Текст книги "Dark Ararat"

Автор книги: Brian Stableford

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Like ancient Rome, the city seemed to have been built on seven hills, although the hills were very various in size and reach. Lynn was guiding him toward the summit of the highest of them all. His limbs felt like lead, and he was glad that Rand Blackstone was not present to witness his weakness.

Had they not been walking through the relics of ancient streets the surrounding territory would have yielded much more to Matthew’s enquiring eyes, but they always seemed to be closely surrounded by huge hedgerows that stopped him seeing anything at all except multitudes of purple flaps, fans, spikes, and florets. Eventually, though, they began to climb something that looked like—and presumably was—a flight of ancient steps. It took them to the top of a lumpen mount that must once have been a building of some kind.

Matthew was exceedingly glad to reach the top. He mopped his brow with the back of his right hand, awkwardly conscious of the fact that both the hand and the moist forehead were intangibly encased in false skin.

The sun was high in the sky now, and its glare was uninterrupted by clouds. Although he knew that the faint purpling of the blue sky had nothing to do with ultraviolet light, Matthew could not help feeling that the alien light might somehow be dangerous, and Blackstone’s wide-brimmed hat suddenly seemed far less ridiculous than it had the previous day. But Lynn had no hat, and no hair either, so he was probably being oversensitive.

From the summit of the mound, the extensive vistas surrounding him seemed quite different from the limited ones accessible from the lower vantage point.

Unpracticed as they were, Matthew’s eyes were suddenly able to pick out the lines inscribed upon the landscape long ago by artificers’ hands, and not yet completely obscured by the patient work of nature. From here, he could see enough of the undulations imposed on the vegetation by ancient walls to comprehend the unobliterated pattern.

The most astonishing thing of all, now that he could judge it properly, was the sheer extent of the walls appended to the city. They covered an area at least twelve times as vast. The residential part of the city—“downtown,” as Matthew could not help calling it in the privacy of his thoughts—was by no means at the center of the complex, most of which was downslope of it. If the whole resembled a falling teardrop, gradually spreading over a landscape of tiny freckles and follicles, “downtown” would have been fairly near to the trailing edge.

“It’s not obvious from anywhere else,” Lynn told him, “but from up here you can see how the pattern must have developed. They moved gradually outward from the primary rampart, preferring downhill to uphill, gradually clearing more ground and surrounding the fields they’d created with new walls. The city itself continued to grow, mostly in upslope directions, so that some of the fields were built over, and there were subsidiary islands of residential building way out there to the east and south, but most of the development as the population swelled seems to have been a matter of building higher and filling in. As they cleared more land for crops, though, they built more walls: rank after rank after rank. The innermost walls are the lowest, perhaps because they routinely cannibalized them to help in the building of the outer ones, even though their quarrying techniques had come on by leaps and bounds. You can see a couple of their biggest quarries way over there in the northwest.”

“How did they move the blocks?” Matthew asked, still feeling distinctly breathless.

“The hard way, according to Dulcie. There’s little enough advantage in wheels, or even in using logs as rollers, on terrain as uneven as this, and you’ve probably noticed that the local tree-substitutes aren’t much given to the production of nice straight logs with a circular cross-section. They had no beasts of burden, so they had to carry the stones themselves, one by one, or maybe a few at a time slung in hammocks from poles and frames carried by small parties of humanoids. But the real question—the bigquestion—is whythey felt they had to move the blocks.”

“They had enemies,” Matthew said, making the obvious deduction. “Their fields were precious, and had to be defended.”

“Maybe it’s not so surprising,” Lynn went on, “whichever hypothesis you favor as to the reason for the great leap forward from hunter-gatherer societies to agricultural ones. If it really was a fabulous stroke of inspiration, the tribes that hadn’t made it were probably keen to get in on the act. If it was a desperation move forced by ecological crisis, the tribes that hadn’t made it would have been even keener. On Earth, the major ongoing conflict was always between settled agriculturalists and nomadic herdsman, but the relative dearth of mammal-equivalents in this ecosphere seems to have ensured that the humanoids never took to animal husbandry—not in a big way, at any rate—so the Cain and Abel allegory doesn’t apply.”

Matthew noticed the tacit assumption that the “enemies” the city-builders wanted to keep out were others of their own kind, but he didn’t call attention to it. Instead, he asked: “Which hypothesis do you like? The inspirational leap or the existential crisis?”

“The crisis scenario always made more sense to me as an explanation of our own prehistory,” Lynn admitted, “but if we don’t know for sure why our own hunter-gatherer ancestors settled down, we’re hardly likely to be able to come to a firm conclusion about these guys. That’s the way I tell the story to myself, though. If the people who migrated up the river and built the city did so because life down on the plain was becoming too difficult, successive waves of their increasingly distant cousins would have followed in their train. Maybe, at first, some or all of them were taken in, coopted to the grand plan—but as living space became more cramped, the people in the city might have become increasingly desperate to keep others out while the people trying to get in became more desperate in proportion. Positive feedback, ultimately bringing the conflict to a mutually ruinous climax.”

“It sounds plausible,” Matthew agreed.

“Not to Dulcie,” Lynn observed. “Not enough evidence of elaborate weaponry in the hidey-holes we’ve so far excavated. Ideally, of course, we’d like some skeletons so that we could look for evidence of violent death, but even hard human bone wouldn’t have survived for long in this kind of environment. The city-dwellers who died here have all been reabsorbed—every last knucklebone and tooth. All we have to go on are the stones and the glass fragments. No earthenware pots, no metal. Dulcie reckons that if you leave out the walls themselves, the evidence so far unearthed favors the notion that the city-dwellers were a relatively peaceful lot.”

“What about the spearhead that killed Bernal?”

“What about it? Dulcie says it’s a fake. Even if it isn’t, it’s recent, and even if it weren’t recent, it would only be evidence of hunting, not warfare.”

Matthew shrugged his shoulders. Although his smartsuit only presented the illusion of clothing, he couldn’t quite escape the false sensation that something clammy was clinging to his back like a sweat-soaked shirt.

“Given that the local plants don’t make storage-proteins to supply seeds,” he said, seeking further distraction from his discomfort, “the staple crop couldn’t have been a grain-analogue, even though the plants in the drawings I saw on Hopelook a bit like corncobs.”

“That’s right,” Lynn confirmed. “We’re not sure how they persuaded their food-plants to put on so much bulk—that’s why we’re doing the test plantings of candidate types. The fields have been reclaimed by local varieties, though—the city-builders probably brought their crop-plants with them from the plain. We don’t really know why they didn’t cultivate the land on the banks of the river, but we figure it must have had something to do with the difficulty of clearing ground and keeping it free from weeds. Those giant grasses are probably more resilient than the hill-dwelling dendrites—too difficult to dislodge.

“I’ll show you the murals when we go down again. We think they might have been colored in at one time, but organic paints would have been stripped off by slugs and snails almost immediately, except where heavy metals in inorganic pigments made them too poisonous. We have a few flakes of what might have been paint, but the only decipherable images are the engravings in the photos.”

Matthew examined the exposed remains of a stone wall on the edge of the platform from which they were looking down. It had been scraped clean of its various encrustations. The blocks of stone from which it had been constructed were relatively small and easily portable, in stark contrast to the bigger foundation blocks that had been similarly cleared.

The mortar sealing the wall gave the impression of being resinous, albeit set as hard as the stone itself, although it could not have survived if it had been organic. Although he could see half-a-dozen places in the immediate neighborhood where similar walls must have been cracked, broken and eventually pulled down by the combined efforts of severe weather and the overgrowing vegetation, this particular fragment looked as if it might stand for thousands of years yet to come, and perhaps hundreds of thousands.

It had been built to last, and it had lasted.

Alas, the civilization it had been built to contain had not. Matthew could hardly help wondering whether any civilization that Hope’s passengers put in place might be bound to meet a similar fate.

TWENTY-ONE

Why didn’t more people come here from Base One when Milyukov refused to supply a proper staff?” Matthew asked Lynn Gwyer. “They’re all Earth-born. They all saw the same VE-dramas you and I grew up on. They must have a proper appreciation of the mythic significance of first contact. The mere possibility that there might be aliens should have had them flocking here in droves.”

“It’s a long way,” she pointed out. “All our aircraft are tiny, and we haven’t finished building and securing a chain of refueling stops. At first, they expected the crew to send down more people. The realization that it wasn’t going to happen was slow to grow, and it grew alongside other arguments. Bernal thought he could change that, if only he could broadcast to Base One, but Milyukov procrastinated over sending the TV cameras he asked for. In the end, we got you instead.”

“He must have chuckled over that one,” Matthew said, meaning Milyukov. “He took an unreasonable relish in informing me that he couldn’t give me the cameras I asked for. He can’t keep me incommunicado, but he knows as well as I do that it’s not easy to persuade large numbers of people to tune in when all you’ve got is a beltphone.”

While he was speaking they completed their descent from the top of the mound—“the tower,” as Lynn insisted on calling it. It had undoubtedly been a tower at one time, but Matthew found his own mind shying away from the designation. Although a way had been cleared to allow observers to climb to the top, and tunnels had been excavated to allow ingress to what had once been the interior, much of the surrounding vegetation had been left in place to provide supportive scaffolding. As he looked back up at it, the only Earthly tower to which Matthew could readily link it, imaginatively, was the fictitious one in which the Sleeping Beauty and her court had been committed to suspended animation until the day that her handsome prince would come. Even having made that link, though, he could not extend the analogy far enough to imagine himself as the Sleeping Beauty, and Nita Brownell or Konstantin Milyukov as the liberator prince.

“There shouldbe more people here,” Lynn said, as they moved toward another, much shallower downslope. “More would be on their way from Base One as we speak if it weren’t for the fact that the groups in favor of a temporary or permanent withdrawal are becoming more paranoid by the day. With Milyukov on one side, insisting that they can’t be taken off the world again, and the frontiersmen on the other, insisting that we have to make a go of the colony and that everybody ought to stop whining and pull their weight, the situation at Base One is gradually turning into total farce. You know they’re planning some kind of election, I suppose? With everything that needs to be donedown here, at least half of the people at Base One are devoting the bulk of their time and effort to organizing a bloody conferenceto determine their official position. Unbelievable! Almost as unbelievable as the idea that if they take a vote on it, the minority will immediately fall into line with the majority!”

“I’ve only heard rumors,” Matthew said, putting a hand on the wall beside the path to balance himself more securely. “No one was delegated to brief us on that sort of stuff, even though Milyukov seems to think that Bernal might have been murdered to deny him a voice in the big debate. Was he even planning to attend?”

“I doubt it. The only plan he seemed to be interested in during the days leading up to his death was the river journey. The engraved wall’s just over there.”

Matthew picked out the relevant patch of wall easily enough. He’d been hoping that the photograph he’d looked at on Hopehadn’t done it justice, but the original was no clearer. The reality seemed, in a way, even more primitive than the image—but someone had obviously gone to considerable trouble to carve out the line drawing, given that any chisels they had available must have had brittle blades.

“Where’s the pyramid?” Matthew asked, suddenly.

“Good question,” Lynn replied. “We decided that it probably isn’t a structure at all. We think it’s a symbol. Maybe a kind of frame, maybe an arrow pointing up to the sky. It’s just a couple of lines—we only see it as a pyramid because we’re culturally preconditioned.”

“Maybe,” said Matthew, grudgingly. “It’s a pity Bernal didn’t get his cameras. If he’d been able to take them downriver with him, he’d have been able to put his two cents’ worth into the debate at Base One from a unique platform. Unless, of course, Milyukov decided to do likewise, in which case there’d have been a big on-screen argument. Bernal always loved a big showdown.”

“It’s not just some cheap TV event, Matthew,” she told him, with a measure of asperity, as she led him away from the mural, this time heading back the way they had come. “It’s real, and it might determine the fate of the colony.”

“Not unless it’s properly stage-managed, it won’t,” Matthew said. “There’ll be a lot of nonsense talked, and maybe a show of hands, and it will accomplish exactly nothing. The fact that there’s a power struggle going on aboard Hopemight have convinced too many of us that there’s more than one possible outcome to this sorry mess, but there isn’t. Whatever happens up there, those of us who are down here are stuck here for the foreseeable future, and probably forever. If this is a death trap, we’ll die in it.”

“Try telling that to Tang. On second thought, don’t. You’ll stand a better chance of getting that berth if you don’t upset him. Ike and I want you to have it, but that might not be enough.”

“So I’d gathered,” Matthew said. “Lynn, who the hell could have killed Bernal—and why?”

“As I told your friend Solari, I don’t know. If he thinks it was me, he’s barking up the wrong tree.”

“Why should he think it was you?”

“Because I’m the nearest thing to a scorned woman he can find. Cherchez la femme—isn’t that the detective’s motto?”

“Oh,” Matthew said, momentarily unable to think of anything else to say. It wasn’t a line of argument he wanted to pursue. He thought about Tang Dinh Quan instead, and the two daughters Tang had in SusAn. For Tang, he knew, any argument about the future of the colony had to cut further and deeper than “We’re stuck with it for the foreseeable future, so we might as well get on with it.” When the time came for him to talk to Tang he had to have something better than that to say to him. Tang’s daughters, like Alice and Michelle Fleury, still had all their options open.

The worst scenario that Matthew could readily imagine was that Alice and Michelle might be whisked away in the tender care of Konstantin Milyukov’s Revolutionary Tribunal while their father was marooned, whether the world on which he was marooned was capable of sustaining human life in the longer term or not—but how could that possibly happen, he asked himself, given Rand Blackstone’s calculations?

Matthew had relaxed considerably now that they were retracing their steps, but that was a mistake. He was still tired, and he had grown used to putting his hand out sideways to rebalance himself and provide a little extra support. While descending from the mound he had been placing it on bare stone, but now they were walking along a narrow path the walls to either side were covered in vegetation. Because he found the feel of the alien “stems” and “leaves” slightly disconcerting, he had developed a subliminal preference for reaching throughthe purple curtain to touch the stone behind it—but it was an unwariness that he quickly came to regret.

It was only out of the corner of his eye that he saw the flicker of movement as a clutch of tentacles began writhing like Medusa’s hair, but the glimpse was enough to flood him with terror.

He snatched his hand away with the utmost urgency—and immediately understood how minutely his autonomic nervous system had been tuned to Earthly conditions. It felt as if his arm had been seized by some alien power and thrown aside. There was no real reason for him to stumble, but the sense of dislocation that suddenly swept over him made it all-but-impossible for him to maintain his stance. He lurched to one side, crashing into the wall opposite the one from which he had removed his hand. He had tripped over his own foot.

While he was cursing volubly Lynn was quick to snatch a long-bladed knife from her belt. She used the blade to part the purple foliage and expose the creature more fully.

Although he was still fighting for balance, Matthew immediately realized how small the monster was by comparison with the one that Rand Blackstone had brought back to the bubble after Maryanne Hyder had been stung. The creature’s body was no bigger than his hand, and was shaped not unlike a hand laid flat, save for the tentacles bedded where the first joint of the middle finger would have been had it actually been a hand. The tentacles themselves were much thinner than a finger; they seemed surprisingly pale—almost translucent—and rather delicate. The flat-worm-like body was a deeper purple than Blackstone’s specimen, and the eyespots were much less prominent.

“It’s okay,” Lynn said. “Even if it had stung you it wouldn’t have been any worse than a bee sting, unless you had a massive allergic reaction.”

“What’s the bloody thing doing lurking in there?” Matthew growled, to cover his embarrassment. “What’s the point of having photosynthetic pigments in your skin if you’re going to skulk in the shadows while the sun’s at zenith?”

“Another good question,” Lynn conceded. “Not hiding from predators, that’s for sure. They don’t seem to have any enemies hereabouts but us.” She let the foliage fall back to its original position and dropped her hand, taking care not to let any part of her surface-suit get into range of the sting-cells. She made no move to capture or kill the creature. “I’m not sure whether their numbers are actually increasing or whether we’re just getting better at spotting them,” she mused.

“I didn’t spot it,” Matthew pointed out, bringing himself upright and looking anxiously at the wall against which he had stumbled. “That was the whole problem.”

Mercifully, there was no sign of any animal life lurking beneath the screen of vegetable flesh—but when he extended his fearful glance to take in the whole of the surrounding terrain he immediately saw the secondanimal he had seen since leaving the bubble that morning: a pair of ratlike eyes staring at him from higher and denser growth. As soon as he met their stare, though, the eyes drew back into the tangled plants. There was only the softest of rustling sounds as the creature’ invisible body slipped swiftly away.

“Did you see that?” he demanded.

“Local mammal,” Lynn told him. “Shy, seemingly harmless. A rare sight, though—you’re lucky.”

“Harmless? What about the ones with the hypodermic tongues?”

“None of those sighted in these parts to date,” she assured him. “The local reptile– and mammal-analogues seem to be mostly herbivores, and the ones that aren’t seem to specialize in smaller worms—they wouldn’t go after something like the one you nearly grabbed. They’re too thin to be cuddly, but temperamentally they’re more rabbit and kitten than rat and monkey. They’re curious, but way too nervous to be intrusive. So far, that is—they might get bolder as time goes by. He was purple too, of course, but he’s not out soaking up the sun either. Even the ones that only come out at night are purple, although we think that they only keep chloroplast-substitutes for purposes of cryptic coloration. The medusa is certainly capable of photosynthesizing, but the species doesn’t seem to have any instinctive imperative to make the most of the noonday sun. Unlike our beautiful pea-green boat, which is charging its storage cells as we speak. Odd, isn’t it?”

It wasodd. Why, Matthew wondered, would animals that could boost their energy supplies by fixing solar energy be hiding in the shadows? Was it just because there were people tramping through their territory, or was there another reason? Earthly herbivores and insectivores were shy for exactly the reason that Lynn had mentioned: they had to keep out of the way of the top predators, and hiding was the strategy they’d adopted. That was precisely the reason why photosynthetic apparatus would be no good to them. If you were the kind of organism that fixed solar energy, you had to be out in the sun, which meant that you had to deter things that wanted to eat you by some other means: thorns or poisons. The slug with the sting-cells had both, after a fashion, but the mammal-analogue with the disconcerting stare apparently had neither. So why were bothof them purple, and why were both of them skulking in the shadows?

“Do you want to see more?” Lynn asked.

Matthew was very tired by now, as well as a trifle bruised. He was far from certain whether he wanted to take the rest of the grand tour now, even though time was pressing.

“What more have you got?”

She tilted her head thoughtfully. “We’ve got a few trenches,” she said. “Dulcie dug them. Nothing much in them though. We’ve got a few glass artifacts, but they’re back at the bubble—all I can show you here are the holes in the walls they came out of. I can take you along the other paths, if you like, but now that you’ve had the best view the rest might seem anticlimactic. We ought to go down into the fields, I suppose, although there’s not a lot to see with the naked eye but more walls. You might be more interested in Tang’s proteonomic studies—he’s got some recent data that augments and amplifies what Lityansky has, but only slightly.”

What Matthew would have liked to do was to take a walk on his own, in the hope of getting a better feel for the environment, but he wasn’t sure that he was up to it. It wasn’t just the problems caused by the necessity of readjusting to 0.92 Earth-normal gravity; the closeness of his encounter with the stinging worm had reminded him that there were dangers here to which he was not yet properly alert.

“All in all,” he decided, aloud, “Lunch seems like a good idea.”

“Right,” Lynn said. “You’ll probably find your appetite running away with you a bit for the first few days, but once the awful tedium of the food becomes obvious to your stomach it’ll lose its enthusiasm. Are you okay?”

“As well as can be expected,” Matthew told her. She nodded, as if she knew that he wasn’t just talking about his physical condition. She knew as well as he did that he’d been unceremoniously tossed into the deep end of this particular pool, without the benefit of swimming lessons. She didn’t seem to resent the time she’d had to spend showing him the view from the city; he was a new face as as well as an old one, a welcome distraction from the work routines she’d established since accepting the posting. She too was doing as well as could reasonably be expected.

“It’s a fabulous discovery,” she said, quietly, as she began to lead the way back to the bubble. “Even more fabulous, in a way, than the world itself. We’re entitled to be disappointed, I think, that the principle of convergent evolution didn’t hold up better at the genomic level—it would make things somuch easier if the local life were DNA-based—but we’re surely entitled to be delighted as well as astounded by the fact that it held up so well at the level of actual organisms. There were menhere, Matthew. I don’t think any of us, here or at the other bases, has really been able to take the enormity of that fact aboard. This was a city, which makes them civilized men. Whatever happened to them, they were here… and so are we.”

Matthew could see what she was getting at. Across the void, across the centuries, two sentient, intelligent, civilized species—two sentient, intelligent, civilized humanoidspecies—had come into such close proximity that one was now aware of the other. They had not yet contrived to meet, or to touch, but even if one of them did turn out to be extinct, it had become known to the other in spite of that fact. At the very least, its passing could be mourned, and some of its lessons relearned. That was a matter of importance, no matter how frustrating all the remaining mysteries might be.

“So are we,” Matthew echoed, to show that he understood—and she nodded, to accept his understanding.