General consternation. Static electricity was unavoidable in the ship, and in the microgravity of the spine, fields of static electricity could condense humidity out of the air and create concentrations of water, and then keep floating water drops from touching any sidewalls, until they grew to sizes like this one. And there was no easy way for the ship to be provided with sensors that would detect such water drops, which could gather in many so-called dead places in the spine, and even in functioning spaces like this electrical cabinet. Then also, as there were thin films of bacteria (also viruses and archaea) covering every surface in the ship, bacterial growths were almost sure to follow in any water droplets that condensed.
After the trauma on Aurora, many were made nervous by this reminder that microflora and -fauna were everywhere among them. The ship had always been stuffed with such life-forms, of course, and all the larger animal bodies as well; any analogy to Aurora was a false one. But the people in the ship lived by so many highly questionable analogies, it was no doubt difficult for them to know where to draw the line (so to speak).
Freya was asked to join a task force assembled to go through the ship looking for any signs of condensation, also any resulting concentrations of mold, fungus, and bacteria.
“The invitation is really to Devi,” Freya said to Badim.
He agreed, but also urged her to join the study.
The results of their investigation disturbed them. The ship was indeed alive with microbial life, as everyone had known, but without regarding it as a problem; it was just the way things were inside any structure that included any life at all. Now, however, they had seen the problems in the newborns, and their crop yields were coming up consistently smaller than during the voyage out, even though the same plants were receiving the same light and nutrients. Birth weights were down in all the animals aboard, while miscarriages were up. So the living nature of the ship’s interior became something ominous and foreboding.
“Look, it’s always been this way,” Freya reminded the executive council when the task force met with the council to discuss it. “There’s no way to sterilize the ship when it’s a set of biomes. It’s alive, that’s all.”
No one could disagree. Howbeit their uneasiness, they simply had to live in a rich broth of bacteria, in a cumulative microgenome that was so much larger than their own genome that it was beyond a complete reckoning, especially as it was fluid and always changing.
But some bacteria were harmful. Same with archaea, fungi, viruses, prions, viris, and v’s. They needed to make distinctions, as part of their ability to keep a healthy biosphere going. Some pathogens had to be tolerated, others had to be killed, if possible; but any attempt to kill bacteria meant that resistant surviving strains of that species would become more dominant and more resistant, in the usual way of things at the micro levels of life, or at all levels of life perhaps.
Dangerous to try to kill things, Freya reminded them. She knew full well, with a sinking sense that she was remembering her earliest memories, that Devi had believed that trying to kill any invasive species usually created more problems than it solved. A destabilized microbiome often caused more harm than anything a balanced microbiome could inflict. Better, therefore, to try to balance things with the least amount of intrusion. Subtle touches, all designed to finesse things for balance. Balance was the crucial thing. Teeter-totters, gently teeter-tottering up and down. Devi had even been an advocate of everyone getting an inoculation of helmiths, meaning ringworms, to give them better resistance to such parasites later. She had been a bit fanatical in that regard, as in so many.
The council and everyone else agreed with Freya on this matter; it was the common wisdom. But they were beginning to suffer problems none of them had seen before. The oldest person aboard was only seventy-eight years old. Median age was thirty-two. None of them had seen all that much in their short lives, and the complex of problems that Aram called zoo devolution was new to them, if not in the abstract, then in the lived experience.
As teams continued to inspect the ship, they found that some of the bacteria living around weld points, and in the gaps and cracks between walls and components, were eating away at the physical substrates of the ship. The corrosion was not chemical but biochemical. As they investigated further they found that all the ship’s walls, windows, framing, gears, and glues had been altered by bacteria, first chemically and then physically and mechanically, in that their function was becoming impaired. Protozoa and amoeba, bacteria and archaea were found on the gaskets around windows and lock doors, also on the components of spacesuits, and in cable insulation, and in the interior panels and chips of the electrical systems, including the computers. Electrical components were often warm, and there was moisture in the air. They were finding microorganisms that lived on and degraded carbon steel, even stainless steel. And anywhere two different kinds of materials met, the microbial life living in the meeting points of these materials created galvanic circuits, which over time corroded both materials. Pitted metal; etched glass; eaten, digested, and excreted plastics: everything had stiffened and disintegrated right in place, without moving except under the forces of the centrifugal rotation of the ship, and the pressure of the ship’s acceleration. Little creatures numbering in the quadrillions or quintillions—it was impossible to get a good estimate, much less a real count—all grew, and ate, and died, and were born and grew again, and ate again. They were eating the ship.
Life is part of the necessary matrix of life, so the ship had to be alive. And so the ship was getting eaten. Which meant that in some respects, the ship was sick.
The weekly meetings of the bacterial task force were similar to the ones Freya had attended as a child, when Devi had plopped her in the corner with some blocks, or paper and pens. Now she sat at the big table, but with about as little to say as when she was a girl. The plant pathologists spoke, the microbiologists spoke, the ecologists spoke. Freya listened and nodded, looking from face to face.
“The organisms in that big water droplet are mostly Geobacter and fungi, but there’s also a prion in there that no one has ever seen on the ship, one that wasn’t there in the beginning.”
“Well, but wait. You mean it wasn’t known about in the beginning. No one saw it. But it had to be there. No way it evolved here from some kind of precursor, not in the time since this ship was built.”
“No? Are you sure?”
The microbiologists discussed this for a while. “Lots of things have had time enough to evolve quite a bit,” one of them said. “I mean that’s our problem, right? The bacteria, the fungi, maybe the archaea, they’re all evolving at faster rates than we are. All organisms evolve at different rates. So discrepancies are growing, because it isn’t a big enough ecosystem for coevolution to be able to bring everything into balance. That’s what Aram has been saying all along.”
Aram was brought into the next meeting to discuss this. “It’s true,” he said. “But I agree that this prion is unlikely to have evolved in the ship. I think it’s just another stowaway, marooned out here with the rest of us. It’s just that now we’ve seen it.”
“And is it poisonous?” Freya asked. “Will it kill us?”
“Well, maybe. Sure. I mean, you don’t want it inside you. That’s the thing about prions.”
“Are you sure it couldn’t have evolved here from some precursor form?”