enclosures.
‘Everything,’ Gleb answered. ‘Because this is where it all begins.’
Geoffrey peered into the lower window of the glassed enclosure. It was a kind of rock-pool tableau, with low plant cover and bubbling, gurgling water. ‘How many plant species have you brought here?’ he asked.
‘Living and replicating now, in the region of eight hundred,’ Chama said. ‘In cryosuspension, or as genetic templates, another sixteen thousand. Still some way to go.’
‘My god, there’s something alive in there.’ He couldn’t help jabbing his finger against the glass. ‘I mean something moving. In the water.’
‘A terrapin,’ Gleb said, on a bored note. ‘Terrapins are easy. If we couldn’t do terrapins, I’d give up now.’
‘Show him what else you do,’ Sunday said.
Gleb walked to another window, a few panels down from where Geoffrey was standing. ‘Come here,’ he said, tapping a thick finger against the glass.
The visible portion of the habitat – though it clearly extended far back from the room – was a circle of bare, dusty earth fringed by tall wheat-coloured grasses. Rising above the grasses, a seamless curtain of enamelblue, projected in such a way that it looked as convincing and distant as real sky. As Geoffrey walked over to join Gleb, he kept on tapping his fingernail against the glass. Gleb had very dark nails, tinted a green that was almost black. Geoffrey arrived in time to see the grasses swishing, parting to allow a hare-sized animal to bound into the clearing.
It was a battleship-grey rhinoceros, the size of a domestic cat. It was not a baby. Its proportions and gait, insofar as Geoffrey could tell – and allowing for the bouncing motion that was an inescapable consequence of Lunar gravity – were precisely those of a fully grown animal.
It just happened to be small enough to fit into a briefcase.
He was just satisfying himself as to the accuracy of his assessment when a pair of true babies sprang along behind what was now revealed to be their mother. The babies were the size of rats, but they walked on absurdly thick, muscular, wrinkle-hided legs. They were as tiny and precisely formed as bath toys moulded from grey plastic.
He laughed, amazed at what he was seeing.
‘Resource load is the crux,’ Chama said, joining them by the window. ‘We don’t have the means to keep fully grown adult specimens alive – at least not in a habitat that wouldn’t feel hopelessly claustrophobic to them.’ He pushed a strand of hair away from his cheekbone. ‘Fortunately – for now, at least – we don’t have to. Nature’s already given us a ready-made miniaturisation mechanism.’
‘Phyletic dwarfism,’ Geoffrey said.
‘Yes. Almost childishly easy to achieve in mammals and reptiles.’
Chama was right. Insular dwarfism often arose when an ancestor species divided into isolated sub-populations on islands. Allopatric speciation, and subsequent dwarfism, had occurred time and again in the evolutionary record, from dwarf allosaurs to the
‘The same mechanisms will assist animal life transition through the difficult bottleneck of the early stages of the Green Efflorescence,’ Gleb declared. ‘All we’ve done is give the inbuilt mechanism a little coaxing to produce extreme dwarfism. It’s as if nature anticipated this future survival adaptation.’
‘A little coaxing’ sounded like magisterial understatement to Geoffrey, given the toy-like proportions of the rhinoceroses. But he could well believe that Chama and Gleb hadn’t needed to perform much deep-level genetic tinkering to achieve it. Certainly there was no evidence that the dwarf animals were in any way traumatised by their condition, judging by the way they were happily snuffling and shuffling around, the babies nudging each other boisterously.
Gleb had retrieved the wheeled trolley, dug some granular foodstuff out of one of the containers and was now sprinkling it down into the enclosure via a hopper above the window. The dwarf rhinoceroses must have taken his fingernail tapping as the sign that dinner was imminent.
‘It’s . . . an ingenious solution to the problem,’ Geoffrey said.
‘You find it troubling,’ Chama said.
‘I wonder whether it might have been better to keep these organisms on ice until you had the means to grow them to full size.’
‘Even if that meant waiting decades?’
‘The Green Efflorescence doesn’t sound like a short-term plan.’ It felt odd to speak of the Efflorescence himself, as if by voicing its name he had bestowed upon the enterprise a measure of legitimacy, even tacit approval.
He was still undecided as to whether it might be some kind of vile, misanthropic eco-fascism. He would need to know a lot more before he made up his mind.
‘These animals don’t know that they’re dwarves,’ Gleb said, patiently enough. ‘On a neurological and behavioural level, there’s no evidence of developmental impairment. There’s a huge redundancy in brain tissue – it’s why birds are at least as good at problem solving as primates, even given the massive disparity in cranial volume. So we have no ethical qualms whatsoever. Chama and I wouldn’t countenance the creation of misery merely to serve some distant utopian objective.’
‘They do look happy enough,’ he allowed.
‘We won’t deny that there are difficulties still to be overcome, with some of the other species.’
Something ominous clicked in Geoffrey’s head. ‘If you can do rhinoceroses, you can do mammoths and elephants. It’s been a while, but I remember something about dwarf populations in those species: the Cretan elephants, the mammoths in the Bering Sea Islands.’
‘We can do
