“And informs.”
“Yes. Informs and interferes.”
“A balance,” he said. “Like everything. Take a look at this.” He was pointing to an arm of the Ooi. It was shaped like a camel’s hump. On the opposite side was another hump-shaped arm, slightly wider and also slightly thicker. “Symmetrical, you think?”
“Almost.”
“Yes. An almost symmetry.”
Symmetry implied organization, a cornerstone of life. Though not necessarily life. Atoms and molecules were extremely well organized. On a larger scale, so were galaxies.
“It’s getting energy from somewhere,” he said.
“That’s a big leap.”
“I’m assuming. From the phosphates, you think?”
What was the spectroscope seeing that he didn’t? More to the point, why was he seeing the Ooi so much better than the machine? If the spectroscope was to be believed, it should have been a blur. To him it was a map, exquisitely drawn, of intrigue and mystery. Three-dimensional, maybe more. Shiny, smooth, lumpy, yellowish-green. Not large, but life came in all sizes. A speck could be a universe. Intelligence could hide in plain view.
He bent to study it closer, careful not to brush it with his helmet, wishing he could do without the helmet, stifling the urge.
Where was a HUBIE when you needed one?
He cringed at the thought, quickly suppressed it.
Turned his attention instead to the Ooi’s method of staying in place. It appeared attached to the asteroid, draped across a narrow crevice. How was it attached? And why? What was the nature of the interface?
It seemed to flow over the rock, over and possibly into, as a liquid might have flowed before hardening and congealing. He imagined a connection between it and the asteroid, an interarticulation, a sharing of some sort, possibly one-directional, more likely back and forth. Perhaps it had roots. Perhaps a tube, or many tubes. Perhaps feet. A mouth? Why not? Everything needed to eat.
It feathered to an edge that was no more than one or two millimeters thick. He had to stifle another urge, this one to lift its border (if it could be lifted), peel it back, and have a peek. A terrible idea, inviting disaster. But he’d learn so much.
The lumps, for example. What were they? He had a feeling that sooner or later he’d have to find out directly, through an incision, and he cringed at this thought, too. The last thing he wanted to do was harm it. Besides, his knife-wielding days were past. As exciting as surgery had once been, he’d long since preferred a hands-on, not-in, approach.
Plus he was old, himself no stranger to the knife. He’d been stabbed surgically on three separate occasions. Nothing major, or that he wouldn’t consent to again. But each stab was a violation, shocking to the body and the spirit. The first time was the worst, each subsequent shock duller, as though he were becoming desensitized, when in fact it was the opposite. He felt more vulnerable to injury than ever, and paradoxically more resistant, as though as his outer self became frailer, his inner, truer self retreated and became harder to reach. And what could be reached was more courageous and resolute. He hoped this were so. Courage was always welcome, but never more than in old age.
The Ooi might be just as old, or older.
Did it have a dormant, cryptobiotic state? Was that what they were seeing? How had it looked and acted when young? Had it always been this shape? Had it always had lumps? There were seven of them, all small, some smooth, some chunkier.
“What do you think?” he asked Gunjita.
“A silicate, I’m guessing. Maybe a quartz of some kind.”
“You’re sticking to your guns.”
“Nothing’s changed my mind. We need a piece. Doesn’t have to be big. We can probe it for biological activity.”
“We have probes?”
“We do.”
“Why? We don’t need them. Not for the H82W8 work.”
“Part of my toolkit, dear. Never leave home without them.”
“You’re amazing. How many?”
“A few hundred.”
“Unlikely we’re going to find a match.”
“It’s a start.”
“Unreasonable to expect the same evolutionary path as Earth,” he pointed out.
“I’ll deep sequence it then. How’s that?”
“It may not even have DNA. Probably doesn’t.”
“Let’s find out.”
“How big of a sample do we need?”
“Tiny,” she said.
He stared at the Ooi. Could it be alive? If so, could it feel pain, or any sensation recognizable to a human? Would it hurt to be knifed? How would it feel being punctured, dissected, and sliced? He had no idea. But he knew how it felt to him.
“Let’s hold off,” he said.
“We’ve watched it for two days. How much longer do you plan on waiting?”
“Before cutting it? As long as I can.”
“Before admitting it’s a rock.”
“Jury’s still out. We need to run more tests.”
“You’re impossible, you know that?”
“I do know that. Your patience means everything.”
She rolled her eyes. “What are you seeing that I’m not?”
“I don’t know what I’m seeing. Honestly. I don’t know what this is.”
“Peas and diced chicken,” she said.
“In reference to …”
“You asked what I thought.”
“Ah. Yes. You’re doubling down.”
“I am. It looks like puke.”
“Thank you. Very scientific.”
“Inclusions, okay? Obviously.”
“Mineral?”
“Yes.”
He unfolded his gloved hand and held it above the Ooi. Feeling for heat, or cold, or anything. “Not organs?”
“No.”
“Or organelles?”
“No. Not organs or organelles. And not symmetric, either. Randomly distributed.”
“Random to us,” he replied.
She gave him a look. “We don’t call it science, Cav, if you keep rewriting the rules. We call it your version of things. Then it’s your word versus the world. Let’s avoid that. Instead, let’s agree on some basic principles. Mathematics, for one. Physics. Reproducibility.”
The palm of his hand had started to tingle. He checked his glove. Needed to check his skin. The Ooi, as far as he could tell, hadn’t changed.
“I agree completely. We need more tests. Noninvasive ones.”
They left the bay, sealed the door, removed their helmets and gloves in the airlock. The skin of his hand looked normal. He rubbed his palm.
“Something the matter?” she asked.
“It’s tingling.”
“Let me look.”
“There’s nothing to see.”
She grabbed his hand, inspected it.
“It’s gone now,” he said.
“Put your gloves back on.”
He nodded. She put hers on, too. Then the helmets, and they went back.
He repeated what he’d done, holding his hand inches above the Ooi. He had a mild age-related tremor, and the effort of keeping his hand in place accentuated it. After a while he got a cramp, along with a pins-and-needles sensation nearly identical to what he’d felt before. He switched hands, then took a break. Gunjita relieved him, cupping both her palms above the Ooi, as if it were a crystal ball.
“Anything?” he asked.
She shook her head. “You okay?”
“Just tingling a little.”
“Like before?”
He didn’t respond right away, working his hand. Then he said, “Yeah. More or less.”
The next day they added more nondestructive tests. In medicalese these were called noninvasive, to distinguish procedures that didn’t hurt, or only hurt a little, from those that hurt more, and carried more risk. The difference between, on the one hand, doing an X-ray, say, or scraping a sample of skin, or snaking a tube through the nose or the butthole, and on the other, puncturing the skin and opening the body with a scalpel. In truth, all forms of testing were invasive. This was Cav’s position, and he wasn’t wrong. Mass spectroscopy bombarded an object with other objects (electrons, chemicals, light), vibrational spectroscopy with infrared radiation, MRI with electromagnetism (a dangerous test if an object were metallic, unknown in this case, and therefore out of the question), ultrasound with sound waves, X-ray with ionizing radiation. The invasions were invisible but no less real. Cav worried how the Ooi would react. He worried they might harm it. An ancillary worry, they might alter it somehow, or it might alter itself in response. Accordingly, he used the lowest possible setting on each device to begin testing, increasing only when and if it became necessary, and then by the smallest of increments. As a result, the testing lasted two full days. In the end they knew little more than when they’d started. Or rather, they knew this: