Martin winced.
Susannah touched his shoulder. “I’m sorry—”
“It’s OK,” he said. “I think it’s time to vote. Any last comments?”
“I say we stay,” Jake said.
“Pavel?” Martin asked.
“I’ve made my position clear,” Pavel said. “Deborah’s death means the risks outweigh the possibilities here. We ought to leave.”
“Susannah?”
“I’m with Jake,” she said. “We don’t know enough about Deborah’s death to leave yet. We owe it to her to try to find out more—or, at least, to make her sacrifice worth something by maybe finding something of interest here—finding some mark of intelligence. That’s what we came for.”
Martin looked back at Deborah. His was still the decisive vote, he knew, because the rules said that in case of a tie in such circumstances, the side with the team-leader’s vote wins. Forgive me, he said to himself, and to Deborah. I haven’t been leader long enough to know what’s good for the group as a whole—only what feels right to me.
“We stay,” he said. “I don’t want Deborah’s death to be meaningless.”
“You’re looking at the top of the line on this planet.” Jake pointed to images of what looked like small, wine-colored cheetahs darting in and out of the screen, the cream of three more months of reconnaissance and recording on four continents and the water around them, some 150 separate sojourns in all. “That’s the most intelligence we’ve seen.” Jake’s specialty was correlation of morphology, motion, other external characteristics to analogs on Earth. He was also known for an uncanny capacity to pinpoint DNA patterns from surface characteristics.
“Cats back home have a lot of intelligence,” Susannah said. “I’ve seen documented accounts of leopards stranded on islands learning how to fish. But no one’s ever seen any evidence of tools or language.”
“None here either,” Jake agreed. “Not so much as a pile of rocks in an x or a circle.”
Susannah bit into one of the fruits they’d recently found nearby. Blend of apple and plum in a peachy flesh, with maybe an edge of piquant cherry, she thought. Tested out as thoroughly edible, confirmed now by a week of eating and no ill effects. Her mouth watered at the sour sweetness.
“So we’ll do a few more macroscans,” Jake went on, “but we might as well go full steam on the DNA mapping now. No techno-intelligence in the life forms, no signs of tangible technology left behind, all we’ve got left to look for is some sign of manipulation in the genes. Though I’d be stunned if Pavel found any evidence of engineering there. Everything fits together too naturally on the surface level.”
Susannah closed her eyes, massaging a thread of fruit in her molars. “It’s a lovely world—at least as nice as the one around faraway Eta Pegasi. Fine array of life, full complement of plants, invertebrates, vertebrates. Air’s sweet, no apparent bacteria, viruses, or retros that our immunes can’t handle. Lots of water, local food is humanly edible; but no damn species around resembling humans, not even a monkey, no one to offer a commentary on the food. Same story as everywhere else.”
“Well, not exactly the same, not for Deborah,” Jake said.
“Yeah, I didn’t mean—” Susannah said, opening her eyes.
“I know,” Jake said. “But maybe this does mean that Deborah died of natural causes after all, and we should count our blessings that there’s no intelligent life out here to get us.”
“Well, I’ll take the risk of competition that companionship brings—I’ll take that over being the only intelligent life in the universe—any time.” Susannah shivered, even though the temperature in their dome was as comfortable as a summer day in her native New York State, just a degree or two warmer than outside. “We’ve found more than enough worlds for human habitation,” she added.
“ ‘And the human being a Miss Lonelyhearts in a sea of starry possibilities,’ ” Jake quoted from a song that had been a classic for at least two decades back on Earth.
Susannah nodded. “I think it was different back in the old ages of exploration on Earth. I think as much as the conquistadors, the imperialists, had contempt for the natives they found, the very existence of these native humans confirmed for the outsiders that humans had some kind of legitimacy to be there. We’ve been searching for nearly a century for that sort of confirmation.”
“Martin says we may be coming up empty because our search criteria are wrong.”
“What else could they be?” Susannah asked.
“I wish I knew,” Jake said. “I wish Martin knew. He’ll likely come up with an answer on our way back home—after he’s pressured us to leave.”
“Jeez, is he starting in with that again?”
Jack nodded.
“Martin’s a fossilist,” Susannah said. She bit into another fruit. “He’s trained to see things after the fact.”
“Martin’s a fossil,” Jake said, and they both laughed.
“Here, try this.” Susannah pressed her oozing, half-eaten fruit onto Jake’s lips. “This apple-plum, or whatever it is, is delicious.”
“I still think looking for gene-splicing when we’ve got no evidence of laser, or any other significant cutting technology, is a waste of time.” Martin was feeding huge gobs of data to Pavel on their two-person machine—two inputs, one screen, set up on a table by the window on a beautiful morning. It came programmed with complete genomes of 50,000 representative Earth species. The real knowledge it offered, though, was not in the genomes themselves, but in the patterns among them—the relationship of any one genome to those of the species presumed closest to it in evolution. These similarities and differences amounted to a road-map of natural selection on Earth. An auxiliary module of 15,000 additional genomes from a dozen exo-sources—the sum of those thus far extensively sampled by humans—yielded patterns highly analogous to the ones of Earth.
“Well, I’m inclined to agree with you,” Pavel replied. “But you’re the one whose vote decided that we stay here, so as long as we’re here, where’s the harm in proceeding?” The data Martin was putting into the system had been genomically analyzed—the distillate of some 700 local species, bacteria to fungi to grass and trees and froglike creatures and the wine-red cheetahs, harvested and continuously assessed over five months. The relationships among its genomes had been computed to a faretheewell, and were now undergoing summating comparison to the baseline biomes of Earth and the exodata from other places. Striking gold would be finding a discontinuity in the biomes of this Beta Hydri planet and the patterns of Earth—such as the presence of some bacillus or plant DNA in the genome of a vertebrate, or better yet, vertebrate DNA in a bacterium, where it had no apparent naturally-selected business being. This, at the very least, would indicate a weird alien evolutionary trajectory well worth pursuing in its own right. Or it could be evidence of intelligent technological intervention on the genetic level.
“All right, I think that does it for the data input,” Martin said. “Look, it’s not that I enjoy being our resident pessimist. And you’re right that it’s on my shoulders that we’re here, but we won’t be here forever.”
“Good,” Pavel said. “Deborah’s death unnerved me—I guess I hadn’t had any experience like that before. Everyone returned just fine in the two other expeditions I was part of. But now… I still don’t feel right being here. I’m going to get into a safer line of work when we get back home. As much as I love knowledge, I love life—mine—a little more.”