“What is it?” Damon asked.

“We don’t have a name for the species yet—nor the genus, nor even the family. It’s a colonial organism reminiscent in some ways of a slime mold. It has a motile form which wanders around by means of protoplasmic streaming, but the colonies can also set rock-hard, setting their molecular systems in sugar like sporulating bacteria or algae that have to withstand ultralow temperatures. In its dormant state it’s as indestructible as any life-form can be, able to survive all kinds of extremes. Its genetic transactions are inordinately complicated and so far very mysterious—but that’s not surprising, given that it’s not DNA-based. Its methods of protein synthesis are quite different from ours, based in a radically different biochemical code.”

Damon had given up genetics ten years before and had carefully set aside much of what his foster parents had tried so assiduously to teach him, but he understood the implications of what Kachellek was saying. “Is it new,” he asked, “or just something we managed to overlook during the last couple of centuries?”

“We can’t be absolutely certain,” Karol admitted scrupulously. “But we’re reasonably certain that it wasn’t herebefore. It’s a recent arrival in the littoral zone, and as of today it hasn’t been reported anywhere outside these islands.”

Damon wondered whether as of todaymeant that Karol had reason to expect a new report tomorrow or the day after, perhaps when the mud samples he’d loaded onto the lorry had been sieved and sorted. “So where did it come from?” he asked.

“We don’t know yet. The obvious contenders are up, down. . . .” The blond man seemed to be on the point of adding a third alternative, but he didn’t; instead he went on: “I’m looking downward; Eveline’s investigating the other direction.”

Damon knew that he was expected to rise to the challenge and follow the line of argument. The Kitehad been dredging mud from the ocean bed, and Eveline Hywood was in the L-5 space colony. “You think it might have evolved way down in the deep trenches,” Damon said. “Maybe it’s been there all along, ever since DNA itself evolved—or maybe not. Perhaps it started off in one of those bizarre enclaves that surround the black smokers where the tectonic plates are pulling apart and has only just begun expanding its territory, the way DNA did a couple of billion years ago—or maybe it was our deep-sea probes that brought it out and gave it the vital shove.

“On the other hand, maybe it drifted into local space from elsewhere in the universe, the way the panspermists think that alllife gets to planetary surfaces. We have probes out there too, don’t we—little spaceships patiently trawling for Arrhenius spores and stirring things upas they go. Maybe it’s been in the system for a long, long time, or maybe it arrived the day before yesterday . . . in which case, there might be more to come, and soon. I can see why you’re interested. How different from DNA is its replicatory system?”

“We’re still trying to confirm a formula,” Karol told him. “We’ve slipped into the habit of calling it para-DNA, but it’s a lousy name because it implies that it’s a near chemical relative, and it’s not. It coils like DNA—it’s definitely a double helix of some kind—but its subunits are quite different. It seems highly unlikely that the two coding chemistries have a common ancestor, even at the most fundamental level of carbon-chain evolution. It’s almost certainly a separate creation.

“That’s not so surprising; whenever and wherever life first evolved there would surely have been several competing systems, and there’s no reason to suppose that one of them would prove superior in every conceivable environment. The hot vents down in the ocean depths are a different world. Life down there is chemosynthetic and thermosynthetic rather than photosynthetic. Maybe there was always room down there for more than one chemistry of life. Perhaps there are other kinds still down there. That’s what I’m trying to find out. In the meantime, Eveline’s looking at dust samples brought in by probes from the outer solar system. The Oort Cloud is full of junk, and although it’s very cold there now it’s not beyond the bounds of possibility that life evolved in the outer regions of the solar system when the sun was a lot younger and hotter than it is now, or that spores of some kind could have drifted in from other secondary solar systems. We don’t know— yet.”

“You don’t think this stuff poses any kind of threat, do you?” said Damon, intrigued in spite of himself. “It’s not likely to start displacing DNA organisms, is it?”

“Until we know more about it,” Karol said punctiliously, “it’s difficult to know how far it might spread. It’s not likely to pose any kind of threat to human beings or any of our associated species, given the kind of nanotech defenses we can now muster, but that’s not why it’s important. Its mere existence expands the horizons of the imagination by an order of magnitude. What are a few crazy slanderers, even if they’re capable of inspiring a few crazy gunmen, compared with this?”

“If it isnatural,” said Damon, “it could be the basis of a whole new spectrum of organic nanomachines.”

“It’s not obvious that there’d be huge potential in that,” Karol countered. “So far, this stuff hasn’t done much in the way of duplicating the achievements of life as we know it, let alone doing things that life as we know it has never accomplished. It might be woefully conventional by comparison with DNA, capable of performing a limited repertoire of self-replicating tricks with no particular skill; if so, it would probably be technologically useless, however interesting it might be in terms of pure science. We’re not looking to make another fortune, Damon—when I say this is important, I don’t mean commercially.”

“I never doubted it for a moment,” Damon said drily—and turned abruptly to look at the man who was rapidly coming up behind them. For a moment, it crossed his mind that this might be an Eliminator foot soldier, mad and homicidal, and he tensed reflexively. In fact, the man was an islander—and Karol Kachellek obviously knew him well.

“You’d better come quick, Karol,” the man said. “There’s something you really need to see. You too, Mr. Hart. It’s bad.”

Ten

T

he package had been dumped into the Web in hypercondensed form, just like any other substantial item of mail, but once it had been downloaded and unraveled it played for a couple of hours of real time. It had been heavily edited, which meant that the claim with which it was prefaced—that nothing in it had been altered or falsified—couldn’t be taken at all seriously.

The material was addressed To all lovers of justice, and it was titled Absolute Proof That Conrad Helier Is an Enemy of Mankind. It originated—or purported to originate—from the mysterious Operator 101. Karol Kachellek and Damon watched side by side, in anxious silence, as it played back on a wallscreen in Karol’s living quarters.

The first few minutes of film showed a man bound to a huge, thronelike chair. His wrists and ankles were pinned by two pairs of plastic sheaths, each three centimeters broad, which clasped him more tightly if he struggled against them. He was in a sitting position, his head held upright by an elaborate VE hood which neatly enclosed the upper part of his skull. His eyes were covered, but his nose, mouth, and chin were visible. His pelvic region was concealed by a loincloth. There were two feeding tubes whose termini were close to the prisoner’s mouth, and there was a third tube connected to a needle lodged in his left forearm, sealed in place by a strip of artificial flesh.