Текст книги "Dark Ararat"

Автор книги: Brian Stableford

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“What’s unlikely,” Matthew said, “is that the colonists have been here for three yearswithout seeing a single identifiable egg of a single identifiable seed, if there are any to be seen.”

“Not as unlikely, I submit,” Lityansky retorted, “as the proposition that organisms of any great complexity could undergo the kinds of fission and fusion that you are proposing.”

“You’re forgetting the insects, Dr. Lityansky.”

Lityansky walked right into the trap. “There are no insects on Ararat,” he said.

“An interesting observation in itself,” Matthew observed. “It must be significant, must it not, that the bioforms that cannot be observed in our problematic Ararat’s life system are those with the greatest reliance on rigid structures like chitinous plates and shells. The reptile– and mammal-analogues here all have relatively flexible bones, tough enough in association with their attendant sinews and tendons to provide leverage but far more active and alive than ourbones. But the insects whose example you seem to be forgetting are the Earthly insects that provide us with our most spectacular examples of serial chimerization: the insects that pupate and metamorphose, so that mere maggots become gloriously gaudy flies.”

“One at a time,” Lityansky pointed out.

“Just so,” Matthew agreed. “One at a time, and in pupae that remain stubbornly opaque. But imagine, if you can, a pupation process that could accommodate whole groups of chimerical maggots, which could continue to draw energy from their environment while they went about their leisurely business, because they had chloroplasts as well as mouths. Imagine, if you can, that these maggots need not exercise their biochemical ingenuity in transforming themselves into gloriously gaudy flies, but may instead be more modest in their aspirations, at least routinely—but at the same time, more ingenious in their intercourse. And imagine, if you can, that the maggots might be mammals, monkeys or men. What dreams might they have, I wonder, while they slept?”

“Incredible,” Lityansky said, presumably having no idea how feeble the judgment was bound to sound to his audience.

“I’ve crossed the void in a pupa of sorts,” Matthew reminded that audience. “I’ve lived in that cold chrysalis for seven hundred years, and have outlived my species, save only for the people who accompanied me, as fellow travelers within their own pupae or faithful watchmen set to see that no harm came to us. Is Hopenot a kind of chrysalis too, bearing humans tightly wrapped in steel and further encased in yet more ice? We’ve been unable to fuse with one another, or even to bond, but mightn’t that be reckoned our misfortune, our tragedy? We’re separate from one another; that’s our nature. The only alliances we can form, even in the height of passion, are brief and peripheral encounters—but we’re capable—are we not?—of forging a society in spite of that. We’re capable—are we not?—of working together to the mutual benefit of our species. Imagine, if you can, the society of the people of our purple Ararat. Imagine their memories, their quests, their hopes, their ambitions, their strangeness, remembering as you do that even if everything I’ve said is the purest fantasy, they arepeople, possessed of memories, quests, hopes, ambitions, anxieties, terrors … and, most of all, of differences. At which point, if you don’t mind, I’ll sign off. I’m sure you’d like the chance to offer the audience your side of the argument.”

Without giving Lityansky the opportunity to answer, he signaled to Ikram Mohammed to cut the transmission.

“You really are an egomaniac, you know” Ikram Mohammed said, as soon as he had disemburdened his shoulder of the camera. “Imagine, if you can… you are going to look sostupid if Lityansky turns out to be right.”

“He won’t,” Matthew said. “I might be wrong, but at least I appreciate the magnitude of what needs to be explained and the adventurousness that will be necessary to explain it. Lityansky doesn’t. There might be an explanation that’s just as crazy—or even crazier—than the one I’m trying to put together, but there isn’t one that’s any saner. If Lityansky had ever been down here, he’d know that—but he hasn’t. He’s sat in his lab wearing blinkers, looking at biochemical analyses, without even a decent TV show to broaden his horizons. There may be very good biomechanical reasons why the intelligent inhabitants of this world look like people, but inside, they’re verydifferent and verystrange. We should be glad of that. It’s what we came here for.”

“We came to find a new homeworld. An Earth-clone.”

“That was always the wrong way to think,” Matthew said, with a sigh. “What we should have set our sights on, right from the beginning, was an Earth-with-a-difference. That was what we were always likely to find, and always likely to find more interesting.”

“If you say so,” Ike said. “But you do realize, I suppose, that you’ve used up nearly all your ammunition—and Lityansky now has the floor for at least five times as long as you.”

“They’ll be queuing up everywhere to take him on,” Matthew said. “Every biologist with a pet theory will want to air it, and Milyukov won’t be able to hold them back. Even if no one supports me—and it’s a good enough story to let me hope—the cat’s among the pigeons. The interchange of ideas is well and truly unblocked, and things can only get weirder. All we have to do to get center stage back again is to find the aliens—and that’ll be easy, because we only have to keep walking long enough to make sure they decide that they have to let us find them.”

“I hope you’re right,” Ike said.

Matthew didn’t dare say so do Ibecause he didn’t want his companion to know that he was anything less than 100 percent confident. If he’d had a choice, he’d have kept it secret even from himself.

THIRTY-SIX

The night passed without incident—which was perhaps as well, given that Matthew slept very deeply. He could have used chemical support to stay awake, at least to share sentry duty with Ikram Mohammed, but he didn’t want to do that because he knew that two consecutive nights without sleep would take a heavy toll of his articulacy and powers of concentration. Fortunately, Ike agreed to take on the chemical burden, on the grounds that he had slept for several hours the night before.

It was not until he woke up again that Matthew realized that he must have been in a slightly abnormal state of consciousness throughout the preceding day. Now that his IT had made good progress with the repair of his damaged shoulder and no longer needed to anesthetize him he was fully restored to his normal self. At first, he felt annoyed with himself for having been carried away with such wild abandon, but having reconsidered the events of the previous two days carefully and critically he decided that his manic state had produced as many good effects as bad ones. It would, at any rate, be far better to go with the flow than to change direction.

It had rained during the night, but the sky hidden by the canopy was obviously still overcast. The morning was decidedly gloomy, but not so bad as to require them to use flashlights to find their way.

As soon as he began to make hasty plans for his next broadcast Matthew realized that Ike had been right. He hadused up almost all of his best material on day one. The terrain they had covered was insufficiently various to warrant much further camera study, and he was perilously close to running out of speculative fuel for his wayward flight of fancy.

He was glad to find that some relief was at hand when he began his reintroductory session, in the form of further debate—but Milyukov had belatedly realized that Andrei Lityansky might not be the best man for this particular job, and Matthew found himself faced with sterner opposition. The subsequent discussion of the tactics of sporulation, the mechanics of gradual chimerical renewal, and the limitations of reproduction by fragmentation was far too evenly balanced to be gripping, even to an audience of experts.

To make matters worse, the captain had an even better spoiler still in reserve: Vince Solari. When Matthew went on the air for the second time, he discovered that all three surface bases had now acquired their own TV equipment, and that Solari had been interviewed and cross-questioned as to the progress of his investigation.

Scrupulous honesty had, inevitably, prevailed over evasive caution. Solari had not taken the trouble to avoid the word fakewhen reporting his conclusion that Bernal Delgado had been manufacturing spearheads and arrowheads from local plant products. He had obviously been talking to Lynn Gwyer, and the fact that it was technically hearsay had not prevented him from informing the world that Dulcie Gherardesca—who was, according to the logs and cross-correlated witness statements, the only person who had had the opportunity to commit the murder—had confessed to the crime while contemplating suicide the day before her capture.

Although Matthew had not been party to the subsequent discussion he soon gathered that a crime-of-passion defense was unlikely to find a sympathetic jury among the crew or the colonists.

Matthew knew that he had to counter these setbacks, even though he was no longer riding the same wave of assertive self-confidence that had carried him through the previous day.

Taking the easiest point first, he gave a suitably impassioned account of Bernal Delgado the man and the scientist. He explained, with measured but righteous anger, that Bernal Delgado had not been a forger or a faker, and that he could not possibly have intended his “alien artifacts” to fool anyone.

Bernal’s first motive, he insisted, must have been to work himself into a better position to understand how the aliens had lived: specifically, how they had developed a technology without the assistance of fire. Given the degraded state of the objects the people at Base Three had managed to recover from within the walls, he argued, it had been far from clear that they really were artifacts, or what their purposes might have been. It had not been clear, until Bernal had proved it, that the multitudinous vitreous substances produced by the plantlike organisms of the hill country were capable of being worked, shaped, and honed. Such a demonstration had been necessary.

Having made the artifacts, Matthew argued, Bernal had realized that they might be very useful in the context of the expedition downriver. When the humanoids had abandoned the city, or when the city-dwellers had died out, there must have been a substantial loss of technology because the resources of the region were different, and perhaps far richer, than those of the plain. What better way to attempt contact, therefore, than by offering the aliens of the plains recognizable artifacts that might now be rare and precious? What better way could there be of creating a bond between such very different species than demonstrating that the newcomers could work with native materials in exactly the same way that the indigenes had once worked with them?

By the same token, Matthew went on to argue, Bernal Delgado had not been a forger or a faker in the realm of emotions and human relationships. He carefully reproduced the account he had improvised for Dulcie, and did his best to turn it into a tragedy of classical proportions. He made much of Dulcie’s former insistence on wearing the scars that she had acquired in the plague wars, claiming that they constituted a heroic badge of courage, and of the sacrifice that the decision must have entailed. He insisted, too, that Bernal Delgado was the kind of man who would have understood, appreciated, and respected such a gesture. He did his utmost to turn Bernal and Dulcie into a middle-aged Romeo and Juliet, rudely torn apart by their sojourn in SusAn and by the failure of memory that had robbed Bernal of the great love of his life and driven Dulcie temporarily mad. He imagined the confrontation scene, when she had found him patiently at work on the alien artifacts, and had finally snapped under a strain that had been wound up so tightly as to have become unsustainable and unbearable.

When he had finished, he asked Ikram Mohammed how it had played. Ike, as usual, misunderstood what he had been doing.

“You don’t know that anyof that is true,” the genomicist complained. “You made it all up, from beginning to end.”

“I had to,” Matthew pointed out. “Facts don’t speak for themselves, and the story Vince was hinting at was wrong from every possible viewpoint, except perhaps that of a policeman building a case.”

“Reality is what you can get away with? Do you really believe that, Matthew? What kind of a scientist does that make you?”

“Of course I don’t believe that reality is what you can get away with. Reality is what it is, and science is the best description of it we can possibly obtain. But you can’t test the hypotheses unless you come up with them, and even scientists need motivation. Everything has to start with fantasy, Ike. Knowledge is what you finish up with, if you’re lucky, after you’ve done the hard work—but the hard work needs passion to drive it. People need reasons to be interested, reasons to be committed, reasons to do their damnedest to find the truth. This mission has been floundering for three years, almost to the point of turning into a farce, because all the passion has gone into defining factions and formulating competing plans. That would never have happened if Shen Chin Che hadn’t been kept out of the picture, but it shouldn’t have happened in any case. It shouldn’t have been allowedto happen.

“I spent the greater part of my adult life trying to stop it happening on Earth, but I was fighting ten thousand years of history and ten million of prehistory. Here, we had a chance to start afresh. We still have that chance. What I’m doing is to remind people that what happens here is important—just as important, in its way, as everything that’s happened on Earth since we left. I’m trying to make it into a story because that’s what it is: a story of confrontation with the alien, of the attempt to understand the alien, to create a mutually profitable relationship between Earth and Tyre, Earthly life and Tyrian life, human and humanoid. I’m trying to make it the best story I can, with heroes for characters instead of fools, because that’s the kind of story it is.”

Matthew was glad to note, as he finished this tirade, that he was recovering something of the mental state that had carried him through his earlier orations.

“You’re going to broadcast that, aren’t you?” Ike said, shaking his head in mock-disbelief. “Even now, you’re still in rehearsal, still making up the script as you go.”

“You could join in,” Matthew pointed out.

“Imaginative fiction isn’t my forte.”

“No, but you’ve always been a first-rate experimental genomicist. They also serve who only ask the questions. Milyukov’s crewmen are still trying to knock me down, even though they ought to know better. What I need is a straight man who’ll help to build me up. You want to try it?”

After a pause, Ike said: “Lynn would have been better.”

“I’ll take that as a yes,” Matthew told him. “Do you want to rehearse? Ask me a question.”

Ike shook his head yet again, but he was grinning now. “Why did the city fail?” he said. “Why did social progress do a U-turn here?”

Matthew was ready for that one. “For exactly the same reason that it very nearly failed on Earth,” he said. “For the same reason, in fact, that you and I became so firmly convinced that Earth was doomed that we accepted the riskiest bet available and signed up for Hope.”

“What reason is that?” Ike said, falling into the role of straight man as if born to it.

“We think of the birth of agriculture and animal husbandry as a great leap forward,” Matthew went on, “because it represented the beginning of everything we now hold dear: the crucial step that made rapid technological progress possible. But for the people who did it, it was a desperation move. Their ancestors had been hunter-gatherers for the best part of a million years, manipulating their environment in all kinds of subtle ways: irrigation, the encouragement of useful plants; the elimination of competitors and predators. But they were too successful. Their numbers increased to the point at which they became their own worst enemy, literally as well as metaphorically.”

“You don’t know that, either,” Ike pointed out.

“Not for certain—but it makes sense. Agriculture and animal husbandry were desperation moves, because fields and herds were the only way they could increase their resources fast enough, and keep them safe enough from competitors, to sustain their exploding population. And that, in essence, was the story of the next ten thousand years. They had to keep on increasing the efficiency of the system, in terms of their means of production and their means of protection. Their technics had to keep getting better and better and better, and the faster their population growth accelerated the faster their technological growth accelerated, until the whole thing went Crash. Hopegot out before the Crash hit bottom, because no one aboard her had any faith in humankind’s ability to pick itself up again, dust itself off, and work out a new modus vivendi. We were too pessimistic, it seems, but it was a damn close-run thing.

“As I see it, something similar must have happened here, with a couple of vital differences. The humanoids migrated from the plains to the hill country because that’s where the technological resources were: the glass and the stone. That’s where they could make their desperate stand against the competitors that had evolved alongside them. The vital difference was that ourcompetitors—our onlysignificant competitors—were our own kind. That wasn’t the case here. Here, the most successful creatures aren’t the handiest, or the keenest-eyed, or the biggest-brained. Here, the most successful creatures are the ones that make the cleverest use of the processes and opportunities of chimerization.”

“The worms and slugs,” Ike deduced.

“Especially the killer anemones,” Matthew agreed. “The killer anemones that became serialkiller anemones, adapting themselves to whatever circumstances chance threw up, taking aboard new features or discarding them every time they had a chance to swap physical attributes with other bioforms in their periodic orgies of chimerical reorganization. There’s an analogy of sorts in something not so verydifferent that happened to our ancestors. Agriculture and civilization were a mixed blessing for their inventors, but not for the other species that took full advantage of the opportunities thus provided. Which species were the favorites to outlast us if the Crash hadproved fatal? Rats and cockroaches. So which species got the greatest benefits out of civilization? Us? Or rats and cockroaches?

“Here, I suspect, neither the rats nor the cockroaches ever stood a chance, because the worms and slugs were always there first: more aggressive, more effective, more adaptable. We saw what they could do when we came down that cliff. We saw how they responded to an unexpected, and perhaps unprecedented, feeding opportunity. How do you suppose they reacted to the humanoids’ establishment of fields: fields full of lovely, concentrated food?”

“It’s anyone’s guess,” Ike pointed out, dutifully—but he was nodding to show that he understood the force of the argument.

“We know how the city-builders reacted: they built walls. Those walls may well have had more to protect than food alone, but even if the crew scientists are right to wield Occam’s razor with such vigor when they talk about sporulation and progressive chimerical renewal, and even if the pyramids aren’t reproductive structures at all, the city-builders stillbuilt walls, and more walls, and even more walls … until they realized that they couldn’t win. Not, at any rate, with the technology they had. If they’d had fire and iron, who knows? They didn’t.

“At the end of the day, their cities—there mustbe more, still buried under purple carpets—were a gift to their competitors they couldn’t afford to go on giving. So they stopped. They probably had a Crash of their own, but when they got up and dusted themselves off they went back to the old ways. It could easily have happened to us. Perhaps it did, more than once. Perhaps it happened a hundred times before we finally became handy enough, and keen-sighted enough, and brainy enough, to run all the way to the stars. But we didn’t have the killer anemones and their kin to fight. All our chimeras were imaginary, creatures of fantasy. Not here.”

Ike was getting into the swim now. For the first time, he took up the argument himself. “Here, chimeras exist,” he said, “and they take all the extra opportunities that chimerization provides. At least, the worms and slugs do, because they’re the ones best fitted to do it.”

“And what makes them best fitted to do it,” Matthew said, “is that they’re so utterly and completely stupid. Swapping biomechanical bits back and forth between organisms is fine and dandy, just so long as the organisms are no smarter than Voconia, running their legs and tentacles on separable autonomic systems.”

“But the humanoids couldn’t do that,” Ike said.

“Right. In order to stay smart—and we have to assume that once they became self-consciously smart the humanoids wanted to stay that way—they had to cut right back on the joys of chimerization. That economy—the increasing strategic avoidance of all the kinds of chimerical renewal that might ruin their big and tightly organized brains—wasn’t particularly costly in reproductive terms, at first, because they’re naturally emortal. When it became costlier, though, as it must have done when they invented agriculture and opened up a whole new wonderland of opportunity to their rivals, they had to backtrack. That’s why social and technological progress did a U-turn here. And there, but for the grace of fire and iron … will that hold the stage for a little while longer, do you think?”

“You haven’t the slightest idea whether it’s true,” Ike pointed out, dutiful as ever. “But yes, as a story, I guess it will run, if only for a little while. Eventually, though, you’re going to have to face up to the fact that it’s all just talk.”

Matthew knew that Ike was right, but when he looked around, all he could see was sheer purple stalks, too slick for anything but a clever worm to climb, and serrated blades that would cut any climber but the most discreet to ribbons. The purple canopy was intriguingly complex, but it was far too dense for its details to be distinguished and defined. Enough light filtered through it to create delicate effects of shade and sparkle, but from the viewpoint of the camera’s eye it was mere wallpaper.

The ground on which they walked was by no means unpopulated by motile entities, but the light-starved population seemed to consist mainly of colorless saprophytes; its detail was not without scientific interest, but nor was it telegenic. There were undoubtedly animals around that were far more complex than worms, including reptile-analogues and mammal-analogues—ground-dwellers as well as canopy-climbers—but they were shy. It was well-nigh impossible to capture more of them on camera than their fleeing rear ends.

It would not have made very much difference, though, if the forest had been lavishly equipped with gorgeous flowers and monstrous insects. Everyone on Hopehad already seen discreetly obtained flying-eye footage of thousands of different kinds of alien plants and hundreds of different kinds of alien animals. What they had not seen, and what Matthew had recklessly promised them, was a humanoid. That was what he had to deliver, in order to create the kind of consensus among the human emigrants that seemed so obviously lacking, and so obviously needed. In the meantime, he had to keep feeding them a story that was interesting enough to hold their interest.

So he and Ike did their double act.

Matthew put out every last thought that he had in reserve, but the day wore on and dusk arrived again, and the perpetual purple twilight faded to black for a second time.

They had covered more than forty kilometers since setting off from Voconia, and had not found so much as a mud hut or a broken arrow. Matthew felt mentally and physically exhausted, even though he had been able to rest his injured arm sufficiently to allow his IT to complete its healing work.

“We’ve done the hard work,” Matthew told his companion. “Now we need the luck. We’ve kept them on tenterhooks long enough. It’s time for the denouement. Why aren’t they here? They were plenty curious enough when we first arrived—why have they suddenly turned shy? They didn’t even take the bait we left outside the bubble when I went to sleep last night. Why not?”

“Maybe they’ve got something else on their minds,” Ike suggested.

Matthew didn’t have to ask what that something else might be. They had Dulcie. Although they hadn’t left her body where her phone had fallen, they mighthave killed her and taken the body with them—but the likelihood was that she had been carried away alive. While they had her, still alive, they had a far more convenient focus for their curiosity than Matthew and Ike—and she wouldn’t die any time soon of hunger, even if she only had alien food to eat. A carbohydrate was a carbohydrate, and sugar was always sweet.

It all came down to Dulcie: Dulcie the anthropologist-turned-murderer-turned-ambassador; Dulcie the tarnished heroine.

“Do you think she’s all right?” Ike asked, having divined the reason for Matthew’s sudden descent into sobriety.

“Of course she is,” Matthew said, valiantly. “She’s in her element. This is what she was defrosted for, what she’s lived her whole life for. She’s fine. She’ll come through. She has to. We just have to spin out the story while we’re waiting. We have to do a session on feeding frenzies, speculate about the kinds of triggers that might set off orgies of chimerization and humanoid pyramid building. I got halfway through working out an analogy involving the boat, switching between engines as it turned around to go upstream—we can use that. There’s also a useful analogy to be drawn between the photosynthesizing pyramids and our bubble-domes. Maybe we can draw a useful analogy between the humanoids and the crewpeople, if we try hard enough….”

“Okay,” Ike said. “I get the picture. We go on and on until it’s done, no mater how silly it gets.”

“It’s not silly,” Matthew insisted, earnestly. “Even if only a tenth of it is true, that tenth is marvelous. We have to help the crew and colonists alike to understand that this business is far bigger than any biotech bonanza or potential death trap. It’s a whole new way of life. Maybe it isn’t better than sex, but it’s weirder. Remember what Dulcie said: sex divides, cooking unites.

“We have to stay here, Ike. We have to stay because it isn’t enough to let the aliens go their own way, culturally unpolluted. We have to help them out of their evolutionary blind alley. We have to extend them hospitality, share food, share technologies, share everything. We’re all on the same side, Ike, and we all have to realize that. Everybody on Hope—and I mean everybody, including Konstantin Milyukov—has to realize that destiny has put them here because here’s where it’s at, so they can be part of it too.

“Even though we’re making it all up, it’s not silly. It’s the most important work there is. However rough the draft might be, we’re writing chapter one of the story of the future of humankind, and all the stranger humankinds we’ve yet to meet.”