Outward Borne (31 page)

YuLon Lim closely followed the
insertion operation as the Kalektians were taken from the shuttle
to the recovery center. Ten days later, she watched, as one at a
time, the smaller ones first, each walked slowly into the brightly
lit, newly built habitat. The forty-three sluggish, decontaminated
survivors were separated, photographed, and documented, including
the implantation of a numbered id tag. The Kalektian habitat was a
large one, occupying an entire deck, with larger rooms than these
small beings required. They would rattle around for a while until
their numbers increased. The Kalektians were logged into their
habitat with its freshly painted gray rooms, allowed to recover
from the transportation, and adjust to their new surroundings.
Curiously, those brown-on-brown drones showed little curiosity
about their change in circumstances, even after they regained some
strength and began moving about their large, sparely furnished
quarters. They never refused any directions that YuLon gave them,
and spent most of their time huddled together in the corners of
same high-roofed rooms where they were first placed. They even
slept in multi-limbed clumps and tended to stay lumped together
even when awake. YuLon could not tell one Kalektian from another,
or even distinguish between sexes, with their elongated shape and
monotonous greasy brown skin. They had eight limbs on a long,
sinuous, articulated body with a long tapered head that ended in a
tiny beaked mouth. It was a body that ought to be quick rather than
strong, but these were neither.

The Kalektians continued to look
and act rather weak and lethargic to YuLon’s eye, so she considered
it a positive sign when one, specifically number twenty-six, was
found to have gone missing. Perhaps it went exploring and had
gotten lost. YuLon called Dyn and asked him to configure one of the
maintenance bots to search for twenty-six. After spending most of
an hour rooting around the huddles of Kalektians to make sure it
had not been overlooked in the body mounds, the bot set off to
scour the habitat. Normally this would not be necessary, but the
surveillance system had not yet been installed. It was one of many
little projects that Dyn needed to complete.

The melting disease had weakened
twenty-six greatly, and its effect was increasing rapidly when it
left its fellows and wandered into a far corner of the habitat to
die alone. The melting disease had been on Kalekto for many
generations, and it was gradually becoming more lethal. They did
not understand the illness, but it was commonly believed that to
survive, you needed to avoid contact with the dead, whether your
own kin or some beast in the wild. So twenty-six went off to die
alone; separated from its friends and family members that had been
taken to this strange place.

The bot, wheels squeaking on the
new flooring, probed one grey room after another. It finally found
twenty-six’s body propped into the corner of an empty storage room
and it beeped YuLon the information. The call was not a surprise,
but when she looked up at the monitor, she let out a yelp and
literally jumped straight off the floor. It was twenty-six, or what
was left of it. Its flesh was sunken, the skin on its face was
dropping away, hanging loose from the skull, and its muscles seemed
to have dissolved. There was a large pool of viscous liquid slowly
spreading across the floor around the body. Fortunately, the bot
had not tracked through it. YuLon maneuvered the upright old bot
around to examine at the body from different angles. It must have
been dead for some time, many days at least, to be in such bad
shape, but it had only gone missing the night before. The
maintenance bot was not equipped to deal with this mess, so YuLon
rolled the unit back to its storage station and called MaxNi9 to
tell him of this odd development. A medical intervention unit was
sent to pick up the remains. Deaths were a common occurrence after
an alien species was introduced into the Outward Voyager. Some
individuals died from the stress of the trip, inability to adjust
to their abduction, or even fear of their strange surroundings, but
nothing like this. It looked like a disease to YuLon. She hoped
that it was not catching.

CamBi, away in her lab in the
Farside antimod, had completed the biochemistry profile of the
Kalektian tissues a few days ago and was now looking at the cell
culture data from her first attempts to synthesize the basic
nutrients, proteins, lipids, and carbohydrates needed to produce an
edible diet for this new alien. She still had six weeks to complete
the task, perhaps longer, as the captives were eating very little,
so the collected food supply might last a few weeks longer. CamBi
took the call from YuLon without much concern, but she when she saw
the images of twenty-six’s remains. She hurriedly prepared the
intervention unit to obtain fluid and tissue samples from the body,
and had it sent it by express shuttle to the Kalekto habitat. She
was anxious to have it arrive before the remains were
contaminated.

CamBi had been wound-up from her
battles, as she saw them, to hold true to the ObLaDas’ mission. She
felt unable to accept so profound a change from her roots. This
typically visceral ObLaDa reaction had held generations of her
predecessors to their original objectives long after they should
have been revised. Now, the sight of twenty-six peaked a new
concern. Her tension rose as she paced across her cluttered
laboratory. The surveillance tape found twenty-six in the Kalektian
huddle less than one day before. It was weak and appeared
unfocused, but it was very much alive. It was unnatural, or at
least abnormal, for a body to decompose so completely in so short a
time, as far as she knew, and she knew a lot.

CamBi punched up new information
each time she returned to her monitor. No, the room temperature was
not high, that was hardly likely anyway. Next, she stopped to watch
as the service unit brought two Kalektians to view the body. They
seemed to smell the decomposing tissue well before they got to the
small dark room in which it lay. They became increasingly agitated,
and then both balked at going any further, refusing even to get
within sight of the body. They knew what had happened. It had
happened many times before.

If they were afraid of the mess
that was twenty-six, why should not she be afraid? She could lose
the whole tribe if this disease spread. CamBi was not at all
pleased with this turn. It was not just the illness of one or two
aliens that she was concerned about, the success of the Kalekto
mission was threatened and with it the future of the Outward
Voyager. CamBi and YuLon had won the argument to approach Kalekto,
and they felt vindicated when an exciting civilization was found.
Now their victory was slipping away. CamBi was determined to do
whatever she could to halt the Kalekto illness as she sent another
medical bot and flybots to the habitat to collect two age-matched
individuals for investigation. The soft souls over there in the
Filim module might object, but she did not care. She had to know
the biochemical composition of a normal Kalektian in order to
understand twenty-six's illness, and to know how to deal with it if
or when it started to spread.

The corpse of twenty-six, the
ObLaDas never learned its true name, was bagged and shipped to
CamBi’s laboratory, where it was sampled, probed, and subjected to
a full chemical dissection and autopsy. The autopsy showed massive
dissolution of all muscle tissues and major organs. The spaces
around the degraded tissues had been turned into a nondescript
viscous fluid mass that was largely composed of a single high
molecular weight protein, multiple complex carbohydrates, and
translucent lipid globules. The extent of tissue destruction was
amazing, as it had occurred in mere hours after death.

She was even more disturbed and
distressed when she learned that both of the supposedly healthy
Kalektians also showed signs of the disease. Certain tissues were
infused with the same protein, not to the level that was present in
twenty-six’s remains, but it was there. YuLon asked CamBi to begin
a full analysis of the disease. She and MaxNi9 were afraid that it
might threaten the survival of the Kalekto colony. Their concern
was heightened on the following day, when CamBi’s tests found that
all of the aliens had the same protein in their tissues, at least
to a limited degree. Had they collected a species in the midst of
some type of plague?

YuLon requested additional support
to help work on twenty-six’s disease. MaxNi9 assigned two
scientists in the better-equipped Filim antimod laboratory and they
were sent frozen tissues from twenty-six and the two healthy
‘volunteers’, while YuLon set out to learn more about the overly
abundant protein. She quickly determined that it was a protease, an
enzyme that degraded other proteins. This explained the decomposed
tissue, but why was there so much around? Especially as she found
that the protein chewed itself up as well as any other protein it
came in contact with. She kept working on the molecule, convinced
that it was the key to understanding the problem. It was
frustrating, her studies refused to give consistent results. The
data never quite correlated with the amounts of protein she knew to
be in the samples. It was three days before she discovered that the
protein not only destroyed proteins, but it could also synthesize
proteins, a whole range of them, including more of itself. The
strange compound could chop up a protein all the way down to its
component amino acids, and then reassembled those units to copy
another protein that was present, or to reproduce itself when given
the chance. If the concentration of this protein reached a critical
concentration in a tissue, it would drive to the ultimate fatal
end. YuLon called the protein Replicide.

CamBi did not know the
evolutionary history of Replicide, but she had worked out what it
could do. It was dire news for the Kalektians. Replicide was not a
typical disease and it could not be countered by any of the
antagonist drugs or vaccine strategies that the ObLaDas had
developed over the centuries. She knew that all of the Kalektians
on board had been infected at some level and it was unclear how to
save the remaining members of the tribe.

Chapter 18 Beyond
Evolution

Replicide was a long time coming.
Kalekto was an extremely ancient place that once harbored a wide
diversity of life forms and had done so over an extraordinary span
of six billion years. Early in that continuum, organisms on Kalekto
developed a unique and very efficient means of constructing
proteins. Proteins, long chains of different amino acids, are
important for cellular growth and division, indeed for almost all
bodily functions, so there are a lot of them. Certain proteins, or
groups of proteins, can carry out individual chemical reactions and
even complex series of reactions. One of these is the ability to
link amino acids together. On Kalekto, a single protein had evolved
the ability to link amino acids together, but in a selected
sequence, that is, it could make copies of other proteins. It could
bind to a protein chain and then reproduce its unique sequence of
amino acids, coupling the required amino acids one after another
until the replicate protein is completed. This ability to copy a
protein’s structure was a very significant advance. This
copy-enzyme synthesis process was far more efficient than the
complex, many-molecule combinations that had evolved on other
planets. Ours is especially complicated, as protein synthesis
requires a whole series of other proteins that crowd around a
nucleic acid template, which was itself made by another set of
proteins crowding around a DNA segment that contained protein
sequence information.

Very recently, but billions of
years into this continuum, a freak mutation occurred within a
simple bacteria-like cell, that gave its copy-enzymes the ability
to clip amino acids from other proteins. The mutant copy-enzymes
could now either built up or tear down proteins by adding amino
acids or taking them away. This does not seem to be an obvious
benefit, but it had a profound consequence for life on Kalekto.
Normal cells turned on and off the copy-enzyme protein synthesis
process by controlling the amount of free amino acids floating
around. No amino acids, no synthesis. But now, this mutant
copy-enzyme could liberate its own amino acids and suddenly became
free of established controls on how fast protein synthesis could
occur. Within its self-generated bath of amino acids, this super
molecule rapidly created new variants of itself, and quickly became
capable of self-replication.

Replicide leapt free of the bounds
of evolution. As a self-replicating but non-living entity, it could
enter any living, or for that matter recently dead, body where it
would begin consuming cellular tissues in which it resided, all the
while building ever more copies of itself. Replicide was a product
of evolution, but it obeyed none of evolutions’ constraints. No
life form on Kalekto had coevolved with Replicide and no life form
had the ability to resist its effects. Replicide did not follow any
productive path to spare its host, as a parasite might do, and
would consume and kill any organism it inhabited. It did not die
when the organism did, but could sit there in the remains waiting
to be consumed. It spread rapidly through the food chain to every
species in every corner of Kalekto.

Healthy individuals were able to
live with a Replicide infestation for some considerable time. At
first, when the concentration of Replicide in their body was very
low, the rate of reproduction of Replicide was restrained by the
normal healthy functions of the body. Replicide was dependent on
its ability to remove amino acids from nearby proteins. While it
could do this reasonably well, it did not have a good ability to
hold onto the amino acids that it freed. They could be washed away
and could just as well become substrates for the normal,
constructive synthesis of new proteins, including the replacement
of proteins already destroyed by Replicide. Eventually, inevitably,
this balance shifted and the concentration of Replicide increased,
perhaps after eating flesh infested with Replicide, when weakened
by a lack of food, or during an illness that slowed recuperative
powers. Once the tissue levels of Replicide passed through a lethal
threshold, it moved quickly, digesting tissues ever more rapidly,
chewing up muscles and making ever more copies of itself. The
process continued even after death, converting the body into an
empty sack in a puddle of lipid slime. Even then, Replicide
survived. Proteins can exist for hundreds of years.