Arrival: Chapter 12

  The four walked together through the cool jungle in the late afternoon, carefully making their way around the bushes and trees while trying not to trip on the labyrinth of vines and roots on the jungle floor.  The place was positively thick with life.  The sights and sounds were overwhelming, and small bugs and critters of every size, shape, and colour seemed to be everywhere to be seen.

  “Here,” Neil pointed out, “more of those… blue-purple fruits.”

  “Well if they’re anything like fruit on Earth,” Sadhika commented as she moved in to take a closer look, “they have seeds which are dispersed after the fruit’s eaten.  It’s the only reason to commit so much of their resources to making something like that.”   She carefully snipped one of the fruit off of the vine which connected it to the main dark stalk.  After taking her back pack off, she carefully placed the bulbous blue-purple mass into the bag she’d rested on the ground.   “Hopefully these are edible for the humans…” she commented as much to herself as to the other three.

  “That’s funny,” she further remarked as she inspected the plants closer.  “There are flowers…” she said as she sifted through the mass of the plant.  “But they’re just dull grey.  I bet…” taking her PANEs out of her grey coveralls, she put them on and thought them to ultraviolet again.  “Yeah… just what I thought, these are very bright in the ultraviolet guys… they don’t need to be bright in the spectrum of light visual to humans, just to the pollinators they’re trying to attract.  They could even be specifically trying to avoid predation of the flowers by whatever other animal they’re trying to attract to eat the fruit... or anything else for that matter.”

  “Speaking of pollinators…” In-Su said to attract the attention of the others.  The bright red insect was hard to miss.  It was the size of a grasshopper, but it was an efficient hoverer.  He carefully followed it over to another bush and vine system like the one Sadhika had been investigating.  Sure enough it started flitting from one flower to the next, just like any number of insects on Earth.  Now that they were attuned to their presence, they could see that the creatures were all around them as they periodically buzzed in and out of sight.

  “Careful In-Su…” Sadhika warned.  “That bright red marking is probably a warning signal to something.”

  “So… what, you’re afraid it’ll sting him?” Neil asked with a smile.  “Simulant, remember?”

  “Of course…” Sadhika shook her head, trying to keep that in her active consciousness.   “That doesn’t make us invincible though,” she said as she came over to In-Su and carefully finessed the insect into a sample jar which she then placed in In-Su’s back pack.

  “No, but it does make us pretty invulnerable to biological attacks like whatever that thing might sting us with,” Neil countered.  “That is after all why we’re here in the first place, to scout ahead for the humans and put ourselves at risk before them.  We’re here to make sure it’s safe for the human crew to descend.   Of course,” Neil further considered, “our programming would only know to simulate an adverse reaction if exposed to a known toxin…” 

  “Oh right, that reminds me…” Wiremu took off his own back pack and removed an air sampling apparatus.  It was his responsibility to take air and water samples from the different areas they explored for later analysis.  He inserted a hard plastic vial into the palm sized apparatus and after a few moments of humming it had compressed to several times normal pressure a sample of the local atmosphere.  Wiremu placed the vial into its protective storage zipper book, placed it and the machine back into his bag, and then slung it over his back again.  “Let’s keep moving,” Wiremu suggested, “we’ve still got a lot of ground to cover.”

  They walked on and continued to make their way through the temperate jungle.  “It must be a thin soil in this area,” In-Su observed as they walked.  “The tree’s roots can’t just go down further when they grow because they run into the bedrock… they have to go out exploring sideways.  Normally there’d be a lot more growing at different layers of the jungle in a place like this… but the trees have figured out how to starve most everything else out.”

  “You’re right,” Neil informed him, “This whole area is sitting on a flat granite slab.”   While they walked Neil and Sadhika were both looking on medium scrolls tied in to all of the ship’s telescopes and sensors, networked satellites, and all of the other sensors and devices on the shuttle and the FDM, all useably compiled at their fingertips.

  “There should be a clearing… about half a kilometer ahead,” Neil reported.

  “I see it,” Wiremu answered, and they all moved towards what lay beyond.  They were working their way towards the cliffs overlooking the ocean straits which Wiremu had selected their landing site based on.   They were all anxious to see the great ocean stretching out before them.  Although the landing strip was a far more open space than any place had been on the ship, they were all still anxious to see the relaxing infinitudes of the ocean seeming to stretch on forever before them.  They were looking forward to being able to send up to the ship a live video feed of what the crew had to look forward to: an open sky and an endless horizon.   Finally, after their long troublesome journey on a claustrophobic ship, they had finally reached a new horizon.

  “So… guys, I’ve been looking over the results from the genetic scanner on the FDM,” Sadhika said as she read her scroll.  “It’s definitely the same DNA system… but the base pairs don’t match.  I won’t be able to say exactly what’s going on without further analysis in the bio-lab back on the ship, but there doesn’t appear to be any adenine or thymine… there’s cytosine and guanine but there seems to be a different base pair set substituted for adenine and thymine!  That’s incredible!  It also means that a whole other set of amino acids are at play based on the different DNA system… there’s only about forty percent overlap with the amino acids used by life on Earth…” she looked up around her at all of the plant life and remembered the initial animal life they’d come across so far.  “At least it appears to be that way in just the one sample I’ve analyzed so far… but at the genetic level all life on Earth uses all of the same genetic tools and ingredients.  There’s no reason to think it would be any different here.”

  “And what does that mean?” Neil asked.  He was an astrophysicist and while he understood the way DNA coded for chains of amino acids, which then built up into proteins which do and make up everything else in the body, biology was sufficiently distant from his areas of specialty that he didn’t really understand the implications of what she was saying.

  “Well, on Earth there are twenty two amino acids which all life on Earth uses to make proteins out of, but there are many more that could be used for… well, for a whole other planetary biome like this one.  It’s just a… a different set of chemical building blocks used to build a similar structure.”

  “And… what does that mean?”

  “Well, it doesn’t-” Sadhika sighed heavily in exasperation.  “It doesn’t mean anything; it’s just… really interesting!!” she said as they continued walking through the jungle.   “It might inform the question of whether or not there’s a connection between the life here on Haven and the life back on Earth.  It doesn’t… it doesn’t say anything definitive in and of itself, but… but it’s a piece of the puzzle!”

  “Wait, shh, shh, shh…  Look at that…” Wiremu said as he motioned for them all to get down and be quiet.  He pointed to something moving towards them in the branches above.  

  From where they were it was difficult to make out what it was but it became more apparent as it moved towards them.  It looked rather like a greeny-brown octopus but with only four arms, and it was moving forward by swinging its rear two limbs down, around, and up to its next grip point and then repeating, back arms to front, over and over again.  A few dozen meters from the sims it paused, held its head-like central projection down while suspended upside down, and looked around with its two black eyes.  After arching its arms in preparation, it jumped several meters away to a lower and further off branch, and then continued swinging off into the jungle, its head moving to follow it overhead as it went.  

  As they watched it recede behind them, they then heard a lot more noise coming from the direction the first one had originally come from.  When they turned back around to look, they saw several thousand of these creatures approaching them and appearing to make the whole jungle shudder as they passed through in one colossal mass.  They seemed to be following the first, as though it was leading them; either that or the rest were trying to catch it for some reason.   It took several minutes for them all to pass overhead, and the simulants could only watch in dumbfounded amazement as they did.

  “Okay… well that was weird.” Neil stated a couple moments after the last stragglers had made their way past them and were themselves finally receding deeper into the jungle.

  “They looked like…” In-Su started.

  “Octopus, yeah.  Cephalopod-like in any case,” Sadhika answered for him.  “You know it’s interesting, we… we always thought that the ones on Earth had the potential to evolve in that direction, but… they never did.”

  Then, just when they thought the excitement was over, a creature began leaping through the trees, appearing to be on the trail of the herd which had just passed them by overhead.  It was easily twice the size of any of the other animals at about a meter and a half long, and it used its slender body and long legs to spring itself from one branch to the next, periodically hissing out a long forked tongue.  It paused momentarily over the heads of the sims, seeming to be investigating them, but with a flick of its tongue it carried on with its pursuit.  It appeared to have scaled skin with a black and dark brown camouflage pattern.   Eventually it too disappeared off into the distance.

  “That was so cool…” Sadhika whispered to the others.  “I can’t wait to study them more closely.”

  “It looked reptilian,” Wiremu observed.

  “Yeah… but neither of those species could possibly be cold blooded, not keeping up an activity level like that.  Like I said, I can’t wait to study them all in much more detail.”

  “Well at least we have great images to show the other biologists on the ship, I recorded the whole thing with my PANEs,” Neil informed the others.

  “All very interesting,” Wiremu agreed, “but shall we?” he asked as he gestured in the direction of the edge of the jungle.  They could already just barely hear the sounds of the shore at this point, but Wiremu was already concerned about how soon the night would be upon them.   He led the way and the others followed.   Before long they came to the edge of the jungle where the trees got sparser and sparser until they completely gave way to open grasslands which extended over a kilometer to the cliffs beyond.  

  Finally they crossed the grassland and came to the edge of the cliff.  They looked down the several dozen meters to the ocean below, and out to the horizon.  There was a large island out there beyond the waters of the straits, but it was far enough away that it couldn’t be seen from where they were.  All they could see was wide open ocean out to the horizon.  The four stood together in silence and savoured the moment, the afternoon sunshine, the view and the breeze, the sounds of the waves crashing below, and the salty smell of the fresh ocean air.

  After a few minutes, Sadhika broke the silence.  “We need to examine the ocean life as soon as possible.  All the important first evolutions of life on Earth all happened in the ocean… it probably happened the same way here too.”

  “So I have a question,” In-Su said, “how do we decide which animals are okay to kill?” he asked.  “Frankly I don’t have much objection to a fish being killed to study or to eat for example, but what about those creatures back there?  How do we deem and declare whether or not they are to be considered a food source?”

  “We need more study,” Neil offered.

  “And how do we do that?” In-Su asked, “capture and imprison one so we can study it?”
“Better than killing it outright, I should think.” Wiremu flatly declared. Nobody could deny the wisdom of his answer. “Besides, killing or capturing alien fish or weird four armed tree octopus things is way out of our current mission profile anyways. We leave that for the human crew landing tomorrow… we don’t get to have all the fun I’m afraid.  Come on,” he said as he motioned for them to follow him.  “It’s starting to get dark and we have significant ground to cover to get back to the landing strip.”  He led them back into the jungle and towards the shuttle. 

   

  “It kinda looks like a cross between a panda bear and a… and a fucking dinosaur!” Neil commented to the others as they lay down to hide.  They’d accidentally snuck up on a large muscular animal picking and pawing at something on the ground.  Neil was still taking video and with a thought zoomed his PANEs in for a closer look.   “Whatever it is, it sure looks dangerous…” He added as he settled down with the others on the ground.

  “Problem is,” Sadhika offered, “there’s no way to know whether it’s a scavenger that’ll be afraid of us and run away, or an apex predator that’ll charge us at first sight.”

  “I think we’re about to find out…” Wiremu said as they felt a breeze brush past them in the direction of the beast.  They had all noticed that the large animal was equipped with a prominent wet nose rhinarium.  

  “Wait,” In-Su asked, “we’re simulants, do we even… would it even want to?”

  “Part of our simulation,” Sadhika informed him, “is to smell like humans too.  Humans communicate a lot more than you’d think with pheromones.  And yes while we certainly wouldn’t make a very satisfying meal for it, we’re far from invulnerable.  We could easily be terribly damaged beyond repair if it tried to eat us, or trampled us… or for that matter if it just gored us with that ominous looking horn.”

   “Quiet.” Wiremu ordered with irritation.  The large animal lifted its head and actively sniffed the air.  It was significantly bigger than even the size of a large bear, and when it turned around to face them the four could clearly see its flat face and rounded ears.  

  Like the animal which had been chasing the herd through the trees, this large beast also had scaled skin but with panda patterned black and dark green camouflage.   It had a single but large and menacing horn protruding out of its head, and a long thick tail.  As Neil had observed, it really did look like some kind of terrifying cross between a large bear and a small dinosaur.  The beast let out a noise which was something between a whimper and a growl, and then turned and wandered off, seemingly in some mixture of confusion and frustration.

  “Guess it doesn’t like strangers, hunh?” Neil suggested.  

  “Or it’s gone to get its friends…” Wiremu further suggested with a chill.

  “Or it was only a youngling, and it’s gone to find its parents” In-Su offered.  All four shuddered at the thought.

  Wiremu was looking over to where the large animal had been before wandering off.  “I bet you a loonie… that it was eating one of those tree octopus things.  I want to go check it out.”

  While the other three stayed hidden, Wiremu cautiously stood up and made his way over to the spot where the animal had been eating something.  Sure enough, it was a half-eaten tree octopus thing.  Wiremu motioned the other three over with his hand.   “Would you like to do the honours Sadhika?” Wiremu asked.

  The simulated woman sighed as she turned In-Su around, unzipped his back pack, and pulled a cylindrical sample container out along with a pair of metal tongs.  She pulled the lid off, then knelt down and picked up the animal with the tongs.  She then gently placed what was left of the carcass in the sample container along with the tongs themselves, and sealed the lid.  “Okay then, sample gotten, and no killing.”

  “Wonderful.   Now let’s get moving,” Wiremu ordered without any ambiguity.  By this point it was getting quite dark and there was still significant ground for them to cover before they returned to the relative safety of the shuttle and FDM back at the landing strip.