Dark Ararat (48 page)

“If that had been the case,” he continued, “how would the adaptive radiation of complex forms have progressed? Maybe it would produce an ecosphere very different from that of Earth—but maybe not. Maybe the speculator would have decided that the principles of convergent evolution would still work to produce many of the same sorts of biomechanical forms. Some, of course, would be easier to produce under the newly imagined circumstances, and some less, but there wouldn’t be any reason to assume that any bioform that functioned reasonably well in Earth’s actual ecosphere wouldn’t work equally well in the hypothetical alternative.

“Now, of course, we have another example on which to draw. We have Tyre, our very own dark Ararat. And what do we find on Tyre? We find a world whose ecosphere contains analogues of many of the bioforms that function well in Earth’s ecosphere, but whose fundamental genomics are surprisingly complicated. We find that the bioforms in question are almost all chimeras, even if the great majority of the organisms so far observed are what would be deemed single-species chimeras on Earth. We find that although sexual reproduction is observable at the cellular level in meitoic fusions and separations of what would be somatic cells if they were parts of Earthly organisms, we don’t find any egg- and sperm-producing apparatus.

“In effect, the complex organisms here are capable of having sex with themselves internally, at the cellular level, swapping genes between their chimerical elements. But are they also capable of having sex with each other, not according to the various bird-and-bee transfer models that the complex organisms of Earth have produced but in a much more thorough, much more
all-embracing
fashion? And if not, what do they do instead to produce the variations on which natural selection–driven evolution works?”

This time it was Ike who spotted something moving behind Matthew’s back, and moved the camera in the hope of giving the audience a glimpse of it. Perhaps he succeeded, but by the time Matthew turned there was nothing to be seen, and only the sound of scampering legs to be heard.

Ike’s lips formed the word
reptile
, but he didn’t say it aloud. Matthew took some comfort from the fact that Ike seemed to be following his discourse intently. If he was getting to Ike, who was here in the midst of all this strangeness, surely he was getting to his target audience.

“Whatever they do,” Matthew said, wryly, “they don’t do it very often. They can’t, for precisely the same reason that our emortal cousins back home on Earth have had to revise their own reproductive arrangements. The longer-lived an organism is, the slower its reproductive processes have to be. Organisms that die as a matter of course have to replace themselves relatively quickly in order to maintain their numbers; organisms that don’t have to die match their rates of reproduction to the rates of environmental attrition. In the short term, of course, it doesn’t always work out that way. Sometimes, reproduction runs riot and produces plagues. We all understand that, because it’s the reason we’re here. And one of the reasons why our emortal cousins are still having plenty of children back on Earth is that the rate of environmental attrition is augmented by a steady exodus to the remoter parts of the solar system and beyond. They’ll be here soon enough, all agog to know how we’ve been handling things in the meantime, in our primitive, barbaric,
mortal
fashion.

“Well, we’ll be able to tell them. We’ll know, by then, whether I’m right or wrong about the manner in which the evolution of our enigmatic Ararat’s ecosphere diverged from Earth’s. We’ll know for sure whether all the complex organisms here can reproduce by binary fission, and whether all of them can get together when it seems politic for all-embracing, all-absorbing, all-consuming two- or four- or sixteen- or thirty-two-way sex. We’ll know how many of those glassy globules in the crowns of gargantuan grass stalks and the corkscrew trees are the products of the trees themselves, and how many are the products of other organisms. And we’ll know whether those sketchy pyramids in the humanoids’ drawings are really artifacts, or whether they’re actually reproductive bodies of some kind. And we’ll know whether they built those walls around their city, while they had a city, simply to protect the crops in their fields, or whether there were other things in those fields, periodically, that were precious enough to warrant all the extra protection they could give them. And we’ll know too how the transmission of culture and knowledge across generations of that kind of humanoid compares to the transmission of culture and knowledge that we achieve as we raise and educate our children.

“We’ll know all of that, and more, even if this trek through the purple wilderness bears no fruit at all. But if we’re
lucky
, this could be the time we start finding out. This could be the time when we make some important new discoveries, and begin to fit the pieces of the jigsaw together. This could be the time when we discover whether any of the people contacted by Dulcie Gherardesca are the
same individuals
who built that city, even if they built it thousands of years before. Maybe they won’t remember it, even if they were, but there’s one thing they will know all about, and that’s the cost of evolution on a world like Tyre. They’ll know the cost of a reproductive system in which variation is imported and sorted by chimerization as well as—and perhaps, at the level of whole organisms,
instead of
—sex. Because, you see, the more interesting possibility is that the basketballs and the pyramids and all the other
exceptional
reproductive structures aren’t same-species affairs at all, but something
much
weirder….”

It was at this point that Konstantin Milyukov decided that the monologue had gone on long enough. He could have taken Matthew off the air, as he’d threatened to do, but he evidently didn’t dare. He took the other option, turning the monologue into a dialogue—and Matthew knew that whatever the outcome of this particular battle might be, the war for
Hope
’s future was as good as won.

It was Andrei Lityansky’s voice that actually did the interrupting, but Matthew knew that it was Milyukov who had taken the decision. From his position in front of the camera he had no way of telling whether the engineers on
Hope
had split the screen so that Lityansky’s face could appear alongside his, or whether they were content for the moment to let their own man remain a disembodied voice, but he figured that they would cotton on eventually.

“This is all very fascinating, Dr. Fleury,” Lityansky said, “but you have no evidence to back it up. The notion that organisms as complex as reptiles and mammals could reproduce by binary fission, with or without forming intermediate multispecific conglomerates, is extremely fanciful and very difficult to believe. Surely it is more likely that we simply have not yet identified the means by which gametes are transmitted between individuals or the cellular apparatus that allows womb-analogues to be produced—presumably on a temporary basis—for the early support of embryos.”

“What’s unlikely,” Matthew said, “is that the colonists have been here for
three years
without seeing a single identifiable egg of a single identifiable seed, if there are any to be seen.”

“Not as unlikely, I submit,” Lityansky retorted, “as the proposition that organisms of any great complexity could undergo the kinds of fission and fusion that you are proposing.”

“You’re forgetting the insects, Dr. Lityansky.”

Lityansky walked right into the trap. “There are no insects on Ararat,” he said.

“An interesting observation in itself,” Matthew observed. “It must be significant, must it not, that the bioforms that cannot be observed in our problematic Ararat’s life system are those with the greatest reliance on rigid structures like chitinous plates and shells. The reptile- and mammal-analogues here all have relatively flexible bones, tough enough in association with their attendant sinews and tendons to provide leverage but far more active and alive than
our
bones. But the insects whose example you seem to be forgetting are the Earthly insects that provide us with our most spectacular examples of serial chimerization: the insects that pupate and metamorphose, so that mere maggots become gloriously gaudy flies.”

“One at a time,” Lityansky pointed out.

“Just so,” Matthew agreed. “One at a time, and in pupae that remain stubbornly opaque. But imagine, if you can, a pupation process that could accommodate whole groups of chimerical maggots, which could continue to draw energy from their environment while they went about their leisurely business,
because they had chloroplasts as well as mouths
. Imagine, if you can, that these maggots need not exercise their biochemical ingenuity in transforming themselves into gloriously gaudy flies, but may instead be more modest in their aspirations, at least routinely—but at the same time, more ingenious in their intercourse. And imagine, if you can, that the maggots might be mammals, monkeys or men. What dreams might they have, I wonder, while they slept?”

“Incredible,” Lityansky said, presumably having no idea how feeble the judgment was bound to sound to his audience.

“I’ve crossed the void in a pupa of sorts,” Matthew reminded that audience. “I’ve lived in that cold chrysalis for seven hundred years, and have outlived my species, save only for the people who accompanied me, as fellow travelers within their own pupae or faithful watchmen set to see that no harm came to us. Is
Hope
not a kind of chrysalis too, bearing humans tightly wrapped in steel and further encased in yet more ice? We’ve been unable to fuse with one another, or even to bond, but mightn’t that be reckoned our misfortune, our tragedy? We’re separate from one another; that’s our nature. The only alliances we can form, even in the height of passion, are brief and peripheral encounters—but we’re capable—are we not?—of forging a society in spite of that. We’re capable—are we not?—of working together to the mutual benefit of our species. Imagine, if you can, the society of the people of our purple Ararat. Imagine their memories, their quests, their hopes, their ambitions, their
strangeness
, remembering as you do that even if everything I’ve said is the purest fantasy, they
are
people, possessed of memories, quests, hopes, ambitions, anxieties, terrors … and, most of all, of differences. At which point, if you don’t mind, I’ll sign off. I’m sure you’d like the chance to offer the audience your side of the argument.”

Without giving Lityansky the opportunity to answer, he signaled to Ikram Mohammed to cut the transmission.

“You really are an egomaniac, you know” Ikram Mohammed said, as soon as he had disemburdened his shoulder of the camera. “Imagine,
if you can
… you are going to look
so
stupid if Lityansky turns out to be right.”

“He won’t,” Matthew said. “I might be wrong, but at least I appreciate the magnitude of what needs to be explained and the adventurousness that will be necessary to explain it. Lityansky doesn’t. There might be an explanation that’s just as crazy—or even crazier—than the one I’m trying to put together, but there isn’t one that’s any saner. If Lityansky had ever been down here, he’d know that—but he hasn’t. He’s sat in his lab wearing blinkers, looking at biochemical analyses, without even a decent TV show to broaden his horizons. There may be very good biomechanical reasons why the intelligent inhabitants of this world look like people, but inside, they’re
very
different and
very
strange. We should be glad of that. It’s what we came here for.”

“We came to find a new homeworld. An Earth-clone.”

“That was always the wrong way to think,” Matthew said, with a sigh. “What we should have set our sights on, right from the beginning, was an Earth-with-a-difference. That was what we were always likely to find, and always likely to find more interesting.”

“If you say so,” Ike said. “But you do realize, I suppose, that you’ve used up nearly all your ammunition—and Lityansky now has the floor for at least five times as long as you.”

“They’ll be queuing up everywhere to take him on,” Matthew said. “Every biologist with a pet theory will want to air it, and Milyukov won’t be able to hold them back. Even if no one supports me—and it’s a good enough story to let me hope—the cat’s among the pigeons. The interchange of ideas is well and truly unblocked, and things can only get weirder. All we have to do to get center stage back again is to find the aliens—and that’ll be easy, because we only have to keep walking long enough to make sure they decide that they have to let us find them.”

“I hope you’re right,” Ike said.

Matthew didn’t dare say
so do I
because he didn’t want his companion to know that he was anything less than 100 percent confident. If he’d had a choice, he’d have kept it secret even from himself.

THIRTY-SIX

T
he night passed without incident—which was perhaps as well, given that Matthew slept very deeply. He could have used chemical support to stay awake, at least to share sentry duty with Ikram Mohammed, but he didn’t want to do that because he knew that two consecutive nights without sleep would take a heavy toll of his articulacy and powers of concentration. Fortunately, Ike agreed to take on the chemical burden, on the grounds that he had slept for several hours the night before.

It was not until he woke up again that Matthew realized that he must have been in a slightly abnormal state of consciousness throughout the preceding day. Now that his IT had made good progress with the repair of his damaged shoulder and no longer needed to anesthetize him he was fully restored to his normal self. At first, he felt annoyed with himself for having been carried away with such wild abandon, but having reconsidered the events of the previous two days carefully and critically he decided that his manic state had produced as many good effects as bad ones. It would, at any rate, be far better to go with the flow than to change direction.