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By Root 1484 0

function as plants or as animals, there must be a reward for versatility. Given that the world itself isn’t very active, and the weather patterns are so benign, he figured that it couldn’t be a response to the inorganic frame. He’d have liked to build a link to the gradual chimerical renewal business, but he couldn’t swallow the notion that emortal animals might be routinely capable of turning into emortal trees—and even if they were, he couldn’t see any reason why the homeobox shouldn’t make chloroplast-analogues for plant forms and get rid of them completely in animal forms. So he—that is, we—figured it had to be something to do with the way the organisms interact with one another. There must be ecosystemic factors of some kind that determine the usefulness of switching back and forth between modes of nourishment on an ad hoc basis: something analogous, however esoterically, to a boat whose energy-requirements change abruptly whenever it switches from going downstream to going upstream. It’s not exactly making a point or exploring a hypothesis … more a sort of heuristic device: an aid to inspiration.”

That was Bernal all over, Matthew thought. He had always been a lateral thinker, ceaselessly trying to find increasingly odd angles from which to approach intractable problems. He was—had been—exactly the kind of man to think it desirable to make an odyssey into alien territory in a vehicle that was “in keeping with local traditions.” Bernal had not recorded any of this in his notepad—but it was exactly the kind of mental exercise that was difficult to commit to text, even as a series of doodles. Bernal must have spent the last few months of his life trying to figure out what analogues of “upstream” and “downstream” the local ecosystems possessed, whose subtle effects favored versatility in so many of the local organisms.

“Instead of seasons,” Matthew murmured.

“What?” Lynn queried.

“Just a stray thought,” Matthew said, slowly. He had to take a deep breath before carrying on, but talking was a lot less energy-expensive than climbing and he certainly didn’t want to move on too quickly. “On Earth,” he said, pensively, “the versatility of organisms is mostly a series of responses to seasonal variations. In winter, deciduous trees shed their leaves and some vertebrates hibernate. Most flowering plants and most invertebrate imagos die, leaving their seeds and eggs to withstand the cold spell. Large numbers of species opt for an annual life cycle, because the year-on-year advantages gained thereby far outweigh the problems raised by occasional disruptive ecocatastrophes. There are seasons even in the tropics—dry and rainy—generated by ocean currents.”

“Not here,” Lynn told him, although he’d already noted the fact. “Tyre’s axial tilt is less pronounced, and the ocean is as stable as the atmosphere. That constancy seems to be reflected in the relative lack of biodiversity—and, of course, in the dearth of species with dramatic life cycles, like metamorphic insects. Bernal said it wasn’t quite that simple, though, because of the complicity of ecosystems and their inorganic environment.”

“That’s right,” Matthew agreed. “Ecosystems aren’t helpless prisoners of their inorganic frames. Life manages its own atmosphere; to some extent, it manages its own weather too. The rain that falls on rain forests evaporates from the rain forests in a disciplined fashion—take away the forest and the rain goes too. Here, where the world’s axial tilt is less, seasonal variations would be less extreme anyway, but the ecosphere may well play an active role massaging them into near-uniformity, thus nullifying the kinds of advantages insects and other ephemerae derive from their chimerical life cycles. It’s easy enough to grasp the fact that there’s a whole new ballgame here, with a very different set of constraints and strategic opportunities—but it’s not easy to imagine what they might be. Take winter and summer out of the equation, and what might substitute for them as forces of variation? Is there another kind of cycle, or something much more arbitrary?