Matthew had become conscious of movement at ground level, and had to pause to direct Ike’s attention to it. Ike redirected the beam of the flashlight, quickly enough to display half a dozen leechlike worms as they turned with surprising alacrity and slid away. Knowing that they were probably harmless, Matthew didn’t think it worth interrupting his monologue to comment on their arrival and departure.
“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-embracingfashion? 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, mortalfashion.
“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 individualswho 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 exceptionalreproductive structures aren’t same-species affairs at all, but something muchweirder….”
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 Hopehad 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 yearswithout seeing a single identifiable egg of a single identifiable seed, if there are any to be seen.”