“If you’d asked me yesterday …” she began, but left it at that. After a pause, she added: “Bernal said they probably had some surprises in store. He didn’t mention giants, but he did wonder whether the ones we’d seen might be immature. Ike had told him they had much bigger genomes than they were exhibiting, and he was trying to figure out why that might be.”
“Was he wondering whether they might be larval stages, capable of further metamorphosis into something completely different?”
“He mentioned the possibility,” Maryanne confirmed.
On a sudden impulse, Matthew said: “What did Bernal callthem? Not in his reports, but in his casual speech. Did he have some kind of nickname for them?”
Maryanne thought about that for a moment before saying: “He called them killer anemonesa couple of times—because the tentacle-cluster made them look like sea anemones.”
“ K-A,” Matthew said, immediately. “ S-K-A. Superkiller anemone. There are no seasons to speak of in these parts, so there’s never been any pressure on complex organisms to develop annual life cycles. They can take all the time they need, or all the time they want. We don’t have the slightest idea how long any of the local life-forms hang around if they don’t fall victim to predators or disease.”
“I’m not the best one to ask,” Maryanne pointed out. “But I don’t think Bernal knew. He did say something about the difficulty of adding chimerization to the sex-death equation. A wild variable, he called it.”
“The sex-death equation,” Matthew said. “That’s right. Never underestimate the power of a man’s favorite catchphrases. Back in sound-bite-land that was one of his ways of dramatizing the population problem.”
“I know,” she said. “I used to see him on TV when I was a kid.”
“Another latecomer to the ranks of the Chosen,” Matthew observed. “Did you see me too?”
“Probably,” she said. “I don’t really remember.”
His ego suitably deflated, Matthew muttered: “He was always the good-looking one—always attractive to the very young.”
“I’m an adult now,” she reminded him, tersely. “Only five years younger than Dulcie and ten years younger than Lynn, in terms of elapsedtime.”
“No insult was intended,” Matthew assured her. “What else did Bernal say about the killer anemones? Not the kind of stuff he’d put in his reports—the kind he’d produce when he was speculating, fantasizing? What did he have to say about superkiller anemones?”
“If he’d had anything at all to say, I’d have realized what skameant myself,” she told him, still annoyed in spite of his assurance that no insult had been intended. “He thought it was odd that the ecosphere seems so conspicuously underdeveloped, in terms of animal species, despite the fact that its complexity seemed so similar to that of Earth. He knew that the extant species had to have a hidden versatility that we hadn’t yet had the opportunity to observe, but he couldn’t figure out what it was for.”
“Reproduction,” Matthew said. “Or gradual chimerical renewal. Unless, of course, they’re the same thing. What did he tell you about gradual chimerical renewal?”
“He told me not to think in terms of werewolves,” she said, obviously having seized upon the same mythical bad example as Solari. “Nor insects. He thought we’d need to be more original than that.”
“Did he suggest any possible explanations for the fact that there don’t seem to be any insect-analogues here?”
“He thought it had something to do with the fact that sex didn’t seem to have caught on as an organism-to-organism sort of thing. He said that flight had more to do with sex than most people realized, and more to do with death than people who thought of souls taking wing for Heaven had ever dared to imagine.”
“It’s another part of the same equation,” Matthew realized, following the train of thought. “Death is so commonplace on Earth because it’s a correlate of the reliance on sex as a means of shuffling the genetic deck. Flight is so commonplace for the same reason: it’s at least as much a matter of bringing mates together and distributing eggs as it is of dodging predators. Flying insects occupy a privileged set of niches on Earth because of the role they play in pollination—a role that doesn’t seem to exist here, at least not on a day-to-day basis. Factoring chimerization into the sex-death equation must have all kinds of logical consequences that we’re ill-equipped to imagine, let alone work out in detail. To borrow another hoary catchphrase, this place might not just be queerer than we imagine, but queerer than we canimagine. Is it possible, do you think—is it even remotely conceivable—that the missing humanoids might be a lot more closely related to the worms than we’ve assumed, for the simple reason that everythinghere is much more closely related to everything else than we’ve assumed?”
“The genomics say no, according to Ike and Bernal,” she told him. “Almost all the chimeras we’ve analysed are cousin-aggregations, made up of closely related cells.”
“So closely related,” Matthew said, remembering what Tang had told him about the same matter, “that it’s difficult to see where the selective advantage lies. But what about the chimeras we haven’t analyzed, or even glimpsed? Probably queerer than we can imagine, even after three years of patient work—but Lityansky’s jumped to his optimistic conclusions half a lifetime too soon. My gut reaction was a lot cleverer than he was prepared to credit. Whatever hidden potential this world’s hoarding, it’s something we haven’t even begun to grasp.”
“There’s no real reason to think you’ll find it downriver if we haven’t found it here,” she pointed out, scrupulously.
“Bernal didn’t think so,” Matthew pointed out. “Why was that?”
“Simply because we’d looked here and not found anything very exciting,” she told him. “He thought that it was time to look somewhere else. He didn’t think they were ever going to find anything on Base One’s island, because the priority there is on usurpation of land, the production of Earth-analogue soils, and the growth of Earthly crops. Base Two’s attention is similarly restricted, with exploitation still taking a higher priority than exploration. The grasslands are the most extensive ecosystemic complexes on at least two of the four continents—but it was hope that was guiding Bernal’s expectations, not the calculus of probability.”
“I understand that,” Matthew told her.
“So do I,” she admitted. “But I’m biased. I loved him.”
“You weren’t the only one,” Matthew assured her. “You weren’t even the only one here, were you?”
“But she didn’t kill him,” Maryanne was quick to say.
“Who?”
“Lynn. She really didn’t mind. Not thatmuch. She knew him years ago. She’d been through it all before. She understood what he was like. She didn’t kill him.”
“Did you tell Solari that Bernal had been sleeping with Lynn before he took up with you?” Matthew wanted to know.
“He already knew,” she told him. “He knew before he left Hope. He asked Lynn about it, and he asked me. But I can’t believe that she killed him. She wouldn’t. She couldn’t.”
Matthew thought about it for a moment, and then said: “No, she wouldn’t. We may be twenty-first-century barbarians, but we’re not nineteenth-century barbarians. We’re mortals, but we’re civilized, and we have other things to think about. More important things. We have a seemingly Earth-clone world that isn’t an Earth-clone at all, and a race of city-dwellers who couldn’t hang on to the habit. We’re uneasy, scared, jumpy … but even here we have our VE sex-kits, our IT, our missionary zeal. You’re right. Lynn couldn’t have killed Bernal, and if Vince thinks she did, he’s tuned into the wrong wavelength. But somebody did.”
“I don’t know who,” Maryanne insisted.