Dark Ararat

by Brian Stableford

  Was that, he wondered, how Milyukov’s people saw all the Chosen People?

  It certainly seemed so when he got back to the room he shared with Vince Solari and found himself confronted with an exceedingly angry Nita Brownell.

  “Are you mad?” she demanded. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”

  “I had to try to see Shen,” he replied, in a mild tone that was neither feigned nor disingenuous. “It was the only way to get a proper understanding of the situation.”

  “You haven’t even begun to understand the situation,” she told him, conveniently forgetting that one of the reasons why he didn’t understand the situation was that she had gone to such perverse lengths to avoid explaining it to him. “Captain Milyukov’s got trouble enough trying to keep the more extreme factions in check, without you adding fuel to the flames. You’ll be down on the surface in two days’ time, but some of us have to live and work up here. What do you think your antics have done to my position?”

  “What extreme factions?” Matthew wanted to know. He couldn’t drum up much sympathy for the doctor’s personal troubles.

  “The faction that wants him to dump all the cryonic travelers, pull out and start over,” she replied, unsurprisingly. “The faction that argues that the revolution didn’t go far enough, and has yet to be brought to its proper culmination. The faction that thinks the people of Earth were so criminally negligent in the management of their own world that they oughtn’t to be trusted with another. The faction that thinks that you and I and your children, and everyone else’s children, ought to be regarded simply as genetic raw material, because our minds are so corrupt as to constitute cultural poison.”

  “That’s a lot of factions in a population of a few hundred,” Matthew pointed out, mildly.

  “Far too many,” the doctor agreed. “Which makes it all the more remarkable that the captain’s on our side, you poor fool. He’s the one who wants to let us fulfil the quest for which we undertook to be frozen down. He’s the one who wants to help us. It’s bad enough that Shen Chin Che is rolling round Hope’s decks like a loose cannon, without you blasting off as well.”

  While this tirade was in progress Vince Solari had hauled himself off his bed and had come to stand with them, ready to play the peace officer by imposing his body between theirs should it prove necessary. All Matthew said was: “Is it really that bad? Are the crew so bitterly divided among themselves?”

  “Captain Milyukov doesn’t seem to think so,” Solari put in. “The doctor may be a little overanxious. She’s in an awkward position.”

  “What do you know about it?” Nita Brownell retorted.

  “Only what the captain told me,” Solari said, soothingly. “Are you all right, Matt?”

  “I might have broken a knuckle,” Matthew admitted. “Otherwise, it’s just bruises. My IT has blanked the pain, but I’m a little spaced out and very tired.”

  Nita Brownell picked up his right hand and felt the knuckle, without any conspicuous tenderness or concern. “It’s not broken,” she concluded, giving the distinct impression that she would have been happier if it had been. “Unlike the jaw of the man you hit.”

  “He was about to hit me,” Matthew pointed out.

  “I think we both need sleep,” Solari said. “Perhaps we should postpone further recriminations until morning.”

  Nita Brownell was ready enough to agree with that, although she insisted on giving Matthew a further examination once he was horizontal on the bed. Matthew was past caring whether her real concern was for his health or to recover some of the bugs that had recorded his conversation with Shen Chin Che.

  When the door closed behind her, Solari said: “Anything I should know?”

  “Not urgently,” Matthew assured him. “It was a personal thing. I know Shen. I owed it to him to pay my respects, whatever the effort required. The crew don’t understand how much they owe him.”

  “That’s the way it is with children of a revolution,” Solari observed. “They tear up the past, demonize the ancestors they used to worship. But when they’ve tried out the extremes for size, they usually swing back. The wheel tends to come full circle—that’s why they call them revolutions.”

  Matthew wasn’t sure that was true, but he hadn’t the energy to argue, or even to reply. As soon as silence fell, he was asleep.

  TWELVE

  Andrei Lityansky was as tall and slim as the majority of the crew, but his skin was too dark to manifest the curious greenish tint that many of his fellows displayed. The cast of his features was slightly Semitic—a point of Earthly reference that Matthew found oddly reassuring—and his hair was jet black. He wore a neat triangular beard, the first one Matthew had seen on Hope.

  Matthew had hardly had time to finish his unappetizing breakfast before Riddell had turned up to guide him to his appointed rendezvous, but Lityansky didn’t look like a man who had recently woken from refreshing sleep. He seemed a trifle fractious, like a man who did not appreciate the disturbance of his expectations by the kind of unexpected delay that Matthew had imported into his schedule. He was nursing a cup of what looked like coffee, but he didn’t offer any to Matthew.

  “How is Shen Chin Che?” the crewman asked, with ostentatious irony. “We haven’t seen much of him lately.”

  “As well as can be expected,” Matthew replied. “How are Captain Milyukov and the man I hit?”

  “The captain’s untroubled. He had no intention of keeping any secrets from you. There was no need for you to seek out the renegades—as you must have discovered. Lamartine’s broken jaw will heal, but the other damage might be more serious.” Matthew took the second remark to imply that Lityansky had heard the tape of his conversation with Shen. The last sentence was more worrying, but he didn’t want to discuss the crew’s ambivalent attitudes to their passengers. He wanted to hear what Lityansky had to say about the ecosphere of the new world; and its underlying genomics.

  Lityansky understood that, but he had his own order of priorities. He insisted on “putting the information in context,” perhaps because he thought it necessary and perhaps because he wanted to inflict a little subtle punishment on Matthew for screwing up his schedule.

  “You might have heard mention of a life-bearing orphan planet that we passed close by two hundred years ago,” the biologist said. “We’ve had reports from Earth’s robot probes of two others, and of half a dozen life-bearing planets in solar systems closer to Earth than this one. That knowledge had already informed our grandfathers, long before we arrived here, that the panspermists and the more extreme convergence theorists were wrong. DNA isn’t the only basis of life to be found in the galaxy, and doesn’t appear to be common. Perhaps one coding molecule will eventually win the cosmic struggle for existence by out-competing all its rivals, but that certainly won’t happen soon—and by soon I mean any time in the next few billion years. Everything we have so far discovered suggests that we live in a galaxy in which life is very various.”

  “But most of the rivals to DNA you’ve so far discovered,” Matthew put in, “aren’t capable of producing anything but bacterial sludge.”

  “We don’t know that,” Lityansky said. “DNA probably couldn’t produce anything but bacterial sludge in the context of an orphan planet, and we’ve no reason to think that any of the alternative coding molecules present on such worlds would be incapable of producing complex life if they had the resources of a sunlit planet like Earth or Ararat to work with. It might, of course, be unreasonably arrogant of us to think of such worlds as the primary abodes of life or as the highest achievements of evolution. It is at least conceivable that one of the many kinds of bacterial sludge that exist in less balmy conditions will ultimately out-compete everything else, proving that metazoan creatures—including sentient humanoids—are merely temporary follies of creation.”

  “Fair enough,” Matthew said. “So tell me about temporary folly number two.”

  “I think you’ll find it intriguing,” Litya
nsky told him, teasingly. “Until we arrived here, everything we had learned from our own orphan and the data harvested from Earth’s probes suggested that there was one candidate rule of comparative evolution that seemed to have held firm. In all the other cases known to us, each ecosphere had only one fundamental reproductive molecule—DNA and RNA aren’t sufficiently different, of course, to be reckoned fundamentally different. The coding molecules were all different, but each ecosphere was derived from a single biochemical ancestor. Earth is now a partial exception to the rule—the news from home says that Earthly biotech has been enhanced by a whole new range of artificial genomic systems based on a molecule whose primary version was dubbed para-DNA—but that was the result of clever artifice. Ararat is a genuine exception: a natural exception.

  “The inference we had taken from the fact that each new ecosphere had only one fundamental coder-replicator was that in any limited arena, one reproductive molecule would be bound to win out over all others in a primordial competition—a biochemical variant of that discredited pillar of primal ecology, Gause’s axiom. That axiom can now be discounted at the biochemical level as well as the specific level. Here on Ararat there are two fundamental reproductive molecules, whose competition has been resolved in a rather peculiar way.”

  “Go on,” Matthew prompted, when Lityansky paused—but he had paused for a reason, to use a keypad to summon a set of formulas and molecular models to the wallscreen behind him.

  “As you can see,” he went on, “one of the molecules is a double helix that codes for proteins in a fashion roughly similar to that of DNA, although it’s a little more versatile. We call it meta-DNA, but that’s just for temporary convenience. There are too many viable molecules in what we now recognize as the DNA-para-DNA-meta-DNA family to be discriminated by the customary tags—doubtless we’ll eventually work out a whole new terminology, and maybe a whole new branch of science.

  “The second molecule, here, is the oddity: a freak whose like hasn’t yet been encountered anywhere else. All the coder-replicators in the DNA family are basically two-dimensional structures, even though they’re twisted repeatedly in order to wind them up into compact structures like plasmids and chromosomes. As you can see”—here Lityansky animated the image on the screen so that the second molecular model began to rotate—“Ararat’s second coder-replicator is three-dimensional even at the most basic level of structure. We thought at first that it was tubular, like the more complicated buckyball derivatives, but those are just carbon complexes with occasional add-ons, and this has other components that are far more complex. The amplifications are mostly nitrogen, hydrogen, and oxygen, as you’d expect, and you won’t be unduly surprised by the phosphate residues—but look at the silicon and the lanthanides! You’ve never seen anything remotely like them.

  “The silicon was an almost-expectable shock, I suppose, because we’ve always preset our probes to search high and low for traces of silicon or silicone-based life, both in and outside the home system. We never found any, but we kept hoping. Even running across silicone-like formations working in collaboration with rare earths as well as carbon didn’t seem so very surprising in retrospect, in view of the way that nanotech development has proceeded on Earth since we’ve been away. There’s been a dramatic convergence of the organic and the inorganic at what more recent jargon calls the picotechnological level, and the inorganic materials involved in the convergence are the descendants of the old silicon chips and modular doping arrays—but that’s artifice too. This is natural, although I ought to admit that there are some mavericks on the surface who aren’t entirely convinced.”

  “Why not?” Matthew asked, wondering whether the “mavericks” in question included Bernal Delgado.

  “Because they’re excessively impressed by the fact that this world is a billion years older than Earth. They’re not convinced that evolution happened here at a much slower rate. They wonder whether there might have been an advanced civilization here at one time: one as advanced as Earth’s. If so, they argue, it too might have developed artificial coding systems for biotechnological and nanotechnological purposes. Personally, I find it impossible to believe that any such civilization wouldn’t have left more obvious relics.”

  “After a billion years?” Matthew countered.

  “A sophisticated inorganic technology ought to have left some identifiable traces,” Lityansky insisted. “There’s no evidence of any such traces on the surface. Anyhow, the situation now is that Ararat’s second coding molecule is associated with a whole new sideline of organic chemistry, which collaborates with the one that’s a close analogue of Earthly organic chemistry. Given that fundamental collaboration, maybe it isn’t so surprising that we also find biochemical collaborations of a much more adventurous kind.

  “With the aid of hindsight, perhaps it isn’t so unusual that all the metazoan cells in the Ararat ecosphere have two differently based genomes. After all, you and I and all our animal cousins have two genomes too, although the nuclear genome and the mitochondrial genome are both DNA-based. Collaboration between genomes is obviously possible, given the Earthly example, so it’s not such a huge stretch of the imagination to wonder whether it might somehow be necessary, or at least very advantageous, to the production of authentically complex organisms. It’s hard to believe that it’s mere coincidence that the only other place in the galaxy where we’ve found evidence of humanoid organisms—albeit, perhaps, unsuccessful humanoid organisms—built them on a double-genome basis.”

  Matthew had been studying the molecular models carefully, hoping for some insight into their potential, but it was no more possible to deduce the organisms he’d studied with Vince Solari from the formulas on the screen than it was to deduce a housefly and a human being from the formula of DNA. It took him a few seconds to realize that the bearded man had paused again, this time in order to invite a response.

  “Collaboration was an emotionally loaded word where I come from,” Matthew observed, cautiously. “It didn’t sit too well within the theory of evolution by natural selection. It’s not a word that Bernal Delgado was wary of using, but he wasn’t the hardest-centered Darwinian in the selection box.”

  “Were you?” Lityansky asked. The way his lips had pursed when Matthew mentioned Bernal Delgado’s name told Matthew that Bernal was indeed one of the disapproved mavericks—almost certainly their loudest spokesman.

  “No,” Matthew admitted, “but whenever Bernal and I got together, I was prepared to play devil’s advocate.”

  “You can call it assimilation if you’d prefer that way of looking at it,” Lityansky offered, as if he were making a generous concession. “Lichens are the only obvious Earthly example of that kind of cross-category fusion, but there are a lot more here. On Ararat, the distinction between plants and animals is unclear. Lots of animals, of many different families, possess chloroplast-analogues.”

  “One could argue that all Earthly plants and all Earthly animals are the products of cross-category fusions,” Matthew pointed out. “Chloroplasts and mitochondria probably started out as independent organisms that became resident in other kinds of cells.”

  “However the association between nuclear and mitochrondrial DNA arose,” Lityansky said, doggedly, “it’s there and it’s productive. It produced a selective advantage that enabled organisms with it to out-compete organisms without it. Something similar must have happened here. The metazoans with two genomes won out over any metazoans that tried to get by with one, whether the one was two-dimensional or three-dimensional.”

  Lityansky dismissed the various images of the new world’s coding molecules from the screen, and brought up a new set of images. At first, Matthew couldn’t make head nor tail of them, but then he realized that they were electron microscope images of cell-clusters, including some cells that were in the process of division and some clusters where neighboring cells appeared to be undergoing some kind of fusion or exchange of nuclear material.

  “Can you see what�
��s happening here?” Lityansky asked.

  Matthew couldn’t, but he wasn’t prepared to look stupid. He felt obliged to make a tentative guess.

  “Reproduction,” he said. “Shuffling the genetic pack. The local equivalent of meiosis. But there’s a twist. There’s something odd about reproductive processes on this world. I never saw any young in the archive photographs, nor any obvious secondary sexual characteristics.”

  It was close enough to wring a grudging flicker of respect from Lityansky. “That’s the heart of the matter,” he conceded. “I believe that biotechnologists had already begun to explore techniques of artificial chimerization by the time you left Earth?”

  “Mosaic organisms had been produced by embryo fusion long before then,” Matthew said. “It was never more than a gimmick in my day, used to produce experimental interspecies hybrids and children for same-sex couples. But it’s different here, right? Chimerization is routine—and the mavericks who reckon that the genomic duplex might be a relic of ancient biotech also wonder whether the local chimeras might be echoes of a glorious past. On the other hand, patterns of chimerization must have been built into metazoan evolution when the first local slime-molds started experimenting with communal living and cellular division of labor. From there, they were handed down to the entire range of metazoans, conserved in every new burst of adaptive radiation.” His guesses were growing more elaborate now, as he picked up cues from Lityansky’s body language that told him that he was on the right track. “At any rate,” he concluded, “that’s why the big animals don’t seem to go in for sex, even though convergent evolution has made them in the same image as their Earthly counterparts in other respects. So how does reproduction work here?”