Текст книги "Dark Ararat"

Автор книги: Brian Stableford

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Текущая страница: 13 (всего у книги 27 страниц)

NINETEEN

Blackstone had entered the dome before sounding his clamorous alarm, and less than three seconds passed before he burst into the room where Ikram Mohammed and Matthew were standing. He was cradling Maryanne Hyder in his arms, trying to hold her still.

The small woman seemed to be in a bad way. Even with the aid of her IT she seemed barely able to suppress screams of agony. Her face was contorted and flushed, and she was trembling with shock as well as experiencing convulsive muscle spasms in her arms and legs.

Blackstone set her down on the tabletop, but Ikram Mohammed and Matthew had to help him hold her there. Had they not taken hold of her limbs the convulsions might have carried her over the edge. Matthew had grabbed her right arm; he was surprised by the strength of the reflexes that fought against his gentle restraint. Small she might be, but Maryanne Hyder was muscular.

“What happened?” Matthew asked—but Blackstone had turned away to face one of the newcomers that were hurrying into the room: the doctor, Godert Kriefmann.

“Slug-sting,” Blackstone said. “Big bugger—twice the size of any I’d seen before. Tentacles twenty centimeters long, maybe more, at least as thick as my thumb….” He might have continued if Kriefmann hadn’t interrupted him.

“Get back out there nowand find the thing,” Kriefmann said. “Be as careful as you need to be, but get it back here alive. Use a thick bag to transport it, but get it into the biocontainment unit as soon as you can.”

Blackstone obeyed immediately, running back into the corridor as soon as he had cleared a way to the door by thrusting Dulcie Gherardesca—who had come in behind the doctor—firmly aside. Kriefmann took up a position beside Matthew, bending over his patient anxiously.

It was obvious to Matthew, even at first glance, that the wounds were serious. They were clustered on the outside of the right thigh, from just above the knee to halfway to the hip. The ragged edges of the smartsuit had not yet had a chance to begin healing—but that seemed to be as well, given that Kriefmann was armed with a pair of tweezers, which he was already using to pull alien tissue out of the wounds.

Dulcie Gherardesca scrambled past Matthew to fetch a plastic petri dish in which the doctor could deposit the tissue.

“If it’s new,” Kriefmann said to Dulcie, “I’ll need a toxin profile as quickly as possible. Where’s Tang? He’ll have to take care of it while Maryanne’s out of action.”

Matthew and Ikram Mohammed both opened their mouths to tell the doctor that Tang Dinh Quan was with Solari, but they shut them again as soon as they observed that it was no longer true. Lynn Gwyer had arrived before him, but she was already moving aside to make way for the biochemist. Vince Solari was bringing up the rear.

“Here,” the doctor said, as he handed the dish to Tang. “Get started on these sting-cell fragments. Now.”

Tang Dinh Quan was as quick to respond as Blackstone had been, seizing and covering the petri dish without further ado and heading off in another direction, presumably racing for his lab. Matthew took a certain comfort from the way in which the team had suddenly reassembled itself, setting aside the disagreements of the preceding day. Faced with an emergency, these people were perfectly capable of working together, all on the same side.

“How bad is it likely to be?” Matthew asked Ikram Mohammed, not wanting to distract the doctor, who was still busy with the tweezers and a replacement Petri dish provided by Dulcie Gherardesca.

“I don’t know,” the genomicist replied. “That’s a bad wound—worse than any I’ve seen. On the other hand, most of the tentacled slugs are very closely related—differentiation into species isn’t anywhere near as clear here as it is on Earth—and the differences between their toxins are usually slight. Our existing antisera ought to be able to help Maryanne’s IT suppress the symptoms. Even if it is a genuinely new variety, using poisons we haven’t met before, her IT should have enough capacity to keep her going until Tang can do a full analysis and come back with a plan for more precise countermeasures.”

“The worst-case scenario is that it might take a couple of days to synthesize antitoxins and her IT might have to put her into a protective coma,” Lynn Gwyer put in. “We have the know-how to counter local toxins—we even have the fundamental components of a Tyre-biochemistry protein manufactory, thanks to Tang—but we don’t have Base One’s facilities. Unfortunately, while Maryanne’s incapacitated we won’t have the benefit of her toxicological expertise.”

“I’m going to give her a shot,” Kriefmann announced to his rapt audience. “Got to relax her muscles. Her IT can take care of the pain, but it doesn’t have the facilities to deal with this kind of reaction.”

“Are you sure it won’t do any harm?” Dulcie Gherardesca asked, anxiously.

“No, I’m not,” said Kriefmann, “But the symptoms are consistent with the smaller wounds I’ve treated before, so it ought to be okay. Keep hold of her, will you.”

“It’s okay,” Ikram Mohammed assured the doctor. The convulsions were not so emphatic now, and Matthew modified his grip so as to put less pressure on the arm.

Kriefmann left the room. Worried glances were exchanged but no one spoke. They were all waiting anxiously. The doctor came back two minutes later with two sterile packs in his right hand, each containing a liquiject syringe. His left was clutching a handful of plastic bottles. Kriefmann scattered the bottles on the tabletop in order to free the hand that held them, then liberated the first syringe. He filled the liquiject from one of the bottles and positioned the head of the nozzle above a blue vein that showed on the inner side of Maryanne Hyder’s left forearm.

When he pressed the button, his patient’s whole body jerked in response. Matthew hoped that it was a reflex born of fear rather than a physical response to the injected drug.

The spasms in Maryanne’s muscles began to die down almost immediately, and Matthew let the arm he was holding go limp. He let go of it, wondering if all the convulsions might have been the result of a psychological response rather than a physiological one.

One final frisson seemed to release the toxicologist’s tongue. She began to swear, and then to babble. “God, I’m sorry,” she said, when she finally obtained sufficient control over herself to string a coherent sentence together. “I never saw it—carrying those boxes in my arms—so careless.”

“It’s okay, Maryanne,” Kriefmann replied. “It could have happened to anyone.”

“They’ve been creeping closer since we established the test plantings,” Ikram Mohammed told Matthew. “They’re just like the slugs back home in one respect—they take it for granted that everything gardeners do is for their benefit.” Then he turned back to Maryanne Hyder. “It wasn’t your fault,” he said. “Rand should have seen it if he was where he was supposed to be, leading the way.”

“You know Rand,” the stricken woman replied, in a thicker and slower tone. “He was in the lead all right, but he was carrying three times as much as me, all piled up. Couldn’t have seen a pitfall full of sharpened stakes.”

“Don’t go to sleep if you can help it, Maryanne,” Kriefmann went on. “Stay with us, if you can. Get a grip on your IT—don’t let it slip you into a coma.” While he was speaking he had been preparing a second shot. This time he positioned the nozzle halfway up Maryanne’s thigh, just above the topmost wound in the cluster. Matthew hadn’t seen him look for a vein, but he presumed that this must be the antitoxin and that he intended to spread it generously around the afflicted tissue as well as the circulatory system.

This time, the woman did not react to the shot. Her Internal Technology had damped out all feeling in the damaged tissue—but she was fighting its wider effects, as she had been instructed. Her IT didn’t know that she needed to retain consciousness, but she knew.

“Hang in there,” Kriefmann advised. “The antitoxin will kick in any second, if it’s up to the job. Once it does, your IT will register the effect and begin to ease up. Keep talking, if you can. You’ve met Matthew Fleury, haven’t you? He’s our new ecological genomicist.” Kriefmann knew perfectly well that Maryanne already knew that, but he obviously felt that he had to keep talking himself and didn’t know what else to say. “Mr. Solari’s been asking us questions,” he went on. “He’ll want to talk to you as soon as possible—which might not be the best reason in the world to stay awake, but …” He stopped as soon as he saw that the woman on the table was trying to say something in reply.

“I’m sorry,” was what she said, as her distressed gaze flickered between left and right, probably without bringing either Matthew or Solari into clearer focus. “You must think I’m sostupid.”

“Maybe it was a step too far in the study of local toxins,” Matthew murmured, “but everyone seems to think you’ve done your job well enough in the past to save yourself now. It could have happened to anyone. Vince and I wouldn’t even have known what to look out for. Take it easy.” He touched her arm again, but merely by way of reassurance. He was satisfied that there was no further need for restraint.

“He’s right, Maryanne,” Lynn Gwyer said. She had worked her way round to Matthew’s side, interposing herself between him and the doctor. “Actually, he’s always right. I knew him back home, and that was his speciality. The last of the great prophets—always an egomaniac, even before he practically took over the news channels. Those who cannot learn from prophecies are condemned to fulfil them.” She looked at Matthew then. “Maryanne was part of a much later intake, one of the last recruits to Hope. She doesn’t remember you at all—must have had a sheltered upbringing. Well, Matthew, this is what everyday life on Tyre is like. Or did you have time enough in orbit to get used to calling it Ararat?”

“Tyre will do fine so far as I’m concerned,” Matthew said. “I seem to have arrived at a bad time, in more ways than one.”

“I think the serum is working,” Maryanne Hyder announced, with slightly more relief than astonishment. She looked at Matthew too. “It must have been the usual kind—just bigger. We don’t really know how big they can grow, or whether they routinely get bigger as they get older. We don’t know much about the life cycles of the animals orthe plants. No eggs, no seeds, no ready-made alternative model to put in place of the birds and the bees.”

“I guess it was a Rand Blackstone among slugs, as opposed to the Maryanne Hyder version,” Lynn Gwyer put in. “Maybe they’ll all grow as fat if we keep up our cultivation experiments.”

“I hope not,” the patient replied, with a groan. “It hurts.”

“You won’t be walking again for a few days,” Kriefmann told her. He seemed much more relaxed now that he was confident that the second shot had done the trick. “It’s going to take time to repair that muscle. You’ll be limping for a while once you’re back on your feet again. Ike, can you give me a hand to get Mary to her bunk?”

“Sure,” said Ikram Mohammed. “Will we need a stretcher?”

The patient tried to say no, but she was summarily overruled. While Ike went to get a stretcher Kriefmann took the time to thank Matthew for pitching in. “Welcome to chaos,” he said, drily.

“It looks as if the meeting has been postponed,” Lynn Gwyer said to Matthew. “We might as well get on with the guided tour.”

Matthew was a little reluctant to leave while the toxicologist was still in trouble, but Ikram Mohammed was already returning with a stretcher.

Matthew glanced at Vince Solari, but the detective merely shrugged his shoulders.

As soon as Matthew and Lynn went outside they saw Rand Blackstone hurrying back to the bubbledome, carrying a transparent plastic sack. Matthew had to admit that the creature contained within it was impressively ugly. He had seen giant slugs in the Earthly tropics, and huge sea anemones in the shallows of the Indian Ocean, but he had never seen anything that combined the worst features of both. The creature’s purple coloration was, however, oddly attenuated; it was distributed in blotches about a transparent tegument, putting him as much in mind of a gargantuan planarian worm or liver fluke as of a slug. The smaller versions he had seen on film while he was on Hopehad seemed much more deeply and more uniformly pigmented.

“Can’t stop,” Blackstone said, as he brushed past them. “Got to get this to Tang.”

“Sure,” Matthew said. “I’ll have time to take a closer look later.”

When the big man had gone inside, Lynn Gwyer looked Matthew in the eye, with obvious concern. “Did Ike have a chance to fill you in on what’s what down here?” she asked. “I don’t know what they told you on Hope, but you’ll have figured out that we have very different problems down here.”

“He didn’t get the chance to say as much as he’d probably have liked,” Matthew told her. “Dulcie Gherardesca brought me breakfast, and she was still around when Ike came back. She had a point of view to put across, just as Blackstone had when he walked us back yesterday. I’m beginning to fit the pieces together, but listening to a calmer voice would be a considerable relief.”

“I would have walked you back myself,” she said, “but it’s not easy to get in Rand’s way when he’s determined to have first shot. I suppose he was hoping that you had a message from Shen Chin Che?”

“He was. I suppose he wanted it so desperately in order to boost morale in the Tyrian Counterrevolutionary Front.”

“Don’t be so quick to make a joke of it, Matthew,” the genetic engineer replied, frowning. “ Didyou have a message?”

“Not as such. Shen’s back’s to the wall, but he didn’t seem to be in any mood to give in yet. If he has any cards left to play he didn’t dare show them to me—but if he doesn’t, it’s only a matter of time before the crew winkle him out. He’s too old to fight a long campaign. The crew have the upper hand, and all the time in the microworld.”

Lynn Gwyer nodded, as if the judgment was exactly what she’d expected. “Rand’s okay, behind the bold pioneer act,” she said. “We really do have a hell of a problem down here, you know, which everybody on Hope—and I mean everybody—seems to be bent on ignoring. It takes more than a breathable atmosphere to make an Earth-clone world, and this is notan Earth-clone world in the sense that you and I would mean. If the probe data Milyukov claims to have is accurate, it may be the nearest thing to an Earthlike world we’ll find within a couple of hundred light-years of Earth, and I’m certainly not as ready to give up on it as some of the people at Base One, but we really do have a major problem to solve, and I don’t mean who killed Bernal. His death was a big blow, because of what we might have lost, but launching a witch-hunt to fit someone up for his murder won’t bring him back, and it might compound the damage.”

“Vince Solari is okay too,” Matthew assured her. “He’s not here to hunt witches or fit anybody up. Why would it compound the problem if the murderer were identified and charged?”

“That depends who it is,” the woman replied. “If it’s one of us—well, we’re stretched beyond the limit already. If he really was killed by an alien humanoid that might be even worse, in terms of tying further knots in the situation. I wish I could believe in a sneaky invader from Base One, but I can’t—which seems to me to leave the bad possibility and the worse possibility.”

“You do believe the aliens exist, then?” Matthew deduced. “You think it’s unlikely that an alien hand wielded the glass dagger, but you don’t believe they’re extinct?”

“No, I don’t,” Lynn confirmed. “I think they’re giving the ruins a wide berth, just like the other mammal-analogues, but I think they’re alive and well downriver. They might not be easy to find, but I don’t think extinction as we know it is a common event on Tyre.”

“Gradual chimerical renewal,” Matthew said. “The Miller Effect, built in to the ecosphere at a fundamental level, in a way that makes it far less ruinous to the learning process. But if everything here’s emortal, how does evolution happen?”

“Did Lityansky tell you about the second genome?” Lynn asked.

“He showed me the diagrams, but he said that no one knows what it does. He wouldn’t speculate. What do you think?”

“You mean, what did Bernal think?”

“I dare say you tossed the ideas back and forth between you—and Ike too. What’s your best guess?”

“We think it’s a homeobox. We think that our own genome may suffer some crucial disadvantages because the homeotic genes are mixed in with all the rest.”

“Homeotic genes control embryonic development,” Matthew said, slightly puzzled. “I thought you hadn’t managed to find any embryos.”

“Homeotic genes control anatomical organization,” Lynn said. “On Earth, that’s mostly a matter of controlling embryonic development, but there are sometimes further metamorphic changes to be managed. If Tyrian plants and animals really are emortal, they might have much more scope in that regard, and they’d need a genomic system equipped to orchestrate that extra scope. We can’t prove it until we can study some actual metamorphoses, but we’re quietly confident that we’re on the right track. Even Tang thinks we’re on the right track, and he’s a hard man to please. The three-dimensional coding complex is a fancy homeobox—fancier by far than anything our one-string genome could contrive.”

Matthew nodded slowly. “I see,” he said. “So evolution happens as organisms change. Natural selection without genetic load. Metamorphosis instead of death.”

“Emortality’s not immortality,” Lynn reminded him. “Things die here. There’s eating—herbivorous andcarnivorous. There’s predation and parasitism. Lots of death—but the organisms that don’t die may not be existentially stuck the way we are. They may be able to go on renewing themselves and changing themselves indefinitely—although it’ll take a long time to prove it.”

“Maybe Vince’s werewolves weren’t such a silly idea after all,” Matthew said. “Maybe you can sell him on the idea that it was a werewolf-analogue that killed Bernal. Not exactly a healthy scenario for a first contact, though, is it? I see what you mean about the bad alternative and the worse one. I can see why you didn’t want to address the question, and don’t want Vince to address it either.”

“That’s not fair, Matthew,” the bald woman said, defensively. “It’s the worldthat’s the important puzzle. That’s the mystery we need to solve—because that’s the mystery that could be the death of every last one of us, if we don’t solve it.”

“I know that,” Matthew assured her. “So let’s get on with the grand tour, shall we?”

TWENTY

While waiting to shuttle down, Matthew had studied most of the available film of the ruined city, using the VE-hood above his bed to take a virtual tour along the same route that Lynn Gwyer was following, so he was now beset by an eerie feeling that he was acting out a half-forgotten dream. He’d had similar experiences back on Earth, when he’d visited established tourist attractions in VE in order to work out exactly what he wanted to see when he got to the real thing. He was already familiar with the ways in which real tours expanded the horizons of virtual ones, offering a better appreciation of size and context.

The film clips had, of course, concentrated on those parts of the city that had been partially cleared of the enshrouding vegetation. It was not until he saw the remainder in all its glory that Matthew realized why the flying eyes entrusted with the work of mapping and surveying the new world had not been able to pick it out for more than a year. So completely were the stone walls overgrown, overlaid, and obscured that it had taken a revelatory freak of chance to provide the first evidence of artifice.

Matthew soon came to understand, as Lynn led him over the ridge separating the Base Three bubbles from the nearest wall of the city, that even after a further year-and-a-half of searching, there might easily be other structures of a similar kind as yet undiscovered.

“Your methods of clearance seem to have been rather brutal,” Matthew commented, as he followed the makeshift path.

“There were only four of us at first,” Lynn reminded him. “We would have liked more reinforcements, but Milyukov wouldn’t send them. He blamed the trouble aboard the ship, but I think he was afraid we’d find what we were looking for. If we do find intelligent aliens, Tang’s case will look a lot stronger. Milyukov wants to delay any discovery until he’s settled his domestic difficulties, and he’s campaigning hard for the conference at Base One to come up with a vote in favor of staying put. So we didn’t really have much choice. We moved on from machetes to chain saws in a matter of days, then figured we might as well go the whole hog and started blasting away with flamethrowers. If we’d had any authentic archaeologists to help us out they’d have fainted with horror, but Dulcie’s not that delicate.

“When we get up to the top you’ll be able to see the outlines of the lesser walls, but you won’t be able to make out their true extent and shape. Even with flamethrowers we haven’t been able to clear more than a tiny fraction of the whole array. The distinction between changes in the contours of the hills and the artificial constructs is hard to see, even with a practiced eye.”

As they toiled up the slope, following a pathway that was far from straight, Matthew’s limbs soon began to ache with the effort. It seemed that every time he came close to a crucial adjustment to circumstance he immediately began to put a renewed strain on his long-frozen muscles. Lynn was moving slowly, continually pausing to lend him a helping hand whenever he allowed his unsteadiness to show, but he knew that he had to make his own way.

At least the stress of climbing distracted him from the ever-present unease caused by the fact that his reflexes were slightly out of tune with the gravity-regime. That would doubtless surface again when he got down to lab work, or when someone pressed him into an educative ballgame.

Further distraction was provided by an increasingly keen awareness of the inadequacy of his eyes. As Lynn had warned, it was easy enough to see where human hands had been at work peeling vegetation away from the walls and burning back the debris, but where there had been no obvious interference it was very difficult to see the evidence of nonhuman work beneath the camouflage of nature.

Wherever patches of stonework had actually been cleared their artificial nature was starkly obvious, but where the purple plants still overlay them the alienness of the life-forms confused all earthly expectations. There were organisms analogous to lichens, to fungi, to mosses, and to creepers, as well as the curious dendrites, but all the appearances were deceptive and that deceptiveness swallowed up every sign that humanlike hands had ever been at work.

As they climbed higher more territory became visible, at least periodically, but the panorama remained utterly confusing to the naked eye, at least until Matthew glimpsed something that stuck out like the proverbial sore thumb.

“What’s that!” he demanded, pointing.

Lynn chuckled. “That’s ours,” she said. “It’s the cabin of Bernal’s boat. The lake and the river are still mostly obscured, but you’ll be able to see the lake and the lower part of the watercourse from the tower.”

“Whose idea was it to paint the damn thing pea green?” Matthew demanded. “I never thought of Bernal as an Edward Lear fan.”

“It won’t be going all the way to the sea,” she reminded him, to indicate that she understood the reference, “and it certainly won’t be manned by an owl and a pussycat, no matter who gets the final berth. It isn’t painted—that’s chlorophyll, to feed the biomotor.”

“It’s powered by a biomotor? Not built for speed, then.”

“It has a conventional engine too, but there’s a fuel problem. Bernal figured that we wouldn’t really need the inorganic engine till the return journey, when we’ll be coming upstream. We wouldn’t actually have to carry a huge stock of fuel, given that we’ve got converters that can process local vegetation into a usable alcohol mix, but gathering material to feed the converter takes a lot of work and the converter uses up fuel at a fair rate itself. Given that we needed to equip the boat with certain other bioanalogous features, and the desirability of a fail-safe backup, Bernal decided that it would be best to double up. He was careful to point out that it’s in keeping with local traditions too.”

Matthew was quick to pick up on that point. “Bernal was trying to figure out the logic of nutritional versatility—the lack of distinction between fixers and eaters. So he wanted to use the boat to … to what, exactly? To make a point? To explore a hypothesis?”

“His argument was that if so many of the local invertebrates can function as plants or as animals, there must be a reward for versatility. Given that the world itself isn’t very active, and the weather patterns are so benign, he figured that it couldn’t be a response to the inorganic frame. He’d have liked to build a link to the gradual chimerical renewal business, but he couldn’t swallow the notion that emortal animals might be routinely capable of turning into emortal trees—and even if they were, he couldn’t see any reason why the homeobox shouldn’t make chloroplast-analogues for plant forms and get rid of them completely in animal forms. So he—that is, we—figured it had to be something to do with the way the organisms interact with one another. There must be ecosystemic factors of some kind that determine the usefulness of switching back and forth between modes of nourishment on an ad hoc basis: something analogous, however esoterically, to a boat whose energy-requirements change abruptly whenever it switches from going downstream to going upstream. It’s not exactly making a point or exploring a hypothesis … more a sort of heuristic device: an aid to inspiration.”

That was Bernal all over, Matthew thought. He had always been a lateral thinker, ceaselessly trying to find increasingly odd angles from which to approach intractable problems. He was—had been—exactly the kind of man to think it desirable to make an odyssey into alien territory in a vehicle that was “in keeping with local traditions.” Bernal had not recorded any of this in his notepad—but it was exactly the kind of mental exercise that was difficult to commit to text, even as a series of doodles. Bernal must have spent the last few months of his life trying to figure out what analogues of “upstream” and “downstream” the local ecosystems possessed, whose subtle effects favored versatility in so many of the local organisms.

“Instead of seasons,” Matthew murmured.

“What?” Lynn queried.

“Just a stray thought,” Matthew said, slowly. He had to take a deep breath before carrying on, but talking was a lot less energy-expensive than climbing and he certainly didn’t want to move on too quickly. “On Earth,” he said, pensively, “the versatility of organisms is mostly a series of responses to seasonal variations. In winter, deciduous trees shed their leaves and some vertebrates hibernate. Most flowering plants and most invertebrate imagos die, leaving their seeds and eggs to withstand the cold spell. Large numbers of species opt for an annual life cycle, because the year-on-year advantages gained thereby far outweigh the problems raised by occasional disruptive ecocatastrophes. There are seasons even in the tropics—dry and rainy—generated by ocean currents.”

“Not here,” Lynn told him, although he’d already noted the fact. “Tyre’s axial tilt is less pronounced, and the ocean is as stable as the atmosphere. That constancy seems to be reflected in the relative lack of biodiversity—and, of course, in the dearth of species with dramatic life cycles, like metamorphic insects. Bernal said it wasn’t quite that simple, though, because of the complicity of ecosystems and their inorganic environment.”

“That’s right,” Matthew agreed. “Ecosystems aren’t helpless prisoners of their inorganic frames. Life manages its own atmosphere; to some extent, it manages its own weather too. The rain that falls on rain forests evaporates from the rain forests in a disciplined fashion—take away the forest and the rain goes too. Here, where the world’s axial tilt is less, seasonal variations would be less extreme anyway, but the ecosphere may well play an active role massaging them into near-uniformity, thus nullifying the kinds of advantages insects and other ephemerae derive from their chimerical life cycles. It’s easy enough to grasp the fact that there’s a whole new ballgame here, with a very different set of constraints and strategic opportunities—but it’s not easy to imagine what they might be. Take winter and summer out of the equation, and what might substitute for them as forces of variation? Is there another kind of cycle, or something much more arbitrary? If there is a cycle, it might take a lot longer than three years to work through—and if there isn’t … how often, and how swiftly, do major changes happen? Confusing as it is, thiscan’t be the whole picture.”

As he voiced the last sentence Matthew drew a wide arc with his right arm, taking in the limited panorama spread out before them and a much greater one whose horizons they were not yet in a position to see.

“Yeah,” said Lynn, quietly. “That’s exactlywhat Bernal sounded like, when he got going. Did you really know him that well, or is it a case of great minds thinking alike?”

“We were two peas in a pod,” Matthew told her, his gaze lingering for a moment longer on the visible fragment of the distant boat. Then he turned away, saying: “Okay, I’m rested. Onward and upward.”

Having visited several of the ancient walled cities of Earth, Matthew had a reasonably good idea of the way in which the scale of cities had shifted with the centuries. His memory retained a particularly graphic image of the Old City of Jerusalem surrounded by its vast sprawl of twentieth-century concrete suburbs. He was not unduly surprised, therefore, to find that what had apparently been the living space of the aliens’ city was mostly compressed into an area not much more than a couple of kilometers square—although the shape of the hills meant that it was anything but square, and only vaguely round.