Dark Ararat - Brian Stableford [19]
Matthew might have paused for a while to wonder whether the oceans were so richly purple because they were abundantly populated by photosynthetic microorganisms and algae, or because of some unexpected trick of atmospheric refraction, but his companion had the keyboard and Solari was already racing ahead in search of more various, more intimate, and more detailed views, while Frans Leitz looked on approvingly. The former hypothesis, Matthew decided en passant, seemed more likely as well as more attractive—but so had the hypothesis that DNA would always be selected out by the struggle to produce true life from mere organic mire.
“Can you find a commentary?” Matthew asked.
Solari shook his head. “None available. I guess they haven’t had time to add the voiceovers yet.” He glanced at Leitz as he spoke.
“We didn’t think a commentary was required,” the crewman said.
Other surprises followed as the mute viewpoint moved a little closer to the surface. Matthew had not been expecting the desert areas to be so silvery, or the ice caps so neatly star-shaped. He saw both ice caps as the synthesized image rotated about two axes, always presenting a full disk to the AI-eye.
“The symmetry of the continents is a little weird,” Leitz put in, obviously feeling some slight obligation to substitute for the missing commentary. “The polar island-continents are so similar in size and shape that some of the first observers thought that the planet had been landscaped by continental engineers. The star is nearly a billion years older than the sun, so evolution has had a lot longer to work here than it had on Earth, but Professor Lityansky reckons that the relative lack of axial tilt and tidal drag haven’t added sufficient agitation to the surface conditions to move evolution along at a similar pace. He reckons that Earth was unusually lucky in that respect, and that’s why we seem to be the first starfaring intelligences in this part of the galaxy. The surface isn’t very active, volcanically speaking, and the climatic regimes are stable. The weather’s fairly predictable in all latitudes, although it varies quite sharply from one part of the pattern to another.”
The viewpoint was zooming in now, as if free-falling from orbit, then curving gracefully into a horizontal course a thousand meters or so above the surface.
The sky was bluish, but it had a distinct violet tinge, like an eerie echo of the vegetation.
At first, Matthew thought that the grassy plain over which the AI-eye was soaring wasn’t so very different from an Earthly prairie. The lack of any comparative yardstick made it difficult to adjust the supposition, but when Leitz told him that the stalks bearing the complex crowns were between ten and twenty meters tall he tried to get things into a clearer perspective.
“The rigid parts of the plants aren’t like wood at all,” Leitz said. “More like glass. Professor Lityansky will explain the biochemistry.”
There were very few tree-like forms on the plain, but when the point of view soared higher in order to pass over a mountain range, Matthew saw whole forests of structures that seemed to have as much in common with corals as with oaks or pines. They seemed to him to be the kind of trees that a nineteenth-century engineer—a steam-and-steel man—might have devised to suit a landscape whose primary features were mills and railroads: trees compounded out of pipes and wire, scaffolding and stamped plate. Given what Leitz had said about the structures being vitreous rather than metallic, the impression had to be reckoned illusory, but it still made the forests and “grasslands” seem radically un-Earthlike. If this world really could be counted as an Earth-clone, Matthew thought, it was a twin whose circumstances and experience had made a vast difference to its natural heritage.
When the low-flying camera eye finally reached the shore of a sea Matthew saw that its surface layer was indeed covered with a richer floating ecosystem than he had ever