Scuzzworms (25 page)

“A lot of answers are here for us.  Look, eight oviducts, four on each side.  The huge central organs act as ovaries, and that is where all of the genetic heterogeneity is located.  The rest of the creature appears bicellular, not tricellular like most other species. Camille, we need to disseminate the genetic data to the rest of the project to try to find genetic matches.  Look at the variety!  If each of these millions of cells represents different species, then the number of species we are seeing on the surface is only a fraction of what is hidden in these ovaries.  These things are huge genetic storehouses!”

The excitement of the others was growing to match Imelda’s.  “Explain the circulation to me,” she said to Post.  “I’ve never seen an ovary tie into a liver’s circulation before.  See, the main blood flow from the gut drains through the liver, much like in earth species, but then the portal lymphatic flow goes to the ovary?”

Post stared at the diagram, frowning.  “I suppose that the simulation could be wrong, but it sure looks like it.  You would expect the liver to screen toxins from the bloodstream but I’m surprised to see the lymphatics routed directly to the ovary afterwards.  Most species protect their ovaries from exposure to toxins a little better than that. You can’t expect the liver to completely clean the blood on one pass.  That IS odd.”

“Maladaptation.  This whole planet is a glorious example of maladaptation.  No floods, no holocausts, just unchanging climate and benevolent conditions.  The entire ecology down there is as fragile as a butterfly’s wings.”  Camille shook her head in pity.

Post interrupted, “Look at the physiologic data for the ovaries!  They vary slightly in temperature, electrolyte concentration, and oxygenation depending on which portion of the ovary you look at.  Even the oviducts are not identical.  Each one differs just enough to provide even widely varying fetuses with an acceptable place to grow.  I’ve never seen anything like this!

“Supermoms!  The things are supermoms!  They could grow anything in those oviducts!” he exulted.   

Imelda frowned.  A fragile ecology with superincubating moms...?  “Including bacteria or viruses.  Jamison may be right about the rest of this ecology, but she could be very wrong about the borgettes.  If there
is a contamination then this is the spot where we’ll find it.  I need to review a lot of videotapes, I’m afraid.  I have about fifty stationary observation posts that I haven’t cracked the data on.  Postman, do you think you could review the immune system for me?  Build a simulation on what might happen if a borgette is contaminated.  Let me know when you have the preliminary report, okay?”

“What about reporting this?  We need to write a formal paper,” Camille chided her.

“You do it.  Organize it and do the presentation yourself.  Ship a tape out to Caldwell via priority and damn the cost.  Charge it to my account if there’s any problem.”

Post’s face reddened.  “There won
’t be any problem,” Camille answered.

After Camille cut off, Imelda turned to look at Post, who sat thoughtfully at his workstation. “Can you do me another favor?”

His eyes met hers and she looked away.  “What kind?” he asked.

“Call Jamison.  Tell her that I said to call a conference and ask Camille to set the time.  She knows what to do.”

He frowned slightly.  “Sure.  Tell me, do you always get other people to do things like this for you?”

Imelda shrugged.  “How do you think I got my reputation?”

He frowned as she turned back to her workstation.

#

“We have a match!”  Imelda started, accustomed to the silence of the last few days.  Camille and Kellogg stood behind her grinning.  They had been busy at their workstations and had spoken hardly at all in the past week.

She turned to face them.  “A cell match?”  Imelda tried to sound enthusiastic but exhaustion crept into her voice.

“A cell match!  To a borgette cell!  In one of the grazers we transported up.  Instead of just asking the computer to look randomly for DNA matches like we had been doing, we realized that the best place to look would be right around the site of the accident.  Bingo!  A perfect cell match!”

Imelda nodded.  “Let me see,” she asked. She scanned the description of the specimen.  One of the cells in the tricellular beast matched a cell from the borgette.  Imelda looked at the site where the cell had been obtained from the borgette and caught her breath.  The cell had not been obtained from the ovary but from the borgette’s body tissues.  Her frown deepened.

“What’s wrong?” Camille asked. “Tissue source,” she answered cryptically and waited as Camille figured out what she meant.

“That’s crazy,” Camille said.  “Maybe there was a mistake.”

“How many of the specimens that we brought up have you looked at?” Imelda asked.

Camille and Kellogg exchanged glances.  “Well, actually, that was the first one,” they answered.

Imelda continued to frown thoughtfully.  “Run a program to look at them all.  See if you can find any matches between beasts as well as with the borgette.”

Kellogg interrupted her.  “You would expect to find some similar sequences between species because of common evolution.  Won’t this be a waste of our time?  The paleontologists will be looking at all this later, anyway.”

“Just do it, Kellogg.  Give me a preliminary after the first ten species.”

Kellogg continued to look doubtful but followed Camille back to their workstations.

It was not very long before they were back at her station.  “They all match!  All of them have the same cell type in common with the borgette.  We’ve only looked at three, not ten, but they all have the one cell in common!  This is wild!”

She nodded, thoughtful still.  She ached to sit down and pour over the histology slides with a cellular biologist to see what else the beasts shared, but first things first.  She hadn’t reviewed enough videos yet.

“Write it up. You and Kellogg do a joint presentation.  Now scram.  See if you can match any of the other cell types.”

They stared at her agape.  “We’re getting close to the answer!  Don’t you see, this is a major clue to how the lifecycle works!  Don’t you want...?”

“Just do what I said, okay?  I don’t have time.  I’m too busy being a video playback machine.  Scram, get it?”  Her voice rose only slightly, she thought.

Both of them flushed in anger.  After a long pause spent clinching fists, they whirled away to stomp back to their workstations.  Imelda slammed the privacy shield shut so she wouldn’t hear their comments.

Most of the borgettes that she had checked on had been rather clearly healthy.  They popped up out of their bogs with amazing regularity, releasing a predictable quota of eggs.  Of the fate of the eggs she had only a sketchy idea, but most of them seemed to hatch on their own with the offspring swimming to the shore while a few were swarmed upon by a herd of similar species.  Sometimes the herd would scoop up the egg and carry it off; other times it would surround the egg and assist in the hatching.  The progeny seemed healthy enough for the most part.

In one distant bog, on
Himalaya, she saw a group of reptilians surround an egg and paste a flat portion of their anatomy to the egg.  They carried the egg off as a group, resembling a single multi-extremity creature.  Imelda sent a message to the scientists studying that area to take a close look at what happened next to the egg.

It was at the twelfth observation post that she found anything even faintly amiss.  The database documented a clearly erratic egg laying behavior on the part of a large borgette.  It was uncomfortably close to the site of the accident.

She scrutinized the visual of the beast carefully.  It was a mottled tan animal, quite huge.  From its condition, it must be rather old, with a great accumulation of crusted slime about its head and cracking of its skin.

It was a bit more attractive than the original Borg but not by much.  It’s egg-laying had become increasingly erratic.  Its ovaries were huge and growing bigger with time.

She sighed.  Disease and illness were norms in any ecology.  Only humans viewed such as obscene and tried to completely eliminate them.  The borgette was probably just suffering from the natural afflictions of age.  There had been a long gap in egg-laying beginning five standard months before. She looked at the videos of its activity during that period.

Not much to see, really, thanks to the mud.  Faint movements of the jaw told her that it still ate, but little else.  She fast-forwarded the tape to the most recent egg-laying, about one standard week previously.   The image, which had heretofore remained mired in one spot, twitched.  It twitched more and more vigorously, then began its slow rise to the surface.  Imelda checked the metabolic rate.  Nothing significantly different from before.  Its movements were similar as well.  Probably just old, that was all, just old.

The sides of the beast were bulging.  It must be enormously old to have developed such huge ovaries.  She wondered briefly how long borgettes lived.  Hard to find out when corpses disappeared before they had finished dying.

Two eggs emerged.  Not an impressive effort after the long rest.  The surrounding animals came to mill about the shore of the bog briefly during the egg laying before they left uninterestedly. The borgette returned to its haven of mud with a mouth full of worms for comfort.

Imelda frowned.  Not necessarily an abnormal response but odd. Must be an egg from a species different from those on the shore.  She magnified the infrared image of the eggs, curious about what creatures might be hatching.

The two creatures inside the eggs looked quite similar, probably of the same species. Warm blooded, four extremities, single heart in the center of a large lung cavity.  Abdominal cavity with a right sided liver-like gland.  Large cranial cavity for weight.

Imelda felt her gut tighten.  Not a really huge cranial cavity, only about one fifth that of an adult human, but the specimens would only weigh around three or four kilos after hatching.  Remembering her long ago conversation with Caldwell about singleton intelligences, she frowned.  It was a long shot but maybe worth a look at the hatchlings.

She fast-forwarded the tape.  The eggs continued to float on the surface of the bog as the creatures harbored within kicked and squirmed.  As time grew close to the present she noticed that their kicking grew less.  She paused the tape and checked to see if the eggs had changed much.

The creatures inside had grown!  Nothing on Iago was supposed to grow!  The shell was thinning, resorbing.  She fast-forwarded again and as she watched, red spots appeared, first on one egg, then the other.  A few worms scuttled by to clean off the eggs, then more red spots appeared.  Although the creatures inside still moved, it was with decreasing vigor.  Imelda switched to real time.

The eggs were still there, unhatched.  The creatures inside were quiet, still.  Their hearts still beat but at a more rapid rate.  The shells were now very thin, translucent and fragile, and the red spots were larger and more widespread.
Worms glided over the surfaces of the eggs hungrily.  She could almost see the shapes inside.

Imelda sat back in consternation.  If these specimens were intelligent she had to know.  For CHA.  It looked as though they would be dead soon, maybe even eaten. She knew what her decision had to be even as she watched another worm glide over the surface of one of the eggs.  She must collect one for the mobile unit to biopsy.  This opportunity was too important to pass up.   

She hit the intercom.  “Post, do you still have a mobile unit?”

He stared back at her, startled.  “Oh, yes.  Two, in fact.”

“Is one of them close to the contamination site?”

His eyes widened a little.  “Yes.  I keep a close watch on the area since no one else is allowed to.  You need it?”

Imelda was so distracted by his statement that she almost forgot why she had called.  Not allowed to?  But..?

“Yes.  I need it.  This location.”  She gave him the coordinates.  “Stat!  Can you move in?”

“Sure.  I’m in a grazing area following a herd not far from that location.  Be there in less than an hour. What’ve you got?”

Imelda paused.  What did she have?  “An egg,” she answered cryptically.

The scene hadn’t changed when she finally heard the soft rustling noise that told her Post’s unit was arriving.  “Careful,” she warned him.  “We can’t afford any attacks.  We’ve got to reach this bog as soon as possible.”

Post gently eased the mobile unit closer to the bog, having had plenty of practice in maneuvering around hypersensitive shorelines.  Several animals came to sniff the unit but none alarmed.  It was almost another hour before the unit drew close enough to the eggs to engage the grabarm.

Post grunted when he caught sight of the eggs.  “What’s wrong with them?” he asked.  “They look like they’re bleeding.”

“I don’t know,” she answered.  “There’s something odd about the creatures inside.”

The grabarm gently closed around the closest egg and lifted it into a specimen bin.  They both watched eagerly as the egg entered the view of the bin’s magnifying camera.

The egg’s shell was almost transparent. With no worms slithering about, Imelda and Post finally got a good look at the specimen inside.

After a long minute’s stunned silence, Post whispered the words that clogged Imelda’s dry throat.  “It can’t be...”