Incandescence

Greg Egan INCANDESCENCE

1

«Are you a child of DNA?»

Rakesh was affronted; if he'd considered this to be information that any stranger wandering by had a right to know, it would have been included in his précis. After a moment's reflection, though, his indignation gave way to curiosity. The stranger was either being deliberately offensive, or had a very good reason for asking. Either way, this was the most interesting thing that had happened to him all day.

«Why do you wish to know?» he replied. The stranger's own précis contained extensive details of its ancestry and sensory modalities, but Rakesh wasn't in the mood to acquire the necessary skills to apprehend it on its own terms. By default, he was already perceiving it as human-shaped, and hearing it speak in his own native tongue. Now, in place of its declared chemosensory label, he assigned it a simple phonetic name chosen at random: Lahl.

Before Lahl could reply, Viya had risen to her feet beside Rakesh and gestured toward an empty spot on the annular bench that surrounded their table. «Please join us,» she said.

Lahl nodded graciously. «Thank you.» Lahl's actual gender didn't map on to Rakesh's language neatly, but the arbitrary name he'd given her was grammatically female. She sat between the other two members of the group, Parantham and Csi, facing Rakesh squarely. Behind her in the distance, water cascaded down a jagged rocky slope, sending a mist of fine droplets raining down on to the forest below.

«I couldn't help overhearing your complaint,» Lahl said. «'Everything has been done. Everything has been discovered.'» To Rakesh, they were seated in the open air, near the edge of a mesa that rose above the treetops of a vast jungle. The murmur of multilingual conversation from the tables around them might have been the sound of insects, if it had not been for the occasional translated phrase that Rakesh allowed himself to hear at random, in case anything piqued his interest. Perhaps to Lahl his words had come across as a distinctive aroma, standing out from a jumble of background odors.

Csi spread his hands in a gesture of apology to this stranger unfamiliar with their customs. «That's just Rakesh's way of talking,» he confided. «You should pay him no attention. We get the same speech every day.»

«Which makes it no less true,» Rakesh protested. «Our ancestors have sucked the Milky Way dry. We were born too late; there's nothing left for us.»

«Only several billion other galaxies,» Parantham observed mildly. She smiled; her position on this subject had barely shifted since Rakesh had met her, but for her it was still a worthwhile debate, not the empty ritual it had become for Csi.

«Containing what?» Rakesh countered. «Probably more or less the same kinds of worlds and civilizations as our own. Probably nothing that would not be a hideous anticlimax, after traveling such a distance.» A few thousand intrepid fools had, in fact, set out for Andromeda, with no guarantee that the spore packages they'd sent in advance would survive the two-million-light-year journey and construct receivers for them.

Rakesh turned to Lahl. «I'm sorry, we keep interrupting you. But what exactly does my molecular ancestry have to do with this?»

«I could be mistaken,» Lahl said, «but it might have some bearing on whether or not I can offer you a cure for your malaise.»

Rakesh hesitated, then took the bait. «I do come from DNA,» he said. «But I warn you, I think that's a strange way to pigeonhole people.» His human ancestors had fashioned descendants in their own image — who in turn were largely content to do the same — but membership of the broader DNA panspermia implied no particular cultural traits. Entirely different replicators had given rise to creatures more similar to humans, in temperament and values, than any of their molecular cousins.

Lahl said, «I don't mean to judge you by your ancestry, but in my experience even molecular kinship can sometimes lead to a sense of affinity that would otherwise be lacking. The DNA panspermia has been extensively studied; every world it reached was thought to have been identified long ago. Adding the first new entry to that catalog in almost a million years might well hold more interest for you than it does for me.»

Rakesh smiled uncertainly. This was not exactly the kind of momentous discovery that people had made in the Age of Exploration, but in his blackest hours he had often imagined contributing far less to the sum of knowledge than this modest footnote.

It was a pity he'd been beaten to it. «If you've found such a world,» he said, «then you're the one who has extended the list.»