Dark Ararat

“I will not permit the colony to withdraw,” Milyukov said. “No matter what you find or what you say, I will not withdraw the colonists.”

“Because you can’t stand the thought of being outnumbered and outvoted in the corridors of your precious worldlet,” Matthew said. “If Hopewere to become an observation station, ma

“That’s not the kind of man I am,” the captain told him. “I repeat, I will not withdraw the colony. Disembarkation of the remaining colonists will be resumed whether you can provide final proof that the world is inhabited or not. Whatever you say while you have the attention of crew and colonists alike, I have the power and the authority to make certain of that.”

“Of course you have,” Matthew assured him, and switched off the camera’s power. He knew that he had to economize. “Let’s go,” he said to Ikram Mohammed.

The two of them started walking, immediately falling into step. They held to the same heading they’d been following all day, although they hadn’t seen any obvious sign of a trail for some time. They both knew that they had no chance of catching up with the aliens if the aliens didn’t want to be caught, but it wasn’t a topic they wanted to discuss.

Above the canopy the afternoon sky had clouded over, and the light was getting steadily worse, but their eyes had adapted to the perpetual purple twilight well enough and they hadn’t encountered any unusually treacherous ground as yet.

“Milyukov really doesn’t understand,” Matthew said, to break the silence. “He hasn’t a clue how this script is going to work out.”

“Nor have you,” said Ike, drily.

“Yes I have,” Matthew told him. “Even if the worst comes to the worst, and the aliens let me down on this particular trip, I know how the story’s going to work out. Maybe I won’t be the one who gets to broadcast the news, but that’s not what matters, is it?”

“No, it’s not,” Ike replied. “And I’m relieved to know that you haven’t forgotten it.”

Matthew could have wished for more light, in order to study the structures of the canopy more carefully, but it was an inherently frustrating task. When the light was brighter it was reflected and refracted in confusing ways, and now it was dimmer the whole panoply became blurred and uncertain.

After a while, though, it became necessary to pay more attention to the ground than the infinite ceiling. No matter how untreacherous it was, it was far from even and the last thing they needed was for one of them to trip up and turn an ankle.

Matthew suspected that the ground vegetation might be as interesting, in a purely scientific sense, as the canopy, but he would have needed to get down on his hands and knees with a flashlight and a magnifying glass to have any chance of appreciating its intricacies. He wondered more than once whether it might not be more sensible to stay put and hope that the aliens came to them rather than keeping moving, but he reckoned that it would be the wrong decision, if only in dramatic terms.

The crewmen who were following the attempted rescue with an excessively avid interest—because it was the first realmelodrama to which they had ever been exposed—would expect movement, and the one thing he knew for sure was that moving was no worse than standing still. The one place the aliens wouldn’t want to make contact was the boat; even if it had been purple rather than pea-green it would simply have been too exotic and too alarming.

They waited until it was too dark to continue safely before making the next broadcast, even though their audience had to wait an extra quarter of a metric hour to hear the next installment of Matthew’s commentary on Tyrian life, and then had to look at his face eerily lit by a flashlight.

“Back home on Earth,” he said to the camera, picking his words carefully, although he tried not to give that impression, “the descendants of the folk we left behind have discovered the secret of true emortality. They made a couple of false starts along the way, but they got there. We should be glad, although we can’t reap the benefit ourselves. There’s cause for a certain pride in being the last mortal humans ever to live and die, if that’s what we turn out to be. We mustn’t forget, though, that death is another of the other things that we, as products of Earth’s ecosphere, fell into the habit of taking for granted.

“Death was the price that complex Earthly organisms paid for reproduction and evolution. The simplest Earthly organisms always had emortality. The bacteria who came with us on our great adventure, as passengers within our bodies, can keep on dividing and dividing indefinitely. All bacterial deaths are accidental. Bacteria starve, or they get poisoned—by their own wastes or by antibiotics—or they get eaten, but if they avoid all those kinds of fates they just go on dividing forever.

“Complex Earthly organisms are different, but that’s because there’s a sense in which a multicelled organism is just a transitional phase in the life of a single-celled organism. As the old saying has it, a chicken is just an egg’s way of making more eggs. So is a human being. A complex organism is just a reproductive mechanism whose necessity is temporary, and which therefore has obsolescence built in.

“As multicellular reproductive systems became more and more complex, of course, it became much easier to think of them as the ends and the eggs as the means rather than the other way around—and once they learned to think for themselves, that seemed to be the only way to see it. We humans see our mortal multicellular aspects as ourselves because those are the aspects that do the seeing, while those of our eggs that attain emortality by fusing with sperm and going on to make more and more of themselves have always been mute, microscopic, and increasingly irrelevant to adult concerns.

“But suppose things had been different. Suppose complexity had been invented by single-celled organisms not merely as the temporary means of manufacturing more single-celled organisms, with sexual variations, but as authenticmulticellular extrapolations of their simpler ancestors. Suppose that these multicellular extrapolations retained the same i

Matthew had become conscious of movement at ground level, and had to pause to direct Ike’s attention to it. Ike redirected the beam of the flashlight, quickly enough to display half a dozen leechlike worms as they turned with surprising alacrity and slid away. Knowing that they were probably harmless, Matthew didn’t think it worth interrupting his monologue to comment on their arrival and departure.

“If that had been the case,” he continued, “how would the adaptive radiation of complex forms have progressed? Maybe it would produce an ecosphere very different from that of Earth—but maybe not. Maybe the speculator would have decided that the principles of convergent evolution would still work to produce many of the same sorts of biomechanical forms. Some, of course, would be easier to produce under the newly imagined circumstances, and some less, but there wouldn’t be any reason to assume that any bioform that functioned reasonably well in Earth’s actual ecosphere wouldn’t work equally well in the hypothetical alternative.