Iterations

  “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.”

  “What?”

  “That one there,” she said, pointing to a chemical formula being displayed on her scanner’s screen. “It looks like—incredible.”

  “What?” asked Tina, sounding rather frustrated at being the only one with no medical or biological training.

  “It’s a neurotransmitter,” said Raji. “At least, I think it is, judging by its structure. Neurotransmitters are the chemicals that transmit nerve impulses.”

  “There’s lots of it in the blood,” said Cardinal, pointing at a figure.

  “Can you show me some blood while it’s still in the body?” asked Raji.

  Cardinal nodded. She pulled a very fine fibre optic out of the side of her scanner, and inserted it into the same distended blood vessel Bancroft had extracted the sample from earlier.

  On the scanner’s screen, blood cells could be seen moving along in unison.

  “They’re all going the same way,” said Raji. “Even without a heart to pump them along, they’re all traveling in the same direction.”

  “Maybe that’s why there are neurotransmitters in the bloodstream,” said Bancroft. “The blood cells communicate using them, so that they can move in unison.”

  “What about the head injury?” asked Tina. “If it’s got all that blood, why isn’t it bleeding?”

  Cardinal moved the scanner up to the alien’s small, spherical head. The eyes were still closed. On the LCD screen, the skull was visible beneath the skin, and, beneath the skull, the scanner outlined the organ that was presumably the brain within.

  “It’s so tiny,” said Raji.

  Bancroft indicated the spaceship around them. “Well, despite that, it’s obviously very advanced intellectually.”

  “Let’s have a look at the wound,” said Raji.

  Cardinal repositioned the scanner.

  “There seem to be valves in the broken blood vessels that have closed off,” she said.

  Raji turned to Tina. “We’ve got valves in our veins, to keep blood from flowing backwards. It looks like this creature has valves in both its veins and its arteries.” He paused, then turned to Cardinal. “I still don’t know if we can or should move the alien.”

  “Well, the oxygen bottle is almost empty,” said Bancroft. “Who knows if it was doing it any good, anyway, but—”

  “Oh, God,” said Tina. She’d still been holding her hand near one of the respiratory orifices. “It’s stopped breathing!”

  “We could try artificial respiration,” said Bancroft.

  “You mean blowing into its hands?” said Tina incredulously.

  “Sure,” said Bancroft. “It might work.” He lifted one of the arms, but, as he did so, orange liquid began to spill from the breathing hole.

 
“Yuck!” said Tina.

  Raji pulled back, too. The head wound had started to bleed as well.

  “It’s bleeding from the mouths, too,” said Cardinal, looking at the medial limbs.

  “We can’t let it die,” said Raji. “Do something!”

  Bancroft reached into the medical kit and brought out a roll of gauze. He began packing it into the mouth located in the palm of the right medial hand. Cardinal grabbed a larger roll of gauze and tried to stanch the flow from the head.

  But it was no good. Orange liquid was seeping out of previously unnoticed orifices in the torso, too, as well as from the soles of the feet.

  “It’s dying!” said Tina.

  Blood was pooling on the spaceship’s floor, which was canted at a bit of an angle.

  “Maybe one of our viruses has the same effect on it that Ebola has on us,” said Bancroft.

  But Raji shook his head. “Viruses evolve in tandem with their hosts. I find it hard to believe any of our viruses or germs would have any effect on something from another ecosystem.”

  “Well, then, what’s happening to it?” asked Bancroft. And then his eyes went wide. Raji followed Bancroft’s gaze.

  The orange blood wasn’t pooling in the lowest part of the floor. Rather, it was remaining in a puddle in the middle of the floor—and the puddle’s edges were rippling visibly. The middle of the pool started to dry up. As the four humans watched, the opening in the middle grew bigger and bigger. But it wasn’t round—rather, it had straight edges. Meanwhile, the outside of the puddle was also taking on definite shape, forming straight edges parallel to those on the inside.

  “It’s—it’s a triangle,” said Tina.

  “The orange pigment in the blood—it’s probably iron-based,” said Raji. “Maybe it’s magnetic; maybe the blood is pooling along the field lines formed by magnetic equipment beneath the hull…”

  But then pairs of liquid arms started extending from the vertices of the central triangle. The four humans watched dumbfounded while the blood continued to move. Suddenly, the six growing arms turned in directions perpendicular to the way they’d previously been expanding.

  Finally, the outline was complete: the central object was a right-angle triangle, and off of each face of the triangle was a square.

  Suddenly, lines started to cross diagonally through two of the squares—one square was crossed from the lower-left to the upper-right; another from the upper-left to the lower right; and the third—

  —the third square was crosshatched, as if the patterns from the other squares had been overlain on top of each other.

  “The square of the hypotenuse,” said Tina, her voice full of wonder, “equals the sum of the squares of the other two sides.”

  “What?” said Bancroft.

  “The Pythagorean theorem,” said Raji, absolutely astonished. “It’s a diagram illustrating one of the basic principles of geometry.”

  “A diagram made by blood?” said Bancroft incredulously.

  A sudden thought hit Raji. “Can your scanner sequence nucleic acids?” he asked, looking at Cardinal.

  “Not quickly.”

  “Can it compare strands? See if they’re the same?”

  “Yes, it can do that.”

  “Compare the nucleic acid from a body cell with that from one of the blood cells.”

  Cardinal set to work. “They don’t match,” she said after a few minutes.

  “Incredible,” said Raji shaking his head.

  “What?” said Tina.

  “In all Earth lifeforms, the DNA is the same in every cell of the body, including in those blood cells that do contain DNA—non-mammalian red corpuscles, as well as white corpuscles in all types of animals. But the alien’s blood doesn’t contain the same genetic information as the alien’s body.”

  “So?”

  “Don’t you see? The blood and the body aren’t even related! They’re separate lifeforms. Of course the body has a tiny brain—it’s just a vehicle for the blood. The blood is the intelligent lifeform, and the body is only a host.” Raji pointed at the orange diagram on the floor. “That’s what it’s telling us, right there, on the floor! It’s telling us not to worry about saving the body—we should be trying to save the blood!”

  “That must be why the host has built-in valves to shut off cuts,” said Cardinal. “If the blood cells collectively form an intelligent creature, obviously that creature wouldn’t want to give up part of itself just to clot wounds.”

  “And when the host dies, the orifices and valves open up, to let the blood escape,” said Bancroft. “The host doesn’t hate the blood—this isn’t an enslavement; it’s a partnership.”

  “What do we do now?” asked Tina.

  “Collect all the blood and take it somewhere safe,” said Raji. “Then see how much we can communicate with it.”

  “And then?”

  “And then we wait,” said Raji, looking up at the transparent ceiling. It was getting dark; soon the stars would be visible. “We wait for other aliens to come on a rescue mission.”

  Raji dropped his gaze. The alien blood was forming a new pattern on the floor: the outlines of two large circles, separated by about twenty centimeters of space.

  “What’s it trying to say?” asked Cardinal.

  Lines started to squiggle across the circles. The lines on the right-hand circle seemed random, but suddenly Raji recognized the ones on the left: the coastlines of North America. It was a picture of Earth and of another planet, presumably the alien’s home world.

  As the four humans watched, the two circles moved closer together, closer still, the gap between them diminishing, until at last they gently touched.

  Raji smiled. “I think that means we’re going to be friends.”

  Forever

  Author’s Introduction

  Mike Resnick and Marty Greenberg, who had re-energized my short-fiction career by commissioning “Just Like Old Times” for their Dinosaur Fantastic, decided to do a second volume of dinosaur-related stories, and once again I was asked to participate.

  Although the dinosaur culture in this piece bears some resemblance to that portrayed in my novels Far-Seer, Fossil Hunter, and Foreigner, the Shizoo are definitely not Quintaglios.

  Attentive readers will note that the Jacob Coin who is quoted at the beginning of this story is also the main character in my “Lost in the Mail.”

  This story received an honorable mention in Gardner Dozois’s Year’s Best Science Fiction.

  Forever

  Everything we know about dinosaurs comes from a skewed sample: the only specimens we have are of animals who happened to die at locations in which fossilization could occur; for instance; we have no fossils at all from areas that were mountainous during the Mesozoic.

  Also, for us to find dinosaur fossils, the Mesozoic rocks have to be re-exposed in the present day—assuming, of course, that the rocks still exist; some have been completely destroyed through subduction beneath the Earth’s crust.

  From any specific point in time—such as what we believe to be the final million years of the age of dinosaurs—we have at most only a few hundred square miles of exposed rock to work with. It’s entirely possible that forms of dinosaurs wildly different from those we’re familiar with did exist, and it’s also quite reasonable to suppose that some of these forms persisted for many millions of years after the end of the Cretaceous.

  But, of course, we’ll never know for sure.

  — Jacob Coin, Ph.D.

  Keynote Address,

  A.D. 2018 Annual Meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology

  Five planets could be seen with the naked eye: Sunhugger, Silver, Red, High, and Slow; all five had been known since ancient times. In the two hundred years since the invention of the telescope, much had been discovered about them. Tiny Sunhugger and bright Silver went through phases, just like the moon did; Red had visible surface features, although exactly what they were was still open to considerable debate. High was
banded, and had its own coterie of at least four moons, and Slow—Slow was the most beautiful of all, with a thin ring orbiting around its equator.

  Almost a hundred years ago, Ixoor the Scaly had discovered a sixth planet—one that moved around the Sun at a more indolent pace than even Slow did; Slow took twenty-nine years to make an orbit, but Ixoor’s World took an astonishing eighty-four.

  Ixoor’s World—yes, she had named it after herself, assuring her immortality. And ever since that discovery, the search had been on for more planets.

  Cholo, an astronomer who lived in the capital city of Beskaltek, thought he’d found a new planet himself, about ten years ago. He’d been looking precisely where Raymer’s law predicted an as-yet-undiscovered planet should exist, between the orbits of Red and High. But it soon became apparent that what Cholo had found was nothing more than a giant rock, an orbiting island. Others soon found additional rocks in approximately the same orbit. That made Cholo more determined than ever to continue scanning the heavens each night; he’d rather let a meatscooper swallow him whole than have his only claim to fame be the discovery of a boulder in space…

  He searched and searched and searched, hoping to discover a seventh planet. And, one night, he did find something previously uncatalogued in the sky. His tail bounced up and down in delight, and he found himself hissing “Cholo’s world” softly over and over again—it had a glorious sound to it.

  But, as he continued to plot the object’s orbit over many months, making notes with a claw dipped in ink by the light of a lamp burning sea-serpent oil, it became clear that it wasn’t another planet at all.

  Still, he had surely found his claim to immortality.

  Assuming, of course, that anyone would be left alive after the impact to remember his name.

  “You’re saying this flying mountain will hit the Earth?” said Queen Kava, looking down her long green-and-yellow muzzle at Cholo.

  The Queen’s office had a huge window overlooking the courtyard. Cholo’s gaze was momentarily distracted by the sight of a large, furry winger gliding by. He turned back to the queen. “I’m not completely thirty-six thirty-sixths certain, Your Highness,” he said. “But, yes, I’d say it’s highly likely.”