The Island - Peter Watts

Peter Watts 9 The Island
nature has any right to be.
For the first time in millennia, I miss my cortical pipe. It takes
forever to saccade search terms onto the keyboard in my head, to
get the answers I already know.
Numbers come back. "Chimp. I want false-color peaks at 335,
500 and 800 nanometers."
The shroud around 428 lights up like a dragonfly's wing, like an
iridescent soap bubble.
"It's beautiful," whispers my awestruck son.
"It's photosynthetic," I tell him.
Phaeophytin and eumelanin, according to spectro. There are
even hints of some kind of lead-based Keipper pigment, soaking
up X-rays in the picometer range. Chimp hypothesizes something
called a chromatophore: branching cells with little aliquots of
pigment inside, like particles of charcoal dust. Keep those particles
clumped together and the cell's effectively transparent; spread
them out through the cytoplasm and the whole structure darkens,
dims whatever EM passes through from behind. Apparently there
were animals back on Earth with cells like that. They could
change color, pattern-match to their background, all sorts of things.
"So there's a membrane of— of living tissue around that star," I
say, trying to wrap my head around the concept. "A, a meat
balloon. Around the whole damn star."
"Yes," the chimp says.
"But that's— Jesus, how thick would it be?"
"No more than two millimeters. Probably less."
"How so?"
"If it was much thicker, it would be more obvious in the visible
spectrum. It would have had a detectable effect on the von
Neumanns when they hit it."
"That's assuming that its— cells, I guess— are like ours."
"The pigments are familiar; the rest might be too."
It can't be too familiar. Nothing like a conventional gene would
last two seconds in that environment. Not to mention whatever
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