Dark Ararat - Brian Stableford [112]
“I’m not the best one to ask,” Maryanne pointed out. “But I don’t think Bernal knew. He did say something about the difficulty of adding chimerization to the sex-death equation. A wild variable, he called it.”
“The sex-death equation,” Matthew said. “That’s right. Never underestimate the power of a man’s favorite catchphrases. Back in sound-bite-land that was one of his ways of dramatizing the population problem.”
“I know,” she said. “I used to see him on TV when I was a kid.”
“Another latecomer to the ranks of the Chosen,” Matthew observed. “Did you see me too?”
“Probably,” she said. “I don’t really remember.”
His ego suitably deflated, Matthew muttered: “He was always the good-looking one—always attractive to the very young.”
“I’m an adult now,” she reminded him, tersely. “Only five years younger than Dulcie and ten years younger than Lynn, in terms of elapsed time.”
“No insult was intended,” Matthew assured her. “What else did Bernal say about the killer anemones? Not the kind of stuff he’d put in his reports—the kind he’d produce when he was speculating, fantasizing? What did he have to say about super killer anemones?”
“If he’d had anything at all to say, I’d have realized what ska meant myself,” she told him, still annoyed in spite of his assurance that no insult had been intended. “He thought it was odd that the ecosphere seems so conspicuously underdeveloped, in terms of animal species, despite the fact that its complexity seemed so similar to that of Earth. He knew that the extant species had to have a hidden versatility that we hadn’t yet had the opportunity to observe, but he couldn’t figure out what it was for.”
“Reproduction,” Matthew said. “Or gradual chimerical renewal. Unless, of course, they’re the same thing. What did he tell you about gradual chimerical renewal?”
“He told me not to think in terms of werewolves,” she said, obviously having seized upon the same mythical bad example as Solari. “Nor insects. He thought we’d need to be more original than that.”
“Did he suggest any possible explanations for the fact that there don’t seem to be any insect-analogues here?”
“He thought it had something to do with the fact that sex didn’t seem to have caught on as an organism-to-organism sort of thing. He said that flight had more to do with sex than most people realized, and more to do with death than people who thought of souls taking wing for Heaven had ever dared to imagine.”
“It’s another part of the same equation,” Matthew realized, following the train of thought. “Death is so commonplace on Earth because it’s a correlate of the reliance on sex as a means of shuffling the genetic deck. Flight is so commonplace for the same reason: it’s at least as much a matter of bringing mates together and distributing eggs as it is of dodging predators. Flying insects occupy a privileged set of niches on Earth because of the role they play in pollination—a role that doesn’t seem to exist here, at least not on a day-to-day basis. Factoring chimerization into the sex-death equation must have all kinds of logical consequences that we’re ill-equipped to imagine, let alone work out in detail. To borrow another hoary catchphrase, this place might not just be queerer than we imagine, but queerer than we can imagine. Is it possible, do you think—is it even remotely conceivable—that the missing humanoids might be a lot more closely related to the worms than we’ve assumed, for the simple reason that everything here is much more closely related to everything else than we’ve assumed?”
“The genomics say no, according to Ike and Bernal,” she told him. “Almost all the chimeras we’ve analysed are cousin-aggregations, made up of closely related cells.”
“So closely related,” Matthew said, remembering what Tang had told him about the same matter, “that it’s difficult to see where the selective advantage