Текст книги "Dark Ararat"

Автор книги: Brian Stableford

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Matthew assumed that “God never does” was a criticism of Kriefmann’s indecisiveness rather than the Almighty’s.

“What about me?” Solari put in. “Do I have a voice?”

“Don’t tell me youwant to go too,” Blackstone said.

“That’s not what I meant,” Solari said. “I was asking whether I have any voice in who goes and who stays … and whenthe boat is cleared for departure.” He obviously felt that the answer ought to be yes in both cases—which would allow him to hold the expedition back until he’d completed his investigation, lest the murderer should slip away unapprehended.

“No, you don’t,” Blackstone told him, brusquely. “The boat trip’s scientific business—nothing to do with you. Long overdue. The moment we figured out that the aliens had to be downriver in the glass-roofed grass forest we should have set off to find them. I was ready to walk, but I got outvoted. I even got voted off the expedition in favor of Dulcie.”

“If it’s scientific business,” Solari pointed out, “it’s nothing to do with you, either.”

“Maybe it isn’t,” Blackstone came back at him, “but if they run into trouble down there, they might need a man who can shoot straight. That’s why I was sent here in the first place, when we thought they might still be skulking in the hills. If it were up to me, I’d be the one taking Bernal’s place.”

“It’s not up to you,” Matthew put in. “I’m Bernal’s replacement. The berth has to be mine, if I want it.”

“Do you?” Blackstone wanted to know.

“Yes.”

Blackstone opened his mouth to offer some further objection, but he was seized by a sudden doubt and hesitated. He deliberated, lowered his voice and said: “Look, I’m sorry about all this. We know we shouldn’t be in this mess. If we could get out of it with a few handshakes and a group hug we would. I wish I could say that your arrival will help, but it won’t. Some of us think the last thing we need is a cop asking questions, trying to make one of us into a murderer. Some others probably think the second last is someone who just came out of the freezer thinking he can solve all our other problems when people who’ve been here for years haven’t even scratched the surface. Sorry, but that’s the way it is.”

Matthew was too taken aback by the change of conversational pace to reply, but Vince Solari wasn’t. “I’m not trying to make one of you into a murderer,” he said, quietly. “Whoever killed Bernal Delgado did that.”

“It wasn’t one of us,” Blackstone said. Matthew had rarely heard a sentence uttered with less conviction. The Australian hesitated again, almost as if he’d resolved as a child always to count to ten before losing his temper. “Personally,” he said, eventually, “I don’t mind either of you being here, as long as you don’t start making waves before you understand what’s what. But even I have to admit that Mr. Solari is an extra complication in a situation that already has a few too many. Can I show you to your bunks now? I have to get back to the shuttle—it’s going to take at least three trips to get all the cargo back here.”

“Fine,” said Matthew, although he felt in his heart of hearts that it was anything but.

EIGHTEEN

Matthew slept far longer than he intended to, and far longer than was comfortable, considering the quality of his dreams. Although the images fled as soon as he was shaken awake he was left with a bitter taste in his dry mouth and a fugitive memory of having struggled in vain to move out of harm’s way, while various no-longer-specifiable dangers threatened to wreak havoc with his lumpen and overly massive body.

The first thing he did when he opened his eyes was check out the other bunk, but it was empty. Vince Solari had been very enthusiastic to get on with the job. The room wasn’t empty for long, though; almost as soon as he moved the privacy curtain slid into its daybed and a woman he recognized as Dulcie Gherardesca appeared in the gap. She had brought him a mug of tea and a bowl of what looked like fortified rice-manna.

“It’s the fresh air that knocked you out,” she said, as he stretched his muscles and rubbed his eyes. “The weight isn’t so bad, but even when it’s filtered the air is flavored and perfumed with all manner of subliminal sensations. It’s a real jolt to the system.”

“Thanks,” he said, as he drained the mug. “I needed that. You’re right about the jolt. I never anticipated the subtle differences. The big ones, yes, but not the ones that hover just out of reach of direct perception. Blackstone seems to be oblivious to them, though—to him, this seems to be the outback painted purple. Or maybe Botany Bay.”

“Rand believes in taking bulls by the horns,” the anthropologist said. “And it wasn’t entirely kindness that brought me here. Your friend Vincent didn’t waste any time at all. I was the one who found the body, so I was the one he came after first. I needed an excuse to make a graceful exit. I guess that’ll make him all the keener to make me a suspect.”

“Vince is a bull-by-the-horns kind of guy himself,” Matthew told her. “But he seems pretty levelheaded to me. He’ll do his best to sort this business out properly, and he isn’t the type to be led astray by preconceptions. You’ve nothing to fear from him—unless, of course, you did it. I’m assuming you didn’t.”

“Nobody here wants to think that any of their friends and colleagues could do such a thing,” she told him, quietly. “Not just because they’d have to worry about being next on the list, but because nobody wants to think anybody else capable of doing that to a man like Bernal.”

“Whereas if it had been a man like Blackstone …” Matthew said, jokingly. He saw immediately that the joke had been ill-advised. Dulcie Gherardesca had been living with the fact of the murder for some time. She had not the slightest wish to consider the question of how much difference it would have made to her feelings and fears if someone else had been the victim. “Sorry,” he said. To cover his embarrassment he thanked her again for bringing his breakfast. Then he took a mouthful of the manna porridge and almost withdrew his thanks.

“Sorry about that,” she said. “We’ve been cutting the manna shipped down from Hopewith the produce of our own converters. It’s certified edible, but edible and palatable aren’t quite the same thing. Base One has food-tech people working on the problem, but it’ll be a while before the delicacies are sorted out. As you say, it’s the subtle differences that make the most impact.”

“It’s not that bad,” he assured her, insincerely.

“I’m sure Lynn would have brought you breakfast if she’d been here,” Dulcie said, awkwardly. “She’s working on the boat with Ike while Maryanne and Tang help Blackstone with the last of the dropship’s cargo. She’s told us a good deal about you—more than Ike has, although I gathered that he knew you better.”

“Ike wouldn’t want to talk about me in case it looked as if he was bragging about knowing someone who was on TV a lot,” Matthew guessed. “Nonsense, of course—but it’s often the people who would never dream of bragging who are most afraid of being caught.”

“I’ve seen you on TV myself,” Dulcie Gherardesca admitted. “I suppose we all did. Couldn’t really miss you in the mid-eighties, could we?”

“And you probably thought me less of a scientist because of it,” Matthew said, a little too glibly. “Bernal too, I dare say. Not our fault, really. Once the ecocatastrophe was well under way ecologists started getting the attention they’d always warranted, and a lot more besides. Pity the prophet whose prophecies begin to come true—what happens then makes living without the honor of one’s countrymen seem like a piece of cake. No wonder Bernal and I were so desperate to get away from it all.”

“I don’t think anyone here thinks any less of you for trying so hard to jerk the world out of its complacency,” she said, “or for trying to get remedial measures moving once the Crash hit hard. I brought you Bernal’s notepad. I figured that you’d be as anxious to get started as Inspector Solari. I’ve checked through it myself, of course—we all have. We can’t find anything epoch-making, but we didn’t really expect to. After all, when Archimedes leapt out of the bath he didn’t go looking for a stylus so he could write Eureka!on the nearest piece of papyrus—and even if he had, it wouldn’t have begun to tell anyone what he’d actually discovered. So even if we could figure out what skameans, it might not get us any closer to the truth.”

While she was speaking she pressed the keys of the notepad to bring up what Matthew presumed to be the last “page” of Bernal Delgado’s jottings. The last entries of all read:

NV correlated with ER?

Ans driver: ska?

“It’s a kind of music,” the anthropologist added. “But I don’t think that’s what it means here. Nobody knows what an ans driver is, although we favor the hypothesis that ansis short for answer and driverfor downriver. NVand ERcould be anything, although the general consensus is that NV probably stands for nutritional versatility. If you look back at earlier notes you’ll see that NV crops up several times and ER once, but skadoesn’t. We’ve always thought that the answers to our most urgent unanswered questions might be found downriver—that’s why we’ve been building the boat—but we’ve always known that it might be wishful thinking.”

“Which most urgent unanswered questions?” Matthew mumbled, his mouth half-full of manna that was proving difficult to swallow.

“Where did the city-builders come from—and where did they go, if they didn’t die here?”

“Why do you think they didn’t?”

“We don’t know whether they did or not. Even if they’d been human they might not have left much trace, and we think the bones of the local mammals are more prone to decay than ours. The only relics we’ve found were artifacts secreted in holes in the walls, and only the hardest kinds of glass have survived. We don’t know how old the city is, because we haven’t established any reliable yardstick that could tell us. We talk about a hundred thousand years, but it’s pure guesswork. It might be out by an order of magnitude. So far as we can tell, they settled here, established their fields, built their homes and their walls—all of which must have taken centuries—and then they vanished. If there were other upland settlements, we haven’t found them yet. If there are any settlements still in existence, we haven’t found them. If the humanoids still exist, it looks as if they’ve abandoned agriculture—and cooking, so far as cooking requires fire-making and fire-keeping. While we only have the one site to look at we’ve no basis for generalization.”

“But you’re convinced that they came up the river.”

“And then they stopped coming,” she agreed. “Whether the city-dwellers died here or left, their plains-dwelling cousins presumably decided to stay where they were. If they died out too, they died where they’d always lived, presumably as nomadic hunter-gatherers. Like all the hominid species of Earth, except one.”

Matthew thought that was a strange way of putting it—but then he saw what she was getting at. Nobody really knew what had happened to all the Australopithecine species that had coexisted with the remotest ancestors of Homo sapiens, or the other hominid species that had fallen by the evolutionary wayside in later eras. The conventional assumption was that they had been out-competed and driven to extinction by genus Homo, but nobody knew. There wasn’t enough evidence left to settle the question. Maybe they had died out for other reasons. How would anyone ever be sure?

“It took Homo sapiens hundreds of thousands of years to invent agriculture,” Dulcie Gherardesca pointed out, “and not much more than ten thousand to bring Earth’s ecosphere to the brink of rack and ruin. Maybe our ancestors should have figured out that it was a bad idea too, and returned to their hunter-gatherer roots as soon as possible.”

“We wouldn’t be here to worry about these guys if they had,” Matthew observed—but he knew that what she was really getting at was that if humans had returned to their hunter-gatherer roots after living for a while in the first cities of Egypt or Sumeria they would probably have died out in the next ecocatastrophe. Even as things were, humankind’s ancestors had squeezed through a desperately narrow population bottleneck.

Matthew handed back his bowl, having done his best to finish the meal. Dulcie made as if to leave, but he checked her retreat with another question. “When will the boat be finished?” he asked.

“Tomorrow, or the day after,” she told him. “We could have set out days ago if we’d been prepared to go without the last few frills, but we were instructed to wait for Solari to arrive, so that we could help with his inquiries. Some of us wanted to say no, if only on the grounds that the instruction came from people who had no authority to give us orders, but…. well, we’re just about getting used to the notion that we’re no longer united, even among ourselves. I suppose you want to come with us.”

“Yes, I do,” Matthew said.

“I suppose you even think you’re entitled, because you’re Bernal’s substitute.”

“That too.”

“But you’ve only been awake four days. You know next to nothing about this world. You’d be a passenger.”

“Sometimes,” Matthew said, mildly, “a fresh pair of eyes can be useful. Not to mention a fresh mind …”

“Bullshit,” she said. “Tang has the educated eye, the educated mind. If it were my boat, I’d want him.”

“And you need an ecologist,” Matthew continued. “All the people I talked to on Hopeare too narrowly focused, on scientific and political issues alike. They’re drowning in biochemical data—there’s so much of it, and it’s so resolutely peculiar, that they’ve almost lost sight of the actual living organisms.”

“That hasn’t happened here,” she snapped back—but then she blinked, and might even have displayed a blush had she not been wearing a surface-suit. “Well,” she conceded, after a pause, “maybe a little. Most of the animals hereabouts are slugs and worms—the mammal-analogues seem to steer clear of the ruins, and the presence of the domes must be even more inhibiting.”

“I wouldlike to go,” Matthew said, deciding that conciliation might be in order. “But I’d rather do it without upsetting anyone. Can we settle the matter amicably?”

“I don’t know,” Dulcie admitted. “The crew had the Revolution, but we’re the ones who can’t figure out who owns what and who has the authority to make decisions. Back in the system it was all cut and dried, but even if Shen Chin Che were still running things like the last of the great dictators we’d all have begun to wonder what gave him the right to keep on giving us orders. As things are, we don’t even have anything in place to overthrow. Can you imagine that we were stupid enough, at first, to think that we didn’t need to worry about it—that we were a community of scientists, all working for the common good? It’s taken us three years to begin putting the fundamental apparatus of a democracy in place at Base One—and it’ll be three years too late to command the respect and consent it needs. Whichever way the Base One vote on future policy goes, it’ll just be more poison in the system.”

“We’re not at Base One,” Matthew pointed out. “Surely the nine of us can settle our differences without going to war.”

“Better talk to Tang, then,” she said, as she moved toward the door again. “Maybe you can settle it between you—unless Rand wants to have another go at persuading us that the last place should go to the guy with the biggest gun.”

This time, Matthew let her leave. It seemed to be the diplomatic thing to do. She closed the privacy-curtain behind her. Instead of getting up immediately he flicked the keyboard of Bernal Delgado’s notepad, bringing page after page of field notes to the tiny screen.

Like most notes designed for purely personal reference, the vast majority of Bernal’s jottings were as gnomic as they were trivial. The computer was host to dozens of other data-fields, but almost all of them would be commonly held stocks and it would take a lot of searching to turn up anything that wasn’t. Matthew played with the keyboard for a few minutes more, but he knew that he was wasting time. He finally gave way to necessity and raised himself from the bed. The surface suit needed to discharge its processed excreta exactly as Matthew would have done had he not been wearing one, so he had to take a few minutes to investigate and use the room’s facilities before leaving.

When he got out into the corridor he found that he couldn’t remember the way to the communal space at the heart of the bubble, but it only took a few tentative steps to get his bearings. When he arrived, however, the only person present was Dulcie Gherardesca, sitting at a big table. She seemed to be waiting for him, but the expression on her face testified that it was a matter of duty.

“Godert’s in the lab,” she told him. “The others are all out. Your friend the policeman must have moved on to suspect number three.”

“His name’s Vincent,” Matthew reminded her. “Vince to his friends. Maybe I should take a look at the boat myself.”

“There’s time,” she assured him. Her tone was conciliatory now; she seemed to be regretting her slight loss of temper. “Lynn wants to give you the grand tour. The people bringing in the last batch of cargo ought to be back any minute—when they arrive we can all get together. It’ll give us a chance to make a better job of the introductions than we did yesterday. We ought to do that.”

Matthew sat down opposite her, letting the width of the table symbolize the distance between them. “I don’t mean to get in anyone’s way,” he said, adopting a conciliatory tone himself. “But I really do believe that I’m a better substitute for Bernal than someone from another field. You may know me as a talking head spewing out sound bites for TV, but I’m a first-rate ecologist, just as he was.”

“I dare say the crew showed you his formal reports,” the anthropologist said, noncommittally.

“Some,” Matthew admitted. “Andrei Lityansky showed me a vast amount of stuff, far too quickly for me to take it all in. It was all dumped in my own notepad before I got my belt back.”

“Bernal said that Lityansky’s pretty good, for a space-born who never saw a blade of grass on a heath or a tree in a forest,” Dulcie admitted. “He also said that no matter how good a biochemist might be, he could never begin to understand ecology—which took in Tang as well as Lityansky, I suppose.”

“He’s right about Lityansky,” Matthew said, carefully.

“I know. Aboard the ship, everything’s too controlled, too organized, too neat, even after the expectable deterioration and the civil war. There’s not enough chaos, not enough spontaneity—not the right kinds, anyway. Bernal said that if hecouldn’t figure out what had happened here, and what was stillhappening, there was only one man who could. He meant you.”

“I’m flattered,” Matthew acknowledged, generously, “but I understand your reservations. I didn’t mean to suggest that Lynn, Ike, and you weren’t competent to interpret whatever you might find downriver.”

“I’m just an anthropologist,” she said. “I’m the one who brought your breakfast because I didn’t have enough real work to keep me busy. The only thing I’ve discovered since I relocated here is that a background in anthropology doesn’t give you much of a head start in the attempt to understand an alien culture on the basis of archaeological evidence. That’s another reason why I’m desperate to go downriver to the plain: sheer frustration. There’s no reason to believe that we’ll find anything to which my expertise is relevant. I suppose that if Tang won’t give way, I ought to be the one to step down in your favor.”

“But you don’t want to?” Matthew said, stating the obvious.

“No,” was her bald reply.

Ikram Mohammed came into the room then. He seemed slightly surprised to find the anthropologist there, but it was Matthew he was looking for. “I thought you’d be up by now,” he said to Matthew. “Lynn’s right behind me and Rand’s bringing in the last load from the shuttle with Maryanne. Tang was with them, but he’s under interrogation now. I know the policeman’s only doing his job, but we’ve already been through it all a hundred times between ourselves. If we’d been able to figure out who did it, we would have.”

“Captain Milyukov seems to think that you have figured it out, and that you’re keeping quiet about it,” Matthew observed.

The genomicist made a disgusted face. “Milyukov’s seriously disturbed,” he said. “Not to mention seriously disturbing. He wants to use this business in one of his convoluted political games, although I doubt that any reasonable person could work out how or why. We always knew that there was a chance that the crew would develop weird ideas after several generations of space flight, but who could have figured that it would be so difficult to straighten them out again? This insistence that we have to learn to fend for ourselves on the surface within a single generation, in order that they can get rid of all the Earthborn sleepers and take complete control of their militarized socialist republic is crazy.”

Dulcie Gherardesca had slipped out while Ikram Mohammed was talking. Matthew got up from his chair and stretched his leaden limbs. He took advantage of what might prove to be a rare moment of confidentiality to say: “I don’t suppose, Ike, that youhave a theory as to who killed Bernal and why?”

“No,” Ike retorted. “All I know for sure is that it wasn’t me.”

Matthew decided to believe him, even though there was something in his manner that suggested that it was not the wholetruth. Even if he had wanted to challenge the statement, though, he wouldn’t have had the opportunity, because Rand Blackstone’s strident voice could already be heard, calling desperately for help.