Scardown-Jenny Casey-2 by Elizabeth Bear Read Free Book Online Page A

evidence of microbial life sixteen million years ago, but—”
    “How long did the Venera probes last?”
    Tapping. It was always reassuring when Paul didn't just
know
something, Charlie thought. “None of them over an hour.”
    “Earth's a much more corrosive environment than Mars,” Charlie hazarded. “Maybe they did send us ships, and they didn't survive. Or maybe they were keeping an eye on Mars because the life there
was
so much more fragile. Earth's ecosystem has survived some pretty astounding blows—”
    “You're thinking of the Yucatán meteor impact, aren't you?”
    Charlie laughed, which turned into a gagging cough. “God
damn
this cold. That was a sissy hit, Paul. We got one about 251 million years back that made that look like—nothing. And the ALH84001 meteorite is the remnant of a relatively minor knock that still managed to kick chunks clean off Mars. Mars doesn't have the gravity or the atmosphere Earth does. The atmospheric blowout, water and oxygen and carbon loss from a few of those would have put paid to whatever chance multicellular life might have had there.”
    “So what do you think the ships were for?”
    Plaintively. Charlie managed not to laugh this time. “You're the sober, responsible ecologist. I'm just a wild-eyed xeno guy. I come up with the crazy theories, you figure out why they don't work. I'm reasonably certain, though, that after all my work with the nanotech we're using on the pilots, it was
intended
for organic interfacing. And the freaky thing: it self-adapts. You show it a cat and it knows it's a cat. You show it a beet and it knows it's a beet. I haven't gotten any beet-cats yet.”
    “Why do you always get the fun jobs?” Paul sighed. “What if the ships were part of a, a—terraforming—no, a
xenoforming
attempt that failed?”
    “Hey, you do okay with the crazy theories on your own.” Charlie grinned, the cold cloth dangling forgotten from his fingers. “Huh. Possible. Or possibly they're interstellar altruists who dropped their nanotech off on an ecologically damaged Mars—figure the atmosphere leakage had already started, say, or a little axis wobble, or what have you—to see if the ecology could be reconstructed. To see if those Martian microbes would evolve into something more impressive, given a fighting chance. And then the system got nailed with another couple of catastrophic failures—like the meteor impacts—and folded. It makes as much sense as them leaving a couple of ships there so the hairless monkeys would be able to call next door for a cup of sugar if we ever got off our own little blue rock.”
    “Miocene, Charlie. Not that there were hairless monkeys—”
    “Fussy.
Carcharocles megalodon,
then. Space sharks.” Charlie braced his palms together, fingers meshing and biting air, and laughed at his own childishness.
    “
Carcharocles translunaria
. Ew. What an image.”
    Charlie could picture Paul's elaborate shudder, and dropped his hands, scrubbing them against his trousers. “If they didn't take a crack at Earth, there could be two reasons, I guess.”
    “One, they liked Mars better. It was more like home.”
    Charlie nodded, forgetting Paul couldn't see him. “Or, as you said. Earth was more hospitable to life than Mars.”
    “So?”
    “So maybe they're good guys. Anticolonialists. Maybe they figured we had a chance on our own.”
    A long silence, and then Paul Perry laughed ironically, his rich voice made tinny by distance and empty space. “Our own colonial history as hairless monkeys is so
rife
with altruism, after all. Don't go buying into that twentieth-century cultist trope that the aliens are advanced and enlightened, Chuck. It worries me. Figure the odds.”
    Figure the odds,
Charlie thought, wondering how naive he could possibly be.
And then figure the odds on life. And then consider the difficulty you have talking to your pet dog, Paul, and figure the odds that life from another planet will want things that are even