When the lander assembly arrived in orbit, survey gliders were sent to investigate a high plateau that housed four inhabited villages. The land was mostly brown, although there were widespread, somewhat varied forests, and widely dispersed patches of faded-green ground cover. The planet apparently never developed grass-like plants. There was little wind over the hot, dry plain that day.
The lander set down on a broad plane in a spot midway between two widely separated villages. More gliders and flybots were sent out to survey life forms across the planet and to enter the inhabited villages. The open, rolling terrain, with its scattered dark plants, made it easy detect the larger animals that lived on its surface, except there were not many to be found. Kalekto supported only small numbers of animals and very few species. This bit of news caught the attention of Jon’s controller staff. It was quite at odds with the experience they had gained from previous ObLaDa studies of hundreds of inhabited planets. Wherever life existed, species evolve to fit the niches that are available and then expand their population to make it a tight fit. On Kalekto, however, there were very few grazing animals on the vast plains and no predators were found. The lakes and ponds were almost devoid of plant-eating life forms, even though they were choked with vegetation. A closer look at the animals that were wandering around was disconcerting. Most individuals were thin or outright sickly, and too many appeared to be young, or at least immature. Jon GeoMon passed along the first of what was to be a long series of warnings to Captain MaxNi9.
However alarming the surrounding fauna might be, there was definitely an organized, seemingly intelligent species on the planet. Their villages, thought small, were carefully laid out and their fires were clearly visible in the purple-black night. As morning broke, the flybots were sent out to probe each of the nearby villages. They were not so very far apart, perhaps two to three days travel for the inhabitants, but there was no sign of any connecting roads, or even paths, nor were there any travelers moving from one town to another.
Jon GeoMon positioned some of the flybots on a hill overlooking the smallest village. These were good-sized robots, about half the size of the Kalektians, so they would be noticed as when they entered the towns. MaxNi9 wanted Jon GeoMon to anticipate a hostile reaction and use the microbots for first contact, as these were not so very threatening, but Kalekto was too large a planet and distances too great for the little guys. Scouts, lookouts, and diversions were all set up in case of a hostile reception, but they needn't have bothered. The Kalektians just stopped and looked when the flybots flew through the village streets. Lethargy and apathy reigned. Another oddity. The town of one hundred to one hundred and twenty-five individuals was planned, with groupings of one- and two-story buildings, a few of which had been decorated in an effort to look nice, but most were shabby, some little more than sheds. Some metals and other synthetic materials were in use, but the Kalektians employed little science or technology in their simply constructed dwellings, although they did burn some form of coal for heat and had lamps for light.
The flybots were soon ignored and their surveillance continued undisturbed. The villages held no livestock, wild animals, or pets, and there was no evidence of hunting. The Kalektians seemed to have established a subsistence living that was wholly vegetarian, and that avoided contact with their own kind and all other living beings. Even with this regimen, things were not right. Many of the Kalektians were thin or frail, and appeared to be ill. The population was quite young and there were many orphans amid the tribe of youngsters. Even the children made no effort to knock the bots down or chase them away. It is difficult to say how a newly discovered alien species should look and act, but the ObLaDas began to suspect that these creatures had been damaged in some way.
Jon GeoMon raised his level of concern with Captain MaxNi9. He had become increasingly uncomfortable about this mission. His instincts were to let those miserable creatures be, and get off the planet. The Kalektians were, however, clearly intelligent and had survived on that ancient planet for billions of years, many times longer than any other species that the ObLaDas had discovered. They were clearly an advanced society and, while not at their peak, they had reached the brink of a science-driven civilization. What if they were in some distress at the moment, would it not be in the new spirit of the Outward Voyager to fix them up? In spite of their apparent difficulties, the Kalektians appeared to be one of the most promising species that the ObLaDas had encountered since the ill-fated Gracks. They were far more dangerous.
It was the ponds that bothered MaxNi9 the most - plant-choked but free of animal life. If nothing else, there should be something in the water eating those plants. What happened to those things? MaxNi9 could not get past that fact. Nevertheless, the probes had completed a visual exploration of the rest of the planet and their early findings held true across the land, so he decided to continue the mission and collect a representative Kalektian population and their food sources.
Forty-six individuals were captured; including more of the older ones than were represented in the population. The younger, or at least smaller ones, were chosen for their apparent health. The robotics picked out food samples and some promising-looking plants, but no other animal species were captured. The collection went without incident. The Kalektians continued to be strangely passive even as they found themselves encased inside the gel-filled transport containers. Only three individuals died during the return to the Outward, which was better than Jon expected, given the weakened condition of most of the captives. Still, there were some minor problems following arrival. Parts of the Farside module were still being been rebuilt. Thus far only the two smallest species, the short wispy LabislassLees and the lumpy Hucs, had been moved to their Farside quarters. The space planned for the Kalektians was mostly finished, but some work remained.
MaxNi9 called CamBi to the command center. As the most senior altspecies biologist, CamBi felt that she deserved to head the team that would install and manage the Kalekto contingent. At the same time, she expected that MaxNi9 would bypass her because of her outspoken politics and support for the traditional ObLa mission. She was surprised, almost shocked, when MaxNi9 gave her the post and even asked her to pick a team to manage the newcomers. Before MaxNi9 could change his mind, she named two of her allies, YuLon Lim, to manage the Kalekto assimilation, and Dyn JonDar, with his experience in habitat construction.
MaxNi9 struggled to keep from flushing, relieved at CamBi’s answer. She had just offered to isolate her most vocal advocates in the Farside wing. He had hoped to arrange this separation of advocacies to keep the conflict between the factions at a minimum. It did not take CamBi long to suspect that she had been manipulated, but she passed over the niggling concern, and went to contact YuLon and the taciturn Dyn about their impending move. They joined Di DonSi, who was already managing the robotic construction teams, and MeSo, who supervised the maintenance of the Hucs and LabislassLees in the Farside habitat module.
YuLon Lim closely followed the insertion operation as the Kalektians were taken from the shuttle to the recovery center. Ten days later, she watched, as one at a time, the smaller ones first, each walked slowly into the brightly lit, newly built habitat. The forty-three sluggish, decontaminated survivors were separated, photographed, and documented, including the implantation of a numbered id tag. The Kalektian habitat was a large one, occupying an entire deck, with larger rooms than these small beings required. They would rattle around for a while until their numbers increased. The Kalektians were logged into their habitat with its freshly painted gray rooms, allowed to recover from the transportation, and adjust to their new surroundings. Curiously, those brown-on-brown drones showed little curiosity about their change in circumstances, even after they regained some strength and began moving about their large, sparely furnished quarters. They never refused any directions that YuLon gave them, and spent most of their time huddled together in the corners of same high-roofed rooms where they were first placed. They even slept in multi-limbed cl
umps and tended to stay lumped together even when awake. YuLon could not tell one Kalektian from another, or even distinguish between sexes, with their elongated shape and monotonous greasy brown skin. They had eight limbs on a long, sinuous, articulated body with a long tapered head that ended in a tiny beaked mouth. It was a body that ought to be quick rather than strong, but these were neither.
The Kalektians continued to look and act rather weak and lethargic to YuLon’s eye, so she considered it a positive sign when one, specifically number twenty-six, was found to have gone missing. Perhaps it went exploring and had gotten lost. YuLon called Dyn and asked him to configure one of the maintenance bots to search for twenty-six. After spending most of an hour rooting around the huddles of Kalektians to make sure it had not been overlooked in the body mounds, the bot set off to scour the habitat. Normally this would not be necessary, but the surveillance system had not yet been installed. It was one of many little projects that Dyn needed to complete.
The melting disease had weakened twenty-six greatly, and its effect was increasing rapidly when it left its fellows and wandered into a far corner of the habitat to die alone. The melting disease had been on Kalekto for many generations, and it was gradually becoming more lethal. They did not understand the illness, but it was commonly believed that to survive, you needed to avoid contact with the dead, whether your own kin or some beast in the wild. So twenty-six went off to die alone; separated from its friends and family members that had been taken to this strange place.
The bot, wheels squeaking on the new flooring, probed one grey room after another. It finally found twenty-six’s body propped into the corner of an empty storage room and it beeped YuLon the information. The call was not a surprise, but when she looked up at the monitor, she let out a yelp and literally jumped straight off the floor. It was twenty-six, or what was left of it. Its flesh was sunken, the skin on its face was dropping away, hanging loose from the skull, and its muscles seemed to have dissolved. There was a large pool of viscous liquid slowly spreading across the floor around the body. Fortunately, the bot had not tracked through it. YuLon maneuvered the upright old bot around to examine at the body from different angles. It must have been dead for some time, many days at least, to be in such bad shape, but it had only gone missing the night before. The maintenance bot was not equipped to deal with this mess, so YuLon rolled the unit back to its storage station and called MaxNi9 to tell him of this odd development. A medical intervention unit was sent to pick up the remains. Deaths were a common occurrence after an alien species was introduced into the Outward Voyager. Some individuals died from the stress of the trip, inability to adjust to their abduction, or even fear of their strange surroundings, but nothing like this. It looked like a disease to YuLon. She hoped that it was not catching.
CamBi, away in her lab in the Farside antimod, had completed the biochemistry profile of the Kalektian tissues a few days ago and was now looking at the cell culture data from her first attempts to synthesize the basic nutrients, proteins, lipids, and carbohydrates needed to produce an edible diet for this new alien. She still had six weeks to complete the task, perhaps longer, as the captives were eating very little, so the collected food supply might last a few weeks longer. CamBi took the call from YuLon without much concern, but she when she saw the images of twenty-six’s remains. She hurriedly prepared the intervention unit to obtain fluid and tissue samples from the body, and had it sent it by express shuttle to the Kalekto habitat. She was anxious to have it arrive before the remains were contaminated.
CamBi had been wound-up from her battles, as she saw them, to hold true to the ObLaDas’ mission. She felt unable to accept so profound a change from her roots. This typically visceral ObLaDa reaction had held generations of her predecessors to their original objectives long after they should have been revised. Now, the sight of twenty-six peaked a new concern. Her tension rose as she paced across her cluttered laboratory. The surveillance tape found twenty-six in the Kalektian huddle less than one day before. It was weak and appeared unfocused, but it was very much alive. It was unnatural, or at least abnormal, for a body to decompose so completely in so short a time, as far as she knew, and she knew a lot.
CamBi punched up new information each time she returned to her monitor. No, the room temperature was not high, that was hardly likely anyway. Next, she stopped to watch as the service unit brought two Kalektians to view the body. They seemed to smell the decomposing tissue well before they got to the small dark room in which it lay. They became increasingly agitated, and then both balked at going any further, refusing even to get within sight of the body. They knew what had happened. It had happened many times before.
If they were afraid of the mess that was twenty-six, why should not she be afraid? She could lose the whole tribe if this disease spread. CamBi was not at all pleased with this turn. It was not just the illness of one or two aliens that she was concerned about, the success of the Kalekto mission was threatened and with it the future of the Outward Voyager. CamBi and YuLon had won the argument to approach Kalekto, and they felt vindicated when an exciting civilization was found. Now their victory was slipping away. CamBi was determined to do whatever she could to halt the Kalekto illness as she sent another medical bot and flybots to the habitat to collect two age-matched individuals for investigation. The soft souls over there in the Filim module might object, but she did not care. She had to know the biochemical composition of a normal Kalektian in order to understand twenty-six's illness, and to know how to deal with it if or when it started to spread.
The corpse of twenty-six, the ObLaDas never learned its true name, was bagged and shipped to CamBi’s laboratory, where it was sampled, probed, and subjected to a full chemical dissection and autopsy. The autopsy showed massive dissolution of all muscle tissues and major organs. The spaces around the degraded tissues had been turned into a nondescript viscous fluid mass that was largely composed of a single high molecular weight protein, multiple complex carbohydrates, and translucent lipid globules. The extent of tissue destruction was amazing, as it had occurred in mere hours after death.
She was even more disturbed and distressed when she learned that both of the supposedly healthy Kalektians also showed signs of the disease. Certain tissues were infused with the same protein, not to the level that was present in twenty-six’s remains, but it was there. YuLon asked CamBi to begin a full analysis of the disease. She and MaxNi9 were afraid that it might threaten the survival of the Kalekto colony. Their concern was heightened on the following day, when CamBi’s tests found that all of the aliens had the same protein in their tissues, at least to a limited degree. Had they collected a species in the midst of some type of plague?
YuLon requested additional support to help work on twenty-six’s disease. MaxNi9 assigned two scientists in the better-equipped Filim antimod laboratory and they were sent frozen tissues from twenty-six and the two healthy ‘volunteers’, while YuLon set out to learn more about the overly abundant protein. She quickly determined that it was a protease, an enzyme that degraded other proteins. This explained the decomposed tissue, but why was there so much around? Especially as she found that the protein chewed itself up as well as any other protein it came in contact with. She kept working on the molecule, convinced that it was the key to understanding the problem. It was frustrating, her studies refused to give consistent results. The data never quite correlated with the amounts of protein she knew to be in the samples. It was three days before she discovered that the protein not only destroyed proteins, but it could also synthesize proteins, a whole range of them, including more of itself. The strange compound could chop up a protein all the way down to its component amino acids, and then reassembled those units to copy another protein that was present, or to reproduce itself when given the chance. If the concentration of this protein reached a critical concentration in a tissue, it would drive to the ultimate fatal end. YuLon called the protein Replicide.
CamBi did not know the evolutionary his
tory of Replicide, but she had worked out what it could do. It was dire news for the Kalektians. Replicide was not a typical disease and it could not be countered by any of the antagonist drugs or vaccine strategies that the ObLaDas had developed over the centuries. She knew that all of the Kalektians on board had been infected at some level and it was unclear how to save the remaining members of the tribe.
Chapter 18 Beyond Evolution
Replicide was a long time coming. Kalekto was an extremely ancient place that once harbored a wide diversity of life forms and had done so over an extraordinary span of six billion years. Early in that continuum, organisms on Kalekto developed a unique and very efficient means of constructing proteins. Proteins, long chains of different amino acids, are important for cellular growth and division, indeed for almost all bodily functions, so there are a lot of them. Certain proteins, or groups of proteins, can carry out individual chemical reactions and even complex series of reactions. One of these is the ability to link amino acids together. On Kalekto, a single protein had evolved the ability to link amino acids together, but in a selected sequence, that is, it could make copies of other proteins. It could bind to a protein chain and then reproduce its unique sequence of amino acids, coupling the required amino acids one after another until the replicate protein is completed. This ability to copy a protein’s structure was a very significant advance. This copy-enzyme synthesis process was far more efficient than the complex, many-molecule combinations that had evolved on other planets. Ours is especially complicated, as protein synthesis requires a whole series of other proteins that crowd around a nucleic acid template, which was itself made by another set of proteins crowding around a DNA segment that contained protein sequence information.
Very recently, but billions of years into this continuum, a freak mutation occurred within a simple bacteria-like cell, that gave its copy-enzymes the ability to clip amino acids from other proteins. The mutant copy-enzymes could now either built up or tear down proteins by adding amino acids or taking them away. This does not seem to be an obvious benefit, but it had a profound consequence for life on Kalekto. Normal cells turned on and off the copy-enzyme protein synthesis process by controlling the amount of free amino acids floating around. No amino acids, no synthesis. But now, this mutant copy-enzyme could liberate its own amino acids and suddenly became free of established controls on how fast protein synthesis could occur. Within its self-generated bath of amino acids, this super molecule rapidly created new variants of itself, and quickly became capable of self-replication.
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