Dark Ararat Page 12

  Lityansky frowned, partly because his prepared script had been subverted and partly because he was now aware that he had underestimated his pupil. Like Milyukov, the genomicist had seen tapes of Matthew’s TV performances, and like Milyukov, he had formed an unjustly modest estimate of Matthew’s intelligence.

  “As you can see,” he said, although he probably knew well enough how opaque the electron micrographs were to anyone unfamiliar with their context, “the local organisms do manifest a physiological process analogous to sexual reproduction. Individual cells do exchange genetic information—but it’s not meiosis because it doesn’t produce gametes. The exchanges are between different somatic components of chimerical mosaics.”

  It took Matthew a few seconds to get his head around that. Put very crudely, what Lityansky was saying was that different bits of local organisms had sex with other bits of the same organism, which had a different genetic makeup, but that whole organisms didn’t have sex with one another. Sex on Ararat/Tyre wasn’t a matter of individuals at all; it was strictly a cell-on-cell business within chimerical individuals.

  If he’d been talking to a man like Bernal Delgado, Matthew would have called it mind-boggling, but Andrei Lityansky didn’t seem to be the kind of man whose mind went in for that kind of thing.

  “We’ve observed this in a wide range of primitive plants and animals,” Lityansky added, while Matthew was catching up. “We assume the same thing goes on in higher plants and animals, but that’s only speculation at present.”

  “Why?” Matthew asked, genuinely surprised.

  “Why what?” Lityansky retorted.

  “Why is it only speculation? Why haven’t you found out?”

  “The live specimens brought up into orbit had to be accommodated to the constraints of our biocontainment facilities,” Lityansky told him.

  In other words, Matthew thought, Lityansky had never seen an alien creature he couldn’t fit on to a microscope slide.

  “The work we’ve done on Hope,” Lityansky continued, “has consisted of fundamental biochemical, genomic, and proteonomic analyses. The biologists at Base One have had more opportunity to observe more complex organisms in the wild, but their lab work has had to be devoted almost entirely to the practical problems of adapting Earthly crops and animals to live in native environments.”

  “That’s ridiculous!” Matthew said. “Are you telling me that you’ve been confronted for three years with a world whose higher plants and animals don’t appear to have any sex organs or to produce any young, but that you haven’t made any significant attempt to find out how they do reproduce?”

  “What I’m telling you,” Lityansky said, frostily, “is that we’ve had too few people working on far too many problems to have made as much progress as we would have liked, or as much progress as we need. We had no idea, when we began, how strange the physiology of the most primitive organisms would turn out to be, but we have taken the view that if we can unravel the mysteries of the simpler entities first, we will then stand a far better chance of understanding the mysteries of the more complex.”

  “So how do the simple entities reproduce themselves?” Matthew wanted to know.

  “Some by simple fragmentation, others by sporulation.”

  “Just like a lot of simple entities on Earth,” Matthew pointed out. “Not much help there in figuring out how the monkeys and the weasels do it. What’s the favorite hypothesis?”

  “I don’t have a favorite hypothesis,” the bearded man told him. “That’s not the way I work.”

  “So what’s the favorite hypothesis of the people who do have favorite hypotheses? What was Bernal Delgado’s favorite hypothesis?”

  Lityansky pursed his lips. “Professor Delgado had become fond of speculating about gradual chimerical renewal,” he admitted. He seemed reluctant to dignify the phrase with elaboration, let alone explanation, but it only took Matthew a moment to connect the term to its most celebrated referent.

  “Gradual chimerical renewal is a fancy name for the Miller Effect,” he said. “That’s not reproduction. That’s a kind of emortality.”

  “Gradual chimerical renewal is a general concept, one of whose specific instances is the so-called Miller Effect,” Lityansky said, using pedantry to avoid simple agreement.

  “I get it,” Matthew said. “It doesn’t remove the need for an account of reproduction, but it might explain why rates of reproduction are so slow that it’s almost impossible to observe immature individuals.”

  “It’s pure speculation,” Lityansky pointed out, “and it’s very difficult to put any such hypothesis to the test. There’s no way to establish how long any individual is potentially capable of living if you can only observe it for a limited period of time. May I return to matters of which I do have some reliable knowledge?”

  “I’m sorry I interrupted,” Matthew said, hoping that he didn’t sound too insincere.

  “We have been able to study the various ways in which the simpler chimeras are compounded,” Lityansky went on, “and the ways in which certain individuals seem to hybridize types that would have been considered on Earth to be different species. Earth wasn’t entirely devoid of natural chimeras, of course. Mules and zeehorses, tigons and ligers were the most obvious—all compounds of closely related species, and they were unable to reproduce themselves because they were almost invariably sterile. There were, however, others far less obvious. In species where multiple embryos were simultaneously implanted, producing litters of fraternal twins, two embryos would occasionally fuse into a single individual. If the result was a fetus in fetu it usually aborted spontaneously, but in rare instances it resulted in a mosaic individual: a single-species chimera not unlike one of those produced by artifice for same-sex couples. The phenomenon was not unknown even in humans, although very rare.

  “After it became possible in the late twentieth century to identify such same-sex chimeras by DNA analysis, some studies did suggest that animals of that kind could manifest a kind of hybrid vigor, because the fact that their individual tissues included two complete sets of chromosomes instead of one made them less vulnerable to genetic deficiency diseases. That was irrelevant from the viewpoint of natural selection, because each individual sperm or egg produced by a mosaic individual could only be a product of one set of genes …”

  “But if the mosaic identity had been heritable,” Matthew put in, “then Earthly mosaics might have had sufficient selective advantages over single-genome individuals to have become the norm!”

  Lityansky had grown used to Matthew’s interruptions by now, and accepted this one with better grace. “Perhaps. Here, where sexual exchanges occur between the cells of chimerical individuals rather than between the whole individuals, and where primitive reproduction is a matter of fragmentation and sporulation, the fundamental situation is very different. We can only speculate as to what happened in the earliest phases of evolution on Ararat, but the situation now is that sexual exchanges between chimerically associated genomes produce new types of somatic cells, some of which are then shed, or encapsulated as spores, which may then meet and fuse with the similar products of other individuals, eventually growing into new chimerical wholes. The vast majority of those we’ve so far catalogued are equivalent to Earthly same-species chimeras, but some are more ambitious combinations, of a kind manifest on Earth only in the lichens—”

  “Hold on,” Matthew said, as he was struck by a sudden inspiration. “I’m not sure that’s true.”

  “What’s not true?” Lityansky snapped back.

  “That the only ambitious chimeras on Earth are lichens. What about insects?”

  Lityansky was mystified. “What about insects?” he countered.

  “Well, what’s an insect but a serial chimera? The imago is only a maggot’s way of making more maggots, so they’re exactly like lichens in being strapped into a specific straitjacket by the limitations of sexual reproduction, but what an insect has, in essence, is a genome that codes for two qu
ite different physical forms.”

  “I don’t think it helps to introduce the notion of serial chimeras,” Lityansky complained. “The whole point about the situation here is that the vast majority of organisms on Ararat are made up of simultaneous chimerical combinations of cell types.”

  Matthew didn’t want to be slapped down so easily. “When Solari and I were trawling through the data banks yesterday,” he said, “arthropod analogues seemed conspicuous by their absence. Assuming that the insects and their kin didn’t just slip into the cracks of our admittedly slapdash search, mightn’t that have something to do with the prevalence of un-serial chimeras?”

  Lityansky wasn’t impressed. “It’s true that Ararat’s ecosphere has a dramatic dearth of exoskeletal organisms,” he admitted. “We think it’s because the local DNA-analogue has a blind spot where chitin and its structural analogues are concerned. We think that the principal reason for the apparent depletion of the vertebrate-analogues by comparison with Earth is due to the same blind spot. The local organisms aren’t good at producing hard bone. Their endoskeletons are more like cartilage, which means that the bigger animals need more complicated articulations to produce similar leverage. The organisms you saw in those photographs aren’t as similar to their Earthly analogues as they appear at first glance. Each individual might almost be regarded as a fusion of several disparate individuals, routinely combining as many as eight different genomic cell types. In some cases, only half of those cell types are sufficiently similar that they’d be reckoned as same-species in Earthly terms. We’ve hardly begun to extrapolate the possibilities opened up by that fundamental difference.”

  Or to investigate it, Matthew added, silently.

  “So the ultimate question—the one that dominates all our minds—is admittedly less simple than it seemed to be three years ago, but also more intriguing,” Lityansky added. His rhetorical manner suggested that his discourse was nearing some kind of climax.

  Matthew knew that the question Lityansky must have in mind was whether or not it would be possible to establish a viable colony on the surface of the new world. “Go on,” he prompted.

  “We had assumed, before arriving here,” Lityansky said, “that the question of whether we could introduce DNA-based ecosystems into an ecosphere that had its own distinct DNA-analogue was relatively straightforward. There was a possibility that DNA organisms might not be able to hold their own in the resultant competition, or that the local organisms might be at a disadvantage, either case presenting a conservation problem. With respect to Ararat, however, we have to ask the question of whether the second genomic system might be integrated into DNA-based organisms, to work in association with them in much the same way that it works in association with the local DNA-analogue. We also have to ask whether we can turn the chimerical constitution of the local organisms to our own technological advantage. In both cases, I believe, the answer is yes. Given what the biotechnologists of Earth have accomplished by taking over the innate natural technology of Earthly organisms, there is good reason to believe that they might accomplish just as much—if not more—by taking control of the natural technology available here, whose potential we have only just begun to glimpse.

  “In brief, Professor Fleury, there is abundant potential here for a biotechnological bonanza that will have Earth’s megacorporations racing one another to establish a presence here and reap its benefits.”

  Matthew could easily see how attractive that possibility might be to the crew of Hope. If the new world could attract enthusiastic support from Earth, it wouldn’t need the kind of support from Hope that had been built into Shen Chin Che’s original plan—not, at any rate, for very long.

  But there was another side to the coin.

  “By the same token,” Matthew said, reflexively taking on the role of devil’s advocate, “there might also be potential here for an ecocatastrophe of an entirely new and previously unenvisaged kind—an ecocatastrophe that could devastate the colony. That’s why the people on the ground are so nervous, isn’t it? That’s why so many of them are ready to give up on the dream that brought them across fifty-eight light-years of void and seven hundred years of history.

  “If the three-dimensional genome is capable of producing infectious agents, its biochemistry is so radically different that all the painstaking technological defenses we’ve built against bacteria and viruses will be useless against them. If the processes by which local organisms can produce exotic chimeras can be extended to embrace Earth-originated cells, we might encounter whole new modes of infection.

  “In either case, this world could be a potential death trap!”

  THIRTEEN

  When Matthew returned to the room in which he had awakened, the complex possibilities that Andrei Lityansky had laid out for him were still causing him considerable distress. He threw himself down on his bed as soon as he was inside—not, this time, because he was exhausted but because he needed to think.

  Lityansky had, of course, done everything within his power to soothe Matthew’s suddenly inflamed anxiety. He had assured Matthew that there was not the slightest evidence that local pathogens could infect DNA-based organisms or that local organisms could form chimeras in association with them. Although the people on the surface had sustained all manner of cuts, bites, and stings, there had not yet been a single case of alien infection. Nor, the crewman had insisted, was there any reason to suppose that Earthly medical scientists could not devise defenses against such an infection, if one ever did arise, with exactly the same alacrity they had demonstrated in the Earthly plague wars, when they had been required to respond to some extremely ingenious and exotic threats.

  The last point would have been more convincing had Matthew not heard news of the havoc wreaked by the ingenious and exotic chiasmalytic transformers, but Lityansky had refused to concede the point. The people of Earth had survived the last plague war just as they had survived the others, and had gone on to achieve true emortality. In the meantime, they had harnessed the new technology of para-DNA to many different purposes, revolutionizing the construction biotech pioneered by Leon Gantz.

  Ararat, Lityansky had continued to insist, was a potential biotechnological Klondyke, for whose right of exploitation the colonists should be exceedingly grateful.

  Matthew attempted to explain all this to Vince Solari, who had come over to stand by the bedside, looking down at him. Although the policeman couldn’t follow the technical aspects of the discourse, he was perfectly capable of reacting to phrases like “potential death trap” and “biotech bonanza.”

  “I take it that you don’t think Lityansky’s trustworthy,” Solari said.

  “Oh, he told me the truth as he sees it,” Matthew admitted. “But his viewpoint is way too narrow. The pattern of discovery here is the reverse of the one that steered the history of Earthly biology, and he hasn’t seen the implications of that.”

  “I don’t even know what it means,” Solari said, a trifle resentfully.

  “On Earth,” Matthew told him, “scientists had an enormous amount of information about plant and animal species before they began to get to grips with the mysteries of organic chemistry. By the time biochemistry got going there was a rich context in place, provided by centuries of painstaking work in taxonomy, anatomy, and physiology. Lityansky and his colleagues have started at the other end, doing the genomic and biochemical analyses first. They haven’t a clue, as yet, how that biochemistry relates to the anatomy, reproduction, and ecology of actual organisms—and they don’t seem to be in any particular hurry to find out. They’re being very methodical, starting with the fundamentals and working their way slowly forward, but they haven’t the slightest idea what the big picture might look like when all the pieces of the jigsaw are fitted together. They think people who try to make guesses—people like Bernal Delgado—are getting way ahead of themselves, but that’s stupid. We have to try to come at the puzzle from every direction if we want to solve it any time soon.”

/>   “So what about these mavericks?” Solari asked. “Could they be right about the planet’s biosphere being the wreckage of some long-past ecocatastrophe? I mean, if things had gone differently on Earth, and the human race really had gone belly-up there, we’d have left an awful lot of biotech debris. When I used to see you on TV, you were fond of saying that there was a possibility that the ecosphere might be cut back all the way to the bacterial level, and that the only footprint we’d leave in the sands of time would be a few hundred long-term survivors out of hundreds of thousands of new bacterial species that had originated as technological products. Might that have happened here, hundreds of millions of years ago?”

  “If we really had contrived an ecospasm as extreme as that on Earth,” Matthew said, pensively, “I suppose there might not be much material evidence of it after a hundred thousand years of lousy weather, let alone continental drift and supervolcanic basalt flows. Given that the biotech products that were already at large in my day had been built to last, though, some of them would have held their own in the ensuing struggle for existence and joined in a new tidal wave of adaptive radiation. If I knew more about this stuff that Lityansky calls para-DNA, I might be able to make a start on figuring out the likelihood of something like that getting so thoroughly mixed up with the bacterial residue of an ecospheric meltdown that a new metazoan adaptive radiation would have taken it aboard … but I’m not sure how relevant it would be. This planet is much quieter than Earth, and I’m not sure that all material evidence of a technically sophisticated civilization could have been so thoroughly obliterated here.”

  “But the planet might have been a lot more active in the distant past,” Solari pointed out. “Even if it wasn’t, the evidence would be buried pretty deep by now. To say that the people on the ground haven’t even begun scratching the surface would be an understatement. But what really matters, I suppose, is whether you’re right or wrong about the world being a death trap now.”