I wasn’t overconfident about the reliability of my memories of what had happened in the depths of Asgard. After all, the person I’d had my enlightening conversation with was the same person that Susarma Lear remembered having killed. If her memory of what happened was an illusion calculated to reassure her, then so might mine be.
Needless to say, I didn’t want to mention this to Susarma Lear, because I didn’t want to admit just yet that I knew—or thought I knew—that Myrlin was still alive. I couldn’t help wondering, though, if it might have been Myrlin who had led the attack on Skychain City, maybe in command of a whole army of beings like himself. It was just possible that he was being used in much the same way I was—as a mercenary soldier.
If he was, I sure as hell wasn’t looking forward to taking up arms against him. The Salamandrans had built him big and tough, and the godlike men of Asgard probably had the ability to make him tougher still. The thought that we might be sent down to the surface to keep tabs on an army of giant soldiers armed by super-scientists was enough to make anyone’s blood run cold.
I didn’t feel disloyal about neglecting to confide these fears to Susarma Lear. I preferred to play my cards close to my chest, and keep my head down.
Some are born interesting, some make themselves interesting, and some have interestingness thrust upon them. But you can fight it, if you try.
8
I was keen to have a discussion with the Tetron bioscientist, 673-Nisreen but this proved difficult, partly because I was kept so busy, partly because the Tetron hardly ever left his cabin, and partly because Valdavia seemed to want all communication with the Tetron channeled through him.
Eventually, though, I did manage to speak to Nisreen long enough to arrange an assignation of sorts in his cabin. He seemed as pleased as I was to have the meeting set up, and I gathered that he would have issued an invitation himself had he not been as worried as Valdavia was about the necessity of observing protocol.
I let him ask me the first few questions, as if I were briefing him about Asgard. He’d never been there, and everything he knew about it was from memory chips that were long out of date.
I gave him a selective account of my adventures before moving on to what they implied.
“The people who thought there were no more than half a dozen levels always had a strong case,” I observed, “because the technology we were digging out of the top levels wouldn’t have been capable of erecting much more than that. The romantics who wanted Asgard to be an artefact from top to bottom had to credit its builders with technological powers far beyond anything known in the galactic community. We still can’t say, of course, whether there’s an ordinary planet inside the shells, but even if there is, we now know that the levels constitute a feat of engineering beyond anything your people or mine could contemplate. Imagine how long it must have taken to put that thing together!”
“It would seem to have been a remarkable achievement,” he opined, in typical Tetron fashion.
“And it begins to look,” I continued, “that it might be much older than many investigators thought. That might have interesting bearings on the question of the origin of the galactic races. I understand that your own researches also have some relevance to that?”
“It would be premature to draw conclusions,” he said. I didn’t intend to let him get away with that. I’d told him my side of the story. Now I wanted his.
“I was told on Goodfellow that DNA-based life has been found in the outer system of Earth’s star—micro-organisms deep-frozen for billions of years,” I said, broaching the matter as forthrightly as I dared, without running the risk of offending him. “The Tetrax must have had a chance to study thousands of life-bearing solar systems. How many are like ours in this respect?”
“Nearly all of them,” he said, lightly. “I know of one or two anomalous cases, but we have concentrated our researches on stars of the same solar type, whose planetary systems are roughly similar.”
“That seems to indicate that life didn’t evolve in any one of them—in fact, that there’s no way of knowing where DNA first came from.”
“We certainly have no basis for speculations about the ultimate origin of life,” admitted the Tetron.
“My ancestors always supposed that life evolved on Earth,” I said, carefully angling for more information. “Even when we came out into space and found the other humanoid races, we clung to that idea, and invented theories of convergent evolution to save it.”
“Our scientists never supposed that to be the case,” he informed me, with a touch of that lofty superiority that the Tetrax love to display. The best way get them to tell you something is to play up to that vanity.
“How did they work that out?” I asked, trying to sound suitably awed.
“A simple matter of the elementary mathematics of probability. The basic chemical apparatus of life is very complex. It is not only DNA itself, but all the enzymes associated with it—and the various types of RNA involved in transcription of the genetic code. It was easy to work out the probability of such a system arising by the random accretion of molecules. When we compared that probability to the area of our planet and the length of time since its origin, it was perfectly obvious that the chance of life originating there—or on any other planet—was absurdly small.
“It was obvious to us that the chemistry of life is so complicated that its evolution by chance would require vast areas of space and incredible spans of time. Our best estimate is that given the size of our universe, the length of time for which we expect it to endure, and the kind of life-history we expect it to follow, the odds against life evolving at all were about ten to one against. It would appear that we owe our existence to a remarkable stroke of luck.”
I didn’t ask him to explain the mathematics of this remarkable calculation, but I took it with a pinch of salt. The trouble with the calculus of probability is that you can easily get silly answers if there are factors operating which you don’t know about. Ludicrous improbabilities are ten a penny in scientific research.
“Does that explain why the life-systems of the homeworlds of all the galactic races are so very similar?” I asked.
“Not in itself,” he told me. “If your world and mine had simply received the same elementary biochemical system, in the form of bacteria and virus-like entities, natural selection might have built very different systems. The fact that the pattern is repeated so closely, to the point where the insects of Tetra are very similar in their range to the insects of Earth—and so on for all the other major groups—implies that each of our worlds was seeded more than once. We think that new genetic material drifts from the outer to the inner regions of solar systems more-or-less constantly, and that this provides a major source of variations upon which natural selection can work, but we also think that seedings of more complicated genetic packages have occurred two or three times in recent galactic history—within the last billion years, that is.”
“So you think that the humanoid gene-complex was actually dumped on the inhabited worlds we know—by godlike aliens using the whole galactic arm as a kind of garden?”
Tetrax can’t frown, but I could tell that he thought I was going way over the top, and he clearly didn’t want such implications read into his argument. “We could not isolate the humanoid gene-complex as such,” he said. “At present, our best theory is that the last seeding may have been done at the time when, in Earthly terms, the dinosaurs died out. That radical break in the evolutionary story is something that recurs on many worlds. But there is no reason to suppose that alien intelligences were responsible for the seeding.”