Текст книги "Dark Ararat"

Автор книги: Brian Stableford

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“The overgrowing vegetation obscured what’s left of the dwellings and broke up the lines of the fortifications. We had trouble surveying Continent B because it’s very difficult to get signals back from ground level. Flying eyes are too small to carry powerful transmitters, and the crowns of the giant grasses and trees block them out. Standard beltphones aren’t much better, so anyone calling from Base Three or its surrounds has to be sure to stand in the open.”

“Can we get a picture of Base Three?” Solari interrupted.

Leitz played with the keyboard for a few moments, and the viewpoint shifted to a more intimate and slow-moving aerial view of hilly terrain.

To Matthew, who had seen the Andes and the Himalayas at close range, this seemed a fairly poor example of a mountain range, not so much because of its lack of elevation as the relatively gentle contours of its individual elements. There was a big river meandering through the lowlands, which the viewpoint followed from the edge of the grassy plain towards its distant source.

A couple of minutes went by before they saw the bubble-domes comprising the Base. It wasn’t too hard to understand why the nearby ruins hadn’t been easy to pick out from directly above, given that the treelike forms had taken it over so completely. Now that there were extensive patches of cleared ground and paths running between them it was easy to see the stark outlines of artificial structures, but it was impossible to tell how extensive the ruins were.

“You can just about see the outlines of the fortifications in the undulations of the overgrowth,” Leitz said, pointing.

At first, because they followed the contours of the hillsides and because there were so many of them, Matthew thought that the “fortifications” to which Leitz was referring must really be terraces from which some or all of the enclosed soil had been leached by centuries of rainfall. But when he was able to compare cleared sections of the walls with the buildings at the core of the vast complex, the proportions suggested that they really mighthave been fortifications. Against what adversaries, he wondered, could a maze like that have been erected? What kind of enemy could have made such lunatic industry conceivable, let alone necessary?

Close-ups showed various sections of wall in much greater detail, including two into which pictures had been carved. The pictures were primitive and cartoonish, but Matthew drew in his breath sharply as he realized that the bipedal stick figures could have passed for a child’s representation of human beings. Apart from the humanoid figures the sketches also showed arrays of bulbous entities, vaguely reminiscent of obese corncobs, and much bigger structures, triangular in silhouette, that might have been conical or pyramidal.

“They’re people!” Solari exclaimed.

“They appear to have been humanoid,” Leitz admitted.

“So what killed them off?” the policeman wanted to know.

“That’s one of the things the people at Base Three are trying to find out,” Leitz said. “It isn’t easy, because their specialisms are only peripherally related to the job. The Chosen People didn’t include any archaeologists—the nearest thing we could find when we thawed out personnel to make up the second half of the team was an anthropologist.”

“Why are you so sure they’re extinct?” Matthew asked. “If your flying eyes can’t get information back from ground level, the whole continent must qualify as terra incognita. The fact that the city-dwellers abandoned the site doesn’t mean that their cousins aren’t still around.”

“We’ve done what we can to find them,” the young man assured him. “Agricultural activity should be easy enough to detect, even at a far more restricted level, and even hunter-gatherers need fires. If anyone had lit a single cooking fire in the last three years, anywhere on the world’s surface, we’d have been able to home in on it. If they were alive somewhere out in the long grass, invisible from the air, they’d have to have gone back to the very beginning, eating what they hunt and gather in its raw state. That seems unlikely. Incredible, even. The people on the ground who believe that the aliens are still around have their own reasons for wanting to believe it.”

“The human race had some pretty narrow squeaks,” Matthew said, pensively. “There used to be more genetic variation in a single chimpanzee troop than in the entire human race, before chimps became extinct. Mitochondrial Eve had lived not much more than a hundred and forty thousand years before Hope’s odyssey began. Animals as big as humans are more vulnerable to catastrophes of all kinds than their smaller and humbler cousins. If these guys had never domesticated fire, they’d be even more vulnerable than our ancestors. Still …”

“Which side was Delgado on?” Solari asked Frans Leitz. “On the extinction question, I mean.”

“I don’t know—but he was enthusiastic about building the boat.”

“What boat?” Solari asked.

“I think it was Dr. Gherardesca’s idea. She’s the anthropologist. She figured that if it wasn’t possible to recover data about ground-level activity in the grasslands from flying eyes, the best way to do it would be to take a boat downriver. It was just about ready when Professor Delgado was killed, although they’d asked for one last consignment of equipment—we’re holding that so that we can send you down with it.”

“How many other people were working at Base Three along with Delgado?” Solari persisted.

“Seven.”

“Seven!” Matthew could hardly believe it. “You found a ruined city made by intelligent humanoids, and you sent sevenpeople to investigate it! The biggest news story in history, and sevenpeople is all you can spare to follow it up.”

“There wereeight,” Leitz pointed out, blushing grayly yet again as his discomfort increased by an order of magnitude. “And will be again, once you’re there.” He was already turning away to resume his interrupted retreat. “I really must go now. You’ll soon get the hang of the keypads if you keep playing with them. There’s plenty more library material. Someone will pick you up when it’s time for you to see Captain Milyukov.”

SIX

Vince Solari waited until the young man had left the room before saying: “Milyukov? Wasn’t the original captain called Ying?”

“That was seven hundred years ago,” Matthew pointed out. “ Captainisn’t a hereditary title. A ship’s crew has to be run on strictly meritocratic principles—supposedly.”

“Why supposedly?” Solari had relaxed, allowing the keyboard to hang loosely from his tired hand. The image on the screen had frozen while displaying the internally lit bubble-domes of Base Three, strangely forlorn in a gathering evening that was turning everything purple to matt black.

“Seven hundred years is a long time,” Matthew said, “and the ship was always capable of running itself between big decisions. Five or six lifetimes, maybe as many as twenty generations, can produce considerable social and political changes, and meritocracies always have a habit of backsliding.”

Solari nodded, slowly. “I see,” he said. “There’s another factor that needs consideration too. Most of the Chosen—including you, I guess—were frozen down before the new generation of plagues had begun to do their worst. Interplanetary distances weren’t quarantine enough to keep the chiasmalytic transformers and their vicious kin on Earth. At least some of the crew must have been sterilized before Hopeleft the system. They must have been forced to adopt whatever countermeasures allowed the reconstruction of Earthly society.”

“How bad did things get before you left?” Matthew asked, quietly.

“I was frozen down twenty-four years after you,” Solari reminded him. “The chiasmalytic transformers were running riot. Nobody had given up hope of finding a cure, but they were stripping the eggs out of the ovaries of aborted fetuses and little girls, and splitting viable embryos so that they could keep the clones as spares … all kinds of weird stuff. And every week seemed to bring news of some new breakthrough in longevity technology that mightbeat the Miller Effect, and mightput us all on the escalator to emortality, and mightmake it possible for civilization to go on forever even if no one ever had another baby for as long as the ecosphere lasted. Not that it made a jot of difference to the doomsayers and the defeatists, the neohysterics or the hyperhedonists. You missed some crazy times, Matt. Times that only a prophet could have relished. I remember seeing you on TV, you know, when I was a kid. Couldn’t really miss you, until you dropped out of sight.”

“If you hadn’t been a kid,” Matthew told him, leaning back against his bed so as to take some of the weight off his aching feet, “you’d have understood that I was never the kind of prophet who could take delight in saying I told you so. I knew what the chiasmalytic transformers might do—what they were madeto do—but I never relished the thought.”

“Made to do? I remember you as a bit of a ranter, but I didn’t have you pegged as a conspiracy theorist. The official line always said that the seetees were Mother Nature’s ultimate backlash—Gaea’s last line of self-defense. The idea that they were a final solution cooked up in a lab was supposed to be a neohysteric fantasy.”

Matthew winced slightly at the casual suggestion that he had been a bit of a ranter, although people had called him a lot worse things. “It matters not whence Nemesis comes,” he said, recalling another of his not-so-classic sound bites as if it had only been yesterday when he had last deployed it. “It only matters where she goes.”

“They might have found a cure after I was frozen down, I guess,” Solari said, pensively. “We ought to look that up, oughtn’t we? We’ve got a lot of history to catch up on.”

“And not enough time,” Matthew said. “Not until we’re down on the surface, at any rate, and probably not then. Still, it looks as if your job won’t be as hard as it might have been, so you might be able to get back to your homework fairly soon.”

“Seven suspects,” Solari mused, lifting the keypad up to his face and studying the layout of the keys with minute care. “Eight if you count the hypothetical alien. It doesn’t sound too difficult—but I’ll be way too late to get much from the crime scene. Until I have the facts …”

“If the murderer isan alien,” Matthew observed, “I don’t suppose we’ll attempt to bring him to trial. The discovery would be far more momentous than any mere murder. The greatest discovery ever—and they seem almost determined not to make it. Maybe the crew don’t quite understand, but the people fresh from the freezer … I can’t understand theirattitude at all.”

Solari obviously didn’t share Matthew’s wonderment. “Do you want to go on playing tourist flyby,” he asked, “or shall I try to find something more interesting?”

“Try to find something more interesting,” was Matthew’s vote. He had seen enough purple vegetation for the time being.

As yet, though, Solari wasn’t sufficiently familiar with the equipment to be able to exit from the image-catalog, and he stopped trying when the sequence moved on to animal life.

In the absence of any oral explanation it was difficult to determine the principles according to which the images had been filed and organized, but the first impression formulated in Matthew’s mind was that the new world was improbably rich in soft-bodied invertebrates. He couldn’t remember exactly what a murex looked like, but there was such a wealth of sluglike, clamlike and snaillike creatures among the images on the screen that he figured that there had to be a murex-analogue in there somewhere.

The worms were even more multitudinous, but worms were fundamentally boring, and Solari kept his thumb on the button that fast-forwarded through that section of the array before slowing down to take a closer look at various entities that seemed more interestingly chimerical.

“What’s that?” Solari demanded, finally making use of his discovery of a pause function. He obviously thought that Matthew, being a biologist of sorts, ought to have been able to master the fundamental taxonomy of the local ecosphere by courtesy of the hectic sequence of glances he had laid on.

“I’ve no idea,” Matthew confessed. The creature in question looked like a cross between a giant liver fluke and a sea anemone, but he was biologist enough not to want to issue a description of that crude kind. The image was a film clip, which showed the creature gliding along like a snail, but the tentacles sprouting from its humped back remained limp and it wasn’t possible for Matthew to come to a firm decision as to their function. “It’s not very big,” he pointed out. “The scale on the baseline puts it at twenty or thirty centimeters from end to end.”

More film clips followed, slowly working up to images of more complex creatures. Eventually, Matthew supposed, they would reach fishy things, amphibians and other vertebrate-analogues, but he was not sure how many orders of invertebrates they might have missed. Were there really so few arthropod-analogues?

“How about thatone?” Solari followed up, this time pointing at something that looked rather like a translucent horseshoe crab. Matthew wondered whether the impression that the creatures he was seeing were soft-bodied might be an illusion born of their mauve coloration, but when this one began to move—more rapidly than he had expected—he judged that the outer tegument was too flexible to qualify as a “shell.”

Solari had to scroll through many more quasi-molluscan and vermiform organisms of widely varying dimensions before the tape reached creatures that had any sort of backbone, but he got there in the end. The analogies between these creatures and their Earthly equivalents were so obvious that Matthew’s faith in convergent evolution was soon restored. Although the new world’s Gaea-clone hadn’t been able to select out DNA as champion coding-molecule, she obviously knew lots of ways to design a perfectly adequate fish. There were things like mudskippers and land-going tadpoles, polished snakes and glassy froglike forms.

Even after an hour’s trawling, though, Matthew hadn’t seen much that could pass for fur and feathers. Even the local rat-analogues seemed to be naked. Unless they had contrived to miss out on the relevant folder, bird-and mammal-analogues were rare. And yet, there had been enough lemuroids around to produce humanoids, and enough humanoids to produce a race of city-builders that might have been alive and active when Mitochondrial Eve was mothering the entire human race.

One thing that Matthew didn’t see while the parade continued was any immature organisms: no nests, no eggs, no infants. Even when there were shots of entire herds of grazers, there was no sign of any young. Nor, for that matter, could he see any sign of secondary sexual characteristics on the adult organisms. In the absence of a commentary, however, he was reluctant to take these apparent absences at face value.

“There must be somereal animals,” Solari complained, meaning that there ought to be more mammal-equivalents.

“There ought to be some quasi-arthropodans too,” Matthew said. “Even if this world’s tacit planner didn’t have the same fondness for beetles as ours, there’d be no sense in missing out on a whole range of viable adaptive forms. Insects are among the most efficient products of Earthly evolution. If the rats had crashed out with the humans, the cockroaches would have inherited the Earth.”

“I can do without spiders, myself,” Solari told him. Matthew didn’t want to insult him with the pedantic insistence that arachnids weren’t insects, so he let the comment pass.

It eventually turned out, though, that there were a few monkey analogues and even a few flying creatures, although they were more like furless bats and flying squirrels than birds. Natural selection on Ararat-Tyre didn’t seem to have come up with hair or feathers, although it had just about mastered scales.

Solari breathed a deep sigh of satisfaction when he found the monkey-analogues, as if they had always been the only worthy objects of his search. They were pale purple, just like everything else, but they didn’t seem as conspicuously alien as the vegetation that surrounded them. Indeed, they seemed quaintly familiar, save only for the fact that they had no young, nor any sign of the kinds of fleshly apparatus employed by Earthly mammals to produce and nurture young.

Matthew noted that the bat-analogues were all tiny, though not as tiny as insects. Some of the monkey-analogues grew quite tall—though none were human-sized—but they were very lean and lithe, and somehow rather mercurial. There was nothing reminiscent of a cow or a hippopotamus, still less of a large dinosaur. The top predators seemed to be stealth-hunters. There were shots of creatures resembling glorified weasels pouncing on their prey and stunning them with the aid of stings mounted in their tongues like hypodermic syringes.

Matthew found the lemuroids strangely unsettling, because rather than in spite of the fact that they were uncannily similar in most respects to the extinct Earthly lemurs he had seen on film. It wasn’t so much that they had the same huge forward-looking eyes and the same gripping hands. It was the strangely elastic way they moved—slowly when contented, rapidly when panicked by the advent of a weasel-analogue—and their perpetual nervous alertness. There was obviously something strange about the way their limbs were articulated, but that was only part of it. Although he knew that he had to be even more careful of the dangers of anthropomorphic thinking here than he had on Earth, the lemuroids seemed to Matthew to be perfect incarnations of an anxiety so deep as to be blatant paranoia. Their feet were mostly equipped with elongated toes that reminded Matthew of the feet of the crewpeople, modified for a way of life that humans had never been able to follow in Earth’s gravity-well.

On Earth, Matthew knew, the genus Homohad descended from a long line of tough and sturdy apes: apes that had learned to swagger like baboons; stand-up-and-fight apes; playground-bully apes. Their near cousins the gorillas—yet another species Matthew had only seen on film—had taken the gentle giant route, while the hominids had clung most steadfastly to the mad psycho alternative, but the whole family had been unmistakably butch. There were no butch lemuroids in the movies taken by Hope’s flying eyes—so what kind of ancestry had the humanoids had? Had they been the last of a line to go down to inglorious extinction? If so, why had the entire batch of strategies failed? If not, how had the ancestors of the seemingly timorous extant lemuroids contrived to produce something as amazing as a city-builder?

If adaptive radiation had ever been as prolific here as it had been on Earth, Matthew thought, an extremely high fraction of its inventions must have been consigned to the dustbin of paleontology. Perhaps it hadn’t been. Perhaps, if this had alwaysbeen a much quieter world, nature had never had to be so recklessly ingenious in making up for mass extinctions. Perhaps this ambiguous home-from-home had not required nearly so many trials and errors before discovering the phylum and the family that human vanity had always placed at the pinnacle of creation.

“What do you think?” Solari asked, as the sequence finally cut out of its own accord, having presumably run to one of its potential termini.

“Maybe we came in late and missed the arthropods,” Matthew mused. “If not, there’s a conspicuous shortage of exoskeletons. Maybe the local coding systems can’t make chitin. On the other hand, the whole animal kingdom seems a trifle anemic, except for slugs and squishy worms, so maybe it’s not much good at bone either. On the whole, there seems to be a noticeable lack of tough stuff, of no-nonsense leverage and substantial solidity.” “How odd would that be?” Solari asked, although he wore the expression of a man who didn’t expect to be able to understand the answer.

“It’s hard to say, when we have only one other case for comparison,” Matthew admitted. “An adult insect is only a maggot’s way of making more maggots, of course, but if the gimmick worked so well on Earth, why not here, where there certainly doesn’t seem to be any shortage of maggoty things? The lack of birds and mammals might not be surprising if the mammals that do exist hadn’t contrived to evolve a humanoid—albeit one that may no longer exist.”

“Maybe Earth was the beetle planet, and this one’s the slug and snail capital of the universe,” Solari suggested. “It couldhave been worse.” Matthew guessed that he was probably thinking about spiders again.

Matthew nodded sympathetically. “It certainly looks like it,” he agreed. “Unless we only got half the story. It’s difficult to believe that nothing flies down there but a few itty-bitty bats and the time.”

The door of their room opened, making them both start slightly. Time had indeed flown while they were engrossed. Eight-zero had apparently arrived, and the someone Leitz had promised had arrived to lead them to the captain. The way Solari nodded to the newcomer told Matthew that it must be Riddell, the man who had been standing guard outside their door.

Matthew inspected the holstered sidearm, and decided that it was indeed a darter. The armed man’s suitskin was the same color as Frans Leitz’s, but its present shape had been organized to give the impression of sharper edges and physical efficiency. On the whole, though, he looked like a soft person pretending to be solid, not a natural tough guy. As such, he seemed to fit the general situation surprisingly well.

It was not until Matthew raised himself up, putting all his weight back on his feet, that he realized how soft he too seemed to have become. He cursed himself for not taking the opportunity to lie down and get some proper rest, but he knew that he still had an enormous amount to learn, and not much time to learn it, if he were to be able to take a significant hand in the unfolding history of the new world.

“Okay,” he said to their appointed protector. “Take us to your leader.” It wasn’t until he saw the blank look on Riddell’s face, signaling a complete failure to recognize and appreciate the cliché, that Matthew finally began to feel the width and depth of the cultural gulf that separated the two of them.