Free Dark Ararat by Brian Stableford

a sea anemone, but he was biologist enough not to want to issue a description of that crude kind. The image was a film clip, which showed the creature gliding along like a snail, but the tentacles sprouting from its humped back remained limp and it wasn’t possible for Matthew to come to a firm decision as to their function. “It’s not very big,” he pointed out. “The scale on the baseline puts it at twenty or thirty centimeters from end to end.”
    More film clips followed, slowly working up to images of more complex creatures. Eventually, Matthew supposed, they would reach fishy things, amphibians and other vertebrate-analogues, but he was not sure how many orders of invertebrates they might have missed. Were there really so few arthropod-analogues?
    “How about that one?” Solari followed up, this time pointing at something that looked rather like a translucent horseshoe crab. Matthew wondered whether the impression that the creatures he was seeing were soft-bodied might be an illusion born of their mauve coloration, but when this one began to move—more rapidly than he had expected—he judged that the outer tegument was too flexible to qualify as a “shell.”
    Solari had to scroll through many more quasi-molluscan and vermiform organisms of widely varying dimensions before the tape reached creatures that had any sort of backbone, but he got there in the end. The analogies between these creatures and their Earthly equivalents were so obvious that Matthew’s faith in convergent evolution was soon restored. Although the new world’s Gaea-clone hadn’t been able to select out DNA as champion coding-molecule, she obviously knew lots of ways to design a perfectly adequate fish. There were things like mudskippers and land-going tadpoles, polished snakes and glassy froglike forms.
    Even after an hour’s trawling, though, Matthew hadn’t seen much that could pass for fur and feathers. Even the local rat-analogues seemed to be naked. Unless they had contrived to miss out on the relevant folder, bird-and mammal-analogues were rare. And yet, there had been enough lemuroids around to produce humanoids, and enough humanoids to produce a race of city-builders that might have been alive and active when Mitochondrial Eve was mothering the entire human race.
    One thing that Matthew didn’t see while the parade continued was any immature organisms: no nests, no eggs, no infants. Even when there were shots of entire herds of grazers, there was no sign of any young. Nor, for that matter, could he see any sign of secondary sexual characteristics on the adult organisms. In the absence of a commentary, however, he was reluctant to take these apparent absences at face value.
    “There must be some real animals,” Solari complained, meaning that there ought to be more mammal-equivalents.
    “There ought to be some quasi-arthropodans too,” Matthew said. “Even if this world’s tacit planner didn’t have the same fondness for beetles as ours, there’d be no sense in missing out on a whole range of viable adaptive forms. Insects are among the most efficient products of Earthly evolution. If the rats had crashed out with the humans, the cockroaches would have inherited the Earth.”
    “I can do without spiders, myself,” Solari told him. Matthew didn’t want to insult him with the pedantic insistence that arachnids weren’t insects, so he let the comment pass.
    It eventually turned out, though, that there were a few monkey analogues and even a few flying creatures, although they were more like furless bats and flying squirrels than birds. Natural selection on Ararat-Tyre didn’t seem to have come up with hair or feathers, although it had just about mastered scales.
    Solari breathed a deep sigh of satisfaction when he found the monkey-analogues, as if they had always been the only worthy objects of his search. They were pale purple, just like everything else, but they didn’t seem as conspicuously alien as the vegetation