said, waving his fatty, gray arm wide. “Is this your dream? Spending the rest of your life on the bottom of the ocean with me and Amanda?”
“We're better off than those who didn't make it,” Renald said.
“Are we?”
Renald did not reply and left, his swishing tail fin driving him through the door. Disconcertingly, Amanda did not leave. He ignored her and sputtered an electrical signal to the communications system on his nearby desktop. A minute later, a fuzzy image formed, part faint blue light, part diffuse standing electrical waves. The two parts complemented each other poorly to build a picture of Kent, the head of operations and Vincent's nominal superior.
“Kent,” Vincent said, “we're having some problems and I'm going to ascend. We need medical treatment. We've each developed multiple, pressure-related tumors.”
The Kent image stilled. “Are they immediately life threatening?” he asked.
Vincent didn't shrug. He had no shoulders, but he used an electrical equivalent that transmitted well. “We have tumors, Kent. How immediate do you want it?”
“Between fifty-six and seventy hours from now, Vincent,” Kent replied, “a big rock is going to hit this hemisphere. We can't get more information because another watch satellite was struck by debris. Our best guess is that it's between a kilometer and a kilometer and a half wide.”
Vincent didn't respond. Whether it struck land or sea, an asteroid of that size would leave a big hole, blocking the sun for weeks or months with atmospheric debris. The sheer force of the shock wave would ravage the towns and maybe even kill the population outright. He had close friends in Charlotte's Web.
“What can we do?” Vincent asked.
“Batten down everything. Secure the computer systems as best you can. You may want to get a little distance between the base and the ocean floor. Shock waves will be bad.”
“What about you?”
“The towns may survive, depending on what happens to sunlight and how many toxic minerals rain down on the ocean's surface. We're scattering everyone as far and as deep as we can, but it may be no use. In a week any town that survives will start sending out radio signals. Any survivors will rendezvous on those.”
“I wish I was there,” Vincent said.
Kent was silent again. There was history and respect between these two, polarized sides of a debate, generation past and generation present. “This is why we've done everything we've done, Vincent. This is to survive.”
“Plankton survives, Kent. Humanity has to live. We have no dignity and we have no hope. I'm here because someone was so afraid that he didn't know that sometimes being true to what you are means admitting you lost.”
“We all make sacrifices, Vincent,” Kent said. “The costs are high, but we live and we dream. Thousands of generations before us stuck through misery because they hoped tomorrow would be better. It won't always be like this.”
“Good luck, Kent,” Vincent said finally. “I'll talk to you when we start picking up the pieces.”
* * * *
While Renald and Amanda secured the camp, Vincent stayed in the lab, supposedly working on the problem of the tumors. He wasn't. He'd figured out what was wrong before even speaking to Kent.
He'd never been short of ways to kill himself. In the middle layers of a deep ocean, only a dozen generations from terrestrial life, the trick was keeping yourself alive. When people like Kent had found no traction for their arguments about the sanctity of life, they'd inevitably turned to community interest. It had never been difficult to show that Vincent was not only a biological, but an intellectual luminary. His death would be a serious loss to the community, making everyone's life that much harder. But the community, whether Charlotte's Web or the larger network of towns, was a fuzzy target and Vincent had never accepted that the needs of the others should stop him from ending a life of misery. Now, today, he felt he had the strength to overcome the survival instinct, the same dumb instinct that had kept mindless creatures alive through eons of suffering. He cursed his collective ancestors, those who were neither mothers nor fathers. Today felt like the day he could be as brave as Merced, even if he was twelve years late. But today, his decision suddenly implicated Renald and Amanda, not a fuzzy concept.
The biochemical problem was simple in comparison. The genetic engineers had modified every one of Vincent's sixty thousand genes to produce proteins that would survive the pressure at the bottom of the ocean. An extra two kilometers of water above them pressing down with three gravities was enough to squash and change the shape of every protein, which changed the way it functioned. So the engineers had tested and made changes in each individual gene, one by one. And they hadn't missed a single gene.
They'd missed the entire specific immune system. They'd missed the immune proteins on all B-cells and all T-cells. It wasn't their fault. The proteins on immune cells and in antibodies were not produced by regular genes. The immune elements of T-cells and antibodies developed in the fetus. Each B-cell and T-cell shuffled sets of DNA fragments like cards in a deck, keeping any combination that didn't attack the host.
The problem was that in coming to the ocean floor, the pressure had squashed the immune elements of every antibody and T-cell. Vincent, Renald, and Amanda had entirely different immune systems down here, none of which were tailored to the bodies that contained them. There were undoubtedly some autoimmune diseases forming right now. And a handful of benign tumors in each of them had now escaped immune surveillance.
If they stayed down here, they would die, unless Vincent could find some medical solution before the tumors or autoimmune diseases killed them. Renald was a good physician and geneticist, but he didn't have Vincent's leaps of intuition and creativity.
&
nbsp; Vincent's first idea had been the one with the most promise: return to Charlotte's Web and hope that the deep pressure changes would be reversible, or at least treatable. The immune cells should be fine, and they would regain the immunities they had before. The ruined antibodies that were probably now in the early stages of attacking their bodies would do a great deal of damage, but might eventually wear out before Vincent, Renald, and Amanda died. But now, there was every chance that there would be no town to return to. There was a chance that the three of them would be the last survivors of all the dreams and aspirations of the thousands who'd lived and died to come to colonize this system. And he was likely the only person who had a chance of saving Renald and Amanda.
Vincent left the lab, gagged down a slimy lump in the kitchen as his stomach prepared to send it back, and went to his room to sleep.
* * * *
In many dreams, Vincent had legs and saw the sun. It was a spotlight in a black sea with sediment drifting in front of it. He didn't know what legs felt like, but faithless instinct suggested. It was an erotic feeling. He'd lived so long among alien things that elicited no sexual recognition in his brain that arms and legs were deeply sexual. They felt natural, frustratingly, hauntingly compelling.
As in most dreams, some part of him was detached, critical, realistic. This part repeated the childhood litany: Don't trust your instincts. They aren't for here. But instinct seduced and in dream he drifted over a field of floating, waving grass, fat-leaved and tickling his dreamed legs. A woman appeared beneath him, with pale grey skin, plump with spaghetti hair floating about her large, bulbous eyes. Her arms and legs spread straight out and he throbbed at her beauty and didn't know what to do. He ached and woke frustrated.
He remembered the dream with painful precision. Very deeply and very powerfully, he hated who he was. Sexuality was not safe for them. Pregnancy was too complicated to design. So Vincent, Amanda, and everyone in the towns squirted eggs and sperm into containers for the genetic engineers. There was no pleasure. A pharmaceutical injection triggered the release. The neural circuitry for reproduction existed in their brains, but led nowhere. The genetic engineers didn't know how to rewrite the neural patterns that were hardwired by evolution into instinct. Every one of them was haunted by a desire that ran nowhere.
Asimov's SF, June 2008 Page 13
