I found Bisset in the lounge with Ulf Thoring and the rest of the IGWI crew. The guys were playing some variant of poker and drinking beer; I could see the pharmacy’s stock of sober-up nano-pills would be called on that night. Bisset sipped his beer and played a few hands, but you could see from the body language what was going on with those smart-ass college boys.
The Citizen-Associate programme of the International Xenographic Agency is aimed squarely at people like Ramone Bisset: his active life extended by decades by the new longevity treatments, his curiosity still bright, his skills long outmoded. Such is the capacity of a quantum-foam-drive starship that there is room for guys like Ramone, whatever they can contribute. It helps the sponsoring nations justify the IXA’s cost to their taxpayers: anybody can be an explorer, so the slogan goes. But the Associates aren’t necessarily given much respect.
I’m not in the habit of taking on lame ducks, and I suspected Bisset could look after himself. But I didn’t like to see a thoughtful man treated that way. I don’t blame the IGWI guys, however. All male, none older than thirty-five, all from a university at Stockholm, Ulf and his guys were a tightly bonded bunch, and too young to be empathetic.
I was glad when, at the start of my next work shift the following morning, Bisset showed up at Dreamers’ Lake.
My cubs were already at work, wading knee-deep in the scummy pond, attaching floating sensor pods to the cognitive net we’d placed over Juliet. I was standing on the comparative comfort of the beach, before a monitoring station on which the first signals were beginning to be processed.
Bisset raised his head to the brightening sky. ‘Nice morning.’
I murmured, ‘Perhaps. That makes me uneasy.’ I pointed upwards.
That was the Hammer, a worldlet the size of Mars, visible in the bright sky, clearly larger since the end of my last shift.
‘Ah,’ Bisset said. ‘You do get the feeling that it might fall at any moment and smash all of this.’
‘But not today. So, the guided tour. You understand what these mounds are? They occurred on primitive Earth – still do, in places where it’s too salty for the predators, like snails. They are layers of bacterial mats …’ A mat of blue-green algae will form on the scummy surface of a shallow pond. The mat traps mud, and then another layer forms on top of the first, and so on. With time the mound builds up, and specialised bacterial types inhabit the different layers, until you have a complex, interdependent, miniature ecology. ‘We’ve found bacterial mats everywhere we’ve looked—’
‘Beginning on Mars,’ Bisset said.
‘Well, that’s true. And everywhere there is standing liquid, water or perhaps hydrocarbons, you get mounds.’
‘Stromatolites.’
The pedant in me objected, although I use the word myself. ‘Strictly speaking, stromatolites are terrestrial forms of blue-green algae. These bacteria are photosynthetic but they’re not algae. You can see they are purplish, not green. They don’t use chlorophyll; their chemistry kit is adapted to the spectrum of their sun. So these mounds are like stromatolites, but—’
‘“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”’
‘More Shakespeare?’
‘Sorry. It’s a bad habit.’
‘The mound bugs here are related to us, of course, although we’ve yet to classify them.’
It would have been a major shock if GC-IV’s bugs hadn’t been a distant relation of our own, their carbon-water chemistry dictated by a kind of skewed DNA. One of the triumphs of the IXA’s exobiology programme has been to establish that all the carbon-water life forms we have found are related, apparently descended from an ancestor that came blowing in from outside the Galaxy altogether. Subsequent ‘generations’ had spread by panspermia processes from star to star. But that origin theory is controversial; the family tree of galactic life is still incomplete. Some even believe that the ultimate origin isn’t carbon-water at all, but lies in a deeper substrate of reality.
‘And,’ Bisset said, ‘there is mind. There, in those mounds.’
‘Oh, yes. Ramone, even though we have only found microbes – no multi-celled life forms like ourselves – there is mind everywhere we look.’ Everywhere there is a network to be built, messages to be passed, complexity to be explored, you’ll find a mind. Again Mars was the prototype, with the billion-year thoughts of its microbial mats locked in that little world’s permafrost layers. ‘You can see we labelled the mounds with marker dye. For the cognitive mapping we looked for the best specimen – the most intricate structure, the least damaged. We picked her.’ I pointed to the larger mound, over which the sensor net had been laid.
‘“Her”?’
A bit sheepishly I said, ‘Anthropomorphising is a bad habit of animists. We call her Juliet. We labelled the mounds – see, that’s Alpha, that’s Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo—’
‘And Juliet. Oh, it’s the old NATO phonetic alphabet, isn’t it? My father was a copper on the streets of London, and they used the alphabet for their call signs. He was Sierra Oscar One Nine…’
I admit I switched off. Why are old peoples’ anecdotes always so damn dull? It doesn’t seem adaptive, evolutionarily speaking.
‘And you can trace her thoughts,’ he said now. ‘Juliet’s. That’s a question of detecting biochemical impulses, right?’
‘We have an analytic technique called animistic deconvolution. It’s possible to break the characteristic signals of a mind into its component parts. You’d be surprised by the commonalities we find.’
He surprised me with his next question. ‘Does she understand death?’
‘Why, I don’t know. Ramone, these minds are not like ours. She doesn’t need to know death. As long as the pond survives Juliet will always be renewed, by one bacterial layer over another. She’s effectively immortal.’
‘Except that tomorrow all this will be destroyed. The mounds, the lake—’
I watched his face. This wasn’t the first young system I had visited; I had come across such reactions as Bisset’s before. ‘This stellar system is unfinished. Just a swarm of worldlets. Collisions are the order of the day, Ramone. In fact it’s the way planets are built.’
‘A rough sculpting.’
‘Indeed. GC-IV is around a hundred million years old – that is, since the last collision big enough to melt the surface. A scummy crust formed in a few million years, comets delivered ocean water, life drifted in from space. Continents, oceans, lakes, air – it all comes together in an eyeblink of geological time. In between catastrophes, you see, there is time for life. But GC-IV hasn’t finished being built yet. It happened to Earth.’
‘But in a few days, everything alive now will be gone.’ He craned his head, looking up at the sky. ‘Is it possible Juliet knows the Hammer is coming?’
‘I don’t see how.’
‘Do you think we should warn her?’
‘No,’ I said firmly. ‘Even if we could, we shouldn’t try.’ Xenoethics is a new and uncertain field. As for me, I trained as a doctor. I don’t believe in intervening if there’s a risk you can do more harm than good. ‘We can’t lift off a whole biosphere – we couldn’t even save Juliet; she’s too fragile. All we can do is take a few samples, make a record of what was here. Wouldn’t it be cruel to interfere?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said simply.
He was interrupted by a slap on the back. It was Ulf Thoring, his team leader. ‘I wondered where you got to, granddad. I patched your comms frequency into the crew and we’ve been having a bit of a laugh.’ He was Icelandic. His accent was strong, his English slightly off-key.