Lau Pin hefted an eighteen-pound fish, turning it this way and that, inspecting it. A row of fins ran down each side, eleven on a side, diminishing toward the tail. Yet the fish looked odd, with ventral fins, long and wispy, narrow eyes, mottled green skin. “I’ll have to be careful,” he said. “Parasites.”
The Astronomer had left Lau Pin a ten-inch knife. He gutted and filleted the creature and cut it in slices. The flesh was pale, like a red snapper, Beth thought. There were angry red spots Lau Pin cut out. “I think I got them all,” he said. “Sushi? Or shall we start a fire?”
“Fire. Cook it,” Mayra said. “I do not feel lucky. It’s ugly.”
They broiled the meat on twigs. It was delicious, rich in oils and savory with a strange, tangy flavor. Spirits lifted and there were jokes about finding the right white wine to go with the fish. Or maybe margaritas all round? Beth was glad to get them in a good mood. The meetings with Memor had fascinated them all, but the brute fact was that they were prisoners listening to lectures. The thrill of contact with a real alien, telling them strange new views — even that had to fade. They were not idle scientists or philosophers. They had signed on to explore a new world, make a fresh home for humanity, to sail the stars. Their patience was limited.
Lau Pin rummaged through his tool belt and then gave a startled cry. “My beamer is live. It’s got signal.”
They gaped. He showed them that the signal light gleamed on his handheld communicator. “It’s tuned to the
“Any internals?” Tananareve asked wanly.
“Just status reports. Everything looks normal. It’s on auto-standby.”
“We must be somehow in line of sight,” Tananareve said.
Lau Pin scowled skeptically. “We’re an astronomical unit away from it, easily. This Bowl is huge. How could we hear from it?”
Beth felt a surge of hope. “It’s a smart system. If
“If we can negotiate our way out of here, we can use homing to find Eros,” Tananareve said.
“Yes, great.” Beth made herself sound more optimistic than she felt. They had last seen
Lau Pin worked on it for moments, staring intently at the small solar-powered beamer that was barely larger than his thumb. “I’m trying the 14.4 gigahertz band, then the subs.… No, I can’t do over-commands from outside. Some kind of safety precaution.”
Abduss growled with frustration. They all looked crestfallen.
Beth couldn’t let that continue. Best to distract them. “Let’s review what we’ve learned, class,” she said with a smile. “Mayra?”
The normally quiet woman blinked and nodded. “When Memor brought those visuals — big constructs, dazzling perspectives — I got a feeling that she did that partly to impress us. You know, show the visitors some flashy capabilities.”
Lau Pin said, “I like that it — okay,
Mayra said, “I liked those visuals it gave us on that screen. One was some kind of macroengineering in a planetary belt. I’ll bet that was their history. How they built this place.”
“She’s using those as attention getters,” Beth said. “Then she showed us those 3-D keyboards. I think she wants us to manipulate display machines. Only — she just spoke to them.”
Mayra asked, “So you think she wants us to learn their language, by picking up how to instruct those 3Ds?”
Lau Pin waved this away. “Maybe. Those images it showed us could be fauxtography, too. A phony story. Distractions, anyway. We’ve got to escape, not just sit and learn language.”
Beth nodded. She liked the wildlife around them, wanted to learn about it — and Cliff would love it, might be loving it now — but — “Right. Our bones are getting worse as we speak. We’ve got to get back to gravity.”
Cliff’s troop were doing badly on the basics: sleep and food. After crossing broad grasslands with clumps of trees for shade, they had seen no game worth pursuing for the better part of an Earth day. Some berries helped, and they found fresh water, a tinkling clear stream without signs of fish.
Following protocols, Irma went upstream and provided cover guard. The four men slipped into the cool waters gratefully. For several days they had all had intermittent dysentery and all needed to soak, a morale booster. In the first days, they had added a chloride pill to the drinking water but now used a solar-powered UV source in the caps of their water bottles to sterilize it.
Something broad, ribbed, and horned scuttled into a burrow at the shore. It looked to Cliff like an oval- shaped turtle with a razor-sharp crest. The burrow reeked, repulsive and rank, so they let it go.
Howard floated in a small muddy pool. He lay slack, grinning widely. “Y’know, I’ve been thinking. I figure our getting the runs is from chirality.”
Aybe asked, “Chirality? Spin?”
Aybe was an engineer, right. “Direction of rotation of molecules. Handedness. When a molecule isn’t identical to its mirror image.” Howard didn’t talk much and kept getting hurt, which made him even more closemouthed, so Cliff listened carefully. “Most biochemists think it was a historical accident that all our sugars are right-handed and our amino acids are left-handed. I think some of the life here has molecules opposite-handed, versus what we know.”
“How?” Terry asked.
“Remember how, two sleeps back, you were all raving about how great that purple fruit tasted?”
Aybe grunted at the memory. “And got ravenously hungry again in an hour. Pretty much like Chinese food, as the cliche goes — then we all got diarrhea.”
“That’s why I’m always hungry?” Cliff asked. He wished they had the chirality gear in the
“We all are,” Howard said. “We’re moving cross-country, burning calories, but some of our food is going straight through us — and burning our guts some, too.”
“We cook the meat,” Terry said.
“Sure, but all the prior biochem work we had, back Earthside, can’t offset microbes no human ever met. Montezuma’s revenge, y’know.”
Cliff said, “That comes from microbial pathogens, different problem. I ran the DNA checks. This ecology uses the same basic double helix structure in everything I checked.”
“Sure, but on other planets, the accidents of evolution could make the proteins and sugars different. If this Bowl has been cruising along, sampling ecologies, then there may be whole ecologies here based on L-glucose rather than our D-glucose, and D-amino acids rather than our L-amino acids.”
Aybe shrugged. “Sick is sick.”
Howard glared. “So L-glucose is interesting because it tastes just about as sweet as D-glucose, but passes through the gastrointestinal system completely unmetabolized. Throw left- and right-handed ecologies together here, and every life-form in the food chain has to choose one isomeric biochemistry or the other. Fruit sugars, fructose, will behave the same way.”
Cliff recalled that Howard had been a media figure of sorts. He ran a semi-private preservation zoo in Siberia, after the climate warming ran wild there, exhaling methane. He’d never have left Earth if a disaster hadn’t wiped out his patch of land, animals and all. The mission planners put him in because
“That explains why we get the runs? How sure is that?” Cliff said. “I thought I’d seen all the problems when I did that air sampling as we came through the air lock.”
“Biology never rests.” As if to illustrate, Howard slapped at gnats that swarmed around his eyes. “Better if we learned what’s got our handedness and what doesn’t.” Howard held up his phone. “I’ve got notes in here,
