“Nothing if not direct. What for?”
“Hooders are long-lived and practically indestructible.” He paused. “That’s a puzzle too-we were told by the locals that when hooders reach a certain age they break into separate segments and each segment grows into a new hooder. This planet should be overrun with them
… perhaps some mechanism based on predator prey ratio….” He sat gazing off into space.
“You were saying,” Shardelle prompted.
“Yes … yes. They are practically indestructible but for one big fault. As you know, the sea tides here are vicious-the moons and Calypse all interact in that respect. Hooders sometimes stray down onto the eastern banks at low tide, get caught there, then washed into deep water where they eventually drown. It takes a while, but it’s deep off the banks and hooders are very heavy.”
“And?”
“Occasionally a hooder corpse will get dragged up by the bank current and deposited ashore.”
“I see-you have your corpse.”
“And no way of getting a large field autopsy kit to it.”
Shardelle gazed up at the screen. “Where is it?”
Jonas touched his aug for a moment, frowned, then pointed. “Five hundred and thirty kilometers thataway- straight to the coast.”
Shardelle nodded at the screen. “He is about three hundred kilometers in the same direction.”
“Your point?”
“Of course you can use my ATV, but under one condition: I’m coming with you.” Shardelle knew there was more to her decision than the gabbleduck’s presence on the route. There was the escape from the frustration of her research, which in that moment seemed to have translated into sexual frustration.
From the chainglass bubble cockpit Jonas glanced into the back of the ATV. Apparently these had been used as troop transports during the rebellion against the theocracy. Now either side of it was stacked from floor to ceiling with aluminum and plasmel boxes, strapped back against the sides, with only a narrow gangway leading back and elbowing right to the side door.
It had been necessary for them to remove much of Shardelle’s equipment, including the chair, but she did not seem to mind. He realized she was glad of this excuse for a journey to take her away from the meticulously boring research into gabbleduck biology, and the seemingly endless and fruitless analysis of The Gabble.
“How long will it take us, do you think?” he asked, now looking ahead. They were leaving the Tagreb enclosure, rolling across an area of trammeled flute grass through which new red-green shoots were spearing.
“How long do you want it to take?”
“Your meaning?”
“Sixty hours if we go non-stop. Rodol can guide the ATV during the night … do you need sleep?”
“No-I’m asomnidapted.”
“Ah, well I’m not.” She glanced back. “I guess I could bed down there overnight.”
Jonas shook his head. Now that they were on their way his urgency to get to the dead hooder had decreased. “No, let’s stop during night time. I may not need to sleep, but I don’t want to spend that length of time just sitting here. There’s camping equipment in the back, so you can get your head down.”
Shardelle guided the ATV down one of the many paths crushed through the flute grass and leading away from the Tagreb.
“And what will you do meanwhile?”
He tapped his aug. “Continue my research. Rodol is sequencing the hooder genome and transmitting the results to me. I’m running programs to isolate alleles and specific coding sequences. I intend to build a full virtual model of hooder growth.”
“But first you need to be rid of the parasitic and junk DNA to get to the basic genome.”
“Yeah, obviously-I’ve got programs working on that.”
“It’ll probably be a massive task. The assumption has always been that hooders are the most ancient creature on the planet’s surface. The gabbleduck is probably younger, and its genome is immense.”
“Yes, quite probably,” Jonas replied, then after a moment, “I don’t really like the term junk DNA.”
Once, centuries ago, no one had known what all the extra coding was for. Now it was known that it was history: old defensive measures that no longer applied, viruses incorporated into the genome, patches much like additional pieces of computer code to cover weaknesses in a program. Some biologists likened much of it to the scar tissue of a species, but Jonas felt that not entirely true because it could, on occasion, provide survival strategies. Perhaps a better analogy would be to the scar tissue and consequent experience of an old warrior.
“You have a better one?” Shardelle asked.
“Reserve, complementary or supplementary.”
“Very good.”
By mid-morning the sun was passing underneath Calypse, throwing the gas giant into silhouette. Jonas spotted the snout spurs of mud snakes cleaving the rhizome layer ahead of them-attracted by the vibrations the vehicle created-but they disappeared from sight, perhaps recognizing the inedibility of ATV tires. Checking her map screen, Shardelle turned the vehicle from flattened track and nosed it into flute grasses standing three meters tall. The cockpit skimmed this, its lower half in the grass. A faint hissing sound impinged under the varying hum of the hydrogen motor and hydrostatic gearing. Eventually they broke from the flute grasses and began negotiating a compacted slope where the old grasses had been flattened by the wind.
Reaching a low peak, a vista opened to one side of them. A fence stretched out of sight in two directions.
