Serials - parts and parts.

SETI Library: Lathe of Evolution, Part 2

Written by Gregory Benford

Hassan leaned forward over coffee, his broad face split by a shiny smile. "So you see, we thought to solicit further your views on the meaning of the flooding."

Ruth blinked. "I'm new here. Not entitled to a theory."

"We want fresh insights," the man Stefano said slowly, eyeing her and Hassan. "You have much training in the SETI messages—" He waved a hand, as if encompassing all that field. "—and this is a vastly more difficult one, of course. But something may resonate, eh?" He gave her a chilly smile. She marveled at its mechanical insincerity.

"I wonder if the Mat may be using direct demonstration all the time?" Ruth said, talking directly to Hassan.

"To . . . show us something relevant to what it wishes to say?" Hassan sipped coffee and tipped his chin down, as if urging her forward.

"Perhaps it demonstrated something it fears? Or likes? Wants?" She knew this was empty speculation, but something in Hassan's look told her she was following a trail he liked. What did he want from this? She had learned to anticipate the Prefect's "avenues of thought," as the man himself had described them. Most leaders tried to coax their own ideas out of underlings, rather than impose them from above.

"Seems unlikely to me," Stefano said flatly. "I've watched the videos. Hard to tell much from suit cams, but it seems a simple reflexive response. Perhaps to something in the alien's symbol set?"

Ruth looked at Hassan's reaction, a quick twitch of his lower lip. Plainly the men did not like each other. After all, they were natural antagonists—Stefano wanted to police Hassan's explorations. Ruth somehow sided with Hassan, without any actual reason to do so.

She always led with her own intuition. In which case, what is he thinking? Ruth reflected. To move the discussion, she said, "We don't know how fast the Mat can think, do we? Could it—however it processes information—answer within minutes?"

"Yes," Hassan said firmly. "Plenty of research shows that. We don't quite know how it does it—these are thinking plants, after all—but it does." A pause. "There is a further fact, just noticed by our sensors."

Stefano began, "I have not seen—"

"This is hours old. The Mat is now exhaling a great deal of CH4, methane."

Ruth was startled. "Didn't that happen right during the first explorations?"

Hassan nodded. "And not since."

Stefano asked, "Maybe that's a symptom of greater growth?

Hassan shrugged. "As I recall, sometimes it recalls previous visits we've made, other times not."

"Suppose it's a deep, long memory?" Ruth asked quietly. Time to put the cat among the pigeons.

Hassan's mouth was open to continue, but his eyes flickered and he said nothing.

"Of what?" Stefano broke the silence.

Hassan took a breath and let the words slide out. "Perhaps we should think of the flooding read as a sign that the Mat liked the wet, warm ages."

Stefano scowled skeptically. "Why should it?"

Hassan said, "That's when it might have gotten out onto the surface. Spread, maybe. The atmospheric pressure was much higher then, providing some shield against the UV and cosmic rays."

Ruth could see the two men considering how this idea shifted their positions. She decided to step in, just to stir things up; this was fun. "In that time, could it have directly connected with other parts of the Marsmat, on the surface?"

They eyed her. Plainly this was a chess game, with ideas as pieces to advance, when needed.

"Preposterous," Stefano said.

"Why?" Hassan chided.

"To think the Mat would remind us of its past—"

"The alien was there, Akralan," Ruth said. "That made a difference."

Stefano pulled the edges of his mouth down in disdain. "Why?"

"The Mat could tell that Akralan was different from us. I was there, but I certainly don't know why. Maybe its 'eyesight'—if that's what it has—can distinguish humans from other species."

"How could—" Hassan started, then blinked. "Only . . . only by experience."

Ruth saw it then. "Yes. The Mat has seen Akralan's kind before. Something happened back then."

Stefano sniffed. "This is all mere supposition."

"Sure it is," Hassan said. "Let's follow the logic."

"To what conclusion?" Stefano insisted.

"Well, for one, how about this idea that the flooding was a recognition signal?" Ruth said.

Stefano's mouth compressed into a thin line. "But that would imply . . . "

Hassan shot back, "That Mars was wet when Akraslan's kind came here."

Silence. Then Ruth said, "We can date that era. It's millions of years in the past."

Stiffly Stefano said, "That could match, if Akralan would tell us when his species came here."

Ruth said, "He—or it, I'm not sure—doesn't know. It was a long time ago, and his species has done a lot. They abandoned their native planet and live in artificial sites strung around their solar system. In all that, plenty of their records vanished."

Both men gaped at her. "This . . ." Stefano said, blinking rapidly, "—this is known?"

"To me and few others."

"Why isn't it known more broadly?"

Ruth spread her hands, shrugging as if the answer was obvious. "The SETI Library doesn't want to turn this into a media circus. Being on Luna helps stay away from Earth's grabby media net. Taking Akralan to Mars is even better. It keeps him under wraps."

There, Ruth thought, I've said it. The Prefect had in mind all along isolating Akralan until they knew more. He had never said so directly, but after years of working with him, she had become accustomed to his ways. She knew a big game was afoot here, too big to squander on a mere publicity campaign. And now these profs and crats did, too . . .

Hassan said, "This casts new light. Akralan is exploring here a site his species once knew. Why?"

Ruth outlined the alien's curious stunts, though they knew most of it. "The point is, Akralan is going back to the time when his kind had a world—an act of ancient nostalgia, I suppose. And the Marsmat is part of that."

"Why didn't his species spread through the wormhole network, so they could come here?" Stefano asked.

Ruth shrugged. "We don't know. Maybe the location of their wormhole mouth is a closely guarded secret, known only to a few?" She laughed wryly. "Because that's how Akralan is treating us, too—hiding the location of the wormhole in our Oort cloud." The big prize, she thought, but didn't say.

Stefano looked worried, then made his face blank. Ruth supposed this was moving too fast for him and his agenda. "We should be careful about turning speculations into facts," he said stiffly.

Hassan nodded but said, "Nobody can test an idea before taking the trouble to have an idea."

****

After that, she decided to go for a walk.

In her first days on Mars she had stayed inside, a bit shy of the suit-up rituals needed. She got to know some of the people in the habitat instead, and made a discovery. Media had trained many to think that only emotionally repressed pilots spouting acronyms were The Real Stuff. Some had become celebs, like Julia and the others in the original First Landing team: the Bright Stuff. But the thousands of people on Mars now, after a century of Marsforming, were varied and spirited—pioneers. Good, odd people. Still, it was the frontier that most interested her here, the unknown.

Getting in and out of anything, habitats or pressured rovers, was so laborious, they kept the "lock-pass-throughs" (an ancient NASA term) to a minimum. With every one they brought in fine red dust, even with the two-shower system designed to wash them away. But she needed to go out, so she went through the procedures. Rules said she was supposed to go with a partner, but she wanted to be alone.

Once outside, she marveled. Marsforming had already brought thin cirrus to the skies. Silvery, they caught the late afternoon sun in filmy layers. It had taken a century to settle Mars and create a substantial local industrial capability and population. Within half a century more, robo-factories venting fluorocarbon gases warmed the planet by eight degrees C. That brought water and carbon dioxide outgassing from the soil, thickening the atmosphere and raising the planetary temperature a further 20 C.

Still, the peroxides hadn't met enough water to gush forth their captured oxygen—the big event everyone anticipated. Marsforming had benefited from nano-bio-machines galore, but some brute chemical facts still ruled. Still, within her lifetime—which she cheerfully expected to exceed the 150 years now standard—Ruth hoped to be able to walk here with just a lightweight compressor to boost the oxygen she needed.

Even so transformed now, this Mars taught hard lessons. For one, how much Mother Earth did for humans without their noticing. Recycling air, water and food demanded an intricate dance of chemistry and physics. The habitat had to tinker with their systems constantly. Let the CO2 rise and they could all be dead before anyone noticed anything wrong; the sensors stood sentinel, carefully tended. Those also watched the moisture content of the hab's air or they would all get "suit throat"—drying out until voices rasped.

Though wetter and warmer, Mars still had plenty of nasty tricks. The pesky peroxides got in everywhere—even her underwear!—and seals eroded, so they had to be replaced with each outing. Air scrubbers needed adjustment and filter changes. They fought a steady battle to keep dust down.

She hiked to a nearby hill and watched the high clouds shadow the rust-brown land to the north. The vent was a dark spot a few kilometers away, thronged by monitors and gear. Their dung dump was a dark spot on the opposite horizon. Marsforming had already made water melt out of the permafrost. Muddy rivers flowed and light rain fell here and there. Radiation doses on the surface were falling as the atmosphere grew. Near the equator the first photosynthetic microbes were spreading in blue-green mats.

"Ruth!" came a call. She turned, irritated, and saw Stefano approaching. He must have followed her out. She wasn't pleased; she liked getting the feel of Mars alone.

"Beautiful, isn't it?" he said, huffing from the climb. His eyebrows furrowed. "But look at this."

He led her to a gully over the crest of the hill. It yawned two meters deep, newly carved. "Some permafrost erupted here last month. Flowed down, into the plain. That will work down into the Marsmat caverns. We're intruding on a fragile biosphere."

"Fragile? It's tough—probably older than ours. The DNA shows that the Marsmat has a lot of similarities to our most ancient bacteria, right? It endured the loss of the planet's atmosphere, the freezing-down, and heavy bombardments."

"We cannot know what reawakening this water will do to the mat. The Precautionary Principle plainly provides that insight."

She always hated hearing the capitals on big, inflated ideas. "We should never do anything for the first time, I get it."

"I don't think that's a fair—"

"Let me guess, next comes 'rocks have rights,' yes? "

He gave her a long, stern glare. "You won't hear me out."

"The Mat isn't afraid of water—it welcomes fluids, and uses them in its own weird way."

"You support Marsforming, then."

"Look, life is a one-way trip." She spread her arms widely. "We're all permanently exiled from our past. Mars colonists—all colonists—are no different. In addition to leaving behind the time of their past, they also leave behind the place. But in return they get to create a world where none existed before, a whole new planet."

"But not for the Marsmat that lives here."

"It's an anerobe. When we have an oxygen atmosphere here, it will still be safe far underground, just like the anerobes on Earth."

He shook his head. "We are not so superior that we should manage another lifeform. Especially a sentient one."

She stood her ground. "Why not manage wildlife? Back Earthside we slip contraceptives into the food of overpopulations of deer. In California people teach condors not to perch on power lines, so they won't get electrocuted. People teach whooping cranes how to migrate, and pick up salamanders to get them across roads—you name it, we do it."

He crossed his arms, the classic hostile stance. "We're radically altering its world."

"If the Marsmat wants to come up, to colonize the surface—as it did before—it will make up its own mind." She paused, her caution saying Don't get into politics talk! So she finished lamely, "Or whatever it uses for a mind."

"Such species-specific ethics are unacceptable." He waved an arm at the plain below. "This is a separate world, with separate rights of its own."

She couldn't resist. "Not once we're here. We're life!—connecting at last to other life, the Mat. Our ethics needs to benefit humanity. I won't debate if the Marsmat's interests can be considered as equal to human interests. It's a microbial intelligence. It's not like us, and moral arguments like yours—well, you contradict yourself every day!"

He looked puzzled. "What? How?"

"Look, if bacterial interests trump human interests, then mouthwash should be banned, right? We shouldn't chlorinate our water supplies. Hell, antibiotics should be illegal. If bacterial interests are superior to human interests, then Albert Schweitzer and Louis Pasteur should be denounced for crimes against bacteria!"

She wondered where her vehemence was coming from, and then went on, throwing caution to the wind. "Now, it's vital to save the Amazon rain forest, because a world without that would be a poorer one. Plus, no inheritance for our descendants. But Mars?"

"I do not see why you can parallel—"

"Hear the end of the argument, at least." She frowned at him and again wondered where all this was coming from.

"Look at it!" She swirled her arms around, rotating, both arms out, sweeping the horizon. "Even with an atmosphere nearly fifty times the original thin skin of carbon dioxide, it's barren! No isolation lab on Earth is remotely as hostile to organic chemistry. A terraformed Mars, filled with life, used book stores, forests—how can that not be a vastly richer gift to posterity?"

"That posterity will lack the Mars we know." He looked around with distaste, and pointed to the gully. "Or knew."

She had to admit, though only to herself, that the sharply eroded scar did resemble a wound. Some aspects of world making were not pretty.

"Look!" She whirled around again, feeling oddly giddy, impetuous. "Anybody who proposed changing our Earth into this place would mad, mad, mad—and bad. So why doesn't that logic work in reverse? Keeping Mars dead rather than make it as wonderful as Earth is—"

"Incorrect logic." His mouth compressed into a thin white line of lips. "Arguments can't be run backwards."

"Maybe. But I can—!" She took off, running downhill, taking long strides in the relaxing 0.38 gravs. It felt good to switch off her comm and leave the dead argument behind her. Stefano hadn't, so she heard his startled yelp and chugging breath as he ran downslope, too. A glance back told her Stefano couldn't keep up; he seemed in poor shape.

She sped down the brown-red soil, placing her boots so she didn't land on rocks, leaping small gullies, headed for the habitat. This was Mars, for Chrissake, an alien place, not just a debating point—and she intended to experience it, not argue it.

Too late, she thought of other arguments. Marsforming was a long term project, and there would come the chance to see directly if and how the Mat adapted to warmer, wetter days. There were plenty of terrestrial microbes incoming from the occasional Earth knockoff rocks, and plenty more brought by humans. Native and immigrant life blending, showing how such past ages might have looked. Understanding of Martian biota would increase by terraforming, not decrease.

Microbial biospheres had survived the early bombardment days on both planets. Life, once started, seemed determined to last.

But Stenflo wouldn't care about arguments, really. Most firm positions