The Braided World (38 page)

“Yes, I know, son. Quadi propaganda. I've seen it.”

Trying and failing to swallow, Nick took a swig of water to loosen his vocal cords. “She pinned some of it up on the walls, the output from the plants. Now she's in there with Anton Prados—he took your place, you know.”

Darrow nodded gravely. “But I'm not dead.”

“That's just what I mean. It's wrong. It's lies. But part of it's true, maybe. The Quadi, they might have done what they said—cloned the human DNA here. We always thought so, but now they're claiming they constructed the planet, and that the Dassa don't know anything, that they're in the dark. But, sir, the Dassa
are
in on it. They always wanted our help—to release the human genomes. Into their keeping. See, they can't reproduce fast enough. The variums aren't efficient, they—”

Captain Darrow gestured for quiet. “Don't get yourself worked up, son. I can separate truth from lies. Zhen is doing the translating.
I'm
doing the thinking. And the Dassa bastards aren't going to win.”

Nick closed his eyes.
Thank God. Thank God he isn't deceived.

The captain's voice came: “Get strong now, Nick. I'm going to need you when I take back my command.”

“Take back?”

The old man's face distorted into a grimace. “That's right,
take back.
And you'll be my right-hand man. Who else can I trust?”

The words were bittersweet. The captain needed him.

“My, my,” Bailey said.

It was all so swift, following on the dreadful night of Nick's betrayal and Vidori's garden. Now, the stunning breakthrough. Anton couldn't quite grasp it, or hold the concept: hope restored, humanity restored—or so it seemed. Zhen hadn't finished translating everything, and a
thousand questions remained. He swept them aside, saving them for later.

Some of the notes were pasted up on the wall, looking precious and insubstantial, as though at any moment the future of Earth could be blown away by a gust from the river.

Several hours ago, still in the middle of the night, Zhen had found Anton. She'd looked like a wild woman. Her hair stood out in every direction, matted and pasted into tufts, perhaps from too much thinking.

“Got it,” she'd said. “We got it.”

Anton had taken one look at her face, and believed her. She'd got it.

“Codas,”
she'd said, taking him by the arm and hurrying him toward her work hut. “They're in what the Quadi call
codas
—little summations.”

She'd pulled him along faster, almost at a gallop, down the palace halls, gesticulating as she went. “The decipherment was easy. They made it easy. It's a quadrinary system, not a binary one, because of the ATCG of the DNA base pairs.”

“Slow down, Zhen. It's in the DNA, that's what you're saying?”

“Yes, I just said it's in the DNA. And get this—the four bases code for ASCII.” She'd rolled her eyes. “Yeah, ASCII.

“I didn't believe what I was seeing in the genome at first. It was too big, impossibly so. I thought the program screwed up. But I modified the language program to specifically translate the quadrinary code. That took a while. When I ran the program, it didn't work, so I figured I'd made a wrong turn somewhere. Then late last night I finally figured out that I might be using the wrong plant variety. See, some of the varieties encode for different alien civilizations …” She'd waved Anton's questions away. “More on that later. Like Sergeant Webb said, we can't decode that stuff. But the next variety I tried, that was the one. It took the program twenty-five seconds to break the code.”

Now, in the science hut, Zhen was rushing through further
explanations, answering questions from Anton and Bailey, but impatiently. She wanted to get to the codas.

Of the DNA sequences.

The four-base-pair system yielded 4×4×4×4, for a total of 256 characters, the basis of ASCII code. Although a hideously inefficient coding system, it was instantly recognizable. The langva genome was engineered to store the entire archive of Quadi information—a gigantic DNA molecule that, if written out at four base pairs per millimeter, would stretch from the Olagong to its nearest planetary neighbor … and would extend even farther, except that the code sometimes read in both directions at once—a feat of incomprehensible complexity.

Through the river-side screen, a trickle of a breeze cooled Anton's face. Although without sleep this night, he was wide awake.

Bailey tapped at the radio transmitter. “Let's send this to the
Restoration.
It's too valuable to just be in our keeping.”

Zhen snorted. “I already did that.” She looked at Anton. “Begging your pardon, Captain, but I was too nervous when I couldn't find you.”

Anton waved it away. “Well done, Zhen. That was well done.” He was gazing at the notes pasted on the wall. “Now read it out loud again, the beginning part.” Zhen had zoomed through her translation fast, to get to the part about human salvation. But now Anton wanted it slow and steady, so it could sink in.

Bailey rose from her seat. “Let the girl rest a moment. I'll read it.” Zhen turned to frown at Bailey. It was Zhen's discovery. After a moment, though, she crossed the room and sank onto a low platform, not relaxing, still spring-loaded.

Bailey peered at one of the notes. “Some of this is technical stuff. About how to create life …” She turned to Anton. “It talks here about fulva. I'm not sure our people will like that.”

Zhen snorted. “How else are we going to rejuvenate the genomes? Wave a wand?”

“Artificial insemination, perhaps.”

“Well, the Quadi gave us instructions for a fulva process. Beggars can't be choosers.”

Anton was still gazing at the wall. “Get on with it, Bailey.”

“Start on the east wall,” Zhen said. “That's the easy stuff.”

Raising an eyebrow, Bailey went to the east wall. “Science wasn't my subject, Zhen my dear, but I wasn't exactly a bonehead.” And she began.

Anton leaned against the corner pillar of the hut and listened with closed eyes.

Coda One. Uncommon Complex Life. In this galaxy, complex life is uncommon. It can be surmised that in other galaxies, animal habitability of planets will be as rare, although no species endures long enough to traverse more than one galaxy. Worlds with climatically suitable environments for water-based biotic inhabitants are rare. Most critical is astronomical setting. A position away from the chaotic center of the galaxy is a prerequisite. Infrequency of extinction events caused by celestial collisions, hard radiation bursts, and Supernovae is fundamental. Of stars, only a few possess the longevity to enable complex life to evolve over the requisite millions of years. Bright stars are short-lived. There are many bright stars. Only a zone of narrow tolerances around a star allows water in liquid form. In addition, a moon is needed at the right distance from a conducive planet to stabilize axial tilt. Also important is a massive planet at a conducive distance to clear cometary obstacles. Many biogeochemical factors are necessary for habitable planets. Susceptibility to extinction events is improved if diversity of body plans among animalia is high, an infrequent circumstance. Millions of planets harbor microbial domains, but sentient species occupy merely seventeen worlds in this galaxy, and in this time frame. Three are

ancient, senile civilizations that will be extinct in your interval of existence. Of the fourteen remaining civilized worlds, six are I were victims of the galactic depletion event, including Earth. Some will not recover even with the data salvage and sequestration undertaken here.

Coda Two. The Galactic Depletion.

The anomalous dark matter structure continues its course through the galaxy, bound gravitationally, never to depart. Coda sixty-one describes its entropie fields in detail. Humans developed the technology of quasi-crystal that defects the data transfer event, but even this strategy could not prevent the serious depletion of Earth's complex life. Quasi-crystal was an imperfect solution. There is no perfect solution. While extinguishing worlds, the dark matter structure has amassed two billion years of knowledge. Because of this cargo, we could not destroy it, nor could we defect it from the path bringing it among the fourteen civilized worlds. We attempted to bestow saving technology on two such worlds. Both resulted in disaster and chaos because of cultural dismay and martial response. We fed, vowing to save some things, but in our way. We were the first galactic technological species, but the tenure of our civilization is ending. We never reckoned to leave behind an empty galaxy. Our purpose is to forestall such a circumstance.

Anton looked at Zhen. “How many codas are there?” “I stopped counting at four hundred thirty-three,” Zhen said. “Most of them are extremely long codas on microbiology genetics, math, and chemistry. These first codas are the short ones—eleven of them. Some of the codas have mutations in the genetic code, introducing garbage into the messages. We can solve that by sequencing several individual genomes, mixing and matching to assemble complete codas.”

Bailey frowned. “What about human genomes? If they're in there as well, what if they're messed up too?”

Zhen waved her off. “It's all in the codas. How to identify harmful mutations and fix them.” She looked at Bailey with pity. “You think the Quadi didn't think of that one?”

Bailey shot back, “There are lots of things the Quadi didn't think of. Like how Earth is going to react to raising babies in ponds.”

“They don't need to be
ponds
, for Christ sakes,” Zhen snapped, “they could be cute little pink creches, if you want.”

Anton said, “Read, Bailey.”

Coda Three. This Planet and Setting Modified. We resolved to salvage the biological and electronic information of Earth on a conducive world, remote from the path of the galactic depletion event. In a delicate process of three hundred years, we siphoned off retrievable data from the dark matter structure. We modified this unsuitable world, creating a compatible one, adjusting atmospherics and chemistries that matched the habitable Earth. We removed two orbiting moons for planetary stability. We modified the astronomical setting, eliminating a gravitationally disruptive gas giant. The astronomical and terrestrial settings have been developed for ideal cosmic, biological, and cultural life cycles.

Coda Four. The Life-Forms Derived.

Life-forms were developed with modifications to assure procreation. Within the dark matter structure, the degradation of information was high due to radiation exposure. Some codes, if badly degraded, were abandoned. The human species is modified here. Humans may accept species modifications. We could not accept modifications for ourselves. Also developed and modified are the other domains of life from Earth to xxxxxxxxxxecological web. In
orieexxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

“There's a bunch of squiggles here,” Bailey said.

“The code was garbled. Just skip it,” Zhen said.

Bailey waved at the tronics station. “I thought you said we could piece it all together from several individual plants.”

Zhen sighed. “I've only been working on this for a
few hours
, for God's sake.”

Coda Five. The Custodial Duty.

We stayed as custodians to tend habitats and assure diverse species survival. Because our time was waning, we accelerated the number of possible procreations using birth cradles. The sentient population having reached a viable level, we departed, leaving little evidence of ourselves to avoid cultist religions. We lefi them to develop a natural culture, including an indigenous language. In ten thousand years they will rise up a civilization capable of knowing of us. This is more likely if the first humans of Earth establish contact with them, for we have lefi the record in the language we identified in the Dark Cloud. All information is sequestered in genome repositories, the only reservoir that would last with minimal disruption over millennia. The complexity of the information stored here requires resistant storage. Biological systems are such storage devices.

Coda Six. Redundant Storage.

Zhen interrupted Bailey's reading. “OK, this is the part about the other messages.”

Other messages.
They were prepared for this part. The Quadi were calling to civilizations in other parts of the galaxy Not because their higher life-forms were revived here—the world wouldn't be chemically and ecologically suited to extraterrestrial biologies. However, along with cultural products, the foreign DNA codes were sequestered here in computational formats. As for the individual alien beings, the Quadi claimed to be working on recovering them on other suitable worlds. Perhaps, after the time these
messages were recorded, they had succeeded elsewhere in doing what they accomplished on Neshar.

Zhen said, “The information on the other—what they call
depleted worlds
—is locked into different varieties of langva, not the staple food variety.”

Anton looked up. It was riches beyond grasping, here at dawn after a sleepless night, with the night's revelations and lessons.

“Keep going,” he told Bailey.

Coda Six. Redundant Storage.

We have provided redundant information storage mechanisms. First, regarding Earth higher and lower life, these are encapsulated as information in the genome of the staple food organism occurring in the habitable biome of this planet. Such a strategy is obvious and will be seen immediately by the first humans if they achieve technology to respond to the radio messages. Abo sequestered here, in other varieties of the staple food plant, are the biological and computational coded information of the other worlds depleted by the dark matter structure. This gathered knowledge has two purposes: to transmit to first and second humans the life and culture of the technological worlds, and redundant safekeeping of the same. In parallel efforts, the information of the depleted worlds is sequestered on other planets as our terraforming progresses. Regrettably, several of these worlds falter, and may have to be abandoned. Not all storage solutions are viable, nor all planetary revisions. Therefore, on every terraformed world, we have encapsulated planetary knowledge from all threatened worlds, for the benefit of redundant storage.