In the yellow morning light, the bay slumbered on, as it had for millennia. The greasy wavelets that lapped against the shore were the only hint of life.
Suzanne woke first. She stretched to look out the window, peering through the heavy atmosphere at dark rock and sea. Only the most determined photons from the young sun above filtered through the cloud cover to shed their light on the bay. Today would be like yesterday and all the days before: overcast and mild.
'Laszlo!'
An undefined mumbling emerged from the pile of quilts and blankets that hid her partner. Had he always been this lazy? She didn't think so, but after two-and-a-half years on this mudball it was getting hard to remember.
'Wake up, you lazy sod. We've got to replace the filters in the monitors today, remember? Let's do it before it gets too warm.'
Another mumble. It took three good kicks to get him moving.
Although Suzanne and Laszlo found it hard to remember what they were doing there, there were good reasons for their presence on the planet. Volkov III had just one thing going for it: of all the worlds humanity had investigated in its slim segment of the galaxy, Volkov was the only one which came anywhere near duplicating the conditions thought to have prevailed on the proto-organic Earth. The land, air, and deeper ocean were barren, but complex chemicals made a tenuous soup of the shallow coastal seas. If current theory was correct, conditions were ripe for the emergence of the first fully living cells.
'Breakfast?'
'No. Not hungry.'
'Come on, Laszlo, we're going to need some energy to lug those filters around. It's bad enough already, living on this recycled crap, without you going on hunger strike.'
'Okay, okay. Pass me those tasty sludgewafers, honey.'
'What have you got in mind for dinner? The usual?'
''Fraid so, unless there's some spare protein floating around out there.'
Breakfast over, they struggled into their cumbersome atmosphere suits and cycled the airlock. The suits and the stronger gravity made movement difficult, but a few plodding steps took them down to the shore of the bay, its water leaden beneath the cloud. The monitors were located from a few metres to more than a kilometre offshore; even that far out, the water was only thigh-deep, but it was tiring to wade so far, bend down and replace the old filters — clotted as they were with proto-organic gunk — and struggle back to shore with their extra weight. The old filters then had to be cleaned and made ready for re-use. In an Earth fortnight, the new filters would become the old filters, and they'd have to go through the whole process again. Laszlo and Suzanne had been changing the filters now for two-and-a-half years, and not a damned thing had happened to break the monotony.
Well, thought Suzanne, that wasn't quite true. The measurements they took showed that the complexity of the proto-organic system in the bay was increasing; that complexity should continue to increase until the point that marked the transition from proto-life to life itself. Whether this would happen before their replacements arrived (now in just six months' time) used to be a burning question, when they could still find the energy to talk about it.
Oh, they had talked about that and everything else when they first arrived, two young graduates lured by the opportunity to see life in the making. For six months or so, they had gone about everything — work, sex, play — with wide-eyed fervour. But the weather had remained grey and warm and damp, and the computers had reported nothing dramatic, and the food tasted always the same, and their enthusiasm had ebbed away. Boredom and relaxation were dangerous, yet even the nagging risks of living on a largely unknown world became boring after a while.
Sex, books, and music had all been replayed too many times, and their favourite pastime now, on days when nothing needed fixing or changing, was to submerge in the soup and drift off to sleep. Not long after arriving, they'd taken to lying around on the shore like armoured sunbathers, watching the slow eddies of the bay and letting their suits take the burden of gravity. Suzanne had suggested they'd be even more comfortable lying in the shallows, and the suits proved just as good at coping with an amphibious life. They slept longer and more peacefully here than in the dome, yet they still seemed to need more rest each day.
Floating on the tide, changing filters, sending reports back to base, they whiled away the days. The shabby interior of the dome became less welcoming with each return. The Volkov expedition had been plagued by financial difficulties from the start; Suzanne just hoped there would be enough money to pay for the relief crew, and that they wouldn't be stuck here for another three years. Their relationship had settled into irritability on Suzanne's part matched with lethargy on Laszlo's; their professional interest in life on Volkov had been all but extinguished.
'Sheldrake,' said Suzanne. They were back in the dome, in the workshop, cleaning filters.
'What?'
'Sheldrake. Dr Rupert Sheldrake and the Hypothesis of Formative Causation. Heard of it?'
'No.'
'I prepped it at college. This Sheldrake was a well respected botanist, or something like that, who suddenly came out with the idea that once something new happens — a new compound crystallises, say, or an animal becomes the first of its species to learn a new skill — "morphogenetic fields" are set up which make it more likely that the compound will crystallise in future or that other members of the species will learn the same skill.'
'Sounds crazy.'
'That's what most people said. Lots of critics pointed out that crystals could travel from one place to another and trigger subsequent crystallisations, and so on. He came up with answers to those points, though, and he—'
'Anyone can sound plausible. Remember McCluskey and his "alien ruins" on Triton?'
'You did History of Science too, eh? The thing was, Sheldrake proposed some experiments to test his hypothesis. For instance, teaching mice in London a new trick and carrying out a blind experiment in Los Angeles to see if mice there learnt faster once the London mice had cracked it.'
'Couldn't the mice just get from London to Los Angeles before the second experiment was done?'
'I don't know. Maybe they did the second experiment later the same day, or something. Besides, I think London and Los Angeles are quite far apart. Anyway, Sheldrake managed to persuade some wealthy businessmen to put up money to test the theory out. Various experiments were made, and Sheldrake's supporters claimed the case was proved, but the scientific establishment wasn't going to give in without a fight. Counter-experiments were run, papers presented, symposia held — you know the story. Neither side convinced the other, and since no firm conclusions were reached and most people could get along quite happily without morphogenetic fields, Sheldrake was eventually filed and pretty much forgotten.'
'Why the sudden interest in Mr Sheldrake?'
'His evidence looked pretty convincing to me. Let's suppose he was right. This planet should be just on the verge of producing life—'
'Whatever that is.'
'— whatever that is, okay, self-replicating organisms. Once it happens, according to old Rupert, it should happen more and more often as the morphogenetic effect grows stronger. There's no way of telling how long that process might take: substantial numbers of self-replicators could be produced within a few days.'
'How exciting.'
'If you weren't so bloody negative, you'd realise what that could mean. Rather than a gradual transition to life, it might happen all at once. You know, like Chaos Theory, or did you sleep through that too?'
Sheldrake's fields are subtle things, and it may be that Suzanne's sudden recollection of Sheldrake and his theory was prompted by the morphogenetic field of the self- maintaining, self-replicating organism that had just come into existence in that shallow bay. As the field strengthened, the energy barriers that had previously prevented such organisms from forming were lowered; and as the barriers lowered and more reactions led to life, so the field grew ever stronger. On Earth, the field of a new form of life would have been diluted by the fields of a thousand others, but here, on Volkov, the new field had no competition, and it called all organic matter to attain its level of complexity.
When Laszlo and Suzanne awoke the next morning, they both felt that something had changed. When they checked the readings on the computer, the difference was obvious.
'It's started!' Suzanne said. Laszlo just grimaced.
'Don't like the look of it?'
'It's not that. My stomach's upset.'
'Stay here and I'll go out to take a look.'
'You think I'm going to miss the first interesting thing that's happened since we got here?' He was already climbing into his suit, and was well out into the bay by the time Suzanne had suited up and left the airlock. She had to call him several times on the radio before he answered.
'Laszlo! What can you see?'
'Not a lot. I'm going to check further out — getting harder to move now . . .'
His voice sounded strange, as if he had bubbles in his throat. Suzanne was about to tell him to come back to shore when she saw him bend, as if to look at something. He remained doubled over for half a minute, then collapsed face forwards into the water.
'Laszlo?' No answer. Battling the viscous fluid, she tried to run to his aid.
She had waded halfway to him when the loosening began. The complex partnership of specialised cells that forms the human body had no place among the coalescing protolife of Volkov III. The least specialised cells, those closest to their free-swimming ancestors, were first to heed the morphogenetic call. They began to detach themselves from their fellows; nuclei and other cell components remembered their independent ancestry and attempted to regain it. Tissue ruptured and dissolved, flesh melted, bone crumbled. Suzanne fell forward, the sea of her womb joining its ocean, the river of her gut flooding her torso, the stream of her thought dying in a greater flow. The ghost of a hand opened her suit, and the waters mingled. Two suits wallowed in the gentle swell, waiting for the relief team to arrive.