The Best of Kim Stanley Robinson

by Johnathan Strahan

  But later when he tried to explain this feeling to Frank, or even just to describe it, Frank shook his head. "It's a bad mistake to worship women," he warned. "A category error. Women and men are so much the same it isn't worth discussing the difference. The genes are almost entirely identical, you know that. A couple hormonal expressions and that's it. So they're just like you and me."

  "More than a couple."

  "Not much more. We all start out female, right? So you're better off thinking that nothing major ever really changes that. Penis just an oversized clitoris. Men are women. Women are men. Two parts of a reproductive system, completely equivalent."

  Smith stared at him. "You're kidding."

  "What do you mean?"

  "Well—I've never seen a man swell up and give birth to a new human being, let me put it that way."

  "So what? It happens, it's a specialized function. You never see women ejaculating either. But we all go back to being the same afterward. Details of reproduction only matter a tiny fraction of the time. No, we're all the same. We're all in it together. There are no differences."

  Smith shook his head. It would be comforting to think so. But the data did not support the hypothesis. Ninety-five percent of all the murders in history had been committed by men. This was a difference.

  He said as much, but Frank was not impressed. The murder ratio was becoming more nearly equal on Mars, he replied, and much less frequent for everybody, thus demonstrating very nicely that the matter was culturally conditioned, an artefact of Terran patriarchy no longer relevant on Mars. Nurture rather than nature. Although it was a false dichotomy. Nature could prove anything you wanted, Frank insisted. Female hyenas were vicious killers, male bonobos and muriquis were gentle co-operators. It meant nothing, Frank said. It told them nothing.

  But Frank had not hit a woman in the face without ever planning to.

  Patterns in the fossil DNA data sets became clearer and clearer. Stochastic-resonance programs highlighted what had been preserved.

  "Look here," Smith said to Frank one afternoon when Frank leaned in to say good-bye for the day. He pointed at his computer screen. "Here's a sequence from my boto, part of the GX three-oh-four, near the juncture, see?"

  "You've got a female then?"

  "I don't know. I think this here means I do. But look, see how it matches with this part of the human genome. It's in Hillis 8050…"

  Frank came into his nook and stared at the screen. "Comparing junk to junk… I don't know…"

  "But it's a match for more than a hundred units in a row, see? Leading right into the gene for progesterone initiation."

  Frank squinted at the screen. "Um, well." He glanced quickly at Smith.

  Smith said, "I'm wondering if there's some really long-term persistence in junk DNA, all the way back to earlier mammal precursors to both these."

  "But dolphins are not our ancestors," Frank said.

  "There's a common ancestor back there somewhere."

  "Is there?" Frank straightened up. "Well, whatever. I'm not so sure about the pattern congruence itself. It's sort of similar, but, you know."

  "What do you mean, don't you see that? Look right there!"

  Frank glanced down at him, startled, then noncommittal. Seeing this Smith became inexplicably frightened.

  "Sort of," Frank said. "Sort of. You should run hybridization tests, maybe, see how good the fit really is. Or check with Acheron about repeats in non-gene DNA."

  "But the congruence is perfect! It goes on for hundreds of pairs, how could that be a coincidence?"

  Frank looked even more noncommittal than before. He glanced out of the door of the nook. Finally he said, "I don't see it that congruent. Sorry, I just don't see it. Look, Andy. You've been working awfully hard for a long time. And you've been depressed too, right? Since Selena left?"

  Smith nodded, feeling his stomach tighten. He had admitted as much a few months before. Frank was one of the very few people these days who would look him in the eye.

  "Well, you know. Depression has chemical impacts in the brain, you know that. Sometimes it means you begin seeing patterns that others can't see as well. It doesn't mean they aren't there, no doubt they are there. But whether they mean anything significant, whether they're more than just a kind of analogy, or similarity—" He looked down at Smith and stopped. "Look, it's not my field. You should show this to Amos, or go up to Acheron and talk to the old man."

  "Uh huh. Thanks, Frank."

  "Oh no, no, no need. Sorry, Andy. I probably shouldn't have said anything. It's just, you know. You've been spending a hell of a lot of time here."

  "Yeah."

  Frank left.

  Sometimes he fell asleep at his desk. He got some of his work done in dreams. Sometimes he found he could sleep down on the beach, wrapped in a greatcoat on the fine sand, lulled by the sound of the waves rolling in. At work he stared at the lined dots and letters on the screens, constructing the schematics of the sequences, nucleotide by nucleotide. Most were completely unambiguous. The correlation between the two main schematics was excellent, far beyond the possibility of chance. X chromosomes in humans clearly exhibited non-gene DNA traces of a distant aquatic ancestor, a kind of dolphin. Y chromosomes in humans lacked these passages, and they also matched with chimpanzees more completely than X chromosomes did. Y chromosomes were quite stable. Frank had appeared not to believe it, but there it was, right on the screen. But how could it be? What did it mean? Where did any of them get what they were? They had natures from birth. Just under five million years ago, chimps and humans separated out as two different species from a common ancestor, a woodland ape. The Inis geoffrensis fossil Smith was working on had been precisely dated to about 5.1 million years old. About half of all orangutan sexual encounters are rape.

  One night after finishing work alone in the lab, he took a tram in the wrong direction, downtown, without ever admitting to himself what he was doing, until he was standing outside Mark's apartment complex, under the steep rise of the dorsum ridge. Walking up a staircased alleyway ascending the ridge gave him a view right into Mark's windows. And there was Selena, washing dishes at the kitchen window and looking back over her shoulder to talk with someone. The tendon in her neck stood out in the light. She laughed.

  Smith walked home. It took an hour. Many trams passed him.

  He couldn't sleep that night. He went down to the beach and lay rolled in his greatcoat. Finally he fell asleep.

  He had a dream. A small hairy bipedal primate, chimp-faced, walked like a hunchback down a beach in east Africa, in the late afternoon sun. The warm water of the shallows lay greenish and translucent. Dolphins rode inside the waves. The ape waded out into the shallows. Long powerful arms, evolved for hitting; a quick grab and he had one by the tail, by the dorsal fin. Surely it could escape, but it didn't try. Female; the ape turned her over, mated with her, released her. He left and came back to find the dolphin in the shallows, giving birth to twins—one male, one female. The ape's troop swarmed into the shallows, killed and ate them both. Farther offshore the dolphin birthed two more.

  The dawn woke Smith. He stood and walked out into the shallows. He saw dolphins inside the transparent indigo waves. He waded out into the surf. The water was only a little colder than the workout pool. The dawn sun was low. The dolphins were only a little longer than he was, small and lithe. He bodysurfed with them. They were faster than him in the waves, but flowed around him when they had to. One leapt over him and splashed back into the curl of the wave ahead of him. Then one flashed under him, and on an impulse he grabbed at its dorsal fin and caught it, and was suddenly moving faster in the wave, as it rose with both of them inside it—by far the greatest bodysurfing ride of his life. He held on. The dolphin and all the rest of its pod turned and swam out to sea, and still he held on. This is it, he thought. Then he remembered that they were air-breathers too. It was going to be all right.

  Discovering Life

  The final approach to the Jet Prop
ulsion Laboratory, a narrow road running up the flank of the ugly brown mountains overlooking Los Angeles, is an adequate road in ordinary circumstances, but when something newsworthy occurs it is inadequate to handle the influx of media visitors. On this morning the line of cars and trailers extended down from the security gate almost to the freeway off-ramp, and Bill Dawkins watched the temperature gauge of his old Ford Escort rise as he inched forward, all the vehicles adding to the smog already making the air a tangible gray mist. Eventually he passed the security guards and drove up to the employee parking lot, then walked down past the guest parking lot, overflowing with TV trailers topped by satellite dishes. Surely every language and nation in the world was represented, all bringing their own equipment, of course.

  Inside the entry building Bill turned right and looked in the press-conference room, also jammed to overflowing. A row of Bill's colleagues sat up on the stage behind a long table crowded with mikes, facing the cameras and lights and reporters. Bill's friend Mike Collinsworth was answering a question about contamination, trying to look like he was enjoying himself. But very few scientists like other scientists listening in on them when they are explaining things to nonscientists, because then there is someone there to witness just how gross their gross simplifications are; so an affair like this was in its very nature embarrassing. And to complicate the situation this press corps was a very mixed crowd, ranging from experts who in some senses (social context, historical background) knew more than the scientists themselves, all the way to TV faces who could barely read their prompters. That plus the emotional load of the subject matter, amounting almost to hysteria, gave the event an excruciating quality that Bill found perversely fascinating to watch.

  A telegenic young woman got the nod from John and took the radio mike being passed around. "What does this discovery mean to you?" she said. "What do you think the meaning of this discovery will be?"

  The seven men on stage looked at one another, and the crowd laughed. John said, "Mike?" and Mike made a face that got another laugh. But John knew his crew; Mike was a smart ass in real life, indeed Bill could imagine some of his characteristic answers scorching the air: It means I have to answer stupid questions in front of billions of people, it means I can stop working eighty-hour weeks and see what a real life is like again; but Mike was also good at the PR stuff, and with a straight face he answered the second of the questions, which Bill would have thought was the harder of the two.

  "Well, the meaning of it depends, to some extent, on what the exobiologists find out when they investigate the organisms more fully. If the organisms follow the same biochemical principles as life on Earth, then it's possible they are a kind of cousin to Terran life, bounced on meteorites from Mars to here, or here to Mars. If that's the case, then it's possible that DNA analysis will even be able to determine about when the two families parted company, and which planet has the older population. We may find out that we're all Martians originally."

  He waited for the obligatory laugh. "On the other hand, the investigation may show a completely alien biochemistry, indicating a separate origin. That's a very different scenario." Now Mike paused, realizing he was at the edge of his soundbite envelope, also of deep waters. He decided to cut it short: "Either way that turns out, we'll know that life is very adaptable, and that it can either cross space between planets, or begin twice in the same solar system, so either way we'll be safer in assuming that life is fairly widespread in the universe."

  Bill smiled. Mike was good; the answer provided a quick summary of the situation, bullet points, potential headlines: "Life on Mars Proves Life Is Common in the Universe." Which wasn't exactly true, but there was no winning the soundbite game.

  Bill left the room and crossed the little plaza, then entered the big building forming the north flank of the compound. Upstairs the little offices and cubicles all had their doors open and portable TVs on, all tuned to the press conference just a hundred yards away; there was a holiday atmosphere, including streamers and balloons, but Bill couldn't feel it somehow. There on the screens under the CNN logo his friends were being played up as heroes, Young Devoted Rocket Scientists replacing astronauts, as the exploration of Mars proceeded robotically—silly, but very much preferable to the situation when things went wrong, when they were portrayed as Harried Geek Rocket Scientists not quite up to the task, the extremely important (though underfunded) task of teleoperating the exploration of the cosmos from their desks. They had played both roles several times at JPL, and had come to understand that for the media and perhaps the public there was no middle ground, no recognition that they were just people doing their jobs, difficult but interesting jobs in difficult but not intolerable circumstances. No, for the world they were a biannual nine-hours' wonder, either nerdy heroes or nerdy goats, and the next day forgotten.

  That was just the way it was, and not what was bothering Bill. He felt at loose ends. Mission accomplished, his TO DO list almost empty; it left him feeling somewhat empty; but that was not it either. He still had phone and e-mail media questions waiting, and he worked through those on automatic pilot, his answers honed by the previous week's work. The lander had drilled down and secured a soil sample from under the sands at the mouth of Shalbatana Vallis, where thermal sensors had detected heat from a volcanic vent, which meant the permafrost ice in that region had liquid percolations in it. The sample had been placed in a metal sphere which had been hermetically sealed and boosted to Martian orbit. After a rendezvous with an orbiter it had been flown back to Earth and been released in such a manner that it had dropped into Earth's atmosphere without orbiting at all, and slammed into Utah's Dugway Proving Grounds a mere ten yards from its target. An artificial meteorite, yes. No, the ball could not have broken on impact, it had been engineered for that impact, indeed could have withstood striking a sidewalk or a wall of steel, and had been recovered intact in the little crater it had made—recovered by robot and flown robotically to Johnson Space Center in Houston, where it had been placed inside hermetically sealed chambers in sealed labs in sealed buildings before being opened, everything having been designed for just this purpose. No, they did not need to sterilize Dugway, or all of Utah, they did not need to nuke Houston (not to kill Martian bacteria anyway), and all was well; the alien life was safely locked away and could not get out. People were safe.

  Bill answered many such questions, feeling that there were far too many people who badly needed a better education in risk assessment. They got in their cars and drove on freeways, smoking cigarettes and holding high-energy radio transmitters against their heads, in order to get to newsrooms where they were greatly concerned to find out if they were in danger from microbacteria locked away behind triple hermetic seals in Houston. By the time Bill broke for lunch he was feeling more depressed than irritated. People were ignorant, short-sighted, poorly educated, fearful, superstitious; deeply meshed in magical thinking of all kinds. And yet that too was not really what was bothering him.

  Mike was in the cafeteria, hungrily downing his lunchtime array of flavonoids and antioxidants, and Bill joined him, feeling cheered. Mike was giving a low-voiced recap of the morning's press conference (many journalists were in the JPL cafeteria on guest passes). "What is the meaning of life?" Mike whispered urgently, "it means metabolism, it means hunger at lunchtime, please God let us eat, that's what it means." Then the TVs overhead began to show the press conference from Houston, and like everyone else they watched and listened to the tiny figures on the screen. The exobiologists at Johnson Space Center were making their initial report: the Martian bacteria were around one hundred nanometers long, bigger than the fossil nanobacteria tentatively identified in ALH 84001, but smaller than most Terran bacteria; they were single-celled, they contained proteins, ribosomes, DNA strands composed of base pairs of adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine.

  "Cousins," Mike declared.

  The DNA resembled certain Terran organisms like the Columbia Basement Archaea Methanospirillum jacobii, thus
possibly they were the descendant of a common ancestor.

  "Cousins!"

  Very possibly mitochondrial DNA analysis would reveal when the split had happened. "Separated at birth," one of the Johnson scientists offered, to laughter. They were just like the JPL scientists in their on-screen performances. Spontaneous generation versus panspermia, frequent transpermia between Earth and Mars; all these concepts poured out in a half-digested rush, and people would still be calling for the nuclear destruction of Houston and Utah in order to save the world from alien infection, from andromeda strains, from fictional infections—infictions, as Mike said with a grin.

  The Johnson scientists nattered on solemnly, happy still to be in the limelight; it had been an oddity of NASA policy to place the Mars effort so entirely at JPL, in effect concentrating one of the major endeavors of human history into one small university lab, with many competing labs out there like baby birds in the federal nest, ready to peck JPL's eyes out if given the chance. Now the exobiology teams at Johnson and Ames were finally involved, and it was no longer just JPL's show, although they were still headquarters and had engineered the sample-return operation just as they had all the previous Martian landers. The diffusion of the project was a relief of course, but could also be seen as a disappointment—the end of an era. But now, watching the TV, Bill could tell that wasn't what was bothering him either.

  Mike returned with Bill and Nassim to their offices, and they continued to watch the Johnson press conference on a desk TV. Apparently the sample contained more than one species, perhaps as many as five, maybe more. They just didn't know yet. They thought they could keep them all alive in Mars jars, but weren't sure. They were sure that they had the organisms contained, and that there was no danger.