CHAPTER 8
STORIES AT THE ROC
Over the next few days Kate settled into a routine that included meeting Sheriff John and Captain Jack each evening at the Roc bar. John, Jack and their friends seemed to take great pleasure in telling their ever-curious newcomer of their experiences on Aves, which were often bizarre. Besides providing an opportunity to relax and socialize, Kate learned a great deal about the wonder planet.
Having learned a painful lesson following the first night, Kate drank much less beer, but on the pretext that hard weeks of harvesting would soon begin, most of her companions were determined to get lousy drunk and succeeded masterfully. This probably loosened their tongues, but blurred the shared information considerably. Half the time Kate couldn’t tell if they were telling her truth, or simply tall tales. After a few beers, they couldn’t very well tell either. In any case, their stories tended to confirm that Aves was indeed a very amazing and dangerous place.
“Other worlds have been discovered that resemble Earth; what makes Aves so special?” a new farmer asked John, between sips of beer.
“The climate and the ecology,” John explained to the newcomer. “Aves isn’t much smaller than Earth, so Earth humans can easily adapt to its gravity. It tilts less on its axis than Earth and the atmosphere is thicker, so the winters are relatively mild and the temperature varies less seasonally. There are several moons, but they are small compared to the Earth moon, and tidal effects are slight, yet they provide dim light nightly. Oceans are smaller and land area is roughly twice that of Earth, and most of the land is forested and capable of supporting Earth crops when cleared. Of course some of the native life is nasty.”
“I seen spiders as big as a man, and as strong as a whole work crew,” claimed Luke, a scarred veteran of several seasons on Aves. “Sticky webs as strong as steel wire, too tough to cut quick enough even with a hunting knife. Get stuck on one of them, and the best thing is to very quietly burn your way free. You can’t struggle or you bring on the beast. If you don’t have a double-dose of repellent in you, you’ve had it. One snip of its jaws and your head is off. Or worse, it’ll paralyze you with a bite, wrap you up alive and suck you dry over a couple of days as you die slow and your repellent fades away. Them big spiders even eat some of the birds, and birds is way stronger than humans.”
Kate smiled and shook her head in disbelief. “I’ve seen some big spiders here, massing several kilos, but nothing nearly as big as a man.”
A man who until now had sat each night quietly listening and drinking his beer stood on alcohol weakened legs and approached Kate. “It is truth you hear young lady. In the tropics one specimen of Goliath spider massed a hundred and fifty kilos. Some Wolf spiders are even larger, but they don’t build webs, they just leave a trail of webbing where they walk.”
“Right,” inserted Luke. “That’s the good news: no hanging web to get tangled in. The bad news is this: their sticky webs can be lying unnoticed anywhere on the ground, and stepping on it is like stepping onto fly-paper.”
“True,” agreed the other man. “Giant tropical spiders are one of the reasons we settled a bit further north. Sometimes they jump a man and kill him before they notice the anti-bug chemicals. Tropical beetles can be just as massive and when in flight can knock down a small plane.”
“Goliath beetles, for example?” Kate asked.
The man smiled. “Cute as a button and you know your Earth insects too! Yes, Goliath beetles, giant water bugs, rhinoceros beetles, and others. I’m Doctor Peter Grimes, by the way, and insects are my specialty.”
Peter looked to be about forty years old and was of middle height and slim build, and sported a will trimmed mustache to match his short brown hair. In his neat Corporation researcher's uniform he looked very much like a scientist. “Very glad to meet you, Peter. I’m Kate.”
“Of course. The government biologist I’m not supposed to talk to. Well, screw that, you’re too cute not to talk to. Most everything I could say will be released to the public soon after the harvest anyway. Ask me anything you want, and I’ll answer it, if I’m drunk enough but not too drunk.” Smiling, he chugged down more beer.
“OK, Peter. Do each of the bugs here match an Earth species?”
“More or less.”
“But that’s simply not possible. Insect physiology wouldn’t support such gigantism. Circulatory and respiratory systems, for example, are much too inefficient to work for such large creatures. Even the ants here are impossibly large.”
“That was my first reaction also,” agreed Peter. “Upon study however, subtitle design changes are evident. Lots of them. Circulation, for example. Though they still don’t have hearts like vertebrates do, they have some big improvements.”
”Improvements in the dorsal vessel and the pulsatile organs?”
“Say, you do know your insects!” He smiled, took another big swig of beer, and belched loudly.
“I remember a few basic things. Significant improvements, you say?”
“Significant and necessary,” added Peter.
“That’s your professional opinion, Doctor?”
“That’s it. You are right. Insects that size couldn’t live without the extensive modifications.”
“Or walk or fly I’d wager,” inserted John Weltman, who had just returned to the table with a re-filled pitcher of frothy brew. “From an engineering standpoint giant flying bugs and birds are impossible, by Earth animal standards, even with reduced gravity and thicker air. They shouldn’t be able to fly, any more than we would be able to fly if we attached wings to our arms. Not even our legs would be strong enough. It's that thing that Leonardo de Vinci or Archimedes or some other ancient architect worked out more than thousand years ago about the strength of structures increasing as the square of the cross section of the structure but mass and weight increasing as the cube of its dimensions. That sets natural upper limits on the maximum sizes that things can reach, alive or dead.”
“Quite so,” agreed Peter. “But bird and insect muscles, bones and ligaments have been redesigned too, for much greater strength per cross section than in their Earth counter-parts. All life on Aves is like that, including wood and other living materials. Their building material is stronger by a factor of at least five compared to their Earth counter-parts. Energy collection through photosynthesis, energy chemical storage, and consumption rate is also greatly enhanced, supporting greater plant biomass energy density then on Earth, and big, strong, energetic animal life-forms that eat those plants. Anyway, the net result of this underlying science is that we can have giant trees and flying ten-ton eagles that are roughly ten times as strong as a five-ton Earth T-rex must have been.”
“Swell. So a twenty-kilo bug is at least as strong as a hundred kilo man?” Kate reasoned.
“Damn straight, and then some,” agreed Luke. “In the old days we had our hands full with those beasties. Strong as sons-a-bitches, and full of claws and jaws and stingers. Then Peter here came up with the stink pills, saving our butts from bugs, and the Brethren worked things out with the damn birds.”
“You came up with the bug repellent, Peter?” exclaimed Kate. “In that case, I want to buy you a drink!”
Peter smiled. “Of course you do. That’s why I hang around here, sitting on a super strong wood bar-stool so I can drink a super massive amount of beer. Grateful folks buy me drinks all damn night. I haven’t had to buy my own drinks in years.”
“You say the Brethren worked out things with the birds?” Kate asked, to return the conversation to things of even greater bird relevance.
“That’s the rumor,” said John.
“More than a rumor,” added Luke. “I seen-um together once, one of the Brethren and one of them big black devil birds, when they thought they was alone. It sure seemed to me that they was talking to each other, all right.”
“What did they say?” asked John, with great interest. He even set aside his beer. “Could you make out their words?”
The scruff
y woodsman shook his shaggy head. “Not a one; I wasn’t close enough. I high-tailed it out of there. I don’t traffic with the Brethren or them devil birds.”
Weltman sighed in exasperation. “There has to be communication between the Corporation and those birds somehow. Our relationship with the birds is too damn perfect to explain any other way. Of course, the Corporation denies it. If the birds were acknowledged to be sentient, all hell could break loose Earth-side. The whole relationship between Earth and Aves would have to be reconsidered.”
“Interesting,” said Kate. “But getting back to physiology, redesign seems to have been carried a step further with the birds. Would you all agree?”
“In what way, cutie?” asked Grimes.
“We’ve been talking about things necessary for survival for giant-sized transported Earth life, like new bug circulatory systems and much stronger bones and muscles. But what about bird intelligence? They don’t need to be as smart as they are just to survive, but they are highly intelligent. How do you explain that one, Mr. Corporation scientist?”
Peter Grimes shrugged. “Humans ancestors became more intelligent than they needed to be. It worked out so well that the trend continued.”
“True. But that happened through evolution over many millions of years, to various families of species and to differing degrees. Our ape cousins are damn near human in intelligence and genes, and they're several millions of years separated from the human linage. But super-high intelligence is a pretty rare occurrence, or at least it has been on Earth. Given how similar Aves life is to Earth life, the life here had to have been introduced from Earth relatively recently, from a geological and evolutionary standpoint. Well within a few million Earth years, I’d wager; perhaps only a few thousand years. That’s a blink of the eye, in terms of evolution. So how and why did all these DIFFERENT bird species get to be intelligent in so short a time? Evolution simply doesn’t work that way, or that quick. Not that fast and not in the same specific direction for hundreds of species at once. That’s far too much of a coincidence to swallow.”
Luke laughed heartily, and finally stopped drinking beer long enough to rejoin the conversation. “True enough, science lady, but there’s one another thing that’s even more peculiar than all them smart birds, aside from the fact they’re from Earth, and a hell of a lot more fucking obvious. Fundamental, you science types might say.”
“And that would be?” Peter asked.
“BIG fucking birds! Big bugs, big trees, big every damn thing. Everything bigger by the exact same amount, no exceptions. Nothing is only twice as big, or five times as big. Every damn thing, plant and animal, is a dozen times bigger than they was on Earth. Every single damn thing! Now ain’t that just a bit peculiar?”
“You’re right,” agreed Kate. “Peculiar as hell. But I’ll give you another fundamental one, Mr. woodsman. Much of the microscopic life is also from Earth.
“Damn, you’re good,” said Peter. “Yes, that’s why all this transplanted big Earth stuff can survive here. A whole damn ecosystem was brought to Aves from Earth and redesigned to work together, including microscopic life, which stayed the same size to be able to function properly and make soil and so-forth. It’s not a dozen times bigger because that wouldn't have worked; viruses and bacteria and so forth can only thrive near the minimum allowable size limits for life. The pills you take since you got here aren’t to kill off Aves microbes, they add Earth microbes back into your system after you’ve been cleared of them by the Directorate before you arrived on Aves. There are some native Aves microbes, but so far they’ve all been harmless to us.”
“My big point is,” said Kate, “Earth life wasn’t simply dropped off here and left to evolve, it couldn’t have been. Everything macroscopic to begin with wouldn’t have gotten bigger, and gotten bigger by the same amount, or stronger or smarter by the same amount, and so forth. Evolution doesn’t work that way. So life here was all purposely redesigned to be bigger, stronger, and smarter too, in the case of the birds. Hell, it was all ENGINEERED to be that way, engineered species by species in the same timeframe, for thousands of individual species."
“Genetic fucking engineering, right?” asked Luke, looking back and forth at the two scientists.
“Actually that and much more,” said Kate. “Genes more or less program what gets built from basic building blocks, but you could screw with Earth genes from here to Sunday and not get most of this stuff. You need some whole new building blocks, basic ones having to do with the fundamental chemical and physical structure of different cells and organs. You’d have to radically mess with the mitosis processes and building process that the genes work with, in addition to just the genes that map out how they're applied. You need whole new proteins and other components at the molecular level that can produce stronger muscles and bones. You need chemical structures that more efficiently gather, store, and convert energy. Someone tinkered with the whole damn engine of creation, so to speak, for thousands of different individual species simultaneously. Do you agree Doctor Grimes?”
“I’d be a lousy scientist if I didn’t. What do you say Denise?” Grimes had spoken to one of the people that had been quietly listening to the conversation, a dire, warn looking middle aged woman.
"I generally don't say very much Pete, even when I'm drinking, but what the hell!" She reached far without getting up to shake Kate's hand. "I'm Denise Roberts, lead genetic designer for the Corporation on Aves, Kate. Glad to meet you." She took a bug swig of beer. "You folks are pretty much covering the same ground as I did, a couple years back. I was supposed to tweak the genetics of the Earth crops that we were introducing here. It was expected to be a huge job. Everything we brought with us had evolved and been genetically modified to grow well on Earth, of course, so we didn't expect it to thrive here on Aves. Corn, wheat, and so forth. We should have had a possibly impossible task to adopt Earth crop plants to Aves soil. But we didn't have to change a damn thing. The soil was already composed of Earth viruses, and bacteria, and fungus, and associated chemicals, minerals, and so forth. Everything we introduce from Earth grows just fine here.
"I was damn near out of a job. My new job is to figure out how we might modify our Earth crop plants to acquire Aves size and robustness, and to introduce Aves plants to Earth."
"Holy crap," said Luke.
"Not so hard to do as you might think," Roberts said. "Mostly we've just got a lot of legally required protective protocols to work out. Red tape science really, since the stuff growing here is already safe for introduction on Earth. I spend most of my time anticipating what the objections of the anti-genetic modification lobby on Earth are likely to be, and coming up with counter-arguments. We already went through some anti-alien phobia Earth-side, when we shipped our first sample wood and food samples to Earth last year. But we got through that mess."
Peter nodded. "There were somewhat legitimate concerns about genetic modification a few centuries ago, when it was new. But of course there is nothing inherently evil or dangerous about genetic modification. It took a while to establish standard safety protocols to follow that ensure that there are no nasty side effects, but such concerns have all been worked out many times over. What we found here on Aves is evidence of modification of life forms far beyond anything ever attempted on Earth. But fortunately whoever modified stuff here on Aves did an incredible job. Their modifications were incredibly extensive but done in a way that preserved compatibility and stability across their ecosystem and even maintained compatibility with ours. The bottom line is that Earth crops and humans can live safely here and Aves life could live safely on Earth, if it weren't for the pollution and so-forth there."
Kate was stunned as the implications of what they were talking about sank into her alcohol slowed brain. "Energy, that's the key. Photosynthesis that's more efficient. Food that pound for pound packs several times the energy. Muscles that are stronger. Maybe brain capability is even enhanced here on Aves! The potential for utilization of all th
is stuff on Earth is beyond huge! Aves is going to transform Earth more than Earth transforms Aves!"
Roberts shook her head in agreement. "You begin to understand the potential. Before too long instead of growing Earth crops here on Aves we'll be growing Aves crops both here and on Earth, and we'll be making genetic enhancements of other species back on Earth. But it won't be easy. Years, decades or maybe even centuries of research are needed. We're only beginning to understand what has been done to the life that we find here. The science behind all this is mind-boggling."
“Can you hear what you're saying?" Kate asked. "Don’t you see what this all means? It can only mean aliens, with smart as hell damned alien science far in advance of ours. Though it looks like the aliens cleared out ages ago, they probably left artifacts. So why haven’t both the Directorate and the Corporation flooded this planet with scientists to track down alien technology?”
“Well, that’s us, I guess,” admitted Grimes. “The life we find here is the alien technology that we study. If we had found any direct physical evidence like space ships or alien dwellings or skeletons or whatever, there’d be tons more scientists, military, and so forth here on Aves, but we haven’t found a damn thing, and we tend to keep our suspicions of aliens under wraps."
“That and the whole concept that life here has been essentially re-created,” concluded Kate. "You've kept that secret."
“Right,” agreed Grimes. “And the Brethren agree with you, on the creation part.”
“They what?”
“They understand the basic situation too, from a general science perspective, even though the hypocrites don’t approve of science. They think that Aves is some kind of Eden. To them Aves is a religious miracle; this planet and the life on it had to be designed and built by God for humans, they figure. That’s why so many of them come to Aves. They figure God did all this, and did it for them. It’s proof of God and of God giving humans a second chance at Eden. That’s why they’re so committed to the Aves project.”
"Eden? What shit!" said Luke. "Would we have the bugs we have if this was bloody Eden? Why, in the tropics, besides giant spiders, there are centipedes, millipedes, and walking sticks with bodies near three meters long! We don’t find them half that big this far north, but they’re plenty big enough to get together and take out humans, especially them poisonous ones like wasps, ants, spiders, and such, not to mention the pain in the ass flies and beetles. Forget to take Peter’s stink pills and you’re a goner. Especially in the wilds.”
“Aye,” agreed another man. “If you ask me, it’s the bugs and not the birds you should be studying, to solve our disappearing people mystery. Maybe some bug out there don’t care no more if we take our stink pills.”
“We’d have seen signs if it was bugs,” disagreed Luke.
“We’d have seen signs if it was birds,” argued the other man.
"Well anyway,” said Luke, “we at least all agree that we don't know shit, and our beer's getting warm from all the hot air we been making here."
"I'll drink to that," said his companion, and everyone chugged down more brew.
****