“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 weird fish—a turbocharged, armoured hagfish with side-skirts and spoilers, or maybe a squid with not enough tentacles. The upper head is a flattened disk, fronted by two bizarre fern-like tentacles drooping over the weird 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, is Anomalocaris, 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 a chance to fathom his real reaction. “Now this 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 cram Anomalocaris into our taxonomy, but this is something that has no precedent. It bears a striking resemblance to an enlarged body segment of Hallucigena—” 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 poor hallucigena 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 they were 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?” asks the colonel.
“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, last half of last century. It’s been dead for years, but there are older people still walking this earth. In contrast—” he flips to the picture of Anomalocaris “—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. Alright.” Bashfulness falls away. “Well, we’ve done some preliminary dissections on the Anomalocaris 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 common ancestry. A cabbage is more human, 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 aren’t used by terrestrial biology. We haven’t been able to figure out what most of its organelles do, what their terrestrial cognates would be, and it builds proteins using a couple of amino acids that we don’t. That nothing 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 any more. “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,” says the colonel, 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 blood-red 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 like, not, ‘is there life out there?’—because we know the answer to that one, now—but questions like ‘what sort 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. Doing so would be another career-limiting move. More to the point, it might be a life-expectancy-limiting move for the professor, who certainly didn’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 fly-blown jungle village in Nicaragua. Somebody might notice. The colonel would be annoyed.