Aurora - Страница 34

“Why us?” Aram asked. He had linked Badim into the call, given its significance. “We’re alien to the place, after all.”

“We’re made of organic molecules. Maybe it’s just that. Or we’re warm. Just a good growth medium, that’s all. And our blood circulation moves it around in us.”

“So they’re in that clay from the estuary?”

“Yes. That’s the highest concentration. But now that I’ve found them, I’ve seen a few almost everywhere. In the river water. In seawater. In the wind.”

“They must need more than water.”

“Yes. Sure. Maybe salts, maybe organics. But we’re salty, and organic. And so is the water down here. And the wind rips the salts right into the air.”

When three more of the people in Hvalsey died in the same way as Clarisse, of something like anaphylactic shock, and then Euan came down with a fever too, he went out by himself, around the estuary’s edge to the beach under the short cliffs, at the south end of the lagoon.

It was windy as always, the offshore wind of the midmorning of the daymonth. So once he got onto the beach and under the sea cliffs, he was mostly out of the wind. The katabatic gusts came barreling down the gap of the estuary and hit the incoming waves, holding up their faces for a time as they rose up in the shallows, also flinging long plumes of spray back from the crests. These arcs of spray were barred by fat little rainbows, called ehukai in the Hawaiian language. Planet E was a thick crescent in its usual spot in the sky, very bright in the dark blue, so that the light in the salt-hazed air over the sea seemed to come from all directions, and suffuse everything. The double shadows there on the ground were faint, and every rock and wave seemed stuffed with itself.

“This would have been a nice place to live,” Euan said.

He was talking only to Freya now, on their private channel. She was sitting on the chair by her bed, hunched over her stomach, looking at the screen. Euan was looking here and there, and her screen showed whatever he was looking at.

“A beautiful world, for sure. Too bad about the bugs. But I guess we should have known. That stuff about the oxygen in the atmosphere being abiologic—I guess you’ll have to rethink that one. I suppose it could still be true. But if these things Jochi found exhale oxygen, then probably not.”

Long silence. Then Freya heard him heave a breath, in and out.

“Probably they’re like archaea. Or a kind of pre-archaea. You’ll have to keep an eye out for that. There might be other chemical signals in oxygen that would reveal its origins. The ratio of isotopes might be different depending on how it got expressed into the air. I wouldn’t be surprised. I know they thought they had a rubric there, but they’ll have to recalibrate. Life might be more various than they thought. That keeps happening.

“Not that you’ll have much of a chance to test it here,” he went on after a while. He was walking on the beach now. The wind was scraping across his exterior mike, and rolling sand grains down the tilted beach into the foam surging up at his feet.

“I guess you’ll have to try to do something with F’s moon now. Presumably it’s dead. Or even try E.” He looked up at it, big in the blue sky. “Well, no. It’s too big. Too heavy.”

Two minutes later: “Maybe you can just keep living on the ship, and stock up on whatever you run out of, from here and from E. Terraform F’s moon if you can. Or maybe you can resupply and get to another system entirely. I seem to recall there’s a G star just a few more light-years out.”

Long silence.

Then:

“But you know, I bet they’re all like this one. I mean, they’re either going to be alive or dead, right? If they’ve got water and orbit in the habitable zone, they’ll be alive. Alive and poisonous. I don’t know. Maybe they could be alive and we live with them and the two systems pass each other by. But that doesn’t sound like life, does it? Living things eat. They have immune systems. So that’s going to be a problem, most of the time anyway. Invasive biology. Then on the dead worlds, those’ll be dry, and too cold, or too hot. So they’ll be useless unless they have water, and if they have water they’ll probably be alive. I know some probes have suggested otherwise, like here. But probes never stop and test thoroughly. They might just as well be running their tests from Earth, if you think about it. Bugs like these we’ve got here, you aren’t going to find those unless you slow down and hunt really hard. Live nearby for a while and look. At which point it’s too late, if you get a bad result. You’re out of luck then.”

Long silence as he walked south along the beach.

Then:

“It’s too bad. It really is a very pretty world.”

Later:

“What’s funny is anyone thinking it would work in the first place. I mean it’s obvious any new place is going to be either alive or dead. If it’s alive it’s going to be poisonous, if it’s dead you’re going to have to work it up from scratch. I suppose that could work, but it might take about as long as it took Earth. Even if you’ve got the right bugs, even if you put machines to work, it would take thousands of years. So what’s the point? Why do it at all? Why not be content with what you’ve got? Who were they, that they were so discontent? Who the fuck were they?”

This sounded much like Devi, and Freya put her head in her hands.

Later:

“Although it is a very pretty world. It would have been nice.”

Later:

“Maybe that’s why we’ve never heard a peep from anywhere. It’s not just that the universe is too big. Which it is. That’s the main reason. But then also, life is a planetary thing. It begins on a planet and is part of that planet. It’s something that water planets do, maybe. But it develops to live where it is. So it can only live there, because it evolved to live there. That’s its home. So, you know, Fermi’s paradox has its answer, which is this: by the time life gets smart enough to leave its planet, it’s too smart to want to go. Because it knows it won’t work. So it stays home. It enjoys its home. As why wouldn’t you? It doesn’t even bother to try to contact anyone else. Why would you? You’ll never hear back. So that’s my answer to the paradox. You can call it Euan’s Answer.”

Later:

“So, of course, every once in a while some particularly stupid form of life will try to break out and move away from its home star. I’m sure it happens. I mean, here we are. We did it ourselves. But it doesn’t work, and the life left living learns the lesson, and stops trying such a stupid thing.”

Later:

“Maybe some of them even make it back home. Hey—if I were you, Freya? I would try to get back home.”

Later:

“Maybe.”

Later, still walking south, Euan passed a ravine cleaving the sea cliff. The cliff was a little lower to each side of this cleft, and the cleft ran back and up into the burren at a steep angle, such that there was a clattering creek running down it, which pooled in the sand of the beach, under the cliffs to each side. Where the pool was closest to the sea, a shallow broad flow of water cut through wet sand and poured down to the swirling foam.

The wind whistled down the cleft. Higher up the cleft narrowed, and the walls to each side steepened, looked impassable. Rather than climb up there and investigate, Euan walked right through the beach stream, splashing fearlessly, though at its middle it was knee deep. His fever was quite high at this point. The numbers from his suit were there at the bottom of his screen, glowing red.

Freya hunched over, arms across her stomach, in a position she had often taken when Devi had been ill. She got up and went to their kitchen and got some crackers to eat. She chomped on the crackers, drank a glass of water. She inspected the water in her glass, swallowed some more of it, returned to her chair and the screen.

Euan continued south and came to a broader part of the beach, with some wind-sculpted dunes sheltered under the cliff. He scrambled to the top of the tallest dune. Tau Ceti was a blaze too bright to look at, pouring its light over the top of the cliff and onto the ocean. Euan sat down.

“Nice,” he said.

The wind was still at his back. As one looked down at the waves, it was clear that the wind held them up for a time as they tried to break; they swept in toward the land, then reared up and hung there with a vertical face as they moved onshore, trying to fall but getting held up by the wind; then finally the steepest section would pitch down in a roiling burst of white spray, some of which whiteness launched upward and was caught on the wind and hurled back over the wall of white water. Quick fat ehukai crossed these tails of spray.

“I’m feeling hot,” Euan said. He walked off the edge of the dune and glissaded down the sand facing the sea.

Freya clutched her stomach under both forearms, put her mouth down on the back of one fist.

Euan looked out at the waves for a long time. The dark gray strand between beach pool and ocean was crosshatched with black sand streaks, far to each side of the shallow runnel of water pouring down into the breakers.