The Ninth Circle (54 page)

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Authors: R. M. Meluch

BOOK: The Ninth Circle
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“Explains why we never see them,” said the Yurg.
“They’re underground!”
“There’s no conduit. Those are just naked tunnels,” said Taher.
“Sure those aren’t wormholes?” said Kerry Blue. “I mean for really big worms?”
Rhino said, “Why do we think these are cloke tunnels?”
“Are you breathing the same skat I am?” said Asante with his shirt collar pulled up over his mouth and nose.
“Delgado said it when we first got here,” said Cain. “It smells clokey.”
“If it’s clokes, they’ve come a long way from their spaceship,” said Colonel Steele. “They had to cover the same distance we did. Addai! How many clicks out are we?”
Asante checked. “About a buck and a quarter, sir.”
Steele wondered how many clokes there really were. Their spaceship wasn’t that big, yet there were a lot of openings in the dirt walls.
The Marines stood around the rim of the sinkhole, wondering if it was safe to climb down into the crater to search for their gear.
Steele hailed
Merrimack
to get a sounding of the solidity of the crater floor and the location of all tunnels that could undermine their path.
Merrimack
sent the map. Tracking also sent Asante the precise coordinates of the Marines’ buried equipment.
Retrieving their stuff was easy. All a Marine had to do was start digging at a spot, and a fox jumped down to take over. They retrieved field packs, landing disks, swords, canteens. A shovel.
Fluffy ate a package of C-Rats.
The foxes leaped back out of the crater. They cleaned their fur and their claws, then started back the way they’d come at a dogtrot.
Finding themselves not being followed, the foxes circled back round to the Marines. The looks on their alien faces clearly said,
Can we GO now?
Steele ordered his squad, “Wear your LDs on your backs. D-collars around your necks. D-gear will be turned on at all times.”
He had
Merrimack
chart a path for them over solid ground to get them closer to the LEN encampment. The ship’s sensor techs plotted the cloke tunnels and sent the locations to Asante’s omni.
There were an ungodly lot of them.
“Any clokes in those tunnels?” Asante asked.
“At current settings our sensors can’t tell the difference between a cloke and dirt,” the tech said.
“Can I suggest you adjust your settings?”
Technicians didn’t take suggestions well.
Colonel Steele bellowed for his squad to move out.
The foxes came along.
 
The expedition members continued to take their meals all together around the fire pit. The pirates insisted. No one ever knew who was getting a pirate to share his plate.
Patrick Hamilton could never be trusted not to say something inappropriate. He just had to comment on The Ninth Circle’s fondness for leopard spots and leopard paw prints.
“The leopard choice doesn’t make sense,” Patrick said.
Glenn cringed.
Nicanor shot Patrick an odd look. Told Patrick coldly, “The leopard guards the lowest circles of hell.”
“Yes,” said Patrick. “The
other way around
. The leopard’s not there to protect the lower circles from outsiders. The leopard is supposed to keep the damned
in
!”
Glenn’s eyes shut themselves, pained. She breathed, “Nox, please don’t kill my husband.”
“The leopard, Dr. Hamilton,” said Nox, chillingly reasonable, “joined the other side.”
 
When the subject of DNA came up again around the fire pit, Nox asked anyone, “Why is this just coming out now? Your expedition has been rotating scientists in and out of here for seven years. Why did no one notice?”
Peter Szaszy answered hotly, “Because SOMEONE never brought a microbiologist on board.” That directed at Izrael Benet. Benet had little enough to say these days.
Sandy Minyas, who never let an I-told-you-so get by her, said, “Our resident physicians were asleep at the switch. They saw the signs and did everything to sit on it.”
“Alien genetics is not in the scope of our project, and you know it,” said the senior physician, Dr. Cecil. “We weren’t sent here to chase uni-corns.”
Wynans gestured toward Glenn and Patrick. “Before those two went wandering unprotected off reservation, no one caught an infectious microbe. No one had any reason to analyze the base life chemistry.”
“And then you got rear-ended by a unicorn,” said Nox.
“That’s a good summation, sir,” said Wynans.
Dr. Sandy Minyas told Nox, “They’ve known for a long time that Zoe has proteins in common with Earth. And proteins don’t just replicate themselves.”
“You’re out of your area of specialization, Dr. Minyas,” Cecil warned. “There is more than one way to build a protein. Protein doesn’t indicate DNA. Other worlds have other ways of manufacturing sugars, phosphates, and bases. There are as many different ways to build life as there are inhabited worlds. No two of them alike. There was no reason to look for DNA just because we found compatible proteins here. And may I say the question of how we missed it strikes me as trivial, petty, and pointless. That question misses the colossal picture. The real issue is how did this happen.”
“It was
my
question,” said Nox, cleaning his nails with a stiletto.
Cecil blanched.
“So how did this happen?” said Nox.
“Easily,” said Dr. Minyas. “We are all—all of us, everywhere in the known universe—built from the same basic blocks—the elements. All elements abide by the same rules of construction. Two hydrogen atoms bond with an oxygen atom to make water. Given same pressure and temperature, that combination will behave the same every single time. There is a logic to the universe. An element is, well, elemental.”
“DNA is a
little
more complex than a water molecule, thank you very much, Dr. Minyas,” said Dr. Cecil, teeth on edge.
“But the DNA macromolecule is still made up of just five common elements from the skinny end of the periodic table. Hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus.”
“That’s it?” said Glenn. “What about iron?”
“Iron is in your blood,” said Sandy Minyas. “Not in your genetic makeup.”
“I don’t understand.”
“DNA is the blueprint for terrestrial life. You’re reading iron off the construction materials list for the finished product.”
Szaszy said, “Sandy, your view is far too simplistic. You’re leaving out the infinite variables, the aeons needed for a solar system to coalesce. You gloss over everything that might happen to the planet as it condenses and cools. There’s no predicting what kind of atmosphere will form or whether it will even stay there. You need some kind of cyanobacteria to organize itself and make the nitrogen atoms let go of each other long enough to bind with carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen to make the formation of organic life possible. Your blithe ‘easily’ ignores the infinite variables and complex orchestration of processes that resulted in that chemical self-organization that is terrestrial life.”
Sandy Minyas said, “The variables are not quite infinite and apparently not random. And it
is
simple. Even our twenty amino acids are made of only hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, and some have sulfur. These are not exotic ingredients, guys. As for fitting them together, all elements have limited ways of forming bonds. Reactions of amino acids with other amino acids is preferential. It’s a complex game board, but there
are
rules.”
“And you’re obviously all about rules, Sandy,” Dr. Cecil muttered.
“Could someone burp Dr. Cecil?” said Sandy. “We have an Earthlike planet here. It is not unimaginable that similar forces would come together to create this pattern twice.”
Cecil said, “Except that you’re completely ignoring the fact that DNA and RNA are chemically difficult to produce.
And
there is a chicken-and-egg conundrum at work here. DNA manufactures RNA, but DNA consists of two strands of RNA. Nucleic acid is needed to make a protein and proteins are needed to make nucleic acid. It’s an informational tail chase. How can a substance spontaneously organize itself into living existence when a living system is required to form those base substances?”
“Suffice to say that it
did
,” said Sandy Minyas. “Twice. And why not? DNA
works
. The basic units are simple molecules. Maybe DNA’s particular combination of molecules isn’t the only template to build life, but it’s a really good one.”
Senior xenozoologist Peter Szaszy lamented, “Everything I knew about the origins of life has gone out the window.”
“Out the window? Szasz, what you knew was never in the building.”
“Thank you for that, Dr. Minyas.”
Cecil said, “The rise of DNA was so improbable as to be miraculous.
Therefore
the first time was a miracle. A second time is fraud.”
“Give it up, Cecil,” said Wynans, who had tested a hell of a lot of Zoen organisms. “This is no fraud. That genie’s already out and granting wishes.”
Sandy Minyas said, “It is precisely because it happened once that a second time is possible. And because it is possible, it is inevitable.”
“Back up,” said Wynans. “How do you figure that? Where are you getting the inevitability from?”
“Because it
did
happen, that means it
can
happen, and when something can happen in nature, it
will
. The same forces that culminated in the first formation of DNA are still at work in the universe.”
Glenn tossed out a word she’d heard once, “Is this Panspermia?”
Pained faces around the fire pit told her it was an ignorant question.
“Panspermia was a bit of a joke really,” said Dr. Minyas. “The chicken-and-egg conundrum was so confounding that the early theorists resorted to importing their eggs from outer space.”
“I don’t get it,” said Glenn.
“According to the theory of Panspermia, the same comets or meteors that salted Earth with amino acids necessary for life also scattered those same molecules onto other planets in the Solar System. Which still left hanging out there the question of how those amino acids formed in the first place.”
“How did they?”
“We don’t know. We can make DNA in the laboratory—”
“
You can?
Can you, Sandy?”
“Oh, back into a unicorn, Cecil. We can make DNA in the laboratory, but we can’t re-create the
evolution
of DNA in the lab.”
Wynans added, “We’re probably overlooking a strategic variable. The presence of chaos means the smallest critical variation can change the whole picture.”
“So we have the same genetic code as the Zoens,” said Dr. Rose, whose specialty was alien atmospheres. “Does that mean we can mate with them?”
“Can you mate with a dog?” Dr. Minyas asked back.
“That’s been suggested to me,” said Dr. Rose. “More than once.”

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