Dark Ararat - Brian Stableford [54]
“So what about these mavericks?” Solari asked. “Could they be right about the planet’s biosphere being the wreckage of some long-past ecocatastrophe? I mean, if things had gone differently on Earth, and the human race really had gone belly-up there, we’d have left an awful lot of biotech debris. When I used to see you on TV, you were fond of saying that there was a possibility that the ecosphere might be cut back all the way to the bacterial level, and that the only footprint we’d leave in the sands of time would be a few hundred long-term survivors out of hundreds of thousands of new bacterial species that had originated as technological products. Might that have happened here, hundreds of millions of years ago?”
“If we really had contrived an ecospasm as extreme as that on Earth,” Matthew said, pensively, “I suppose there might not be much material evidence of it after a hundred thousand years of lousy weather, let alone continental drift and supervolcanic basalt flows. Given that the biotech products that were already at large in my day had been built to last, though, some of them would have held their own in the ensuing struggle for existence and joined in a new tidal wave of adaptive radiation. If I knew more about this stuff that Lityansky calls para-DNA, I might be able to make a start on figuring out the likelihood of something like that getting so thoroughly mixed up with the bacterial residue of an ecospheric meltdown that a new metazoan adaptive radiation would have taken it aboard … but I’m not sure how relevant it would be. This planet is much quieter than Earth, and I’m not sure that all material evidence of a technically sophisticated civilization could have been so thoroughly obliterated here.”
“But the planet might have been a lot more active in the distant past,” Solari pointed out. “Even if it wasn’t, the evidence would be buried pretty deep by now. To say that the people on the ground haven’t even begun scratching the surface would be an understatement. But what really matters, I suppose, is whether you’re right or wrong about the world being a death trap now.”
“Unfortunately,” Matthew said, “the answer to that one depends on the answers to all the other questions—including the ones Lityansky didn’t want to address, like the possible relevance of serial chimeras. Maybe the relative dearth of chitin and hard bone isn’t the product of a blind spot in the protein-coding mechanism. Maybe there’s another factor militating against rigidity.”
“Serial chimeras?,” Solari echoed. “Like werewolves, you mean.”
“Not exactly—but I’ll have to devote some time to figuring out what I might mean. What have you been doing while I’ve been taking lessons in xenobiology?”
“Checking the list of murder suspects.”
“Really?” The news was sufficiently interesting to make Matthew lift his head a little higher and turn to lie sideways, supporting himself on his elbow.
Solari had obviously been practicing his keyboard skills, because it required no more than a casual sweep of his fingers to replace the single image on the wallscreen with a mosaic consisting of seven faces arranged in two ranks, four on the upper and three on the lower. Matthew took due note of the symbolism of the empty square at the right-hand end of the