Echoes of an Alien Sky (14 page)

Despite their lag in space technology, Terran electronics was astoundingly advanced. If anything, it had been ahead of the state of the art of Venus. The technical historians attributed it to the combined effects of the subordination of just about everything else to military demands and the ferocious competitiveness of Terran economics. Ironically in some ways, the greater lifting power and on-board cosmic supply tapping of Venusian spacecraft had made the need for extreme miniaturization less pressing. The Terrans' ultra-dense and fast circuitry had also given them computers of phenomenal power and complexity, but none of the remnants discovered on Earth were in a condition that would allow much to be learned from them. But here was equipment that had been preserved in a deep-lying, radiation-protected, sterile environment, and if the intricacies could only be unraveled and decoded, looked as if it might well still be functional.

Irg patted the side of a cabinet that had been opened up to reveal rows of tightly packed racks and assemblies. More similar parts were strewn across several of the counter tops, connected to tangles of Venusian instruments and monitoring screens. "If we can work out the powering and operating protocols, I'm certain we can get this working," he declared. "It's like new."

"You mean we might get to hear some of that Terran music finally?" Yorim said.

"And more. I'd say there's a good chance of accessing bulk storage media that hasn't deteriorated. Think what that could mean! Whole libraries of information at once, instead of things having to be reconstructed from fragments scattered all over the place."

Kyal thought about the still images that he and Lorili had looked at in the collection at Foothills Camp. "You might even be able to bring some Terran movie clips back to life," he mused to Irg.

"Exactly."

The next two levels they clambered down to were all sleeping accommodation—both small private rooms and dormitories. That was as far as they had penetrated, Fenzial told them as they came back out into the corridor from another of several identical rooms. The lighting here was sparse, and they were having to use their hand lamps to move around. There was more below, but the stairs down were still being constructed. Fenzial waved a hand to indicate the direction into the shadows and darkness ahead of them. "We've only just got to the end that way. "Well, we think it's the end."

"More of the same?" Brysek asked.

"And a couple of bigger rooms. They look like a play room and a gym. Showers and baths, and what probably a laundry," Fenzial told him. Brysek scratched his head, looking baffled, and looked at Casselo. Casselo looked from Kyal to Yorim.

"What do you make of it?" he asked them.

Yorim shrugged. "It beats me. How come all this living space and comfort? It feels more like a hotel than a moon base."

Kyal stared at Casselo with an odd, thoughtful look on his face, then turned to take in the surroundings again. Finally, he brought his gaze back to the others. "How about a survival shelter?" he suggested.

In the Molecular Biology section of the ISA Laboratories at Rhombus, Lorili checked through her incoming mail. A smile brightened her face when she saw Kyal's name among the list of senders. They had arrived on Luna without mishap, he informed her, and he was working with a good team there. The stillness and desolation made Moscow look like the center of Thagar—the principal city of Ulange back on Venus. The feeling of newness about everything in the Terran installations was eerie. You found yourself half expecting a live Terran to come around a corner or out of a door at any moment. The electrical constructions that he and Yorim had gone there to study were an enigma. There was much to do yet, but what they had seem so far seemed to reinforce the original impression of an experimental facility built to test a technology that the Terrans weren't supposed to posses. It was all very intriguing. Anyway, he hoped she was settled back in and being creative after her vacation. Oh yes, and there were hopes here of reactivating some of the Terran electronics; so they might actually see some of those cities that they visited brought to life before very much longer. Wouldn't that be something? He signed the message "Fondly."

Lorili read it again. It was a warm and reassuring feeling that he had found time to remember her in the middle of all that seemed to be going on up there. She moved the file to her Reply queue and opened the next. It was from a research group on Venus that she contributed to, and contained the results of comparisons of a selection of Venusian bird DNAs with those from Terran species. All Venusian birds had quadribasic DNA. The similarities to the Terran types were uncanny. Lorili spent some time going over the details. Then she called Iwon, her colleague in the adjoining lab, who had been with the group that she split off from to go her own way with Kyal.

"Are you busy, Iwon?"

"I could use an excuse for a break. What's up?"

"I've just got something in from Venus that I'd like to show you?"

"Sure, come on over."

Iwon inclined toward the traditionalist outlook, but he was easygoing about it in the same kind of way that Kyal had been. Lorili liked him for that reason. He made a good sounding board for her to bounce thoughts off and know she wasn't going to end up in an argument. Their current topic of amiable dispute was the Terran notion of unguided natural evolution, driven by chance mutations. Having little in the way of Progressive views that it would appeal to, Iwon was not attracted to it. His main objection echoed the conventional line that the time scales the Terrans had used to make it appear workable were vastly exaggerated. Whether it had been a result of genuine scientific error, their tendency to erect unquestionable dogmas, or a manifestation of some deeper psychological need was still being debated.

But whatever the reason, the result was the same. In earlier days, the Venusians' first inclination had been to accept that maybe the enormous epochs that the Terran sciences talked about were a possibility. Venusians' only direct knowledge of such matters was that derived from their own planet, after all, which had a different history. Shouldn't the Terrans have been the better judges of the one they had actually lived on? But the evidence was piling up, and there no longer seemed any doubt. The Terrans had gotten it colossally wrong.

She found Iwon sprawled at the desk at one end of his cramped lab, surrounded by bottles, glassware, analytical instruments and a centrifuge. The desktop was barely visible beneath a litter of papers, micrograph prints, and a monitor screen showing a table of protein folding parameters. He was tall and loose-limbed, with clear gray eyes, sandy hair, and a ragged mustache. Mustaches were something the Venusians had copied from Terrans. Early researchers returning from Earth had started sporting them to let people know where they had been, and it caught on as a fashion. Lorili had never seen him looking anything but at ease and relaxed; never tense or flustered. He was one of those enviable people who could sit talking for an afternoon at a table outside one of the cafes in Rhombus, managed to read the piles of books most people always had set aside but never seemed to get around to, had seen every movie that was talked about, and yet all the things that he needed to do got done.

He pulled a stool from under the bench by his desk, cleared away a box of data disks balanced on some journals, and pushed it forward for her to sit down. "You never told me you read minds. The timing's perfect. I'm wearing my brain into a rut." He gestured at the screen and the rest of the mess around him, then pushed back his own chair. "Did you ever try coffee? It's a Terran drink made out of crushed dried beans. One of their addictions."

"Yes. They've started serving it at the Blue Planet. I heard somewhere it's one of the things they're trying to grow back home."

"I've got some here. Want to try it?"

"Okay."

Iwon got up and moved to the bench, where a section of the shelf above was reserved for jars and mugs. "Sweet?"

"You know I am."

"When have you known me argue? What about your coffee?"

"Please."

"I think they put cream or something in it, didn't they? I've only got this powdered stuff you mix for dessert sauce."

"That's fine. It's okay black too."

"Really?" Iwon contemplated the mug he had been about to fill. "Maybe I'll give it a try."

Lorili took a look around. "You look busy enough," she remarked.

"Oh, just staying out of Nostreny's way, really. He's running around in a panic over something." Garki Nostreny was the section chief. "So, anyway . . . what have you got?"

Lorili set down a sheaf of printouts that she had brought. "The results of those bird DNA studies just came in. The parallels are striking. You can have a look at them for yourself when you get a moment. It's just the kind of pattern you'd expect from a common ancestry." She meant descent from common ancestral genetic seed material in the way she had described to Kyal, that had somehow found its way to both Earth and Venus.

Iwon was already shaking his head as he immersed a net bag of the crushed beans into a flask to boil. But he didn't smile. Another thing Lorili liked about him was that he wasn't condescending. It was nice to think she was being taken seriously, even when their fundamental premises were at odds. "The time scales just isn't there for anything like that to have happened on Venus," he said. "And it's looking pretty certain now that it wasn't much better on Earth either, whatever else the Terrans thought. Have you seen what's coming in from the geologists? There are fossilized trees here, extending intact through layers of coal and limestone that the Terrans dated as millions of years apart." He turned briefly and tossed up his hands. "How could they be. The trees didn't stand there for millions of years being slowly buried in sediments. They were obviously buried rapidly. . . . And the boundaries between the sediment layers are clean, with no signs of tracks, roots, worm burrows, or any of the other biological activity you'd expect to find if the surfaces had been exposed for any length of time."

Lorili had expected this much. They had been over it enough times. "But we know that organisms can vary over time." She was simply staking out the ground, not saying anything new.

"Nobody's disputing it," Iwon agreed. "There has to be some ability to adapt over a range ofchanging conditions. But the same would have to be true whatever its origin. And extrapolating non-controversial variations about a theme to account for major differences between types is an act of faith, not an inference from any evidence. Even the Terrans never stopped arguing over it. The universe doesn't possess enough probabilistic resources for the number of trial combinations it would need."

Lorili held up her palms in a restraining gesture. "Okay, if it will save time, I accept that the Terran idea of major change through selection of random variations doesn't work. But here's another angle."

Iwon sat back down and handed her one of the mugs. He looked interested. "What?"

Lorili separated out several of the sheets that she had laid down. "Twenty-five years ago, a population of finches was introduced into Abarans—they're not native there." The Abaran Islands were a remote group in Venus's embryonic northern ocean, well to the east of Korbisan.

"Uh-huh."

"Already, several distinct types of beak morphology and plumage have appeared. See what it means? The programs to produce the different types didn't come together a step at a time through trial and error in twenty-five years. They were already there, in the genome. We know that most DNA doesn't code for protein. It's the same thing as Julow has been saying in Ulange, from those experiments with bacteria. Gene changes aren't random, the way the Terrans insisted. They're cued by changes in the environment."

Iwon shrugged. "Which fits with what the traditional view has always said. It's what you'd expect from the explanation that we're part of some purposeful scheme that nobody pretends to understand. I can't put it better than what they told us at school: Vizek knows best."

"It isn't an explanation," Lorili retorted. "It's just a label to hang on not knowing the answer. But what I'm suggesting could give you faster, directed evolution without the label."

"How so?" Iwon invited, sitting back down and stirring his own drink.

"We've been hearing a lot of speculation about what the purpose of reverse transcriptase is," Lorili answered. It was an enzyme discovered some years previously that wrote information into DNA. This was in the opposite direction to that believed until then to be the rule for genetic information flow: originating in DNA and ending up in proteins. Hence the name. "The information that it carries seems to originate within other cells of the body."

"Okay," Iwon agreed. For a while there had been a flurry of activity among researchers on Venus following a false trail that attributed it to an external virus.

Lorili went on, "Suppose that a lot of DNA coding comes about in this way. Maybe even most of it. What you'd have is a feedback system from the body for creating a repository of acquired survival-related information. Valuable lessons learned in an individual life can be written into the germ-cell DNA for transmission to future generations. So the genome carries an accumulating history of the race that programs the descendants to deal with situations that have been encountered in the past."

"Like the immune system." Iwon was clearly thinking about it.

"A good example. So evolution doesn't have to be a process of blind trial-and-error groping over countless generations the way the Terrans thought." Lorili nodded to concede a point. "It
is
directed, as the traditional view maintains. But not for the reason we were told at school." She concluded, "It's not driven by random factors that would take forever to come up with something useful. And so the long time scales that the Terrans constructed aren't necessary."

Iwon stared into the distance while he turned the proposition over. Then he sipped his drink experimentally, sucked his teeth, and smacked his lips.