Weekly Drabble #75: Keeping the Balance (Patreon)

This week's drabble prompt is 'lots of rabbits' from ubderdrops. Here, we return once more to the beautiful world of Geode and this time, George actually gets to spend time in a lab! Won't that be a nice change of pace from risking life and limb?

~

Keeping the Balance:

Panspermia was one held to be a position held by crackpots, kooks and believers in little green men, but by the twenty-first century it had become accepted as a legitimate theory and gained widespread traction in scientific circles, though actual evidence was understandably hard to come by.

Geode was a glistening datapoint in support of the panspermia hypothesis. How else, the theory went, could organisms that grew up on worlds light-years apart be physiologically compatible with each other? There were jokes about the poor phrasing of that term, but compatibility referred to more than sexual congress. Boreflies were one such example. The fact that much of Geode’s wildlife could eat, digest and receive nutrition from Terran organisms was another. And, of course, that whatever had created the Lucifers had found fertile ground in human genetics and anatomy. How else, the proponents of panspermia, asked, could this be possible unless both worlds had some biochemical commonalities, seeded from the same extrasolar source. It might have taken a comet or asteroid carrying organic molecules thousands of years to pass from 51 Pegasi to Sol (or the other way around), but that was nothing in evolutionary terms. Both worlds could be the children of the same wandering parent. 

Examining that possibility was one of the goals of the Bellerophon and now Verendrye expeditions. The former’s research was all but lost, but the existence of the Lucifers spoke as much as any scientific study. As far as the latter went… so far, the results were inconclusive. In the meantime, the human population of Geode was well aware of how readily their new home’s wildlife would use the intruders for sustenance.

Use them… or change them.

“It’s a rabbit,” Lisa du Med said as she walked into the lab, brushing past George as the male biologist stared at the animal in a quarantine enclosure. Both expeditions had brought with them a plethora of Terran animals, both aboard ship and as embryos for later development. After the final on-site tests confirmed the environment was safe and compatible with Terran fauna, Bellerophon established outdoor ranches and paddocks for their livestock. The Verendrye colonists had diverted industrial production and resources to building massive sealed and filtered enclosures for theirs. 

The animal in front of Mbenge was one reason for that. Instead of a fluffy white or brown animal, most of its fur had fallen out and its skin was a coal hue, with large bubble-like bioluminescent organs along its flanks and spine, currently dark.

It had been caught by one of the survey groups. They’d been scouring Looksgood in hope of anything from the Bellerophon colonists. What remained of the original colony had been picked clean, but every so often, the optimistic or the adventurous would make another trip to the abandoned city. Despite being relatively close to Secondplace, most of the Verendrye expedition avoided the burned-out and overgrown ruins of Geode’s first colony. Just entering the city’s borders felt like a weight settling on you – the knowledge of what had happened to the thousands that had lived there. No one would go so far as to say it was haunted, but it was close enough. What hadn’t been gutted by the fires or destroyed by two decades of neglect was a testament to the final days of the city’s existence. The fear, the terror, the desperate escape to the Bellerophon and the fate of those who hadn’t. It was a monument to how much this beautiful world hated its new inhabitants.

In a manner of speaking, the same could be said for the animal George was currently watching. “I know it’s a rabbit,” he said. “I was just thinking.”

“About what?”

During the events that led to the destruction of the Bellerophon expedition, most of the animals they’d brought with them, or produced in vitro had been killed one way or another. Some hadn’t; some had even managed to survive two decades on Geode. There was a small population of cows, some feral dogs and cats and a surprising number of rabbits. None of them had become destructive or invasive; Geode’s own ecosystem appeared to have that situation well in hand. There’d been reports of odd behaviours in some of the wild Terran stock and claims of physical mutations, but until now the latter had never been confirmed. There were fears that whatever infection had created the Lucifers might have affected or be carried by other Terran animals.

And that was why one rabbit was within an airtight cage and inside a clean room. Every possible precaution was being taken, but it looked like it was all for naught. There’d been hopes that this mutation would provide some insight into the infection that had run rampant through the Bellerophon colonists, but initial tests indicated otherwise. The rabbit’s transformation was due to a parasitic infestation, one not shared by the Lucifers.

The smaller mammal’s bioluminescent patches were produced by the organism inside it as a way to signal predators to find and eat its host and allow it to move into the next stage in its life cycle. There were worms on Earth that did something similar – they would enter the eyestalks of their snail and slug hosts and develop bright-coloured stripes and begin pulsing to draw the attention of birds. Other parasites would get into the brains of ants and force them to stand on the tips of grass stalks to be eaten by grazing cattle. Aside from the changes in skin coloration and presence of bioluminescence, there was no similarities between the rabbit’s transformation and that of the Lucifers. The parasite itself had been genetically matched to organisms removed from larger predators. Rather than the means by which Geode had turned thousands of people into predators, they’d found another way it kept its invaders in check.

It was still valuable data and it answered several questions already, but it wasn’t the answer.

“About,” George began, watching the coexistence of a Terran and Geode animal as the former tried its best to survive and the latter did it’s best to kill it. “That it’s a good thing we have lots of rabbits.”