The Sunborn

“Quite patently artificial,” she said.

“Looks like it to me, and I’m just a physicist.”

“I thought you were an engineer-pilot.”

“Hey, physicists can do anything.”

“Um. So they think. But not biology…”

Definitions, her grandmother once said, had to be like a fat man’s belt—big enough to cover the subject but elastic enough to allow for change.

There was more known, but always more to be known.

Yes, she thought, and the unknown can masquerade as the unknowable.

“Why paired?” Viktor asked. “Have two sexes?”

“Hard to imagine how electromagnetic creatures could,” Mary Kay said.

Viktor grinned. “Lack of imagination is not an argument. Especially lately.”

Nobody out here was going to find an alternative here to Earth’s tiresome clash of selfish individualisms and stifling collectivisms.

Would an alien outsider judge America’s performance by My Lai and Wounded Knee or by Lincoln and Jefferson?

Anyway, the Shanna woman was abrasive, self-obsessed, smug—and those were her good points. Julia suspected that in a pinch the woman might also be careless, the one sin reality never forgave.

They had a legend about a Chemical pinned to a piece of dead matter and allowed to die that way—Diminished to extinction! Apparently a commonplace among Chemicals. Yet after this fearsome loss, the identity emerged from its full subtraction—to claim life again. Such a desperate story! Elementary knowledge tells us that such things do not happen, of course.

Better be a bit more diplomatic. Translation: cover your scientific ass.

The evolutionary routes are many, she knew, wending through the howling wilderness of the maladaptive, on to their severely narrowed destinations. Biology abounded with convergent examples, destinations arrived at along very different paths. Fruiting bodies of slime molds and myxobacteria alike evolved multicelled advances. Warmbloodedness came forth several times, as did live birth and even penile tumescence. The eyes did indeed have it—as seen in the camera-like eyes of vertebrates and octopi, and the similar tiny preceptors of worms and jellyfish. Nature invented over and over again the mechanisms used by diverse organisms to hear, smell, echolocate, sense the prickle of electric and magnetic fields.

“I think,” Jordin said mildly, “a professional biologist would label that aggressive behavior.”

None of the above. That’s often the right answer, and bugger the exams.

She had always admired the way bureaucracies spontaneously produced leaden prose, blandly sliding from the mouths of people who absolutely believed everything they said.

Always keep your words soft and sweet, just in case you have to eat them.

He’s an order of magnitude better than mere diplomats. He’s a conniver.

After weeks of indoor work it actually felt good to be doing something—clean, direct, muscles and mind.

Puzzled frowns in the audience. Science reporters they might be, but high school chemistry was going a bit too deep for most.

Shanna put on the last movement of Beethoven’s Fifth and turned up the gain.

Ludwig von Cornball, they had called him back at Moonbase One. Hipitude: post-postmodern irony. All because she played ol’ Ludwig so much—but who was more appropriate? What spirit better expressed the grandeur of an expedition to the edge of the solar system?

Not sure. When don’t know, do experiment.

Exercise erased cares.