BOUNDARY(64)

"Well, no one doubted Bemmie was smart," A.J. commented. "Still, that's a hell of a brain. Great for zombies, though. Brrraiiiiins!"



The idea of a Bemmie zombie was creepy, Helen thought, since they were actually looking at a mummified corpse. "Look at all these other organs. That must be the digestive tract. Right there at the mouth and going down—"



"How do you know that's not his respiratory system?"



Helen could tell that was just a contrarian question. But she answered anyway, tracing the complexities revealed with her eyes, trying to wring every last bit of information from the image.



"First, because the area it comes through has a number of structures that look like they were made for cutting and crushing—a mouth, just like we thought when we looked at the fossil. Second, because the structures trailing down here look an awful lot like flattened intestines. And, third, because I think these are his respiratory system."



A.J. looked at "these," which were a pair of structures extending from slitlike areas on each side of Bemmie. "Okay, yeah, I'd probably agree, at least at a first guess."



"You'd damn well better. Who's the professional reconstruction expert and who's the glorified photographer here?"



"Fine, lemme give you another daguerreotype for your collection."



Another view of Bemmie shimmered into view next to the first, this one done in different wavelengths.



"Oh, now there's some nice structure! That must be the equivalent of cartilage and connective tissue. Look how it layers along the shoehorns. Weird, it seems very heavily set, though. A lot more than I remember the limbs of the fossil being."



Helen gnawed on her lower lip for a few seconds. "I think I know what caused that. Drying out retracted the arms. I'll bet the extension and contraction tissue was pretty hydrophilic, even for living tissue."



"I dunno. Depends on the mechanism. As I recall, you've been arguing with yourself for the past couple of years on just how it managed the 'extend' part of that movement. Memory molecules, crystal structure, all that kind of thing."



He glanced back at the other view. "Getting back to the digestive and respiration systems, there's one area he was built better than us, if you're right. Bemmie never choked to death on a chicken bone. If they ate chickens. I wonder what he did eat? Was Bemmie vegetarian?"



"I severely doubt it, unless it was from personal conviction or ideology. His eating mechanism doesn't look all that much like ours at first glance, naturally. But my gut reaction—pardon the pun—looking at his, um, dentition, and the internal structure you've got here, is that Bemmie was an omnivore, like us."



"Just a guess though, right?"



"Yeah. An educated one, but still a guess. We don't have any idea what plants or their equivalent were like on his homeworld, or what other species existed besides themselves. But there are also these structures on the arms. I found some of them in our fossil Bemmie, but I couldn't be sure what they were. Looks like one of my guesses was right, however. They exist on the inside of the arms or tentacles in the front, and I'll bet the lumps of tissue under them indicate that they can be raised and lowered. Sort of like a cat's retractable claws."



"They do look kinda like claws. Or shark teeth even, or thorns."



"And where they're located indicates they were used to grab something and prevent it from moving away. And not gently, either. That looks to me like a predatory creature's design. Squid have some similar hooked structures on their tentacles. The length of the digestive system, though, is really over the top for something that's an obligate carnivore. At least here on Earth, the digestive tracts of meat eaters tend to be significantly less complex because, well, you're trying to convert meat into meat, rather than plants into meat."



"And that funnel sort of thing around the mouth. Like lips?"



"Yes, I think so. It's got more structure around it, though, from what I can tell. I'm not sure, but I think that it might not look so simple if it were still alive. Maybe not like pedipalps or other side organs, but not just a smooth funnel of tissue, either."



A.J. was studying other external features. "They didn't wear clothes, exactly, but they did have sort of harnesses and other things. I'll bet that's either jewelry or else some kind of communicator badge up there."



"Embedded in the skin? Well, I guess that tells us that they did have pretty tough skin."



"Not necessarily. After all, we get ears and other body parts pierced just for vanity. Still, at that size it probably did have pretty tough skin, like a rhino or elephant."