“Life on Earth is of course built on oxygen-carbon chemistry. But a wide range of such compounds are possible under chemical law. If you analyze the contents of carbon-compound material scraped from a lifeless comet, you get a broad, smooth distribution like this.” A flat, even curve. “An indiscriminate melange of many compounds. Whereas if you analyze a scraping of my skin, for instance, a sample from a living being, you get this.” A spiky distribution showing a heavy concentration of certain compounds, nothing of others. “We call this the building-block principle, and it’s believed to be a universal feature of life. There is a strong selection toward standard building blocks, you see: living things from Earth use the same handful of key components—amino acids, sugars—over and over, out of all the theoretically possible compounds—”
“A Xeelee nightfighter isn’t made of amino acids,” Gramm growled.
“No. But look here.” Nilis showed displays of substructures he had observed in the Xeelee’s design, in its condensate hull, even its spacetime-defect wings. The distributions were spiky. “You see? A characteristic building-block pattern. And that has certain consequences. Of course any life-form must have certain features—notably an information store.”
He began to speculate about how a Xeelee genome might be stored. A genotype of an organism was the internal data store that defined that organism’s growth and structure; Nilis’s own genotype was stored in DNA. The phenotype was the expression of that data, like Nilis’s body. Nilis said that extended quantum structures had been discovered in the “spine” of the craft. So far it had only been possible to hack into the simpler communications loops that controlled the ship’s basic operations. But if he was right, somewhere in there was stored the equivalent of Xeelee DNA.
“They may reproduce through some exotic principle, much more sophisticated than our own molecule-splitting. We know they use quantum entanglement to communicate. Perhaps for a Xeelee, giving birth is more like teleportation, making a copy of oneself outside the body.” He imagined what might be possible if human hackers could break into that genotype, how Xeelee technology could be hijacked. . . .
His listeners took this in with resentment and impatience. Pirius thought it was remarkable how a genius like Nilis could continually misjudge the mood of his audience. Pirius himself was sanguine. He had become a veteran of incomprehensible technical briefings long before he left Arches Base, and he knew how to keep up a show of attentiveness while letting his thoughts wander.
Pirius had picked up some gossip from the locals. An ice-coated ball of rock, Enceladus wasn’t even Saturn’s largest moon—that was called Titan. On Titan, vast factory ships cruised seas of hydrocarbon slush and processed it into nano-food, to feed ever-hungry Earth. Of course, these days all this was controlled by the agencies of the Coalition, but Titan had a racy history. Titan had once been the most populous human world beyond the orbit of Earth itself. Even now—so the locals informed him—in the great ports with their ice-carved harbors, where kilometer-long factory ships put in to offload their stores and hundred-meter-high waves lapped like dreams, there were exotic adventures to be had, if you knew where to look.