Dark Ararat - Brian Stableford [52]
“Hold on,” Matthew said, as he was struck by a sudden inspiration. “I’m not sure that’s true.”
“What’s not true?” Lityansky snapped back.
“That the only ambitious chimeras on Earth are lichens. What about insects?”
Lityansky was mystified. “What about insects?” he countered.
“Well, what’s an insect but a serial chimera? The imago is only a maggot’s way of making more maggots, so they’re exactly like lichens in being strapped into a specific straitjacket by the limitations of sexual reproduction, but what an insect has, in essence, is a genome that codes for two quite different physical forms.”
“I don’t think it helps to introduce the notion of serial chimeras,” Lityansky complained. “The whole point about the situation here is that the vast majority of organisms on Ararat are made up of simultaneous chimerical combinations of cell types.”
Matthew didn’t want to be slapped down so easily. “When Solari and I were trawling through the data banks yesterday,” he said, “arthropod analogues seemed conspicuous by their absence. Assuming that the insects and their kin didn’t just slip into the cracks of our admittedly slapdash search, mightn’t that have something to do with the prevalence of un-serial chimeras?”
Lityansky wasn’t impressed. “It’s true that Ararat’s ecosphere has a dramatic dearth of exoskeletal organisms,” he admitted. “We think it’s because the local DNA-analogue has a blind spot where chitin and its structural analogues are concerned. We think that the principal reason for the apparent depletion of the vertebrate-analogues by comparison with Earth is due to the same blind spot. The local organisms aren’t good at producing hard bone. Their endoskeletons are more like cartilage, which means that the bigger animals need more complicated articulations to produce similar leverage. The organisms you saw in those photographs aren’t as similar to their Earthly analogues as they appear at first glance. Each individual might almost be regarded as a fusion of several disparate individuals, routinely combining as many as eight different genomic cell types. In some cases, only half of those cell types are sufficiently similar that they’d be reckoned as same-species in Earthly terms. We’ve hardly begun to extrapolate the possibilities opened up by that fundamental difference.”
Or to investigate it, Matthew added, silently.
“So the ultimate question—the one that dominates all our minds—is admittedly less simple than it seemed to be three years ago, but also more intriguing,” Lityansky added. His rhetorical manner suggested that his discourse was nearing some kind of climax.
Matthew knew that the question Lityansky must have in mind was whether or not it would be possible to establish a viable colony on the surface of the new world. “Go on,” he prompted.
“We had assumed, before arriving here,” Lityansky said, “that the question of whether we could introduce DNA-based ecosystems into an ecosphere that had its own distinct DNA-analogue was relatively straightforward. There was a possibility that DNA organisms might not be able to hold their own in the resultant competition, or that the local organisms might be at a disadvantage, either case presenting a conservation problem. With respect to Ararat, however, we have to ask the question of whether the second genomic system might be integrated into DNA-based organisms, to work in association with them in much the same way that it works in association with the local DNA-analogue. We also have to ask whether we can turn the chimerical constitution of the local organisms to our own technological advantage. In both cases, I believe, the answer is yes. Given what the biotechnologists of Earth have accomplished by taking over the innate natural technology of Earthly organisms, there is good reason to believe that they might accomplish just as much—if not more—by taking control of the natural technology available here, whose potential we have only just begun to glimpse.
“In brief, Professor Fleury, there is abundant potential here for a biotechnological