Read Online Asgard's Conquerors by Brian Stableford - Free Book Online
Authors: Brian Stableford
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invitation
himself had he not been as worried as Valdavia was about the necessity of
observing protocol.
I let him ask me the first few questions, as if I were briefing him
about Asgard. He'd never been there, and everything he knew about it was from memory
chips that were long out of date.
I gave him a selective account of my adventures before moving on to
what they implied.
"The people who thought there were no more than half a dozen levels
always had a strong case," I observed, "because the technology we
were digging out of the top levels wouldn't have been capable of erecting much
more than that. The romantics who wanted Asgard to be an artefact from top to
bottom had to credit its builders with technological powers far beyond
anything known in the galactic community. We still can't say, of course,
whether there's an ordinary planet inside the shells, but even if there is, we
now know that the levels constitute a feat of engineering beyond anything your
people or mine could contemplate. Imagine how long it must have taken to put
that thing together!"
"It would seem to have been a remarkable achievement," he
opined, in typical Tetron fashion.
"And it begins to look," I continued, "that it might be
much older than many investigators thought. That might have interesting
bearings on the question of the origin of the galactic races. I understand that
your own researches also have some relevance to that?"
"It would be premature to draw conclusions," he said. I
didn't intend to let him get away with that. I'd told him my side of the story.
Now I wanted his.
"I was told on Goodfellow that DNA-based life has been found in
the outer system of Earth's star—micro-organisms deep-frozen for billions of
years," I said, broaching the matter as forthrightly as I dared, without
running the risk of offending him. "The Tetrax must have had a chance to
study thousands of life-bearing solar systems. How many are like ours in this
respect?"
"Nearly all of them," he said, lightly. "I know of one
or two anomalous cases, but we have concentrated our researches on stars of the
same solar type, whose planetary systems are roughly similar."
"That seems to indicate that life didn't evolve in any one of them—in
fact, that there's no way of knowing where DNA first came from."
"We certainly have no basis for speculations about the ultimate
origin of life," admitted the Tetron.
"My ancestors always supposed that life evolved on Earth," I
said, carefully angling for more information. "Even when we came out into
space and found the other humanoid races, we clung to that idea, and invented
theories of convergent evolution to save it."
"Our scientists never supposed that to be the case," he
informed me, with a touch of that lofty superiority that the Tetrax love to
display. The best way get them to tell you something is to play up to that
vanity.
"How did they work that out?" I asked, trying to sound
suitably awed.
"A simple matter of the elementary mathematics of probability. The
basic chemical apparatus of life is very complex. It is not only DNA itself,
but all the enzymes associated with it—and the various types of RNA involved in
transcription of the genetic code. It was easy to work out the probability of
such a system arising by the random accretion of molecules. When we compared
that probability to the area of our planet and the length of time since its
origin, it was perfectly obvious that the chance of life originating there—or
on any other planet—was absurdly small.
"It was obvious to us that the chemistry of life is so complicated
that its evolution by chance would require vast areas of space and incredible
spans of time. Our best estimate is that given the size of our universe, the
length of time for which we expect it to endure, and the kind of life-history
we expect it to follow, the odds against life evolving at all were about ten to
one against. It would appear that we owe our existence to a remarkable stroke
of
himself had he not been as worried as Valdavia was about the necessity of
observing protocol.
I let him ask me the first few questions, as if I were briefing him
about Asgard. He'd never been there, and everything he knew about it was from memory
chips that were long out of date.
I gave him a selective account of my adventures before moving on to
what they implied.
"The people who thought there were no more than half a dozen levels
always had a strong case," I observed, "because the technology we
were digging out of the top levels wouldn't have been capable of erecting much
more than that. The romantics who wanted Asgard to be an artefact from top to
bottom had to credit its builders with technological powers far beyond
anything known in the galactic community. We still can't say, of course,
whether there's an ordinary planet inside the shells, but even if there is, we
now know that the levels constitute a feat of engineering beyond anything your
people or mine could contemplate. Imagine how long it must have taken to put
that thing together!"
"It would seem to have been a remarkable achievement," he
opined, in typical Tetron fashion.
"And it begins to look," I continued, "that it might be
much older than many investigators thought. That might have interesting
bearings on the question of the origin of the galactic races. I understand that
your own researches also have some relevance to that?"
"It would be premature to draw conclusions," he said. I
didn't intend to let him get away with that. I'd told him my side of the story.
Now I wanted his.
"I was told on Goodfellow that DNA-based life has been found in
the outer system of Earth's star—micro-organisms deep-frozen for billions of
years," I said, broaching the matter as forthrightly as I dared, without
running the risk of offending him. "The Tetrax must have had a chance to
study thousands of life-bearing solar systems. How many are like ours in this
respect?"
"Nearly all of them," he said, lightly. "I know of one
or two anomalous cases, but we have concentrated our researches on stars of the
same solar type, whose planetary systems are roughly similar."
"That seems to indicate that life didn't evolve in any one of them—in
fact, that there's no way of knowing where DNA first came from."
"We certainly have no basis for speculations about the ultimate
origin of life," admitted the Tetron.
"My ancestors always supposed that life evolved on Earth," I
said, carefully angling for more information. "Even when we came out into
space and found the other humanoid races, we clung to that idea, and invented
theories of convergent evolution to save it."
"Our scientists never supposed that to be the case," he
informed me, with a touch of that lofty superiority that the Tetrax love to
display. The best way get them to tell you something is to play up to that
vanity.
"How did they work that out?" I asked, trying to sound
suitably awed.
"A simple matter of the elementary mathematics of probability. The
basic chemical apparatus of life is very complex. It is not only DNA itself,
but all the enzymes associated with it—and the various types of RNA involved in
transcription of the genetic code. It was easy to work out the probability of
such a system arising by the random accretion of molecules. When we compared
that probability to the area of our planet and the length of time since its
origin, it was perfectly obvious that the chance of life originating there—or
on any other planet—was absurdly small.
"It was obvious to us that the chemistry of life is so complicated
that its evolution by chance would require vast areas of space and incredible
spans of time. Our best estimate is that given the size of our universe, the
length of time for which we expect it to endure, and the kind of life-history
we expect it to follow, the odds against life evolving at all were about ten to
one against. It would appear that we owe our existence to a remarkable stroke
of
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