Dark Ararat - Brian Stableford [166]
“Well, we’ll be able to tell them. We’ll know, by then, whether I’m right or wrong about the manner in which the evolution of our enigmatic Ararat’s ecosphere diverged from Earth’s. We’ll know for sure whether all the complex organisms here can reproduce by binary fission, and whether all of them can get together when it seems politic for all-embracing, all-absorbing, all-consuming two- or four- or sixteen- or thirty-two-way sex. We’ll know how many of those glassy globules in the crowns of gargantuan grass stalks and the corkscrew trees are the products of the trees themselves, and how many are the products of other organisms. And we’ll know whether those sketchy pyramids in the humanoids’ drawings are really artifacts, or whether they’re actually reproductive bodies of some kind. And we’ll know whether they built those walls around their city, while they had a city, simply to protect the crops in their fields, or whether there were other things in those fields, periodically, that were precious enough to warrant all the extra protection they could give them. And we’ll know too how the transmission of culture and knowledge across generations of that kind of humanoid compares to the transmission of culture and knowledge that we achieve as we raise and educate our children.
“We’ll know all of that, and more, even if this trek through the purple wilderness bears no fruit at all. But if we’re lucky, this could be the time we start finding out. This could be the time when we make some important new discoveries, and begin to fit the pieces of the jigsaw together. This could be the time when we discover whether any of the people contacted by Dulcie Gherardesca are the same individuals who built that city, even if they built it thousands of years before. Maybe they won’t remember it, even if they were, but there’s one thing they will know all about, and that’s the cost of evolution on a world like Tyre. They’ll know the cost of a reproductive system in which variation is imported and sorted by chimerization as well as—and perhaps, at the level of whole organisms, instead of—sex. Because, you see, the more interesting possibility is that the basketballs and the pyramids and all the other exceptional reproductive structures aren’t same-species affairs at all, but something much weirder….”
It was at this point that Konstantin Milyukov decided that the monologue had gone on long enough. He could have taken Matthew off the air, as he’d threatened to do, but he evidently didn’t dare. He took the other option, turning the monologue into a dialogue—and Matthew knew that whatever the outcome of this particular battle might be, the war for Hope’s future was as good as won.
It was Andrei Lityansky’s voice that actually did the interrupting, but Matthew knew that it was Milyukov who had taken the decision. From his position in front of the camera he had no way of telling whether the engineers on Hope had split the screen so that Lityansky’s face could appear alongside his, or whether they were content for the moment to let their own man remain a disembodied voice, but he figured that they would cotton on eventually.
“This is all very fascinating, Dr. Fleury,” Lityansky said, “but you have no evidence to back it up. The notion that organisms as complex as reptiles and mammals could reproduce by binary fission, with or without forming intermediate multispecific conglomerates, is extremely fanciful and very difficult to believe. Surely it is more likely that we