Dark Ararat (46 page)

Lynn shook her head, but all she said to Ike was: “He’s in rehearsal already.”

Ike shrugged his shoulders. “We have to get going,” he said. “Will you be all right?”

“Sure,” she said. “If you don’t come back, I’ll be the sole survivor. And if there are any interesting formations in that unholy mess we made on the shore, I’ll be the one to find them. Just make sure you find Dulcie, if it’s humanly possible.”

Matthew and Ike had already triangulated the location where Dulcie’s phone still lay, and it only took them a few minutes to reach it. The battery was still active and the line was still open, but Matthew turned it off as soon as he had picked it up. It was less than a kilometer from the place where the bubble-tent had been pitched, but they were already in the depths of the so-called grassland.

It only took a slight effort of imagination for Matthew to recover the impression of being very tiny, lost in a wilderness made strange by inflation. For the first time, he could see why the crew’s mapmakers had decided to favor this place with such an odd label. Although the structures surrounding him were certainly high enough to be considered elements of a forest, the “tree trunks” really were remarkably reminiscent of wheat stalks and blades of lawn grass. Some were rounded and very smooth, others spatulate and barbed. When he looked up into the canopy he could see structures reminiscent of corncobs and structures reminiscent of barley heads, although there were others that looked, quite literally, like nothing on Earth. From above, the canopy had looked like an ocean stirred by waves and littered with flotsam, but from below it seemed as if he were staring up into the vaulted ceiling of an infinite crystal cathedral, lavishly decorated with all kinds of sprays and chandeliers, droplets and honeycombs.

The light that crept through this bizarre prismatic array was by no means bright, but it was strangely even. Such undergrowth as it supported looked more like a slightly undulant carpet of vitreous tiles than the mossy leaf litter of an Earthly forest but it did seem to be
alive
. It was easy to walk on, and the supportive stalks and blades were far enough apart to allow perfectly comfortable passage for Matthew and Ike. Forewarned by experimental forays, they had not troubled to bring a chain saw although they both had machetes dangling from their belts in case they ran into different conditions in some future phase of their journey.

“I think they went this way,” Ike said, having examined the ground around the spot from which Dulcie had made her final call. “The ground doesn’t take footprints very well, but you can see where junctions between the platelets have cracked. If we follow this heading and keep an eye out for more signs, we’ll probably be moving in the right direction—unless you have a better idea.”

“First things first,” Matthew said. He had always intended to make his first broadcast from the place where the phone had fallen—or, as he represented it, the very spot where the momentous and long-anticipated first contact between humankind and intelligent aliens had taken place.

He explained to his audience that he and Ike were going to keep on walking in the direction in which the aliens had been heading before they paused to capture their inquisitive pursuer, on the assumption that whatever destination they had had in mind must lie that way. He played back a recording of Dulcie’s last message in order to establish a “picture” of the aliens in the minds of his audience, and he asked Ike to pan the camera over the canopy and the ground, pointing out the salient features.

He refrained from mentioning that Dulcie had killed Bernal Delgado, and silently hoped that Vince Solari would have the sense to do likewise. Having made the computations necessary to convert Earthly hours into the metric hours that had displaced them aboard
Hope
, he promised to make further twenty-minute broadcasts at regular intervals, whenever he and Ike paused to rest—every two ship-hours, approximately, except for one longer interval that would allow him to get some sleep.

“What are you going to tell them?” Ike wanted to know, once the camera was off and they had started walking. “The scenery’s not going to change much, so there isn’t a lot to show them except for your face.”

“I’m going to give them a grand tour of the enigmas of local genomics,” he said. “I’m going to offer some intelligent speculations about possible solutions to those puzzles. It doesn’t matter whether I’m right or not as long as I keep pumping out food for thought and material for discussion. You’re probably right about the scenery, but its very constancy might be a useful talking point. I suspect that interesting changes happen
very
rarely, barring episodes like the one we precipitated with our blundering, but it’s not impossible that we might come across bigger versions of the formations you had to scorch in order to get rid of the stinging slugs. I’d really like to see a pyramid, although my gut feelings tell me that they’re once-in-a-century or once-in-a-millennium constructions in these parts.”

“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.