Robert Sawyer: Stream of Consciousness

A thought occurred to Raji. If the breathing orifices weren’t on the middle hands, maybe they were on the upper hands. He looked at one of the upper hands, spreading the semi-clenched fingers. The fingers seemed to be jointed in many more places than human fingers were.

Once he’d spread the fingers, he could see that there were holes about a centimeter in diameter in the center of each palm. Air was indeed alternately being drawn in and expelled through these—Raji could feel that with his own hand.

“It’s alive,” he said excitedly. As he looked up, he saw the air ambulance hoverjet through the transparent hull, coming in for a landing.

The ambulance attendants were a white man named Bancroft and a Native Canadian woman named Cardinal. Raji met them at the entrance to the downed ship.

Bancroft looked absolutely stunned. “Is this—is this what I think it is?”

Raji was grinning from ear to ear. “It is indeed.”

“Who’s injured?” asked Cardinal.

“The alien pilot,” said Raji.

Bancroft’s jaw dropped, but Cardinal grinned. “Sounds fascinating.” She hustled over to the hoverjet and got a medical kit.

The three of them went inside. Raji led them to the alien; Tina had remained with it. She had the palm of her hand held about five centimeters in front of one of the alien’s breathing holes. “Its respiration is quite irregular,” she said, “and it’s getting more shallow.”

Raji looked anxiously at the two ambulance attendants.

“We could give it oxygen…” suggested Bancroft tentatively.

Raji considered. Oxygen only accounted for 21% of Earth’s atmosphere. Nitrogen, which makes up 78%, was almost inert—it was highly unlikely that N 2was the gas the alien required. Then again, plants took in carbon dioxide and gave off oxygen—perhaps giving it oxygen would be a mistake.

No, thought Raji. No energetic life forms had ever appeared on Earth that breathed carbon dioxide; oxygen was simply a much better gas for animal physiology. It seemed a safe bet that if the alien were indeed gasping, it was O 2that it was gasping for. He motioned for the ambulance attendants to proceed.

Cardinal got a cylinder of oxygen, and Bancroft moved in to stand near the alien. He held the face mask over one of the alien’s palms, and Cardinal opened the valve on the tank.

Raji had been afraid the creature’s palm orifices would start spasming, as if coughing at poisonous gas, but they continued to open and close rhythmically. The oxygen, at least, didn’t seem to be hurting the being.

“Do you suppose it’s cold?” asked Tina.

The creature had naked skin. Raji nodded, and Tina hustled off to get a blanket from her helicopter.

Raji bent over the creature’s small head and gently pried one of its pairs of eyelids apart at their vertical join. The eye was yellow-gold, shot through with reddish orange veins. It was a relief seeing those—the red color implied that the blood did indeed transport oxygen using hemoglobin, or a similar iron-containing pigment.

In the center of the yellow eye was a square pupil. But the pupil didn’t contract at all in response to being exposed to light. Either the eye worked differently—and the square pupil certainly suggested it might—or the alien was very deeply unconscious.

“Is it safe to move it?” asked Cardinal.

Raji considered. “I don’t know—the head wound worries me. If it’s got anything like a human spinal cord, it might end up paralyzed if we moved it improperly.” He paused. “What sort of scanning equipment have you got?”

Cardinal opened her medical kit. Inside was a device that looked like a flashlight with a large LCD screen mounted at the end opposite the lens. “Standard class-three Deepseer,” she said.

“Let’s give it a try,” said Raji.

Cardinal ran the scanner over the body. Raji stood next to her, looking over her shoulder. The woman pointed to the image. “That dark stuff is bone—or, at least, something as dense as bone,” she said. “The skeleton is very complex. We’ve got around 200 bones, but this thing must have twice that number. And see that? The material where the bones join is darker—meaning it’s denser—than the actual bones; I bet these beasties never get arthritis.”

“What about organs?”

Cardinal touched a control on her device, and then waved the scanner some more. “That’s probably one there. See the outline? And—wait a sec. Yup, see there’s another one over here, on the other side that’s a mirror image of the first one. Bilateral symmetry.”

Raji nodded.

“All of the organs seem to be paired,” said Cardinal, as she continued to move the scanner over the body. “That’s better than what we’ve got, of course, assuming they can get by with just one in a pinch. See that one there, inflating and deflating? That must be one of the lungs—you can see the tube that leads up the arm to the breathing hole.”

“If all the organs are paired,” asked Raji, “does it have two hearts?”

Cardinal frowned, and continued to scan. “I don’t see anything that looks like a heart,” she said. “Nothing that’s pumping or beating, or…”

Raji quickly checked the respiratory hole that wasn’t covered by the oxygen mask. “It is still breathing,” he said, with relief. “Its blood must be circulating somehow.”

“Maybe it doesn’t have any blood,” said Bancroft, pointing at the dry head wound.

“No,” said Raji. “I looked at its eyes. I could see blood vessels on their surface—and if you’ve got blood, you’ve got to make it circulate somehow; otherwise, how do you get the oxygen taken in by the lungs to the various parts of the body?”

“Maybe we should take a blood sample,” said Bancroft. “Cardy’s scanner can magnify it.”

“All right,” said Raji.

Bancroft got a syringe out of the medical kit. He felt the alien’s hide, and soon found what looked like a distended blood vessel. He pushed the needle in, and pulled the plunger back. The glass cylinder filled with a liquid more orange than red. He then moved the syringe over to the scanner, and put a drop of the alien blood into a testing compartment.

Cardinal operated the scanner controls. An image of alien blood cells appeared on her LCD screen.

“Goodness,” she said.

“Incredible,” said Raji.

Tina jockeyed for position so that she, too, could see the display. “What?” she said. “What is it?”

“Well, the blood cells are much more elaborate than human blood cells. Our red cells don’t even have nuclei, but these ones clearly do—see the dark, peanut-shaped spot there? But they also have cilia—see those hair-like extensions?”

“And that means?” asked Tina.

“It means the blood cells are self-propelled,” said Cardinal. “They swim in the blood vessels, instead of being carried along by the current; that’s why the creature has no heart. And look at all the different shapes and sizes—there’s much more variety here than what’s found in our blood.”

“Can you analyze the chemical makeup of the blood?” asked Raji.

Cardinal pushed some buttons on the side of her scanner. The LCD changed to an alphanumeric readout.

“Well,” said Cardinal, “just like our blood, the major constituent of the alien’s plasma is water. It’s a lot saltier than our plasma, though.”

“Human blood plasma is a very close match for the chemical composition of Earth’s oceans,” said Raji to Tina. “Our component cells are still basically aquatic lifeforms—it’s just that we carry a miniature ocean around inside us. The alien must come from a world with more salt in its seas.”

“There are lots of protein molecules,” said Cardinal, “although they’re using some amino acids that we don’t. And—my goodness, that’s a complex molecule.”