by Jeff Carlson
“Impossible,” Frerotte said. “Scout suits are insulated plastisteel.”
“The sunfish have had to become remarkably sensitive to find prey in the ice,” Dawson said. “Perhaps they reacted to the suit itself. Sharks were known to attack phone cables in the earliest years of telecommunications. One of the suit’s systems could have attracted them, but I think not. You were hurt. Wounded creatures emit stronger signals than normal as the electrical activity controlling their heart rate and respiration increases.”
Vonnie felt her face lose its color. Her memories of screaming and killing would always be with her, and Dawson had unlocked that terror with a few words.
Then she got mad. Why is he smiling? she thought. Is he deliberately trying to weaken me? She was the loudest proponent of treating the sunfish like equals. If he dominated her, he might win this argument.
“Finely-developed sensory inputs are what elevated the sunfish to sentience,” she said.
“On the contrary,” Dawson said. “They no longer have enough mass left for higher thinking. Certainly they don’t have the emotional quotient we do. They might be smart like our spies are smart — like termites or bees or prairie dogs. They’re able to build structures in a step-by-step manner as a group, but without real initiative or independence. Too much of their capacity is dedicated to pure survival.”
“I disagree,” Metzler said. “They have spindle cells like human beings and the great apes.”
“Dolphins, elephants, and giraffes have spindle cells in similar concentrations,” Dawson said. “No one considers giraffes intelligent.”
Vonnie glanced at Metzler, who said, “Spindle cells are neurons without extensive branching, sort of like free-floating processors. They play a crucial role in the development of cognition and decision-making.” He turned back to Dawson. “Sunfish brains are also more convoluted than ours, and they have faster brain stem transmission times.”
“So do rats,” Dawson said. “Their brain stem transmission time is an adaptation to living in eternal darkness, not evidence of superhuman thinking. That their brain mass ratio is greater than ours also means nothing. It’s a necessary result of their hemispheric asymmetry during sleep.”
“They don’t sleep.”
“They do, Dr. Metzler.” Dawson opened a series of medical imaging scans of the sunfish. He turned to Vonnie and said, “In addition to motor function, most of any creature’s brain is dedicated to involuntary functions such as heartbeat, digestion, and respiration. In sunfish, breathing is voluntary. They must decide to inhale or use their gills or hold their breath.” He looked at Metzler. “We’ve recorded EEG patterns which very much resemble REM activity, but only in one hemisphere at a time.”
“Then they’re technically awake.”
“Indeed. Because the sunfish are voluntary breathers, they would asphyxiate as soon as they relaxed and failed to breathe. They must also remain vigilant for predators. Therefore it’s uncommon that both of their hemispheres are simultaneously awake. In essence, they have two small brains, not a single large one. They alternate between which small brain they use throughout the day.”
Enough, Vonnie thought.
“Their carvings talk about the future and the past,” she said. “They had laws. Some of it looks like philosophy! At the very least, there was tribal rule, and a warlord strong enough to form an empire.”
“It’s interesting that their carvings invariably show perfect sunfish,” Pärnits added. “They never exhibit wounds or age. That suggests a desire for beauty.”
“We’ve dated the youngest carvings at nine thousand years,” Dawson said. “Something happened between now and then. Perhaps the sunfish didn’t always have such dependence on dual forms of sonar or their bioelectric sensing organs.”
“You think they evolved away from sentience?” Pärnits asked. “That would be unprecedented.”
“Everything in this world is unprecedented,” Dawson said.
“Nine thousand years is too quick,” Metzler said. “It’s not enough time for the sunfish to degenerate without an outside cause like massive radiation, and they don’t have the resources or the technology for a nuclear war.”
“Nothing so dramatic is necessary,” Dawson said. “Jupiter’s magnetic field is, in essence, a gigantic particle accelerator. It blasts Europa’s surface with octillions of high-speed ions and electrons every hour.”
“They don’t live on the surface,” Vonnie said. “They’re safe inside the ice.”
“No. The ice shields them from the primary radiation, but there are elements dissolved in the ice like iodine and potassium. When those elements are bombarded, they turn into short-period isotopes, which are sinister little poisons. Churn brings the hazardous material down into the ice. Periods of violent churn exacerbate the contamination.”
“It’s still too fast,” Vonnie said, running a calculation in her head. If the lifespan of a sunfish was twenty years… “It’s only been five hundred generations since they were writing.”
“I’m afraid it’s more than that,” Dawson said. “Male sunfish don’t mature until six years of age. Until then, they may be expendable, leaving only the hardiest to procreate. But their females reach adolescence at two years. They’re fertile at three. It’s been four thousand generations since the carvings.”
“Where’s the evolutionary pressure to give up their intelligence?” Metzler said. “Sentience is the greatest weapon any species can develop.”
“Not necessarily. As nourishment became more difficult to find, they grew more instinctive — more aware in other ways — trading their intelligence for improved sonar and detection. It all fits. We know they’re severely limited genetically. There’s been inbreeding. Unfavorable mutations took hold because those adaptations serve them well. They don’t need intelligence to roam the ice. In fact, their self-awareness worked against them, making them all too conscious of what they’d lost in the turmoil of Europa’s crust. They suffer less without their intelligence, and we should feel lucky indeed at this twist of fate.”
“What do you mean?” Koebsch said.
“Our ancestors had scarcely invented the most primitive forms of agriculture and herding when the sunfish began their decline. Their empire fell. Then they regressed. Otherwise they might have traveled to our world before we visited theirs.”
34.
“Imagine if a superior race had landed among us when we were tribal nomads without science, only fire and spears,” Dawson said. “That’s why the sunfish run away. That’s why they fight us even though they’re impossibly outmatched.”
Silence filled the group feed. Brooding, Vonnie saw troubled looks in her crew mates.
The far-away feeling she’d experienced weeks ago when the Chinese rover discovered the first carvings was with her again now, richer and more poignant.
How close did we come to exchanging destinies with the sunfish? she thought. If there had been more supervolcanoes on Earth… If another meteor strike like the one that killed the dinosaurs had pushed us to the brink while the sunfish were given another 10,000 years of peace… What if they’d discovered iron and steam power, then steel, electronics, and finally the atom? We might have been a few starving bands of cavemen when they brought spacecraft to Earth.
“I have to admit I’m disappointed in how the sunfish have responded,” Koebsch said.
“Sir, we’ve only been here for six weeks,” Metzler said. “I know you’re under a lot of scrutiny from Berlin, but I think we’ve made inroads.”
“Really?” Dawson said. “All I’ve noticed are the same attacks on our mecha.”
“He’s right,” Koebsch said.
“We should capture some of them,” Dawson said, and Vonnie exploded: “You son of a bitch! People stopped hunting whales because they’re too close to sentience to treat like cows or sheep. Even if you’re right about the sunfish, the same principle applies here.”
“I don’t want to eat them,” Dawson said with h
is elfin smile.
“But you want to take them apart! Who have you been talking to? Is there a gene corp offering you money or a job?”
“That’s offensive.”
“So is pushing us to treat the sunfish like a commodity. You’re demonizing them.”
“It’s ludicrous to expect a single lab to sequence and develop the material we’ve gathered thus far,” Dawson said. “There aren’t enough of us. We need to send tissue samples to Earth — dozens if not hundreds of samples. Live specimens would serve even better.”
“I can’t believe you’ve been hiding this bullshit from the rest of us.”
Koebsch said, “Look, Von, let’s calm down—”
“I am calm!”
“—and maybe get some lunch,” Koebsch said. “We can talk again later. Let’s meet again on the group feed in an hour. Frerotte, I want to talk to you on Channel Thirty.”
“I need to talk to you, too,” Vonnie said.
“Not now,” Koebsch said, cutting his connection with the group feed.
Vonnie stayed online, watching Dawson, who ignored her as he closed his sims. If he had more to say to the group, she wanted to hear it. But he signed off.
“Sorry, Von,” Frerotte said. He lifted a privacy screen on his station. From the outside, the screen left Frerotte visible yet fuzzy as his display components turned to gray blotches, including his link to Koebsch. The privacy screen also canceled their voices.
Vonnie paced in the confines of data/comm. Metzler tried to make room for her, clearing his station and hanging back. Ash wasn’t so tolerant. Ash took her hand and dragged her into the ready room, where Vonnie at least had space to wave her arms.
“Son of a bitch!”
“Walk it off,” Ash said. “Just walk a little.”
Metzler followed them into the L-shaped area between the lockers and the empty scout suits. “Don’t let Dawson get to you,” he said. “We’ve only had a few encounters with the sunfish, and most of those were with different tribes. It’s been like starting from square one every time.”
Vonnie shook her head. “Dawson’s an asshole, but he’s right that we can’t keep repeating the same cycle. We approach, they attack. We approach, they attack. There has to be some way to get through to them.”
She laid a hand on her suit — a new suit calibrated to her biometrics. Then she turned abruptly. Metzler and Ash both pretended they hadn’t been watching her.
They were nice to worry. Vonnie wanted to promise she was fine, but she was afraid they’d see right through her.
She felt estranged and shut out.
“Let’s get to work on the new probes,” she said. “If we can make them lighter, that might help. Maybe the sunfish won’t know they’re fakes.”
“The only way to reduce the probes’ weight is to pull their radar and X-ray,” Ash said. “Koebsch won’t like it.”
“Koebsch has different objectives than we do. He has to pay attention to the budget. You noticed how Dawson got fussy about how much the mecha cost? He was sucking up to Koebsch. But we don’t need more maps. We don’t need more body scans, either. We need to convince the sunfish to listen to us before glory hounds like Dawson decide they belong in a zoo.”
“Or on a menu,” Ash said with a glint in her hazel eyes.
Vonnie laughed, glad for any chance to break the tension. “I’ll put you on a menu,” she said.
Metzler draped his arms around both women. “You two go ahead,” he said. “I’ll make lunch. No sunfish. Then I want to go over Dawson’s sims. Maybe I can shoot some holes in his data.”
“Marry me,” Vonnie said, laughing again, but Metzler nodded sincerely.
“Be careful what you ask for,” he said.
They left the ready room. In data/comm, Frerotte continued to talk inside his privacy screen. Vonnie took the next station and unfolded the chair. Ash sat beside her, glancing after Metzler as he ducked into the next compartment. Now the young woman’s eyes were characteristically shrewd.
“He really likes you,” she said.
Vonnie didn’t answer. As a teacher, she had learned to be charming. It was part of the job. She was less comfortable with her newfound charisma. She’d become a polarizing figure in their group, a crusader and a leader.
People want to be inspired, she thought. Are they helping me because I’m famous?
What if Dawson went out of his way to take an opposing view for the same reason? Because he resents seeing me in the limelight and wants it for himself?
Vonnie hoped her friends appreciated her for her own qualities, not the image of the hero created by the media buzz, and yet she found herself playing into that role more and more. Most of the crew respected her conviction. Some of them, like Metzler, even welcomed her volatility.
As she opened their schematics of the new probe, she said, “Can you hack our own datastreams?”
“Yes,” Ash said. “Why would I do that?”
“Everyone has different encryption packets depending on who they’re communicating with on Earth. I’m curious who’s on Dawson’s lists.”
It would be easy to conceal illicit transmissions in their data bursts. All of them were linked with a myriad of government agencies, labs, universities, and media outlets — but if Dawson stood to profit from his decisions, if he was saying what a corporation wanted to hear in order to classify the sunfish as animals, Vonnie was well-positioned to stop him. She could use her celebrity to burn him in public opinion.
“What if Dawson’s in a gray area legally or flat-out breaking the rules?” she said. “He’s got his nose turned up so far, it makes me think he knows something we don’t. He might be taking bribes. Hell, he probably has a deal with someone. That’s why he’s taunting us.”
“I’ll peek,” Ash said. “The tough part will be getting a minute without Koebsch online to see what I’m doing. Maybe while he’s sleeping. Let me wait until I’m in the command module tonight or tomorrow.”
“Tonight.”
“I need an excuse to drive over, Von.”
“Here.” She opened the remote operation link to the armory, which, like Koebsch’s central data/comm post, was in the command module. “The forge doesn’t work right with our link. We can take the jeep after we finish our redesign. Koebsch will want to tell me everything I did wrong anyway, so I’ll keep him busy. Trust me.”
“I do trust you,” Ash said.
Vonnie met her gaze, then responded with total candor. “You’re my best friend in this place,” she said, which was true, but inside, she thought, I wish I knew who you were working for.
She needed Ash’s help to stop Dawson. But who would stop Ash if the girl was on the payroll of MI6 or another intelligence agency? Vonnie took it for granted that Ash’s directives were ultimately identical to Dawson’s: to own and control everything of value on Europa while disrupting the efforts of any other group to do the same.
Once upon a time, Vonnie might have laughed at the predicament they’d brewed for themselves. Instead, she cursed herself.
Face it, she thought. You’re outclassed.
The only people who’d been sent to Europa without covert training might be the poor, honest fools who’d volunteered when no one imagined there was anything more than bugs in the ice, namely Vonnie, Bauman, and Lam. Too much was at stake. As soon as Earth realized the larger ramifications, new players had been sent for a different game.
If the Allied Nations accepted the sunfish as a sentient race, that might affect who was permitted to mine the ice, where they were licensed to operate, and how much they paid the sunfish in trade goods.
If any country or gene corp got a head start on developing useful applications of Europan DNA, that could lead to the priceless first-to-market position for new meds or treatments.
Cryogenics and improved cancer resistance were top priorities for Earth’s military and civilian space forces. Astronauts who could sleep safely for months at a time would allow ships to travel farther tha
n ever. Soldiers who could be stored, forgotten, and yet come up fighting would act both as deterrents and as first strike weapons. They could be stashed all over the solar system until needed.
Germany had spliced cockroach and black fly genes into some of their Special Forces commandos with solid results. China was known to have tried rat and chimpanzee DNA. The side effects were minor, and there would always be volunteers eager to trade their health for glory and strength.
Dawson was correct that Europan lifeforms dealt with high levels of radiation in addition to extreme cold. Christmas Bauman had felt that many of them must have evolved the ability to suppress and repair cellular damage, and Bauman’s word was enough for Vonnie. If she’d believed there were revolutionary genetics here, Vonnie wanted that magic for the human race, too — but it wasn’t fair for any single group to own it, and it wasn’t right to condemn the sunfish for anyone’s profit margin.
Vonnie felt like she was standing in a mine field. She didn’t know where to step. Someone she depended on today might betray her tomorrow, and she remembered when she’d met Ash. She’d done everything possible to convince Ash that she would put the team first.
Could the same be said for Ash’s intentions?
35.
Ash will be my friend as long as it suits her, Vonnie thought. I think she genuinely likes me. That’s part of why she saved Lam. But no matter how she feels about me or the sunfish, eventually we’ll go home. She’s made a career for herself there, so she’ll lie or steal from me if that’s what they tell her to do. Won’t she?
What can I promise her that they haven’t? I don’t have a lot of money. Even if I was a division leader, any promotion I offered would be a joke compared to the job they’ve given her.
Who can I trust? Metzler? Koebsch?