Dark Ararat - Brian Stableford [84]
Matthew nodded slowly. “I see,” he said. “So evolution happens as organisms change. Natural selection without genetic load. Metamorphosis instead of death.”
“Emortality’s not immortality,” Lynn reminded him. “Things die here. There’s eating—herbivorous and carnivorous. There’s predation and parasitism. Lots of death—but the organisms that don’t die may not be existentially stuck the way we are. They may be able to go on renewing themselves and changing themselves indefinitely—although it’ll take a long time to prove it.”
“Maybe Vince’s werewolves weren’t such a silly idea after all,” Matthew said. “Maybe you can sell him on the idea that it was a werewolf-analogue that killed Bernal. Not exactly a healthy scenario for a first contact, though, is it? I see what you mean about the bad alternative and the worse one. I can see why you didn’t want to address the question, and don’t want Vince to address it either.”
“That’s not fair, Matthew,” the bald woman said, defensively. “It’s the world that’s the important puzzle. That’s the mystery we need to solve—because that’s the mystery that could be the death of every last one of us, if we don’t solve it.”
“I know that,” Matthew assured her. “So let’s get on with the grand tour, shall we?”
TWENTY
While waiting to shuttle down, Matthew had studied most of the available film of the ruined city, using the VE-hood above his bed to take a virtual tour along the same route that Lynn Gwyer was following, so he was now beset by an eerie feeling that he was acting out a half-forgotten dream. He’d had similar experiences back on Earth, when he’d visited established tourist attractions in VE in order to work out exactly what he wanted to see when he got to the real thing. He was already familiar with the ways in which real tours expanded the horizons of virtual ones, offering a better appreciation of size and context.
The film clips had, of course, concentrated on those parts of the city that had been partially cleared of the enshrouding vegetation. It was not until he saw the remainder in all its glory that Matthew realized why the flying eyes entrusted with the work of mapping and surveying the new world had not been able to pick it out for more than a year. So completely were the stone walls overgrown, overlaid, and obscured that it had taken a revelatory freak of chance to provide the first evidence of artifice.
Matthew soon came to understand, as Lynn led him over the ridge separating the Base Three bubbles from the nearest wall of the city, that even after a further year-and-a-half of searching, there might easily be other structures of a similar kind as yet undiscovered.
“Your methods of clearance seem to have been rather brutal,” Matthew commented, as he followed the makeshift path.
“There were only four of us at first,” Lynn reminded him. “We would have liked more reinforcements, but Milyukov wouldn’t send them. He blamed the trouble aboard the ship, but I think he was afraid we’d find what we were looking for. If we do find intelligent aliens, Tang’s case will look a lot stronger. Milyukov wants to delay any discovery until he’s settled his domestic difficulties, and he’s campaigning hard for the conference at Base One to come up with a vote in favor of staying put. So we didn’t really have much choice. We moved on from machetes to chain saws in a matter of days, then figured we might as well go the whole hog