Relic

The disk was obscure. It showed some kind of ceremony, people standing in a shallow lake, bending over, some with plants in their hands, baskets on their backs. Very odd. But it certainly didn’t seem to be an object of veneration.

The list wasn’t helpful. Nothing inside the crate had looked remotely like a devil, or whatever else could inspire such terror in an old woman.

Margo carefully unscrewed the small, rusty plant press, its screws and plywood holding the blotter paper in place. She eased it open and lifted off the first sheet.

It held a plant stem and several small flowers. Nothing she had ever seen before, but not particularly interesting at first glance.

[270] The next sheets in the press contained flowers and leaves. It was not, Margo thought, a collection made by a professional botanist. Whittlesey was an anthropologist, and he had probably just picked these specimens because they looked showy and unusual. But why would he collect them at all? She went through all the specimens, and in the back found the note she was looking for.

“Selection of plants found in overgrown abandoned garden near hut (Kothoga?) on September 16, 1987. May be cultivated species, some may also be invasive after abandonment.” There was a little drawing of the overgrown plot, showing the location of the various plants. Anthropology, thought Margo, not botany. Still, she respected Whittlesey’s interest in the relationship the Kothoga had to their plants.

She continued her inspection. One plant caught her eye: it had a long fibrous stem, with a single round leaf at the top. Margo realized it was some kind of aquatic plant, similar to a lily pad. Probably lived in an area of floods, she thought.

Then she realized that the incised disk found in the but showed the very same plant. She looked at the disk more closely: it depicted people harvesting these very plants from the swamp in a ceremony of sorts. The faces on the figures were twisted, full of sorrow. Very strange. But she felt satisfied to have made the co

Putting the disk aside, she reassembled the press and screwed it down tight. A loud beeping sounded: the centrifuge was finished, the material prepared.

She opened the centrifuge and slid a glass rod into the thin layer of material at the bottom of the test tube. She carefully applied it to the waiting gel, then eased the gel tray into the electrophoresis machine. Her finger moved to the power switch. Now for another half-hour wait, she thought.

[271] She paused, her finger still on the switch. Her thoughts kept returning to the old woman and the mystery of Mbwun. Could she have been referring to the seed pods—the ones that resembled eggs? No, Maxwell had taken those back himself. They weren’t in Whittlesey’s crate. Was it one of the frogs or salamanders in jars, or one of the bird skins? That seemed an unlikely locus for the son of the devil himself. And it couldn’t have been the garden plants, because they were hidden in the plant press.

So what was it? Was the crazy old woman ranting about nothing?

With a sigh, Margo switched on the machine and sat back. She replaced the plant press and the incised disk in her carryall, brushing away a few packing fibers clinging to the press, packing fibers from the crate. There were additional traces inside her handbag. Yet another reason to clean the damn thing out.

The packing fibers.

Curious, she picked one up with the tweezers, laid it on a slide, and placed it under the stereo-zoom. It was long and irregular, like the fibrous vein of a tough-stemmed plant. Perhaps it had been pounded flat by Kothoga women for household uses. Through the microscope, she could see the individual cells gleaming dully, their nuclei brighter than the surrounding ectoplasm.

She thought back to Whittlesey’s journal. Hadn’t Whittlesey mentioned specimen jars being broken, and his need to repack the crate? So, in the area of the deserted hut, they must have thrown out the old packing material, which had become soaked in formaldehyde, and repacked the crate with material found lying near the abandoned hut. Fibers prepared by the Kothoga, perhaps; probably for weaving into coarse cloth or for the production of rope.

Could the fibers have been what the woman was referring to? It seemed impossible. And yet, Margo [272] couldn’t help a little professional curiosity about it. Had the Kothoga actually cultivated the plant?

She plucked out a few fibers and dropped them in another mortar, added a few drops of enzyme, and ground them up. If she sequenced the DNA, she could use Kawakita’s program to at least identify the plant’s genus or family.

Soon, the centrifuged DNA from the fibers was ready for the electrophoresis machine. She followed her usual procedure, then switched on the current. Slowly, the dark bands began forming along the electrified gel.

A half hour later, the red light on the electrophoresis machine winked out. Margo removed the gel tray and began recording the position of the dots and bands of migrated nucleotides, typing her results into the computer.

She punched in the last position, instructed Kawakita’s program to search for matches with known organisms, directed the output to the printer, and waited. Finally, the pages began scrolling out.

At the top of the first sheet, the computer had printed:

Species: Unknown. 10% randomized genetic matches with known species.

Genus: Unknown

Family: Unknown

Order: Unknown

Class: Unknown

Phylum: Unknown

Kingdom: Unknown

Cripes, Margo! What did you put in here? I don’t even know if this is an animal or plant. And you won’t believe how much CPU time it took to figure that out!

Margo had to smile. So this was how Kawakita’s sophisticated experiment in artificial intelligence communicated with the outside world. And the results were ridiculous. Kingdom unknown? The damn program couldn’t even tell if it were a plant or an animal. Margo suddenly felt she knew why Kawakita had been reluctant to show her the program in the first place, why it took a call from Frock to get things in motion. Once you strayed out of its known provinces, the program grew flaky.

She sca

At the waiting prompt, she typed:

How come you don’t even know if it is an animal or plant? I see lots of plant genes in here.

There was a pause.

Didn’t you notice the animal genes in there, too? Run the data through GenLab.

Good point, thought Margo. She dialed up GenLab on the modem and soon the familiar blue logo popped up on the screen. She uploaded the DNA data from the fibers and ran it against their botanical sub-bank. Same results: almost nothing. A few matches with common sugars and chlorophylls.

On an impulse she ran the DNA data through the entire databank.

There was a long pause, and then a flood of information filled the screen. Margo quickly hit a series of [274] keys, instructing the terminal to capture the data. There were numerous matches with a variety of genes she had never heard of.

Logging off GenLab, she fed the data she’d captured into Kawakita’s program, instructing it to tell her what proteins the genes coded for.

A complicated list of the specific proteins created by each gene started to scroll down the screen.

Glycotetraglycine collagenoid