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“Are we not taught that competition breeds for strength?” Nen Yim asked.

“Of course,” Harrar answered. “But only to a point, if there is not also cooperation.”

Nen Yim twisted her tendrils into an ironic mode. “And there is the lesson of Zonama Sekot,” she said. “The lesson you and I both seem to agree our people must learn.”

Harrar relaxed again.

“Take a seat,” Nen Yim said. “I will explain what I see here as best I can.”

Harrar settled into his usual cross-legged position and waited.

“The diversity of species here is quite low,” she began. “Much lower than one would expect in a natural ecosystem.”

“What could cause such a thing?” Harrar asked.

“Mass extinction, for one. Some catastrophe or series of catastrophes that served to wipe out many of the species.”

“That’s an interesting fact, but—”

“No, it’s more than an interesting fact,” she averred. “The ecosystem functions as if it were fully diverse. Species have filled roles they were not designed for.”

“I’m not sure I entirely understand.”

“After any mass extinction, many ecological niches are opened, and species take advantage of these empty niches, adapting through natural selection to fill them and benefit from them. Eventually, after millennia, a ravaged ecosystem becomes healthy again, and as diverse as the one that was impacted.”

“Isn’t that what you said is occurring here?” Harrar asked.

“No. Not at all. For one thing, the extinctions here are very recent. There hasn’t been enough time for the sort of adaptation I speak of to take place. For another, species here are not adapting to fill ecological niches—they remain adapted to their own niches, the ones they evolved to fill, and yet they also perform the environmental tasks of extinct species—for no benefit to themselves.”

She waited a moment to let him absorb that, enjoying the sudden breeze and the smell it brought, a sort of dusty golden scent.

“Perhaps an example will help,” she began again, “There is, for instance, a plant with a kind of tubular blossom. The only possible way for it to reproduce is for an arthropod or other small creature to enter the tube of one plant, and then enter that of another, carrying with it the sticky secretions of the first. The plant entices this insect with an edible fluid, nourishing to the insect—and, I suspect from certain clues, important to that insect’s life cycle.”

“That makes sense,” Harrar said.

“Yes, except that I can find no insect that feeds on the fluid. Yet I have seen them pollinated, by another insect whose primary role in the ecosystem is feeding on carrion. Its life cycle, from egg to nymph to adult revolves entirely around carrion. Yet they make time to enter these flower tubes with enough frequency to pollinate them, at no benefit to themselves.”

“Perhaps you have not yet discovered the benefit.”

“If this were the only example of such behavior, I might agree with you. However, I find more than half the animals I have examined play roles in this life-web that are plainly unrelated to their life cycles and physical design. More interesting yet, I have discovered that each species practices some form of reproduction control. When a particular sort of moss becomes scarce due to its consumption by a kind of beetle, the beetles begin disposing of their eggs without fertilizing them. In other words, the ecosystem of this planet is homeostatic—it seeks to remain in absolute balance. It manages to do so even after enormous extinction events.”

“That sounds reasonable.”

“For a worldship, yes, because each life-form is engineered to play a certain role and the system is guided by intelligence—by a rikyam at one level, and by shapers at the next. Mutations are eliminated, as is undesirable behavior. But in the natural ecosystems I’ve studied from data collected in this galaxy, that’s not how things normally work. Each individual organism fights to maximize the number and survivability of its own offspring. Mutations come along that have advantages and are perpetuated. Such systems