Baltiel had expected to be the great expert on the land of Nod by now. Instead he felt as though their accumulated knowledge of the planet was to the mind what the alien flesh would be to the stomach, almost impossible to assimilate. It wasn’t that the automated survey had turned up blank, quite the opposite. They had a vast wealth of information about the planet, and no way to readily put it together in any kind of order. He felt like a schoolchild taught history as a list of dates and names of kings, without context to let him draw meaning from the information.
Nodan organisms were organized into cells, just like Earth creatures, although the cells themselves were very different. They were smaller, for one thing, no bigger than an E. coli bacterium on average. There was no nucleus, but some manner of transmissible organization, incredibly dense, was implanted in the membrane. Lante, wearing her biochemist hat, was talking about atomic-level information storage, more compact than DNA but perhaps more energy-intensive to produce. Every cell seemed to react to light, even the ones buried deep in the bodies of creatures. Why? Nobody had a good theory. Plenty of the organisms they had looked at appeared to be metabolizing sunlight, some sessile-like plants, others highly mobile, suggesting that their mechanism (as yet unknown but there were some fascinating suggestions) was far more efficient than plant photosynthesis – and there appeared to be no hard plant/animal divide on Nod.
Almost every organism was radially symmetrical, top and bottom but no front or back, save where evolution had twisted them round to let them flap through the skies dorsal-side first. Oh, and many of them were only partially cellular, with large portions of their bodies composed of a plasticky tissue that seemed almost inanimate and which was manipulated and deformed by contracting fibres – the jellyfish, which comprised a significant phylum of Nodan life, were all sail and hardly any actual ship.
Baltiel wasn’t someone whose mind leapt instantly to thoughts of commercial exploitation, but Nod had already shown him forms of information storage, energy conversion and super-strong, super-light materials that Earth technology could not currently replicate. And yet, at the same time, the Nodan ecosystem felt . . . young. Aside from some truly colossal medusae-forms nothing on land seemed bigger than a medium-sized dog. There was nothing like a forest (nothing like wood), nothing much like an internal skeleton. Everything sprawled outwards rather than fighting for height. He wondered if this was what Earth would have felt like back in the Devonian era or some such, when life was just encroaching on land.
What might they become? But he would never know, and he had a bitter certainty that human presence in this solar system meant that nobody would, that the future of life on Nod was going to be brutally curtailed.
He had not sent anything home about their discoveries. As far as he knew, everyone had respected his orders on that front. But it wouldn’t matter as soon as the next wave of Earthlings arrived, ready to wash away all these fragile marks in the sand prior to building some prime beachfront property on any habitable planet they found. He had daydreamed about putting plague beacons in orbit all over the planet, warning off the future.
So instead he was indulging himself. He and his crew would do what they could to curate this riot of weirdly unambitious-seeming life while they were still able to. There would be a record for later generations, even if there would be nothing else.
He sent a call to Skai over the module’s network and she confirmed her readiness, highlighting the green system readouts. He checked to ensure that his ground team had reached the shuttle. Erma Lante (biologist and medic) and Gav Lortisse (geothermal engineer and general technician) were there, and Kalveen Rani (meteorologist and pilot) was just on her way. She had a message pending and he checked it anxiously, expecting something to have arisen to delay his destiny – faults, storms, something. Instead she was recommending he speak to Senkovi. He had some meteorological data for me to analyse but when it came through it was nonsense. He may be having problems.
Baltiel felt he had plenty of his own problems, to which he really didn’t want to add Senkovi. The man was supposed to be so damned self-sufficient, after all.
He set his feet on the brief path to the shuttle bay and a sudden rush of excitement seized him, like a child about to go on a much-dreamt-of holiday. He’d been living in this tin can for too long; subjectively for years, objectively (meaning by the ship’s clock) for decades. Like a child, again, but one who’d been staring at the presents under the tree for a generation, not forbidden to open them but exercising inhuman self-restraint.
Like a child. Nobody on his team would describe him so: he was the man who was always calm, who always had an answer, who could even – miracle of miracles – talk Senkovi up or down or sideways from wherever the man’s thought processes had led him. And yet, inside, Baltiel felt a bubbling, innocent glee. The timing of the mission, however well accounted for in the records, was more to do with him having finally exhausted his iron reserves of patience. Today was Christmas and he was about to tear off the wrapping paper.
Still, he was Overall Command, and Senkovi’s little fiefdom was still part of Overall, at least nominally, so he had the module signal its other-self, the Aegean.
‘Hi, boss,’ came the delayed response, by which time Baltiel was in the shuttle double-checking Lortisse and Rani as they double-checked each others’ pre-flight checks, belt and braces all the way down.
‘Siri’s chasing up some met data from you,’ Baltiel prodded.
‘Oh, hum, yes. No, not a priority right now.’ By which time everyone on the ground crew had checked everyone else’s sums and Siri Skai had confirmed their launch window and the excited child taking up space in Baltiel’s head was virtually blocking out everything else. And Senkovi sounded off balance, which should have been a huge worry given how the man kept his insides inside, but surely it couldn’t be now that things went catastrophically wrong. Not on the very edge of departure.
And yet . . . ‘Disra, what’s up?’
‘We’re just having a few system glitches, boss, nothing to worry about.’ Senkovi’s tone, when it finally came back, was transparent. He’s screwed up somehow and he doesn’t want me to check up. And Baltiel could check up, of course. He could query the Aegean with his command access and then, doubtless, cut through all the baffles and screens Senkovi had festooned the problem data with. Or he could just let Senkovi get on with it and deny the man the chance to rain on Baltiel’s greatest ever parade.
He made a command decision that, even then, he knew was on the wrong side of cautious. He’d been cautious for twenty years, though. Time for one glorious, reckless act. Cutting the connection, he decided to let Senkovi scoop his own crap without supervision, this one time, and hoped that the man didn’t end up finger-painting it all over the walls.
He refused to lose the launch window. He couldn’t know, at the time, just what was riding on the decision.
‘Skai?’
‘When you are.’ Skai and the rest of the module crew were already settled in to continue the data gathering. Most of them would be back in cold sleep as soon as the shuttle was safely down. He was surprised there hadn’t been more jostling for a place on the ground, but going to live with the jellyfish didn’t appeal to everyone.