Echoes of an Alien Sky (9 page)

Life forms on Venus, as any reasonably well-read Venusian would have known, fell into two broad classes that were distinguished by the number of nitrogenous bases available for the structure of their DNA: quadribasic (four base, comparatively rare) and hexabasic (six bases, common). The six-base structure was more versatile, able to specify a more complex coding system and hence, in principle, to blueprint a greater and more complex variety of plant and animal forms.

"So you know about the way things back home seem to be backward?" Lorili queried.

"As far as I know, hexa forms are the most common and should theoretically have more potential. But it's the quadri forms that you don't find so much that are more varied and advanced." The gap between the two groups was quite marked—although it would have taken a biochemist to appreciate it—and had mystified biologists since they first began sequencing giant molecules. The Venusians themselves were quadri.

"That's right," Lorili conrirmed.

Kyal picked up her original point. "But it turns out that
all
Terran life is four-based. There are no six-base kinds at all."

"Exactly," she confirmed.

"Mm." Kyal tried to look businesslike about it, but the significance eluded him. As far as he could see, it was just one of those many apparently strange things that the universe turned up that could only be acknowledged and accepted. "Does anyone have any idea why, yet?" he asked.

"There are a lot of speculations . . ." Lorili hesitated for the briefest of instants, "not all of them intellectually fashionable." She was testing him again. He decided to rise to it.

"Well, what can you say? It's just the way things are. Vizek knows best, I suppose." He met her eyes over the top of his mug as he sat back to sip his drink, challenging her to make an issue of it. He wanted to know at this early if he was dealing with someone who couldn't let it go. Charming and intelligent, maybe. . . . But a fanatic was still a fanatic.

But she opted for a tactful withdrawal. "Maybe. We'll see what more turns up. But anyway, that's the kind of thing we're into."

Kyal was inwardly relieved. Yes, he would like to get to know her better if circumstances should move them in such a direction, he told himself. An obligation was also now on him to acknowledge the truce by changing the subject. "What are your plans from here?' he asked, returning to his meal.

"The group I'm with is divided. Some want to get back to Rhombus. Others are talking about detouring via the Himalaya plateau first. I've seen enough of mountains. I'd like to see something of the European cities, but I think I'm outvoted."

"That's exactly where I'm hoping to go . . ." Kyal started to answer automatically but fell silent as an implication of what he was saying became clear. He paused to wipe his mouth with a chow shack paper towel. No, it was too outrageous a thought. They had only just met.

He looked up. Lorili's eyes had an impish light. "How long did you say you were down for?" she asked.

"A week. A Terran week, that is."

"I'm not due back in Rhombus until Tenday." Evidently some Venusians stuck to their own fourteen-day cycle. Back home, a longer working spell was preferred, followed by enough days off to go somewhere or do something useful. Lorili let things hang for a moment—just enough not to be indelicate. "What would you say to going our own way together?" She shrugged lightly. "Seems simplest to me. And eminently sensible."

A woman putting a proposition to a man? And she hadn't even asked if there was a Mrs. Reen back home, or some such. That clinched his suspicion.

For form's sake, Kyal made a pretense of having to mull over it, then grinned. "So long as I don't have to listen to any Progressive propaganda," he said. Better to be clear about that from the outset, he supposed.

She neither questioned, confirmed, nor denied anything, but took a phone from her jacket pocket and punched in a code. Before Kyal had fully registered what she was doing, he heard her say, "Hello, Iwon. How's it going? . . . Did you get to the dam? . . . . Oh, just fine. . . . Yes, very interesting. Look, I've decided on a change of plan. We've all got different preferences, and there's only a few days left. I've met someone here who has the same agenda that I was hoping for. Why don't we go separate ways for now, and I'll see you back at Rhombus on Tenday? . . . Of course I'm sure. . . . Well, we can always call each other about that, can't we? . . . . Yes. . . . Not really. . . . I'm not sure yet. It depends on flights and things. I'll let you know. But if not, then I'll see you back in Rhombus. . . . Well, have fun there. . . . Whenever." She flipped the unit's cover shut and looked back at Kyal. "No problem," she announced.

Kyal had intended giving Moscow, the former Russian capital city, a miss. It had been obliterated by nuclear bombs in the Central Asian War and never rebuilt thereafter. Hence there was little to be seen there other than a small geological drilling and weather station, and some scattered excavating to probe the ruins. But a supply ferry on its way there from Rhombus and due to make a stop at Foothills Camp was less than an hour away when Kyal checked, and repair crew would be returning from Moscow to the central European region the following morning. Kyal called them, and yes they would have room for two extra. The ferry's stop at Foothills Camp was a brief one, and Kyal and Lorili left aboard it before Iwon and her other friends had returned.

En route to Moscow, they put down again to drop somebody off at small settlement of colonists at the site of what had been another Russian city called Volgograd, situated by a wide river. Apparently it had been the scene of large battle in the worldwide conflagration the historians were still trying to make sense of, that had happened before the Central Asian War. There was little to see, since it was getting dark by then. Kyal was beginning to wonder if there was anywhere on Earth that didn't have a battle associated with it from some era or another. Killing each other seemed to have been the Terrans' main preoccupation. There was certainly no denying that they became very proficient at it.

If Kyal was a VIP, the style of life that went with being a notable personage had changed markedly in the day that had elapsed since his coming aboard
Explorer 6
. The reception party at Moscow took the form of two site workers with a truck, and supper came as meat stew and bread in a prefab hut lit from a noisy motor-generator in an adjacent shed. But the chance to meet some of the field archeologists and geologists, and talk face-to-face with them around the stove until late in the night more than made up for the conditions. Kyal didn't particularly mind roughing it a little in any case. It felt like some of the expeditions to wilder parts of Venus in his student day. Lorili seemed to thrive on it.

The drilling station was one of a chain strung across northern Asia and the top of the Americas. The huge deposits of graded sediment, silt, amorphous muck forming a band of hills, plains, and swamps around the polar regions, filled with the fossil remains of millions of animals, told of flooding on an immense scale, in which the oceans had surged poleward and then retreated. The most likely explanation seemed to be one or more close encounters between Earth and another massive object—and not too far distant in the past. Significant in this connection was the fact that legends and myths going back to the earliest period of recorded Terran history contained vivid descriptions of skies filled with fiery objects and spectacles of violence unlike anything seen in the present heavens that were consistent with just such happenings. There were even suggestions that the most terrifying and destructive encounters might have been primordial Venus! However, the Terrans of later times refused to accept what Venusians already had no trouble seeing, and wrote it all off as fanciful invention. It seemed to be another part of the Terran proclivity for denying whatever didn't fit with their preconceptions. One of the geologists preferred the simpler explanation that they were collectively crazy.

Investigations into these and related matters indicated that the old Venusian myths about Froile appeared to have substance after all. Terran astronomic records showed that at the time of their presence on Earth, Venus had no moon. Also, its rotation had been slow and retrograde then, giving it a day that was longer than its orbital period—in contrast to the current rotation giving it a little over 75 days to its year.

Such speeding up as a young planet aged was consistent with the accepted electrical model of Solar System dynamics. Since planets carried electrical charge, any small initial rotation would constitute a current that would produce a magnetic field, which according to calculation would interact with the solar field in such a way as to enhance the effect and spin the planet faster. The general observation that planetary rotation rates correlated with magnetic field strengths seemed to support it —although Mars stood out as an anomaly. A newer proposition was that the capture of Froile some time after the Terrans became extinct was responsible, but it was hard to see how an object that small could have imparted the required angular momentum into a body the size of Venus, and the suggestion had not found many takers.

What had come out of it all, however, was that Froile could have caused the kind of havoc that the old Venusian legends implied when they talked about a time of hurricanes and floods, the seas moving over the land, and the sky falling. If, then, the much earlier Terran catastrophe had indeed involved Venus, the scale of the devastation and the terror induced by it were probably beyond the powers of imagination. The wonder, surely, was that anyone could have survived it at all.

There wasn't a lot of time to be spent at Moscow. They did drive out with some of the drilling engineers the first thing the next morning, but the operations were concerned primarily with obtaining samples of materials melted in the nuclear blasts, offering little to see. The surroundings were bleak, somber, and depressing, the feeling perhaps intensified by the knowledge that millions of people had been wiped out here, along with their city. They were happy enough to return by mid morning to catch the small, twin-motored service plane taking the repair crew back to Europe.

The "room for two extra" turned out to be a couple of folding jump seats in the rear compartment of the craft, cramped between toolboxes, cable reels, and assorted gear and tackle. Soon they were flying above a monotonous landscape of gray plains and marshes cut into patterns by sullen, winding rivers. Even the sixth of the planet that was supposedly land looked to be half water, Kyal thought to himself. Lorili was less talkative today, staring out at landscape, absorbed in her own thoughts. Fatigue was no doubt taking its toll. Kyal pulled the hood of his parka up around the back of his head as a cushion and settled himself as comfortably as it was possible to get against the bulkhead and the wall ribbing. Within minutes he was dozing.

Living things had fascinated Lorili since an early age. One factor that had no doubt contributed was her growing up on the island of Korbisan, in the Venus's northern mid-temperate region. "Temperate," that was, as the term was understood there. Hot and humid, covered with dense vegetation, and teeming with life, it would have qualified as tropical by Terran standards. The equatorial zone was too hot and dark from heavy, ever-present cloud cover for comfort. Life there was sparse due to sulfurous gases and pollution from liquid and vapor hydrocarbons, and it was generally avoided.

From their observations of the complexity of life and the intricacies of universe, Venusians had always considered obvious that the reality they found themselves part of owed its existence to a powerful creative intelligence of some kind, that made its presence felt through the very functions of consciousness and spirituality and life. If it acted for anything that could be understood as reasons, they would be its own reasons. Since there was no obvious way of knowing what such reasons were, or of doing much about them in any case, the sensible reaction seemed to be to accept that the span of existence called life was there, and get on with making the best of it. Although various speculations were sometimes aired, nobody claimed to really know the nature of the implied intelligence, its motives, the extent of its powers, its mental state, or much else about it. It was simply acknowledged as an organizing principle that defied the physical laws of inanimate forces and matter and caused impossible things to happen. In everyday speech it was referred to in such vague, general terms as "The Scheme of Things," which in latter times biochemists unraveling the genetic codes carried by the immense nucleic acid molecules had whimsically personified as "The Great Programmer." Sometimes, as when dealing with children or simply as a convenient shorthand, it was given the name "Vizek."

The Terrans had arrived at similar conclusions too. But in following their fashion of molding reality to suit their wishes, they had taken things to an absurd extreme by projecting their own fears, desires, likes, and dislikes into various forms of divine beings that concerned themselves with day-to-day human affairs, and judged, rewarded, or punished them as if the universe existed for that sole purpose. The cults founded on these beliefs proved an effective means of social control, enabling a few to exercise power and control over the many. A number of Venusian exo-historians, pondering skeptically on the discrepancies they uncovered between the ideals the cults preached and the reality of how they behaved, were led to wonder just how sincerely the professed beliefs were held. Strangely, it had never seemed to concern more than a minority of Terrans.

Venusians accepted that some restraint on individual behavior was necessary too, of course—but as a practical, common-sense aspect of making communal societies workable, not out of obedience to some supernaturally handed-down law to be coercively enforced. To Venusians, external conformity obtained through coercion was meaningless and in the end, self-defeating. Behavior that emerged freely from following their own internally adopted standards was what said something worthwhile about people. Politeness, a mindfulness for decorum, and respecting others through observances of simple social etiquette were examples.