Saturn Rukh (19 page)

The ribbonswimmer had been deeply slashed by its impact with the taut primary strands of the tether. As Jeeves had predicted, one end of the ribbonswimmer had been cut off, but the other end was there, and hung down alongside the Hoytether where it could easily be examined by the two scientists climbing up the inside of the tether.

“The skin looks like the surface of a starfish. Covered with cilia,” said Sandra as she stroked the surface with her gloved fingers, making sure that the image intensifier in her helmet camera got a good closeup view so the video images transmitted down to
Sexdent
and stored in the cavernous memory of Jeeves were of high scientific quality. “Probably works the same way, too.” She pointed to the converging pattern on one portion of the skin. “Probably is a mouth right here in the center.” She pulled apart a mat of longer cilia to expose a pursed mouth, then took out a scalpel and poked the handle inside, not wanting to risk her finger—gloved as it was.

“No teeth or tongue,” she remarked as she poked around. “Not very deep. Can’t seem to find a throat. Strange...” A few quick strokes with the other end of the scalpel and the mouth had been removed. She looked it over and looked into the hole that had been left.

“The reason I couldn’t find a throat is that there isn’t one!” she exclaimed.

“No throat?” said Dan.

“Look for yourself,” said Sandra. “Underneath where I removed the mouth is nothing but air bladders. There is a whole network of them, with valves connecting each one to the next. But there doesn’t seem to be any central gut or central anything.” She took another look at the “mouth.” “In fact, I suspect that this mouth is nothing but a stomach. The skin gathers any food that happens to strike the surface and directs it to the mouth, which then digests it.”

“But what about excretion?” asked Dan. “What goes in must come out.”

“Once you’ve sucked all the good out of it, you spit it out and wait for the next meal,” said Sandra. “Or, if you have a mouthful that you are working on, just have the cilia hold the morsel until you are done.”

“So the ribbonswimmer is a gigantic flying mouth,” said Dan.

“More like a collection of flying mouths working together for the common good. Any one of them couldn’t come up with enough flotation or flying ability to hunt prey by themselves, but by joining together, they can survive. Each mouth and its surrounding cilia are like a single cell in a multicellular animal or plant on earth, like sponges and coral.

“That philosophy probably also applies to the whole school of ribbonswimmers. They swim so close to each other that any prey that doesn’t get stuck to the skin of one ribbonswimmer gets pushed by the backwash onto the skin of a nearby ribbonswimmer.”

They clambered up and down the tether, looking at different portions of the remains of the giant creature. Although the creature as a whole was dead, some of the less-damaged sections responded in a desultory fashion when prodded, giving Sandra and Dan some clues as to their function. Each portion looked very much like the next, but there were differences.

“Look here,” said Sandra, pointing to an area where the region of inward-pointing cilia around a mouth was very much smaller than the regions around it. “Here’s a tiny mouth fed by a small region of cilia, while next to it is a very large mouth supported by a very large and very old region of cilia.”

“Old?” asked Dan, puzzled. “How can you tell how old it is?”

“Look at the cilia, especially the larger ones close to the mouth. Some of them are scarred or are missing their tips, like they have been damaged in the past by contacting something sharp.”

“Probably from trying to grab something that bit back,” murmured Dan.

“You don’t see any of that damage on the small region with the small mouth,” said Sandra. “The small region must therefore be younger. I would bet that it’s a bud off the older region. Sort of like a bud on a coral reef. The creature not only gets bigger by having its cells grow bigger, it buds off new cells too.”

“So, like a coral reef, it keeps on growing bigger and bigger.”

“Probably not,” said Sandra. “We’ve seen large and small ribbonfish in a flock, but not tiny ones and not huge ones. If you are too small, you don’t have enough flotation volume and wing area to fly fast and hunt well. If you are too big, the feeding surface-to-body volume ratio becomes unfavorable. I suspect that once a ribbonfish gets to an optimum size it divides in two.”

They continued their examination of the gigantic creature. Sandra found, by poking some of them, that the membranes between the flotation bladders were contractile.

“So instead of using muscles to move stiff bones, they use pneumatics to move rigidized bladders,” she concluded. “Certainly is alien,” said Dan.

“Not really all that alien,” said Sandra, calmly. “I’m sure you can recall a human organ that works in a similar fashion, although it uses hydraulics instead of pneumatics...” She paused, certain that it wouldn’t take a medical doctor very long to figure out what organ she was talking about, especially a male medical doctor. But the pause grew longer as the look on Dan’s face grew more puzzled. She finally decided she would have to give him another clue—Dan was so naive in many ways.

“That is... if you think about it
long
and
hard
enough.” She giggled when Dan’s face suddenly grew red behind his visor.

They spent some time looking at one of the dark “spots” on the creature, trying to figure out if they were functional or purely decorative.

“This black segment looks pretty much the same as the tan segments around it,” remarked Dan. “A circular pattern of cilia surrounding a mouth. I think it’s just a ‘ spot. ‘ A decoration, like the spots on a leopard, same type of fur, just a different color.”

“You might be right,” said Sandra as she combed through the black cilia, with her gloved fingers, “but these black cilia
do
have a different shape and texture, as well as color. They look more like feathers than fingers.” She lifted up a fan of some of the larger ones. “They’re linked together with tiny hooks like the feathers on a bird, so they always overlap.” Underneath the larger circle of “feathers” were smaller circles of smaller feathers. It was dark under the fan of outer black feathers so Sandra switched on her helmet lamp. Instantly, there was a reaction as the smaller feathers raised and turned their tips toward the bright source of light. Sandra found herself looking into a myriad of dark “eyes,” each surrounded by dark feathery lashes that formed a hollow cone that restricted the incoming light to only those rays coming from a single direction. The involuntary reflective response of the feathers to the strong light only lasted for a few seconds as the retractile tissues used up their last reserves of energy. The feathers collapsed again.

“Must be an eye,” concluded Sandra. “A crude eye. There’s no lens to form an image. It basically operates like a pinhole camera, with the feathers able to form the ‘pinhole’ in many different orientations so there is directional information provided. Yet not too crude, since it’s a compound eye, like that of a bee. The multitude of different eyes looking in slightly different directions must be able to give range information too.”

“Quite adequate for detecting predators, considering the basic simplicity of the creature,” said Dan.

“Not quite adequate for spotting tethers, though,” remarked Sandra as she cut out a section with a couple of eyes in it.

Loaded down with samples, the two worked their way up the inside of the Hoytether, clearing away the rest of the ribbon-swimmer’s body from the tether lines. They were joined by Mouser, who carefully inspected the lines in the struck region and replaced two of the secondary lines that had been stretched past their elastic limit. They were able to load up Mouser with a few kilos of ribbonswimmer tissue to lighten their load, but they had to carry most of the rest of the twenty kilos Sandra had collected down the half-kilometer “rope ladder.” They were both tired and hungry as they finally entered the airlock, just as the Sun set on another day in the clouds of Saturn.

“I’m making dinner tonight,” said Pete, as he helped them pack their samples in the freezer. He held up a sealed bag containing a large chunk of flesh; it was very lightweight for its bulk because of the flotation bladders. “Would you like me to pan-fry up some of these ribbonswimmer filets for you?”

“No! Thank you!” replied Sandra with a grimace. “I can just imagine the aroma—ammonia and methane mixed. I
will
have a filet, however. I’m hungry enough to eat a cow, so I’ll have one of my special beef filet dinners. Be careful how you grill it, I like it medium—no red on the inside and no black on the outside.”

“I’ll set Puss to work on it,” said Pete cheerfully. “It’ll be ready by the time you finish with your shower. Don’t forget to save room for dessert, I’m making cherries jubilee, complete with flaming brandy. I think I have finally found the right settings on the chemsyns to get it to produce cognac!”

“Nix on that, Pete!” said Dan. “Don’t forget we’re breathing a mixture that includes both hydrogen and oxygen. Although the percentage of oxygen is theoretically too low for the mixture to explode, I don’t want to take any chances.”

That night at dinner Rod announced, “Tomorrow is the tenth of June; we’re halfway through the mission.”

“As far as the meta production is concerned, we’re more than halfway,” remarked Pete. “We reached ninety tons a few days ago—only thirty tons to go for a full load. Then we can go home and collect the rest of our billion.”

The mention of money sent Dan’s mind wandering away from the excitement of the day—hanging from a windblown tower of string while trying to figure out how a dead alien worked when it was still alive. Now all he could think of was the chore of composing this week’s message to Pamela and the kids. The kids now led very active lives, and by cutting the calls down to once a week, Pamela said she could count on everyone being there. With Saturn in opposition to Earth, they were only nine AU away, which cut the round-trip communication delay to only two-and-a-half hours. It was still too long for him to cope with the situation back at home. During the 150-minute interval between the time he had coped with one question or problem and supplied an answer or a suggestion, Pamela or one of the kids had usually generated another question or problem. Right now he had a more serious problem, and Pamela would be no help in solving that one. If tomorrow was the tenth of June on Earth, then his second quarterly estimated tax payment was due to the IRS on the fifteenth. He would have to talk to the loan officer at the bank again—for certain Pamela hadn’t left much in the checking account. The minute they were inside, Dan went to his habitat and sent out messages to the loan officer and Pamela. Those difficult chores done, with a heavy heart he clambered back out to join the rest of the crew for dinner.

The sight of Pete preparing the cherries jubilee brightened Dan’s spirits, even though Pete had to forego lighting the brandy. The cherries were slightly mushy from being freeze-dried and reconstituted, but the total effect was delicious. Dinner done, for all of the crew except the one on night watch duty it was off quickly to bed for three-and-a-half hours of sleep followed by another day shift of five-plus hours. Technically 3.5 hours of sleep every 10.7-hour Saturnian day worked out to 8 hours of sleep every 24-hour Earth day, but every once in a while, one of the crew felt the need for a longer, deeper sleep session. After declaring that the next daylight period was going to be a personal “Saturnday,” he or she would take the day off and sleep in, while the others covered their shift duties. Both Dan and Sandra had just experienced a tiring day and Dan offered to let Sandra announce a Saturnday, but she turned him down.

“There’s no way I could stay asleep knowing that all these specimens were waiting for me to slice them up and put them under the nanoimager,” said Sandra. “Why don’t you declare a Saturnday instead.” Dan, tired from the day’s exertion, agreed and headed for his habitat. Instead of dropping off to sleep, however, he switched ends and stuck his head out under the tilted viewport that made up one end of his tubular habitat. Since he would be sleeping in tomorrow, he could afford to spend some time gazing at the stars. There weren’t any stars visible tonight since the ammonia cloud deck, although thin, was unbroken, but the water clouds were patchy, allowing him to see the brilliantly illuminated rings arcing overhead, tinted orange by the ammonia layer. For the next few months, the rings would be at their maximum inclination to the Sun’s rays, and would be a brightly lit bridge from horizon to horizon every night. He stayed awake, calming his tormented soul with the majestic sight, watching the rising or setting of Tethys, Dione, and Mimas. He finally fell into a troubled sleep just as Titan loomed over the horizon, to dream once again of winning the Solar Lottery ... only this time, instead of receiving a check, he was handed a “Payment Overdue” notice from the IRS.

~ * ~

Petra, riding in her usual position along the ridge of the central keel, urged Petru to open the gigantic maws on either side of the keel and take another large gulp of cold middark air. The giant body rippled along its sides as it sieved the air clean with its mouthfeathers and pushed it out forcefully in twin jets from the rear, driving the winged being upward against the prevailing winds. Petra urged again and Petru responded with another burst of power.

“The nights are very short now,” Petra thought to herself. “I must hurry to get Petru to the clouds before Bright rises, so Petro has a good hunt tomorrow.” She raised her head on her long neck and looked around. Only a few of the flock were at a higher altitude than she was. Holding on to the wingfeathers with some of her claws, she looked down over the leading edge of the gigantic wing that composed most of the body of Petru. Most of the flock was below her. She was certainly doing her part to get them all to a good hunting altitude. She had been hoping that the skies would be clear tonight so she could continue her studies of the skies, but the orange-tinted highclouds prevented her from seeing the stars and the globes. The only things visible in the sky were the Arcs and the moons. Largemoon was now rising. It would be brighter for the rest of the night. She greeted Largemoon with a song, a multitude of tones generated by passing air from one flotation cavity to another through an orifice, a process that usually was silent, but which could be made to generate a tone by careful control of the tension in the orifice. In a range of tones that varied from the rumble of thunder to the whistle of a pierced roundfloater, Petra started the rising song. Soon the entire flock joined in, waving their long colorful tailfeathers in wide swooping and rising motions that imitated the swooping and rising tones of the song.