Dark Ararat - Brian Stableford [53]
Matthew could easily see how attractive that possibility might be to the crew of Hope. If the new world could attract enthusiastic support from Earth, it wouldn’t need the kind of support from Hope that had been built into Shen Chin Che’s original plan—not, at any rate, for very long.
But there was another side to the coin.
“By the same token,” Matthew said, reflexively taking on the role of devil’s advocate, “there might also be potential here for an ecocatastrophe of an entirely new and previously unenvisaged kind—an ecocatastrophe that could devastate the colony. That’s why the people on the ground are so nervous, isn’t it? That’s why so many of them are ready to give up on the dream that brought them across fifty-eight light-years of void and seven hundred years of history.
“If the three-dimensional genome is capable of producing infectious agents, its biochemistry is so radically different that all the painstaking technological defenses we’ve built against bacteria and viruses will be useless against them. If the processes by which local organisms can produce exotic chimeras can be extended to embrace Earth-originated cells, we might encounter whole new modes of infection.
“In either case, this world could be a potential death trap!”
THIRTEEN
When Matthew returned to the room in which he had awakened, the complex possibilities that Andrei Lityansky had laid out for him were still causing him considerable distress. He threw himself down on his bed as soon as he was inside—not, this time, because he was exhausted but because he needed to think.
Lityansky had, of course, done everything within his power to soothe Matthew’s suddenly inflamed anxiety. He had assured Matthew that there was not the slightest evidence that local pathogens could infect DNA-based organisms or that local organisms could form chimeras in association with them. Although the people on the surface had sustained all manner of cuts, bites, and stings, there had not yet been a single case of alien infection. Nor, the crewman had insisted, was there any reason to suppose that Earthly medical scientists could not devise defenses against such an infection, if one ever did arise, with exactly the same alacrity they had demonstrated in the Earthly plague wars, when they had been required to respond to some extremely ingenious and exotic threats.
The last point would have been more convincing had Matthew not heard news of the havoc wreaked by the ingenious and exotic chiasmalytic transformers, but Lityansky had refused to concede the point. The people of Earth had survived the last plague war just as they had survived the others, and had gone on to achieve true emortality. In the meantime, they had harnessed the new technology of para-DNA to many different purposes, revolutionizing the construction biotech pioneered by Leon Gantz.
Ararat, Lityansky had continued to insist, was a potential biotechnological Klondyke, for whose right of exploitation the colonists should be exceedingly grateful.
Matthew attempted to explain all this to Vince Solari, who had come over to stand by the bedside, looking down at him. Although the policeman couldn’t follow the technical aspects of the discourse, he was perfectly capable of reacting to phrases like “potential death trap” and “biotech bonanza.”
“I take it that you don’t think Lityansky’s trustworthy,” Solari said.
“Oh, he told me the truth as he sees it,” Matthew admitted. “But his viewpoint is way too narrow. The pattern of discovery here is the reverse of the one that steered the history of Earthly biology, and he hasn’t seen the implications of that.”
“I don’t even know what it means,” Solari said, a trifle resentfully.
“On Earth,” Matthew told him, “scientists had an enormous amount of information about plant and animal species before they began to get to grips with the mysteries of organic chemistry. By the time biochemistry got going there was a rich context in place, provided