Dark Ararat (16 page)

Lityansky was mystified. “What about insects?” he countered.

“Well, what’s an insect but a serial chimera? The imago is only a maggot’s way of making more maggots, so they’re exactly like lichens in being strapped into a specific straitjacket by the limitations of sexual reproduction, but what an insect has, in essence, is a genome that codes for two quite different physical forms.”

“I don’t think it helps to introduce the notion of
serial chimeras
,” Lityansky complained. “The whole point about the situation here is that the vast majority of organisms on Ararat are made up of
simultaneous
chimerical combinations of cell types.”

Matthew didn’t want to be slapped down so easily. “When Solari and I were trawling through the data banks yesterday,” he said, “arthropod analogues seemed conspicuous by their absence. Assuming that the insects and their kin didn’t just slip into the cracks of our admittedly slapdash search, mightn’t that have something to do with the prevalence of un-serial chimeras?”

Lityansky wasn’t impressed. “It’s true that Ararat’s ecosphere has a dramatic dearth of exoskeletal organisms,” he admitted. “We think it’s because the local DNA-analogue has a blind spot where chitin and its structural analogues are concerned. We think that the principal reason for the apparent depletion of the vertebrate-analogues by comparison with Earth is due to the same blind spot. The local organisms aren’t good at producing hard bone. Their endoskeletons are more like cartilage, which means that the bigger animals need more complicated articulations to produce similar leverage. The organisms you saw in those photographs aren’t as similar to their Earthly analogues as they appear at first glance. Each individual might almost be regarded as a fusion of several disparate individuals, routinely combining as many as eight different genomic cell types. In some cases, only half of those cell types are sufficiently similar that they’d be reckoned as same-species in Earthly terms. We’ve hardly begun to extrapolate the possibilities opened up by that fundamental difference.”

Or to investigate it, Matthew added, silently.

“So the ultimate question—the one that dominates all our minds—is admittedly less simple than it seemed to be three years ago, but also more intriguing,” Lityansky added. His rhetorical manner suggested that his discourse was nearing some kind of climax.

Matthew knew that the question Lityansky must have in mind was whether or not it would be possible to establish a viable colony on the surface of the new world. “Go on,” he prompted.

“We had assumed, before arriving here,” Lityansky said, “that the question of whether we could introduce DNA-based ecosystems into an ecosphere that had its own distinct DNA-analogue was relatively straightforward. There was a possibility that DNA organisms might not be able to hold their own in the resultant competition, or that the local organisms might be at a disadvantage, either case presenting a conservation problem. With respect to Ararat, however, we have to ask the question of whether the second genomic system might be integrated into DNA-based organisms, to work in association with them in much the same way that it works in association with the local DNA-analogue. We also have to ask whether we can turn the chimerical constitution of the local organisms to our own technological advantage. In both cases, I believe, the answer is yes. Given what the biotechnologists of Earth have accomplished by taking over the innate natural technology of Earthly organisms, there is good reason to believe that they might accomplish just as much—if not more—by taking control of the natural technology available here, whose potential we have only just begun to glimpse.

“In brief, Professor Fleury, there is abundant potential here for a biotechnological bonanza that will have Earth’s megacorporations racing one another to establish a presence here and reap its benefits.”

Matthew could easily see how attractive that possibility might be to the crew of
Hope
. If the new world could attract enthusiastic support from Earth, it wouldn’t need the kind of support from
Hope
that had been built into Shen Chin Che’s original plan—not, at any rate, for very long.

But there was another side to the coin.

“By the same token,” Matthew said, reflexively taking on the role of devil’s advocate, “there might also be potential here for an ecocatastrophe of an entirely new and previously unenvisaged kind—an ecocatastrophe that could devastate the colony. That’s why the people on the ground are so nervous, isn’t it? That’s why so many of them are ready to give up on the dream that brought them across fifty-eight light-years of void and seven hundred years of history.

“If the three-dimensional genome is capable of producing infectious agents, its biochemistry is so radically different that all the painstaking technological defenses we’ve built against bacteria and viruses will be useless against them. If the processes by which local organisms can produce exotic chimeras can be extended to embrace Earth-originated cells, we might encounter whole new modes of infection.

“In either case, this world could be a potential death trap!”

THIRTEEN

W
hen Matthew returned to the room in which he had awakened, the complex possibilities that Andrei Lityansky had laid out for him were still causing him considerable distress. He threw himself down on his bed as soon as he was inside—not, this time, because he was exhausted but because he needed to think.

Lityansky had, of course, done everything within his power to soothe Matthew’s suddenly inflamed anxiety. He had assured Matthew that there was not the slightest evidence that local pathogens could infect DNA-based organisms or that local organisms could form chimeras in association with them. Although the people on the surface had sustained all manner of cuts, bites, and stings, there had not yet been a single case of alien infection. Nor, the crewman had insisted, was there any reason to suppose that Earthly medical scientists could not devise defenses against such an infection, if one ever did arise, with exactly the same alacrity they had demonstrated in the Earthly plague wars, when they had been required to respond to some extremely ingenious and exotic threats.

The last point would have been more convincing had Matthew not heard news of the havoc wreaked by the ingenious and exotic chiasmalytic transformers, but Lityansky had refused to concede the point. The people of Earth had survived the last plague war just as they had survived the others, and had gone on to achieve true emortality. In the meantime, they had harnessed the new technology of para-DNA to many different purposes, revolutionizing the construction biotech pioneered by Leon Gantz.

Ararat, Lityansky had continued to insist, was a potential biotechnological Klondyke, for whose right of exploitation the colonists should be exceedingly grateful.

Matthew attempted to explain all this to Vince Solari, who had come over to stand by the bedside, looking down at him. Although the policeman couldn’t follow the technical aspects of the discourse, he was perfectly capable of reacting to phrases like “potential death trap” and “biotech bonanza.”

“I take it that you don’t think Lityansky’s trustworthy,” Solari said.

“Oh, he told me the truth as he sees it,” Matthew admitted. “But his viewpoint is way too narrow. The pattern of discovery here is the reverse of the one that steered the history of Earthly biology, and he hasn’t seen the implications of that.”

“I don’t even know what it means,” Solari said, a trifle resentfully.

“On Earth,” Matthew told him, “scientists had an enormous amount of information about plant and animal species before they began to get to grips with the mysteries of organic chemistry. By the time biochemistry got going there was a rich context in place, provided by centuries of painstaking work in taxonomy, anatomy, and physiology. Lityansky and his colleagues have started at the other end, doing the genomic and biochemical analyses first. They haven’t a clue, as yet, how that biochemistry relates to the anatomy, reproduction, and ecology of actual organisms—and they don’t seem to be in any particular hurry to find out. They’re being very methodical, starting with the fundamentals and working their way slowly forward, but they haven’t the slightest idea what the big picture might look like when all the pieces of the jigsaw are fitted together. They think people who try to make guesses—people like Bernal Delgado—are getting way ahead of themselves, but that’s stupid. We have to try to come at the puzzle from every direction if we want to solve it any time soon.”

“So what about these mavericks?” Solari asked. “Could they be right about the planet’s biosphere being the wreckage of some long-past ecocatastrophe? I mean, if things had gone differently on Earth, and the human race really had gone belly-up there, we’d have left an awful lot of biotech debris. When I used to see you on TV, you were fond of saying that there was a possibility that the ecosphere might be cut back all the way to the bacterial level, and that the only footprint we’d leave in the sands of time would be a few hundred long-term survivors out of hundreds of thousands of new bacterial species that had originated as technological products. Might that have happened here, hundreds of millions of years ago?”

“If we really had contrived an ecospasm as extreme as that on Earth,” Matthew said, pensively, “I suppose there might not be much material evidence of it after a hundred thousand years of lousy weather, let alone continental drift and supervolcanic basalt flows. Given that the biotech products that were already at large in my day had been built to last, though, some of them would have held their own in the ensuing struggle for existence and joined in a new tidal wave of adaptive radiation. If I knew more about this stuff that Lityansky calls para-DNA, I might be able to make a start on figuring out the likelihood of something like that getting so thoroughly mixed up with the bacterial residue of an ecospheric meltdown that a new metazoan adaptive radiation would have taken it aboard … but I’m not sure how relevant it would be. This planet is much quieter than Earth, and I’m not sure that all material evidence of a technically sophisticated civilization could have been so thoroughly obliterated
here
.”

“But the planet might have been a lot more active in the distant past,” Solari pointed out. “Even if it wasn’t, the evidence would be buried pretty deep by now. To say that the people on the ground haven’t even begun scratching the surface would be an understatement. But what really matters, I suppose, is whether you’re right or wrong about the world being a death trap
now
.”

“Unfortunately,” Matthew said, “the answer to that one depends on the answers to all the other questions—including the ones Lityansky didn’t want to address, like the possible relevance of serial chimeras. Maybe the relative dearth of chitin and hard bone
isn’t
the product of a blind spot in the protein-coding mechanism. Maybe there’s another factor militating against rigidity.”

“Serial chimeras?,” Solari echoed. “Like werewolves, you mean.”

“Not exactly—but I’ll have to devote some time to figuring out what I
might
mean. What have you been doing while I’ve been taking lessons in xenobiology?”

“Checking the list of murder suspects.”

“Really?” The news was sufficiently interesting to make Matthew lift his head a little higher and turn to lie sideways, supporting himself on his elbow.

Solari had obviously been practicing his keyboard skills, because it required no more than a casual sweep of his fingers to replace the single image on the wallscreen with a mosaic consisting of seven faces arranged in two ranks, four on the upper and three on the lower. Matthew took due note of the symbolism of the empty square at the right-hand end of the bottom rank: the blank where a photograph of one of the alien humanoids might be, if the alien humanoids still existed. Even at a relatively oblique angle, Matthew had no difficulty identifying two of the faces.

“The second from the left on the top row’s Ikram Mohammed,” he said. “A first-rate experimental genomicist. Did some remarkable work on intron architecture and functional gene-nesting. I met him a dozen times at conferences. Bernal would have known him fairly well too—whatever Bernal was working on or thinking about, he’d have shared it with Ike. More of an acquaintance than a friend, but I feel confident saying that he’s not a likely murderer.”

“I’ve looked at his CV,” Solari said, noncommittally. “Do you know any of the others?”

“Lynn Gwyer, directly below him. Genetic engineer specializing in agricultural pharmaceutical production. Did a lot of work on bananas. Regarded by some—but certainly not by me—as a plague-war draft dodger, mainly because she dedicated her efforts to attempts to protect Third World innocents rather than First World software engineers. Bernal probably knew her better than I did, maybe better than he knew Ike Mohammed. Again, an acquaintance rather than a friend, but also not a likely murderer, in my opinion. In fact, a highly unlikely murderer.”

“None of them is a
likely
murderer,” Solari said, a trifle impatiently. “Few murderers are, alas—especially when it comes to domestics. This has to be reckoned a domestic of sorts. They’d all been living together for months. One big happy—or not-so happy—family.”

“Why
not so happy
?”

“There’s always friction in living space that small. There were disagreements. Personal as well as theoretical.” He didn’t elaborate, presumably because it was gossip rather than real evidence.

“Who are the others?” Matthew asked.

Solari started at the top left-hand corner, with a man who might have passed for Shen Chin Che’s son in a dim light. “Tang Dinh Quan,” he reported. “Analytical biochemist. Very accomplished, apparently. Two daughters still in SusAn, but no partner—just like you. Reported to be showing signs of strain and acute anxiety in the last few months, becoming increasing vocal in his support for the Base One party advocating withdrawal from the world.”

“Reported by whom?” Matthew inquired.