The Long Mars

Hemingway said, ‘Yes. So, on this world there are clearly multicelled forms, and some of them are photosynthesizers. But look closer at this specimen. They are both photosynthetic.’

Maggie scratched her head. ‘They? Both?’

‘Both the life forms you see here.’

Yue-Sai leaned closer to the dome. ‘Actually it looks like a tree being attacked by something like a strangler fig.’

‘Not attacked . . . I’m not being fair. I’ve had the benefit of a full biochemical analysis of these specimens. Lieutenant Wu, on our Earth all life is based on DNA. Yes? We share DNA and its coding system and so on with the humblest bacterium. So we can say that all life on the Datum derives from a single origin. Even to get to that point, the DNA-life origin, there had to be earlier selections, by various evolutionary processes: the selection of a set of amino acids to work with, twenty out of the many possible alternatives, the choice of what kind of DNA coding to use . . . But other choices were possible. There may have been other origins of life, based on different choices. If so, those other domains were wiped out by our kind, the triumphant survivors.’

Mac grunted. ‘Genocide, even at the root of the tree of life. So it goes. Hemingway, I’m guessing from your big build-up that things are different here.’

‘They are. There are two life forms, under this dome. The tree is based on DNA like our own, and amino acids like our own set. But the other, the “fig”, has a different suite of aminos. It uses a different genetic coding, with some of the information carried in a DNA variant, the rest in proteins—’

‘Wow.’ Mac straightened up. ‘Life from two origins survived here?’

‘So it seems. Who knows how or why? Perhaps there was a refuge, an island . . . For one thing the fig’s chirality is different. Organic molecules aren’t symmetrical; we describe them as left-handed or right-handed. All our aminos are left-handed. The aminos in the “tree” are left-handed. The aminos of the “fig” are right-handed.’

Maggie shook her head. ‘So what? What does that mean?’

Mac said, ‘I guess a left-hander couldn’t eat a right-hander.’

‘Well, it couldn’t digest it,’ Hemingway said. ‘They could destroy each other. But look what they’re actually doing.’ They bent to see again. ‘The fig is using the tree for support. You can’t see another detail – in their tangled-up root systems the fig pays the favour back by bringing nutrients to the tree.’

‘It is cooperation,’ Yue-Sai breathed. ‘No genocide here, Doctor. They work together to live. Cooperation, across two domains of life! What a wonderful discovery. My faith in the universe is restored.’ She playfully patted Hemingway on the shoulder. ‘There, you see! If two alien beings such as this can cooperate for their mutual benefit, why not us Chinese and you Americans?’

‘I was born Canadian, not American,’ Hemingway said, uninterested. He bent closer to the intertwined plants.

Maggie came to an impulsive decision. ‘Let’s leave this busy guy to his work. Mac, come with me.’

Mac raised an eyebrow. ‘Problem, Captain?’

‘Yeah,’ she said privately. ‘This issue with you and Snowy – enough with the frosty glares and moody silences. It’s festered long enough, and I need to know what the hell the problem is.’

‘What’s brought this on now? Was it that tree and the strangler fig, living in harmony? You’ll start singing “Ebony and Ivory” next.’

Glowering at him, she said nothing.

He sighed. ‘Your sea cabin?’

‘You bring the single malt.’

Shi-mi insisted on sitting in. Maggie insisted she stay out of sight, under the desk.

And, making it clear he resented being ordered to do so, Mac told Maggie the full story.

‘Here’s the main thing you got to remember, Captain,’ Mac began, as he sipped his malt: his favourite, Auld Lang Syne. ‘We meant well.’

‘“We meant well.” My God, I wonder how many sins have been justified by that line?’

‘Look – this all happened in 2042, ’43. A couple of years after Yellowstone. At that time the Franklin was still ru

As Maggie remembered too well. Military twains with their holds full of wide-eyed refugees, men, women, children, being taken away from their volcano-smashed homes and deposited in entirely unfamiliar worlds . . .

‘If I recall you had about a year away from the Franklin.’

‘Yeah,’ Mac said, ‘before I was called back to advise on the fitting-out of the new Armstrong and Cernan. You were somewhat busy, Maggie. And you didn’t ask any close questions about what I’d done with my year away.’

‘Hmm. Nor did I check the crew files. No need in your case. So I thought.’

‘You wouldn’t have found much, not without digging. The outcomes were kind of covered up . . . Maggie, I was sent to West 1,617,524.’

She knew that number, and wasn’t surprised. ‘The beagles’ Earth. Snowy’s world.’

‘Yeah. I was conscripted – under Admiral Davidson’s command, but it was a commission from higher up. I was part of a multi-service, multi-disciplinary party sent to establish some kind of formal liaison with the beagles, after the first contact in 2040. President Cowley and his advisers thought it was important to mount the mission even at a time of national emergency, to make sure we had a foot in the door. We were basically military, but there was genuine scientific interest, of course. We had anatomists, linguists, psychologists, ethnologists. Even a dog trainer. Look, it was a successful project. You saw the extension that’s still ru

‘We studied every aspect of the beagles’ society, every aspect we were allowed to see anyhow, and we snooped on much of the rest. Maggie, beagles can’t step, even with a Stepper box. Hell, you know that. Aside from that, they seem to be richly intelligent, individually just as smart as we are.

‘But here’s the headline. Despite their smarts, their culture is impoverished. I don’t mean just technologically, materially, though they are stuck at the level of Stone Age herdsmen – or were, before the kobolds sold them iron-making and a few advanced weapons.’

Kobolds were something of an embarrassment: cu

Mac said, ‘The beagles’ art is primitive, they don’t have complex writing, their religions and civilization forms are crude. Their science is non-existent, although they have a decent tradition of trial-and-error medicine – based mostly on battlefield experience.’

Maggie frowned. ‘So what? Maybe beagles don’t need writing, for instance. I know that the beagles communicate by scent, by hearing – those howls Snowy likes to run off into the night to make . . . And didn’t modern humans hang around for an age after they evolved, before they started painting caves and flying to the moon?’

‘It’s true. But in the end we did take off, there was a kind of spiral of invention. And, Maggie, though we’ve had calamities since then – the collapse of empires and shattering plagues and such – our progress has pretty much been, well, I won’t say “upward”, that’s a value judgement. At least in the direction of more complexity. Yes?’

‘OK.’

‘And we tend not to lose what we invent. Oh, individual civilizations lose it all, but—’

‘I get the picture. Once iron-making is invented, it stays invented. And the same isn’t true of the beagles, I’m guessing.’

‘That’s what we found. You see, the beagles go through booms and crashes, catastrophic crashes. Because their societies aren’t stable.

‘It all comes from their breeding cycle. The problem is that beagles breed like dogs – that is, they breed copiously, with huge litters. A beagle Pack is a martial matriarchy, basically, with the authority of the Mother being expressed down through Daughters and Granddaughters, even Great-granddaughters. So if you have a period of peace you end up with a population boom – and, more significantly, far too many Daughters and Granddaughters.’