by Jeff Carlson
"I'll put some information on the display." Harmeet smiled once more -- her warm smile. "Um, Ben would be proud of you, you know."
"I know," Vonnie said, but she was germinating her own plan. Ben had adored her for being a loudmouth with their commanders and Berlin and the media. He'd loved how she refused to be pushed around. Didn't the proxies realize she'd tell everyone? She could ruin careers on Earth.
I should have married you, she thought. We played around and teased each other, but we should have had a ceremony, even a quick one with alumalloy rings like the Americans.
We knew the expiration dates on our lives had passed. We knew the end could surprise us at any time.
I would've liked to be your wife.
Harmeet was talking again and Vonnie had missed several words. She gazed up at the display, where Harmeet posted thirteen amplified helixes of DNA. Color codes matched strands of genetic code, then labeled the revolving strands. Ten were different kinds of bacteria, five from Earth, five from Europa. The other three were terrestrial organisms.
"A cow, a viper snake and a tick," Vonnie muttered. Ben would have said: If the three of them walk into a bar, you've got the opening of a good joke.
I'm going insane, she thought. I want to hear his voice.
"Why are you showing me this?" she asked.
"There are leaps in our evolutionary history," Harmeet said. "Creationists say this means evolution can't be real, but the fossil record isn't thorough. As a paleontologist named Donald Prothero pointed out, it can't be. The number of species found in the fossil record is less than five percent of the number of living species. Do the math and it suggests there are fossils of less than one percent of all of the species that have existed on Earth. Plants and animals are fossilized only in the most favorable conditions, and we uncover only a fraction of them. So there are leaps."
"Missing links."
"Very good. We've found transitional forms of three- and four-toed dog-sized herbivores that evolved into the horses we see today. We have transitional forms of long-bodied creatures with snouts and legs like crocodiles except they're mammals. These are land animals that returned to the oceans, where they became dolphins and whales. Creationists are mentally and spiritually lazy. They say we don't have the entire puzzle, so there is no puzzle, only divine intervention. They can't handle the uncertainty, so they decide life originated by magic. The fact is we've detailed the progression of apes into human beings. But even in these cases of little herbivores evolving into horses or shallow water mammals evolving into dolphins or apes evolving into human beings, there are leaps... accelerations... like one species' personal little Cambrian explosion."
"I read something about flowers once."
"Yes. The sudden appearance of flowering plants in the fossil record was such an obstacle to the theory of evolution, Darwin referred to it as the 'abominable mystery.' Of course we've expanded our knowledge and he didn't have AIs or genesmithing, but he touched on a glaring contradiction. How did flowering plants evolve without pollinating insects? Why would pollinating insects evolve if there weren't flowering plants?"
A tick and a flower walk into a bar, Vonnie thought, waiting for Harmeet to make sense.
"Island genetics are one explanation for what looks like the sudden, full emergence of flowering plants," Harmeet said. "They probably evolved on a secluded chain of islands where they were in a safe place -- like a lab -- for trial and error. The biggest trial was a finely specialized dependency on wasps to carry pollen. Later, wasps diverged into bees. There's one example of symbiosis on Earth, Von. But how did crude gymnosperms like trees and shrubs abruptly transform into more fragile yet more prolific flowering plants?"
"Europa."
"Now you're getting it. Three hundred and twenty million years ago, one hundred and ninety million years ago and one hundred and sixty million years ago, there were genetic events that led to flowering plants. Wasps appear in the fossil record between the initial two events. Bees appear simultaneously with the third. All insects transmit bacteria, viruses or both."
"And viruses transmit genetic information."
"So do bacteria." Harmeet highlighted ten of the helixes on their display. "This is a class of jumping genes called transposons. They acquire abilities from their hosts. Then they leave. They're capable of separating themselves from one organism's DNA and pasting themselves into a completely different organism. Retrotransposons are even more impressive. They copy and paste instead of cutting and pasting. Every jump makes new copies, so they spread like pandemics. Think about that for a moment. Hard-won evolutionary skills bouncing from one species to another. For the most part, horizontal gene transfer is involuntary and the new codes are inactive. They're lost in junk DNA. The organism with the new codes doesn't use what it's gained except for very gradual, very subtle changes until everything jumpstarts at once."
Vonnie nodded. "You're saying the evolutionary events began with meteors from Europa."
Harmeet shook her head. "Not necessarily. A virus can lie dormant. So will bacteria, although it tends to wax and wane with plant and animal populations. Bacteria increase with the decay of feces and dead bodies and dead plants. It spreads with migrations and parasites, just biding the years until there's a need. Until there's an opening. Bacteria that had been on Earth for millennia could initiate a change without the appearance of new Europan DNA."
"That's confusing."
"It's not. Organisms develop through natural selection and environmental pressures, but horizontal gene transfers are another factor. They can provide options that a plant or an animal might not otherwise tap."
"A jumpstart, you said."
"Jumpstarts, course corrections, even reversals or paths to an organism's detriment. Evolution is messy. It's a heartless bitch. One of the most baffling examples is a gene that's transferred between lizards, snakes and cows. We find it in geckos and elephants, too." Harmeet indicated the sims where she'd posted DNA from a cow, a viper snake and a tick. "This particular gene, or its descendents, account for twenty-six percent of the cow genome. Going by this family tree, cows are more closely related to snakes than they are to horses."
"That doesn't make sense."
"It's bizarre! This gene has jumped between snakes and cows eleven times that we can count. It's less prevalent in sheep and elephants, and it barely appears in horses, but it found a receptive host in cows. It's like it kept coming back for more."
"Because of ticks?"
"Partially. A tick sucks the blood of a lizard or a snake. Bacteria move into the tick population. Then the ticks bite mammals. They transfer bacteria, and, with it, jumping genes. Most parasites serve the same function. In the grand scheme of life, bloodsuckers are beneficial. They inoculate us with fresh possibilities."
"What does the gene do? Are you saying that in a million years, the Earth will be conquered by fanged cows with scales? I think I read that book."
"This gene doesn’t seem to have any function except replicating itself, but the sequences are so prevalent, it must exert some low force deep in a cow's make-up. We don't know what it could be since we can't determine how cows perceive the world. Obviously a cow doesn't look or act like a snake. Cows are stupid and slow. Snakes are cunning and fast. But if the environment drastically changed and a cow had new demands on its survival? The gene transfer might give it a higher chance of adapting suddenly."
"Like flowers."
"Like us. Von, something happened to us. Modern man has existed with opposable thumbs and our current brain size for over two hundred thousand years -- but for the vast majority of that time, we were barely more than animals. It's only in the past four thousand years that we invented agriculture and cities, less than two centuries since we conceived of airplanes and spacecraft. Why? Why did it take so long!? We're not physiologically different than we were two hundred thousand years ago, but our brains hadn't turned on."
Vonnie offered a tired grin at Harmeet's consternation. "The Lord
works in mysterious ways," she said, trying not to sound mean. If she couldn't needle Ben, she'd needle Harmeet, but her friend nodded soberly.
"We don't see many ticks or worms on a day-to-day basis anymore, and none in space, but our ancestors lived with vermin for millions of years. Every lifeform on Earth has jumping genes. All of us have been exposed to transposons. Sweetheart, it wouldn't be wrong to say Europa is our God."
"Heresy."
"You're making fun of me, but the proteins that led to voluminous brain matter on Earth may have originated in bacteria indigenous to the city builders on Europa's ocean floor. The same proteins are in the sunfish."
"Here's a thought," Vonnie said. "If life on Earth and Mars came from Europa, who's to say life on Europa didn't come from somewhere else?"
Harmeet beamed at her. "Good girl. That's the question I've been waiting for."
24.
"Jupiter and its moons have been a prodigious mixing bowl," Harmeet said. "It's very possible that Europa's first microbes drifted in from another star system. Billions of years before our system formed, there were worlds in the galactic core. Some of them must have supported life. What if the first microbes on Europa belonged to a larger panspermia? It could have been a natural event. It could have been... manufactured. A highly advanced race might have seeded the galaxy. I'll never know, but someday people will travel between the stars. I'm curious what our children will find."
Children, Vonnie thought, shying away from her ghosts of Ben and more tears. She felt like he was everywhere.
He would haunt her for years. She wanted him to haunt her. Loving anyone else -- romantic love -- would test her to her bedrock. She'd dug through her inhibitions and scars to open herself to him. That part of her was damaged now, but she would heal. Slowly, she would heal.
Decades in the future, Earth's sons and daughters would venture into interstellar space. I'll feel whole again around the same time, she thought, chiding herself like Ben would chide her. She couldn't shut down every time somebody mentioned kids or boyfriends or any of his sciences.
Start now, she thought. Heal now.
"I'd like to see starships full of people and sunfish," she said gamely. "Imagine who they'll meet."
"You might be on one of those ships. Our work on longevity treatments has been promising. We're not ready yet, but we will be in five years. They'll test it on elite military units first, then astronauts."
"I hope I'm still here." She was afraid they'd retire her. There were too many reasons to send her home. She was a loudmouth. She was a nervous wreck. She was maxing out on radiation and other toxins, not to mention the bone density loss caused by Europa's low gravity. By claiming it was for their own good, Berlin could rotate her crew back to Earth and replace them with a company of EUSD marines.
Harmeet was gentle. "Do you want to leave?" she asked.
"Maybe I would have gone home to have a family. I... Now I want to stay with the sunfish."
"I think Berlin will keep you here. You're not always easy to work with, but you're a media darling. Even the people who hate you, they love to hate you."
Vonnie nodded. She produced a noise like a laugh.
Harmeet said, "With you on Europa, the opposition parties can continue to point fingers and rail about the legislation and budgets they want. Also, it costs less to leave us in place. Berlin and Washington will rebuild our presence in the Jupiter system. Most of the ships that come here will stay here. Every berth on a ship returning to Earth will be contested, although I suspect Peter is leaving soon."
"Do you?"
"He's had his failures and his successes. Overall, he's done well, but he can't stand to look at the empty seats in the mess hall if you understand what I mean."
I do, she thought. He sees ghosts.
"They'll promote him," Harmeet said. "He'll return to Earth with a nice salary and some fame. Settle down."
I hope he's happy, she thought, but she couldn't say that out loud, either. Like an electric shock, she remembered kissing Peter.
The memory of his warmth was repulsive. It was a betrayal of Ben. She wished Peter well, but she knew in her heart that she could never go home, not because of Peter but because of the good, normal, domestic lives she couldn't share.
Harmeet said, "If we stay, there will come a time when we need surgeries to deal with various cancers and skeletal issues..."
Vonnie brightened. You're staying, too?
"...but those surgeries may not be too dire for your generation. I have days when my research feels genuinely inspired. Genesmithing sunfish DNA has been effortless. In a few years, we'll be able to revitalize human tissue with Europan hemoglobins. You're young enough."
"You're not that old."
"I'm in my fifties. Most aging can be suspended. It can't be reversed. You and Ash, Claudia, the American girls, all of you might live for a hundred and fifty years, longer if there are other breakthroughs, and there will be. We've opened Pandora's Box."
Vonnie could not stop thinking about Ben. Together in their bunk, she'd murmured, Two intelligent species around one star makes me believe in God.
Almost speaking to him, she said, "It's like both of our worlds were test tubes. Both species evolved with weaknesses and strengths. You're going to take the best of their DNA, correct parts of our DNA, and maybe we'll live long enough to see starships. It's like you're unlocking a door. We'll walk into a hallway we didn't even know was there."
"John 14:2," Harmeet said. "'In my Father's house are many rooms; if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.'"
Vonnie shifted uncomfortably. "The men who wrote the Bible lived in low-tech economies where power was quantified in livestock, women and babies - that's what you said. John 14:2 is about dangling a carrot for everyone that heaven won't be crowded like their dirty little towns if they obey their patriarchs, obey the church, and raise more workers and sheep. Don't tell me they thought heaven on Earth is locked inside our genetic code."
"Didn't they?" Harmeet spread her hands like a priestess invoking God's presence. "They bred animals and did the same with their people, conducting what were essentially mating programs by rewarding their strongest males with young brides. They probably knew more genetics than you think. But you're correct. John 14:2 is about the afterlife. I used it as a metaphor. I liked what you said about unlocking doors. I believe we've witnessed an invisible, exquisite hand at work. The way we fit with the sunfish is sublime. We're parts of the same design."
Vonnie nodded, although her bitterness throbbed inside her like a broken bone. Berlin had deprived Ben of more than the truth. They'd robbed a century from him, and for what?
With a conscious act of will, she tamped down her resentment and her fury. She said, "What about the sunfish? I accepted that curing their diseases shouldn't take priority, but we told them we'd develop medicine for them. That's partly how we earned our treaties."
"I'm sorry. Helping them was something else we weren't allowed to talk about."
"You're not developing their meds at all?"
"We didn't need to. I thought that was obvious."
Vonnie felt like throttling Harmeet again -- but, again, she decided to ease the tension with a laugh. "I'm not a genesmith. You'd better spell it out for me."
"Human meds will work on sunfish. With minor adjustments, we can give them normal gene sweeps, drugs and nanotech."
"What will that do for their lifespans?"
"It will double it."
"Then why haven't we..." Vonnie asked before she caught herself and lifted her hand to stop Harmeet from explaining. She answered the question herself. "Money," she said. "Money and power. Meds were another carrot for us to show the matriarchs. 'Do what we say. Maybe we'll cure you.'"
"It was more than that. If the world saw the sunfish using human meds, we would reveal our lineage. The media and the public were too close to figuring it out. If we provided the tribes with anti-fungals, anti-virals, gene mods
for Alzheimer’s, Parkinson's and kidney disease, that would lay out the evidence. Instead we put on a sham. We said we were struggling with an alien genome. Otherwise people might demand a large-scale humanitarian effort, which would be a cost with no profit."
"No profit? If we make the sunfish healthy and sane, they'll defend us! They'll make the ice safer. They'll make mining safer and we'd have more allies against the PSSC."
"Talk to Cornet."
"I'm talking to you. Cornet authorized you to tell me everything. Why?"
"Von, I'd prefer if..."
"I'm willing to concede you've had some sleepless nights about the lie. You were under orders. I get it. Dawson must have laughed at me behind my back until he was hoarse."
"Sweetheart, no. He alluded to our ancestry as much as he dared. He wanted you to guess."
"The lie put blinders on us. It led to everything that's gone wrong. O'Neal wouldn't have gone searching for portals and libraries if we'd solved the tribes' problems. Our navy wouldn't have been slow to match the PSSC. We could have had more ships in orbit. No battle, no deaths. We wouldn't have needed to fake a civilian mission with the Lewis."
"You're wrong. The lie prevented deaths. You heard Peter. China was always going to provoke a fight. They're squeezing the energy markets. Their political bloc will gain territory in the Kashmir at the same time that we're backing down in the Middle East, Korea and Vietnam. More battleships around Europa would have meant more destruction."
"Then why share the secret with me at all? Why not bury the truth forever?"
Harmeet sighed. "It's damage control, part of a larger strategy to boost public opinion. Our governments have suffered too many black eyes. The Jyväskylä looked outmuscled, NASA appeared toothless, the FNEE were totally defeated, and our presence in the Great Ocean has been symbolic more than anything else. But we struck a blow for the allies by engaging the PSSC and mapping the ocean floor. Now we can talk about the city builders. We can talk about countering the enemy. Berlin and Washington will make martyrs of our friends. Then we'll release our news about the sunfish. We'll be vague about when we discovered our common ancestry and it makes a nice talking point. It will feel like a victory."