“Hey there, little one … where’s your mum, hmm? Left you out here … huh? Didums? Wuzza wugga icewuggy…”
As she made absent minded baby-talk, she delicately and slowly handled the alien, peering closely at the fine fibers that gave it its velvet texture. They were each a greenish-brown seaweed color, but the whole collection of them seemed darker, due to the light-absorbing properties of the fiber array. The single large eye of the node portion was more brown in color, like kelp. Finally, she straightened, wincing a little as her chilled backbone moved erect.
“Well, better go find more of Little Red … keep cool, little one.”
With a final pat to the surface of the tiny icerug, she strode briskly away over the crusted snow, feeling with pleasure the warmth returning as she stretched her long legs. As she searched the snow ahead of her for red blobs, moving her head from side to side in a deliberate search pattern, a movement behind her caught her eye, and she turned abruptly.
What was that? A dark shape on the ice, small, but moving, and coming closer. With mounting dismay, Deirdre realized the small icerug was following her!
“Oh, drat the thing…” She stopped, and the small icerug silently flowed up to stop at her feet, its large brown eye looking at her hopefully.
“Here now, get off with you! Daft beastie.” No hint of gentleness now in the singing voice, only coldness and dismissal. “Off! Off with you! Back to mama! Or whoever! Sssscat!”
Deirdre turned and started to move away as fast as she dared over the crusted snow.
Wwaaoo! Wwaaoo!! Wwaaoo!!!
Behind her, a hideous deep wailing arose, like a warbling fog horn, and she stopped, uncertain. Quickly the icerug caught up with her and the dreadful noise it was making quieted.
“Damn! As if I didn’t have enough to worry about! I’ve no time for baby-sitting carpets. Go home, blast you!”
She moved off again, but it was instantly evident that there was no way she could escape the small creature which seemed to have imprinted itself upon her. She stopped, and glared fiercely into its one huge eye, but it only seemed to take this as encouragement, and wrapped itself around her legs, gazing up at her trustfully.
“Blasted terry cloth mutant,” she muttered under her breath. “An’ they say you all are sentient beasties.”
She reported her predicament to the Dragonfly through the comm link.
“I would really like to get a sample of an infant icerug,” came Katrina’s voice. “Can we come and pick you both up?”
“It may be small, but it’s too big to fit into the airlock,” replied Deirdre.
“Besides,” added George. “Our primary responsibility is to finish collecting the rest of Little Red.”
“Well, I’m of no help, now, with this blasted creature always under my feet,” complained Deirdre.
“We’re almost done,” suggested Sam. “Why don’t the rest of us continue the search for Little Red, while Deirdre walks the baby icerug back to the rocket. We’ll meet her there.”
Deirdre agreed, although the prospect of spending hours alone walking across this slippery and unfriendly terrain was not attractive.
“And heaven knows what will happen if this carpet’s mum finds out I’ve run off with her child…”
CHAPTER 14 — EXPLAINING
Thomas, having pumped the diminished Little Red out of the rescue bag and into the flouwen habitat on Victoria, was venting the spilled ammonia water out the open airlock door, when he looked down and saw Deirdre at the base of the Jacob’s ladder. Thomas slid down the winch line to stare at Deirdre’s curious companion.
“Where did you get that?” he asked.
“I found it alone out on the ice, and it followed me here,” was the terse reply. The brief answer was so chilly it did not invite further questions, but Thomas broke into gleeful laughter.
“That old story!”
“Obviously the immature specimens of the icerug species exhibit the imprinting instinct common in many Terran species, particularly those whose young must be mobile at an early age,” came the retort, in tones so cold Thomas was shunted back to years and light-years ago, when a similar voice had caught him daydreaming and asked that since he seemed to know so much already, perhaps he would care to demonstrate the next problem on the board.
“Erm, yes, right,” he stammered, “Of course.” Deirdre went in the Dragonfly to get out of her suit and put Foxx into her cage. Soon, however, at everyone’s insistence, she had to suit up again and go back outside, where the small icerug was warbling loudly and trying to get inside the airlock door.
“Poor widdle thing!” Thomas was saying to the icerug as she exited the air lock. “Awl awone out in da cold. Mommy will be coming soon…”
“A stupid creature, indeed,” Deirdre muttered as she exited the airlock, forgetting how the suit imps magnified everything that was said. No one could be sure whether she meant the alien or Thomas.
Now she sat stonily on an upturned sample container while the icerug rumbled about her feet. One by one, others of the crew came out to view the tiny icerug and, to her ire, congratulate Deirdre on her “new baby”.
The minute David saw the creature he blurted in astonishment, “Say! That icerug is exactly the same ugly color as that gacky pus sack you brought back last time! Couldn’t you find something prettier?”
Deirdre was surprised that David saw a resemblance in color, but she didn’t question his judgement — the whole crew knew that David’s color sense was as true as his pitch sense. Instead she turned to Katrina, the last to arrive to see the young icerug.
“Katrina?” she said. “I found this icerug in the same place where I picked up the bit of pus, from the decaying coelashark. And, David says they have exactly the same color. I think we might compare a sample of this wee beastie with that pus sample.”
As Katrina approached, the young icerug shuffled around, making room for her. Katrina knelt, and while gently stroking the icerug’s carpet, she teased out a small portion of the velvet flesh until it was attached to the main carpet by only a thread. The huge brown eye watched her trustingly, then the six-leaved nictating membrane blinked as Katrina gave the carpet a spank while simultaneously snipping through the thread with a pair of scissors — but the infant didn’t utter a sound.
“What have you named it?” she asked, gently ruffling the fur where she had caused the injury.
“It’s not to be named. It must go back to its mother, or tribe, or whatever the icerugs have.”
“With its seaweed-colored carpet and its kelp-colored eye, I think you should call it Kelpie,” said Katrina, standing up with her now-filled sample bag, and tickling the alien with her boot.
“Huh,” was Deirdre’s reply. According to Celtic mythology, Kelpies were sea sprites who tried to drown unwary travelers. This kelpie was trying to freeze Deirdre instead. When daylight came, Deirdre led the infant across the knob to the local association of icerugs nearby. It was with immense relief that she saw the infant instantly transfer to Smooth-Brown, the teacher for the local association, and Deirdre was able to drift away and return to the Dragonfly.
When Deirdre emerged from her shower, Katrina had some news for her.
“The gene patterns on the baby icerug cells are identical to those on the pus cells! That baby icerug seems to have spontaneously generated itself from a dead coelashark! Maybe the Surgeon General was right!”
“Daft, y’are,” reproved Deirdre.
“Maybe icerugs lay their eggs in dead coelasharks, like wasps do in caterpillars,” suggested David.
“An idea, that,” said Deirdre. “For we know that coelasharks have something in them which forces them to turn into dead coelasharks. Something that quite likely came from an icerug. The worms in the vermicysts.”
“I see!” exclaimed Katrina. “The icerugs send out zygotes — embryo icerugs — which infect the coelasharks, driving them to suicide, so the zygotes can have enough food to grow up into big new icerugs.”
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“But that cannot be the whole story,” objected Deirdre. “Why then do the icerugs remove the vermicysts whenever they find a dead coelashark — and eat them? Why don’t they just leave the dead coelashark alone to turn into a new icerug?”
They discussed their findings with Cinnamon on Victoria.
“We need more facts,” concluded Cinnamon. “Up until now, we’ve concentrated on collecting samples, not analyzing them. I think we’d better start looking closely at some of our samples and comparing them — especially our samples of icerugs, coelasharks, and worms. Maybe there’s a link we’re missing.”
“The sample of pus had some coelashark tissue in with it,” said Katrina. “I’ll take a look at that.”
“And I’ll use the microscope here on Victoria to take a look at the worms in the vermicysts we collected,” said Cinnamon.
“And I’ll be cooking something to eat,” said Deirdre. “Let me know what you find.”
The bleak surroundings turned her thoughts to soup, and quickly she sizzled tiny bits of onion and pseudo-bacon in algae-butter until they were fragrant. They had long ago learned that small pieces of the mock-foods tasted closer to the real thing than did large chunks. She chopped potatoes into neat cubes, cooked them rapidly, and added them to the pot along with algae-cream, which she insisted on calling “top o’the milk”, and stirred and simmered the mixture until it was thick enough to stand a spoon in upright. Then she added lavish amounts of real chopped clam meat from the Blue Oyster Culture. Deirdre ground fresh pepper over her creamy chowder, and ladled generous bowls for herself and the others. The hot, richly satisfying meal awoke generous thoughts in Richard, and he had the Christmas Branch pack portions in an insulated carton for the crew on Victoria and take them over to put in the galley.
It was Cinnamon who reported back first. “Whatever those worms are in the vermicyst, they certainly aren’t icerugs. They don’t have the right cellular structure. They only have a one-knobbed basic cell structure, with a large banded tail growing out of the cell for swimming about.”
“Strange, is that,” replied Deirdre, coming forward look at the image of Cinnamon’s worm on the science console screen. “Everything else on Zulu has a two-knobbed basic cellular structure.”
“Perhaps I chose a defective one,” said Cinnamon. She directed the imp in the microscope stage to replace the worm with another one. “Nope,” she said, as the image built up. “Another one-knobber instead of two.”
“A half-sized cell instead of a whole-sized one,” remarked David, who had a copy of Cinnamon’s screen on his console.
“Hmmm,” added Cinnamon. “Am I right, Josephine? Is the genetic pattern on this one different?”
“Very observant, dearie. It is different.”
“But, look there, the band pattern on the tail is the same,” said Deirdre. “That would indicate a common genetic heritage in the tail-banding gene. Look at another one.”
Scanning a number of worms from the vermicyst, the biologists learned that there were two kinds of worms, and only two.
“Half-sized cells that come with two different genetic messages,” Deirdre mused.
“That certainly sounds familiar,” said Cinnamon. “I’d better take a look at the genetic patterns of the coelashark that harbored that vermicyst.”
Taking a sample from the liver-like organ of the coelashark, she gave it to Victoria‘s Christmas Branch, who took it to the micro-surgical stage. There, a single cell was teased out and transferred to the microscope stage. Cinnamon then set up the desired scan pattern on her screen, and Josephine started scanning the tunneling array across the surface of the cell.
“That’ll take a while,” said Cinnamon, getting up and heading for the galley. “I think I’ll have an early lunch.”
#I watch scan,# said Little Purple from the flouwen habitat tank. On his taste-screen was a copy of Cinnamon’s screen.
Cinnamon was halfway through a bowl of chowder, listening to “Knights In White Satin” through her imp earphones, when a crackly flouwen voice exploded in the middle of the second chorus.
#It is same! Worm and coelashark same!#
Cinnamon twisted one hand next to her earphones and the music of the Blue Oyster Cult faded away. Still carrying the bowl, she went to the science console where Josephine was proceeding with the imaging scan. The screen showed only a small portion of the surface of the coelashark cell, with more detail showing up slowly as the tunneling array microscope moved across the surface. The high resolution screen showed a complex pattern on the surface — the genetic code of the coelashark. As she sat down at the console, Josephine brought her and Deirdre up to date.
“Little Purple believes that the genetic code pattern on this liver cell is identical to that on the worm.”
“I would suspect that all life forms on Zulu have similar patterns for many of their functions, so it isn’t surprising that the patterns would be similar,” said Cinnamon. “How does he know they’re identical?”
#I remember,# said Little Purple with confidence. #This bit is pattern for length of leg. It is same on worm. Worm and coelashark same.#
“You remembered?” exclaimed Cinnamon, stunned again by the magnitude of the IQ of the flouwen. “Is he right, Josephine?”
“Yes, dearie. The genetic pattern on the single-knobbed cell of the worm is identical to one of the knobs on the double-lobed cell of the coelashark.”
“But how about the other knob?”
“That is identical to the worms in the vermicyst who have the other genetic pattern.”
“So,” remarked Deirdre, her green eyes wide with discovery. “One wee worm is just like one-half of a coelashark cell, while the other is just like the other half. The coelashark has a diploid cell carrying two different copies of the genetic pattern, while the wee worms are monoploid — carrying only half of the genetic information of the coelashark.”
“The worms in the vermicyst are the sperm of the coelashark,” exclaimed Cinnamon.
“Or eggs,” corrected Deirdre. “Or something neither sperm or egg. We cannot assume earth-like attributes for alien creatures.”
“What’s going on?” asked Sam, who had wandered by.
“We’ve found the sex organ for this coelashark,” replied Cinnamon. “It’s the vermicyst.” She quickly explained what they had learned.
Sam chuckled, “So when an icerug eats a vermicyst, it’s like a cowboy eating a prairie ‘oyster’.”
“But,” said Cinnamon. “We don’t know how it is used, or where it goes into the receiving coelashark, or how it produces more coelasharks, or why it makes icerugs sick, or why icerugs eat them in the first place.”
“Perhaps the icerug contributes by disseminating the sperm cells over a wide area,” suggested Sam.
“Questions we have,” Deirdre concluded. “Facts are harder to come by. The truth may be far stranger than we can guess.”
Katrina finally looked up from her console, where she had been imaging the cells of the coelashark that had produced the pus and the infant icerug.
“I’ve learned something else that may help. It took me a while, since I chose the wrong half of the coelashark cell to scan first, but now it’s clear.” Deirdre’s screen blinked as the image she had been looking at was replaced by the contents of Katrina’s screen. There were two images of two double-knobbed cells.
“On the top of the screen is a cell from the pus, which is exactly the same as a cell from the baby icerug that Deirdre caught.”
“It caught me,” objected Deirdre.
“On the bottom of the screen is a cell from the coelashark that produced the pus and the baby icerug. Note that both patterns on the two halves of the icerug cell are the same, as is typical for an icerug cell, while the patterns on the two halves of the coelashark cell are different, as is typical for a coelashark cell. But … the pattern on one half of the coelashark cell is identical to the baby icerug pattern. So, the genetic pattern that defines what an icerug
is, also exists in the coelashark cell — at least half of it. That baby icerug did spontaneously generate itself — from its dead parent.”
“Or half-parent,” remarked Deirdre. “Curiouser and curiouser. Well, that explains where baby icerugs come from — they don’t come from momma and papa icerugs — which is why the icerugs know nothing of reproduction. But, then, where do baby coelasharks come from?”
*Look at worm I find!* interrupted Little Red from the habitat tank on Victoria. *It not have one knob. It have two!*
“He’s right!” exclaimed Deirdre. “It did have two knobs. Where is that vent worm?”
“I’ve got the image in memory,” said Katrina. “Let’s see … what did I label it?”
“I’ve got it, luv,” said Joe helpfully, and instantly a two-knobbed worm appeared on their screens.
“That worm is different from the ones I looked at from the vermicyst,” said Cinnamon. “Mine have a one-knobbed cell and this vent worm has two.”
*Worm is baby coelashark!* said Little Red.
“I was saying at the time the vent worm had a larger head,” said Deirdre. “But it was hard to be sure since the video enlargements had such poor resolution. The beasties are mostly tail anyway.”
“It did have identical banding on the tail,” said Katrina.
“Which shows that it came from the vermicyst I videoed,” said Deirdre. “But this wee one has had something added to it. Perhaps added during its trip through Pink-Orb.”
“We have a sample of Pink-Orb’s flesh,” Katrina said. “I never got around to scanning it, though. I assumed it would be similar to the other icerug samples I had already scanned. It’s in the storage locker on Victoria.”
“I’ll get it out and take a look,” said Cinnamon. A short while later, a cell from Pink-Orb was teased out onto the microscope stage, and the tunneling array microscope started to produce an image below the image of the two-knobbed vent worm.
Ocean Under the Ice Page 33
