Made progress. Once I confirmed Kiley had brought back some microbes I had three more processor nodes implanted.
Oh, Royan, she said despairingly. How many times had they argued over implants? He had wanted them so badly after he was recovered and showing an interest in helping her with Event Horizon. She grudgingly paid for four, two processors, two memory stores.
I can handle it he said calmly. I knew you’d complain about that.
I’m not going to argue with a package, she said. What happened to the microbes?
I loaded my implants with biochemistry and genetics data, and started to map their chromosomes.
The package squirted an image of the microbe’s genetic structure. It looked like a Christmas tree bauble, a softly gleaming metallic-purple sphere hanging in the null-space of the node universe. As it grew larger she saw the surface was mottled with minute rings, it began to resemble a twined ball of chain.
Familiarity overwhelmed her. Dear Lord, that’s the same genetic structure as the flower.
What flower, Snowy?
You sent me a flower, an alien flower. It has toroidal chromosome-equivalents stacked in concentric shells. Just like that.
I don’t understand. The flower came from a starship?
I… Yes, no, something. Greg said there was something behind the flower, waiting. He must have sensed the starship. What else could it be?
And I warned you about it?
That’s right. She thought furiously, summoning up a logic matrix from her processor node. The question was simple enough, trying to formulate a correlation between the microbes Kiley returned and a starship, it couldn’t be coincidence. Her processor reduced the question to equations, naked digits, feeding them into the matrix’s channels. The construct wasn’t the kind of prismatic graphics a terminal cube projected, more an instinctive awareness of maths, the true properties of numbers. Colourless, almost without form, she needed the bioware to analogize it for her.
The equations flowed through the matrix channels, fusing, interacting, offering solutions. Could the microbes have been part of a waste dump? she asked. If an alien starship has been orbiting Jupiter for any respectable length of time, the entire ring and moon system would be contaminated by now.
No, I don’t believe that’s your answer, Snowy.
Why not?
I managed to identify some of the toroid sequences. I’ll show you.
She watched the gleaming purple sphere turn. The chain was beginning to unwind. It was like a magician’s trick, pulling a line of handkerchiefs out of one hat, a line that just kept coming. The chain spiralled round her perception point, forming a near-solid cylindrical wall, etched with a black groove.
This is just the outer shell, Snowy.
Dear Lord. The cylinder stretched out above and below her, there were no ends in sight. And you thought you could tame this?
It’s all a question of processing power. Everything is solveable given time. I taught you that, remember?
So what have you solved?
Below her, the colour began to change. Fans of pale light were shining into the cylinder, as if slots had appeared in the wall of chain letting in the dawn sun. They began to build, moving up towards her. When they were level, she could see it was lengths of the chain itself that were brightening. Individual toroids in the lengths glowed, becoming translucent; in some cases there were only twenty or thirty of them strung together, in others there were over a hundred. They were filled with alphanumeric codes.
It’s funny, Royan said. Only the outer shell was active.
What do you mean?
The genes which dictate the microbe’s structure are all contained in the outer shell The rest, the inner shells, are inactive. It’s all spacing. Waste toroids, nonsense.
They have no purpose?
The inner shells aren’t part of the microbe, no. In that respect this genetic structure is similar to human DNA. Ninety per cent of our DNA is rubbish, filling up the spaces between the active genes, the ones that make us what we are, give us our hair colour and height and blood type, every characteristic. But our active genes are strung out all the way along the DNA helix. Whereas in the alien microbe, they’re only on the outside. And I can’t think why.
Is it important?
I’m not sure. it doesn’t affect the microbe in any way.
What’s the significance of the sequences you have managed to identify? Why do they show the microbe isn’t part of a waste dump?
It’s not impossible, Snowy, I didn’t say that, just highly unlikely. You see, I’ve found the sequences for the mechanism which breaks down minerals in rock The genetic mother-lode.
A lot of the glowing toroids reverted to purple, the majority of the ones that were left were situated in a broad band of the cylinder above her perception point. These ones, Royan said. It’s like an osmotic process, but dry. The microbe envelope can be made porous to selected molecules, and gradually they diffuse across. And these-the glowing toroids began to blank out, others came on to replace them, scattered the whole length of the cylinder. These control its thermal absorption mechanism. The microbe becomes functional in a temperature gradient, one side hotter than the other. Perfect energy utilization for a space environment.
She observed in silence as the identified toroids flashed at her like a mad nightclub lighting stack. Royan reeling off their functions, proud and possessive.
The point is, he said, it lives in a vacuum, it’s perfectly adapted for surviving interstellar transit, then multiplying on the asteroids and interplanetary dust orbiting a star. It’s not a faecal parasite, Snowy. It’s not something you have on board a starship.
I’ll grant you that, but there has to be a connection. Could it live on the starship’s hull?
Hey, yes. That might be it. On the ball, Snowy, as always.
The cylinder dissolved around her, leaving only the lustrous purple sphere.
So what was this package recorded for? she asked. What are you here to tell me?
That I’ve cracked it. It’s all there, just like I said, Snowy. The potential. Think of it; a clump of cells you can smear on an asteroid, they’d grow, cover the whole rock in a photosynthetic membrane, and inside they’ll be grazing on the ore, fruiting pods of solid minerals and metaL You could seed a hundred rocks, a thousand, turn the entire asteroid belt into a living mine. Then we’d launch a fleet of Dragonflight’s cargo ships to pick up the pods, bring them back to Earth. Enough wealth for everyone to live like a king. Imagine that, Snowy.
Yeah. Imagine that.
Cancel Integrity Monitored Link to Processor Node One. Squirt Package into NN Core Two.
The patio shimmered into place around her. Matthew’s damp towel was lying in a heap on the York slabs, she picked it up and hung it over his chair.
Same as last time, she told the NN core. Review the package memories; but this time I want that microbe’s genetic structure compared to the flower’s. They obviously come from the same planet. See if you can find out how close the relationship is.
Right.
Cancel Channel to SelfCores.
Being free of the electronic voices and pictures in her mind was like an escape from prison. She could hear the children laughing and yelling, Brutus barking. When she looked round the stone pillar at the end of the patio she saw they were playing with one of the big colourful inflatable balls on the lawn. It looked like a grand game.
Her cybofax began to shrill.
CHAPTER 23
Listoelhad changed since the last time Greg had visited, seventeen years ago, investigating his first Event Horizon case. Now he sat behind the Titan’s pilot watching their approach through the cockpit windscreen. They were due west of Ireland, flying subsonically, descending slowly. Below him, the ocean was completely green. It was a ragged patch over a hundred kilometres wide, its shape varying according to currents and wind. Today it looked like a bloated comet, with a tail which streamed away to the south, broadening and diluting to invisibility three hundred kilometres distant.