2312

“But don’t they know how high the ocean will go?” Kiran asked. “I mean, the water’s already up there in the atmosphere, right?” Gesturing briefly at their eternal blizzard. “Why wouldn’t the models get it right?”

His teammates shrugged. One or two were giving each other looks that indicated to Kiran that this question needed to be added to his Unsolved Mysteries of the Solar System file. It was a big file. One of the mates finally said, “There are choices to be made. Some basins flooded or not flooded.”

They took him to a sidewalk cafe backing the new seawall, overlooking another little marina standing over black rock. Each round table of the cafe had its own umbrella, despite the bigger umbrella of the tent over the whole town. They were almost the only ones there, at first; then others began to trickle in, and a trio of guitarists set up and began to play, after which people started dancing. Party in a dry marina, in a night-dark storm by an empty sea. The heat lamps were on, and if you danced long enough, you could even warm your feet up. Kiran kept dancing with someone from his new unit, a young woman-yes, the old male-female magnetism still the most reliable guide to sex, as far as Kiran was concerned; and he could see variants of that being acted out all over the dance floor. Actually it was often hard to tell who was what, and this gal in fact was half a meter taller than he was, and pretty masculine and assertive at that, and in response Kiran was ready to melt like a girl who wants to get pregnant that very night. Whatever! He liked looking up at her face!

He tried talking. “ Lyanhe? Shengren syingyu? ” Union? Stranger sexual desire?

“ Syin pengyu syingyu,” she said, mocking him.

New friend sexual desire, his spectacles wrote on the world in red. Even better!

“ Tyauwu,” she ordered him. Dance.

Extracts (10)

Take some carbon dioxide, ammonia, formaldehyde, hydrocyanic acid, and salt. Put them in water and heat. Reduce to hot goo at the bottom of the pan; add more salt water. Repeat until you have a thick broth containing amino acids, sugars, and fatty acids. Throw in seasoning to taste. Each reduction and rehydration will thicken the broth further, until it includes many newly created nitroglycopeptides, and they will begin to form the protopolymers you need.

Some of the fatty acids will have hydrophobic tails and will tend therefore to stick together aligned with each other. These masses are your protomembranes, which in the heat of your stove top will wrap into tubes, also spheres with holes in them. Inside these little tart shells, a stuffing of protopolymers will clump together in a variety of macromolecules. These begin the chemical breaking and joining we call catalysis.

Chemical patterns in your new stuffing will yield similar combinations most of the time, and these new combinations will match up chemically in ways that can be read off each other; so information is now burbling around in your stuffing, and into and out of the hole in the cell wall will come useful molecules for more reactions. Linking up with patterned molecules already inside, these characteristic actions are coded by the basic chemistry, so they will keep occurring. What began as small accidental connections will link together in patterned ways, until the same polymers are always replicated, creating information contained in the longest chains to have been cooked up. At that point you have ribonucleic acid, RNA, and you are close to being ready.

The new RNA encodes the making of proteins, which in their three-dimensional sculptural glory are capable of creating a huge variety of tastes and smells. “Division of labor” in the proteins and what they accomplish is one way to describe the proliferation of replicating forms, but also, it’s a richer brew; it tastes better; there are micro-tastes within the taste. Your RNA will turn amino acids into particular flavors. (The technical term among biologists is “translation.”)

Finally some of your RNA will melt together into strands of DNA, a more stable form because of its double helix. Then DNA will take over the role of protein expression, although by way of the creation of messenger RNA. (That would be “transcription.”) Information at that point will move from DNA to RNA to proteins, and the now living cell will reproduce itself, divide up functions in ever-more-versatile larger organisms, and so on.

You have cooked up life from scratch! Eat it with gusto.

Quantum Walk (1)