Dancing with Eternity

by John Patrick Lowrie

  Looking into Yuri’s faceplate, I saw his dancing eyes. I could feel everyone lift as if the curse had been broken. Holding up the little rock so they could see it, I said, “Thank you, Yuri. Thank you very much. This is— this is really—”

  [What are the chances, huh? What are the chances?] He clapped me on the back.

  [All right,] even Marcus’ voice seemed buoyant, [we need to stay focused. We have a lot of work to do.]

  I placed the meteorite in my sample pouch—we all had them in case we came across something we wanted, and formed back up. The tube fields were only fifty meters away.

  Walking toward that softly undulating carpet reminded me of Lawson’s Crossing on Eden. Once again we were approaching someone else’s home unannounced. Were we welcome guests or feared invaders? Or did we just not matter to the Brainardites at all? The tubes right on the edge of the desert were small—as thick as my wrist and coming up to no more than my knees—but soon we were weaving our way through thigh-thick polyps that reached up to our chests. They responded to us: shrinking away as we approached and then curving toward us—swelling, blushing in a sensual, almost sexual manner, then reaching for us as we moved on, longing for a moment and then forgetting our passage altogether. If you touched them their surface texture would roughen, dimple, I guess, like a woman’s aureole.

  [Mo, heads up. You’re a lookout, not a tourist.]

  “Sorry, Marcus. I mean, yes, sir.” I lifted my gaze to scan above the swirling salmon sea. A little farther in I could see spider-plane trees punctuate the pink carpet here and there, their web-like fronds obsidian black supporting billows of shuddering, turquoise platelets shot with gold and lavender.

  “The tubes sure notice us,” I said, to no one in particular.

  [Yes, but they don’t build anything and they certainly don’t talk,] Archie responded.

  “I was just wondering why they would but nothing else does.”

  [You and everyone else. This is a very strange place.]

  We moved farther into the field, taking samples as we went. Yuri and Alice each collected several sluglets and ‘zooids.’ I never saw any. They didn’t crawl very far up the tubes; you had to be looking to catch them, and my focus was mostly on the horizon looking for danger.

  Archie decided that she would collect tube samples from the very edge of the field where they were smallest. [I’d rather get a complete specimen,] she said, [And I just don’t want to harm anything if I can help it.] Knowing that everything here was at least hundreds if not thousands of years old put a tremendous pressure on us to not step on or even bruise anything. The place was a living museum and we were on the wrong side of the glass.

  When we got back to the edge of the field at the end of the day, Arch bent down to look at a small pink, weaving individual and started a discussion with Yuri about whether she should pry the tube loose from the rock or chip off the piece of rock with the tube on it.

  [When the slugs move them they just seem to detach, but I can’t see how they do it. It must be chemical or, or biological. These little guys are stuck fast.]

  [I’d just take the rock with it,] Yuri answered. [It looks like sandstone. Something sedimentary, anyway. Can you pry a piece loose?]

  [I think so.]

  At that moment an incredible basso profundo thrumming swelled over us out of the south. It grew and throbbed and waned and grew again. Everyone turned to look. It was so powerful I could feel my suit vibrate, resonating with the surging waves of sound.

  No one seemed to be particularly worried, so I took it upon myself to say, “What the hell’s that?”

  [Evening prayers,] Alice answered.

  “What?”

  [You’ll see it when we go into the colony. It’s what made Brainard think they had a religion. It’s very powerful to see. Up close.]

  “I’ll bet. It must be really loud.”

  [No, it’s just such a low frequency. It travels a long way. Look at the tubes.]

  I did. You could see them vibrating subtly like thousands of amplifiers.

  Archie worked at the rock for at least half an hour, accompanied by that ominous, pulsing drone, before she finally said, [There! Got it loose.] She stood up with her prize. Surrounded by all of us, it didn’t know which way to reach. It was strangely romantic. It swelled and throbbed and stretched for us, one after the other—turning, twisting, blushing a deep rose, almost violet.

  “It sure seems like it’s trying to get our attention,” I said.

  [I know,] said Archie. [Why the display? What’s the purpose of the color? Nothing has any eyes here.]

  [Maybe just a byproduct of some biological process? You know, just a ... just a coincidental byproduct of something ... or something?]

  [Look out, Marcus. You’re starting to sound like me.] Arch carefully put the tube in a collection case. [I think we can head back for today. I have lots of stuff to study.]

  [All right, let’s go,] said Steel. The bass throbbing ceased then as abruptly as it had started, leaving only the soft wafting sound of the tubes rubbing together as they slowly danced. It wasn’t until then that I realized we’d let our guard down. We were on the edge of the field and all of us had focused on the little tube. It was so hard to think we were in danger here—everything soft, gently swaying, calm.

  Marcus noticed me lift up to scan the horizon again. He said, [Captain, we need to maintain watch.]

  [Oh, yes. Of course. Mo?]

  [I’m on it.] We made our way back to the lab.

  Yuri, Alice and Archie placed their specimens in trays arrayed along the outside of one of the lab walls. And me, too, I placed my new talisman in a tray of its own. We’d need to make sure it was completely sterile before I could bring it into the lab; the tiniest trace of slime would be fatal to all of us. Then we tromped around to the other side of the big, inflated igloo and backed up to the hatches there, attached ourselves, opened up the mated hatches in the backs of our suits and slipped inside.

  Archie assigned us all tasks and we got busy. We did the grunt work—sorting, weighing, taking holograms, making sure everything was recorded, while Arch did the real science. Yuri had come up with a great design for the lab. All of the specimens stayed outside while we worked with them inside. Even the manipulators that stuck through the lab wall generated his anti-plague field.

  Archie would occasionally emit small vocal sounds as she worked, but nothing that was intelligible to us. Then, after a couple of hours of this she said, “This is good. This is big.”

  We looked toward her. Steel asked, “What have you found?”

  “This is incredible. This is really incredible. This is big.”

  “What?”

  She turned and looked at us, calm, balancing. “They’re multi-cellular. Made of cells. Everything we collected today is made up of little protein bubbles filled with salt water, just like us. The proteins are different than the ones we use but that’s no surprise.”

  “So,” Steel started again, “does that mean—”

  “It means that all of the life that we know of in the entire universe is cellular.” Archie was trying to stay calm, but her eyes burned with the fire of discovery. “We all assumed it would be, life here, on Brainard’s Planet, but we didn’t know until now. This is huge. It’s incredible. My hands are shaking. Come here and look at this.” She led us over to the display she had been using and called up an image. “This is the—I don’t know, I guess you’d call it the epidermis—of that small tube.” We could see rows and rows of little blobs on the magnified image. They sure looked like cells to me.

  I said, “But wasn’t that scum they found on, what planet was it, um, Paradise, I think. Wasn’t that made of cells?”

  Archie replied, “Yes, the quasi-algae on Paradise. But that was single-celled life. These are complex, multi-cellular organisms. We’ve never found anything like this anywhere but Earth. Who knows how many more ecosystems we’ll discover, but, but for the first one we meet to be built like we are ..
. this is, this is huge. This is huge.”

  Steel asked, “But what does this mean for Alice—”

  Archie turned on her, “Now, Captain, you’re going to have to be patient. I’m trying to write an entire freaking biology text from the ground up. It’s going to take a little time.”

  “We don’t have time—”

  “Then we shouldn’t be wasting it on conversations like this one. I’m working as fast as I can.”

  “I just don’t want us to get side-tracked. I don’t want us going down blind alleys. We’re here for a particular—”

  “I know why we’re here!” And just like that the tension level went through the roof. Archie stopped and took a breath. “Look, Captain, look. You see those things?” She pointed to dark spots in the middle of the cells. “Those are nuclei. Do you understand what that means? It means that on two tiny, nickel-iron specks orbiting stars that are twelve hundred light years apart, life has formed the same kinds of structures. Bubbles within bubbles. You see those squiggles?” She increased the magnification. “Those are chromosomes. Chromosomes made of deoxyribonucleic acid. DNA.”

  “I know what DNA is. What are you telling me?”

  “I’m telling you that we haven’t found any deal breakers yet. I’m telling you that this can’t be coincidence.”

  “What can’t?”

  “These structures. The odds against two completely separate biospheres evolving the same kinds of structures simply by chance are more than astronomical. It means that this is how it works. Put the right chemicals together and combine them with an energy source and this is what you get. These kinds of structures.”

  “That’s all well and good but—”

  “I’m telling you that our chances of finding a cure for Alice just got a lot better. A LOT better. By orders of magnitude, I don’t even know how many orders. This is HUGE.”

  “Oh, okay. Well, that’s good, then—”

  “Those are chromosomes, huh?” Yuri interjected.

  “What?” Archie turned. “Oh, yes. Chromosomes. Yes.”

  “So these cells reproduce by dividing?”

  “Well, I haven’t seen it happen yet, but, yes, I assume they do.”

  “They reproduce.”

  “What are you driving at?”

  “Well, it’s just that ... it’s just that nothing reproduces here. Right? At least on a large scale, nothing reproduces. We’re looking at the same individuals, the same number of individuals that Brainard saw five centuries ago.”

  “Oh, right. Yes. Yes, that’s still ... yes. We still have a lot of work to do.”

  “I just don’t get it.” Yuri took another look at the image on the screen. “I mean everything we know about terrestrial life is dynamic. It’s constantly changing—bell curve growth patterns, populations growing to fill an ecological niche, then overfilling it, then declining. There’s none of that here. There’s no population growth, no decline. It’s static, at least for the last five centuries. Static. I don’t get it.”

  “It’s like a utopia,” I said.

  “What do you mean?” asked Alice.

  “Oh, you know, those thinkers on Earth back in the— what was it, the eighteenth or nineteenth century I think— they thought that they could work things out to a certain point and then they’d just stay that way: perfect forever. I think they were called Utopians ... no, no, Marxists, something like that. There were other groups, too. They each had their own prescriptions for achieving a perfect world.”

  Alice said, “That would be nice.”

  “What would be nice about it?” Yuri asked. “Stasis is death. Change is the most sublime aspect of the universe. And, anyway, even if it were desirable, or possible, to make things perfect, you’re talking about a manufactured condition. An artifact. What we have here is a natural system. I don’t see how it works, how it could work.”

  “I just meant it would be nice if there weren’t any problems,” Alice replied. Steel put a hand on her shoulder. Alice didn’t quite shrug it off.

  Yuri answered, “I suppose. Maybe. But if there weren’t any problems, what would we do? Just wander around?”

  “Well, for one thing I wouldn’t be dying,” Alice answered.

  Yuri looked stricken. “Oh, Alice, I’m ... I didn’t mean to say— Of course, some problems are ... I wasn’t saying ... I meant—”

  “It’s okay.” She looked at him with real kindness, affection. “I’m okay.”

  “That’s what the Brainardites seem to do,” I said. “Wander around.”

  Yuri checked in with Alice for a second, then responded, “Yeah, yeah, but still what are we saying? I mean all of the architecture is present in these cells for mitosis, right? Which suggests that that is how they reproduce.”

  “Well, they have chromosomes. That’s correct. I haven’t identified all of the internal structures,” Archie answered.

  “It suggests that they do reproduce.”

  “I would say so, yes.”

  “Why?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Why would they? Reproduce?”

  Archie thought for a minute. Then, “I’m not sure what you’re— I mean, I don’t know if there’s a reason, per se. It’s just how it works. This chemistry self-replicates. That’s what it does.”

  “But to what effect? In this ecological system. What does cellular reproduction do?”

  “Umm, it would replace worn out cells—”

  “So we’re saying that, at least at a cellular level, there is death here.”

  “I guess so. I don’t know. I haven’t seen any cells die. I haven’t seen any reproduce.”

  “Right, right, but the architecture is there.”

  “It is.”

  “So, if they do reproduce, they reproduce at exactly the same rate as they die off.”

  “Whoa,” Archie pushed her hair back and looked at the ceiling, “that seems far-fetched.”

  “That’s what I was thinking,” Yuri answered.

  “This whole place is mind-boggling,” said Marcus.

  “So, Draco and The Pleiades have been observing this planet for five centuries,” I said.

  “Right.”

  “I assume they’ve done some kind of census.”

  Archie said, “Every decade. I have the figures. Same numbers every time. They don’t have the resolution to get the smallest organisms, but for all the larger ones the populations are absolutely stable.”

  “Hmm.” I thought. “How many, what would you call them, species? How many have they identified?”

  “Well, one of the things that defines a species is the ability of its members to reproduce with each other, so—”

  “Since Brainardites don’t reproduce—”

  “Right. But they have identified around twenty-five hundred discrete physical types.”

  “Twenty-five hundred.”

  “That’s right.”

  “How many terrestrial species are there?”

  “True terrestrials or including all the ones we’ve created to survive on other planets?” Yuri asked.

  “Just the ones on Earth.”

  “Well, it used to be more, but there are still around thirty million.”

  “Hmm. We’ve got the Brainardites beat there.”

  “You see? This is what I mean,” Steel interjected angrily. “We don’t have time for this!”

  “Okay, okay,” Archie said. “I’ve found some other stuff. It might be important, too. It’s certainly important to science.”

  “I don’t care about science. I just want— I want to get Alice—”

  “Yes. We all do. Look at this.” Archie called up another image. “This is one of the sluglets.” She focused down through the body, in and out so we could see the internal structures. “You see? It has organs. Specialized organs. Once again, we assumed life here would, but we didn’t know until now.”

  Tamika said, “That— that looks kind of like a ... Is that a digestive system?”


  “It’s what it looks like to me. But notice ...” She focused forward and then to the rear of the animal, if it was an animal.

  “Where’s the mouth?” Marcus asked.

  “That’s the thing. There’s no mouth. No entrance, no exit. But all of the internal structure is there. It’s a digestive system with no way to get any food into it or waste out of it.” We all shook our heads in wonder. “There’s more. Let me change the sensitivity. Okay. You see that?”

  “Nerves. A nervous system.” That was Alice.

  “Looks like. But look, no sensory organs anywhere. No eyes, no ears, no olfactory organ. All the motor neurons—I’m calling them neurons because that’s what they look like to me—all of them look fully developed. But you see these?” She pointed to tiny parallel strands on the screen. “These look like sensory neurons, but they’re stunted. It’s like they have some tactile sense, perhaps even a sense of taste on their skin, but it’s very attenuated compared to ours, very rudimentary.”

  “What are these concentrations of nerves up here?” Tamika asked.

  “Right,” Archie answered. “What are they? Are they the beginnings of sensory organs? Maybe. Maybe Brainardites take so long to evolve that they’re all still waiting for their eyes and ears.”

  “I don’t see how they could evolve at all,” said Yuri. “If they don’t reproduce how could they evolve?”

  “Right. You’re right. I don’t see how, either,” Arch answered.

  “So,” Yuri rubbed his forehead, “are we saying that the biosphere as we see it now, these complex organisms, this whole biological complex, somehow emerged full-grown out of the head of Zeus? One day we have a proto-planetary disc swirling around a star and the next we have a fully populated planet? With intricate interactions and an absolutely stable population level?”

  We all stared at the conundrum for a moment. Finally Arch said, “I don’t know.” She thought a little more, but could only come up with, “I don’t know.”

  The next few weeks were like that. We’d go into the tube fields, a little deeper each day, and collect samples and specimens. Then back to the lab for cataloging and analysis. Each morning we’d take the previous day’s samples and place them back where we got them. It was becoming almost a fetish. These things had been here for so long we didn’t want to do anything that might upset the balance in this remarkable and baffling place.