by MadMaxAU
—Unclean and dangerous. — Quiverian nodded as if he had completely missed Carl’s sarcasm. —We shall be better able to work on the Nudge Launchers, since they are to be situated at the south pole, anyway. All that is required is that we are given materials and supplies, and left alone. —
—My crews remain in charge of the launchers themselves, — Jeffers insisted. Quiverian merely shrugged.
—Just do not come into our homes. —
Virginia noted the mood of all the participants. None of them think any of it really matters, or there’d be more yelling going on.
Jeffers shrugged. —We’re all welcome to outfit our own tombs however we want. — The others all seemed to agree with his somber assessment.
Except for Saul, who suddenly barked in laughter. They all turned to look at him.
—Excuse me. Don’t mind me, — he said, waving with one hand. But everyone could see, through his faceplate, that he was fighting down a fit of hilarity.
Carl frowned until Saul’s expression had settled down to a mere controlled smirk. Then he turned back to Quiverian. —Go on, then. Go south in peace. —
The three Artists swiveled and departed. In turn, Carl and Jeffers strode off toward the nearby tunnel lock.
Saul brought the mech’s hand to his faceplate, pantomiming a kiss. —I must go too, darling. Don’t wait up for me. —
“But, but . . . I thought you’d come down now. We could spend some time together. Saul, you’ve been away for nearly a week.”
—Oh, now, Virginia. We talk several times a day. —
“Through one of my mechs!” A robot foot kicked up dark dust near his leg. “It’s not the same!”
He nodded, grinning infuriatingly.
—I know. I miss you too. Terribly. It’s just . . . —
He shook his head.
—It’s just that I have to verify something. It’s too damn important to wait. And I can’t tell anybody yet . . . not even you . . . not until I know for sure if . . . —
His voice trailed off as he backed away toward the airlock. Virginia knew the look on his face, that faraway, scientific look. He was already somewhere else.
“Until you know what?” she asked. “What is all this, Saul?”
He shrugged.
—Until I know for sure if I’m crazy . . . or if I’m . . .—
The last word was a mumble, something in one of Saul’s foreign languages.
“What?”
But he only blew her a kiss then, and spun about to lope toward the tunnel entrance.
The part of her that was above the surface, linked to a machine of metal and ceramic, watched him until the doors closed, leaving her locked out in the chilly night.
Deep under the ice, the rest of her was no less in darkness.
SAUL
He found Lieutenant Commander Osborn up at Greenhouse 3. Carl stood before a forty-meter dome window, wearing stained, patched spacesuit without tabard. The spacer held a battered helmet in the crook of his arm and looked out onto the garbage-strewn plain of dirty ice.
What a mess, Saul thought, looking over the tattered warehouse tents, the broken mooring mast where that unlucky ship Edmund Halley had once been tethered. At last Saul realized what was bothering him most. It was too dim here in the greenhouse.
He looked up at the spider thin towers holding one of the huge concentrator mirrors salvaged from the space tug Delsemme’s great solar sail. Two guy wires had snapped. A whole quadrant of the big collector drooped.
Out on the surface, a single figure picked desultorily through the debris, presumably looking for material from which to make repairs. He seemed not to be in any hurry.
Within, things weren’t much better. The four men and three women on this shift tended the slowly moving belts of drip irrigated sweet potatoes, clearing debris from the plastic tracks and cleaning the nutrient spray jets. It was vital duty, but they moved without apparent enthusiasm.
Three of the newly reprogrammed mechs followed the workers around, but nobody seemed even interested in training them in the new hydroponics procedures. The belts ground on; plants drooped in the dim illumination.
Saul was shaken when he recognized the sigil on the workers’ clothes—the staircase and star that stood for Plateau Three.
Spacers!. They’re the last people I’d expect to give up.
Saul saw the expression on Carl Osborn’s face as the man gazed out over the icefield. I suppose you can’t blame him if he’s lost hope, too, Saul thought. He’s obstinate, and made of strong stuff. But everyone has a limit.
He’s run the same simulations I have. He knows what’ll happen if things go on this way.
Even if everyone pitched in and cooperated, with all the mechs in the world, there would still be nowhere near enough manpower to set up the Nudge Launchers properly, let alone do all the work needed to keep things from going to hell. I’m surprised he even goes through the motions, believing that.
Saul smiled. He planned on changing Carl’s mind about the future.
This time, I swear, we won’t misunderstand each other. Saul hoped that his good news would make Carl forgive even Virginia’s poor choice in men.
I never thought of it before, but with that touch of gray at the sides, and that cool gaze, he sort of resembles Simon Percell!
“Yes?” Carl said as he approached. “You told me you were going to do a bioinventory of the colony. You’ve got a report already?”
“That’s right.” Saul nodded. “But I don’t think you’re going to be very ready to believe it.”
Carl lifted his shoulders. “Bad news doesn’t frighten me anymore.”
Saul couldn’t help letting out a short, sharp laugh. The sound was abrupt, unexpected in this solemn place. Carl’s eyes narrowed.
“You misunderstand me.” Saul grinned. “Either I have gone mad—in which case the news is neutral to good from your point of view—or I have made a discovery which bodes very well, indeed.”
Carl stood quite still. His body remained in a spacer’s crouch, arms forward, knees bent. Only a twitch of his cheek betrayed a hint of feeling, but it was enough for Saul.
Is hope, then, so very painful? He may hate me, but he knows I have pulled rabbits out of hats before.
Saul reminded himself not to be too quick to judge. To a man who has seen the face of Death, and learned resignation, hope is often the most frightening thing of all.
“Explain, please,” the younger man said softly.
“Come with me to my lab,” Saul told him “Even with graphic displays, I’m not sure I can make it clear. But I have to share this. It may be the Infinite’s ultimate joke on a man who had the unrepentant gall to try to play God.”
“I see,” Carl told him after half an hour. “You’ve found infestations of cometary flora and fauna in every single living crew member, in every clan, even in the few people we never unslotted at all.”
Saul nodded. “Even Virginia’s bio organic computer, JonVon, seems to be suffering from an infection. The thing’s not really alive, of course, but something’s gotten into it. I’m working to find a way to treat it.”
Carl shrugged. “I’ve tried hard to get it through the Ubers’ and Arcists’ heads that their war hardly matters, anymore. Percell, Ortho, everybody is dying.”
He started to get up. “You may have done us a service at that, Saul. Write me up a concise report for distribution. It may help us all make peace with each other, in the time we have left.’
Saul stopped him with a gesture. “Sit down, please. I’m not finished yet.”
Carl settled back into the webbing, reluctantly.
“So what else is there?”
“Remember that bioanalysis I performed on my own body?”
“Sure.” Carl nodded. “Except for your reproductive system—and that perpetual sniffle of yours—you’re fairly healthy. I’m sorry you’re sterile, Saul. And I’m glad for you that the comet bugs seem to be killing you slower than most.
”
“Carl, they aren’t killing me at all.”
The other man snapped a cold look at Saul. “Don’t be an ass! Your chart showed an asymptotically increasing— “
“Increasing variety of infesting organisms, same as everybody else. By normal logic I can’t keep fighting all these infections much longer. Sooner or later one will wreck my immune system, opening me wide to all the others. Is that the pattern you’re thinking of?”
Carl nodded. “I’ve studied a lot of medical biology, over my last five duration years.”
“I guess you had to, since Svatuto quit as your doctor.”
“Right. And since Earth stopped giving advice that was worth a tinker’s damn.” Carl grimaced, remembering bitterly. “During my shifts I’ve seen guys live for years with green tinted skins and low fevers, fighting on like champions . . . only to fall to pieces—literally—when that last straw hit.”
Saul shrugged. “That was them.”
“And you’re different?” Carl sneered. “You’re somehow especially blessed?”
Saul wanted to laugh. Blessed? Oh, Miriam, what has the almighty done to your simple Saul?
He paused and took a breath. “I want to tell you about something. Let me talk to you about symbiosis.”
Imagine a virus . . . a simple bundle of nucleic acid packaged inside a protein shell . . . a killer, a smart bomb with only one job—replication.
Suppose this virus finds a vector, and penetrates the skin and outer membranes of a multicelled organism . . . perhaps a human being At that point, its job has only begun. From there it seeks its real prey, not the man so much as a single one of his trillion cells.
Seeking might not be the proper word. For a virus is only a pseudo-lifeform. It doesn’t propel itself after vibrations or chemical traces, as protists and bacteria do. A virus only drifts, suspended in water or blood or lymph or mucus—until it strikes the surface of an unlucky cell.
Now suppose one of these little bits of half life is lucky. It has evaded the victim organism’s defenses. No antibodies manage to latch on to it and carry it away. It isn’t engulfed and destroyed by the immune system’s strike forces. The fortunate virus survives to bump against a likely cell in just the right way, triggering adherence.
It sticks to the cell wall, a simple capsule of protein, ready to inject its contents into the prostrate prey. Once inside, the viral RNA will take over the vast, complex chemical machinery of the cell, forcing it to forge hundreds, thousands of duplicates of the original virus, until, like an overstretched balloon, the ravaged cell bursts. The new viral horde spills forth, leaving only wreckage behind.
There is the virus, stuck to the outer wall . . . poised to inject this tyrannical cargo into the prostrate prey . . . .
Prostrate, yes. But helpless?
For a long time an argument raged among physicians, biologists, and philosophers. A small minority kept asking the same question over and over again.
“Why does the cell let this catastrophe happen?”
Biological heretics pointed out how difficult it was to seize and penetrate the intricate barriers of a cell wall. So much was involved, and it would seem so simple for a cell merely to refuse access.
What about the fantastic number of steps needed to turn the machinery of the cell into a slave factory, forcing the ribosomes and mitochondria to perform tasks totally alien to their normal functions?
“All the cell needs to do is interrupt any one of these steps, and the process is stopped, cold!” the unbelievers declared. “There must be a reason. Why does the cell allow itself to be such easy prey?”
Classical biologists sniffed in disgust. Animals develop new ways to fight viruses all the time, they said. But viruses evolve methods around every obstacle. The balance is always struck across a knife edge of death.
But the dissenters insisted, “Death is nothing but a side effect. Disease is not a war between species. More often, it is a case of failed negotiation.”
“You’re losing me,” Carl told Saul.
Saul drummed his fingers on the desktop and searched for the right words. “Hmmm. Let’s try an example. You know what mitochondria are, right?”
Carl inclined his head and spoke in a hollow voice. “They’re organelles . . . internal parts of living cells. They regulate the basic energy economy . . . take electro chemical potential from burning sugars and convert it into useful forms.”
“Very good.” Saul nodded, impressed. Carl had, indeed, been studying over the long, hopeless years. No scholar, he had probably mastered the material by brute force. “And you know the widely held theory over where the mitochondria came from?”
Carl closed his eyes. “I remember reading something about that. They resemble certain types of free living bacteria, don’t they?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“Some people think they were once independent creatures. But long ago one of their ancestors got trapped inside one of the first eukaryotes.”
Saul nodded. “About a billon years ago . . . when our ancestors were only single cells, hunting around in the open sea.”
“Yeah. They think one of our ancestors ate the ancestral mitochondria. Only, for some reason it didn’t digest it that time. It let the thing stay and work for it, instead.
Carl looked up at Saul, seriously. “This is what you mean by symbiosis, isn’t it’? The early mitochondria provided more efficient energy conversion for the host cell. And in return, it never had to hunt for food again. The host cell— “
“—Our ancestor— “
“—took care of that from then on.”
“And when one divided, so did the other, passing the arrangement down to each daughter cell. The partnership was inherited, generation by generation.” Saul nodded. “The same seems true of chloroplasts, the organelles in plant cells that do the actual work of photosynthesis. They’re kin to blue green algae. And many other cellular components show signs they may have once been independent creatures, too.”
“Yes. I do remember reading about that.” Carl seemed interested for the first time. Saul remembered some of the conversations they’d had back in the early days, before their differences had yawned like gulf between them. He wondered if Carl missed them s much as he did.
Probably more. After all, I have Virginia.
“The same holds for the entire organism, Carl. A normal human being has countless species of creatures living in him, depending on him as he depends on them. From gut bacteria that help us digest our food, to a special type of mite that lives only at the base of human eyelashes, scouring them, eating decayed matter and keeping them clean.”
Saul spread his hands. “None of these symbiotic animals can live independently of man anymore. Nor can we very easily do without them. They’re almost as much parts of the colony organism called Homo sapiens as human DNA itself.”
Carl blinked, as if trying to absorb this new leap. “It’s like a quantum field in physics, then. The boundaries of what I call ‘me’ are . . . are . . .”
“Are amorphous. Nebulous. Difficult to define. You’ve got it! They’ve found that married couples share much the same suite of intestinal flora, for instance. Make love to a woman, and you exchange symbionts. In a sense, you become partly the same creature by sharing elements that grow and participate in each other.”
Carl frowned. And Saul realized that he was skirting a touchy subject. He hurried on.
“But here is my main point. Carl. Probably few, if any, of these symbionts simply settled into their niches without an initial struggle. Evolution doesn’t work that way . . . at least not usually.”
“But—“
“Every symbiont, from digestion helper to follicle cleaner, started out as an invader, once upon a time. Every synergism began in a disease.”
“I don’t . . “ Carl frowned in concentration. “Wait. Wait a minute.” His brow was knitted with tight furrows. “You spoke of disease as negotiation between a host and an invading— �
�
“— Visiting—“
“— species. But . . . but even if that’s the case, this negotiation takes place over the bodies of uncounted dead of both sides!” Carl looked up, eyes flashing. “True, they may come to a modus vivendi someday, but that doesn’t help the individuals who die, often horribly, broken on the wheel of evolution.”
Saul stared, unable to hide his surprise. In his most pensive moments, Carl Osborn seemed to have come upon a new facility with words. With tempering, an awkward youth had turned into something of a poet.
“Well said.” Saul nodded. “And that’s exactly what we’re seeing here on Halley. Some die abruptly. Others fight the interlopers to a standstill. Some even profit a little from some side effect of their infestation.”
Carl slapped the desktop with a loud report and swiveled to face Saul fully.
“All very well and good, Saul. If— if— there were only one or two diseases, and if we had generations, with millions of people, in which to work all this out.”
“But that’s not the case! Say you’re like that green colored character up in Hydroponics Two— “
“Old McCue? The one whose skin parasite seems to feed him nutrients made from sunlight?”
“Yeah. Great stuff. But— to quote from your own report— the man’s mind has also been reduced to the level of a moron by a peptide byproduct of that very same fungoid parasite!”
The younger man breathed heavily.
“I’m glad you read my studies,” Saul answered.
Carl snorted. “Besides Jeffers, and Virginia’s computer, you’re the only one who writes anything worth reading, anymore. I’m sure you’ll be more famous than ever, when you send your reports to Earth.”
That made Saul wince. How had he managed to make Carl misunderstand him again? “It’s not like that.”
“Oh? Then how is it, Mr. Great Man of Biology? Tell me! I’ve shown you 1 know plenty, for an amateur. Convince me! Tell me how the hell all these fancy theories about symbiosis are going to make one slice of difference to a tiny, overwhelmed colony, every member of which is a total, certain goner!”