Dark Ararat - Brian Stableford [50]
Lityansky frowned, partly because his prepared script had been subverted and partly because he was now aware that he had underestimated his pupil. Like Milyukov, the genomicist had seen tapes of Matthew’s TV performances, and like Milyukov, he had formed an unjustly modest estimate of Matthew’s intelligence.
“As you can see,” he said, although he probably knew well enough how opaque the electron micrographs were to anyone unfamiliar with their context, “the local organisms do manifest a physiological process analogous to sexual reproduction. Individual cells do exchange genetic information—but it’s not meiosis because it doesn’t produce gametes. The exchanges are between different somatic components of chimerical mosaics.”
It took Matthew a few seconds to get his head around that. Put very crudely, what Lityansky was saying was that different bits of local organisms had sex with other bits of the same organism, which had a different genetic makeup, but that whole organisms didn’t have sex with one another. Sex on Ararat/Tyre wasn’t a matter of individuals at all; it was strictly a cell-on-cell business within chimerical individuals.
If he’d been talking to a man like Bernal Delgado, Matthew would have called it mind-boggling, but Andrei Lityansky didn’t seem to be the kind of man whose mind went in for that kind of thing.
“We’ve observed this in a wide range of primitive plants and animals,” Lityansky added, while Matthew was catching up. “We assume the same thing goes on in higher plants and animals, but that’s only speculation at present.”
“Why?” Matthew asked, genuinely surprised.
“Why what?” Lityansky retorted.
“Why is it only speculation? Why haven’t you found out?”
“The live specimens brought up into orbit had to be accommodated to the constraints of our biocontainment facilities,” Lityansky told him.
In other words, Matthew thought, Lityansky had never seen an alien creature he couldn’t fit on to a microscope slide.
“The work we’ve done on Hope,” Lityansky continued, “has consisted of fundamental biochemical, genomic, and proteonomic analyses. The biologists at Base One have had more opportunity to observe more complex organisms in the wild, but their lab work has had to be devoted almost entirely to the practical problems of adapting Earthly crops and animals to live in native environments.”
“That’s ridiculous!” Matthew said. “Are you telling me that you’ve been confronted for three years with a world whose higher plants and animals don’t appear to have any sex organs or to produce any young, but that you haven’t made any significant attempt to find out how they do reproduce?”
“What I’m telling you,” Lityansky said, frostily, “is that we’ve had too few people working on far too many problems to have made as much progress as we would have liked, or as much progress as we need. We had no idea, when we began, how strange the physiology of the most primitive organisms would turn out to be, but we have taken the view that if we can unravel the mysteries of the simpler entities first, we will then stand a far better chance of understanding the mysteries of the more complex.”
“So how do the simple entities reproduce themselves?” Matthew wanted to know.
“Some by simple fragmentation, others by sporulation.”
“Just like a lot of simple entities on Earth,” Matthew pointed out. “Not much help there in figuring out how the monkeys and the weasels do it. What’s the favorite