Lungfish

6

Towering spires hulked all around, silhouetted against the starlight—a ghost-city of ruin, long, long dead.

Frozen flows of glassy foam showed where ancient rock had briefly bubbled under sunlike heat. Beneath collapsed skyscrapers of toppled scaffolding lay the pitted, blasted corpses of unfinished star probes.

Ursula followed Gavin through the curled, twisted wreckage of the gigantic replication yard. It was an eerie place, huge and intimidating.

No human power could have wrought this havoc. The realization lent a chilling helplessness to the uneasy feeling that she was being watched.

It was a silly reflex reaction, of course. Ursula told herself again that the Destroyers had to be long gone from this place. Still, her eyes darted, seeking form out of the shadows, blinking at the scale of the catastrophe.

One fact was clear. If the ancient wreckers ever returned, mankind would be helpless to oppose them.

“It’s down here,” Gavin said, leading the way into the gloom below the twisted towers. Flying behind a small swarm of little semisentient drones, he looked almost completely human in his slick spacesuit. There was nothing except the overtone in his voice to show that his ancestry was silicon, and not carbolife.

Not that it mattered. Today “mankind” included many types… all citizens so long as they could appreciate music, a sunset, compassion, and a good joke. In a future filled with unimaginable diversity, Man would be defined not by his shape but by a heritage and a common set of values.

Some believed this was the natural life history of a race, as it left the planetary cradle to live in peace beneath the open stars.

But Ursula—speeding behind Gavin under the canopy of twisted metal— had already concluded that humanity’s solution was not the only one. Other makers had chosen other paths.

Terrible forces had broken a great seam in one side of the planetoid. Within, the cavity seemed to open up in multiple tunnels. Gavin braked in a faint puff of gas and pointed.

“We were beginning the initial survey, measuring the first sets of tunnels, when one of my drones reported finding the habitats.”

Ursula shook her head, still unable to believe it.

“Habitats. Do you really mean as in closed rooms? Gas-tight? For biological life support?”

Gavin’s face plate hardly hid his exasperated expression. He shrugged. “Come on, Mother. I’ll show you.”

Ursula numbly turned her jets and followed her partner down into one of the dark passages, their headlamps illuminating the path ahead of them.

Habitats? Ursula pondered. In all the years humans had been picking through the ruins of wave after wave of foreign probes, this was the first time anyone had found anything having to do with biological beings.

No wonder Gavin had been testy. To an immature robot-person it might seem like a bad joke.

Biological starfarers! It defied all logic. But soon Ursula could see the signs around her… massive airlocks lying in the dust, torn from their hinges… reddish stains that could only have come from oxidization of the primitive rock as it had been exposed to air.

The implications were staggering. Something organic had come from the stars!

Although all humans were equal before the law, the traditional biological kind still dominated culture in the solar system. Many of the younger Class AAAs looked to the future, when their descendants would be the majority, the leaders, the star-treaders. To them, the discovery of the alien probes in the asteroid belt had been a sign. Of course something terrible seemed to have happened to the great robot envoys from the stars, but they still testified that the galaxy belonged to metal and silicon.

They were the future.

But here, deep in the planetoid, was an exception!

Ursula poked through the wreckage, under walls carved out of carbonaceous rock. Mammoth explosions had shaken the habitat, and even in vacuum little had been preserved from so long ago. Still, she could tell that the machines in this area were different from any alien artifacts they had found before.

She traced the outlines of intricate separation columns. “Chemical processing facilities… and not for fuel or cryogens, but for complex organics!”

Ursula hop-skipped quickly from chamber to chamber as Gavin followed sullenly. A pack of semi-sent robots from the ship accompanied them, like dogs sniffing a trail. In each new chamber they snapped and clicked and scanned. Ursula accessed the data on her helmet display as it came available.

“Look there! In that chamber the drones report traces of organic compounds that have no business being here. There’s been heavy oxidation, within a super-reduced asteroid!”

She hurried to an area where the drones were already setting up lights. “See these tracks? They were cut by flowing water!” She knelt and pointed. “They had a stream, feeding recycled water into a little lake there!

Dust sparkled as it slid through her gloved fingers “I’ll wager this was topsoil! And look! stems! From plants, and grass, and trees!”

“Put here for aesthetic purposes,” Gavin proposed. “We class AAA’s are predesigned to enjoy nature as much as you biologicals…”

“Oh, posh!” Ursula laughed. “That’s only a stopgap measure until we’re sure you’ll keep thinking of yourselves as human beings. Nobody expects to inflict a love of New England autumns on people when we become starships! Anyway, a probe could fulfill that desire simply by focusing a telescope on the Earth!”

She stood up and spread her arms. “This habitat was meant for biological creatures! Real, living aliens!”

Gavin frowned, but said nothing.

“Here,” Ursula pointed as they entered another chamber. “Here is where the biological creatures were made! Don’t these machines resemble those artificial wombs they’re using on Luna now?”

Gavin shrugged grudgingly.

“Maybe the organic creatures were specialized units,” he suggested, “intended to work with volatiles. Or perhaps the type of starprobe that built this facility needed some element from the surface of a planet like Earth, and created workers equipped to go get it.”

Ursula laughed. “It’s an idea. That’d be a twist, hmmm? Machines making biological units to do what they could not? And of course there’s no reason it couldn’t happen that way.

“Still, I doubt it.”

“Why?”

She turned to face her partner. “Because almost anything available on Earth you can synthesize more easily in space. Anyway…”

Gavin interrupted. “Explorers! The probes were sent out to explore and acquire knowledge. All right then. If they wanted to learn more about the Earth, they would want to send units formatted to live on its surface!”

Ursula nodded. “Better,” she admitted. “But it still doesn’t wash.”

She knelt in the faint gravity and sketched an outline in the dust. “Here is the habitat, nearly at the center of the asteroid. Now why would the parent probe have placed it here, except because it was the best possible place to protect its contents?

“Meanwhile, the daughter probes the Parent was constructing were out there, vulnerable to cosmic rays and other dangers during the time when their delicate parts were most exposed.

“If the biologicals were just built to poke into a nook of this solar system, our Earth, would the parent probe have given them better protection than it offered its own children?” She gestured upward, toward where the twisted wreckage of the unborn machines lay open to the stars.

“No,” Ursula shook her head. “These ‘biologicals’ weren’t intended to be exploration sub-units, serving the parent probe. “They were colonists!”

Gavin stood impassively for a long time, looking down at her sketch silently. Finally, he turned away and sighed.