Dark Ararat - Brian Stableford [118]
All in all, Matthew decided, the vast majority of the structures seemed to be no more exotic than a coconut, and considerably less weird than a pineapple. He went back to his patient search for signs of animal-equivalents. He was now quite adept at spotting lizard-analogues, even when their long bodies remained quite motionless, but his eye was continually attracted by subtle movements that turned out not to be animal movements at all. He began to realize for the first time that the plants clustered at the waterside were considerably more active than those he had seen in and around the ruins.
While he had been walking from the shuttle to the bubble-domes of Base Three it had been the odd quality of the background noise that had seemed to be the most alien component of the environment, but the lapping of the water against Voconia’s flanks seemed much more familiar. The movements of the bundled stems and their superficial plant-parasites now seemed the creepiest subliminal impression that his mind was picking up. He wondered whether the subtle not-quite-swimming deformations of the craft in which he was traveling helped him notice similar inclinations among the elements of the forest.
Eventually, Matthew became uneasily conscious of the fact that the relationship between the faint breezes that stirred the riverside canopy and the responses of the “leaves” was by no means a simple matter of pressure-and-deformation. But why, he asked himself, were the twisted stems, their radar-dish plates, and their coquettish fans moving so purposefully? Presumably, it was to catch the light more efficiently as the sun tracked across the sky. Why, then, did the movements seem so capricious and disordered? The competition between the plants was so intense that they had probably been forced to make more strenuous efforts to harvest their share of solar energy than their Earthly analogues—but was that the only reason for their subtle fidgeting? They had been guided by natural selection to make use of certain animal tricks—in much the same way, he could not help thinking, that the Voconia had been engineered to combine plant- and animal-inspired devices—but how versatile was that legerdemain?
In a way, he thought, the real wonder was that there was such a clear distinction on Earth between vegetable “creepers” and animal “creepy-crawlers.” When Pliny the elder had assembled his classic Natural History he had been unable to resist the imaginative allure of hypothetical creatures that combined the utilitarian attributes of stems and worms—so was it not surprising, in a way, that natural selection had been so firm in its actual discriminations? Was there not a certain common sense in the refusal of Tyre’s ecosphere to maintain such a stark apartheid? Why should Earthly plants be so restricted in their powers of movement, and Earthly animals so determined to place photosynthesis under rigid taboo? Why should Earth’s entire ecosphere be so determined to use a single coding molecule, when it was obvious now that there was a much greater range of opportunities lurking in the exotic hinterlands of organic chemistry?
The likely answer, of course, as Ike Mohammed had pointed out with brutal simplicity, was that the relevant fuel-consumption equations had never quite added up. Here, the sums had been done differently. Was the arithmetic more elegant or more efficient? Probably not—although the apparent lack of biodiversity among the vertebrate-analogues and arthropod-analogues ought not to be taken as a reliable indicator. But it was probably no less elegant, once one grasped the fundamental aesthetics. It would be foolish to assume