Dark Ararat - Brian Stableford [57]
“I don’t. I was wondering whether it might have had an effect on Tang’s state of mind and his conversion to the party demanding withdrawal. As you pointed out, I have two daughters in SusAn myself. If I became convinced that the surface was direly unsuitable for colonization, I might not be prepared to expose them to risks I’d gladly face myself.”
“Is it direly unsuitable?” Solari wanted to know. “Can we establish a colony here or not?”
“I don’t know,” Matthew told him. “But I can understand why the people on the surface don’t want to wait around for Andrei Lityansky and the one-step-at-a-time brigade to come to a firm conclusion.”
“Maybe we could do something about it even if there turned out to be awkward problems,” Solari said.
“Maybe,” Matthew agreed. “In theory we could probably dose the entire world with weed killer, a few hectares at a time, and replace the alien ecosphere with a duplicate of our own, converting it into an authentic replica of Earth. It might be the case that releasing Earthly organisms into the planetary ecosphere will eventually have that effect anyway, because it would begin a competition of replicator molecules that would eventually be settled by the absolute victory of DNA over its alien rivals. Unfortunately, you don’t have to be a radical Gaean to think that murdering an entire ecosphere, or standing back and letting DNA do the dirty work for us, would be an unforgivable crime.
“What we actually want is to be able to set up a situation that would allow DNA’s rival replicators to continue to flourish, and also allow us to benefit from the bounty of their natural technology. How easy that might be to achieve I can’t even begin to guess—and given the unanticipated complexity and flexibility of the local ecosphere, it might be exceedingly difficult to come up with a confident answer in the space of a single lifetime. The seven hundred years it took to get here might be needed to be doubled before we can be certain that any colony we found is genuinely secure. The worst-case scenario is that this isn’t our Ararat at all, but our Roanoke.”
Solari nodded to indicate that he understood the reference to the most famous of America’s lost colonies. “Yeah,” he said. “Well, we’ll have to find out the hard way—on the surface. I’m not going to solve this case by looking at pictures and CVs. The sooner we can get down there the better, from my point of view. I’m not looking forward to this suit-fitting business, but the quicker we get kitted out the sooner we can get stuck in.”
He blanked the screen and hopped up onto his own bed, stretching himself out in much the same pose as Matthew’s. Matthew let himself relax onto his back again, but he didn’t close his eyes. He knew that he, like Solari, wouldn’t even be able to begin to fit the pieces of his puzzle together until he was actually on the surface, able to gather evidence at first hand, but he still had a lot of preparatory thinking to do. When the opportunity arrived to see the wood in spite of the trees, he had to be as ready as he possibly could.
FOURTEEN
In theory, the suit fitting should not have been an unduly unpleasant experience. It wasn’t unduly uncomfortable, in purely physical terms, and probably wouldn’t have been alarmingly painful even if Matthew’s IT had not been ready to muffle anything worse than the mildest discomfort, because the human body had few pain receptors ready to react to the kind of invasion that the suit mounted. The fact that the problem was psychological rather than physical didn’t make it any less troublesome, though.
Matthew belonged to a generation that had grown used to the idea of smart clothing. Even as a baby he had been swathed in living fibers charged with taking care of the various wastes that his body produced, but he had also been used to smartsuits as things a man could put on and take off at will. He had never worn “dead clothes” but he had nevertheless thought of his smartsuits as clothing to be changed at regular intervals, or whenever the