Dark Ararat - Brian Stableford [16]
“We think that’s another of the reasons for the groundlings’ continuing unease,” Leitz told them. “It’s proved to be surprisingly difficult to modify the physiology of Circadian rhythms, but we’re sure that they’ll solve the problem soon. If only they could be patient … anyhow, the planet’s year is one point twenty-eight Earth-standard, but its axial tilt is very slight, so its temperate-zone seasons aren’t nearly as extreme. That’s not problematic, although Professor Lityansky thinks it has something to do with the strange pattern of local evolution. He’ll explain it when he briefs you tomorrow, Professor Fleury. That’s at three-zero, provided that you’re up to it. How do you feel now?”
“Better,” Matthew assured him, drily. “Professor Lityansky’s busy too, I dare say.”
“Extremely busy,” the boy replied. “He’s working flat-out trying to figure out exactly what we need to do to make the colony work. He’s under a great deal of pressure, because the groundlings hold him primarily responsible for the decision that the world is sufficiently Earthlike to qualify as a clone. The decision to go ahead with the colonization wasn’t entirely his, of course, but his genomic analyses provided the relevant data and his judgment of their significance was crucial. He feels badly let down by some of the people on the surface.”
“How come their judgment is so different?” Matthew asked.
Leitz hesitated, but eventually decided to answer the question. He was becoming more relaxed now, and a certain boyish enthusiasm was beginning to show through. “Our data was limited, of course,” the youth conceded. “Our nanotech is way behind Earth’s, and we haven’t been able to improve our probes to anything like the same degree while we’ve been in transit. Apart from evidence gathered at long-range by our instruments, we had a very limited range of surface-gathered samples to work from. They were adequate for genomic analysis, but most of what we had on which to base our decision was fundamental biochemical data. The photographs taken by our flying eyes showed us what the local plant life looked like, but we didn’t have any real notion of the ecology of the world, or even of its diversity, let alone its evolutionary history. Once the first landing was complete, the biologists on the ground began to fill in the other parts of the picture—and they began to get alarmed.
“Some of the groundlings began to argue that Professor Lityansky had made a bad mistake, because he hadn’t been able to think through the consequences of his genomic analyses. The extreme view is that the colonization should have been put on hold as soon as it was realized that the local ecosphere wasn’t DNA-based—but that’s absurd, isn’t it, Professor Fleury?”
Matthew could see what the young man was getting at. When Hope had set out from the solar system its scientists had not the slightest idea exactly how alien any alien life they discovered might turn out to be. Having only had a single ecosphere on which to base their expectations, they had no way to arbitrate between hypotheses that held that life throughout the universe was likely to be DNA-based, or that DNA would turn out to be a strictly local phenomenon unrepeated anywhere else.
Matthew had always had more sympathy for the former opinion, not because he lent any credence to the panspermist myth—which held that life had originated elsewhere and arrived on Earth while being dispersed throughout the expanding cosmos—but because it seemed to him that natural selection operating in the struggle for existence in the primordial sludge would probably have found the same optimum solution to the business of genetic coding that would materialize elsewhere. In the absence of any comparative cases, however, the matter had been pure guesswork—until Frans Leitz’s forbears had found the “sludgeworld” whose bacteria employed a different