Dancing with Eternity

by John Patrick Lowrie

  Arch looked very dark, very pre-occupied as we entered the lab. I would have thought after a discovery of that magnitude that she would have been at least somewhat elated, but her features were focused in a scowl of concentration.

  “What made you think to do that?” I asked.

  Her scowl didn’t waver, but she said, “Something Alice said last night.”

  “What?”

  “About Ham.” She turned to Tamika, “Let’s see what you two found out there.” We headed to what had become the geology workstation, Alice happily attached to Yuri’s side. “Were you able to determine the age of the coal?”

  “More or less,” Yuri said. “We found a layer of basalt that was on top of the coal seam.”

  “Yes?”

  “It has to be between three and a half and five billion years old.”

  “Billion?” Arch asked, for all of us really.

  “Yeah, but that’s not the big news. Take a look at what else we found.” He started to manipulate the samples they had placed in the trays outside. “We found these in a thin layer just above the basalt. Once again, I’d have to say that they are at least three billion years old.”

  There were three thin, delicate pieces in the tray. They looked like they had been crushed; like little more than foil that had been crumpled and stomped on. “We didn’t really bring a lot of metallurgical equipment with us, but I was able to get a good read with the grav-echo. You can run them through the mass spectrometer if you want.”

  “Were you able to determine what they were?”

  Yuri nodded. “That,” he pointed to the first sample, “is a piece of fairly high-grade stainless steel.” He looked around for our reactions. I imagine we all looked stunned. “This one,” he indicated the paler sample, “is polyethylene.” Once again he checked out our faces before turning back to the display screen. “And this,” he pointed to a thin chunk that was brown like the piece of the colony I had brought back, “is plutonium.”

  “Plutonium?” Arch asked. “Plutonium isn’t brown.”

  “Plutonium is also radioactive. But this plutonium isn’t.” Yuri looked at us significantly. “Three billion years ago these slugs were able to manufacture alloys, plastics, and do something to plutonium to make it absolutely stable. Everything I’ve done to that little rock says it’s plutonium, but it’s not emitting so much as a gamma ray.”

  Archie stared at it in wonder.

  “But get this,” Yuri added, “it’s just a little bit heavy.”

  This got Archie’s attention, “Heavy?”

  Yuri and Tamika nodded.

  Marcus said, “Wait a minute. How do you know the slugs made these? I mean, three billion years ago there was probably a completely different ecosystem here—different dominant life form, everything.”

  Yuri grinned, “Check this out.” He called up a reality they had taken in the canyon, but it was obviously taken in grav-echo. The translucent images were all rendered in pale green. You could see the layered nature of the canyon walls and, due to the grav-echo, you could see into the rock about a hundred meters before the resolution got too coarse to be usable. Yuri focused in on various little layers of detail. We saw the small shapes come into focus. Little pieces and shards, fragments, then larger pieces, then whole shapes preserved in the stone.

  “Those are fossils!” Marcus exclaimed. We could see little impressions of Brainardite shells and carapaces, most of them broken or shattered, but some mostly or completely preserved. Lots of them were smaller, but there were also many that could have ridden on any of the slugs we had met at the colony.

  “But see what happens,” Yuri said. He panned up the canyon wall. “Here is the layer where we found the steel and stuff. You see?” Above that layer the fossil record stopped, just vanished. Before that point in time things had died and decomposed on Brainard’s Planet. From that point forward it was obvious that they hadn’t. “As near as I can tell the population we’re looking at now has been here for somewhere between three and three and a half billion years.” Yuri sat back, nested his fingers behind his head, put his feet up on the workstation desk and said, “So. What have you guys been doing?”

  No one said anything. What could we say? I was the oldest person there and I needed to live another eighty-five centuries to reach ten thousand years of age. Then I needed to live another ninety millennia to reach a hundred thousand years, then another nine hundred millennia to reach a million. And these slugs were over three billion years old?

  “I was thinking that this might explain the lack of sensory organs,” Yuri continued.

  “What do you mean?” Steel asked.

  “Well, think about it. If the slugs figured out a way to live without killing anything, anything at all—I mean nothing has died here in over three billion years—what would they need sensory organs for? There’s no need to hunt, no predators to avoid. No problems left to solve, really. Maybe their sensory organs just atrophied.”

  “But, but why do they move the colonies?” Archie asked.

  “Habit?” Yuri answered.

  “Habit?”

  He nodded, grinning like a cat. “They’re redecorating. I mean, what else do they have to do?”

  We sat there for a while longer looking at our thoughts before Steel said, “All right. You’ve had your little junket to the canyon. You’ve made your discoveries; you’ve answered your questions. How does this get us closer to a cure for Alice?”

  I’m not sure why, but we all looked to Archie. She said, “So you’re suggesting ... You think the slugs ... You’re saying that ... that the, the immortality here is— is— is manufactured. That the slime ...” she moved to the workstation she’d been at all day, “is manufactured.”

  “Is that what I’m saying?” Yuri asked. Then, “Yeah, I guess that’s what I’m saying. Why? What have you found?”

  Arch turned to me. “Mo? Where’s that little piece of the colony you brought back?”

  “Workstation 3,” I said.

  She walked over and fired up the screen. She did various things to the little chunk and then sat back. “It’s plutonium all right, non-radioactive plutonium. They build their houses out of non-radioactive— Why would they do that?”

  Yuri said, “Maybe, maybe ... maybe they used nuclear power back in the day. Maybe they built a bunch of reactors and then had all this nuclear waste to deal with and they didn’t know what to do with it until they found a way to make it non-radioactive and then they found that it had some really cool architectural properties that we’ve never looked for because plutonium is radioactive.”

  Arch looked at Yuri for a moment, not really taking in what he said. Then she turned back to the screen, “And it’s a little heavy. Not heavy enough to be Curium or Berkelium. Just a little heavy.” She tapped her fingers on the desk in front of her. Then she said, “Yuri, can you focus the grav-echo to see subatomic particles? I’m talking leptons.”

  Yuri looked dubious. “Um-m-m, we’re kind of set up for biochemistry, not particle physics.”

  “Can you do it?” she repeated.

  Yuri pulled out a couple of racks and crawled behind them. He was back there for a long time. He would occasionally ask for some tool or other. The rest of us went to the hab to eat dinner then brought dinner back for Yuri, who munched on it as he continued to work on into the evening. None of us were going to bed. We waited and helped when we could. It was past midnight when he said, “Okay, try that.”

  Arch didn’t even respond, she just moved to the workstation where the little chunk of plutonium was. Yuri was at her side almost as quickly as she got there. The rest of us gathered around. Images came up on the screen as Arch focused tighter and tighter. Finally Arch said, “What the hell is that?” She turned to Yuri, “Have you ever seen a hadron like that? Or is it a meson? What the hell is it?” She focused in a little tighter. The image was starting to pixilate. “Holy skag! They’re engineering with individual leptons. With neutrinos and quarks. Look at th
at. They’ve built little machines out of neutrinos and quarks.” She rolled her chair over to the slime workstation. She focused down and down. “There. Look. Different configurations, but ... Holy mother of Lao-Tse! Look at that. Look at that.”

  We had gone as far as we could that night. We were all buzzing but we were all exhausted, too. Alice was very content to head to her bunk with Yuri again. The rest of us just fell into bed. But as Arch and I spooned I could tell that she was not happy.

  “Are you all right?” I whispered.

  She snuggled into me. “I’m ... I don’t know.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  She rolled over and looked at me. Her voice was barely audible. “I’m afraid ... I’m afraid ...”

  “What? What are you afraid of?”

  She thought for a long time before she whispered, “You know that it was always a long shot, don’t you?”

  “What was?”

  “Coming here. Finding a ... finding something that would ... that would help Alice. It was always ... I mean, the odds were always against us.”

  A cruel fist was squeezing my heart. I looked into her eyes—her sad, tired eyes. “I saw you testing the slime on your blood.” She nodded. “Then Alice’s blood.”

  She nodded again. “There was no difference. The cellular degradation and destruction progressed at the same rate, in basically the same way. Then I tested it on the little zooid and tube. I was thinking, what if the Brainardites were just kind-hearted? What if they didn’t want anything to die?”

  “Like Alice was saying about Ham,” I said. Then something else occurred to me, “Like the vegans.”

  “Vegans?” She looked at me quizzically, “What do you mean? There aren’t any planets around Vega.”

  “No, no. Not people from Vega. The vegans were an ancient cult on Earth. They didn’t want to eat anything, or something like that. I forget exactly. They kind of faded out when the human race started to populate the solar system.”

  “Hmm. I guess the Brainardites are a sort of super-vegan.”

  “But what were you saying about long shots? What did you find?”

  She looked at my chest while she formulated her reply. Even more softly she said, “When Steel lost Jacob in Switzerland I was back at the Institute on Circe, but of course Steel was keeping me up on how they were doing— Jacob and Alice.”

  “Yes?”

  “When Jacob was ... was ... lost that way I was the one who compared it to Brainard’s plague. The symptoms were almost identical, and the speed of the progression of the disease. I’d been doing research on Brainard’s Planet. You know, it’s another isolated culture.”

  “Like Eden.”

  “Right. When Jacob ... when we lost him that way it seemed like the perfect reason to— to, you know, take another try at cracking the mysteries of the ecosystem here. If we could, if we could come up with a way to protect ourselves from the plague.”

  She paused for a long time. I said, “Yes?”

  “Steel was very enthusiastic. She said she knew people, could put together a crew. Cost was no object. I was hoping ... more than that: I thought Brainard’s plague was a disease that the Brainardites had developed immunity to. That it was so lethal to us because our bodies weren’t prepared to fight it off. It didn’t look like they had much technology besides working with metals and building their colonies. I thought we could find antibodies or, or some sort of serum that we could use or— or modify. But you see?” She looked into my eyes, “It’s not a disease. It’s the opposite of a disease. It’s medicine.” I remembered watching the little zooid and tube heal so quickly. “The slime is just trying to heal us. It’s trying to turn us into healthy Brainardites, but it can’t because we’re made of the wrong proteins. So it just turns us into more slime. It can take us apart but it can’t put us back together.” She snuggled in closer to me. “I’m afraid ... I’m afraid that Drake ... that he, that we lost him for ... for nothing. That he— that he— that he ... died ... for … for no reason.”

  I held her and tried to comfort her, but I wasn’t thinking about Drake. Alice was just across our inflated hut, tucked into an alcove that she had transformed into a little nest for her and Yuri. “We’ll ... we’ll try again tomorrow,” I said, but I didn’t know what I meant. If Archie couldn’t find a cure for Alice, I had no idea who could. What would we do? What could we do? Exhaustion relieved me of my troubles until morning.

  “What’s the next step?” Steel said over breakfast. “Where do we go from here?”

  Arch looked into her tea, held the mug like she was holding onto her home, but said nothing.

  Marcus said, “We’ve made some significant discoveries. Surely we can assemble a— a— a plan of action to take us to the next ... to the next ... to where we want to be. We need to decide ... I mean, where are we right now? What do we know? What do we need to find out?”

  Yuri looked at Archie like he was beginning to suspect. I tried to not look at anybody. Alice looked like she wanted to give us all the day off, just forget the whole thing for a while and goof around.

  When Archie finally spoke her voice carried the weight of her knowledge, of her limits: “We’ve learned that instead of dealing with a primitive society here what we have is a society whose technology is so advanced that they no longer have any need to be technological. They’ve solved all their problems.” Her eyes never left the wafts of vapor rising from the surface of her tea.

  Steel responded, “So ... so, what? How can we use what we’ve found here?”

  The curls of vapor lifted to dissipate and disappear. “I don’t know,” was her simple reply. “I mean, I’m sure that, given time, we can ... we can reverse engineer, we can figure out how they, how they can ... I mean we don’t even know how to capture neutrinos, never mind assemble them into ... into ...”

  Yuri said, “Yeah. That’s a neat trick. I wouldn’t even know where to start. But we know it can be done now. That’s ... that’s a huge advantage.”

  “How long do you think it would take?” Steel asked. “To, to reproduce what we’ve found here?”

  Yuri just shook his head and spread his hands.

  “But that’s not the problem,” Arch responded. “The problem is that the Edenites didn’t have access to this level of technology or anything close to it. What’s preventing Alice from re-booting has nothing to do with gadgets made from individual leptons.”

  Alice said, “It has to be genetic,” and once again I was struck by her incredible courage. Here we were discussing her impending ... impending ... I couldn’t even think it, and yet she was calmly taking part in the conversation.

  “That’s right, Alice,” responded Archie. “Genetics is what they were good at. But we haven’t been able to find the genetic trigger anywhere. We haven’t been able to isolate it.” Arch was working to stay positive, engaged in the problem, but desolation spread out in front of her like a desert.

  Alice breathed. I could hear her exhale. I felt I could almost hear her heart beating. She was alive, living each second, each moment. She seemed to relax a little, come to a resolution. She said very calmly, “Well, I want to thank all of you for, for working so hard, for coming to this dangerous place—”

  Steel cut her off, “No. NO!” She looked at Alice, “We are NOT giving up.” She glared at all of us. “We are NOT through here. We have an entire ecosystem to mine, to research. There’s got to be something here we can use!” She slammed her hand down on the table, knocking cutlery to the floor with a crash that was still startling even now, even after all the time we had spent in this place.

  Alice’s voice was very small, “Mom, I don’t want to. I don’t want to put you all in any more—”

  “Alice. Alice, look at me.” Steel grasped her shoulders. “We have supplies for another month. We have time. Look at all we’ve discovered so far.” She turned to Archie, “What about their central nervous systems? We still don’t know how they’re structured, how they last so long.
”

  “I don’t think it’s anything intrinsic in their structure. I think the slime maintains them just like it maintains everything else,” Archie replied.

  “But you don’t know that. We don’t know how long they would live without the slime. It could be hundreds of years. Thousands.” Arch looked at her tea. “Couldn’t it?” And looked. “Archie! Isn’t that right?”

  “Yes, Captain. We don’t know how long they live. But—”

  “We’re not through here. We still have work to do.”

  “Captain, what do you want me to do?”

  “We need samples of their central nervous systems at least.”

  “You want me to extract brain tissue?”

  “We need to see how it interacts with us. With human brain tissue. What if ... What if ...”

  “Mom, I don’t want to graft my brain onto the brain of a—”

  “Alice, you don’t know what you’re saying. It would only be for a little while. Just until we could figure out a cure. A few decades. A century at most.”

  “Mom—”

  “Captain, you’re asking me to perform brain surgery on a sentient being without its consent.”

  “How do we know they’re sentient? Maybe their sentience atrophied along with their eyes and ears.”

  “Captain—”

  “They’re barely aware of their environment anymore. How could they be aware of themselves?”

  “There are serious ethical questions here—”

  “DAIMLER?”

  [I’m here.]

  “Tell them!”

  Tell us what?

  [Estelle, you have all the authority you need here. You don’t need me to tell them anything. You’re the Captain.]

  Steel stared at her fists clutched on the table, “I want you to tell them.”

  There was a pause. Then, [All right. In case you need to be reminded, you are all under contract to your Captain and therefore to the Bayernische Syndicate. The case could be made that you forfeited any legal rights you had when you chose to break very stringent Draconian and Pleiadean laws by landing on Brainard’s Planet. While I’m sure that Estelle wouldn’t want you working under coercive conditions, these things are nonetheless true. Archie, wouldn’t you say that the slime could heal any wounds you cause by surgery?]