Текст книги "Dark Ararat"

Автор книги: Brian Stableford

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 18 (всего у книги 27 страниц)

“But she didn’t kill him,” Maryanne was quick to say.

“Who?”

“Lynn. She really didn’t mind. Not thatmuch. She knew him years ago. She’d been through it all before. She understood what he was like. She didn’t kill him.”

“Did you tell Solari that Bernal had been sleeping with Lynn before he took up with you?” Matthew wanted to know.

“He already knew,” she told him. “He knew before he left Hope. He asked Lynn about it, and he asked me. But I can’t believe that she killed him. She wouldn’t. She couldn’t.”

Matthew thought about it for a moment, and then said: “No, she wouldn’t. We may be twenty-first-century barbarians, but we’re not nineteenth-century barbarians. We’re mortals, but we’re civilized, and we have other things to think about. More important things. We have a seemingly Earth-clone world that isn’t an Earth-clone at all, and a race of city-dwellers who couldn’t hang on to the habit. We’re uneasy, scared, jumpy … but even here we have our VE sex-kits, our IT, our missionary zeal. You’re right. Lynn couldn’t have killed Bernal, and if Vince thinks she did, he’s tuned into the wrong wavelength. But somebody did.”

“I don’t know who,” Maryanne insisted.

“Neither do I—but however it came about, I have to try to step into Bernal’s shoes. I have to try to see things as he had begun to see them, to take advantage of his accumulated knowledge of the world. I need to know what was in his mind when he coined the phrase super killer anemone. I need to know, even if it was hope and hope alone that set his compass, what he expected to find downriver. If there’s anything more you can tell me, I wish you’d tell me now. We’ll have our beltphones with us, but talking on the phone isn’t the same as talking face-to-face.”

“I don’t know what to tell you,” she insisted. “I’m sorry, but I just don’t know. I’m a toxicologist, not an ecologist. To me, a worm with tentacles is just a liquiject full of interesting poisons. There are too many poisons hereabouts, which would be even more lethal to creatures like us than to the enemies they were designed for, if it weren’t for the safeguards built into our suits and our IT. There are a million ways to fuck up a functioning metabolism, and very few of them are choosy.”

“It reminds Rand Blackstone of home,” Matthew observed.

“So it should,” she said. “On Earth, all toxicologists turn toward Australia when they pray. Until we arrived here, it was poison paradise. An alien world on the surface of the Earth—until the dingoes and the rabbits moved in. Has it occurred to you that the sin skamight stand for something other than super, even if the kand the astand for killer anemone?”

“Sure,” Matthew said. “But when you’re guessing, first guesses are often the best. What did you have in mind?”

“Strange. Sinister. Solitary. Son of the. Spawn of the.”

“I still like super—oh shit, no I don’t. It’s a joke. It’s just a bloody joke.”

She waited patiently for him to tell her what he meant.

“ Serialkiller anemone,” Matthew said. “I should have seen it immediately. It has to be.”

“Forgive me if I don’t laugh,” she said. “I’m sorry I don’t know more about what Bernal was thinking. He wasn’t quite the talker you are—not so far as shoptalk was concerned, anyway.”

Matthew wasn’t sure whether to take offense at that or not. “We all have our specialisms,” he said. “Maybe I’m a little more obsessive than Bernal was—or a little less.”

“I did see you on TV, now I come to think about it,” she said. “You always looked so serious. Not that Bernal wasn’t—but he had style.”

“Now that isan insult,” Matthew said. “I have style. It might not be the same sort of style as Bernal’s, but it isstyle.”

“That’s what Lynn said,” Maryanne recalled. “When we heard you were coming, she was the one who was glad. But she knew you in the flesh, didn’t she? So to speak.”

Matthew realized, rather belatedly, that it was her turn to go fishing for information.

“Just good friends,” he said. “Not even that, really. If she and Bernal were intimate back on Earth I didn’t know about it, but I probably wouldn’t have even if they were. She and I never were.”

“Well, it’s a whole new world now,” the blond woman said, softly. “One fresh start after another.”

“Does it matter?”

“What matters,” she informed him, mournfully, “is that he’s dead. If I weren’t so absurdly spaced out, so remotely detached from all my feelings …”

“Yeah,” said Matthew, sympathetically. “When I said I knew the feeling, I forgot the exclusion effect. But Bernal was my friend, my ally … in Shen Chin Che’s reckoning, my counterpart. I canimagine how you feel. I’m truly sorry that we had to meet like this. I wish he could be here.”

“When you do find out who did it—” she began, but cut the sentence short with abrupt determination.

“Vince already knows,” Matthew reminded her, gently.

“When youfind out,” she repeated, adding the emphasis.

“What?” he prompted.

“Tell them I forgive them. Tell them that I wish them no harm.”

She was spaced out, disconnected from her feelings: from her grief, from her anger, from her pain. She knew that. She also meant what she said.

“Them?” Matthew queried. “Not him, or her?”

“I honestly don’t know,” she murmured. “If I gave Solari the last piece of the jigsaw, I had no idea where it fit. But he was right all along—if we’d really wanted to know, we could have worked it out. We didn’t, even before I stepped on the worm.”

“It’s a whole new world now,” Matthew quoted, to show that he understood. “One fresh start after another. We may be twenty-first-century barbarians in an era when Earth is populated by emortal superscientists, but we’re doing our best to make progress. We can figure out our penal code when we have more time. For now, we have to move forward on other fronts. If I can complete the work that Bernal began … I was right to claim the berth, you now. Tang is needed here. He’ll figure out the mystery eventually, working from the biochemistry up, but if there’s a shortcut to the truth, it’ll need an ecologist’s eye to capture it. Seeing the wood in spite of the trees is our speciality.”

“I wish you the best of luck,” she said.

He knew how costly the wish had been, and thanked her accordingly.

TWENTY-SIX

Seen from the mound in the ruined city the boat had been no more than an anomalous patch of color, so Matthew was quite unprepared for the peculiarity it displayed at closer range. There was nothing so very unusual about the basic shape of its hull or its cabin and wheelhouse, but its construction material was exotic and the hull was ornamented with a complex network of striations. It was as if each of the vessel’s flanks were overlaid by a set of articulated hawsers.

“Those are the legs,” Lynn informed him. “They’re quite spectacular when they’re extended.”

“ Legs?” Matthew echoed, in helpless amazement.

“We’re quite a lot higher than the lowland plateau here,” she explained. “The watercourse is fairly smooth and comfortably deep for long stretches, but there are a couple of whitewater canyons. The keel’s retractable, but the boat still draws too much water to get through the difficult stretches without bumping against the rocks. The hull’s made of smart fabric, of course—it has a few tricks of its own and it heals quickly if it’s ripped—but we can’t afford the luxury of laying up for days at a time. Bernal decided that it would be best if she could take the worst sections in her stride, literally. I’d have thought three legs each side would be okay, according to the conventional insect model, but Bernal opted for eight. That’s why we call her Voconia.”

Having had the benefit of this introduction, Matthew had no trouble deducing that the black spots in Voconia’s prow were compound eyes of some kind. The water was clear enough for him to see that the lines of sensors extended below the water, doubtless to ensure that the craft could take soundings as it went. The wheelhouse was too narrow for comfort, but that was only to be expected; the rudder and biomotor would be under AI control for the greater part of the journey, although there had to be a set of manual controls for use in an emergency.

The hold in which the supplies and equipment were stored was crammed to bursting, and there was a certain amount of overspill stacked in the corners of the cabin. This meant that the cabin was less roomy than was desirable, even when the dining table and bunks were folded back, but Matthew figured that extra space would be generated at a reasonably rapid rate as Voconia’s biomotor and passengers worked their way steadily through the bales of manna. He could see that it wasn’t going to be easy to dismantle the craft, transport the pieces down a steep cliff and then reassemble it, but he assumed that the hull’s “smartness” extended to the inclusion of convenient abscission layers that could be activated by the AI.

“Pity you didn’t fit it out with wings,” Matthew commented, although he knew perfectly well why bio-inspired design ran into severe practical limitations when it came to mimicking the mechanisms of flight. Locusts and herons were near-miraculous triumphs of engineering; the only ornithopter produced on twenty-first-century Earth that had been capable of carrying a human passenger had been the ungainliest machine ever devised. If the engineers of twenty-ninth-century Earth had been able to improve on it, the secret hadn’t yet been passed on to the crew of Hope.

“We had to keep it simple,” Lynn told him. “Going downstream will be easy, though, provided that the biomotor finds the locally derived wholefood adequate to its needs. The real trial will begin when we turn around to come back. Coming back under our own power will test the boat’s resources to the limit. We can arrange for an emergency food and equipment drop from Hopeif we need one, and maybe some sort of rescue mission if things get really desperate, but there are matters of pride to be considered. She’s our baby—we want her to do well.”

Everyone but Maryanne Hyder was on the riverbank to see them off, and the good-byes seemed reasonably effusive by comparison with the awkward hellos that had greeted Matthew a couple of days earlier.

Rand Blackstone made a considerable fuss about presenting his rifle to Matthew. “I won’t need it up here,” he said. “You might.”

“Why give it to me rather than one of the others?” Matthew asked.

“I used to watch you on TV,” the Australian told him. “I could see that you got out and about at lot, sometimes in dangerous places. You didn’t live in a lab like Ike or Lynn. Besides which, I’ve seen the others try to shoot. Your reflexes may not be attuned yet, but you can’t be any worse than them. I ought to be going with you, of course—but Delgado was insistent that he needed educated eyes. Mine didn’t qualify, apparently.”

“Nor would mine,” Vince Solari told him, belatedly beginning the work of cultivating a sense of camaraderie with his new neighbors.

“Good luck,” was all that Godert Kriefmann said, but Tang was more forthcoming.

“I hope you have a productive journey,” the biochemist said. “If you can’t bring back the answers to the big questions, I’m sure you’ll make good progress on some of the smaller ones.”

Matthew took Vince Solari aside so that he could speak to him in confidence: “Is there anything you want to tell me?” he asked.

Solari was still sulking. “No,” he said. “We can always compare notes by phone, if necessary.”

“While we’re still sailing down the river, at least,” Matthew said. “Once we head off into the glassgrass forest, it might become more difficult. If our beltphones don’t have enough power to force a signal through the canopy that’s strong enough for the comsats to unscramble, they might not have much sideways range either. At least one of us will stay with the boat at all times, but keeping in touch with them might become a problem.”

“Have you complained to Milyukov about that?” Solari said. “It seems stupid to send you on an exploratory mission without adequate equipment.”

“Of course I did,” Matthew replied, sourly. “He assured me that better equipment was on standby, ready to drop at a moment’s notice in any emergency. I think he’d rather we didn’t stray too far into terra incognita. He’d rather we didn’t find anything too exotic while he’s still trying to reach a satisfactory agreement with the people at Base One, and doesn’t want to give broadcasting equipment to anyone down here in case they start putting out propaganda for Tang’s party. I’m sorry you didn’t get to arrest your murderer.”

“I will,” Solari assured him. He seemed more confident of that now than he had the previous evening. “And by the time you get back, I’ll have some kind of due process in place to carry the case forward.”

“So you are convinced that it’s one of my fellow expeditionaries.”

“Absolutely—but that should be the least of yourworries. If you get through the canyons and past the cataract, you’ll still have all the unknown perils in front of you. If the plain is a potential death trap, I hope you’ll be quick enough on the uptake not to spring it.”

“Thanks,” Matthew said, drily.

After that, there was only the farewell waving to be done. Blackstone was the only one of the people left behind on the shore who was an enthusiastic waver, but that was probably because no one else cared to compete with the majestic sweeps of his hat.

The biomotor was silent, and it seemed at first that they were simply drifting on a leisurely current. Once they were comfortably set in the middle of the watercourse, though, Matthew became aware of the fact that Voconia’s hull wasn’t rigid, and that it was undergoing slight but distinct undulations in a horizontal plane.

“It’s swimming!” he said to Ikram Mohammed, who had joined him in the bow to watch the water go by.

“Not really,” Ike told him. “It’s just making minimal adjustments to reduce flow-resistance. Swimming would have required more elaborate musculature and more energy-rich food. Even if the fuel-consumption equations had added up better we’d have had to go to some trouble to rig the converters to produce the stuff. The kit we’ve got isn’t fussy, so we’ve been able to put the vegetation we cleared with machetes and chain saws straight into the machine for minimal treatment. It saved us the trouble of amassing huge waste heaps.”

Matthew leaned over the rail and peered at the water, hoping to catch sight of a few native swimmers whose fuel-consumption equations added up better than Voconia’s, but the sunlight reflected from the wave-stirred surface made it impossible to see much below the surface.”

“If we hit quiet water around dusk you might be able to see top-feeders at work,” Ike told him. “Otherwise, they’re very discreet. I tried fishing with a rod and line back at the base, but I must have been using the wrong bait. We’ve deployed a couple of trail nets, but they didn’t pick up much on the test runs. You’ll stand a better chance of spotting interesting wildlife if you scan the vegetation on the bank. You’ll see lizards, mammals. This green color seems garish to us, but it doesn’t seem to alarm the natives unduly, even though the clever ones do have color vision. The local species don’t seem to go in for warning coloration—camouflage is much more popular.”

Matthew discovered soon enough that Ike was right. It was possible to catch glimpses of animal life at the water’s edge, but glimpses were all he caught. There were no hawks circling in the sky, but there were presumably sharp-eyed predators lurking in the abundant undergrowth, ever-ready to creep up on any prey that displayed itself too flagrantly in the open. As time went by he became more expert in picking out the particular purples displayed by the scales of reptile-analogues. Once or twice he thought he recognized the darker shades of purple favored by the fur of mammal-equivalents, but he couldn’t be sure. The hectic background was too confusing to permit much certainty of perception.

After a while he tried to stop sorting out shades of purple and concentrated on trying to locate black dots that might be staring eyes, but that only made it slightly easier to pick out the bigger reptilians. As Ike had predicted, the lizard-analogues seemed quite unworried by the passage of the green boat, although many of them turned their heads in what seemed to be a negligent manner to watch it drift downriver. Matthew couldn’t help wondering whether they were at all curious about its nature or origins, and whether it would be any easier to read the expressions of the mammal-analogues if and when he got a chance to do so.

Matthew clung to his position in Voconia’s bow for more than two Earthly hours, determined to obtain a better sense of the nature of the riverside forests and their inhabitants. The shallows, mudflats and occasional marshlands were full of broad-leaved plants that would not have seemed un-Earthlike had it not been for their color, but the firmer ground was more exotically populated.

The prejudice that the local dendrite species seemed to have against orthodox branching-patterns seemed even more obvious now than it had when he had walked from the shuttle to the bubble-complex. The stems of these plants always grew in clusters rather than singly, usually coiling about one another. When they subdivided they did so into further clusters of intricately entangled helices. The resulting bundles were obviously strong, because the biggest dendrites could attain heights of twenty meters in spite of their lack of stoutness, but the competition between individuals and species seemed to be intense: the resultant crowding prevented all but the most powerful individuals from gaining any considerable dominance. The tallest crowns were the most lavishly equipped in terms of bright fans and other leaf substitutes, and it was also the tallest structures that supported the broadest globular structures, some of them as large as basketballs.

Matthew checked the data that had been downloaded into his notepad to see whether anyone had contrived to determine the nature of the globules, but most of the data related to the easily gatherable specimens that grew on the tips of more modest structures. Several observers had noted that DNA-analyses revealed that some of the globules were parasites with radically different chimerical compositions, although they were not obviously different in appearance from the rest. Many reports had recorded the impression that the globules were reminiscent of eggs in that they had unusually thick and resilient vitreous teguments protecting unusually soft and fluid inner tissues, but no one had yet been able to determine whether they had a reproductive function. Globules subjected to experimental “planting” had not so far contrived to generate new dendrites or anything else. In spite of this lack of success some of the experimenters clung hard to the supposition that they mustbe reproductive structures of some kind, but that no one had yet found the trigger that would cause them to “germinate.” One dutiful statistician—a crewman, not a groundling—who had taken the trouble to collate all the available data about the shape and size of “bulbous protuberant apical structures” had discovered that “ovate ellipsoids” were nearly twice as common as “oblate spheroids,” and that 70 percent of the structures that exhibited “evident quasiequatorial constrictions” also had “bipolar spinoid extensions.”

All in all, Matthew decided, the vast majority of the structures seemed to be no more exotic than a coconut, and considerably less weird than a pineapple. He went back to his patient search for signs of animal-equivalents. He was now quite adept at spotting lizard-analogues, even when their long bodies remained quite motionless, but his eye was continually attracted by subtle movements that turned out not to be animal movements at all. He began to realize for the first time that the plants clustered at the waterside were considerably more active than those he had seen in and around the ruins.

While he had been walking from the shuttle to the bubble-domes of Base Three it had been the odd quality of the background noise that had seemed to be the most alien component of the environment, but the lapping of the water against Voconia’s flanks seemed much more familiar. The movements of the bundled stems and their superficial plant-parasites now seemed the creepiest subliminal impression that his mind was picking up. He wondered whether the subtle not-quite-swimming deformations of the craft in which he was traveling helped him notice similar inclinations among the elements of the forest.

Eventually, Matthew became uneasily conscious of the fact that the relationship between the faint breezes that stirred the riverside canopy and the responses of the “leaves” was by no means a simple matter of pressure-and-deformation. But why, he asked himself, were the twisted stems, their radar-dish plates, and their coquettish fans moving so purposefully? Presumably, it was to catch the light more efficiently as the sun tracked across the sky. Why, then, did the movements seem so capricious and disordered? The competition between the plants was so intense that they had probably been forced to make more strenuous efforts to harvest their share of solar energy than their Earthly analogues—but was that the only reason for their subtle fidgeting? They had been guided by natural selection to make use of certain animal tricks—in much the same way, he could not help thinking, that the Voconiahad been engineered to combine plant– and animal-inspired devices—but how versatile was that legerdemain?

In a way, he thought, the real wonder was that there was such a clear distinction on Earth between vegetable “creepers” and animal “creepy-crawlers.” When Pliny the elder had assembled his classic Natural Historyhe had been unable to resist the imaginative allure of hypothetical creatures that combined the utilitarian attributes of stems and worms—so was it not surprising, in a way, that natural selection had been so firm in its actual discriminations? Was there not a certain common sensein the refusal of Tyre’s ecosphere to maintain such a stark apartheid? Why should Earthly plants be so restricted in their powers of movement, and Earthly animals so determined to place photosynthesis under rigid taboo? Why should Earth’s entire ecosphere be so determined to use a single coding molecule, when it was obvious nowthat there was a much greater range of opportunities lurking in the exotic hinterlands of organic chemistry?

The likely answer, of course, as Ike Mohammed had pointed out with brutal simplicity, was that the relevant fuel-consumption equations had never quite added up. Here, the sums had been done differently. Was the arithmetic more elegant or more efficient? Probably not—although the apparent lack of biodiversity among the vertebrate-analogues and arthropod-analogues ought not to be taken as a reliable indicator. But it was probably no lesselegant, once one grasped the fundamental aesthetics. It would be foolish to assume that either ecosphere could be judged significantly superior, even on the simplest of comparative scales.

The more eyes Matthew noticed—especially when he began to glimpse pairs of forward-looking eyes, some of which presumably belonged to monkey-analogues—the more convinced he became that while he was studying the alien world, it was studying him. It was impossible to guess how much intelligence there was in the observing eyes—although he had no doubt that there was far less than there was behind his own—but it was observation nevertheless. The new world might not be alarmed by the presence of aliens, but it was sensitive to their arrival and continued presence; the invaders were not being ignored.

“You’ll see a little more when the sun’s not so bright,” said a voice from behind him, breaking into his reverie, “but you won’t heara lot more until it’s dark. Rather frustrating, that.”

Matthew turned to look at Dulcie Gherardesca. “It’s the same in most places on Earth,” he reminded her. “Sensible animals only come out to play in the dark. Daylight’s for the primary producers and lumpen herbivores, darkness for the nimbler herbivores and the cleverer hunters. Except for birds. And people.”

“The people of the city were daylight-lovers too,” she said. “They were artists, after a fashion, as well as technologists. Artists and artificers have to work in the light, at least to begin with. The cave paintings our remotest ancestors made were celebrations of their mastery of firelight: the power to banish darkness. The Tyrian city-dwellers didn’t have that. They never domesticated fire, so they had to work in daylight.”

“They probably had less incentive as well as less opportunity to domesticate fire,” Matthew suggested. “Milder weather, fewer big predators to scare away, fewer forest fires. But it is odd, isn’t it? Agriculture without cooking. Culturewithout cooking. A fundamental difference between our ancestors and theirs. If they’d domesticated fire, maybe they’d have made a go of civilization. Do you think so?”

“It’s hard to tell,” she said. “Everything you know about genomics is DNA, so it’s difficult for you to imagine how things might develop when there’s another player on the pitch. Everything I know about cultures and civilizations involves fire-users, so figuring out the social evolution of nonusers is trying to see into the darkness in more ways than one. It’s such a simple thing, but if you remove it from the equation you have to use a whole new arithmetic.”

Her choice of analogies struck a chord, and Matthew couldn’t help feeling an intellectual kinship that he hadn’t felt before, when the situation had been far more awkward.

“That’s right,” he said. “Exactly right. We haven’t yet begun to see the possibilities. But it’s a beautiful place, don’t you think? There’s an aesthetic resonance. And those fugitive eyes—the fact that it’s so difficult to make out the lines of the bodies in which they’re set makes them stand out so much more. Maybe they think our glorious pea-green boat is the loveliest thing they’ve ever seen.”

“Maybe,” she echoed, skeptically—but she smiled. It was the first time Matthew had seen her smile.