They began to notice, too, that a lot of the dead fish were covered in tumors. These did not seem, particularly, to have been the cause of death. When you found a fish asphyxiated on dry land, you didn't have to look much farther for what had killed it, even if the reasons for it remained mysterious. But still, there were more cancers than Conrad would expect to see in a healthy population. Was proton radiation a strong mutagen? He couldn't remember, though he would certainly look it up. Anyway, a star would emit neutrons and alpha particles and all kinds of other garbage as well. Clean-burning they were not! This by itself wasn't necessarily a problem, except that no one had designed adequate coping mechanisms into the animals. Or perhaps they had, and the mechanisms had stopped functioning, or something was interfering with them.
“The ecology of this planet was never stable,” commented Giotti. “It never had any need to be, with freshly printed organisms compensating for any unforeseen population crashes. P2 is at best a garden, not a wilderness.”
“Your point being?” Conrad asked, for Giotti was a man who stated the obvious far more readily than he stated his own opinion.
“Well,” said Giotti, “in a stable ecology the mutants die out. Everything is perfectly evolved for its niche, and change comes slowly or not at all. Anything different or anomalous is defective, almost by definition.”
“But . . . ,” Conrad said, with patient tolerance for his crewman's foibles. He was learning patience, oh yes, as anyone must who had lived this long and seen this much.
“But an ecology without stable niches is more tolerant of mutation,” Giotti answered. “You might almost say it encourages mutation, as a means of trying out new body plans and lifestyles. Because you never know what's going to work better unless you try it.”
“Hence these leggybugs?”
“I don't think those are going to succeed, sir. At least, I hope not.”
And here some old words of Bascal's floated up in Conrad's mind: “The true measure of any life-form is how quickly it can skeletonize a cow.” By that half-serious reasoning, Giotti could hardly be wrong, for the leggybugs were not efficient scavengers, nor tidy ones.
The men of Snowflake might've explored more—hell, they might've found the clue that would solve the whole mystery—but the long, slow morning was already beginning to heat up, and by the end of their next shift on the island the smell of rotting fish drove them back onto the boat and out to sea, none the wiser for their investigations. Would the incident have made more sense as an isolated, anomalous occurrence? It was hard to know, because they encountered several more such kills over the course of that year. And then the kills stopped, just as mysteriously, but the fish populations in that area never did seem to recover.
“Ah, well,” Conrad told his men on a rare night of drunken revelry, when the light of Sol shone down upon them like a mother watching over her children. “If the sea weren't full of mystery, then what good would it be?”
The night sky of P2 was a lopsided affair, with all the bright stars squeezed into a band along the river of the Milky Way, cutting at an angle against the horizon. Sol herself dangled from the belt of Orion, a fourth star in that perfect line, but brighter and spaced out a bit farther. A longer and much brighter line, cutting the sky from horizon to pole, was formed by Canopus and Sirius and Alpha Centauri, with Rigel and Betelgeuse and Procyon hovering nearby. Together they formed a single constellation, much bigger and clearer than anything in the skies of Soclass="underline" Orion, the Randy Vaulter.
“Men go to sea,” Conrad said beneath the Vaulter's light, “because the land is tedious, and the sea, which is never twice the same, obliges them. Drink up, laddies! Turn those mugs over and drain them dry, for tomorrow the sea will have new surprises, and beforehand we must needs refresh ourselves.”
The parlance of sailors was saltier and more expansive than the clipped, dead-in-five-seconds urgency of spacers, and Conrad found that he loved talking that way as much as he loved the sea itself. In all his long life, this was the closest he would ever come to poetry. Alas.
In the years that followed, they never did see any more leggybugs, although they did find a few amphibious creatures so strange that it was hard to believe they'd evolved from human-drawn designs. Perhaps their made-up genomes were unstable? Given to sudden fits of mutation in the isolation of an island ecosystem?
Fancying himself a bit of a scholar, Conrad went so far as to trace the evolution of a particular beast, the island river nereid, from a primordial form—the sea nereid—that had been designed and introduced in the colony's earliest days. Then it had turned out that the river nereid really was man-made, though obscure, and the whole argument sort of collapsed.
But then, as happens sometimes with scientific obscura, it revived again with lively debate in the ecology journals when a number of other established species—some more awful even than the leggybugs—turned out to have mutated in exactly the ways that Conrad had theorized. This touched off a wave of cryptozoological exploration which flew in the face of the colony's poverty, igniting imaginations. Who knew—who knew—what strange monsters might be found on and around these islands, or in the deeper trenches of the middle ocean?
“It may be hubris,” Conrad wrote in a letter to several of the journals, “to believe that a system as complex as a planetary ecology can simply be installed to order, or controlled in place.”
There were strange creatures as well in the growing Thorn Jungles, as blackberry bramble decided not only to take over the world's narrow soil belts, but to creep in around the edges of civilization itself. Naked-eye ghost sightings there were easily dismissed, for the lighting was always poor. And for similar reasons, the existence of a rumored Thorn Jungle Hydra was never verified, although other shocking discoveries were made during the hunt. Anyway such a beast was plausible in the extreme, for the jungle's own mutants kept company with unauthorized creatures invented and released without official permission. And who was doing the releasing? Civilization had its own monsters, driven half mad—or perhaps wholly mad—by ill-conceived body plans their human brains could not control without gross rewiring. More than one of these self-made unfortunates had disappeared into the jungles, and who could say what became of them? But that is another tale, and nothing to do with Conrad Mursk.
Of course, not every adventure on the sea was fish or monster related. Snowflake really did encounter some weather every now and then, especially in the polar latitudes where it occasionally met its namesake, where the ice on the deck and the instruments and steering controls would occasionally get so thick that Snowflake couldn't maneuver at all and had to radio for emergency warming by batteries of orbital lasers.
Of course, Conrad still had his money, and during his infrequent trips to Backupsville he still sometimes sent copies of himself off to the stars and gathered up the replies. There were always fewer incoming messages than outgoing ones, though—he'd lost two more copies of himself out there, and something about that began to bother him in a way it never had before. Lost in transmission, yes: two more pieces of himself he could never recover, experiences and conversations he'd genuinely had, but would never know about. Would they have changed him? Solved his problems?
Finally, he ceased the practice altogether—no more would he cast his soul upon the spaceways—and when a call came in for him from the King and Queen of Sol, he refused to accept it. Let them come in person, or else leave him in peace.