Chapra decided not to point out to Abaron that use of ‘we’.
“It’s all rather moot,” she said. “The Jain has shown no signs of hostility.”
“The Jain has placed a container upon the jetty,” said Box.
“Let’s go see what it wants now,” said Chapra, and they trooped back into the lock. Soon they were out on the jetty. The container was at the furthest end.
“What the hell is that?” wondered Chapra as she strode towards the container. Showing great fortitude, Abaron strode at her side. Inside the container was a coil of something fleshy. They halted at the container and stood over it.
“It looks like something alive,” said Abaron, crushing the dread in him under the cool analytic scientist.
“It certainly—”
The coil snapped straight out of the container, cobra fast. It hit Abaron’s arm, hung there for a moment as it recoiled, then snapped out into the water. Abaron yelled, staggered back, and sat down.
“Oh,” he said, then looked down at his shoulder where blood was spreading between the layers of his environment suit. “It bit me.” In a moment Judd lifted him up and all but carried him to the door. Chapra followed. In the lock Abaron’s legs gave way and he looked more bewildered than scared.
“It’s just shock,” Chapra told him, but she could not put from her mind visions of an ancient celluloid film she had in her collection; of the contents of an egg shooting out and attaching to a man’s face, and the consequences of that.
Box looked upon the world with all its superbly precise senses and analysed it with a mind that made the mind of any god humans had imagined appear that of an infant throwing a tantrum, and it found the world beautiful. The eye of the beholder. Box could find beauty in anything because it could look at things in so many thousands of different ways. Many philosophers in the human polity now posited that humans were not created by gods, that in fact the complete reverse applied.
At the poles of the world the temperature was the same as at Earth’s equator, but at two atmospheres pressure. At its equator the environment was about as inviting to a human as the inside of a pressure cooker. The place swarmed with life much like that in the isolation chamber, but with one important exception. There were great and complex ecosystems here, but no outpost of any star-spanning civilization, and no discernible remnants, but then little might survive five million years in such hostile conditions. There were no Jain, not a trace.
Very cool and very factual Abaron said, “There are no toxins in me, there is no disgusting alien embryo waiting to burst out of my stomach in a messy spray. There is, in fact, nothing alien to my body inside me barring the two doughnuts I ate half an hour ago and the cup of coffee I washed them down with.” Chapra smiled. The attack, rather than feeding his fear, had destroyed it. Irrational fear could never long survive harsh realities.
“What happened then?”
“This.” Abaron peeled back the dressing on his arm to show the wound. A perfect circle of skin a centimetre wide and few millimetres deep had been excised from his biceps.
“What do you think?”
“I think the Jain took a sample. It is as curious about us as we are about it. Only its curiosity must have a greater urgency because it is entirely dependent on us and has no idea what we might want of it.”
“What do you think it might learn?”
“Everything it is possible to learn from my DNA. Being able to build and alter DNA to the extent it does it must be able to decode it down to the atomic level.”
“I think you’re right,” said Chapra. She thought a lot else but wasn’t going to spoil his moment.
“Box,” said Abaron. “What happened after the… worm… bit me?”
“It swam very fast to the inside of the Jain’s machine. The Jain is now wrapped around its machine. There is much nanomechanical activity.”
“There,” said Abaron to Chapra.
Just then the door to the medlab hissed open and in walked the Jain’s probe beast, closely followed by Rhys.
Box said, “There was an ultrasound communication between this probe and the Jain six minutes after the sample was taken from your arm.”
The beast squatted on the floor, facing towards Abaron, who sat on the edge of the examination couch.
“It is scanning you,” said Box, then, “Your graft is ready.”
“Perhaps it has come to see this,” said Abaron as he lay back on the couch. The doctor, which was a close relation to the PSR but deliberately less threatening in appearance, gripped Abaron’s arm above and below his biceps. What might be described as its head came down against the muscle. It quickly gobbled up the dressing. In a glare of sterilizing ultraviolet it pressed a circle of skin into place with a flattened white egg on the end of one many jointed arm. The egg had the words ‘Cell Weld Inc.’ printed on it. It hummed mildly. The probe beast got up, turned, and left the room.
“It’s satisfied you’re all right,” said Chapra.
When Abaron had nothing to say to that Box said, “You may be interested to know that prior to coming here the probe beast, as you call it, was in an observation blister, looking at the stars, and seeing our arrival at system DF678.98 and the world with the name Haden. It is now returning to the isolation chamber.”
“We have to see this,” said Abaron. He inspected his arm as the doctor took the cell welder from his arm. There was no sign of a wound.
“The world?” asked Chapra.
“No, what the Jain does with its probe beast.”
When the doctor released him Abaron headed quickly for the door. Chapra followed calmly after, faintly smiling. She let Abaron get ahead of her; out of hearing.
“Where’s the xenophobe?” she asked.
“There is nothing more fearful than fear itself,” said Box.
“Yet you would have thought the opposite effect.”
“Human psychology. Go figure,” said Box.
Rhys opened the lock doors for the probe creature. It walked out along the jetty and dropped into the water. Chapra cleared the projection of surface refractivity and they watched the beast walk across the bottom to its creator. The Jain, still clinging around its machine, turned its strange head, then after a moment let go. It coiled out a triangular-section tentacle and plugged into the probe beast’s back.
“It’s down-loading it, reading it,” said Abaron.
Chapra was glad to hear fascination in his voice rather than the suppressed horror she had heard before. They sat watching. Chapra expected nothing more than the tentacle to detach in a few minutes, perhaps in a few hours. She did not expect what happened next. The Jain convulsed, its tentacle cracking like a whip. It broke the probe beast on the chamber floor and let it go. Leaking green blood and fizzing like sherbet the beast floated to the surface. The Jain convulsed again and coiled hedgehog fashion, all its tentacles, its head, its arm, and its tail hidden away. Nothing but a crescent of ribbed body, sinking to the bottom.
“Hell, what happened?” wondered Chapra, her hands blurring over her touch console. Abaron just studied the projection, his hands folded in his lap. “It just discovered how long it was in stasis I reckon.”
Chapra gaped at him. That had not even occurred to her.
The Jain remained coiled for twenty hours and when it finally uncoiled it swam around aimlessly for another eight hours. Chapra and Abaron used the time profitably, putting a probe down into the seas of Haden and discovering many of the same plants and creatures that now flourished in the isolation chamber.
“This certainly could be the Jain home world,” said Chapra.
“Any world could be the Jain home world,” said Abaron.
Chapra waited for an explanation.
“Our Jain has ably demonstrated how it can re-engineer any life form, and how it can build life forms from component atoms. How much has it re-engineered itself? Haven’t we done the same? There are humans with gills and fins, humans with compound eyes and exoskeletons, humans who can live in ten gees.”