New Earth Read online

  As soon as Adri was out of sight, Meek stirred to life. “I don’t trust him. Despite everything he says, I don’t trust the man.”

  “Perhaps,” Jordan said, “you don’t trust him because of everything he says.”

  * * *

  To Jordan’s surprise, Thornberry took up residence in the city. He spent his days in happy conference with young men and women who were fellow engineers.

  “It’s unbelievable, the things they can do,” he said to Jordan and Aditi over dinner one evening. “I mean, they’ve developed quantum computers, for god’s sake. No bigger than a grain of sand, yet more powerful than anything we’ve got. They implant ’em in their skulls at birth!”

  “I know,” said Jordan, looking at Aditi.

  “I mean, we’ve been talking about quantum computers for damned near a century now, and we’re nowhere near making one work. These people carry them around inside their heads! If I could bring one of ’em back home, I’d become a billionaire overnight, I could.”

  Aditi said, “We can show you how to build them.”

  Thornberry nodded eagerly. “I’m talking to your bright young folks about just that, I am.”

  “Good,” Jordan said.

  The three of them were sitting at a small table in the dining area of the dormitory building. The place was filled with Aditi’s people, young and old, men and women. Conversations in their fluted musical language and laughter drifted across the room. Human servants carried trays of food and drink to the tables.

  But they’re not human, Jordan thought as he listened to Thornberry with half his attention. They’re human in form, but they belong to a different race, a different civilization. They’re aliens.

  “And these energy shields,” the roboticist went on, “they take ’em for granted, they do. It’s ordinary engineering, as far as they’re concerned.”

  Aditi said to Thornberry, “The shield generators are ordinary engineering. After all, we’ve used them for many generations.”

  “I know,” said Thornberry. “But what I can’t figure out is how they work.”

  “The engineers haven’t explained it to you?” she asked.

  “They explain to me for hours, they do,” Thornberry said, “but for the life of me, the more they explain the less I understand.”

  Jordan snapped his attention to the roboticist. “What do you mean, Mitch?”

  “They’re talking about physics and principles that’re beyond me. Maybe a quantum physicist could understand them. More likely a string theoretician.”

  “The closest we have to a physicist would be Elyse Rudaki,” said Jordan.

  Thornberry nodded. “Maybe I should ask her to listen to ’em. Maybe she could understand the math.”

  Aditi looked troubled. “Do you mean that the engineers are not answering your questions?”

  His beefy face contorting into a troubled frown, Thornberry said, “Oh, they answer my questions, they do. But their answers are beyond me.”

  “Then we must find someone who can explain it to you more clearly,” said Aditi.

  Jordan smiled slightly. “Mitch, perhaps you’ve got to go to school and learn more physics.”

  Thornberry conceded the point with a nod. “Maybe I should. Maybe what I need is a patient teacher.”

  Jordan turned to Aditi. “You’re a teacher, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, that’s right,” she said.

  “Could you help Mitch? I realize that advanced physics is probably beyond you, but perhaps you could find one of your fellow teachers who could help.”

  She looked thoughtful for a moment, then smiled and said, “I’ll ask Adri about that in the morning.”

  As they turned their attention back to the dinners before them, Jordan marveled all over again at how closely the New Earthers’ cuisine resembled Earth’s. The meat on his plate certainly looked and tasted like veal. Grown in a biovat, but cooked to perfection with a tangy sauce that was tantalizingly familiar yet slightly different from anything Jordan could remember.

  They were finishing their desserts when Jordan spotted Paul Longyear walking past their table.

  “Paul,” he called, “join us for coffee?”

  Longyear stopped, looked over their table, and pulled out the empty chair.

  “It’s not coffee,” he said as he sat down. “Tastes almost the same, but it doesn’t have any caffeine at all.”

  “You’ve tested it?” Jordan asked.

  “I’ve been analyzing all their foodstuffs,” said the biologist. Holding up a thumb and forefinger a mere millimeter apart, he went on, “They’re all this close to Earth normal. Nothing in them that’s harmful to us, but just a tinge different.”

  Aditi said, “I’m pleased that you find our food satisfactory.”

  “More than satisfactory,” Jordan said. “It’s delicious. And I find the slight differences to be rather exotic.”

  Thornberry pouted. “I haven’t found a decent potato here. I miss them, I do.”

  Aditi looked troubled.

  Then Thornberry added, “But we don’t have decent potatoes at our camp, either. Nor aboard the ship, by damn. The nearest honest potato is back on Earth, more’n eight light-years away.”

  Jordan murmured, “The rigors of exploration.”

  Thornberry broke into a hearty laugh. Looking around at the busy dining area, he guffawed, “Right you are. It’s hell out here on the frontier.”

  Longyear didn’t laugh. Jordan thought he looked uptight, preoccupied by something that was bothering him.

  When the waiter brought their coffee the biologist sipped at his cup minimally.

  “So what have you and Nara been up to?” Jordan asked him, trying to shake him out of his dour mood.

  “Cataloging the various species of animals here,” Longyear replied. With a shake of his head, he added, “It’s amazing what these people can do with biological engineering.”

  Jordan glanced at Aditi. The “these people” phrase didn’t seem to bother her a bit.

  “I mean,” Longyear went on, “they use genetic engineering the way we use mechanical engineering. Instead of inventing machines for labor-saving jobs, they gengineer animals.”

  “And plants, too,” Aditi said. “Most of the fruits and vegetables we eat have been genetically modified.”

  “We’ve done that on Earth,” Longyear said to her.

  “We have?” Jordan asked.

  “He means genetically engineered crops,” said Thornberry. “Frost-resistant wheat, grains that resist insect pests. It’s a big business.”

  But Longyear said, “We’ve been doing genetic engineering for a long time, Mitch. Centuries. Millennia.”

  Aditi said, “I had no idea your biological sciences were that advanced so long ago.”

  With a hint of a smile, Longyear said, “They weren’t. The genetic engineering we did back then was done the old-fashioned way.”

  “What do you mean?” Jordan asked.

  “Well, take corn for instance. When my ancestors first came to what we now call Mexico, corn ears were no bigger than my thumb. But by consistently planting kernels from the biggest ears, over many generations we produced the kind of corn we eat today.”

  “Selective breeding,” Jordan said.

  “That’s right. The old-fashioned method of genetic engineering. We took wild cattle and pigs and bred them generation after generation to carry more meat. And to be docile. We fattened them up and dumbed them down.”

  “And then we figured out the double helix,” said Thornberry. “Now we can do inside of a year what it took centuries to achieve before.”

  Longyear nodded tightly. Then he turned to Jordan. “I need to talk to you. In private.”

  Something’s in the wind, Jordan thought. With a glance toward Aditi, he replied to the biologist, “Will tomorrow morning do?”

  “Fine,” said Longyear, tight-lipped. Then he repeated, “In private.”

  CONUNDRUM

  The following
morning, Jordan left Aditi sleeping in his bed, showered, shaved, and dressed as quietly as he could, then went to Longyear’s quarters. To his surprise, Meek was there, standing uneasily by Longyear’s desk.

  “Harmon! I didn’t know you had come to the city.”

  “I came early this morning,” said the astrobiologist. “I was up at the crack of dawn, the very crack of dawn.”

  Longyear’s apartment was a single room, partitioned into a bedroom area, kitchen, and a sitting room furnished with a small sofa, a pair of armchairs, and a sleekly curved desk. The walls were covered with display screens that glowed pearly gray.

  “I hope you had a pleasant walk through the forest,” Jordan said as he went to the sofa.

  “I drove a buggy,” Meek replied. He dropped his lanky frame onto one of the armchairs.

  “I see.” Turning to Longyear, who got up from his desk and went to the other armchair, Jordan said, “I gathered from the way you asked for this meeting that you didn’t want Aditi present.”

  “That’s right,” the biologist said. Frowning slightly, he said, “It’s not that I don’t … um, trust her. It’s just that I think it’s better if we thrash this matter out among ourselves before talking to Adri or any of the others about it.”

  “All right,” Jordan said, leaning back on the sofa’s plush cushions. “What’s the problem?”

  “It’s not a problem so much as a conundrum.”

  “A conundrum?”

  Meek said, “A puzzle. A riddle.”

  “Thank you, Harmon,” said Jordan, dryly.

  Longyear’s lean face was entirely serious. “I’ve been thinking about this planet’s ozone layer.”

  Jordan felt surprised.

  “It’s much thicker than Earth’s,” Longyear said.

  “Well, it has to be, doesn’t it? Sirius emits much more ultraviolet radiation than our Sun does. The ozone layer screens out the UV, protects life on the planet’s surface.”

  “Exactly right,” said Meek.

  Longyear leaned closer and asked, “But how did the ozone get there, in the first place?”

  Jordan blinked at him. “As I understand it, the ultraviolet light coming in creates a reaction that turns some of the oxygen molecules high in the atmosphere into ozone: oxygen-three, isn’t it, where regular oxygen is a two-atom molecule.”

  “Right,” said Longyear. “But how did the oxygen get into the atmosphere?”

  Feeling as if he were taking a high school science exam, Jordan answered, “From living plants that give off oxygen as a result of photosynthesis.”

  “Aha!” Meek pounced. “And how could plant life arise in the face of the heavy ultraviolet radiation reaching the planet’s surface?”

  Jordan was puzzled by that. “Why … how did photosynthetic plants arise on Earth? In the oceans, wasn’t it? Single-celled bacteria in the water.”

  “That’s what happened on Earth, true enough,” said Longyear. “The so-called blue-green algae—”

  “Cyanobacteria, actually,” Meek interrupted.

  A frown flashed across Longyear’s face as he continued, “Those single-celled creatures lived deep enough in the water so that the Sun’s UV didn’t reach them.”

  “The water protected them,” Jordan said.

  “Right. And over many eons, they pumped enough oxygen into Earth’s atmosphere to allow an ozone layer to build up. The ozone layer protected the planet’s surface from killing levels of ultraviolet and life could eventually evolve on land.”

  Jordan spread his hands. “So the same thing has happened here, obviously.”

  “Not so obvious, Jordan,” Longyear contradicted. Ticking off points on his stubby fingers, the biologist said, “One, Sirius puts out so much UV that it’s tough to see how life could have arisen in the first place.”

  “Really? Even in the oceans?”

  Raising a second finger, Longyear went on, “Which brings us to point number two: time. It took billions of years for life to evolve in the oceans of Earth. Billions of years for those cyanobacteria to generate enough oxygen to change the atmosphere and form an ozone layer.”

  “This planet can’t be that old,” Meek said. “Sirius itself can’t be more than half a billion years old, from what Elyse Rudaki’s told me.”

  “That’s not enough time for a thick ozone layer to be built up,” Longyear resumed.

  “So how did it get there?” Meek demanded.

  “How did life evolve on the ground without an ozone layer to protect it from lethal levels of UV?” Longyear added.

  Jordan looked at them: Longyear earnest, serious, troubled; Meek burning with righteous indignation.

  “Life couldn’t get started on the ground without a strong UV shield, a thick ozone layer high in the atmosphere,” Longyear repeated. “But the ozone layer couldn’t get created until life spent billions of years producing oxygen.”

  “And this planet can’t be more than half a billion years old,” said Meek, almost triumphantly.

  Jordan sat up straighter. “Are you certain of this, Paul? Or is it unproven speculation?”

  “I’ve run the numbers through the computer. Considering the level of ultraviolet that Sirius emits, and the time scale involved, there’s no way that such a thick ozone layer could have been built up.”

  “That’s … odd,” Jordan said, weakly.

  “And then there’s this energy shield they’ve put up to protect against solar storms,” Longyear went on.

  “That’s because there’s no planetary magnetic field, as on Earth,” said Jordan.

  “Uh-huh. And how did Adri’s people evolve to the level of high technology without a geomagnetic field to protect them?”

  Jordan blinked at him.

  “Adri’s been lying to us,” Meek insisted. “There’s no way that these people could have originated on this planet.”

  “That’s hard to believe,” Jordan protested. “I mean, they’re here, they exist. Together with all the other life forms we’ve seen.”

  “Planetary engineering,” Longyear said. “Terraforming.”

  “The idea of reshaping an entire planet to make it like Earth? That’s ridiculous!”

  “Is it?” Meek snapped. “Look around you. It’s been done.”

  “But the energy it would require,” Jordan argued. “The resources. The time.”

  Meek said, “They’re a much older race than we are. They have a much superior technology. Look at those energy shields, their technology is light-years ahead of ours.”

  “But to transform an entire planet…”

  “That’s what they’ve done,” said Longyear, totally certain.

  Meek insisted, “And we’ve got to find out why.”

  CONFIRMATION

  Jordan’s first thought was to go to Adri and ask him about Longyear’s conclusion. But he hesitated. Instead, he decided to call his brother, still out in the field with de Falla, halfway across the planet.

  Leaving Aditi in the city, Jordan joined Meek and Longyear in the buggy that the astrobiologist had driven to the city. All the way back through the shadowed, softly quiet forest, Jordan wrestled with his conscience. He found that he didn’t want to believe that Adri was lying to him, that Aditi was part of a scheme to deceive him and the other humans. It can’t be, he told himself, over and over. It can’t be.

  And yet, if Longyear was right, Adri and his people were carrying out a massive deception. And Aditi was part of it. Mata Hari indeed, he thought. More like Delilah.

  Then a new worry hit him. Can Adri tap into our phone conversations? What if he can listen to everything we say to each other?

  By the time they reached the camp and Jordan had walked to the barracks tent, he had decided that there was nothing he could do about the possibility of Adri’s eavesdropping. If he can listen to our phone conversations, he surely must have overheard what Longyear and Meek told me this morning.

  Once he reached his own cubicle, Jordan reluctantly sat on the springy, nar
row cot and flipped open his pocketphone. Brandon answered immediately, looking sunburnt, his hair tossed by a fresh breeze, smiling like a man happy with his work. In the phone’s small screen, Jordan could see that his brother was up in the mountains: bare slabs of jagged rock rose behind him, and wisps of clouds threaded through the craggy peaks.

  As he explained what Longyear and Meek had told him, Jordan could see his brother’s face grow somber, grave.

  “They might be right, Jordy,” Brandon said. “What we’re finding out here is that this planet is much younger than Earth. A lot younger.”

  “Geologically speaking,” said Jordan.

  “Right. Half a billion years old, at most.”

  “That would still give it enough time to develop indigenous life, wouldn’t it? Enough time for life to evolve into an intelligent species.”

  “It took more than four billion years for an intelligent species to arise on Earth,” said Brandon.

  “But that doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen sooner, elsewhere.”

  “Maybe, maybe not,” said Brandon. “We just don’t know. We’re trying to make valid conclusions with just two examples. Hard to draw a curve with only two data points.”

  Jordan sank back on the cot and stared at the domed ceiling of the bubble tent.

  “How can we tell for sure?” he asked.

  Brandon shook his head. “Jordy, if I knew, I’d tell you.”

  Jordan understood the unspoken message. Ask Adri. He knows. The question is, will he tell me the truth?

  And he realized that, before confronting Adri with his suspicions, he had to face Aditi.

  * * *

  Dreading what he had to do, Jordan walked through the midafternoon heat back toward the city. Sunshine filtered through the high canopies of the trees. Birds swooped above and butterflies flitted through the foliage. Furry little animals scampered and chittered. He saw it all but paid no attention. His thoughts were entirely on Aditi.

  And there she was, standing alone on the stone walkway that circled the city’s perimeter, as if she were waiting for him.

  “Hello,” he called. Then he couldn’t help adding, “Been waiting long?”