A Science Fiction Omnibus

by Brian Aldiss

  Dr Andrew Smith was as aware of these possibilities as anyone. Indeed, it constituted one of the central problems of his field – convincingly to sort the traces of DNA in the fossil record, distinguishing them from an array of possible pseudofossils. Pseudofossils littered the history of the discipline, from the earliest false nautiloids to the famous Martian pseudo-nanobacteria. Nothing progressed in paleogenomics unless you could show that you really were talking about what you said you were talking about. So Dr Smith did not get too excited, at first, about what he was finding in the junk DNA of an early dolphin fossil.

  In any case there were quite a few distractions to his work at that time. He was living on the south shore of the Amazonian Sea, that deep southerly bay of the world-ringing ocean, east of Elysium, near the equator. In the summers, even the cool summers they had been having lately, the extensive inshore shallows of the sea grew as warm as blood, and dolphins – adapted from Terran river dolphins like the baiji from China, or the boto from the Amazon, or the susu from the Ganges, or the bhulan from the Indus – sported just off the beach. Morning sunlight lanced through the waves and picked out their flashing silhouettes, sometimes groups of eight or ten of them, all playing in the same wave.

  The marine laboratory he worked at, located on the sea-front of the harbor town Eumenides Point, was associated with the Acheron labs, farther up the coast to the west. The work at Eumenides had mostly to do with the shifting ecologies of a sea that was getting saltier. Dr Smith’s current project dealing with this issue involved investigating the various adaptations of extinct cetaceans who had lived when the Earth’s sea had exhibited different levels of salt. He had in his lab some fossil material, sent to the lab from Earth for study, as well as the voluminous literature on the subject, including the full genomes of all the living descendants of these creatures. The transfer of fossils from Earth introduced the matter of cosmic-ray contamination to all the other problems involved in the study of ancient DNA, but most people dismissed these effects as minor and inconsequential, which was why fossils were shipped across at all. And of course with the recent deployment of fusion-powered rapid vehicles, the amount of exposure to cosmic rays had been markedly reduced. Smith was therefore able to do research on mammal salt tolerance both ancient and modern, thus helping to illuminate the current situation on Mars, also joining the debates ongoing concerning the paleohalocycles of the two planets, now one of the hot research areas in comparative planetology and bioengineering.

  Nevertheless, it was a field of research so arcane that if you were not involved in it, you tended not to believe in it. It was an off shoot, a mix of two difficult fields, its ultimate usefulness a long shot, especially compared with most of the inquiries being conducted at the Eumenides Point Labs. Smith found himself fighting a feeling of marginalization in the various lab meetings and informal gatherings, in coffee lounges, cocktail parties, beach luncheons, boating excursions. At all of these he was the odd man out, with only his colleague Frank Drumm, who worked on reproduction in the dolphins currently living off shore, expressing any great interest in his work and its applications. Worse yet, his work appeared to be becoming less and less important to his advisor and employer, Vlad Taneev, who as one of the First Hundred, and the co-founder of the Acheron labs, was ostensibly the most powerful scientific mentor one could have on Mars; but who in practice turned out to be nearly impossible of access, and rumored to be in failing health, so that it was like having no boss at all, and therefore no access to the lab’s technical staff and so forth. A bitter disappointment.

  And then of course there was Selena, his – his partner, roommate, girlfriend, significant other, lover – there were many words for this relationship, though none was quite right. The woman with whom he lived, with whom he had gone through graduate school and two post-docs, with whom he had moved to Eumenides Point, taking a small apartment near the beach, near the terminus of the coastal tram, where when one looked back east the point itself just heaved over the horizon, like a dorsal fin seen far out to sea. Selena was making great progress in her own field, genetically engineering salt grasses; a subject of great importance here, where they were trying to stabilize a thousand-kilometer coastline of low dunes and quicksand swamps. Scientific and bioengineering progress; important achievements, relevant to the situation; all things were coming to her professionally, including of course offers to team up in any number of exciting public/co-op collaborations.

  And all things were coming to her privately as well. Smith had always thought her beautiful, and now he saw that with her success, other men were coming to the same realization. It took only a little attention to see it; an ability to look past shabby lab coats and a generally unkempt style to the sleekly curving body and the intense, almost ferocious intelligence. No – his Selena looked much like all the rest of the lab rats when in the lab, but in the summers when the group went down in the evening to the warm tawny beach to swim, she walked out the long expanse of the shallows like a goddess in a bathing suit, like Venus returning to the sea. Everyone in these parties pretended not to notice, but you couldn’t help it.

  All very well; except that she was losing interest in him. This was a process that Smith feared was irreversible; or, to be more precise, that if it had gotten to the point where he could notice it, it was too late to stop it. So now he watched her, furtive and helpless, as they went through their domestic routines; there was a goddess in his bathroom, showering, drying off, dressing, each moment like a dance.

  But she didn’t chat anymore. She was absorbed in her thoughts, and tended to keep her back to him. No – it was all going away.

  *

  They had met in an adult swim club in Mangala, while they were both grad students at the university there. Now, as if to re-invoke that time, Smith took up Frank’s suggestion and joined him at an equivalent club in Eumenides Point, and began to swim regularly again. He went from the tram or the lab down to the big fifty-meter pool, set on a terrace overlooking the ocean, and swam so hard in the mornings that the whole rest of the day he buzzed along in a flow of beta endorphins, scarcely aware of his work problems or the situation at home. After work he took the tram home feeling his appetite kick in, and banged around the kitchen throwing together a meal and eating much of it as he cooked it, irritated (if she was there at all) with Selena’s poor cooking and her cheery talk about her work, irritated also probably just from hunger, and dread at the situation hanging over them; at this pretense that they were still in a normal life. But if he snapped at her during this fragile hour she would go silent the whole rest of the evening; it happened fairly often; so he tried to contain his temper and make the meal and quickly eat his part of it, to get his blood sugar level back up.

  Either way she fell asleep abruptly around nine, and he was left to read into the timeslip, or even slip out and take a walk on the night beach a few hundred yards away from their apartment. One night, walking west, he saw Pseudophobos pop up into the sky like a distress flare down the coast, and when he came back into the apartment she was awake and talking happily on the phone; she was startled to see him, and cut the call short, thinking about what to say, and then said, ‘That was Mark, we’ve gotten tamarisk three fifty-nine to take repetitions of the third salt flusher gene!’

  ‘That’s good,’ he said, moving into the dark kitchen so she wouldn’t see his face.

  This annoyed her. ‘You really don’t care how my work goes, do you?’

  ‘Of course I do. That’s good, I said.’

  She dismissed that with a noise.

  Then one day he got home and Mark was there with her, in the living room, and at a single glance he could see they had been laughing about something; had been sitting closer together than when he started opening the door. He ignored that and was as pleasant as he could be.

  The next day as he swam at the morning work-out, he watched the women swimming with him in his lane. All three of them had swum all their lives, their freestyle stroke perfected
beyond the perfection of any dance move ever made on land, the millions of repetitions making their movement as unconscious as that of any fish in the sea. Under the surface he saw their bodies flowing forward, revealing their sleek lines – classic swimmer lines, like Selena’s – rangy shoulders tucking up against their ears one after the next, ribcages smoothed over by powerful lats, breasts flatly merged into big pecs or else bobbing left then right, as the case might be; bellies meeting high hipbones accentuated by the high cut of their swimsuits, backs curving up to bottoms rounded and compact, curving to powerful thighs then long calves, and feet outstretched like ballerinas. Dance was a weak analogy for such beautiful movement. And it all went on for stroke after stroke, lap after lap, until he was mesmerized beyond further thought or observation; it was just one aspect of a sensually saturated environment.

  Their current lane leader was pregnant, yet swimming stronger than any of the rest of them, not even huffing and puffing during their rest intervals, when Smith often had to suck air – instead she laughed and shook her head, exclaiming ‘Every time I do a flip turn he keeps kicking me!’ She was seven months along, round in the middle like a little whale, but still she fired down the pool at a rate none of the other three in the lane could match. The strongest swimmers in the club were simply amazing. Soon after getting into the sport, Smith had worked hard to swim a hundred-meter freestyle in less than a minute, a goal appropriate to him, and finally he had done it once at a meet and been pleased; then later he heard about the local college women’s team’s workout, which consisted of a hundred hundred-meter freestyle swims all on a minute interval. He understood then that although all humans looked roughly the same, some were stupendously stronger than others. Their pregnant leader was in the lower echelon of these strong swimmers, and regarded the swim she was making today as a light stretching-out, though it was beyond anything her lane mates could do with their best effort. You couldn’t help watching her when passing by in the other direction, because despite her speed she was supremely smooth and effortless, she took fewer strokes per lap than the rest of them, and yet still made substantially better time. It was like magic. And that sweet blue curve of the new child carried inside.

  Back at home things continued to degenerate. Selena often worked late, and talked to him less than ever.

  ‘I love you,’ he said. ‘Selena, I love you.’

  ‘I know.’

  He tried to throw himself into his work. They were at the same lab, they could go home late together. Talk like they used to about their work, which though not the same, was still genomics in both cases; how much closer could two sciences be? Surely it would help to bring them back together.

  But genomics was a very big field. It was possible to occupy different parts of it, no doubt about that. They were proving it. Smith persevered, however, using a new and more powerful electron microscope, and he began to make some headway in unraveling the patterns in his fossilized DNA.

  It looked like what had been preserved in the samples he had been given was almost entirely what used to be called the junk DNA of the creature. In times past this would have been bad luck, but the Kohl labs in Acheron had recently been making great strides in unraveling the various purposes of junk DNA, which proved not to be useless after all, as might have been guessed, development being as complex as it was. Their breakthrough consisted in characterizing very short and scrambled repetitive sequences within junk DNA that could be shown to code instructions for higher hierarchical operations than they were used to seeing at the gene level – cell differentiation, information order sequencing, apoptosis, and the like.

  Using this new understanding to unravel any clues in partially degraded fossil junk DNA would be hard, of course. But the nucleotide sequences were there in his EM images – or, to be more precise, the characteristic mineral replacements for the adenine=thymine and cytosine=guanine couplets, replacements well-established in the literature, were there to be clearly identified. Nanofossils, in effect; but legible to those who could read them. And once read, it was then possible to brew identical sequences of living nucleotides, matching the originals of the fossil creature. In theory one could re-create the creature itself, though in practice nothing like the entire genome was ever there, making it impossible. Not that there weren’t people trying anyway with simpler fossil organisms, either going for the whole thing or using hybrid DNA techniques to graft expressions they could decipher onto living templates, mostly descendants of the earlier creature.

  With this particular ancient dolphin, almost certainly a fresh-water dolphin (though most of these were fairly salt tolerant, living in river-mouths as they did), complete resuscitation would be impossible. It wasn’t what Smith was trying to do anyway. What would be interesting would be to find fragments that did not seem to have a match in the living descendants’ genome, then hopefully synthesize living in vitro fragments, clip them into contemporary strands, and see how these experimental animals did in hybridization tests and in various environments. Look for differences in function.

  He was also doing mitochondrial tests when he could, which if successful would permit tighter dating for the species’ divergence from precursor species. He might be able to give it a specific slot on the marine mammal family tree, which during the early Pliocene was very complicated.

  Both avenues of investigation were labor-intensive, time-consuming, almost thoughtless work – perfect, in other words. He worked for hours and hours every day, for weeks, then months. Sometimes he managed to go home on the tram with Selena; more often he didn’t. She was writing up her latest results with her collaborators, mostly with Mark. Her hours were irregular. When he was working he didn’t have to think about this; so he worked all the time. It was not a solution, not even a very good strategy – it even seemed to be making things worse – and he had to attempt it against an ever-growing sense of despair and loss; but he did it nevertheless.

  ‘What do you think of this Acheron work?’ he asked Frank one day at work, pointing to the latest print-out from the Kohl lab, lying heavily annotated on his desk.

  ‘It’s very interesting! It makes it look like we’re finally getting past the genes to the whole instruction manual.’

  ‘If there is such a thing.’

  ‘Has to be, right? Though I’m not sure the Kohl lab’s values for the rate adaptive mutants will be fixed are high enough. Ohta and Kimura suggested 10 percent as the upper limit, and that fits with what I’ve seen.’

  Smith nodded, pleased. ‘They’re probably just being conservative.’

  ‘No doubt, but you have to go with the data.’

  ‘So – in that context – you think it makes sense for me to pursue this fossil junk DNA?’

  ‘Well, sure. What do you mean? It’s sure to tell us interesting things.’

  ‘It’s incredibly slow.’

  ‘Why don’t you read off a long sequence, brew it up and venter it, and see what you get?’

  Smith shrugged. Whole-genome shotgun sequencing struck him as slipshod, but it was certainly faster. Reading small bits of single-stranded DNA, called expressed sequence tags, had quickly identified most of the genes on the human genome; but it had missed some, and it ignored even the regulatory DNA sequences controlling the protein-coding portion of the genes, not to mention the so-called junk DNA itself, filling long stretches between the more clearly meaningful sequences.

  Smith expressed these doubts to Frank, who nodded, but said, ‘It isn’t the same now that the mapping is so complete. You’ve got so many reference points you can’t get confused where your bits are on the big sequence. Just plug what you’ve got into the Lander-Waterman, then do the finishing with the Kohl variations, and even if there are massive repetitions, you’ll still be okay. And with the bits you’ve got, well they’re almost like ests anyway, they’re so degraded. So you might as well give it a try.’

  Smith nodded.

  That night he and Selena trammed home together. ‘What do you think of t
he possibility of shotgun sequencing in vitro copies of what I’ve got?’ he asked her shyly.

  ‘Sloppy,’ she said. ‘Double jeopardy.’

  *

  A new schedule evolved. He worked, swam, took the tram home. Usually Selena wasn’t there. Often their answering machine held messages for her from Mark, talking about their work. Or messages from her to Smith, telling him that she would be home late. As was happening so often, he sometimes went out for dinner with Frank and other lane mates, after the evening work-outs. One time at a beach restaurant they ordered several pitchers of beer, and then went out for a walk on the beach, and ended up running out into the shallows of the bay and swimming around in the warm dark water, so different from their pool, splashing each other and laughing hard. It was a good time.

  But when he got home that night, there was another message on the answering machine from Selena, saying that she and Mark were working on their paper after getting a bite to eat, and that she would be home extra late.

  She wasn’t kidding; at two o’clock in the morning she was still out. In the long minutes following the timeslip Smith realized that no one stayed out this late working on a paper without calling home. This was therefore a message of a different kind.

  Pain and anger swept through him, first one then the other. The indirection of it struck him as cowardly. He deserved at least a revelation – a confession – a scene. As the long minutes passed he got angrier and angrier; then frightened for a moment, that she might have been hurt or something. But she hadn’t. She was out there somewhere fooling around. Suddenly he was furious.

  He pulled cardboard boxes out of their closet and yanked open her drawers, and threw all her clothes in heaps in the boxes, crushing them in so they would all fit. But they gave off their characteristic scent of laundry soap and her, and smelling it he groaned and sat down on the bed, knees weak. If he carried through with this he would never again see her putting on and taking off these clothes, and just as an animal he groaned at the thought.