Текст книги "Dark Ararat"

Автор книги: Brian Stableford

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THIRTY-TWO

The basket was not a comfortable place to bed down, but it could have been far worse. It was big enough to allow Matthew to stretch himself out, almost as if he were in a hammock, and he felt reasonably safe. Nor was his arm as troublesome as it might have been, considering the miscellaneous stresses to which he had subjected it. Even so, he could not sleep. The discrepancy between Tyre’s twenty-one-and-a-half-hour days and his Earth-trained circadian rhythms had finally caught up with him. He huddled where he was, becoming increasingly miserable, listening to the many sounds of the alien night.

The area in which Ike and Lynn had piled all the expedition’s stores and equipment was quieter than the grassland itself—presumably because the silent stinging slugs were still around, acting as a powerful deterrent to the approach of other creatures—but he was close enough to the high canopy to provide an audience for an entire orchestra of fluters, clickers, and whistlers. The sounds were oddly blurred, partly by echoes from the cliff face behind him but also by strange refractory effects within the canopy itself.

He was reluctant to disturb his companions, lest their exertions should have left them direly in need of sleep, but he was considering calling the base, or even the ship, when his own phone beeped. He snatched it up gratefully.

“Sorry to disturb you, Matthew,” Lynn Gwyer said, in a low voice. “Ike and Dulcie are asleep but my ankle feels wrongin spite of the IT anaesthetic. I figured that your shoulder might be just as bad.”

“I can’t sleep either,” Matthew assured her. “Insufficient exertion, I guess. Is the ankle very bad?”

“Not really, I stepped in a hole while climbing out of the shallows—stupid thing to do, but Dulcie came to help me. It’s one of those awkward situations where your IT’s programmed to force you to rest up, so it lets the pain through if I try to walk. I’ll be okay in a couple of days. Ike and Dulcie will be able to put the boat together, if they get the chance. We really screwed things up, didn’t we? Did everything wrong we possibly could.”

“It wasn’t that bad,” Matthew said. “I suppose, with the aid of hindsight, that the first person down should have lit a fire on the bank to deter visitors. Maybe you should have used the flame-thrower instead of the chain saws—but how could we know? If you can unpack the flamethrower tomorrow, without getting too close to the killer anemones, you should be able to scare them away in a matter of minutes—or roast them, if they’re stubborn.”

“They took us by completely by surprise,” Lynn lamented. “We should have been on our guard. We knew that the experience we brought down from the hills might be worthless here—but who could have expected anything to happen so soon and so fast? How much stuff has been damaged, do you think? Will we be able to carry on, or do we have to hang about waiting to be rescued?”

“There’s not that much damage,” Matthew assured her. “As far as I could see, the big worms were only interested in the spilled boatfood, and most of the things that came after them were only interested in them. The stingers are omnivores, but they’ve got plenty of vegetable matter to gorge themselves on. They won’t hurt the boat itself or the equipment.”

“I’m sure we made it worse by cutting up the worms and exposing their soft centers,” Lynn told him. “Mercifully, there weren’t any sharks in the water when I made my dive. I suppose it was only to be expected that the scent of blood would attract all kinds of nasties, but we weren’t thinking. We overreacted.”

“Nobody else would have done any better,” Matthew consoled her. “Some might have done a lot worse. Can you hear the midnight chorus in the bubble, or is the fabric soundproof?”

“It’s audible, but muffled,” she said. “Will it keep you awake all night, do you think?”

“I hope not. I’ll have to try to sleep—tomorrow could be a demanding day.”

“Me too,” she said. “Better say good night.”

The call had made Matthew feel slightly better, but no sleepier. With the folds of the pliable basket gathered about his horizontal frame he was beginning to feel rather claustrophobic, and the rigid extent of the rifle laid alongside his body made it even more difficult for him to find a position that did not put undue pressure on his damaged arm. He knew that his IT would still be working steadfastly on the strained tendons and ligaments, but he had to suppose that the day’s dramatics had undone most or all of the work they had done beforehand, and perhaps a little more besides.

After two further Earth-hours of failing to settle Matthew felt so cramped that he had to stand upright for a while. The sky was cloudier than it had been on the two previous nights, but a few stars were visible in the shifting gaps. Somewhat to his surprise, he caught sight of a faint glimmer of light in the grass-forest, just about visible in the gap between the tops of the nearer bushes and the lower reaches of he canopy. His surprise faded into reassurance, though, when he realized that it must be the bubble-tent. Made of smarter fabric than the basket, its opacity was adjustable and its three inhabitants must have decided that keeping a light on was likely to deter more nocturnal creatures than it attracted.

The noise was less intense now; the chorus of moans and whistles was lapsing into a calmer mood. Matthew decided to take that as a good sign. He settled down again, confident at last that he might be able to sleep, but had hardly begun to drift off into a light delirium when his phone sounded again. He snatched it up immediately, stifling the reflexive curse that rose to his lips as his censorious IT let a little pain through to remind him that he ought to be more careful.

“It’s Lynn again, Matthew. We just had a visitor. Big, possibly bipedal.”

Any annoyance he might have felt evaporated on the instant. What Lynn meant, obviously, was possibly humanoid—but she didn’t dare tempt fate by saying so.

“How close did it come?” Matthew asked.

“I wouldn’t have known it was there if it hadn’t come close enough actually to touch the tent—but the reflections from the fabric made it impossible to see more than a shadow. It backed off as soon as I sat up.”

“The monkey-analogues are probably inquisitive,” Matthew reminded her. But not as curious as humanoids would be, he added, mentally. However badly we messed up our entrance, we certainly broadcast the news that we were here far and wide. If they can be persuaded to come to us, instead of letting us hunt for days on end for spoor and signs….

He stood up again, and looked out in the direction of the glimmer of light he had noticed before. The area beneath him was in deep shadow; there could have been a dozen fascinated tribes-men standing there looking up at him and he would not have known. He cocked an ear, trying hard to detect signs of movement. The continuing chorus from the forest made it difficult to hear anything else, but he was half-convinced that he didhear something moving: something too big to be stealthy. It could have been a hopeful illusion, but if not it was something—or several somethings—moving among the stacks of equipment.

After a few minutes more he was almost certain that some of the boxes and pieces of the boat were being moved in a relatively careful fashion. If so, he thought, then handsmust surely be at work. He was suddenly aware of the fact that his foot was touching Rand Blackstone’s rifle, but he made no move to pick it up.

“Just don’t steal any essential bits of the boat,” he murmured. “Help yourself to all the food you want, and all the tools, glass or metal—but please don’t take anything vital.” He regretted not having asked Ike to try to throw a flashlight up to him, although he knew that he had been right to judge the risk too great.

He listened dutifully for a few minutes more, waiting for the sounds to die away before reporting back to Lynn. “I can’t be absolutelysure that it’s not my imagination,” he said, in a voice tremulous with anticipation and triumph, “but I’m pretty sure that we’ve just been investigated by an alien intelligence.”

“Shall I wake Ike, or try to take a look myself?” Lynn asked.

“No. Stay where you are, as quiet as quiet can be. If they’ve come to us, the last thing we want is to scare them off. In the morning, we’ll know for sure whether they exist or not, and we can make proper plans. Yesterday wasn’t such a disaster after all—maybe it was the best possible beacon we could have planted. Now, we have to tread carefully.”

“Not the best choice of words,” she told him, ruefully.

“We have to wait for morning,” he said, as much to himself as to her. “If they’ve taken anything, we’ll know. Then the new ball game begins. Everything changes. Bad arms and ankles notwithstanding, we have to get busy—but we have to do it right.”

“Will you call the base—or Hope?”

“Not yet,” he said. “We have to know, to be in a position to confound all skeptics, however unreasonable. This has to be handled right. Can you stay awake?”

“I doubt that I have the choice,” she retorted, drily. “Can you?”

“Same thing. Trying to see in the dark, hear significant sounds against the white-noise background. Probably pointless, but … call again if they come back to you.”

They left it at that, but when Matthew returned his phone to his belt he found that he was trembling with excitement. If it is them, he thought, they know more about us than we know about them. They could see into the lighted tent. They sorted through our stuff. They may be nervous, but they’re bound to keep us under observation. We’re the most interesting thing that’s happened to them since they decided to give up on civilization, and they must know it. Even if they don’t want to make contact now, they’ll want to know exactly where we are and where we’re going. They won’t go far, and they’ll be back. All we have to do is wait, and make our plans with due care. Everything else is subsidiary now; this is the spearhead of Hope’s mission, the determining fact of all our futures. And I’m on the spot, running the show. Destiny needed a prophet, and it picked me. Whatever it needed to get me here, it had to have me. This is it. This is what it was all for: every moment of every one of those forty-eight years. Dulcie was just an innocent part of the apparatus of fate, like Shen Chin Che and the cometary blizzard and the Crash, and fifteen billion years of the prehistory of the universe. It was all leading down to this: to Matthew Fleury’s advent in the New World, and his first meeting with the Other Human Race. This is my moment, my winning play, my reason for being. This is the beginning of the New Era. It was easy to forget, in the circumstances, that he was stuck halfway down a cliff with a worse-than-useless rifle and a nonfunctional control box.

He spent the rest of the night forgetting it, in the cause of making grander plans—and now the twenty-one-and-a-half-hour Tyrian cycle of day and night didn’t seem too short at all, but far too long. Eventually, he lay down again and tried to sleep, knowing that he was going to need every atom of intelligence he had to see him through the crises of the next few days, but he couldn’t do it. His IT wasn’t up to the job; there was too much adrenaline in his system and no matter how hard the nanobots worked they couldn’t stop his adrenal cortex producing more and more.

It was a verylong night—subjectively, the longest in his life. But it came to an end eventually, as all his nights were bound to do. When dawn broke, he was more than ready to greet it. He waited until the light was a little better before he actually struggled to his feet again, but the precaution was unnecessary. The sight that met his eyes would not have disappointed his appetite for startlement no matter how dimly it had been lit.

The first casual sweep of his gaze over the area of devastation told him that the tentacled slugs still had secure tenure over their empire, and they had grown prodigiously during their occupation. He knew, at the back of his mind, that there was a second possibility—that the moderately sizable specimens that had held the terrain when dusk fell had been driven out during the night by more powerful competitors—but he never gave it a moment’s serious thought. He had confidence in his guesses now, and he was certain in his own mind that the creatures had grown fat, processing food into flesh with un-Earthly rapidity.

On another occasion he might have been more surprised by the changes that had overtaken the battlefield on which the serial killer anemones’ victory had been won, but in his present mood he saw it as an inevitable confirmation of his most recent speculations.

If giant slugs had been making their way back and forth across the scattered debris of a thousand shredded bushes, they too would have left the terrain embalmed in slime, but it could not have been so vitreous, nor so dramatically uneven. It would not have been studded with the upper hemispheres of glass basketballs, or the bubble domes of half-embedded footballs … or the pyramidal extrusions of “bipolar spinoid extensions.” Had there not been more urgent matters of concern, Matthew would have paused to wonder, but as things were he merely clocked up one more lucky guess to his rapidly escalating score.

He phoned Lynn, thinking that it was he who had news to impart, but he didn’t get a chance to speak.

“Matthew,” she said. “Thank heaven you’re all right. Can you see Ike or Dulcie?”

“No,” said Matthew, darting his eyes rapidly from side to side. “Should I be able to?”

“Dulcie’s gone, Matthew. If her phone’s still working, she’s not answering. Ike went off to look for her as soon as he gave up thinking that she must have stepped out to relieve herself.”

Ike joined in the conversation almost immediately. “No sign,” he said. “She must have been crazy. The worms are still around—mostly above head height, admittedly, curled around the stalks beneath the seed heads, but too close for comfort if you’re wandering in the gloom. It was just after first light when she went, but it’s way too dim in here to be wandering around without a flashlight.”

“Oh shit,” Matthew murmured. “I was so sureI’d talked her out of it.”

“Out of what?” Lynn wanted to know. She and Ike had had too much on their minds to notice Dulcie’s awkward pose on the lip of the cliff, or to interpret it correctly if they had.

“She nearly jumped off the cliff yesterday.”

“ What?Why?”

“Guilt.” He didn’t bother to specify what it was that Dulcie felt guilty about. He knew they’d work it out quickly enough.

“No!” The complaint came from Lynn. “You think she’s gone off to have another go?”

“Maybe just to think about it. But she knowshow much we need her. Hell, she even made that crazy leap into the pool so that she could go after you. You didtell her about the night visitor when she woke up.”

“Of course I did,” Lynn said. “I didn’t tell her it was a humanoid, because I didn’t know, but …”

“She shouldn’t have gone outside on her own, even to take a leak,” Ike put in. “Maybe whatever it was that touched the tent last night didn’t go away. Maybe it was biding its time … but there’s no sign that I can see. No footprints, of any kind. No sign of any struggle that I can see.”

“Maybe she wanted to make an early start on scaling the cliff, for your sake,” Lynn suggested, although it was obvious that she didn’t believe it. “Did Solari tell you that she killed Bernal?”

“No. I got sidetracked thinking he suspected you. I should have known better. I didn’t guess until I saw her with the artifacts. It still took time to figure out how she’d cultivated enough suppressed rage to explode when she found him with them—but it was all a mistake from beginning to end. She figured out afterward why Bernal was making the spearheads, knives, and arrowheads, and so did I. It wasn’t forgery, or just an experiment. It was flattery.”

“What?”

“As in imitation, the sincerest form of. Bernal always believed that the humanoids were here, in spite of the failure of the flying eyes to catch a glimpse of them. He wanted to make contact, but he didn’t have enough information about them to make a decent plan and he didn’t want to presume too much. He wanted to use the one thing we didknow: the artifacts. He intended to leave them lying around, as communicative bait. He wanted to demonstrate to the aliens that we could make them too, that we have at least that much in common. He would have let you in on it, but he wanted to be sure that he could make a good job of it first—and maybe he wanted to keep the people on Hopeand at Base One in the dark as to where exactly he stood on the great debate, in anticipation of being the one to break the big news. Spin works somuch better if it’s unanticipated.”

“None of that matters now,” Ike said, a little sharply. “What matters is finding Dulcie. Her phone was working last night, so it should be working now. The fuel cell can’t have run out so quickly. Is it possible that the humanoids have got her, do you think?”

Matthew knew that Ike had posed the question that way because it was uncomfortably close to the substance of cheap melodrama—but he understood that they been tipped into a melodrama as soon as they made their descent from the uplands. If they took Bernal’s artifacts from our luggage, he thought, his plan’s already past phase one. The humanoids must have grabbed her. She must have thought about it too. She can’t have been thinking of killing herself until the impulse actually came upon her. She’s an anthropologist, and she’s had all the time in the world to figure out how to handle this, if that’s really what’s happened. But we have to be sure. Before we shout Eureka!we have to be sure.”

“You have to get rid of the killer anemones, Ike,” Matthew said, deciding that the time had come to take command. “Use the flamethrowers. Then you have to check the equipment and the supplies, to make sure exactly what’s missing. Then you have to get me down.”

“Haven’t you got that in the wrong order?” Ike objected. “It’ll take at least two of us to clear those monsters way.” He had obviously seen the current occupants of the disputed area.

“We have to find Dulcie first,” Lynn said.

“No,” Matthew put in, knowing that he had to make good his bid for authority if he were to make it stick. “Ike’s right. It’ll take two of you to take the territory back—but you have to be careful. If Dulcie can make her own way back, that’s great. If not … we have to make ourselves safe first. There’s no time to waste. You have to get moving now.”

This time, they accepted the necessity. Ike appeared on the edge of the ill-cleared area within minutes, clad in ochreous armor. Matthew watched while he spent a few minutes making sure of the lie of the land, testing the speed at which the giant slugs could move.

“Just kill the bloody things, will you,” Matthew shouted down to him. It wasn’t the sort of thing an ecologist ought to say, but the urgency of the situation overrode other considerations.

Ike had already taken an opportunity to begin delving in one of the ragged heaps of cargo, freeing the flamethrower. He carefully fitted the canister of propellant to his back and placed protective goggles over his eyes, while the tentacled slugs went contentedly about their business. When he eventually let fly, in a series of short but lethal bursts, he managed to roast more than twenty of the monsters without placing the boat or its cargo in the least danger. He had to pick off half-a-dozen more one by one, using more subtle but equally lethal instruments, but he completed the task as quickly as was humanly possible.

Only then did Lynn limp out of the purple backcloth. She had put on her own armor, but she was moving as freely as anyone could have expected, given her injury.

The stink was appalling. Matthew’s nasal filters had carefully screened him from those complex organic odorants to which he might have been allergic, but the cruder fumes of burnt flesh posed no threat of that kind, and he was permitted to experience the full measure of their unpleasantness.

Lynn set to work immediately. “It’s okay,” she said to Ike. “I’m fine as long as I don’t have to walk far. I’ll take care of the inventory while you find a way of getting up to the cliff top and freeing the cable. When that’s done, we can all pitch in. It’s about time Matthew started doing his share.”

“What if more of them come?” Ike asked.

“Matthew can drop the rifle down to me so that I can blast them at short range.”

“We didn’t come here to conduct a holocaust,” Ike said, sorrowfully. “This is getting way out of hand.”

“We’ll go back to being Mr. Nice Guys when we’ve got back to being Mr. Safe Guys,” she countered, grimly. “We’ll put a cosmetic gloss on the story when we relay it back to Tang if you like, but until further notice I’m the original devil-may-care shoot-anything-that-looks-at-me-sideways colonist, okay?”

“If you say so,” Ike conceded, a little stiffly. He raised his voice to say: “I’m on my way, Matthew. Just sit tight for one more hour.”

“Whatever you do,” Matthew shouted down “for heaven’s sake don’t fall.”

Ike’s only response to that was a gesture of contempt.

Having watched Ike do his painful work. Matthew now had to watch Lynn doing hers—but she didn’t have to call for the gun. The odor of cooked flesh was entirely alien to Tyre, and it seemed to function as powerfully as a deterrent as their spillage of the day before had functioned as bait.

It wasn’t obvious that the work of reassembling the boat could be completed that day, but Lynn seemed determined to do it on her own if need be. She was moving with the same quasi-mechanical stiffness and efficiency that Dulcie had demonstrated the day before. She paused occasionally to take a drink of water or a few mouthfuls of food, but she was so solidly locked into her trance of determination that Matthew made no attempt to converse with her.

He tried to call Dulcie, but she still wasn’t answering her phone. He hesitated over calling Tang Dinh Quan, but decided that it could wait until he had more definite news.

Instead, he continued thinking about possible correlations between nutritional versatility and exotic reproduction, and the reasons why intelligent bipeds might be favored by evolution on a world like Tyre, and the reasons why civilization might fail on such a world in spite of the fact that its walls had never been exposed to cannon fire or fire of any other sort. He thought too about the probable ecological impact that a species like humankind might have on a world like this one, given the scenes to which he had recently been witness.

This isn’t bad, he told himself. Not yet. If we’re lucky, it could be good. And we are lucky. We’re riding a streak, and we can ride it all the way. I can do this. Cometh the hour, cometh the man. Shen was right. Leader or not, I can light the way, with just a little help from my friends.