The Heart Of The Comet by David Brin

Author:David Brin
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2011-02-17T08:00:00+00:00

SAUL

April 2062

Wriggling, fluttering in a saline solution, the tiny bests flicked here and there, hunting, always hunting.

Certain substances, flavors, drew them to the equivalent of sweetness. Others repelled. The choice was always as easy as that, a logic of trophic chemistry. On the level of the cell, there were no subtleties, no future to worry about. No past to haunt one’s dreams.

Saul was pensive as he watched the tiny creatures pulse under the fiber microscope. They were the last and most potent of the new developments cooked up during the two months since the mutiny. Biological smart bombs for an unwanted war against Comet Halley.

So many of the rules he had lived by-codes of slow caution when experimenting with the stuff of life-had been pushed aside in order to get here. He envied the little microbes, in a way. For they would do as they were programmed, but he, their “creator,” was left with his load of doubt and mystery.

No. Of course you don’t worry, little ones. Guilt is a teamwork thing-a trait of eucaryotic metazoans-vast collections of conspiring cells gathered to form men and women, societies … gods.

Look at me, tampering with what I barely understand, on the questionable excuse that all our human lives depend on it.

The cyanutes had fully as much history behind them as he did. Their tiny ancestors had spent well over three billion years evolving

in Earth’s waters. Then, some few millions of years ago, they adapted to take up a different way of life in another salty soup-the bodily fluids of complex creatures with great, nucleated cells.

How many thousands of my own ancestors did they kill in order to establish that first beachhead? How many trillions of them, in turn, were fought off by my forebears’ immune systems-latched onto by antibodies and transported to destruction, or engulfed and digested by white cells? How long did it take for a truce to be called at last … for evolution to work out a negotiated peace, a symbiosis ?

It was an unanswerable question. But at some point in the past some human being and some ancestral cyanute struck an accidental bargain. In exchange for a minor cleansing function in the lung cavity, the creatures were granted safe conduct from the body’s immune system. They settled down to an innocuous existence, so innocuous, in fact, that they weren’t even discovered until the waning days of the last century.

In our wisdom, we meddled with them, turning them into “cyanutes.” And, Heaven forgive me, I’m not ashamed at all. A hundred skilled, devoted men and women spent half a decade altering the fruits of four gigayears’ evolution. Given special permission, we used the tools of Simon Percell-and forged a useful thing of beauty.

But this!

The creatures on the screen had been changed even more, given jagged new protein coats, snipped and edited with tailored chain molecules, analyzed and reanalyzed by “reader enzymes” … warped by the drives of an emergency nobody had expected.

The job had taken only eight weeks since the mutiny.

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