Dark Ararat - Brian Stableford [133]
“They couldn’t have driven the big herbivores to extinction recently,” Dulcie put in, by way of correction. “This is an old world. What would the biodiversity of Earth have been like a billion years hence, if humans had never invented genetic engineering?”
“It isn’t coming back,” Lynn observed. “We must have passed through its stamping ground. But there’ll be others.”
“They can’t do us any damage,” Ike said. “They won’t even wake us up, unless they can stay close enough to start chewing up the biomotor outlets.”
“Is that possible?” Matthew asked, suddenly realizing that there might be a downside to Voconia’s employment of organic structural materials and an artificial metabolism that used lightly converted local produce as fuel.
“No, it’s not,” Lynn assured him. “The AI defenses can take care of anything that conspicuous. There’s no need for anyone to sit in the stern with Rand’s gun.”
Matthew, knowing that big grazers usually congregated in herds, was not entirely convinced by this reassurance, but he was prepared to let it go for the time being. There might well be bigger animals in the lower part of the watercourse, where its progress became ever more leisurely as it meandered patiently toward the distant ocean, but Voconia was not bound for the sea. Her first mooring would be in the more active waters immediately below the cataract, and it would be from there that their first expedition inland would be mounted. Given that the “grasslands” grew so tall as to be virtual forests, they would be more likely to be inhabited by pygmies than giants—always provided, of course, that the logic that pertained on Earth was reproducible here.
The evening meal’s main course was a surprisingly accurate imitation of Earthly ravioli. Matthew wondered at first whether his IT had responded to his earlier dislike to filter out some of the less pleasant taste sensations from the Tyrian manna, but he decided on closer examination that his positive reaction was partly a matter of gradual acclimatization and partly a matter of the skill with which the programmer—Dulcie—had concocted a masking sauce.
“Congratulations,” he said to her, when they were done. “I think you’ve cracked the problem. What this colony needs more than anything else, at this stage of its history, is a Brillat-Savarin. At the end of the day, there’s nothing like a pleasant taste to create a sense of welcome. Hope could do with a good chef or two—soon put an end to all that revolutionary nonsense.”
“I’m an anthropologist,” she reminded him. “Cooking is the foundation stone of all human culture, the first of the two primary biotechnologies. Unfortunately, that might be exactly why my talents will be wasted if we do make contact with intelligent aborigines. Whatever the fundamental pillars supporting their cultures are, they can’t include cooking. Clothing maybe, but not cooking.”
“I’d have thought that the probable absence of sex was a far more radical alienation,” Lynn Gwyer put in, trying to turn the joke into something more serious. “People get a little carried away with this primary biotechnology stuff, in my opinion. The real foundations of human society lie in parental strategies for the care and protection of children. Families, marriage ceremonies, incest taboos: the whole business of the determination and regulation of sexual relationships. Take away that—as we may have to—and the fact that they don’t cook begins to seem utterly trivial.”
Matthew expected Dulcie to dismiss the objection with a gentle reminder that she had not been serious, but that wasn’t what happened. Instead, Dulcie said, with sudden deadly earnest: “You’re wrong, Lynn. That’s nature, not culture. All animals regulate their sexual relationships