Across the Sea of Suns

Carlotta was awfully tart when she arrived.

Miffed at something perhaps.

There’s nothing developing between her and Bob if that’s what you’re thinking.

I’m not thinking at all actually.

I don’t think she knows herself what’s bothering her; she can’t talk about it, but look at that forced way she’s laughing over there and how she keeps glancing over at us.

Well look at it her way, we two’ve been together since the Pleistocene and she’s always going to be the last in, the odd number

Funny, it’s easier to talk about her here than when we’re alone

Ye olde multifass, everything comes out here—

And you always mixing around, it looks like aimless walking—

Walking yes, aimless no

Eavesdropping?

I, I like the mix—

Thing is, they’re going such a long way around in biochem terms, using what they can get after the sunlight scatters around in all that dust. No UV gets through down at the surface to speak of. That poor li’l biosphere, they stack photons on top of each other somehow to get enough energy, then grab onto water near the ocean, split off the oxy, God what a lotta work

Petrowski calcs that the biosphere’s older than our solar system, really old, been perkin’ along over five billion years, think ’bout that, figured it from the heavy element abundance—

—dust transfers the energy to the bigger life-forms, uses mostly sulfide electron donors, quite a trick when you consider—

—riding those winds, eating the goddamn dust, little bitsy microbes on their way from the Eye to the sea—

—still think you’ve got the most beautiful ass honey of any guy who wears those maintenance overalls—

Seems to me you people got a purty good handle on the biosphere, can’t see why you don’t pass on the touchdown option an’ let us get on with it.

Bob it’s not that simple

Lissen we let the specialists chip away at the thing ferever we’re gonna turn gray up here ’fore we ever get down and movin’

Squeeze it a li’l an’ see what you get

Tough ecology, man, I mean tough. This place’d be dead as Mars with just a little less sunlight and atmosphere. Bio’s creamin’ their jeans to see what else’s under that dust

Too early to tell; we can’t see well enough to estimate the extent of the life pyramid

Shit this all there is to drink gotta be sumpin’ better down at Nguyen’s

Look at him makes you wonder how a muitifass can work with people getting carried away, drink and even drugs on a ship no less

Him? They’re self-canceling, doncha see? Keeps things loose but when votin’ time rolls around they’re too fuzzed to care—

You look at paramecia or your own sperm cells even they have this little whip,

No thanks not my kind of thing

flagella down there is your justly famous balls, my good man

wigglin’ upstream like salmon. Story of my life

and if this grack will let me finish, there are nine fibers on the outside of that whip to every one fiber on the inside

she’s fine y’know wonderful but also great at takin’ the ol’ romance out of it

and that ratio, that nine to one, is the same in thousands of organisms all over Earth and nobody has the slightest idea

unoriginal God is the best explanation. He just got tired

couldn’t you mumble a little softer I can still hear what you’re saying

okay okay so tell us nine. to one

we can’t see any obvious selective survival advantage for the nine-to-one ratio but who knows, still the easiest out is that ’way back at the beginning when sex started the nine to ones were just lucky is all and that ratio got locked in early

kiss me quick I’m nine to one

had too much sniffo already eh?

love me love my ratio

well you just keep on holding up that bulkhead it looks like hard work white the adults talk

hark the queen speaketh

so first thing I look for in the dust crawlies from Isis is the flagella, and sure enough—oh thanks, I’m having that rum stuff—sure enough I squint into the electron mike and there are the little whips going like mad, only when I splice some down it’s a seven to one, not our nine to one. So question is, what’s magic about odd ratios?

only two cases hell honey not statistically meaningful

still sounds suspicious to me

could be that an odd ratio gives ’em edges to hold onto?

so what’s the comparative advantage?

more leverage with an odd ratio? maybe that way it’s easier to make your point even if the lady’s not interested

talk about anthropocentric

must be they need a good grip right Nigel?

I never speculate on extraterrestrial pornography

Well they use something to hold onto those dust motes while they’re riding the winds out from the Eye, up those mountains and down to the sea, chomping away on those sulfide electron donors

then when the Eye winds turn near the seas the big cyclone pattern that’s when the dust falls

Remarkable how fast his head clears I could almost follow that

But do we need to decide basic mechanisms like that before a manned landing?

There’s lots of biochem to study we can spend a year easy

Not me Come now we’ve been in orbit for months already bloody long enough

Much as we all love good, old Bob-boy I’d rather rely on Nigel’s judgment

Thanks but isn’t that what this muitifass is about?

Goddamn dust if we could only see more. That third flyback probe, it found lots of dust eaters dropping off near the seas but you know I keep thinking

Yeah, seems like those li’l buggers are a planet-wide feeding system for the bigger life-forms, so we ought to look at who benefits

Their function is carrying chemical energy you mean, that’s all?

Sure, they’ve sopped up photons at the Eye and made the right carbo-oxy compounds

—which get dumped into the mountain valleys where those EMs are—

right

Strange kind of energy vector, moving biochem energy out from the Eye. Hard to see how a whole biosphere like that could evolve

This isn’t New jersey m’ love