Dark Ararat

by Brian Stableford

  “You think the thing in the drawing really was a pyramid?” Ike queried.

  “Not a stone pyramid. Glass, maybe, or something similar. But not a tomb. Almost the reverse, in fact—but not a straightforward baby factory either. If Lynn can get enough live samples out of the mess we left behind she’ll lay the foundations for a more accurate understanding, but it doesn’t matter much that she won’t be able to feed the information through to me. I’ll have to make the most of my guesswork regardless.”

  “But you’re not going to give me a preview?”

  “I’m still working on the script. Trust me, Ike—if you hold the camera, I’ll improvise the show.”

  Privately, Matthew wasn’t nearly as confident as he seemed, but he didn’t have any alternative. Now the stakes had been laid—and how could he possibly have refused to play or demanded a lower level of risk?—he was committed. If the world would not deliver an adequate story on cue, he would have to make one up.

  Ike’s suspicions about the constancy of the environment were fully justified; it changed so little that its wonders soon became tedious. They heard other creatures, but rarely saw them. Most of the animals that lived hereabouts lived in the canopy, and those that did not fled their approach.

  Matthew opened his second broadcast by reviewing the last few notes that Bernal Delgado had keyed into his notepad.

  “What do they mean?” he asked, rhetorically. “Answer downriver seems obvious enough, and we now believe that ska might mean serial- or super-killer anemone—a reference to the creatures that brought our expedition to the brink of disaster when we cleared the ground beneath the cliff in order to bring our equipment down. But what about the NV that’s supposedly correlated with ER? If anyone has any suggestions as to what those terms might signify, I’ll be glad to hear them when I’m able to take phone calls again, but in the meantime I’m working on the assumption that they stand for nutritional versatility and exotic reproduction. Those are two of the most stubborn mysteries we’ve had to confront as we’ve undertaken a painstaking analysis of the ecosphere of the world that some of you call Ararat and others Tyre.

  “Nutritional versatility may seem at first glance to be a non-problem. So organisms whose activity and tendency to eat everything in sight entitles them to be thought of as animals also have the purple chloroplast-equivalents that allow them to fix solar energy, just as plants do—why shouldn’t they? Isn’t the situation on Earth the surprising one? Why should there be such a clear distinction between Earthly plants and animals when every species might, potentially, enjoy the best of both worlds? Why is nutritional versatility the Earthly province of a few exotic plants like the Venus flytrap?”

  Matthew paused, looking beyond the camera at the man holding it. Ike had been concentrating on the problem of keeping the camera steady, and didn’t immediately register the slight change of attitude. When he did, he took his eye away from ther viewfinder momentarily to acknowledge the contact. He couldn’t shrug his shoulders without shaking the image, so he contrived a gesture of reassurance with a forced smile.

  Having cleared his throat Matthew went on.

  “Well, the logical answer is that once an organism can obtain energy by eating, the extra margin of assistance to be gained from continuing to fix solar energy is too small to be worth keeping, so there’s no selective pressure to retain it. The number of animal species is, of course, limited by the fact that they all have to have something to eat, so there have to be lots of plants around in order to support any animal life at all, but the more animal life there is the more scope is opened up for animals that eat other animals. Plants can only dabble in eating animals if there are enormous numbers of plants around that don’t, and they find it difficult to compete with animals because they’re sedentary. If you’re an eater, it’s a great advantage to be able to get around—waiting for your food to come to you is obviously a second-best strategy—and an organism needs so much energy to get around that if it’s going to do that, it might as well be a specialist eater.

  “So how come this world is so rich in organisms that have kept their ability to fix solar energy in spite of the fact that they can eat and get around? The purple worms don’t even seem to make strenuous efforts to get out into the sun when they can. They lurk in the shadows like any other stealthy predator. How can that make sense?

  “Well, I can only see one way in which it might make sense. If the super-slugs keep chloroplast-analogues they don’t bother to use on a day-to-day basis, there must be times when they do need to use them. Rare times, maybe, but vital times—times when that energy-fixing capability is so vital that it’s carefully sustained through all the times when it’s not. And that’s where the exotic reproduction has to come in.”

  He looked away as a sudden movement caught his eye, but it was only something falling from the canopy. He looked back before Ike moved the camera.

  “The most important difference between life on Earth and life on Ararat, alias Tyre, is that sex isn’t the only way of shuffling the genetic deck so as to produce the variations on which natural selection works. Here, sex involves cells within a chimerical corpus rather than whole organisms. You could say that all the local organisms are actually small-scale colonies of continually cross-breeding individuals. And they’re probably all emortal. That doesn’t matter much to the simplest ones, because they never live long enough to die of old age; they always get eaten long before they reach the limits of their natural life spans. The more complicated ones are a different matter.”

  Matthew hesitated again, but this time it was purely for dramatic effect. Ike understood that, and stayed focused.

  “Earth’s ecosphere was shaped by what Bernal Delgado used to call the sex-death equation. The essence of life is reproduction, but there are two kinds of reproduction. There’s the kind by which organisms make new organisms and the kind by which organisms reproduce themselves. The cells of your body are continually replaced, so that every eight years or so there’s an entirely new you, almost as good as the old one but not quite. We humans—and I mean we in a narrow sense, because there’s a new human race on Earth now that doesn’t have this particular disadvantage—deteriorate like a chain of old-style photocopies, each image becoming a little more blurred than the last. Eventually, we die of growing old, if we haven’t already been killed by injury or disease. In the meantime, though, most of us make a few new individuals, by means of sexual reproduction. We die, but the species goes on—and we owe our existence to the fact that natural selection used to work on the new individuals our remoter ancestors made, weeding out the less effective ones. We owe our intelligence to the slow work of natural selection, which perfected the union of clever hands, keen eyes, and big brains that pushed our forefathers ahead of all their primate cousins.

  “To us, that all seems perfectly natural, and so it is—but it needn’t have been that way. Here, evolution took a slightly different path. Here, sex is routinely confined to the kind of reproduction by which the local equivalents of organisms reproduce themselves. I say the local equivalents of organisms because they’re not the same as Earthly organisms in the sense of being genetic individuals. They’re compounds: chimeras. That seems odd, because they don’t look like the chimeras of the Earthly imagination: they’re not compounds of radically different species, like griffins, and they don’t seem to go in for dramatic metamorphoses—at least, not on a day-to-day basis. But they do reproduce in the other sense, because they have to, and they are subject to the kind of natural selection that drives an evolutionary process, because they have to be. We can see that, just by looking around, because we can see perfectly well that this ecosphere is as complex as Earth’s, and that the logic of convergent evolution has produced all kinds of parallel bioforms. It may seem puzzling at first that we can’t see the second kind of reproduction going on, because no alien visitor to Earth could possibly miss it if he hung around for a year or two, but when you think about it carefully, you can see that it
’s much less puzzling than it seems.”

  Matthew looked up at the canopy and gestured with his arm. Ike looked puzzled for a moment, but then he caught on. There was nothing that a sweep could actually show the viewers by way of dramatizing Matthew’s rhetoric, but it could relieve the tedium by giving them something else to look at. Even an audience as well-educated and interested as the one he was hoping for couldn’t be expected to stare at his face indefinitely without getting a trifle bored.

  “It’s probably simplest to think about it in terms of different timescales,” Matthew went on. “Earth’s timescales are determined by a seasonal cycle, which gives the year a tremendous importance. Although complex organisms like mammals live for many years, the vast majority of Earthly animal species go through an entire life cycle in a year, and most of those only devote a short space of time—maybe as little as a single day—to the business of sexual exchange. The rest of the time is spent lying dormant, growing, and the first kind of reproduction—which often involves considerable metamorphoses. Most Earthly organisms with annual life cycles mass-produce young, but only a few individuals make it through the long phases of the cycle to become the next generation of breeders. The vast majority become food for other organisms.

  “At first glance, it might seem that more complex Earthly animals—like us—have developed a radically different reproductive strategy, as far removed from mass production as you can imagine, but the appearance is slightly misleading. Humans do mass-produce sperms and eggs, but only a few of them ever get together successfully enough to produce a live baby, and by the time a baby is born it’s already gone through the first few phases of its growth and self-reproduction. The whole cycle is slowed up by a factor of twenty to fifty—and biotechnology has shown our cousins back home how to slow it up indefinitely. But here on this world the chimerical individuals that stand in for organisms never had to cope with the tyranny of the seasons, and they never faced the kind of struggle our ancestors had to resist that tyranny. Here on Tyre, even worms are emortal—and every single quasi-organism that ever figured out a better way of avoiding getting eaten has the chance to live forever.”

  Matthew paused again to give Ike the chance to pan around, displaying the purple forest yet again in all its peculiar glory. This time, Matthew, hoped, the view would add something to the argument. By now, the viewers should have learned to see the alien environment through eyes whose curiosity had been cleverly restimulated: eyes informed by a more prolific imagination.

  “Even in that sort of situation,” he added, hoping that his confidence was warranted, “I suppose sex could have established itself as an individual-to-individual thing, but it didn’t. It remained within individuals, and chimerization became the means by which those individuals produced new individuals, in orgies of mass production not unlike those in which most Earthly organisms indulge on a yearly basis—except that here on Tyre, there is no yearly basis. Where complex organisms are concerned, those orgies are much more widely spaced. Even for the reptile-analogues we might have to think in centuries; for the humanoids, who knows? Maybe millennia.

  “In terms of the natural cycles of this world—a world whose ecosphere may be a billion years older than Earth’s—the three years we’ve been here might only be the equivalent of a few hours on Earth: a few hours in the depths of winter, when nothing’s busy with the adventurous kind of reproduction, except maybe people. But in spite of appearances, the people of Tyre aren’t like the people of Earth. They couldn’t be. Convergent evolution might have given them keen eyes and clever hands and self-conscious brains to go with their bipedal stature, but it couldn’t give them a way of making babies, because that’s not the way things work hereabouts. Think about the possible consequences of that difference, if you care to, while I’m off the air. I’ll pick up the story later. In the meantime, thanks for listening.”

  THIRTY-FIVE

  There’s an incoming call,” Ike said, as soon as Matthew had closed his eyes in order to collect himself.

  “What?” Matthew said, automatically reaching for his useless beltphone.

  “Not the phone,” Ike said. “The screen in back of the camera’s rigged to receive as well as to monitor and the fuel cell’s five times as powerful as a phone’s. We can be contacted that way, provided that—”

  “Provided that the other guy has a similar rig,” Matthew finished for him, as enlightenment dawned. “Milyukov.” He took the camera from Ike’s weary arms and looked into the monitor.

  “Captain,” he said. “How good of you to call. Are you enjoying the show?”

  “You are being irresponsible,” Milyukov said, flatly. “You have been awake for little more than ten days. You are not qualified to produce these fantasies.”

  “So put someone who is qualified on the air,” Matthew retorted. “I’m leaving gaps between broadcasts of a couple of hundred of your metric minutes—it’s up to you to decide what to fill them with.”

  “We don’t go in for such time-wasting relics of Earthly barbarism as round-the-clock broadcasting,” was Milyukov’s frosty response.

  “It’s up to you, of course,” Matthew told him. “But you’ve got an audience whether you want to keep it entertained or not. If you don’t want to broadcast I’m sure that you could find people at Base One who’d be only too glad to amplify or challenge my speculations, if you’d care to drop them the relevant equipment.”

  “That would not be appropriate,” the captain said.

  “Not from your viewpoint it wouldn’t,” Matthew agreed, sarcastically. “After all, you wouldn’t want them bringing discussions about the future of the colony into the open at such a delicate time. You certainly wouldn’t want to get involved in an actual debate, would you? You’d rather talk to your own people directly, without anyone having a chance to interrupt. Well, you’ve been well and truly interrupted, and you can either make provision to answer back or keep quiet.”

  “I can take you off the air.”

  “Can you? The camera Ike’s using has enough power to send out a signal for several days. If you interfere with the satlinks your people and the people at Base One will make what provision they can to receive signals directly. You’re not under the delusion, I hope, that Shen Chin Che doesn’t know what’s going on? If there’s one man on Hope who understands the power of TV as well as I do, it’s Shen.”

  “I can certainly keep him out of this,” was Milyukov’s immediate response.

  “Maybe you can and maybe you can’t,” Matthew countered, “but a brave and honest man wouldn’t even try. A man who thought he had a good case to argue would be only too pleased to take his opponent on in open forum.”

  “If you say that on air I’ll cut you off immediately,” the captain insisted, stubbornly.

  “In propaganda terms, that would be the next best thing to cutting your own throat,” Matthew told him. “You can’t hide any more. You can fight, but you can’t run away. It was always bound to come to this, as you should have realized before you brought the first colonist out of the freezer.”

  “There was no evidence that Ararat was inhabited by intelligent aliens,” Milyukov said, mistaking the nature of the argument yet again. “We had no reason to think that the colonization could not go ahead as we had planned.”

  “You live in a world with very narrow horizons, Captain Milyukov,” Matthew observed. “Maybe that’s not so surprising, given that you’re fourth- or fifth-generation spaceborn, but there’s really no excuse for it. You brought all of Earth with you, and all of the universe too. You only had to use your VE-apparatus intelligently. You really don’t understand what’s happening here, do you? If you’d had the slightest idea of the true significance of what we’ve found here, you wouldn’t have wasted a year hoping it didn’t exist and doing everything within your meager power to prevent its discovery.”

  “I will not permit the colony to withdraw,” Milyukov said. “No matter what you find or what you say, I will not withdraw the co
lonists.”

  “Because you can’t stand the thought of being outnumbered and outvoted in the corridors of your precious worldlet,” Matthew said. “If Hope were to become an observation station, manned by Shen’s Chosen People, what power and reward would there be in the rank of ship’s captain? Well, so what? Can’t you see that you have a chance to inscribe your name in the annals of human history? I can only transmit to you and yours, but you can transmit to the solar system. You won’t get a reply for a hundred and sixteen years, but you can set yourself in place as anchorman of the greatest show off Earth. Why stop me when you can simply take my place, for the only audience that really matters?”

  “That’s not the kind of man I am,” the captain told him. “I repeat, I will not withdraw the colony. Disembarkation of the remaining colonists will be resumed whether you can provide final proof that the world is inhabited or not. Whatever you say while you have the attention of crew and colonists alike, I have the power and the authority to make certain of that.”

  “Of course you have,” Matthew assured him, and switched off the camera’s power. He knew that he had to economize. “Let’s go,” he said to Ikram Mohammed.

  The two of them started walking, immediately falling into step. They held to the same heading they’d been following all day, although they hadn’t seen any obvious sign of a trail for some time. They both knew that they had no chance of catching up with the aliens if the aliens didn’t want to be caught, but it wasn’t a topic they wanted to discuss.