THESE WERE HELLISH CIRCUMSTANCES. AND YET, for a biologist, it might be heaven. While his body endured cramped confinement in a stinking plastic bag, Lark’s mind sped through lessons expanding his parochial view of the vast panorama of life. He grew deft at a new form of communication, receiving visual images that came enhanced by meanings and connotations sent through a tube directly to his bloodstream. A language of hormones and mood-tweaking peptides. And it went both ways. Whenever Lark understood something new, he did not have to speak or even nod his head. The mere act of comprehending had metabolic effects — a familiar endorphin burst of satisfaction — that his alien tutor quickly detected. Likewise, confusion or frustration brought rapid changes. The globule-teacher kept revising its presentation until Lark grasped what he was being shown.
It was a strangely active kind of passive study.
Would you call this a form of telepathy? he wondered.
Yet, the method also seemed slow and crude. As visual lessons, the demonstrations were a lot like puppet shows. Physical portions of his instructor would bud off the parent body to float within a vacuole cavity, twisting and transforming themselves into living models or mannequins to play out a little scene. The same images might have been presented far swifter, and more vividly, using one of the computerized display units he had seen Ling use, on Jijo and in the Jophur ship.
Inefficient or not, Lark eventually realized why his captors used this approach.
It’s fundamental to the difference between hydrogen-and oxygen-based ways of looking at the universe.
At a glance, the two worlds seemed utterly unalike.
While both biologies were based on carbon molecules, one used the reactive chemistry of oxidizing atmospheres, with liquid water serving as the indispensable solvent. Only narrow circumstances of temperature and pressure could nurture this kind of life from scratch: Normally, it arose in filmy skins of ocean and air, coating Earthlike worlds. Venturing beyond these lean oases, oxy-life must carry the same rare conditions with them into space.
“Reducing” environments were far more abundant, covering cold, giant planets like Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, or Titan — and even the broad, icy domain of comets. Some of these worlds soaked in abundant hydrogen, while others featured methane, ammonia, or cyanogen. But most shared a few common features — enormous, dense atmospheres and turbulent convecting layers, somewhat like the roiling strata of a sun. Life-giving heat often flowed upward, from a hot planetary core. Sometimes there was no solid “surface” at all.
Because of this, most hydros were creatures of a vast, boisterous sky. Up and down became tall, unlimited, almost coequal with the other two dimensions. Nor was travel a matter of exertive flying, by defying gravity with flapping wings, but of adjusting buoyancy and propelling through fogs so dense the pressure was like the bottom of Earth’s sea.
In such a realm, there were advantages to size. Big creatures cruised with languid grace, sifting for organic food. When caught in strong downdrafts, only a giant could fight free and keep from being hauled to searing, crushing depths. So huge did some hydro-beings grow, they could be viewed from space, resembling titanic, self- contained clouds.
And that was where organic chemistry — the Designer’s Assistant — might have left things, if not for action by another party.
The Critic.
Evolution.
Inevitably, the logic of reproduction and advantage took hold on reducing worlds, as it did on oxidizing ones like Earth … though in different ways.
Oxy-life counted on liquid water to carry out the complex colloidal chemistry of proteins and amino acids. Yet, too much watery flow would dilute those same processes, making them useless. Even in the warm sea, this meant crafting compact packages — cells — of just the right size to evolve life’s machinery. For two billion years, the limit of biological accomplishment on the early Earth had been to spread single-celled organisms through the ocean, soaking up sunlight and devouring each other while slowly improving their molecular techniques.
Until one day a cell consumed another — and let it continue living. A primitive eukaryote took in a blue-green alga and gave it a home, exchanging safe living quarters for sugars produced from photosynthesis. This act of cooperation gave the combined team a crucial edge in competition with other cells.
Nor was it the only joint venture. Soon, cells paired up in quantity, amassing and colluding, forming temporary or permanent associations to gain advantage over other teams. Complex organisms flourished, and evolution accelerated.
Some call it the food chain, or the Dance of Life. I’ve seen it played out on Jijo, in so many subenvironments and ecosystems. Plants use photosynthesis to store food energy in carbohydrates. Herbivores eat plants. Carnivores prey on herbivores, completing the cycle by returning their own substance to the ground when they defecate or die.
It looks like a well-tuned machine, with each part relying on the others, but paradoxes abound. Everything that seems at first like cooperation has its basis in competition. And nearly every act of competition takes part in a bigger, healthier system, as if cooperation were inherent all along.
Of course that oversimplified matters. Sometimes the balance was thrown off kilter — by some environmental change, or when one component species escaped natural controls keeping it in check. Like a cancer, it might “compete” out of existence the very econetwork that had enabled it to thrive in the first place.
Still, the basic pattern was nearly always the same on millions of fecund little worlds. Take compact bags of protein-laced water. Provide sunlight and minerals. Get them busy vying in life-or-death rivalry. Over the long run, what emerges will be ever-greater and more complex alliances. Cooperative groups that form organs, bodies, packs, herds, tribes, nations, planetary societies … all leading to the fractious but astounding Civilization of Five Galaxies.
The story of hydrogen-based life had similarities, but the plot took a different twist.
On Jovian-type worlds, size emerged from the start. Simple beings of vast extent flapped and fluttered across skies broad enough to swallow several hundred Jijos. Evolution caused such creatures to improve, though more slowly at cooler temperatures. Indeed, change did not always come about through reproduction and inheritance. More often, some part of a huge, drifting beast might stumble onto a new chemical trick or behavior. That portion would spread laterally, consuming and replacing the flesh next to it, gradually transforming the whole entity.
Death was still part of the process, but not quite in the same way it occurred on Earth.
To us, dying is a quantal thing. An individual may succeed in having offspring, or not. But either way, personal extinction stalks you all your life, and must eventually win, however hard you struggle or however much you innovate.
But to hydros, everything is murky, qualitative. Without such clear lines, death is relative. So long as a transformation happens slowly and smoothly, you look at it with no more dread than I fear cutting my hair.
Instead of building up through hard-won cooperation among tiny cells, life on Jupiter-type worlds was large from the start. It did not revolve as much around cooperation-competition. Self and other were known concepts, but distinguishing between the two had less central a role in existence than it did to oxy-beings.
Then how do you organize yourselves? Lark thought at one point, wrestling with frustration. How do you recognize objects, goals, opponents, or ideas?
Lark’s tutor could not read his mind, or perceive his questions as discrete sentences. But clearly some kind of meaning entered his bloodstream, secreted by Lark’s brain when he posed a query. It was a slower, less efficient process than speech, involving many iterations. But he wasn’t going anywhere.
Objects throbbed within the vacuole, budding off the parent body, pulsing as they crossed the open space, then merging together or recombining with the greater whole. For quite some time, Lark had watched these little forms writhe into subtly formed shapes that performed for his edification. Now, all at once, he realized the deep truth underlying it all.
These little subselves. They are …
A throbbing wave penetrated his thigh, swarming down a leg then up his torso. The sensation was unlike any other, and Lark abruptly realized he had been given a name.
A name he could not repeat aloud in any language, or even in his thoughts — so he translated as best he could.
