Dark Ararat - Brian Stableford [171]
“You don’t know that, either,” Ike pointed out.
“Not for certain—but it makes sense. Agriculture and animal husbandry were desperation moves, because fields and herds were the only way they could increase their resources fast enough, and keep them safe enough from competitors, to sustain their exploding population. And that, in essence, was the story of the next ten thousand years. They had to keep on increasing the efficiency of the system, in terms of their means of production and their means of protection. Their technics had to keep getting better and better and better, and the faster their population growth accelerated the faster their technological growth accelerated, until the whole thing went Crash. Hope got out before the Crash hit bottom, because no one aboard her had any faith in humankind’s ability to pick itself up again, dust itself off, and work out a new modus vivendi. We were too pessimistic, it seems, but it was a damn close-run thing.
“As I see it, something similar must have happened here, with a couple of vital differences. The humanoids migrated from the plains to the hill country because that’s where the technological resources were: the glass and the stone. That’s where they could make their desperate stand against the competitors that had evolved alongside them. The vital difference was that our competitors—our only significant competitors—were our own kind. That wasn’t the case here. Here, the most successful creatures aren’t the handiest, or the keenest-eyed, or the biggest-brained. Here, the most successful creatures are the ones that make the cleverest use of the processes and opportunities of chimerization.”
“The worms and slugs,” Ike deduced.
“Especially the killer anemones,” Matthew agreed. “The killer anemones that became serial killer anemones, adapting themselves to whatever circumstances chance threw up, taking aboard new features or discarding them every time they had a chance to swap physical attributes with other bioforms in their periodic orgies of chimerical reorganization. There’s an analogy of sorts in something not so very different that happened to our ancestors. Agriculture and civilization were a mixed blessing for their inventors, but not for the other species that took full advantage of the opportunities thus provided. Which species were the favorites to outlast us if the Crash had proved fatal? Rats and cockroaches. So which species got the greatest benefits out of civilization? Us? Or rats and cockroaches?
“Here, I suspect, neither the rats nor the cockroaches ever stood a chance, because the worms and slugs were always there first: more aggressive, more effective, more adaptable. We saw what they could do when we came down that cliff. We saw how they responded to an unexpected, and perhaps unprecedented, feeding opportunity. How do you suppose they reacted to the humanoids’ establishment of fields: fields full of lovely, concentrated food?”
“It’s anyone’s guess,” Ike pointed out, dutifully—but he was nodding to show that he understood the force of the argument.
“We know how the city-builders reacted: they built walls. Those walls may well have had more to protect than food alone, but even if the crew scientists are right to wield Occam’s razor with such vigor when they talk about sporulation and progressive chimerical renewal, and even if the pyramids aren’t reproductive structures at all, the city-builders still built walls, and more walls, and even more walls … until they realized that they couldn’t win. Not, at any rate, with the technology they had. If they’d had fire and iron, who knows? They didn’t.
“At the end of the day, their cities—there must be more, still buried under purple carpets—were a gift to their competitors they couldn’t afford to go on giving.