Around Earth West 175,000,000 they again found a divergence from the simple-cell purple scum worlds. There was complexity in this island of worlds, but not at the level of a cell, or groups of cells, but at a more global scale. There would be a whole lake, even a sea, swarming with microbial life, yet all linked in hierarchies of communities, all contributing to a single, compound, protean life form. Fifteen years back the Valienté expedition had discovered one such entity, in retrospect freakishly close to the Datum: the beast Joshua Valienté had called First Person Singular, of a type that had since been named ‘Traversers’. Maybe this band of worlds was the ultimate origin of such creatures.
Given Valienté’s experience, the airship crews knew to be cautious here.
And still the ships plunged on into the unknown. Maggie was fascinated by the evolving panoramas of land, sea and sky she glimpsed through the windows of the observation galleries, and intrigued by the closer-up glimpses of the worlds they stopped at to sample in more detail. Yet, as they flew on, day after day, something in her recoiled from the bombardment of strangeness. And longed to come to some terminus.
On Earth West 182,498,761, Maggie watched an expedition of spacesuited crewmen explore yet another distant relation of North America, rich with intricately complicated and entirely unfamiliar life forms.
Gerry Hemingway arranged for one specimen to be brought up to the Armstrong. This was set up in a lab deep in the bowels of the gondola, with lamps that simulated the local daylight, under a plastic dome in which the methane-rich, oxygen-depleted local atmosphere could be reproduced. When he was ready, Hemingway invited Yue-Sai, Mac and Maggie to come and inspect his latest display.
They gathered around and peered down, frowning. Under the air dome, in a tray of local soil, stood what looked like a small tree, with a woody trunk and purple leaves. A yellowish thread was wrapped around the trunk, and yellow-white flowers poked out among the purple.
‘It’s like bonsai,’ Mac said.
Yue-Sai laughed. ‘Yes, as developed by some fellow on hallucinogenic drugs. That’s the Japanese for you!’
‘Just tell me what you see,’ Hemingway said, reasonably patiently.
‘A tree,’ Maggie said briskly.
‘Exactly. Though not remotely related to any tree species on the Datum, now or in the past.’
Mac said, ‘But like all trees it’s competing for the light. So it’s photosynthetic. I suppose you could tell that from the purple and yellow leaves, the little flowers.’
Hemingway said, ‘Yes. So, on this world there are clearly multicelled forms, and some of them are photosynthesizers. But look closer at this specimen. They are both photosynthetic.’
Maggie scratched her head. ‘They? Both?’
‘Both the life forms you see here.’
Yue-Sai leaned closer to the dome. ‘Actually it looks like a tree being attacked by something like a strangler fig.’
‘Not attacked . . . I’m not being fair. I’ve had the benefit of a full biochemical analysis of these specimens. Lieutenant Wu, on our Earth all life is based on DNA. Yes? We share DNA and its coding system and so on with the humblest bacterium. So we can say that all life on the Datum derives from a single origin. Even to get to that point, the DNA-life origin, there had to be earlier selections, by various evolutionary processes: the selection of a set of amino acids to work with, twenty out of the many possible alternatives, the choice of what kind of DNA coding to use . . . But other choices were possible. There may have been other origins of life, based on different choices. If so, those other domains were wiped out by our kind, the triumphant survivors.’
Mac grunted. ‘Genocide, even at the root of the tree of life. So it goes. Hemingway, I’m guessing from your big build-up that things are different here.’
‘They are. There are two life forms, under this dome. The tree is based on DNA like our own, and amino acids like our own set. But the other, the “fig”, has a different suite of aminos. It uses a different genetic coding, with some of the information carried in a DNA variant, the rest in proteins—’
‘Wow.’ Mac straightened up. ‘Life from two origins survived here?’
‘So it seems. Who knows how or why? Perhaps there was a refuge, an island . . . For one thing the fig’s chirality is different. Organic molecules aren’t symmetrical; we describe them as left-handed or right-handed. All our aminos are left-handed. The aminos in the “tree” are left-handed. The aminos of the “fig” are right-handed.’
Maggie shook her head. ‘So what? What does that mean?’
Mac said, ‘I guess a left-hander couldn’t eat a right-hander.’
‘Well, it couldn’t digest it,’ Hemingway said. ‘They could destroy each other. But look what they’re actually doing.’ They bent to see again. ‘The fig is using the tree for support. You can’t see another detail – in their tangled-up root systems the fig pays the favour back by bringing nutrients to the tree.’
‘It is cooperation,’ Yue-Sai breathed. ‘No genocide here, Doctor. They work together to live. Cooperation, across two domains of life! What a wonderful discovery. My faith in the universe is restored.’ She playfully patted Hemingway on the shoulder. ‘There, you see! If two alien beings such as this can cooperate for their mutual benefit, why not us Chinese and you Americans?’
‘I was born Canadian, not American,’ Hemingway said, uninterested. He bent closer to the intertwined plants.
Maggie came to an impulsive decision. ‘Let’s leave this busy guy to his work. Mac, come with me.’
Mac raised an eyebrow. ‘Problem, Captain?’
‘Yeah,’ she said privately. ‘This issue with you and Snowy – enough with the frosty glares and moody silences. It’s festered long enough, and I need to know what the hell the problem is.’
‘What’s brought this on now? Was it that tree and the strangler fig, living in harmony? You’ll start singing “Ebony and Ivory” next.’
Glowering at him, she said nothing.
He sighed. ‘Your sea cabin?’
‘You bring the single malt.’
Shi-mi insisted on sitting in. Maggie insisted she stay out of sight, under the desk.
And, making it clear he resented being ordered to do so, Mac told Maggie the full story.
‘Here’s the main thing you got to remember, Captain,’ Mac began, as he sipped his malt: his favourite, Auld Lang Syne. ‘We meant well.’
‘“We meant well.” My God, I wonder how many sins have been justified by that line?’
‘Look – this all happened in 2042, ’43. A couple of years after Yellowstone. At that time the Franklin was still running Low-Earth relocation missions . . .’
As Maggie remembered too well. Military twains with their holds full of wide-eyed refugees, men, women, children, being taken away from their volcano-smashed homes and deposited in entirely unfamiliar worlds . . .
‘If I recall you had about a year away from the Franklin.’
‘Yeah,’ Mac said, ‘before I was called back to advise on the fitting-out of the new Armstrong and Cernan. You were somewhat busy, Maggie. And you didn’t ask any close questions about what I’d done with my year away.’
‘Hmm. Nor did I check the crew files. No need in your case. So I thought.’
‘You wouldn’t have found much, not without digging. The outcomes were kind of covered up . . . Maggie, I was sent to West 1,617,524.’
She knew that number, and wasn’t surprised. ‘The beagles’ Earth. Snowy’s world.’
‘Yeah. I was conscripted – under Admiral Davidson’s command, but it was a commission from higher up. I was part of a multi-service, multi-disciplinary party sent to establish some kind of formal liaison with the beagles, after the first contact in 2040. President Cowley and his advisers thought it was important to mount the mission even at a time of national emergency, to make sure we had a foot in the door. We were basically military, but there was genuine scientific interest, of course. We had anatomists, linguists, psycho
logists, ethnologists. Even a dog trainer. Look, it was a successful project. You saw the extension that’s still running, under Ben Morton.
‘We studied every aspect of the beagles’ society, every aspect we were allowed to see anyhow, and we snooped on much of the rest. Maggie, beagles can’t step, even with a Stepper box. Hell, you know that. Aside from that, they seem to be richly intelligent, individually just as smart as we are.
‘But here’s the headline. Despite their smarts, their culture is impoverished. I don’t mean just technologically, materially, though they are stuck at the level of Stone Age herdsmen – or were, before the kobolds sold them iron-making and a few advanced weapons.’
Kobolds were something of an embarrassment: cunning humanoids, parasitical on human culture, and evidently using scraps of it to disrupt the destiny of others.
Mac said, ‘The beagles’ art is primitive, they don’t have complex writing, their religions and civilization forms are crude. Their science is non-existent, although they have a decent tradition of trial-and-error medicine – based mostly on battlefield experience.’
Maggie frowned. ‘So what? Maybe beagles don’t need writing, for instance. I know that the beagles communicate by scent, by hearing – those howls Snowy likes to run off into the night to make . . . And didn’t modern humans hang around for an age after they evolved, before they started painting caves and flying to the moon?’
‘It’s true. But in the end we did take off, there was a kind of spiral of invention. And, Maggie, though we’ve had calamities since then – the collapse of empires and shattering plagues and such – our progress has pretty much been, well, I won’t say “upward”, that’s a value judgement. At least in the direction of more complexity. Yes?’
‘OK.’
‘And we tend not to lose what we invent. Oh, individual civilizations lose it all, but—’
‘I get the picture. Once iron-making is invented, it stays invented. And the same isn’t true of the beagles, I’m guessing.’
‘That’s what we found. You see, the beagles go through booms and crashes, catastrophic crashes. Because their societies aren’t stable.
‘It all comes from their breeding cycle. The problem is that beagles breed like dogs – that is, they breed copiously, with huge litters. A beagle Pack is a martial matriarchy, basically, with the authority of the Mother being expressed down through Daughters and Granddaughters, even Great-granddaughters. So if you have a period of peace you end up with a population boom – and, more significantly, far too many Daughters and Granddaughters.’
‘Hmm. All of whom have an eye on the throne. I learned that from talking to Snowy. To kill you honourably is seen as a gift.’
‘All very Klingon. Anyhow, any period of peace—’
‘Inevitably ends in over-population and a devastating war.’
‘That’s the idea, skipper. In the end the conflict generally goes continental if not global, as Packs invade warring neighbours, and the rival Daughters rip each other to pieces over the spoils. Each period of recovery lasts no more than a century, maybe two, and then everybody’s busted back down to hunting and gathering, and it all starts again.
‘We learned this from the archaeology, but also from the accounts of the beagles themselves. They know what happens to them; they have oral traditions, histories shading into legend. But all they seek to retain from each cycle is weapon-making. They don’t tend to save farming technology, for instance. Each Pack hopes that its descendants will be the ones to win the big global war next time. Which is why their weapons tech is relatively advanced, and little else is. Although their doctors are an exception, I have to say. They at least try not to forget all they learned.
‘Anyhow, you see that the cycle of their history is quite unlike ours. And though they seem to have been around a lot longer than we have – maybe a half-million years according to some first guesses – they’ve been limited in their development. And all because of a flaw in their biology.’
Suddenly Maggie saw where this was going. ‘A flaw. What’s that but a value judgement?’
Mac growled, ‘They have too many babies, too many litters. Their medical science doesn’t go much beyond the treatment of traumatic wounds. They haven’t even come up with the idea of contraceptive treatments . . .’
‘And then in walk a bunch of idealistic humans, with simplistic theories and advanced biological science, and an impulse to meddle.’
‘Maggie, it wasn’t as crude as that. Imagine what we found when we got there. Snowy’s people had just all but wiped themselves out. The ruling elite gone. This time the damage had been worse than ever because of high-energy weapons they’d been trading from the kobolds. We felt we had to do something. I mean, the fix was so easy to research, from what we know of dog anatomy, and easy to administer.’
‘How did you do it?’
‘In the water supply. Dropped by drone aircraft, across the continent. We didn’t make the females unable to bear pups; we just reduced the litter sizes. We thought that was the best way; later, when they perceived the benefits, we could explain what we’d done, give them a choice.’
‘My God. I guess we do have a track record of this kind of meddling with populations back on the Datum . . . So what happened, Mac?’
‘The beagles we treated, when they stopped having big litters, thought they were cursed by their gods, or maybe infected with some plague by their enemies – a plague that made them nearly infertile. We tried to explain what we’d done, but they wouldn’t listen.’
‘They didn’t blame you?’
‘It was more that they don’t take humans seriously. Their internal politics blinds them to everything else. The Daughters and Granddaughters turned on each other, each suspecting the other of poisoning or infection. And the neighbouring Packs, seeing their continuing weakness, started invading, from all corners. As things heated up, some of them did start to point the finger at us. We got out of there.’
‘I bet you did. And the war got even worse, right?’
‘We let it burn out. Then Ben Morton led the first party back in . . .’
‘God knows what the long-term consequences are going to be. “Murder my people.” That’s what Snowy said. Got it about right, didn’t he?’
Mac poured another slug of whisky. ‘You know me. I’m a doctor, Maggie. I meant to help.’
‘I thought the first principle of medicine was to do no harm. Well, you should have told me all this before. Oh, get out of my sight, Mac. Go back to work – no, hell, go find Snowy. Try to talk to him. Don’t expect forgiveness; you don’t deserve any. That’s an order, by the way. And send him to see me.’
Snowy eventually showed up the following day. Shi-mi got out of the sea cabin a quarter-hour before he arrived.
Knowing the background now, Maggie tried to judge Snowy’s mood, towards Mac, towards humanity in general. ‘Mac says they were trying to help you. Mistakenly, maybe, but—’
‘Not hell-p. Cont-hhrol.’
‘I don’t think that was the intention.’
‘Cont-hhrol.’
Well, maybe he was right. Even if the party of meddlers hadn’t understood their own deeper motives. ‘Yet you flew with us. You’re here now, talking to me.’
‘Lea-hrrn about you.’ He gazed at her, huge in the small human-scale cabin, his wolf eyes wintry. ‘Some good, some bad, in stink-chhrotch kind.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Good in Mac, even. Docto-hhr. We have docto-hhrs.’
‘Yes. He’s a good man, if misguided sometimes—’
‘But not cont-hrol beagles. Never-hhr again.’
‘I understand . . .’ Her comms light sparked.
He stood, saluted smartly enough, and left.
The comms call was an urgent one, from Ed Cutler on the Cernan. The sister ship had gone on alone, probing deeper into this band of worlds, which Gerry Hemingway had informally named the Bonsai Belt. Now it had come hurrying back. ‘Captain Kauffman, you’d better come
see this.’
‘Tell me what you found, Ed.’
‘The wreck of the Neil Armstrong I.’
31
EARTH WEST 182,674,101. Another world of the Bonsai Belt, with roughly the same suite of dual-origin life.
And a crashed airship.
The Cernan had detected it through a radio beacon, picked up as it had sailed through this world in the course of its explorations. Maggie had ordered the comms teams to check for radio signals, routinely, at each step, even under fifty-steps-per-second cruise; a fraction of a second was enough to detect if such a signal was present. As far as the geographers could tell, the Armstrong had come down in a scrap of continental terrain that, on other worlds, would underpin much of Washington State. The Cernan, and now the Armstrong II, had had to travel a thousand miles laterally to reach the site.
The profile of the Armstrong I, an airship of the same class as the Benjamin Franklin, was unmistakable from the air.
‘It looks like a whale carcass, dropped from the sky,’ Mac said.
The crew were fascinated by the huge wreck, as they hadn’t been by any of the natural wonders they’d seen so far. That was the Navy for you.
‘And there are survivors,’ Maggie pointed out.
You could tell that immediately. Near the fallen ship, rect angular fields had been scraped in the loamy ground, though the crops looked sparse. There were structures like tepees, evidently assembled from scavenged components of the Armstrong. And Maggie could see people, down there on the ground, looking up and waving. Among them were recently landed crew from the Cernan in their distinctive uniforms.
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