"Paul J. McAuley - Reef" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mcauley Paul J)

overgrowing and devouring another. Others appeared to be parasites, sending
complex veins ramifying through the thalli of their victims. Water-mining organisms
recruited sulphur oxidizers, trading precious water for energy and forming warty
outgrowths like stromatolites. Some were more than a hundred metres across, surely
the largest prokaryotic colonies in the known Solar System.
All this variety, and after only eighty years of accelerated evolution! Wild beauty
won from the cold and the dark. The potential to feed billions. The science crews would
get their bonuses, all right; the citizens would become billionaires.
Margaret spent all her spare time investigating the reef by proxy, pushed her crew
hard to overcome the problems of penetrating the depths of the Rift. Although she
would not admit it even to herself, she had fallen in love with the reef. She would
gladly have explored it in person, but as in most habitats the Ganapatis citizens did
not like their workers going where they themselves would not.
Clearly, the experiment had far exceeded its parameters, but no one knew why. The
AI that had overseen the experiment had shut down thirty years ago. There was still
heat in its crude proton beam fission pile, but it had been overgrown by the very
organisms it had manipulated.
Its task had been simple. Colonies of a dozen species of slow-growing
chemoautotrophs had been introduced into a part of the Rift rich with sulphur and
ferrous iron. Thousands of random mutations had been induced. Most colonies had
died, and those few which had thrived had been sampled, mutated and reintroduced in
a cycle repeated every hundred days.
But the AI had selected only for fast growth, not for adaptive radiation, and the
science crews held heated seminars about the possible cause of the unexpected
richness of the reef’s biota. Very few believed that it was simply a result of accelerated
evolution. Many terrestrial bacteria divided every twenty minutes in favourable
conditions, and certain species were known to have evolved from being resistant to an
antibiotic to becoming obligately dependent upon it as a food source in less than five
days, or only three hundred and sixty generations, but that was merely a biochemical
adaptation. The fastest division rate of the vacuum organisms in the Rift was less
than once a day, and while that still meant more than thirty thousand generations
had passed since the reef had been seeded, half a million years in human terms, the
evolu-tionary radiation in the reef was the equivalent of Neanderthal Man evolving to
fill every mammalian niche from bats to whales.
Margaret’s survey crew had explored and sampled the reef for more than thirty
days. Cluster analysis suggested that they had identified less than ten per cent of the
species that had formed from the original seed population. And now deep radar
suggested that there were changes in the unexplored regions in the deepest part of
Tigris Rift, which the proxies had not yet been able to reach.
Margaret had pointed this out at the last seminar. “We’re making hypotheses on
incomplete information. We don’t know everything that’s out there. Sampling
suggests that complexity increases away from the surface. There could be thousands
more species in the deep part of the Rift.”
At the back of the room, Opie Kindred, the head of the genetics crew, said languidly,
“We don’t need to know everything. That’s not what we’re paid for. We’ve already
found several species that perform better than present commercial cultures. The
Ganapati can make money from them and we’ll get full bonuses. Who cares how they
got there?”
Arn Nivedta, the chief of the biochemist crew, said, “We’re all scientists here. We
prove our worth by finding out how things work. Are your mysterious experiments no