Phytosphere

The president paused to consider.

“If it’s a living thing,” said Sidower, “it can be killed.”

Neil grinned at this characteristically hawkish response from Sidower. “One would think so. In fact, I had some of the top herbicide specialists in the country come to the lab in Miami to take a look at the specimen. We sat around and had a real bull session about the whole problem.”

“And what did you come up with?” asked the president.

“Well, we hypothesized that we could use some commercially formulated herbicides because, structurally, the shroud is similar to many of the plant and weed varieties that these products are active against. But as we mapped out the specimen’s chromosome, we began to see that some of its DNA sequencing differs from the more common forms of phytoplankton. It was a tough genome, but we finally got it all mapped out.”

“And how, exactly, does it differ?” asked Julia.

Neil glanced at the national security advisor. “Some of the sequencing in the specimen comes directly from Tarsalan genetic makeup itself.”

This, he knew, was the showstopper.

The president’s eyes went wide. “You mean they’ve stirred some of their own genome into the mix?”

Neil raised his palms, as if he were as surprised as the president. “Their splicing techniques are far more… advanced than ours.” He sat back and consulted his waferscreen. “You might remember I wrote a paper on a subset of Tarsalan genes, ones with transmutational properties. These are the ones we’re finding in our samples.”

Sidower made a face as he glanced at the president, not looking too pleased about the growing complexity of the threat.

“If you could give us the essentials,” said the president.

Right. Bayard liked the simplified version. But he wasn’t sure he could simplify something that was so complicated. “Let me go into lecture mode here. The Tarsalans have a subset of genes in their makeup, and this subset of genes can mutate certain of their physical characteristics, depending on environmental circumstances. This is what’s made the Tarsalans so… so adaptable, and it’s why they’ve been able to live on so many different planets throughout the galaxy.” He squinted as he tried to demystify the whole concept. “The simplest analogy would be the jackrabbit. It turns white in winter. Not that the mechanism in the Tarsalan is in any way the same, but it gives you an idea of what I’m getting at. Chameleon lizards turn from brown to green and back again. There’s a transmutational component.”

“So they’ve put some of themselves into the shroud,” said Sidower. “Big deal. How does it affect our odds of defeating the goddamn thing?”

He glanced at the secretary of defense, who was cantankerous for obvious good reason.

“Eventually we will defeat it.” He meant it to be a bold Neil Thorndike proclamation, but it came out sounding weak. “It’s just that I think it will take a little more time than I originally thought. And that’s because the shroud—and, by the way, I prefer to call it the phytosphere now, because that’s what it is, a sphere made out of plant material.” He felt his forehead moistening. “Anyway, the phytosphere seems to adapt to whatever we throw at it, most probably because of this subset of transmutational genes. Also,

we’re finding it hard to penetrate the individual planktons themselves because the Tarsalans have spliced resistant traits of the Martian paleo-organism, Aresphyta, into the mix, and this has created a kind of impenetrable shell around each individual organism. To give you a bit of history—”

“We get the picture, Neil,” said Sidower. “This shell more or less acts as armor.”

“Yes.”

“And there’s no way we can penetrate this armor with conventional herbicides?” asked the president.

“No. I’ve got one team working on finding a herbicide that will effectively destroy the phytoplankton component, another working on destroying the shell, or carapace if you will, and a third studying the Tarsalan genetic component. The main thrust right now is the carapace. We’ve got to find a way to break the carapace. Once we’ve done that, we can concentrate on the organism itself.”

“Do you have any ideas about the carapace?” asked the president.

Neil squared his shoulders, forcing his confidence. “We’ve tried acids and other corrosive agents, but so far nothing has worked. We have to devise something that can compete against the carapace, in the Darwinian sense, and come up the winner every time. We need something that’s adaptable and can shift strategies, depending on the situation. I believe the best answer is to develop some kind of omniphage, an organism that can eat through the carapace, and won’t stop eating. If we develop an omniphage capable of penetrating the carapace, we can then use the same macrogen as a delivery module to carry a lethal dose of whatever toxic agent we finally develop to kill the xenophyta—that’s what I’m calling the individual organisms.”

“And is it possible to develop such a… hell, what do you call it? An omniphage?” asked the secretary.

“I have a team of geneticists working on the problem right now.”

“So when you say it should be designed to carry a lethal dose…” The president trailed off, trying to figure it all out.

“It would essentially be a workhorse macrogen engineered to penetrate the carapace and administer the necessary fatal agent. As for the fatal agent itself, my team is working on a hydrogen sulfide compound that’s going to fool the xenophyta into thinking it’s getting its usual supply of carbon dioxide when in actual fact—”

“But first we have to get this…this omniphage going, right?” said Sidower.

“Yes.”

“And do we have all the best experts on board to help us build this omniphage?”

“In the case of the Aresphyta, all the best experts would be Martian.”

“Wonderful. Let’s send a drop to Mars right away.”

Neil nodded, even as his confidence once again ebbed. “I’ve been having some of my people track these experts down. And they tell me that the top expert of all, Dr. Luke Langstrom, is currently on the Moon. As a matter of fact, he’s part of my brother’s team.”

Neil couldn’t help being galled by this. After advising strongly against his brother’s involvement, and getting Gerry’s flat refusal in a recent drop, his brother now held a trump. He glanced around at the other three, and knew they understood the implications. He had alienated all those working on the Moon effort, and now it was going to play against them. Neil couldn’t help feeling like an idiot. And he didn’t like feeling like an idiot. Especially in front of the president.

The president turned to the national security advisor. “Send a priority drop to the Moon. Do whatever it takes, but get this Luke Langstrom on board.”

9

Gerry left the Nectaris Buena Vista after supper and strolled down Sagittarius Way, still trying to come to grips with all the wild and conflicting information the Smallmouth had brought back from the shroud.

He looked at the vaulting underground dome of Nectaris, ten miles across and two miles high, most of it laminated rock, but with huge polycarbonate windows here and there. He headed downtown.

At this time of the day, the lighting technicians, probably zonked out on premium-grade bud, were having fun with their spots, floods, and lasers, choosing, for the most part, a mood indigo. The sky was a preternatural violet, intense in its dark luminosity, the epitome of dusk, peppered here and there with red stars. Food vendors were conspicuously absent, and as he reached Pisces Road, he realized that even the prostitutes weren’t around, that all the curtains to the brothels were closed, and that despite the carnival indigo of the evening sky, there weren’t many people about at all, as if the somber situation on Earth had cast its pall over the gay old Moon.

Yet a few cafes were open, and he saw couples sitting at tables drinking espresso and eating pastries.

He remembered the old days, when he and Glenda had lived in the center of Raleigh, before the kids had been born; how they would go to cafes, just like these young people, and believe for a while that life had all the magic of an indigo sky with red stars.

He strolled down Pisces Road toward Mobius Lake. Would he ever make sense of all the bizarre information