Symbionts (27 page)

“Just what the hell is the matter with you, Dev?” she demanded, ignoring the white, gold, and violet panorama on the lounge viewall behind the sofa. Set to display the planet’s surface as seen from a camera mounted on
Eagle’s
bow, the screen revealed no movement save the steady, silent glide of clouds, seas and mountains over the curve of the planet.

“Nothing,” Dev replied. “I told you, nothing! I’m fine!”

“You get sick all over the deck coming out of link, you can hardly stand up, and you tell me you’re
fine?”

He looked a little better now than when she’d met him by the link module. She’d slap-injected him with medical nano, then helped him back into the module, jacked him in, and summoned a med-psych monitor on the link.

“It’s okay, Kat. I’m okay. Don’t make more of it than it is.”

“That, Dev, sounds like a classic case of denial. I don’t want to hear what
you
think. What did the monitor program say? Or do I have to haul you down and let the nanosomatic engineers take you apart?”

“My physiodiagnostics still check okay,” he told her. “I’m a little… depressed, is all.”

“Depressed? Depressed? Depression doesn’t make people vomit. And it doesn’t turn people as close as we’ve been into strangers.”

He sighed. “Hate to tell you, Kat, but you’re wrong. It does all that, and more.”

“Did the monitor suggest treatment?”

He nodded. “It prescribed a series of sex and relaxation ViRsims, and a daily, five-minute series of in-link alpha modulations. Tranquilizers, in other words.”

“Okay. Fine. Are you doing it?”

He gave a half smile. “I’ve hardly had time to, have I? Anyway, I… I don’t think I really want to.”

“Why the hell not?”

“Because I’m more than halfway convinced that linking is my problem.”

Katya felt herself go cold. “What, you think you’re going null? That’s ridiculous, Dev, and you know it.”

Nulls were those people who, for physiological, psychological, religious, or ethical reasons could not accept the nano-grown cephlink hardware that allowed them to interact with technic society. They formed a substantial, if largely invisible, minority throughout both the Core and Frontier of the Shichiju.

“No, I’m not going null. Quite the opposite, in fact. I… think I’m in some kind of withdrawal.”

Katya looked for the right words to say, then failed. Withdrawal? She knew whatever Dev was going through had to be wrapped up in his experience with the Xenolink, since he’d never had any real trouble with linkage one way or the other before. He’d always shown a slight tendency toward technomegalomania, enough, she remembered, to get him disqualified for the Hegemony Navy, but except for an occasional touch of recklessness, it had never seemed to affect him.

What had changed?

At that moment, several off-duty engineers entered the lounge. Katya didn’t want to discuss something so personal as this in public, especially something that could erode the confidence the squadron’s personnel felt in their military CO if it got around.

Dev was obviously thinking the same thing. “Well, Katya,” he said rising from the sofa, “I’d better get back to work. Want to be linked in when
Rebel
hauls the
Valiant
into orbit. I’ll talk to you more about it later, if you want. I assure you, though, that there’s nothing wrong. Later?”

“At dinner,” she told him. “Officers’ mess.”

“At dinner.” He walked out, leaving her alone by the viewall.

But he wasn’t at dinner. When she inquired through
Eagle’s
AI network, she learned he was in a tactical sim, overseeing the beginnings of the repair work to both
Constellation
and
Valiant.
She left word for Dev that she would be in the lounge, then returned there to find a seat in front of the viewall.

The compartment was fairly crowded when she got there. Brenda Ortiz was there, along with several of the scientists and programmer techs from the expedition’s contact team.

She stood before the viewall for a time, watching the drift of ShraRish’s seas and clouds. In the distance, an odd assembly of bulky, angular shapes gleamed in the sunlight. Frigates were, by ship-class definition, larger than corvettes, but
Rebel
was still wearing her skip rider, and the dismounted
Valiant
looked like a toy clutched tightly against the other ship’s belly.

Was Dev really addicted to linkage? She’d heard of such things happening, of course, though usually it involved some poor guy—or gal—wiring into a continuous orgasm loop and burning out the pleasure centers. Such people weren’t good for much after that, not without a massive neural rewrite, a reprogramming of memory and personality that amounted to wiping the brain clean and starting over.

She shuddered, preferring not to think about that. Whatever was haunting Dev was nothing so obvious as sex addiction. He’d mentioned being depressed, but this was more subtle than TDS, or technodepressive syndrome. He could still function and didn’t seem impaired in any way.

But how would it affect his performance as the squadron’s commanding officer? If he had to be relieved, Lisa Canady would replace him, and while Katya had nothing specific against her, the woman was still something of an unknown quantity.

Maybe,
she told herself,
it’s none of your business. Go back to the
Trixie,
see to your troops, and get ready for the landings. You’re going to have enough to worry about without wondering what’s going on in Dev’s scrambled brains.

But she couldn’t just walk away from him. She had to help. But how?

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

Katya started. Brenda Ortiz stood at her side, a glass of caff in her hand. She was staring at the viewall display, where the curved horizon of ShraRish bowed against the tiny, blazing disk of Alya A.
Eagle
was past the planet’s terminator and falling into night.

“It makes you wonder,” Brenda continued, “just how accurate our notions of our own planet’s history really are.”

“What do you mean?”

Brenda nodded toward the planet below. “Everything we’ve learned about that ecosystem has been teaching us more about our own. And about life in general. It turns out that the evolution of life isn’t quite so unlikely as we always thought.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Katya said. She welcomed the distraction, needing to think about something else for a while, before her software burned itself into a loop. “Living ecologies are still scattered pretty thinly. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have to do as much terraforming as we do, right?”

“Oh, ecologies where we can live comfortably are rare enough, all right. But everything we learn about life, about how it works as a system, how it spreads, how it evolves,
everything
demonstrates that life is a part of the natural order of things. It’s as though the universe was designed specifically to produce life. It’s not an accident.”

“You’re starting to sound like a Determinist,” Katya said, grinning to disarm what could have sounded like a challenge of Brenda’s intelligence. Determinism was one of the host of more or less fuzzy-minded religions that had appeared among the worlds of the Shichiju, a tenet that, like predestination before it, held that everything that happened in the universe was preordained and beyond the reach of human will.

“The first great revolution of biology,” Ortiz said, with the air of a classroom lecturer, “was the theory of evolution. The second was genetics, and the understanding that life was an elaborate means of preserving and transmitting DNA.

“The third began when we realized that the beginnings of life on Earth stretched back a lot farther into the past than we’d imagined at first. Fossil evidence showed that there was life on the planet within half a billion years after a solid crust formed. Right?”

“I’m linked.”

“Okay. That early appearance of life on Earth demonstrates that wherever you have CHON—carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen—plus assorted seasonings and a mean temperature range between zero and one hundred Celsius, sooner or later—and probably sooner—life is going to appear.”

“Wait, that’s what I don’t understand. Most of the worlds of the Shichiju were prebiotics. No life… just the building blocks life needed to get started. I thought the idea was that life was limited to worlds that had something like a large, close moon to stir things up on a regular cycle.”

Brenda nodded. “Ah, yes. The old Tidal Theory.”

“Right. Worlds that had their own native ecologies before humans showed up are rare. Earth. New America and New Earth. Eridu. Maia. Six or eight others in a volume of space a hundred light years across. And the Alyan worlds, of course, and even there ShraRish started off lifeless.”

“Exactly. Out of the eighty-some worlds we know with the prerequisite conditions for life, fifteen developed their own ecosystems. Almost twenty percent. And life was deliberately introduced on the rest.”

“Well, yes, but those others were terraformed. Humans deliberately creating a new ecosystem where there was none before. It wasn’t…”

“Natural?”

“Right. It wasn’t natural.”

“How do you distinguish natural from artificial?”

“Easy. We planted life on places like Liberty and Herakles by using technology, and lots of it. Sky-els and atmosphere generators as big as mountains, just for a start. Now
that’s
artificial.”

“How life does what it does is beside the point, Katya. Look at the Nagas. They spread from world to world too, but not by what we would call intelligent volition. They’re undeniably intelligent, yes, but their world view and their version of technology are so different from what we know that the actual process, blindly firing capsules containing nanotechnic matter programmed with the template of a new Naga, really isn’t any more reasoned than when two people have sex and conceive a child. The mechanics of the process aren’t conscious and they aren’t planned, at least not by us. Another way of looking at it is that
life
planned it that way, through biodiversity and natural selection. I’ve heard it said that we are DNA’s way of making more DNA.”

Katya laughed. “I see your point. Still, it’s hard to see life as an automatic process when eighty percent of the worlds we’ve found that
could
have had life, didn’t.”

“Ah, but how many of those worlds might have developed their own ecosystems, given another billion years or two?”

“Well, as I understand it,” Katya said, “that Tidal Theory you mentioned a minute ago says that strong tides are necessary for the appearance of life. That the constant mixing of CHON soup in the twice-daily rise and fall of the tides, coupled with the appropriate thermal and ultraviolet input, gives a regularity to hot and cold, light and dark, wet and dry that encourages the appearance of long-chain molecules that are both strong enough to survive the cycles and complex enough to self-replicate. That sure seems to explain the native life on New America, at any rate.” Katya’s homeworld possessed a single huge, close satellite, Columbia, that raised gentle but enormous tides across the world’s oceans twice in each long day.

“Maybe the moonless worlds are just slow,” Brenda said with a smile. “They still have the tides generated by the local sun, those that rotate, anyway. And maybe there are other ways of doing things that we don’t understand yet.”

“Like the way life got started originally on GhegnuRish?”

“Especially
how it got started on GhegnuRish so early in the planet’s history, and how it developed so quickly. It’s almost as though life knows it doesn’t have much time before a star like Alya leaves the main sequence and makes the planet uninhabitable.

“That’s why I was wondering about whether we know all there is to know about our own planet’s history.” She gestured at the golden globe of ShraRish, a glorious splash of color hiding sulfurous volcanoes and sulfuric acid rain. “Looking at that, it makes me wonder. Those earliest fossils we’ve found on Earth, the ones going back to the first billion years or so of Earth’s evolution, they’re obviously simple things, but they don’t tell us much about the actual conditions, save that there was liquid water present. We can guess about the actual composition of the atmosphere, of course. CO
₂
. Sulfur compounds in the air.”

“You’re saying conditions on the early Earth were like those on the DalRiss worlds.” Katya wondered where she was going with this.

“Not really,” Brenda said. “The modern Alyan atmosphere isn’t any more similar to what it evolved from than Earth’s atmosphere today is to its atmosphere three billion years ago. Environmental conditions are changed and regulated by life. But conditions on the early Earth and on the early GhegnuRish must have been similar. A
lot
more similar than they are today. Probably the main difference was in how much energy the system received from its sun.

“It got me wondering if maybe there’d been a time, early in our planet’s history, when life was basically, uh, DalRissan. Breathing CO
₂
and giving off oxygen, utilizing sulfur compounds for energy-transfer molecules, the way we use phosphates. Maybe there was a whole, entire alternate biology on Earth that we don’t know about today, one that was wiped out when too much oxygen was dumped into the atmosphere or that couldn’t compete with our kind of life when it wiggled along or, well, whatever. You’ve heard of the Burgess Shale?”

Katya shook her head.

“One of the great paleontological discoveries of history.A group of fossils from five hundred fifty million years ago that included types of animal completely unrelated to modern life. Things so bizarre that, well, the name given to one species was
Hallucigenia.”

Katya laughed. “Evidence of an alien invasion of Earth?”

“Not quite. Evidence that the course life takes as it evolves is subject to abrupt and unexpected twists and changes. But for an accident that we can’t even guess at today, intelligence on Earth could have evolved from one of those Burgess monsters, maybe something like
Opabina,
with five stalked, compound eyes and a long, flexible trunk equipped with pincers on the end.”