Tau Ceti (an Ell Donsaii story #6) (15 page)

Wheat cocked his head, “Who then?”

She smiled, “No one.”

Wheat
stared at her in confusion a moment, then
felt icy prickles run down his back, “Huh?” He suddenly remembered that this girl had saved the space station and stopped a comet. She probably
was
more
accomplished and
comfortable
in the realm of
space travel than movie making. But that wasn’t any planet in the solar system!
He frowned,
was it?

Wheat turned to look at the screen
again
, still showing the intelligent
appearing
eyes of the… alien?
“Uhhh,” he said, “You’re not trying to say that’s a real alien?”

“Yes sir,” she said quietly.

“But… but the wings are too small!”

“Ah
, yes
sir
. T
he atmosphere is seven times denser and the gravity is only 0.27G.”

Wheat drew back, considering, “The dense atmosphere makes the fire burn hotter too?”

“Yes sir, and it’s 36% O
2
.”

“Oh.” He leaned back, thinking again about his objections. Of course the animal bounced high if the gravity was low.
He thought through his others. “But the head of
that—
p
resumably
smart
—
alien is too small to hold a brain
big enough to
be
intelligent
!”

“Yes sir, we have a couple of hypotheses on that?”

Wheat nodded for her to go ahead.

“One, it has a small brain in the head that has more efficient neurons than our
s,
so it still has the computation
al
power to make it intelligent.”

Wheat shrugged, “Seems unlikely
,
but can’t rule it out.”

“
Two, i
t has a large brain, located somewher
e other than the head. Similar
to the likelihood that many of the computations carried out in our brains actually occurred somewhere in the spinal cord of the
enormous
dinosaurs with their notably small cranial cavities.”

“Well yes, but in a
huge
dinosaur it
would make
more sense for the ‘calculations’ as you call them
,
to occur closer to the body parts being controlled. Otherwise the messages
’
transit time
from the brain to the hind limb for instance would have taken so much time as to be problematically slow. But I assume this animal isn’t huge?”

“No sir, it appears to stand a little more than twice as tall as the three foot long rocket that is observing it.”

That statement reminded Wheat that she was claiming to be observing real aliens on another world. His eyes narrowed, “Wait, that
can’t
be a planet in our solar system, how are you claiming that one of your, admittedly amazing, little rockets reached another star!”

“Um, yes sir. As you know, the rockets are possible because we can send fuel to them through portals connecting us to them through another dimension?”

Wheat nodded.

“We can open a port to another location that doesn’t have a ‘port mechanism’ at that location, though
the
accuracy is poor. We opened a lot of ports near Tau Ceti before we had one open close enough to put a rocket through. It still took months for the rocket to fly the rest of the way to TC3.”

Wheat sagged back in his chair, “TC3?”

“Our shorthand for the ‘third planet of Tau Ceti.’ The one you’ve been viewing.”

“You haven’t named it?”

“No sir. We thought it might be nice to let the public pick a name.”

“You’re going public?”

“Not anytime soon. We want to understand
it
better first. We
desperately
need your help with
that part of it
.”

Wheat felt more prickles under his scalp.
She’s handing me the opportunity of the
millennium
for a biologist! The first to describe the flora and fauna of an alien world!
He wondered if he was worthy.
“So, do you have questions? Or do you want to let me look at all the recordings you have and prepare a report?”

“How about if you look through the… ‘dissection’ we’re calling it, even though it really was more of a ‘cleaning before cooking.’ We’d like your thoughts on the anatomy? We’re looking for your ‘comparative anatomy’ expertise.”

Wheat chuckled, “I don’t think anyone has much ‘alien comparative anatomy’ expertise.”

“You get to be the first then!” she said brightly.

“OK, can you take me back to the start of the dissection and run it in slo-mo?”

On the screen the knife chopped the head off of the floppy neck. “Hold it there. Note that the neck appears boneless?
It’s hard to imagine keeping the spinal cord in a neck without some bony protection for it.”

“Might not have a spinal cord as we think of it?”

Wheat paused a moment then shrugged, granting the possibility. “Let’s run some more video.” They watched the skin being peeled away for a moment, exposing a brownish layer that Wheat had thought was muscle the first time through, but now he noticed it seemed somewhat amorphous. “Earth animals keep fat under the skin. Provides insulation and padding and the increased weight of the good times is evenly distributed. That might be what we’re seeing here even though it’s brown instead of white? Do we know anything about their chemistry?”

“The plants contain DNA, according to a reagent test.”

Wheat tilted his head, “Really?
Maybe ‘panspermia’ is right after all.
”

“Panspermia?”

“The theory that life didn’t start here
,
but that DNA is spread throughout the universe in bacterial spores etcetera and thus forms the basis of life everywhere.
It might evolve into different life forms on each world but it always uses DNA for genetic encoding.
”
He shrugged. “
I’ve always thought it was
a
ridiculous
theory but it won’t be the first time I was wrong
.
”

“Oh. Yeah we talked about that theory, that’s why we equipped the rocket to test for DNA.”

Wheat had
turned his head back to the screen
,
so Ell resumed the video.

Having completed the skinning, the knife
made a transverse cut
in
the body of the animal just behind the front limbs.
“Stop!” Wheat tilted his head. “Why transverse?” he mused, “For earth animals the next incision is longitudinal. Run it back a little.”

Ell ran it back through the skinning.

“Watch the body as he bumps it around during the skinning. It looks pretty stiff as if it has a skeleton or ribs or something all around the
entire
body cavity instead of only parts of the cavity like Earth animals. If so it would be hard to cut longitudinally because of the ribs and cutting transversely between them would be easier, eh?”

Ell narrowed her eyes as she watched the video again, “I see what you mean…”

“Then there’s some kind of bony structures at the front and the back that are joining the two halves he’s created. Something going from one rib to another. I would be guessing a spine except you’re working so hard on me to keep me from ascribing Earth vertebrate structure. Slow it way down
, zoom in…
let’s watch the transection part of the video over a few times… Stop! Back up a little. There’s a
circular bone like a rib exposed there for a second. Oh! And a
little joint visible there at the back, see he pops it loose with a claw there?
And a little bone going, presumably from the rib ring above to the rib ring below? Not hollow like our spinal columns. Ho! And look, another little jointed connector bone in the front, opposite the one in the back.”

Ell had paused it with Goldy popping the front joint loose. “They look like they would let the ribs twist
and tilt
relative to one another, thus providing some rotational and lateral bending motion?”

“Exactly!” Run some more video,” Wheat said excitedly. “No! Wait. Pause it. Let’s just look at the head of the dissector alien for a moment. Hmmm, it looks like there are some big forward facing eyes below the mouth and smaller backward facing eyes above and behind the mouth.
Wait…
is
that the mouth? I’m realizing I haven’t seen it open.”

“Yeah, we have just a few seconds of
‘Goldy,’ as we’ve been calling it,
eating in front of the camera. Definitely a mouth. Here…” Ell had Allan play the video of the few moments Goldy appeared in frame while eating the neck of the
burrower after it had been cooked
.

“Ooh, black teeth! Hard to tell much about the dentition with black teeth in the
dim lighting
.
But… look at it bite right through the neck. Can’t be any spinal column in that neck if Goldy can chomp through it like that! Back to the eyes.” Ell
jumped
the video back to where it had been. Wheat leaned forward as he stared at the eyes. “
Maybe… high quality forward binocular vision for hunting and low quality backward facing eyes to warn of impending predation?
And those holes look like ears. I know you’re wondering if we can assume that similar appearance means similar function but notice the translucent appearance of the edge of the one eye focused on the dissection? Translucency is a pretty compelling argument for
a
light receiving structure. The trumpet shape of the ear holes
is
also a compelling argument for a structure intended to focus acoustic energy. Again notice, forward and backward facing earholes. I’ll bet when we go back and zoom in on the animal he’s cutting up
,
we’ll find some similarities in the eyes and ears.
”

“Yes sir,” Ell said, “the eyes of the smaller animal are more equal in size and more evenly spaced, I’m thinking to provide near 360 degree
warning of predators
like herbivores here on Earth.” The head of the small animal popped up on the screen.

“Yep, even better with four eyes I would think. Oh, and look the backward facing eyes are oval and the tops extend up higher on the head. It can see above itself pretty well
,
I’ll bet. That would be important on a world with a lot of flyers.
Wait, I’m assuming a lot of flyers
,
but haven’t seen them. Have you seen others?
”

“Yes sir, we have a lot of video of Goldy and Silver walking through the forest and there are huge numbers of small flyers in
amongst the trees
. And if you watch carefully
,
when they were in the meadow there
we
re little flyers popping up here and there. I think there might normally be more but they could have been scared away by the descent of the rocket.”

“Wait, how in the world are you following Goldy and… Silver?” At Ell’s nod he continued, “around with a rocket? Something like that should scare primitives half to death.”

Donsaii smiled at him, “Goldy picked it up, strapped it to its chest
,
and took it along.”

Wheat leaned back in his chair, flabbergasted. After a moment he waved weakly at the screen for Ell to continue.

Goldy cut the rest of the way through the body, exposing a body cavity front and back of the cut. He pulled the two halves apart and coils of material fell free. “Those tubes look like intestines of course. It’s hard to imagine a body plan that doesn’t follow some kind of ‘tube structure’ wherein the food is pulled through the central tube for digestion. Food needs to go inside somewhere to be exposed to enzymes
,
etcetera
,
for digestion and pulling it in and pushing it back out of the same hole is less efficient than passing it through a long tube with different things being done to the food at different stages.
” Donsaii nodded her understanding. She’d stopped the video to listen and he waved to start it up again. As the video resumed Goldy reached into the front half of the body with his knife. He deftly made some cuts and pulled stuff out. Wheat quickly put his hand up to halt the video. “I’ll bet that mass of soft pink stuff is for oxygen exchange. It seems kind of flimsy like our lungs.” He tilted
his head,
“
though it doesn’t look as soft as mammalian lung tissue is. A little more like gill
tissue
I’d say. That solid chunk that came out might be a heart analogue, or liver or kidney I suppose. We have no way to even guess about solid organs.” He waved to start the video again
, “Same for
those
solid looking chunks.” Goldy had deftly spun the knife inside the back half of the body cavity pulling out more intestine and several more solid looking structures.
“Wait! Go back!” He had Ell move the video back and forth some. “Look at that! The pulmonary tissue has a tube coming off the front and another off the back. I’ll bet that
the
air comes
in
through the front
tube
and
out
through the one in the back. That’s more efficient than going in and out
the same
passage
like our lungs
do,
mixing old air with new
. Gills obviously do it that way
for fish
,
but birds also have a mechanism to pump air
through
their lungs instead of pulling
it
in an
d
back out the same way.
He’s a fascinating bugger!
”