Dark Ararat - Brian Stableford [60]
“I can’t make head nor tail of it myself,” Solari admitted. “I suppose I’ll have to try, though, if I’m going to spend the rest of my life down there.”
“It might be as well,” Matthew agreed.
“So tell me the difference between serial chimeras and werewolves—in terms I can understand.”
“Caterpillars become butterflies. Tadpoles become frogs. It’s a gradual progressive metamorphosis, not a matter of switching back and forth every full moon.”
“So you think the reason we didn’t see any young animals is that the animals we did see might really be different forms of the same animal?”
“Different forms,” Matthew echoed. “That might be the essence of it. On a world of chimeras, it might not make sense to think of different kinds of plants and animals—only of different forms. Everything related to everything else. Creatures that don’t just use gradual chimerical renewal as a means of achieving emortality, but as a means of achieving continual evolution.”
Solari sat up and began stroking his limbs experimentally, as if savoring the sensations of his new skin. Matthew still felt the need of distraction, so he continued his callisthenics.
“So the city-builders might not have died out,” Solari said. “They might just have changed into something else. They tried humanity and didn’t like it, so they moved on.”
“It sounds unlikely,” Matthew said, “but everything’s conceivable, given that nobody seems to have taken the trouble to find out where the limits of the chimerization processes actually lie. No—that’s unfair. I mean, nobody’s been able to figure out a way of finding out where the limits lie. If the natural metamorphoses are slow and gradual it might need more than a human lifetime just to observe them.”
As Nita Brownell had promised, Matthew felt a lot better now than he had the previous day. His body, assisted by his dutiful IT, had been working overtime to make good the deficits incurred by his organs during their suspended animation. The acceleration of his cellular-repair processes was probably going to knock a year or two off his potential lifespan, but he figured that if he could hang around until the crew obtained more information about contemporary longevity technology from Earth he would surely get some compensatory benefit from that. True emortality was apparently out of reach, but seven centuries of progress must have produced much better ways of keeping unengineered individuals healthier for longer.
“So, all in all,” Solari said, “you don’t think Delgado could have been murdered by a humanoid who shifted out of some other form and then shifted back?”
“I don’t know enough yet to rule it out completely,” Matthew said, cautiously, figuring that it would be unwise to say that anything was impossible until he had a much firmer grasp of the facts. “I’d have to say, though, that it seems extremely unlikely by comparison with the hypothesis that one of your seven suspects stabbed him for reasons we haven’t yet determined. Or, for that matter, with the hypothesis that someone sneaked over from Base One in a microlite aircraft.”
“It’s a hell of a long way,” Solari said. “The people at Base One have started establishing fuel dumps and supply caches to make long-distance travel feasible, but it would be extremely difficult for anyone to make an intercontinental flight without making elaborate preparations. To do it without anyone else knowing about it would be extremely difficult, especially with comsat eyes in the sky. My money has to be on one of the seven. But which one?”
“The real question,” Matthew observed, “is why? I can’t believe that any of them would have gone so far as to kill a man in order to prevent him revealing some discovery he’d made. Not so much because all of them except Blackstone are scientists—although that would surely be reason enough—but because they’re all Shen’s Chosen People. No one would have signed up