GRAHAM SPEARMAN PEERED INTO THE WINDOW OF THE COLD chamber in one of Orion’s biological laboratories, where an automatic manipulator assembly was slicing test specimens from a sample of brownish, rubbery substance recovered from the wreckage of the bizarre walking wagons destroyed in the encounter with the Paduan Taloids. The cold chamber was a necessity since most Taloid pseudoorganic materials tended to decompose into evil-smelling liquids at room temperature. In the work area around Spearman, the displays and data presentations were showing some of the findings from electron and proton microscopes, gas and liquid chromatographs, electrophoretic analyzers, isotopic imagers, x-ray imagers, ultrasonic imagers, and just about every kind of spectrometer ever invented. Spearman had already described the incendiary chemical thrown by the catapults mounted on several of the Paduan war vehicles; it had turned out to be a substance rich in complex oxygen-carbon compounds that would be highly inflammable in Titan’s reducing atmosphere once ignition temperature had been attained by the reaction of a fast-acting outer acid layer upon a metallic target surface. The catapults themselves had been shown by video replays also to be organic, and suggested enormous, finely sculptured vegetables that ejected their missions either by releasing stored mechanical strain-energy or by compressed gas accumulated internally.
In his late thirties, with thick-rimmed spectacles and a droopy mustache, and wearing a tartan shirt with jeans, Spearman was the easygoing kind of person that Thelma could find interesting without running the risk of ending up being used as an ideological dumping ground if she spent time talking to him. The problem with many scientists, she found, especially the younger ones, was that their successful intellectual accomplishment in one field could sometimes lead them to overestimate the value of their views on anything and everything, which tended to make conversation a survival skill by turning every topic into a minefield. Spearman provided a refreshing contrast by holding no political opinions, having no pet economic theory for solving all the world’s problems at a stroke, and no burning conviction about how other people should conduct their lives to make it a better place.
“I’ve never seen anything quite like this,” he said, turning back and waving an arm to indicate the sample behind the window. “It’s capable of growing under the direction of large, complex director molecules, sure enough, but you couldn’t say it’s alive. It’s kind of halfway in between...It has a primitive biochemistry, but nothing approaching life at the level of cellular metabolism. You see, there aren’t any cells.”
Thelma looked intrigued as she swiveled herself slowly from side to side in the operator’s chair in front of the microscopy console, while Dave Crookes listened from where he was leaning just inside the doorway. “Then what’s it made of?” Thelma asked. “How does it grow without cells?”
Spearman sighed. “A comprehensive answer will probably take years to unravel, but for the moment think of it as something like an organic crystal, but more complicated...with variations in structure that you don’t get in crystals.” He gestured at the sample in the cold chamber. “That’s a part of one of the legs. It does have a rudimentary vascular system to transport nutrients for renewing itself, an arrangement of contractile tissues that enable it to move, and a network of conductive fibers that transmit electrical discharges in response to applied mechanical force. And that’s about all. What it suggests is that the complete structure could respond by moving itself if something pulled it—a kind of passive friction-reducer.”
“An organic wheel,” Thelma said.
Spearman grinned. “Sure—that’s just about what it is.”
“But it couldn’t do anything else, like reproduce itself or something like that?” Crookes asked.
Spearman shook his head. “No way. As I said, it can move and regenerate its form—parts of it anyway. But there’s no way you could say it’s alive.”
Thelma frowned to herself. “So how could something like that ever have evolved in the first place if it can’t reproduce itself?” she asked.
“It couldn’t have,” Spearman replied simply.
“So where did it come from?”
“The only thing we can suggest is that the Taloids created it.”
Thelma and Crookes exchanged puzzled glances. “But how could they have?” Crookes protested. “I mean, their technology is back in the Middle Ages. You’re talking about something that might be crude compared to the living cells we know, but surely it’s still a pretty impressive feat of bioengineering.”
“Astonishing,” Spearman confirmed. “In fact I don’t think any genetic engineering of ours could touch it—not without naturally occurring macromolecules already available to work with, anyhow.”
“Well, that’s the point,” Thelma said. “How could the Taloids have done it?”
Spearman moved a few paces across the lab, then turned and spread his hands. “We’ve already found plenty of examples of quite complex hydrocarbons and nitrogenous compounds in the soil, very much like the molecules believed to have been precursors of life on Earth. But apparently they never progressed much further on Titan, probably because of the low temperature and absence of strong ionizing radiation and other mutagenic stimulants. Well, our best guess is that the Taloids somehow learned to manipulate such raw materials, and over a period of time developed techniques for manufacturing the kind of thing you see here.” He waved toward the cold chamber again. “And I mean manufacturing. That stuff didn’t grow naturally. It accounts for their peculiar houses too, as well as a lot of other things we’ve seen.”
John Webster, an English genetic engineering consultant from the Cambridge Institute for Molecular Biology, nodded from a stool in front of a cluttered workbench jammed into a corner among shelves of bottles and racks of electronic equipment. “That’s the way it looks. It’s our culture turned upside down. We grow our food and our offspring, and make artifacts out of metals that we extract from rocks; the Taloids’ food and offspring are produced on assembly lines, while they grow artifacts—developed from organic substances which they discovered in their rocks and soils. That explains all those ‘plantations’ that we’ve been wondering about: They’re Taloid factories.”
“That’s right—they did the same as we did, but the other way around,” Spearman said. “Man learned to make mechanical devices to mimic the actions of living organisms in his familiar environment—to lift weights and move loads, and so on. The Taloids found they could manufacture artificial devices too—organic ones—to mimic the only form of life they knew.”
“It’s a good way of looking at it,” Crookes agreed. “But that still doesn’t explain how the Taloids could engineer processes at the molecular level when their culture is centuries behind ours.” He gestured to indicate the banks of instrumentation and equipment all around them. “We had to invent all this before we even knew what a protein was, never mind how to splice genes into plasmids. The Taloids couldn’t make anything even remotely comparable to all this stuff.”
“They never needed to,” Spearman said. “They’re surrounded by it already.”
It took Thelma a moment to grasp what he was saying. “You’re kidding,” she said incredulously.
Spearman shook his head. “Man learned how to use enzymes and bacteria to make wine and cheese thousands of years ago without having to know anything about the chemistry involved. Who’s to say that the Taloids couldn’t have learned to domesticate the life forms that they found all around them too? We take wool off sheep to make overcoats; they take wire from wire-drawing machines.” He shrugged. “It’s the same difference.”
“Everything about them is us the other way around, and taken back three or four centuries,” Webster said. “We were practical artisans first, and from those beginnings we developed engineering and the physical sciences. Biochemistry came later. The Taloids developed applied biology first, but without any real comprehension of biological science, and now they’re only just beginning to dabble in the physical sciences.”
“That seems strange,” Crookes commented. “You’d think that all the advanced hardware down there would have given them an intuitive comprehension of it from early on.”
“Why should it have?” Spearman asked. “Human beings are advanced biological systems, but that doesn’t give them an intuitive understanding of how their brains and their bodies work. That knowledge could only come later, when suitable instruments became available...and it’s still far from complete. Human consciousness operates at a level way above that of the neural hardware that supports our mental software, and the world of raw sensory data which that hardware reacts to. We don’t perceive the world as consisting of pressure waves, photons, forces, and so on, but as people, places, and things. Our awareness arises from the interaction of abstract symbols that are far removed from the original physical stimuli—shut off, as it were, from any direct knowledge of its own underlying neurological and physiological processes. So we can think about the things that matter without knowing anything about what the trillions of nerve cells in our brains are doing, or even being aware that we have any.”
Crookes frowned for a moment. “So what are you saying—that the Taloids are advanced electronic systems, but that doesn’t give them any intuitive understanding of how they work either? Their awareness operates at a higher, abstract level in the same way?”
“Just that,” Spearman replied.
Thelma nodded as the implications became clearer. “So just because the Taloids are computers, it doesn’t mean necessarily that they think with machine precision and possess total information recall, does it? They might not be able to remember a conversation from yesterday word for word, or behave the same way in the same situation every time...just like us.”
“That’s what Graham’s getting at,” Webster said. “At its basic hardware level, the human brain is every bit as mechanical and predictable as an electronic computer chip: A neuron either fires or doesn’t fire in response to a given set of inputs. It doesn’t go through agonies of indecision trying to make up some microscopic mind about what to do. At that level, there isn’t any mind to make up. ‘Mind’ emerges as a property of organization that becomes manifest only at the higher level...In the same kind of way, a single molecule doesn’t possess a property of ‘elephantness’; a sufficiently large number of them, however, organized in the correct way, do. Taloid minds are almost certainly a result of complexity transcending their underlying hardware in the same way.”
Spearman moved back to the cold chamber, stooped to look at what was going on inside, and entered a command into the control panel below the window. “If you showed a Taloid a piece of holoptronics from the inside of a computer processor, I think it’d be about as mystified as someone in the Middle Ages trying to make sense of a rabbit brain,” he said over his shoulder. “We understand machines because we were able to begin with the simple and progress through to the more complicated—from pulleys and levers, through dynamos and steam engines, to computers, nuclear plants, and spaceships. Hence we can explain every detail of our creations and its purpose, right down to the last nut and bolt of something like the Orion. But an understanding of biological processes didn’t come so easily because, instead of being able to start with the simple, we found ourselves confronted by the most complex—the end-products of billions of years of evolution. With no comprehension of DNA, protein transcription, cell differentiation, and the like, it’s not easy to explain the totality of a rabbit or account for how it came together in the first place.” Spearman entered another command, waited to check its effect, and turned back to face the others once more. “The Taloids had the same problem. They were confronted by the end-products of a long history of alien technology, plus probably millions of years of evolution after that, without any of the benefit of attending the schools and technical colleges that the alien engineers went to. So the physical sciences remained a mystery. But dabbling with biological techniques was something they could figure out for themselves, using the resources they had.”
Thelma reflected for a few seconds. “You mean for a long time they never even experimented with simple tools as we know them?...They’d have had enough raw materials lying around down there. It seems...oh, strange somehow.”
Spearman smiled faintly. “The reason’s pretty obvious when you think about it,” he said.
“What?” Thelma asked.
“Tools as we know them are made out of refined materials like metals, glass, plastics, and so on,” Spearman said. “In other words, the same kinds of substances that are produced naturally all over the place on Titan. They wouldn’t last very long. Neither would anything you tried to make with them.”
Crookes gave a puzzled frown. “How come?”
Webster spread his hands. “Anything like that would probably turn out to be ‘food’ for something or other. And besides...who’d dream of making tools, ornaments, and houses out of candy bars and pizza?”
The crew mess hall inside the larger of the two prefabricated domes that constituted Genoa Base One was warm, stuffy, and crowded. At the serving window, Massey picked up a mug of hot coffee and a donut and walked away from the short line of bulky figures in extravehicular suits waiting to snatch a last-minute snack before another expedition into the city. Since he had come down from the Orion thirty-six hours or so previously and just awakened from a rest period, it was really breakfast, he supposed. The Taloids remained continuously active for a period of a little over ten terrestrial days, centered around the time of maximum total illumination that resulted from direct solar radiation and reflection from Saturn as Titan progressed through its sixteen-day orbit. Since Titan kept one hemisphere permanently toward Saturn, one side of Titan experienced changes in both direct radiation and reflection while the other side experienced the direct component only, the areas in between receiving a mixture of both in varying proportions; thus the light-dark cycle was a complicated function of orbital motion, and on top of that, varied from place to place.
“And how is the rationalist today?” a jovial voice inquired from behind him. “It’s not a good time of year for the debunking business, I hear.”
Massey had recognized Zambendorf even before looking round. Although many of the mission’s scientists had shown some signs of disdain and aloofness toward Zambendorf and his team three months previously at the time of leaving Earth, things had changed noticeably in the course of the voyage. Now Zambendorf, Abaquaan, Thelma, and the rest were simply accepted as a normal part of the day-to-day life of the Orion’s community. Whether this was a psychological effect of everyone’s sharing the same, tiny, man-made environment hundreds of millions of miles from Earth, Massey didn’t know; but in his conversations he had detected a not-uncommon attitude among the scientists of amused respect toward Zambendorf and his crew for at least being indisputable masters of their chosen profession; the scientists’ contempt was reserved more for those who chose to adulate Zambendorf’s team.
Massey turned to find Zambendorf grinning at him over the metal-ring helmet-seating of his EV suit. “It looks as if you might last a few more days yet,” he conceded grimly.
“I should hope so too,” Zambendorf said. “Surely it must be obvious by now, even to you, Gerry, that there is more important work to be done than wasting time with trivia that belong where we should have left them—a billion miles away, back on Earth.”
Massey looked at him curiously. Zambendorf and his team had been showing a genuine interest in the mission’s serious business—and surprising some of the scientists with how much they knew. Was it possible that Zambendorf could be undergoing a change of heart? “What’s the matter Karl?” he asked. “Are you developing a guilt complex now that you’re seeing some real science for once?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Zambendorf scoffed. “And besides, even if it were true, do you think I’d tell you? You’re the psychologist. You should be telling me.”
In other words Massey could take Zambendorf’s attitude either way. He was still the same old Zambendorf—forever confusing, and always a jump ahead of the game. “You’re doing something worthwhile for once,” Massey said. “You’ve got a knack for getting through to the Taloids, and they trust you. That has to be a better feeling than ripping people off all the time, so why not admit it?”
“It’s not the same thing,” Zambendorf replied. “I’ll help anyone who makes the effort to help himself. The Taloids might have some way to go yet, but they value knowledge and skill. They want to learn. They’re willing to work at it. But people? Pah! They grow up surrounded by libraries, universities, teachers who could show them the accumulated discoveries and wisdom of millennia and they’re not interested. They’d rather live junk-lives. How can you steal anything from someone who has already thrown everything away?”
“Perhaps people simply need to be shown how to think,” Massey suggested.
Zambendorf shook his head. “It’s like leading horses to water. When people are ready to think, they will think. Trying to rush them is futile. All you can do is show them where the water is and wait for them to get thirsty.” He gestured over Massey’s shoulder at Osmond Periera and Malcom Wade, who were standing by the doorway, debating in loud voices a speculation of Periera’s that the antimatter spaceship responsible for creating the North Polar Sea might have come from Titan. “Listen to those two idiots,” Zambendorf murmured in a lower voice. “You could spend a year of your life preparing a detailed refutation that might succeed in convincing them that what they’re talking about is nonsense. Do you think they’d learn anything from the experience? Not a bit of it. Within a week they’d be off into something else equally preposterous. So you could have saved your time for something profitable. I’ll save mine for the Taloids.”
“Careful, Karl,” Massey cautioned. “You’re beginning to sound as if you’re admitting you’re a fraud again.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Zambendorf said. “But even if it were true, do you think people would learn anything from the experience if you proved it?” He shook his head. “Not a bit of that either. Within a week they would have found something else too...just like friend Osmond and that other character behind you.”
At that moment a loudspeaker announced that the personnel carrier that would be taking the party into the city was waiting at the vehicle-access transfer lock. “The problem with you is that you really are a scientist at heart,” Massey said as they began moving in the direction of the doorway. “But you think it would be beneath your dignity to admit it.”
Half an hour later they were among the passengers watching parts of the outskirts of Genoa slide through the headlamp beams of the carrier and its escort of two military scout cars fifty yards ahead and behind. All along the way, Taloids came to stand by the roadside to watch the procession of strange creatures that bore within them beings from another world. Some ran forward to bathe themselves in the light, which they apparently believed to possess miraculous and curative properties; a few shrank back as the vehicles passed, or fled into the alleys and sidestreets.
One—a mounted figure wrapped in a heavy riding cloak, its face concealed in a deep hood—watched inconspicuously from the shadows of a gateway near the city wall, absorbing every detail. When the Terran vehicles had passed, the rider reemerged and moved away along the side of the road in the opposite direction to resume the journey that would take it out of the city, beyond the borders of Carthogia, and across the Wilderness of Meracasine. Skerilliane, Spy-with-a-Thousand-Eyes, would have much to report when he returned to his royal master Eskenderom, the King of Kroaxia.