Dark Ararat - Brian Stableford [161]
“To us, that all seems perfectly natural, and so it is—but it needn’t have been that way. Here, evolution took a slightly different path. Here, sex is routinely confined to the kind of reproduction by which the local equivalents of organisms reproduce themselves. I say the local equivalents of organisms because they’re not the same as Earthly organisms in the sense of being genetic individuals. They’re compounds: chimeras. That seems odd, because they don’t look like the chimeras of the Earthly imagination: they’re not compounds of radically different species, like griffins, and they don’t seem to go in for dramatic metamorphoses—at least, not on a day-to-day basis. But they do reproduce in the other sense, because they have to, and they are subject to the kind of natural selection that drives an evolutionary process, because they have to be. We can see that, just by looking around, because we can see perfectly well that this ecosphere is as complex as Earth’s, and that the logic of convergent evolution has produced all kinds of parallel bioforms. It may seem puzzling at first that we can’t see the second kind of reproduction going on, because no alien visitor to Earth could possibly miss it if he hung around for a year or two, but when you think about it carefully, you can see that it’s much less puzzling than it seems.”
Matthew looked up at the canopy and gestured with his arm. Ike looked puzzled for a moment, but then he caught on. There was nothing that a sweep could actually show the viewers by way of dramatizing Matthew’s rhetoric, but it could relieve the tedium by giving them something else to look at. Even an audience as well-educated and interested as the one he was hoping for couldn’t be expected to stare at his face indefinitely without getting a trifle bored.
“It’s probably simplest to think about it in terms of different timescales,” Matthew went on. “Earth’s timescales are determined by a seasonal cycle, which gives the year a tremendous importance. Although complex organisms like mammals live for many years, the vast majority of Earthly animal species go through an entire life cycle in a year, and most of those only devote a short space of time—maybe as little as a single day—to the business of sexual exchange. The rest of the time is spent lying dormant, growing, and the first kind of reproduction—which often involves considerable metamorphoses. Most Earthly organisms with annual life cycles mass-produce young, but only a few individuals make it through the long phases of the cycle to become the next generation of breeders. The vast majority become food for other organisms.
“At first glance, it might seem that more complex Earthly animals—like us—have developed a radically different reproductive strategy, as far removed from mass production as you can imagine, but the appearance is slightly misleading. Humans do mass-produce sperms and eggs, but only a few of them ever get together successfully enough to produce a live baby, and by the time a baby is born it’s already gone through the first few phases of its growth and self-reproduction. The whole cycle is slowed up by a factor of twenty to fifty—and biotechnology has shown our cousins back home how to slow it up indefinitely. But here on this world the chimerical individuals that stand in for organisms never had to cope with the tyranny of the seasons, and they never faced the kind of struggle our ancestors had to resist that tyranny. Here on Tyre,