Symbiosis Chapter 14

“Captain, I don’t think it would be wise for me to just start in on this corpse,” Dr. Adams said. “Not that Dr. Ferris and I wouldn’t have a field day.”

“No need to do an entire autopsy; why don’t you just get some DNA and see if you can figure out what killed him?”

“I have every intention of doing that, Jack. But anything more might ruin the specimen.”

Jackson and Adams spoke while Ferris worked in the isolation room unwrapping the body. Rianya joined them a few moments into their on board adventure.

“I hope I can join in, I’ve never seen anything like this!”

“It’s up to the doctors, Love. My interest is in its age and origins. Rumors are flying about it being from both the past and the future.” All eyes turned to him. “Yes, that’s what I’m saying.”

“Time travel, Jack?”

“You have another explanation for the Kiian research? Humans have only been out of the solar system for a few decades, not a few centuries. How can it be hundreds of years old and have human DNA?”

“It may not be hundreds of years old, and it may not have human DNA,” Adams reminded the captain. “Don’t get too excited.”

“I rely on facts, Doc, don’t worry about me.”

“I do, Jack. It will be an hour or so, Rianya, why don’t you come back and you can suit up and help Dr. Ferris.”

Tom and Rianya left the sick bay, stopping at their quarters.

“Where’s ‘Lara?”

“She’s with Zoe and Honey in the gym. Tom, why does Dr. Adams call you “Jack” all the time? No one else does.” Tom chuckled softly.

“We go back a long time.” Tom made his way to the lavatory to clean up from the landing mission. Although time spent outside had been in EV suits, when he returned from the Kiian research station he wanted wash off.

“What does that have anything do with it?” she called after him from their bedroom.

“He said I didn’t look like a Thomas, I looked like a Jack, so he’s always called me Jack, or Jackson, or Captain.” Rianya looked down at the floor and then called back.

“You look like a Tom to me.” She could hear water splashing in the shower, so changed into some clothing that would suit her being in the medical bay and then called through the door. The water had stopped. “Have you eaten anything?” The door opened promptly.

“The Kiians fed us, they insisted.” Tom walked past her rubbing a towel on his head, another one around his waist. The familiar fragrance of the soap on board trailed behind him, triggering a fond, vivid memory from years back, before she’d become a seasoned space traveler, before Zalara had been born. The scent teleported her to the first night they’d spent together on the beach of her home world. Forever linked were the curious fragrance of the humans’ soap and Tom’s firm embrace, the heat of his body against hers, and the confident feeling of euphoria.

“I know that look in your eyes,” Tom said while pulling on his trousers and looking at the chronometer on his wrist.

“I know, you have to be on the bridge, or something.”

“I have a few minutes.” He straightened up and stopped what he was doing, raising one brow at her, likely not entirely in jest.

“No, thank you, not interested.” He started to laugh and pulled on a shirt over his shoulders and quickly manipulated half a dozen buttons while he walked out, kissing her ear on the way past.

“Seriously,” he called to her. “Once we’re on our way to Eta Cass Four I don’t need to be on the bridge every minute.” She stepped up to him in the big room.

“I’m going to the sick bay for the afternoon,” she reminded him, reaching up to his collar and pulling the knot of his tie slightly to center it. While they’d lived a year in Enceladus, a human woman who had befriended her did the same for her husband one morning. “Maybe you can take up Zalara and Honey’s play hour. You don’t do that too often.”

“It’s a little difficult to go from captain to babysitter in the blink of an eye.”

“And captain to lover is not?” Tom opened the door to leave but he looked back over his shoulder and smiled.

“No.”
~~~

“We should date the carcass before exposing any of it to the air; that might change its molecular structure irreparably.”

“Dr. Jane,” Rianya said, “do you believe a person can go to different times but stay the same? It’s not sensible in any context.”

“I’m a scientist. The idea is to put forth an idea and then test it to prove it wrong.”

“Prove it wrong?”

“That’s what we call The Scientific Method. You have to be able to put a theory through tests, tests that can be duplicated by someone else, and if they can’t disprove your hypothesis, it’s probably solid.”

“It sounds backwards,” Rianya said. She stretched yellow latex gloves over both her hands.

“One day I’ll show you how it works. Earth struggled for decades with cold fusion, and breakthroughs were reported and debunked all the time.” Dr. Jane also pulled gloves on both of her hands, and they fastened hook and loop tape for each other along the backs of their gowns.

“Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but why are we dressed for surgery if this thing is dead?”

“In this case, the idea is to protect the examiner, not the patient,” she chuckled briefly. “Let’s get started.”

The woman from Earth and the woman from Beta Hydri each pulled up a Mayo stand on wheels and opened surgical packs. Rianya tapped a button on the one meter monitor and a radiograph of the skeleton appeared in highly refined detail.

“Those are strong bones,” Jane said. “Look at the density.”

“Is it human?”

"The skeletal structure is similar, but not a hundred percent. It is a mixed species. Look here.” She indicated some faint structures that appeared as collapsed balloons. “I think these are air sacs, like birds have.”

“Why would a person need those?” Rianya was baffled.

“Faster more efficient locomotion I suppose. Different atmosphere. We’ll see when we get in there.” She called up to the ceiling. "Computer, begin recording."

Dr. Jane Ferris picked up the laser and created a precision incision to the exact depth she wanted that for all intents and purposed created a lid out of the skull. She lifted it off with extra caution. Inside they saw a dark lump, not entirely shriveled but nevertheless dry. Rianya wasn’t familiar with malodors ever present in a morgue, and was glad to find that the body before them had an insignificant aroma compared to what she was expecting.

“Are you going to remove it?”

“I don’t want to sever it from the spinal cord. But I had to look. There’s no sign of hemorrhage so I don’t think he had a head injury. Let’s get a sample from the brain. It will have the best preserved cells since its mostly fat.”

Rianya held a small tray near the brain and Jane took the smallest possible bit with her laser and deposited it in the tray.

“You didn’t answer my question,” Rianya said suddenly. “Time travel?”

“Oh, yes. Well, no, it seems to me that if you went forward, you’d not exist yet, so you can’t do that. If you went backward, everything you do would change what exists today, and so maybe you’d not be here to go back and change it. That makes no sense. Hand me that,” she said, pointing. Rianya obliged.

“Aren’t there people who just go along and never make any significant change to the rest of the universe? Not everything a person does comes back to bite us.”

“If you can figure it out, let me know. But I don’t think it’s possible, practical, or even desirable.” The doctor cut a minute bone fragment from the skull and placed that alongside the bit of brain they’d taken a few moments earlier. After some more digging around, they finished for the time being. “Take these to Dr. Adams for carbon dating and a DNA spectrum, will you?”

Rianya dutifully removed her surgery attire to avoid contaminating anything outside of the isolation room, tossed the gloves, and then left with the samples for sick bay. Her mind focused only on getting to sick bay and not on the corpse, Zalara, Tom, or what they were going to find on the next planet.

“Dr. Adams, here’s what you need,” she called upon arrival.

“Wonderful, dear, let’s see what we have.” She handed off the small tray and he took each sample and put them into individual jars of a clear liquid. “These should do nicely. It will be a while before we have the final results. How are you holding up after this long in space?” he said suddenly.

“Me? Oh, it hasn’t been as long as the trip from Beta Hydri. I thought I would be crazy by the time we got to Earth.”

“Captain tells me we’re going to Beta Hydri after we’re done here. You still have family there.”

“Oh, yes, but I’m a bit worried about seeing them. Did he tell you what happened there?”

“No, not really.” His eager eyes begged for whatever she cared to share.

“My family would not accept Zalara. They thought she was a magic shaman that made a flood, and the earth shake.”

“Why would they think that?”

“Because she looks like Tom, not me. Her hair, her hands, her eyes. But not her ears. Those are like me.”

“You and she have so much hair no one would notice anyway,” he said with a laugh and a smile. Rianya had twice as much hair as any other female on board the ship, but only on her head.

“Maybe I shouldn’t ask this,” Rianya said, looking at her feet and sitting in the nearest chair, “but if you can keep a confidence?”

“Certainly,” Adams said with all seriousness. He stepped closer to her but remained standing. Rianya struggled a little but summoned her courage.

“Why does Dr. Jane look part brown and part pink? I’ve just never seen anyone like her before, on my planet, or Earth. I didn’t think I should ask her directly.”

“There’s nothing wrong with her. We call it hetero-chromatic displacement. It’s rare, only a few dozen people out of several billion on earth have it. But there’s a reason.” Rianya waited, raising her feather fine brows in expectation. “I’m not sure it’s a good reason.” The doctor sighed. “Okay, back about a hundred years a few governments started experimenting with chimeras.”

“I don’t know what that is, a chimeras.”

“A chimera is a creature that is part one thing and part another thing.”

“Zalara is a chimera?”

“Oh, heavens no, dear, no! She’s simply biracial, more or less, or technically a hybrid. A chimera is two different things put together, like a bird and a cat.” Rianya sat back, thoroughly confused. She shook her head.

“Humans have been putting similar things together forever, horses and donkeys, lions and tigers, but usually the offspring are infertile. In the mid-21^st century, genetic engineers had gone overboard and were putting all kinds of animal genes together, including the last one they ever did until international laws stopped it.”

“Is Dr. Jane genetically engineered?”

“Not exactly. Her ancestors were. One of her great grandparents was, well, a black and white canine. The canine’s genes were spliced into the human embryo, and so she kind of, well, retained the gene. She’s not half dog or anything; she just has the pigmentation pattern of one.”

“You’re joking with me,” Rianya said suddenly, smiling and laughing at Dr. Adams. He shook his head slowly.

“It’s no joke. Most of the chimera embryos were destroyed,  early on, but a few were, well, adopted, implanted in women, and became delightful people with interesting characteristics.”

“The people didn’t reject her.”

“She had nothing to do with her genome. A child is innocent. Not everyone can come to that level of consciousness, but it’s more widespread now than, say, a hundred years ago when this kind of thing was still frowned upon.”

Rianya sank deeper into the chair, not quite sure what she should do with that kind of information. Zalara was a naturally conceived child, born from a loving bond. Her small differences were just part of who she was, not any kind of intentional scheme or experiment. She swelled with gratitude for her fortune to live with humans, despite the few she’d encountered who were bad of their own devices, thinking of her own people who feared Zalara simply because of her looks, wiping a small tear from the corner of her eye.