Текст книги "Dark Ararat"

Автор книги: Brian Stableford

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Текущая страница: 15 (всего у книги 27 страниц)

TWENTY-TWO

After programming the cooker Matthew sat down at the table with Lynn and Godert Kriefmann. The doctor opened his mouth, presumably to offer news of Maryanne Hyder’s condition, but he closed it again abruptly when Vince Solari came into the room. The temperature was thermostatically controlled, but it seemed to drop a degree anyhow. Matthew noticed that Lynn was clearly discomfited, and realized that she had not been joking when she had confessed her fear that Solari suspected her.

The policeman came to sit beside Matthew. He seemed to be slightly discomfited himself by the reaction his entrance had caused. He leaned toward Matthew in a confidential fashion that was only a trifle overacted. “There’s something I need to show you,” he said.

“Is there time to eat first?” Matthew wanted to know.

“If you like—but it’s important.”

Lynn and the doctor were trying hard not to look as if they were hanging on Solari’s every word, but they weren’t succeeding. Kriefmann looked just as worried as Lynn.

“It’s about Bernal’s murder?” Matthew said, just to make certain.

“Yes.”

Solari’s terseness was obviously intended to display the implication that he didn’t want to say too much in the present company, but Matthew wasn’t at all sure that he wanted to pander to that kind of provocation—or, for that matter, to enter into any kind of apparent conspiracy. There seemed to be way too many conspiracies already festering on and above the new world.

“Do you know who did it?” Matthew demanded.

“Not for certain.” It was another calculated provocation, although he didn’t go so far as to favor anyone with a meaningful look. Matthew began to feel just as uncomfortable as his two companions.

“Where?” Matthew asked, anxious to have done with the conversation.

“Outside. I’ll take you.”

Matthew knew that Solari had been at the crime scene for most of the morning. He couldn’t imagine that there would be any useful forensic evidence left after a week of imperfect weather, but Solari obviously thought that he had found something significant—something that he wanted to talk over with the only person on the Base who couldn’t possibly have committed the murder.

“Okay,” Matthew said, brusquely. “Give me twenty minutes. Are you eating?”

Solari shook his head. “I took a packed lunch with me,” he said. “Thought I might be gone all day—didn’t expect to find anything so soon.”

Matthew turned to the doctor and said: “How’s Maryanne?”

“Better,” Kriefmann told him. “She won’t be running, skipping or jumping for a couple of days, but she’ll be able to sit up in bed, read, even answer stupid questions….” The final remark was obviously slanted toward Solari.

“I met one of the monsters just now,” Matthew reported. “Just a little one. Lurking in the vegetation—odd, that, for a creature able to fix solar energy, with no apparent natural enemies in the vicinity.”

“Its instincts probably can’t figure out that it’s in a safe area,” Kriefmann pointed out, grateful for the distraction. “Maybe it won’t be safe for long—if the critters really are becoming more common, the predators will begin to move in soon enough.”

“I’ve only seen pictures of the predators,” Matthew said. “Things like big rats with crocodile snouts and things like frilly lizards. Have you ever seen anything like that in the flesh?”

“Nothing particularly scary,” Kriefmann told him. “There are lizards up here, but they mostly stick to the treetops. Mammal-equivalents too, but mostly herbivores and moppers-up of little worms. The serious hunters only come out at night, though, so there might be more around than we suppose. By day, the ruins seem unusually peaceful by comparison with Earthly subtropics. According to the evidence gathered by the flying eyes things are busier downriver—but that may be an illusion. It may be our presence that’s scaring the wildlife away. A pity, if so. There are lots of worms, of every size imaginable, but worms don’t hum like flies or sing like birds. It’s noisier as well as more crowded downriver, so I’m told. More species down there use sound signals.”

While Matthew collected his meal, Lynn Gwyer asked Solari where he had worked back on Earth. Having already heard the story, Matthew felt free to concentrate on his food. This was a prepackaged meal sent down with him in the shuttle, so it didn’t have the slightly offensive taste and texture of the locally extracted manna substrate, but it was as bland and unappetizing as the meals he’d had on Hope. The colonists had food technology that would allow them to do better in time, but they were obviously still thinking in stern utilitarian terms. Matthew didn’t doubt that the wheat-manna pancakes and thinly sliced synthetic vegetables would serve his nutritional needs, but he couldn’t help wondering whether the humans on the surface might have felt slightly more welcome here if they’d paid more attention to matters of aestheticization.

While Matthew ate, Kriefmann quizzed him about his condition, and advised him to try not to overtax himself during his first few days on the surface. The chance, Matthew thought, would be a fine thing. As soon as he had dumped the remains of his meal and its packaging in the recycler, Vince Solari stood up, obviously expecting him to follow. He signaled his apologies to Lynn.

Once they were outside the bubble Solari led the way downhill, in a direction almost exactly opposite to the one Matthew had taken on his earlier expedition. They made more rapid progress, though, partly because flamethrowers had been plied with such reckless abandon that the way was clearer and partly because Vince Solari’s mind was focused on more practical matters than Lynn Gwyer’s had been. Matthew noticed, however, that he was already moving a little more freely and comfortably than the policeman, who reacted to his own clumsiness with casual impatience.

Come nightfall, Matthew thought, Solari’s surface-suit and IT would be working overtime on the bruises generated by his purposeful hurrying.

“Have you reported your find to anyone else?” Matthew asked him, interested to know how fully Solari intended to cooperate with Konstantin Milyukov.

“I dare say they’ll know as soon as you do,” Solari told him, not bothering to specify who he meant by they. He was assuming, of course, that their surface-suits might have been bugged in some unobtrusive manner. Matthew had not been convinced that Shen’s anxieties regarding the temporary smartsuit he had been given on Hopewere anything more than paranoia, but he knew that it would be foolish to take anything for granted. So sophisticated had surveillance methods become in the years before he left Earth that every wall in the world had been collecting eyes and ears by the dozen, many of them undetectable by human observers. For all he knew, his new suit might even be rigged for visual transmission—in which case, “they” might not have to wait for Solari to spell anything out in conversation; “they” might already have seen whatever he had seen, and interpreted it with equal intelligence.

From the top of the mound that he and Lynn had climbed Matthew had seen the city’s fields laid out like a vast purple-blanketed maze, with their vaguely outlined protective walls seeming no more impressive than lines doodled on a page. From within, though, the fragmentary network of partly fallen walls seemed positively oppressive. They loomed up haphazardly, curving this way and that, almost as enigmatically as the corridors of Hope. Those closest to the bubble-complex were mostly between one and three meters tall, but the further Matthew and Solari went the taller the fragments became.

The route Solari took involved little actual climbing, but the penalty they paid for that convenience was that it was by no means straight. At these close quarters it was easy to see that the wall-builders had made their own provision for laborers to pass from field to field, equipping their citadel-fields with gateways whose gates had long since decomposed, but they had not taken the trouble to make arterial roads that radiated from the city proper like the spokes of a wheel. Perhaps that was because they were anxious that such highways might be too convenient for traffic coming the other way, Matthew thought—or perhaps it was merely because the endeavor had spread out in an untidily improvised manner.

Some of the fields had obviously had blockhouses in the corners, perhaps to provide temporary accommodation, or to house sentries, or to store tools, or for any combination of those reasons. Others had had stone shelves built into the angles where walls intersected, but any staircases that had led up to the tops of the walls must have been made of perishable materials; there was not the least trace of any such structure now.

The walk was a long one—more than twice as long as the one Matthew had taken with Lynn Gwyer—and it took a proportionate toll of their unready bodies. At first, Matthew told himself that it was bound to be easier because their route was mostly downhill, but it was a false assumption. When he remembered that Solari had already made the uphill climb once he began to understand the effort that the policeman had put in, and the strength of the motive that had led him to insist on making a second trip almost immediately, with Matthew in tow.

“We’re not doing this just because you need somebody to talk to, are we?” he said, when that became clear to him. “You really do need my help to figure out the significance of what you’ve found.”

“Yes,” said Solari, his terseness now owing to shortness of breath rather than any disinclination to show his hand to possible suspects.

“Why?” Matthew persisted.

“Because you knew the man,” Solari said, laboriously. “You’re far better able to guess what he might have been up to than I am.”

“Up to?” Matthew queried—but Solari didn’t want to put in the effort of compiling an elaborate explanation when he had evidence waiting that would speak more eloquently for itself.

When they finally reached the spot where Bernal had been killed there was nothing to indicate where the body had been found. Matthew had not been expecting a bloodstain, let alone a silhouette in white chalk, but he had been expecting something, and it seemed somehow insulting that there was nothing at all. Any vegetation that had been crushed had recovered its former vigor. The place was screened from everything further uphill by a very solid and intimidating wall some ten or twelve meters to the north of the place where the body had been found. It met another, equally high and solid, twenty meters to the left. There was a ledge set in the angle, but it was too high up to be a shelf and it was angled downward. It looked like a place where laborers a long way from home might huddle together and shelter from the rain.

“What was he doing way out here?” Matthew wondered, aloud.

“The same question occurred to me,” Solari said. “According to the bubble’s log, he’d been spending a lot of time out here during the weeks before his death, even though his preparatory analysis of the local ecosystem was supposedly done and dusted. He must have been caught in the rain more than once, maybe for long enough for his idle hands to get restless.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Matthew said.

Solari took him to the angle of where the walls met: to the gloomy covert under the down-slanting ledge.

The wall seemed solid enough to a cursory glance, but when Solari reached up to remove a stone set slightly above waist height it came out neatly enough. There was a space behind it: a lacuna in what otherwise seemed to be a solid wall. Matthew recalled that the artifacts Dulcie Gherardesca had recovered had been found in cavities in the walls, where they had enjoyed a measure of protection from the forces of decay.

“It’s a hidey-hole,” Solari said. “Built for that purpose a verylong time ago. Still serviceable, though.”

The policeman removed several objects from the hole, one by one. Most of them were were blackly vitreous. Three looked like knives, or perhaps spearheads. Three more were similar in design but much smaller—perhaps arrowheads. The nonvitreous items were stone: two appeared to be crude chipping-stones of a kind that might well have been used by a Stone Age craftsman for working flint. One was some kind of scraper. There were numerous pieces of raw “glass,” of a convenient size for working into useful objects.

“There aren’t any shafts for spears or arrows,” Solari said. “He hadn’t gotten around to that. He was still practicing.”

“He?” Matthew echoed, with an implicit query.

“Delgado.”

Matthew thought about that for a couple of minutes. Then he said: “Are you sure that Bernalwas making the spearheads and arrowheads? Maybe he found someone else making them. Maybe he was killed because he found out that someone else was making imitation alien artifacts.”

“I can’t be absolutely sure,” Solari said, scrupulously. “The surface-suits are too thick and too resilient to permit easy DNA-analysis of their excreta, and the murder weapon itself had been handled by too many people before I got to it, but the fact that the only contaminants on these are Delgado’s makes it highly unlikely that someone else had put the necessary hours into making them. Unless someone’s gone to enormous trouble to erect an evidential smokescreen, Delgado was the one who faked the artifact with which he was killed. He had already faked others, and he was in the process of faking more. Maybe it began while he was whiling away the time waiting for a shower to pass, but it must have become purposive soon enough. He made time for the work; he must have had a plan for the results. Whoever killed him found out about it. Maybe they knew about the hidey-hole and maybe they didn’t. If they did, they probably took the trouble to tidy up a little after he was dead—but if they expected that I wouldn’t be able to find the evidence, they were wildly optimistic. Anyone could have found it, if they’d bothered to look. Delgado’s friends—the murderer’s friends—didn’t bother to look.”

This speech seemed to exhaust Solari’s strength, and he had to lean against the wall, but he seemed relieved that he’d made his point.

“It doesn’t make sense,” Matthew said, after a pause.

“That won’t wash, Matt,” Solari replied. “It has to make sense. You say that you knew him as well as anyone—maybe better than anyone here, even though their acquaintance was more recent. So tell me. Why would he be faking alien artifacts?”

“He wouldn’t. He was a scientist.”

“But he was.”

“No. Fakingis your word, your interpretation. He was makingartifacts of the same kinds as those found elsewhere in the ruins, but it doesn’t mean that he had any intention of trying to pass them off as the real thing. Maybe someone else leapt to the same conclusion you did, but it has to be wrong. He was just experimenting with local manufacturing techniques. He couldn’thave intended to attempt to fool anyone into believing that the blades and arrowheads had been made by aliens.”

“Not even if he had a powerful motive for persuading people that the aliens aren’t extinct?” It was obvious from Solari’s tone that he didn’t believe Matthew’s version of events. The policeman had found what seemed to him to be a plausible motive: that Bernal had been determined to prove that the aliens were still around, and that somebody else had been determined to stop him.

“Whatever he was doing,” Matthew said, stubbornly, “I can’t see that it would provide a motive for his murder. If someone wereplanning to run that kind of fraud, and got caught red-handed, hemight be tempted to do something to prevent the story coming out, but why would the person who caught him want to silence the person he’d caught? It doesn’t make sense—and it certainly doesn’t get you any closer to identifying the murderer.”

“Somehow,” Solari persisted, doggedly, “it hasto make sense. You say that Delgado wouldn’t do a thing like this—but he did. I know he was your friend, but you must see that this stuff about experimenting with alien manufacturing techniques is too feeble for words. He wouldn’t have gone to this much trouble without a much better reason than that. How obvious the fakes would have been if they’d been found in less compromising circumstances I can’t tell—but that might not matter. Maybe he knew that they’d be tagged as fakes sooner or later, but maybe he was prepared to settle for later, given that the colonists’ big argument was about to come to a head.”

“You think he was doing this to influence a vote that probably doesn’t have any meaning whichever way it goes?” Matthew said, skeptically. “I don’t think so. That’s even more feeble than my story.”

“So think of a better one. I mean it, Matt. I have to put a case together.”

“Against Lynn Gwyer?”

Solari was suitably taken aback by that, but he was too good at his job to let his reaction give anything away. “Have you some reason for thinking that Gwyer might be guilty?” he asked, swiftly.

“Quite the contrary,” Matthew said. “But she seems to think that you have her in the frame.”

“Don’t try that distraction crap with me, Matt,” the policeman came back. “I thought you and I were becoming friends. Please don’t start giving me the same runaround as these clowns.”

“It must be hard to run a good cop–bad cop routine all on your own,” Matthew observed, drily.

Solari seemed genuinely disappointed by that response—but that was his job. “Look, Matt,” he said, earnestly, “neither of us knows how important this impending vote has come to seem to the people who’ve been down here for three years. Neither of us knows how deep anyone’s paranoia cuts, or how weirdly it’s con-figured. But if the planet were really inhabited, by an intelligent species on the ecological brink, that might seem to some people to be a powerful reason for letting it alone, don’t you think? Given that we all signed up for this mission because our own species was on the brink, facing what looked like a terminal ecocatastrophe, don’t you think that some people here might have powerful conscientious objections to the possibility of precipitating an ecological crisis here that might condemn another species—a brotherspecies—to extinction?”

Matthew already knew that Solari was no fool, and he knew that Solari was absolutely right to say that no one who had only been awake for a matter of days could possibly comprehend the complexity of the evolving situation into which they’d both been precipitated—but Bernal Delgado had been his colleague, his rival, his collaborator, his fellow prophet, his mirror image in all but private and personal matters. Matthew could not imagine any circumstances in which hemight be led to commit the kind of betrayal that Solari had imagined, so he was extremely reluctant to accept that Bernal might have been led to it. But to what hypothetical extreme would he have to go in order to construct a story that could conserve Bernal’s innocence?

Could the evidence Solari had found so very easily, as soon as he began to look, have been faked, just like the arrowheads themselves? Could the conspiracy of which the murder was a part be far more complicated than Solari was yet prepared to suspect? How complicated could this mystery be? Was it not far too complicated already?

“They could have been planted,” he said to Solari, although he knew exactly how desperate the suggestion was. “Given that we all wear heavy-duty smartsuits, you can’t have much in the way of forensic evidence. Maybe this whole setup is fake—rotten through and through. Maybe the bubble’s logs have been altered too.”

“So who didfake it all?” Solari countered, plainly exasperated. “Why? Which of the seven had the motive, the time, the skill to do the murder andthe cover-up? Come on, Matt. We have to do better than that.”

“I don’t know,” Matthew said, helplessly, knowing that if he had to stay ahead of the game he had to improvise something much better. “What I want to think is that Bernal really did findthe artifacts, that they really are evidence of the continued existence of the indigenes … but that someone didn’t want him to reveal that fact. Maybe the artifacts arereal. That’s another thing neither of us is competent to judge.”

“Unfortunately,” Solari observed, drily, “it’s difficult to think of anyone who is. But it still won’t wash. If they really were made by aliens, Delgado would have shouted the news from the rooftops the moment it broke. Nobody could have imagined, even for a moment, that they could keep it quiet—and if they had they certainly wouldn’t have used one of the alien artifacts to commit the murder while they had a perfectly good stainless steel knife in their belt, would they?”

Matthew had to concede that it was all true. He was thoroughly ashamed of himself. He had always thought of himself as an unusually accomplished improviser, especially under pressure. He knew that he ought to be able to make up a better story, even if he couldn’t actually intuit the truth. He was recently arrived on an alien world, exhausted and ill-fed, but none of those circumstances constituted an acceptable excuse.

“I’ll work it out,” he told Solari, grimly. “I promise you that. I’ll work it allout. Every last piece of every last puzzle. I’m Bernal’s replacement as well as his friend. It’s up to me to carry through his plan, whatever it was, and that’s what I intend to do. You can spread that around if you like, on the off chance that it will make the murderer take a pop at me. But either way, I’m going to sort this mess out. Properly.”

Solari finally cracked a smile. “That’s what I wanted, Matt,” he said, softly. “Just be sure you let me in on it first, okay?”