In the Ocean of Night (39 page)

“Isn’t
that
…”

“Right. I’m a bit rusty at all this but I checked with Kardensky and my memory from the news media is right—that’s the stuff they use as an RNA trigger. That, and a few other long chain molecules, are what the NSF is trying to get legislation about.”

Nikka studied the prints he handed her. To her untrained eye the complex matrix made no sense at all.

“Doesn’t it have something to do with sleep learning in the subcortical region?”

Nigel nodded. “That seems to be one of its functions. You give it to someone and they are able to learn faster, soak up information without effort. But it acts on the RNA as well. The RNA replicates itself through the DNA—there’s some amino acid stuff in there I don’t quite follow—so that there is a possibility, at least, of passing on the knowledge to the next generation.”

“And that’s why it’s illegal? The New Sons don’t want it used, I’ve heard.”

Nigel leaned back against the wall and rested his feet on the narrow bunk. “There’s one point where our friends from the Church of the Unwarranted Assumption may have a point. This is dangerous stuff to fool about with. Biochemists started out decades ago using it on flatworms and the like. But a man isn’t a worm and it will take a
bloody
long series of experiments to convince me using it on humans is a wise move.”

He paused and then said softly, “What I’d like to know is why this molecule is represented in an alien computer memory almost a million years old.”

Nikka held out her glass. “Could you give me a drop of that canniforene in fruit juice? I’m beginning to see it might have a use.”

“Quite so,” Nigel said dryly.

“There are some other points too. That long black line against the mottled background we found, that’s a DNA molecule entering a—let me look it up—pneumococcus. A simple step in the replication process, Kardensky tells me.” He put aside his papers and carefully mixed her a drink. “That’s what I was having off on, hallucinating about, I suppose, when you knocked.”

Nikka drank quickly and then smiled, shaking her head. “Interesting taste. They mix it with something, don’t they? But explain what you mean, I don’t see where all this points.”

Nigel chuckled and turned thumbs up. “Great. I’m hoping the fellows who peeked inside the packages from Kardensky won’t see it either.”

“What do you mean? They were
opened
?”

“Sure. All the seals were off. The canniforene was disguised, so it got through. The rest was just books, papers, photos and a tape. I don’t know what the censors—New Sons I’d imagine—thought of it all.”

“Incredible,” Nikka said, shaking her head in disbelief. “You’d hardly believe this was a scientific expedition at all. It seems more like—”

“A political road show, yes. Makes one wonder why our schedule has been so frequently interrupted.”

Nikka looked puzzled. “Our shed-yool?”

“Yes, you say sked-jule, don’t you? What I mean is that we seem to get interrupted on our shift a great deal, more than the other teams. We lost several hours today from that electric high tension, for example—”

“High tension?”

“In American that’s, uh, high voltage.” “You’ve never lost your Englishisms.” “
We
invented the language.”

“Say, could I have some more of that…” “So soon?”

“It has some aspects…”

“So it does. Think I’ll indulge in a nip.”

“Exotic slang. Old World charm.”

Nigel collected the papers and piled them on the floor, feeling his heels lift and float beneath him. The room was so cramped there wasn’t space for a desk.

When he lofted back to his bunk he was surprised to find Nikka there. She kissed him.

Nigel made a formal gesture, not totally explicit, currently fashionable throughout Europe. Nikka raised an eyebrow in reply. She came to him as an eddy of warmth.

“You’re enough to stiffen a priest,” he said admiringly. “Haven’t tried.”

She unfastened the brass buckle at her side. Forthright, he thought. Direct.

She hovered over him and her small, elegantly peaked breasts swayed slowly. The period of oscillation, he thought distantly, depended on the square root of the acceleration of gravity. An interesting fact. Something stirred within him and he saw her diffused in the mellow cabin light, a new continent in the air. His clothes had evaporated. She knelt and his stomach muscles convulsed as a warm wave enclosed his penis. He blinked, blinked and merged into billowing yellow cloudbanks of philosophy.

TWELVE

They went for hikes outside, laboring up the hillsides, slipping in the powdery dust. Nigel wanted to see Earth and he had not realized until he arrived here that Mare Marginis was aptly named, for it appeared from Earth on the very margin of the moon, only a third of it visible. To see the Earth they had to scale a steep hill. Nikka was concerned that the exercise might overtax him, but she had not allowed for his training; he panted continuously but did not slow until near the summit.

“Beautiful,” he said, stopping with hands on hips. His voice rasped over the suit radio.

“Yes. I can see home.”

“Where?”

“Yokohama. There.”

“Right. And there’s the western United States.” “Clouds over California.”

“But not Oregon.”

“Where your Mr. Ichino is?”

“Right. I wonder why I haven’t heard anything from him.”

“Ummm. Even that enormous blast crater is
invisible
from here. Funny. But, look, isn’t it too soon to expect results?”

“Probably. He may be snowed in, too.”

“After all, he hasn’t gotten a peep out of you, either.” “True. We’ve been so damned busy.”

“And censored.”

“Dead on,” he said with a dry chuckle.

“No way around it.”

“I’m not so sure.”

“Oh? How?”

“I’m thinking of getting an unbreakable channel through to Kardensky.”

“That will be difficult.”

“But not impossible. Maybe we can route it through someplace else.”

“On Earth?”

“No, here. The moon. How about Hipparchus Base?” “It’s only an outpost. When they struck the ice lode at Alphonsus, Hipparchus became a backwater.”

“Um.” He fell silent.

“Look at it,” he said at last. “Earth. Hanging there like some sort of nondenominational angel.”

“Careful. Call it that and the New Sons will claim they thought of it first.”

“They would. Quite their style.”

“Why can’t they stick to one world at a time? Why pull the strings here?”

“They like to muck about. Power, you know—it’s an addictive drug.”

They watched their planet, half of it visible over the mottled horizon. Nikka pitched a stone down the baked hillside. The only sound was a whirring of air circulation in their suits.

“Incredible,” Nigel said intently. “Nobody’s noticed, but this is going to be the first true moon colony. The wreck will always have a covey of scientists poking into it, decade after decade.”

“The cylinder cities will have their own base. Probably bigger.”

“That electromagnetic gun of theirs? If we build it at all.”

“Don’t you think they will?”

“Maybe. The media are certainly singing about the idea.”

“Shouldn’t we?”

“Oh—” Nigel shrugged and then realized it was invisible inside the suit. “Probably. The cylinder cities will be good manufacturing sites, I’ll give you that. And they’ll sop up sunlight, then beam power down in microwaves. Photovoltaic conversion, the lot. That’ll be a big help— the coal liquefaction plants are being closed, you know, now that benzopyrene is proving to be a carcinogen. The Europeans are getting desperate for energy sources again.”

“Can’t they buy enough alcohol fuel? Brazil’s sugar cane crop is immense this year.”

“Not enough; they’re streets behind the worldwide demand.”

“Then we’d best build cylinder cities and more solar collectors as quickly as possible.”

“Ummm, yes, I suppose. But that’s not why the space community idea is being brushed off and taken out of the closet.”

“Why is it?”

“The New Sons. I think they’re using this as a smoke screen.”

“I heard there is widespread support.”

“Oh yes, they’re thick on the ground—and the pun is intentional.”

“A smoke screen? For what?”

“Not
for
what,
against
what. Against
us.
To deflect attention and money from the program here.”

“Oh. You’re certain?”

“No.” Nigel kicked at a rock. They watched it tumble downhill, flinging up a silvery cloud of dust in its wake that rose and fell with ghostlike smoothness. “No, that’s the hell of it. I must guess at all this. But I
know
that congressional committees don’t suddenly take up big spending bills, putting them on the top of the docket, for no reason whatever. Something’s happening.”

“I feel quite naive.”

“Don’t. See, the games played up at the top of the pile—they’re still merely games. Politics, public relations, oneupmanship, showbiz—those words have gotten to be synonyms.”

“Competition is fun.”

“Of course. ‘This show was brought to you through the miracle of testosterone.’ But there’s got to be more to it than that. More than another zero-sum game.”

“That’s why you never went into the higher echelons? So you could be free to use your influence for what you truly wanted—to come out here and turn your back on all that?”

“Eh?” Her tone took him by surprise. “Turn my back? No, look—look at that sherbet planet of ours. Here we are, the furthest out. Nothing but night beyond us. And still the view dominating the sky is bloody old Earth. Turn my back? We’re still looking at ourselves.”

That evening, after a grueling session at the consoles, she came again to his room. Their lovemaking had a more desperate edge to it, Nigel sensed. He felt himself pressing her to him with a furious energy, and wondered at himself. The silken movements, so electric, had their own life. Considered as a designed act, it was in the mind’s eye a slow churning of bloated and gummy organs, dumb to the ethereal, a rising with involuntary spasms from ancient ooze. But beyond that lay joy, an airy joy, with a burning pressure that lifted away the convenient carapace of mannerisms he wore. It took place in a spherical space so intense that people had to go in pairs; one could scarcely bear to go alone.

Yet, even lying at the place where all the lines of her converged, his head cradled between her thighs, Nigel felt himself slipping away from her, from the gliding moment, and into the riddles that chipped away at his focus. He felt a lazy peace with Nikka, a sensation he hadn’t had since Alexandria, but the stretching tension remained, a double pull both toward this woman and to the ruined ship outside, as though both were links in an unseen circle. He fumbled with these thoughts and the knot they made inside him, and in the act fell asleep, with Nikka’s salty musk in his nostrils, his arms heavy and sluggish as though they had supported an unseen weight.

He awoke in the middle of the night. He took elaborate pains to slide out of the bed without waking her and switched on only the small reading lamp in the corner.

The mass of material from Kardensky was imposing but he worked at it steadily, reading as fast as he could. The riddles of the past had an annoying habit of slipping away as he tried to pin them down. Much was known, but it was for the most part a collection of facts with the interrelationships only implied. It is one thing to find a wide variety of tools, mostly stone, chipped or polished for some particular use. But how to put flesh on these bones? How, from a chipped flint, to deduce a way of life?

He rather wished he had paid more attention to such matters at University, rather than swotting up the readings just before term examinations.

There was a lot of talk and data about apes, but the evidence was quite strong—man’s prehuman ancestors didn’t look
or
act like the present great primates. Just because Fred is your cousin doesn’t mean you can learn much about your grandfather by studying Fred’s habits. It was all so interwoven, so
dense.
There was a jungle of theories and test mechanisms that were supposed to explain man—big game hunting, fire, then selection for bigger brains. And that implied prolonged infant and female dependency; loss of the estrous cycle so the woman was always available and interested; the beginnings of the family; taboos; tradition. All factors, all parts of the web.

The Hindu temple monkeys are ordinarily peaceful in the jungle. But once they become pets, take to living in the temples, they multiply freely and form large troops. One troop, stumbling on another, suddenly flies into a fierce rage and attacks. They are animals with time on their hands; deprived of the need to hunt, they have invented warfare. As man did.

Nigel sighed. Analogies with animals were all very well, but did this mean man followed the same path? Admittedly, men were the cleverest prey one could find. War has always been more exciting than peace, robbers than cops, hell than heaven, Lucifer than God.