Matthew looked up at the canopy and gestured with his arm. Ike looked puzzled for a moment, but then he caught on. There was nothing that a sweep could actually showthe viewers by way of dramatizing Matthew’s rhetoric, but it could relieve the tedium by giving them something else to look at. Even an audience as well-educated and interested as the one he was hoping for couldn’t be expected to stare at his face indefinitely without getting a trifle bored.
“It’s probably simplest to think about it in terms of different timescales,” Matthew went on. “Earth’s timescales are determined by a seasonal cycle, which gives the year a tremendous importance. Although complex organisms like mammals live for many years, the vast majority of Earthly animal species go through an entire life cycle in a year, and most of those only devote a short space of time—maybe as little as a single day—to the business of sexual exchange. The rest of the time is spent lying dormant, growing, and the first kind of reproduction—which often involves considerable metamorphoses. Most Earthly organisms with annual life cycles mass-produce young, but only a few individuals make it through the long phases of the cycle to become the next generation of breeders. The vast majority become food for other organisms.
“At first glance, it might seem that more complex Earthly animals—like us—have developed a radically different reproductive strategy, as far removed from mass production as you can imagine, but the appearance is slightly misleading. Humans do mass-produce sperms and eggs, but only a few of them ever get together successfully enough to produce a live baby, and by the time a baby is born it’s already gone through the first few phases of its growth and self-reproduction. The whole cycle is slowed up by a factor of twenty to fifty—and biotechnology has shown our cousins back home how to slow it up indefinitely. But here on this world the chimerical individuals that stand in for organisms never had to cope with the tyranny of the seasons, and they never faced the kind of struggle our ancestors had to resist that tyranny. Here on Tyre, even worms are emortal—and every single quasi-organism that ever figured out a better way of avoiding getting eaten has the chance to live forever.”
Matthew paused again to give Ike the chance to pan around, displaying the purple forest yet again in all its peculiar glory. This time, Matthew, hoped, the view wouldadd something to the argument. By now, the viewers should have learned to see the alien environment through eyes whose curiosity had been cleverly restimulated: eyes informed by a more prolific imagination.
“Even in that sort of situation,” he added, hoping that his confidence was warranted, “I suppose sex couldhave established itself as an individual-to-individual thing, but it didn’t. It remained within individuals, and chimerization became the means by which those individuals produced new individuals, in orgies of mass production not unlike those in which most Earthly organisms indulge on a yearly basis—except that here on Tyre, there is no yearly basis. Where complex organisms are concerned, those orgies are muchmore widely spaced. Even for the reptile-analogues we might have to think in centuries; for the humanoids, who knows? Maybe millennia.
“In terms of the natural cycles of thisworld—a world whose ecosphere may be a billion years older than Earth’s—the three years we’ve been here might only be the equivalent of a few hourson Earth: a few hours in the depths of winter, when nothing’s busy with the adventurous kind of reproduction, except maybe people. But in spite of appearances, the people of Tyre aren’t like the people of Earth. They couldn’t be. Convergent evolution might have given them keen eyes and clever hands and self-conscious brains to go with their bipedal stature, but it couldn’t give them a way of making babies, because that’s not the way things work hereabouts. Think about the possible consequences of that difference, if you care to, while I’m off the air. I’ll pick up the story later. In the meantime, thanks for listening.”
THIRTY-FIVE
There’s an incoming call,” Ike said, as soon as Matthew had closed his eyes in order to collect himself.
“What?” Matthew said, automatically reaching for his useless beltphone.
“Not the phone,” Ike said. “The screen in back of the camera’s rigged to receive as well as to monitor and the fuel cell’s five times as powerful as a phone’s. We can be contacted that way, provided that—”
“Provided that the other guy has a similar rig,” Matthew finished for him, as enlightenment dawned. “Milyukov.” He took the camera from Ike’s weary arms and looked into the monitor.
“Captain,” he said. “How good of you to call. Are you enjoying the show?”
“You are being irresponsible,” Milyukov said, flatly. “You have been awake for little more than ten days. You are not qualified to produce these fantasies.”
“So put someone who isqualified on the air,” Matthew retorted. “I’m leaving gaps between broadcasts of a couple of hundred of your metric minutes—it’s up to you to decide what to fill them with.”
“We don’t go in for such time-wasting relics of Earthly barbarism as round-the-clock broadcasting,” was Milyukov’s frosty response.
“It’s up to you, of course,” Matthew told him. “But you’ve got an audience whether you want to keep it entertained or not. If you don’t want to broadcast I’m sure that you could find people at Base One who’d be only too glad to amplify or challenge my speculations, if you’d care to drop them the relevant equipment.”
“That would not be appropriate,” the captain said.
“Not from your viewpoint it wouldn’t,” Matthew agreed, sarcastically. “After all, you wouldn’t want them bringing discussions about the future of the colony into the open at such a delicate time. You certainly wouldn’t want to get involved in an actual debate, would you? You’d rather talk to your own people directly, without anyone having a chance to interrupt. Well, you’ve been well and truly interrupted, and you can either make provision to answer back or keep quiet.”
“I can take you off the air.”
“Can you? The camera Ike’s using has enough power to send out a signal for several days. If you interfere with the satlinks your people and the people at Base One will make what provision they can to receive signals directly. You’re not under the delusion, I hope, that Shen Chin Che doesn’t know what’s going on? If there’s one man on Hopewho understands the power of TV as well as I do, it’s Shen.”
“I can certainly keep himout of this,” was Milyukov’s immediate response.