Brian Stableford: Inherit the Earth

“Conrad can never be irrelevant to me,” Kachellek said, rising obediently to the bait but not showing the slightest sign of bad temper. “He isn’t able to work on the problem which faces us just now, but he’s present in spirit in every logical move I make, every hypothesis I frame, every experiment I design. He made me what I am, just as he made the whole world what it is. You and I are both his heirs, and we’ll never be anything else, however hard we try to avoid the consequences of that fact.” He obviously had no intention of giving Damon an easy ride.

Kachellek paused before a rocky outcrop which was blocking their path, and knelt down as if to duck any further questions. He scanned the tideline which ran along the wave-smoothed rock a few inches above the ground. The weed which clung there was slowly drying out in the Sun, but the incoming tide would return before it was desiccated; in the meantime, the limp tresses provided shelter for tiny crabs and whelks. Where the weed was interrupted, sea anemones nestled in crevices like blobs of jelly. The bare rock above the tide-line was speckled with coloured patches of lichen and tarry streaks which might have been anything. Kachellek took a penknife from his pocket and scraped some of the tarry stuff from the rock into the palm of his hand, inspecting it carefully. Eventually, he tipped it into Damon’s hand and said: “ That’s more important than all this nonsense about Eliminators.”

“What is it?” Damon asked.

“We don’t have a name for the species yet—nor the genus, nor even the family. It’s a colonial organism reminiscent in some ways of a slime-mould. It has a motile form which wanders around by means of protoplasmic streaming, but the colonies can also set rock-hard. Its genetic transactions are inordinately complicated and so far very mysterious—but that’s not surprising, given that it’s not DNA-based. Its methods of protein-synthesis are quite different from ours, based on a radically different genetic system and genetic code.”

Damon had given up genetics, and had carefully set aside much of what his co-parents had tried assiduously to teach him, but he understood the implications of what Kachellek was saying. “Is it new,” he asked, “or just something we managed to overlook during the last couple of centuries?”

“We can’t be absolutely certain,” said Kachellek, scrupulously. “But we’re reasonably certain that it wasn’t here before. It’s a recent arrival in the littoral zone, and so far it hasn’t been reported anywhere outside these islands.”

“So where did it come from?”

“We don’t know yet. The obvious contenders are up, down...” He seemed to be on the point of adding a third alternative, but didn’t; instead he went on: “I’m looking downwards; Eveline’s investigating the other direction.”

Damon knew that he was expected to rise to the challenge and follow the line of argument. The Kite had been dredging mud from the ocean bed, and Eveline Hywood was in the L-5 space-colony. “You think it might have evolved on the sea-bed,” Damon said. “Maybe it’s been there all along, since DNA itself evolved, or maybe not. Perhaps it started off in one of those bizarre enclaves that surround the black smokers where the tectonic plates are pulling apart and has only just begun expanding its territory, the way DNA did a couple of billion years ago. On the other hand, maybe it drifted into local space from elsewhere in the Universe, in the form of Arrhenius spores... again, maybe a long, long time ago or maybe the day before yesterday. How different from DNA is its replicatory system?”

“We’re still trying to confirm a formula,” Kachellek told him. “We’ve slipped into the habit of calling it para-DNA but it’s lousy name because it implies that it ’s a near chemical relative, and it’s not. It coils like DNA—it’s definitely a double helix of some kind—but its subunits are quite different. It seems highly unlikely that the two have a common ancestor, even at the most fundamental level of chemical evolution. It’s a separate creation. That’s not so surprising—whenever and wherever life first evolved there would surely have been several competing systems, and there’s no reason to suppose that one of them would be superior in all conceivable environments. The hot vents down in the ocean depths are a different world—life down there is chemosynthetic and thermosynthetic rather than photosynthetic. Maybe there was always room down there for more than one chemistry of life. Perhaps there are other kinds still down there—that’s what I’m trying to find out. In the meantime, Eveline’s looking at dust samples brought in by probes from the outer Solar System. The system is full of junk, and it’s not beyond the bounds of possibility that life has evolved in the outer regions, or that spores of some kind could have drifted in from other systems. We don’t know— yet .”

“You don’t think this stuff poses any kind of threat, do you?” said Damon, intrigued in spite of himself. “It’s not likely to start displacing DNA organisms?”

“Until we know more about it,” Kachellek said, sternly, “it’s difficult to know how far it might spread. It’s not likely to pose any kind of threat to human beings, given the kind of nanotech defences we can now muster, but that’s not why it’s important. Its mere existence expands the horizons of the imagination by an order of magnitude. What are a few crazy slanders, even if they’re capable of inspiring a few crazy gunmen, compared with this? ”

“If it is natural,” said Damon, “it could be the basis of a whole new spectrum of nanomachines.”

“It’s not obvious that there’d be huge potential in that,” Kachellek countered. “So far, this stuff hasn’t done much in the way of duplicating the achievements of life as we know it, let alone doing things that life as we know it has never accomplished. It might be inefficient, capable of performing a limited repertoire of self-replicating tricks with no particular skill; if so, it would be technologically useless, however interesting it might be in terms of pure science. We’re not looking to make another fortune, Damon—when I say this is important, I don’t mean commercially.”

“I never doubted it for a moment,” Damon said, drily, and turned abruptly to look at the man who was rapidly coming up behind them. For a moment, it crossed his mind that this might be an Eliminator foot-soldier, mad and homicidal—but he was an islander, and Kachellek obviously knew him well.

“You’d better come quick, Karol,” the man said. “There’s something you need to see. You too, Mr. Hart.”

The package had been dumped into the Web in hypercondensed form like any other item of mail, but once it had been downloaded and unravelled it played for a couple of hours of real time. It had been heavily edited, so the claim with which it was prefaced—that nothing had been altered or falsified—couldn’t be taken seriously.

The material was addressed to all lovers of justice and it was titled absolute PROOF THAT CONRAD HELIER IS AN ENEMY of mankind. It came—or purported to come—from the mysterious Operator 101. Kachellek and Damon watched in anxious silence as it played back.

The first few minutes of film showed a man bound to a huge, throne-like chair. His wrists and ankles were pinned by two pairs of plastic sheaths, each three centimetres broad, which clasped him more tightly if he struggled against them. He was in a sitting position, his head held upright by a device which neatly enfolded his skull. His eyes were covered but his nose, mouth, and chin were visible. His pelvic region was also enclosed.

“This man,” a voice-over announced, “is Silas Arnett, an intimate friend and close colleague of Conrad Helier. He has been imprisoned thus for seventy-two hours, during which time almost all of his protective nanomachinery has been carefully flushed from his body. He is no longer protected against injury, nor can he control pain.”