“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I mean, I might have read something about it, but it’s not something I keep current on.”
“Well, there’s five, take my word for it. And in one of them, like ninety-five percent of all life on Earth died. So how the hell you gonna tell me that on Tahn-Skyyiah, just because they started out with RNA from a comet, they wound up with humanoid sentient life so close to us you could mistake one of them for human if you ran into them on the street on a dark night?”
“So, you think what? That the Predecessors, whoever they were, took…well, hell, they’d have had to grab like anthropoids at least, right? To get the Tahni that close to us.”
“Maybe.” He took a long, thoughtful swig of the beer. “I mean, it doesn’t have to be that way. I mean, these Predecessors were pretty fucking smart. They could have just engineered the whole business from scratch, just using DNA. They terraformed all these worlds anyway. Everything except Earth and maybe a couple others.”
“What?” I sat up straight, nearly spilling my drink. “Now you’re just talking crazy!”
“Actually…,” Vicky trailed off, seeming reluctant to agree with Clines again but too honest not to.
“Not you, too?” I pleaded with her.
“Oh, come on, Cam, you have to have seen reports about the algae stuff.”
“The algae?” I repeated, drawing a blank. Vicky rolled her eyes.
“The bacterial mats in the oceans and lakes of every colony world, ours and the Tahni’s. They’re basically the same organism on every world, but adjusted just slightly to the ecosystem and they’re incredibly efficient at producing oxygen. They were the only life form on a couple of the worlds we found, and they’re the oldest on every habitable world. And yes,” she said, rolling her eyes, “the people who believe it’s all panspermia say that it’s the first life that rises up on every world, the one that evolves first when the building blocks of life arrive off the comet or whatever. They say what you’re saying, that we just didn’t know because it was too long ago, but the problem with the idea is that the algae is still around on all those other worlds, but it’s not on Earth.”
“Maybe it died off in one of those catastrophes Dave was talking about.” I was grasping at straws now, but unwilling to give in on this. “Maybe that’s why things are so different on Earth.”
Clines rubbed a hand over his face like he was the one getting frustrated.
“Cam, Cam, Cam…,” he sighed. “Just look at the evidence here. We know there was a race of advanced aliens who either lived in or visited our part of the galaxy at least once ten thousand years ago. You’ll give me that much, right?”
“Well, of course,” I granted. “I mean, someone left the wormhole map on Hermes. We only found the first jumpgate in the asteroid belt by accident. If it wasn’t for the map, we’d never have found all the others. And without finding the wormholes, we wouldn’t have ever figured out Transition Space and wouldn’t have invented the Transition drive. So, here’s to the Predecessors,” I said, trying to make a joke of it, raising my glass and taking a drink. “Without them, we wouldn’t be here on this porch, getting drunk and arguing about bullshit.”
“Well, I’ll drink to that,” Clines agreed, taking a swig of beer, “mostly ‘cause I’ll drink to anything. But think about it. We know the Predecessors existed. They left the map. We know the algae is on every world except Earth, and we know it was responsible for terraforming all of them.” I started to open my mouth and he raised a palm to stop me. “Either by design or by accident, that’s what they did. They made all these worlds habitable to us. Not to methane-breathing gasbags or giant ice worms, but to us, oxygen-breathing mammals. And the Predecessors had to have been like us or they wouldn’t have put that wormhole map in the side of a mountain on a world like Hermes. So, you’ve got one world where we know everything evolved over a period of billions of years, where there were so many cosmic coincidences that you could never repeat the whole thing, and that resulted in us.” He clarified who “us” meant with a hand on his chest, as if I might not understand, and I wondered if he was already drunk or just thought I was.
“And then,” he went on, “you got all these other worlds where we know this algae stuff made them habitable. To us. And you got the Tahni, who are way too much like us for coincidence. It’s pretty obvious what happened if you ask me. The Predecessors set this whole thing up for us.”
“This whole thing?” I shook my head, uncomprehending.
“The Cluster. All the stars we can reach with the Transition Drive, which, by the way, ain’t that many compared to the whole galaxy. But all the stars that have terrestrial planets in the whole Cluster have habitables, have life. And the wormhole map was left on Hermes, around Proxima Centauri, the closest star to us. Not the closest one to the Tahni. And the Tahni already knew about the wormholes, though they ain’t ever said how they found out.”
“Okay, let’s just say for a second that I agree with you that the Predecessors left us the map and made all these habitable worlds just for us because they’re like, I don’t know, galactic philanthropists or something. Why the hell would they make the Tahni? Their whole biology is totally fucked when it comes to making a technological civilization. I mean, the males can barely control themselves around females and have to live separate from each other! I don’t know how the hell they even developed space travel.”
“Maybe they didn’t,” Vicky mused.
She had a glass of wine, which she’d taken up drinking since we’d moved here. Red this time, because it apparently went with rock dragon steaks. She swirled it around in her glass, staring at it in silent contemplation for a moment.
“Think about it this way,” she said, finally. “You’re some powerful, ancient alien with a long-term mindset, with the technology to terraform planets for kicks. You come to this Cluster of systems where there’s only one living planet, so you start terraforming a bunch of worlds. And you see us, maybe ten or twenty thousand years ago, sitting in our mud huts, hunting antelope or whatever, and since you’re thinking long-term, you say ‘hey, what if we design our own version? Maybe we can make it better.’ And then, every once in a while, you kick the Tahni some technological advantage under the table, because you really want your boys to come out on top.”
I gaped at her and she grinned at my expression of utter disbelief.
“This could all be like a giant science experiment to them. We’re the control group, they’re the experimental group.”
“Just what kind of shit are you reading when you can’t sleep?” I wondered, shaking my head. “Do you really believe that shit, Vicky?”
She laughed, sipping at her wine.
“Believe? No,” she admitted. “But would I be surprised to find out it was true? Also, no.”
“Who are you,” I asked her, “and what have you done with my wife?”
I was so absorbed with the bizarre turn the conversation had taken that I almost missed the distant roar of jets.
“Goddammit,” Clines spat, tossing another bottle toward the recycling bin, missing this time, sending a small puddle of beer trickling out of the open mouth like blood. “That’s two of the fucking things this week. Damn Hellnick and those smuggler assholes.”