discovered by paleontologist CharlesD. Walcott on his pioneering expeditions into the Canadian Rockies, near the eastern border of British Columbia-” a hand-drawing of something indescribably weird appears on the screen “-like thisopabina, which died there six hundred and forty million years ago. Fossils of soft-bodied animals that old are rare; the Burgess shale deposits are the best record of the Precambrian fauna anyone has found to date.”
A skinny woman with big hair and bigger shoulder-pads sniffs loudly; she has no truck with these antediluvian dates. Roger winces sympathy for the academic. He’d rather she wasn’t here, but somehow she got wind of the famous paleontologist’s visit-and she’s the Colonel’s administrative assistant. Telling her to leave would be a career-limiting move.
“The important item to note-” photograph of a mangled piece of rock, visual echoes of theopabina “-is the tooth marks. We find them also-their exact cognates-on the ring segments of the Z-series specimens returned by the Pabodie Antarctic expedition of 1926. The world of the Precambrian was laid out differently from our own; most of the landmasses that today are separate continents were joined into one huge structure. Indeed, these samples were originally separated by only two thousand miles or thereabouts. Suggesting that they brought their own parasites with them.”
“What do tooth-marks tell us about them, that we need to know?” asks the Colonel.
The doctor looks up. His eyes gleam: “That something liked to eat them when they were fresh.” There’s a brief rattle of laughter. “Something with jaws that open and close like the iris in your camera. Something we thought was extinct.”
Another viewgraph, this time with a blurry underwater photograph on it. The thing looks a bit like a bizarre fish-a turbo-charged, armored hagfish with side-skirts and spoilers, or maybe a squid with not enough tentacles. The upper head is a flattened disk, fronted by two weird, fern-like tentacles drooping over the sucker-mouth on its underside. “This snapshot was taken in Lake Vostok last year. It should be dead: there’s nothing there for it to eat. This, ladies and gentlemen, isAnomalocaris, our toothy chewer.”
He pauses for a moment. “I’m very grateful to you for showing it to me,” he adds, “even though it’s going to make a lot of my colleagues very angry.”
Is that a shy grin? The professor moves on rapidly, not giving Roger time to fathom his real reaction.
“Nowthis is interesting in the extreme,” Gould comments. Whatever it is, it looks like a cauliflower head, or maybe a brain: fractally branching stalks continuously diminishing in length and diameter, until they turn into an iridescent fuzzy manifold wrapped around a central stem. The base of the stem is rooted to a barrel-shaped structure that stands on four stubby tentacles.
“We had somehow managed to cramAnomalocaris into our taxonomy, but this is something that has no precedent. It bears a striking resemblance to an enlarged body segment ofHallucigena -” here he shows another viewgraph, something like a stiletto-heeled centipede wearing a war-bonnet of tentacles “-but a year ago we worked out that we had poorhallucigena upside down and it was actually just a spiny worm.
And the high levels of iridium and diamond in the head here…this isn’t a living creature, at least not within the animal kingdom I’ve been studying for the past thirty years. There’s no cellular structure at all. I asked one of my colleagues for help and he was completely unable to isolate any DNA or RNA from it at all. It’s more like a machine that displays biological levels of complexity.”
“Can you put a date to it?” the Colonel asks.
“Yup.” The professor grins. “It predates the wave of atmospheric atomic testing that began in 1945; that’s about all. We think it’s from some time in the first half of this century, or the latter half of the last.
It’s been dead for years, but there are older people still walking this earth. In contrast-” he flips to the picture ofAnomalocaris “-this specimen we found in rocks that are roughly six hundred and ten million years old.” He whips up another shot: similar structure, much clearer. “Note how similar it is to the dead but not decomposed one. They’re obviously still alive somewhere.”
He looks at the Colonel, suddenly bashful and tongue-tied: “Can I talk about the, uh, thing we were, like, earlier…?”
“Sure. Go ahead. Everyone here is cleared for it.” The Colonel’s casual wave takes in the big-haired secretary, and Roger, and the two guys from Big Black who are taking notes, and the very serious woman from the Secret Service, and even the balding, worried-looking Admiral with the double chin and coke-bottle glasses.
“Oh. All right.” Bashfulness falls away. “Well, we’ve done some preliminary dissections on theAnomalocaris tissues you supplied us with. And we’ve sent some samples for laboratory analysis-nothing anyone could deduce much from,” he adds hastily. He straightens up. “What we discovered is quite simple: these samples didn’t originate in Earth’s ecosystem. Cladistic analysis of their intracellular characteristics and what we’ve been able to work out of their biochemistry indicates, not a point of divergence from our own ancestry, but the absence of any common ancestry at all. Acabbage has more in common with us than that creature. You can’t tell by looking at the fossils, six hundred million years after it died, but live tissue samples are something else.
“Item: it’s a multicellular organism, but each cell appears to have multiple structures like nuclei-a thing called a syncitium. No DNA, it uses RNA with a couple of base pairs that don’t occur in terrestrial biology. We haven’t been able to figure out what most of its organelles do, or what their terrestrial cognates would be, and it builds proteins using a couple of amino acids that we don’t. Thatnothing does.
Either it’s descended from an ancestry that diverged from ours before the archaeobacteria, or-more probably-it is no relative at all.” He isn’t smiling anymore. “The gateways, Colonel?”
“Yeah, that’s about the size of it. The critter you’ve got there was retrieved by one of our, uh, missions.
On the other side of a gate.”
Gould nods. “I don’t suppose you could get me some more?” he asks hopefully.
“All missions are suspended pending an investigation into an accident we had earlier this year,” the Colonel says, with a significant glance at Roger. Suslowicz died two weeks ago; Gorman is still disastrously sick, connective tissue rotting in his body, massive radiation exposure the probable cause.
Normal service will not be resumed; the pipeline will remain empty until someone can figure out a way to make the deliveries without losing the crew. Roger inclines his head minutely.
“Oh well.” The professor shrugs. “Let me know if you do. By the way, do you have anything approximating a fix on the other end of the gate?”
“No,” the Colonel says, and this time Roger knows he’s lying. Mission four, before the Colonel diverted their payload capacity to another purpose, planted a compact radio telescope in an empty courtyard in the city on the far side of the gate. XK-Masada, where the air’s too thin to breathe without oxygen; where the sky is indigo, and the buildings cast razor-sharp shadows across a rocky plain baked to the consistency of pottery under a bloodred sun. Subsequent analysis of pulsar signals recorded by the station confirmed that it was nearly six hundred light years closer to the galactic core, inward along the same spiral arm. There are glyphs on the alien buildings that resemble symbols seen in grainy black-and-white Minox photos of the doors of the bunker in the Ukraine. Symbols behind which the subject of Project Koschei lies undead and sleeping: something evil, scraped from a nest in the drowned wreckage of a city on the Baltic floor. “Why do you want to know where they came from?”
“Well. We know so little about the context in which life evolves.” For a moment the professor looks wistful. “We have-had-only one datum point: Earth, this world. Now we have a second, a fragment of a second. If we get a third, we can begin to ask deep questions not like, ‘Is there life out there?’-because we know the answer to that one, now-but questions like ‘Whatsort of life is out there?’ and ‘Is there a place for us?’”
Roger shudders:Idiot, he thinks.If only you knew you wouldn’t be so happy. He restrains the urge to speak up- to do so would be another career-limiting move. More to the point, it might be a life-expectancy-limiting move for the professor, who certainly doesn’t deserve any such drastic punishment for his cooperation. Besides, Harvard professors visiting the Executive Office Building in DC are harder to disappear than comm-symp teachers in some flyblown jungle village in Nicaragua.
Somebody might notice. The Colonel would be annoyed.
Roger realizes that Professor Gould is staring at him. “Do you have a question for me?” the distinguished paleontologist asks.
“Uh-in a moment.” Roger shakes himself. Remembering time-survivor curves, the captured Nazi medical atrocity records mapping the ability of a human brain to survive in close proximity to the Baltic Singularity. Mengele’s insanity. The SS’s final attempt to liquidate the survivors, the witnesses. Koschei, primed and pointed at the American heartland like a darkly evil gun. The ‘World-Eating Mind’ adrift in brilliant dreams of madness, estivating in the absence of its prey: dreaming of the minds of sapient beings, be they barrel-bodied wing-flying
