Free Dark Ararat by Brian Stableford Page A

that surrounded them. Indeed, they seemed quaintly familiar, save only for the fact that they had no young, nor any sign of the kinds of fleshly apparatus employed by Earthly mammals to produce and nurture young.
    Matthew noted that the bat-analogues were all tiny, though not as tiny as insects. Some of the monkey-analogues grew quite tall—though none were human-sized—but they were very lean and lithe, and somehow rather mercurial . There was nothing reminiscent of a cow or a hippopotamus, still less of a large dinosaur. The top predators seemed to be stealth-hunters. There were shots of creatures resembling glorified weasels pouncing on their prey and stunning them with the aid of stings mounted in their tongues like hypodermic syringes.
    Matthew found the lemuroids strangely unsettling, because rather than in spite of the fact that they were uncannily similar in most respects to the extinct Earthly lemurs he had seen on film. It wasn’t so much that they had the same huge forward-looking eyes and the same gripping hands. It was the strangely elastic way they moved—slowly when contented, rapidly when panicked by the advent of a weasel-analogue—and their perpetual nervous alertness. There was obviously something strange about the way their limbs were articulated, but that was only part of it. Although he knew that he had to be even more careful of the dangers of anthropomorphic thinking here than he had on Earth, the lemuroids seemed to Matthew to be perfect incarnations of an anxiety so deep as to be blatant paranoia. Their feet were mostly equipped with elongated toes that reminded Matthew of the feet of the crewpeople, modified for a way of life that humans had never been able to follow in Earth’s gravity-well.
    On Earth, Matthew knew, the genus Homo had descended from a long line of tough and sturdy apes: apes that had learned to swagger like baboons; stand-up-and-fight apes; playground-bully apes. Their near cousins the gorillas—yet another species Matthew had only seen on film—had taken the gentle giant route, while the hominids had clung most steadfastly to the mad psycho alternative, but the whole family had been unmistakably butch . There were no butch lemuroids in the movies taken by Hope ’s flying eyes—so what kind of ancestry had the humanoids had? Had they been the last of a line to go down to inglorious extinction? If so, why had the entire batch of strategies failed? If not, how had the ancestors of the seemingly timorous extant lemuroids contrived to produce something as amazing as a city-builder?
    If adaptive radiation had ever been as prolific here as it had been on Earth, Matthew thought, an extremely high fraction of its inventions must have been consigned to the dustbin of paleontology. Perhaps it hadn’t been. Perhaps, if this had always been a much quieter world, nature had never had to be so recklessly ingenious in making up for mass extinctions. Perhaps this ambiguous home-from-home had not required nearly so many trials and errors before discovering the phylum and the family that human vanity had always placed at the pinnacle of creation.
    “What do you think?” Solari asked, as the sequence finally cut out of its own accord, having presumably run to one of its potential termini.
    “Maybe we came in late and missed the arthropods,” Matthew mused. “If not, there’s a conspicuous shortage of exoskeletons. Maybe the local coding systems can’t make chitin. On the other hand, the whole animal kingdom seems a trifle anemic, except for slugs and squishy worms, so maybe it’s not much good at bone either. On the whole, there seems to be a noticeable lack of tough stuff, of no-nonsense leverage and substantial solidity.” “How odd would that be?” Solari asked, although he wore the expression of a man who didn’t expect to be able to understand the answer.
    “It’s hard to say, when we have only one other case for comparison,” Matthew admitted. “An adult insect is only