Tau Ceti Read online

  Wheat’s eyes narrowed. The animal appeared to have been rolled onto its stomach, four smaller limbs below. The larger limbs seemed to come off the upper part of the animal. The front pair of the upper limbs at present dangled down to the ground. Did they normally reach the ground and assist with locomotion? Or did they serve some other purpose and were just dangling to the ground in the flaccidity of death? Limbs on the top, i.e. wings, and limbs on the bottom, i.e. legs, was a common body plan in Insecta but this animal didn’t look like it had an exoskeleton and only had four, not six, limbs on the bottom! At first he’d thought that it had a flexible snout like an elephant, but the end of that snout seemed to have eyes on it? Could that be a head?

  The clawed feet reappeared. Looking like bird feet except with a fuzzy covering rather than feathers. Then another pair of fuzzy skinned limbs appeared from above, holding a primitive knife! “Hah!” Wheat sat back, suddenly enlightened. “That’s some very good CGI. You had me completely fooled for a minute or two.” He frowned, “So what are you doing in the movie business?” They want me to consult on some kind of sci-fi movie? It’s comforting to know that someone in the movie business is trying to get the science right! He looked at Donsaii expectantly.

  She had paused the video and now turned to look at him quizzically, head turned to the side. Her smile began as a little quirk of the lip, then spread across her delicate features, stopping just short of when he thought she’d begin laughing. She looked positively delighted. “How about if I get you to watch the rest of this clip, then I’ll show you a few others? Then we’ll talk about how I got into the ‘movie business’?”

  Donsaii still looked like she was suppressing a laugh, but Wheat turned to the screen again raising an eyebrow. On the screen the skin was deftly removed with a few strokes of the (flint?) knife, peeling it up like taking off a t-shirt.

  The detail here is amazing! Wheat thought to himself. For a small throw away part of the movie, one that doubtless contributes little to the main storyline, they’ve invested heavily in making this look right! Wheat’s respect for the filmmakers rose immensely. He’d been impressed that they wanted his scientific help, but what they’d already done showed amazing attention to detail.

  The knife then went back to peel the skin off of the limbs. Then it made a transverse cut the body of the animal just behind the front limbs.

  The head of the dissector dipped into the view! Wheat leaned forward in amazement. Rather than creating an inexplicably different creature, like an amateur might have, the filmmakers had put the head of the dissector on a prehensile neck also. It also had four eyes, like the animal it was cutting up! They had designed this animal like it was a distant relative of the one it was cutting up, like one would actually expect on an alien world with evolution doing its thing. So many filmmakers would have thought it “more interesting” to have some completely different types of aliens cutting each other up in their movie, no matter how unlikely it would be to find bizarrely different body structures on the same planet. But, these two did look like they could have evolved from the same ancestor.

  The alien paused to break something bony at the back and the front of the animal before cutting the rest of the way around to separate the animal into a front and back half. Then it cut the rest of the way through the body, exposing a cavity that it quickly pulled organs and intestine looking things out of, casting most of them aside, but keeping a few solid looking chunks. This was done so quickly that Wheat suspected the animator hadn’t wanted to spend time showing each of the organs and trying to make them appear realistic. The limbs were twisted and cut loose from the body. Then all the pieces, neck, eight limbs and two body parts were spitted on a stick and hung over the fire.

  Putting the spit over the fire the entire alien finally came into view. Wheat’s shoulders sagged a little in disappointment. The moviemakers had decided to give wings to their alien but had made them far too small for them to be useful for flight in such a large animal. He tilted his head, unless of course these are small animals seen greatly magnified. Insects fly with small wings because they’re tiny. He shrugged to himself, but then it’s ridiculous to imagine that a tiny animal like that could be intelligent. Well, and look at the tiny size of the head on that thing. It couldn’t have enough brain in that little cranium to be intelligent, even if it was full size. Wheat quirked his mouth, the fire’s wrong too. Look how energetically it’s burning with just a little wood. They must have added accelerant to it for it to burn that bright. Or it could be a CGI fire too, I suppose. He felt disappointed that they’d gotten these things wrong after doing such an amazing job with the little alien animal, but then, he thought, they wouldn’t need me, would they, if they could get it all right without my help?

  Wheat turned to Donsaii, “So you want my critique?”

  Eyes twinkling, with a couple of fingers pressed to her lips, Donsaii nodded.

  Following the principle of giving compliments first and making criticisms second, Wheat told her that he thought the computer algorithms they were using had produced astonishingly realistic imagery. Then he pointed out that when the animal had been first tossed into the frame it had bounced a bit too high. He went on to compliment the similar structure of the alien and its prey, but to point out that the wings on the alien were too small for flight and the head too small for intelligence. He finished up with the fire that burned excessively for the fuel it was consuming.

  Donsaii nodded, “Can I show you some more video?”

  Wheat checked his watch, he had nothing pressing and, they were paying handsomely. His department would be pleased to have him bringing in the cash and they would give some of it to him. He nodded and turned back to the screen. An image of a planet appeared on a black background. Almost entirely white with some spots of blue. Donsaii spoke to her AI and the view jumped closer several times then curled in around the planet. A few more jumps and it descended into the atmosphere, then into the clouds, then through the clouds to show splotchy green everywhere.

  The detail continued to astonish Wheat as the viewpoint slowly dropped down to a landing in a meadow surrounded by an enormous rain forest. Similar to an Earth rain forest, yet without a single piece of flora he recognized. Some obviously modeled on Earth’s trees, but much too tall for the diameters of their trunks. He mused, perhaps as if the trunks are constructed of stronger material than the cellulose of Earth’s plants? Then something flew across the image. His eyes widened, the alien? It crossed the field of view again, closer this time. Shortly it crossed the field one more time as if it were circling. When he would have expected it to cross again it landed, the eyes in that prehensile neck looking at him. My God, something about that gaze… they’ve managed to make it look intelligent somehow! It has a harness made out of leather or something. And, there’s the hilt of that flint knife. The wings may be too small but they beat like wings should, instead of with that oddly “wrong” motion of most of the other CGI wings I’ve ever seen. The filmmakers must have studied small bird’s wing beating in slow motion and modeled them. Or something? He turned to Donsaii, “That’s amazing! You must be dedicating supercomputer time to the CGI or somehow doing something much more sophisticated than the big studios.”

  He tilted his head, “But why? I thought you were into physics, not sci-fi movie making?” He carefully didn’t express his disappointment that she would use her prodigious talents for making movies instead of continuing her research, or whatever you would call turning out profoundly new technology at an unheard of rate like she’d been doing. He supposed she had the right to do whatever she wanted with the talents God gave her, but he felt troubled nonetheless.

  Donsaii seemed to struggle with her expression a moment, then her face turned serious. “Thank you for the compliments. It’s gratifying to think that you would believe that I could make such a movie from scratch but I really have no talent along those lines.”

  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. The 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% O2.”

  “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—presumably 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 ours, so it still has the computational power to make it intelligent.”

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

  “Two, it has a large brain, located somewhere 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?”