Текст книги "Dark Ararat"

Автор книги: Brian Stableford

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THIRTEEN

When Matthew returned to the room in which he had awakened, the complex possibilities that Andrei Lityansky had laid out for him were still causing him considerable distress. He threw himself down on his bed as soon as he was inside—not, this time, because he was exhausted but because he needed to think.

Lityansky had, of course, done everything within his power to soothe Matthew’s suddenly inflamed anxiety. He had assured Matthew that there was not the slightest evidence that local pathogens could infect DNA-based organisms or that local organisms could form chimeras in association with them. Although the people on the surface had sustained all manner of cuts, bites, and stings, there had not yet been a single case of alien infection. Nor, the crewman had insisted, was there any reason to suppose that Earthly medical scientists could not devise defenses against such an infection, if one ever did arise, with exactly the same alacrity they had demonstrated in the Earthly plague wars, when they had been required to respond to some extremely ingenious and exotic threats.

The last point would have been more convincing had Matthew not heard news of the havoc wreaked by the ingenious and exotic chiasmalytic transformers, but Lityansky had refused to concede the point. The people of Earth had survived the last plague war just as they had survived the others, and had gone on to achieve true emortality. In the meantime, they had harnessed the new technology of para-DNA to many different purposes, revolutionizing the construction biotech pioneered by Leon Gantz.

Ararat, Lityansky had continued to insist, was a potential biotechnological Klondyke, for whose right of exploitation the colonists should be exceedingly grateful.

Matthew attempted to explain all this to Vince Solari, who had come over to stand by the bedside, looking down at him. Although the policeman couldn’t follow the technical aspects of the discourse, he was perfectly capable of reacting to phrases like “potential death trap” and “biotech bonanza.”

“I take it that you don’t think Lityansky’s trustworthy,” Solari said.

“Oh, he told me the truth as he sees it,” Matthew admitted. “But his viewpoint is way too narrow. The pattern of discovery here is the reverse of the one that steered the history of Earthly biology, and he hasn’t seen the implications of that.”

“I don’t even know what it means,” Solari said, a trifle resentfully.

“On Earth,” Matthew told him, “scientists had an enormous amount of information about plant and animal species before they began to get to grips with the mysteries of organic chemistry. By the time biochemistry got going there was a rich context in place, provided by centuries of painstaking work in taxonomy, anatomy, and physiology. Lityansky and his colleagues have started at the other end, doing the genomic and biochemical analyses first. They haven’t a clue, as yet, how that biochemistry relates to the anatomy, reproduction, and ecology of actual organisms—and they don’t seem to be in any particular hurry to find out. They’re being very methodical, starting with the fundamentals and working their way slowly forward, but they haven’t the slightest idea what the big picture might look like when all the pieces of the jigsaw are fitted together. They think people who try to make guesses—people like Bernal Delgado—are getting way ahead of themselves, but that’s stupid. We have to try to come at the puzzle from every direction if we want to solve it any time soon.”

“So what about these mavericks?” Solari asked. “Could they be right about the planet’s biosphere being the wreckage of some long-past ecocatastrophe? I mean, if things had gone differently on Earth, and the human race really had gone belly-up there, we’d have left an awful lot of biotech debris. When I used to see you on TV, you were fond of saying that there was a possibility that the ecosphere might be cut back all the way to the bacterial level, and that the only footprint we’d leave in the sands of time would be a few hundred long-term survivors out of hundreds of thousands of new bacterial species that had originated as technological products. Might that have happened here, hundreds of millions of years ago?”

“If we really had contrived an ecospasm as extreme as that on Earth,” Matthew said, pensively, “I suppose there might not be much material evidence of it after a hundred thousand years of lousy weather, let alone continental drift and supervolcanic basalt flows. Given that the biotech products that were already at large in my day had been built to last, though, some of them would have held their own in the ensuing struggle for existence and joined in a new tidal wave of adaptive radiation. If I knew more about this stuff that Lityansky calls para-DNA, I might be able to make a start on figuring out the likelihood of something like that getting so thoroughly mixed up with the bacterial residue of an ecospheric meltdown that a new metazoan adaptive radiation would have taken it aboard … but I’m not sure how relevant it would be. This planet is much quieter than Earth, and I’m not sure that all material evidence of a technically sophisticated civilization could have been so thoroughly obliterated here.”

“But the planet might have been a lot more active in the distant past,” Solari pointed out. “Even if it wasn’t, the evidence would be buried pretty deep by now. To say that the people on the ground haven’t even begun scratching the surface would be an understatement. But what really matters, I suppose, is whether you’re right or wrong about the world being a death trap now.”

“Unfortunately,” Matthew said, “the answer to that one depends on the answers to all the other questions—including the ones Lityansky didn’t want to address, like the possible relevance of serial chimeras. Maybe the relative dearth of chitin and hard bone isn’tthe product of a blind spot in the protein-coding mechanism. Maybe there’s another factor militating against rigidity.”

“Serial chimeras?,” Solari echoed. “Like werewolves, you mean.”

“Not exactly—but I’ll have to devote some time to figuring out what I mightmean. What have you been doing while I’ve been taking lessons in xenobiology?”

“Checking the list of murder suspects.”

“Really?” The news was sufficiently interesting to make Matthew lift his head a little higher and turn to lie sideways, supporting himself on his elbow.

Solari had obviously been practicing his keyboard skills, because it required no more than a casual sweep of his fingers to replace the single image on the wallscreen with a mosaic consisting of seven faces arranged in two ranks, four on the upper and three on the lower. Matthew took due note of the symbolism of the empty square at the right-hand end of the bottom rank: the blank where a photograph of one of the alien humanoids might be, if the alien humanoids still existed. Even at a relatively oblique angle, Matthew had no difficulty identifying two of the faces.

“The second from the left on the top row’s Ikram Mohammed,” he said. “A first-rate experimental genomicist. Did some remarkable work on intron architecture and functional gene-nesting. I met him a dozen times at conferences. Bernal would have known him fairly well too—whatever Bernal was working on or thinking about, he’d have shared it with Ike. More of an acquaintance than a friend, but I feel confident saying that he’s not a likely murderer.”

“I’ve looked at his CV,” Solari said, noncommittally. “Do you know any of the others?”

“Lynn Gwyer, directly below him. Genetic engineer specializing in agricultural pharmaceutical production. Did a lot of work on bananas. Regarded by some—but certainly not by me—as a plague-war draft dodger, mainly because she dedicated her efforts to attempts to protect Third World innocents rather than First World software engineers. Bernal probably knew her better than I did, maybe better than he knew Ike Mohammed. Again, an acquaintance rather than a friend, but also not a likely murderer, in my opinion. In fact, a highly unlikely murderer.”

“None of them is a likelymurderer,” Solari said, a trifle impatiently. “Few murderers are, alas—especially when it comes to domestics. This has to be reckoned a domestic of sorts. They’d all been living together for months. One big happy—or not-so happy—family.”

“Why not so happy?”

“There’s always friction in living space that small. There were disagreements. Personal as well as theoretical.” He didn’t elaborate, presumably because it was gossip rather than real evidence.

“Who are the others?” Matthew asked.

Solari started at the top left-hand corner, with a man who might have passed for Shen Chin Che’s son in a dim light. “Tang Dinh Quan,” he reported. “Analytical biochemist. Very accomplished, apparently. Two daughters still in SusAn, but no partner—just like you. Reported to be showing signs of strain and acute anxiety in the last few months, becoming increasing vocal in his support for the Base One party advocating withdrawal from the world.”

“Reported by whom?” Matthew inquired.

“The resident doctor, Godert Kriefmann,” Solari said, passing on to the image on the other side of Ikram Mohammed’s face, of a solidly built, square-jawed man whose head had been comprehensively depilated. “He’s a medical researcher too, of course, but the doctors on the surface have had more work to do than they expected. The smartsuits designed for surface use are reasonably strong, and they seem to work very well inside the body, protecting the lungs and the gut from orthodox invasion, but some of the local wildlife is pretty dangerous. Some wormlike things have nasty stings and surprisingly powerful jaws, and some of the mammal-equivalents have tongues like harpoons. To make a smartsuit capable of resisting all the local armaments would inhibit movement considerably. Fortunately, the toxins are more painful than life-threatening, and Kriefmann’s working to develop antisera with Maryanne Hyder, toxicologist.” Solari’s finger dropped to the image beneath Kriefmann’s. It was a study in contrasts: Maryanne Hyder’s face was slender, almost elfin, and she had an abundance of carefully coiffed blond hair.

“She seems to be the one that Bernal was playing happy families with at the time of his death,” Solari reported. “Very cut up by his loss, apparently. Quiet and methodical beforehand, now more hysterical than Tang. On the surface, the least likely of all the suspects—but if it is a domestic, she’s the closest thing we have to a spouse, which might put her under the microscope ahead of all the rest if this weren’t such a bizarre crime. In my experience, domestic murders don’t often involve alien artifacts, real or faked, and they almost always take place inside the home, not in a field two miles away.”

The policeman’s finger moved on to the only remaining woman, whose picture was at the far end of the top row. She was darker than any of the others, and her face was extensively scarred, as if by smallpox or some other supposedly extinct disease.

“Dulcie Gherardesca, anthropologist,” Solari reported. “The most recent arrival at the base, sent to study the ruins of the city in the hope of building a fuller picture of the technological resources and folkways of the humanoids. Spent less time safely enclosed in the bubbles than most of the others, although Hyder and Mohammed both picked up more injuries. Probably better equipped to fake alien artifacts than any of the others, and with more opportunity to do it, but everything else in her background makes her just as unlikely a murderer as the others. A victim of plague war in infancy, very nearly died—said to be fiercely dedicated to her work.”

The last remaining picture showed a blond man wearing a hat and a wide smile. He was carrying a rifle.

“Rand Blackstone,” Solari reported. “Specialist in survival skills. Professional soldier, served with UN forces in half a dozen shooting wars—all spinoff from the plague wars. Argumentative type, but most of his arguments seem to have been with Tang, not Delgado. No doubt at all that he’s capable of killing, but he was there to protect the people at Base Three, and losing one of them is a blot on his reputation. If Milyukov’s right about there being a conspiracy to protect the murderer, it’s difficult to believe that he’d be in on it. Insofar as there’s been an investigation, he’s done it—but he’s no detective. He seems to have made up his mind very quickly that it wasn’t any of the people stationed at the base, and must therefore have been an alien, even though he hasn’t seen the slightest sign of a humanoid since he was commissioned to help set up the operation—he was part of the original group sent over from Base One, along with Mohammed, Gwyer, and Delgado. The others shuttled down a couple of weeks later.”

“Does anyone except Tang have family still in SusAn?” Matthew asked, curiously.

“No, but Kriefmann has a wife, also a doctor, at Base One. Gwyer’s ovaries were stripped and the eggs placed in storage in the gene banks, so I suppose she could be said to have potential children up here—but then, all the males have made sperm donations. Gherardesca’s the odd one out on that score. She was sterilized by a plague-war agent that nearly killed her. Nothing as refined as a chiasmalytic disruptor—an artificial variant of systemic lupus erythromatosus, whatever that is.”

“A very nasty virus,” Matthew told him. “That would explain the scars—although she could have had them removed by elementary somatic engineering.”

“Making a political point, apparently,” Solari told him. “Thought the effects of plague war on the disadvantaged ought to be made manifest. Made herself into a kind of walking ad. Your friend Gwyer would presumably have sympathized.”

“There’s no need to sound contemptuous,” Matthew objected. “ Isympathize.”

“You would,” Solari observed. “As an adman yourself, I mean.”

“I wasn’t an adman,” Matthew told him. “If I was a trifle over-theatrical it was because I was trying to ram home an unwelcome message. As William Randolph Hearst himself was fond of saying, the news is what somebody wants to stop you spreading—it’s the rest that’s the ads. I was spreading the news. So was Lynn Gwyer. So, apparently, was Dulcie Gherardesca. We had to work hard at it because it was news that a lot of people seemed determined not to hear. We had to make them pay attention. Apparently, we succeeded. If we hadn’t, Earth couldhave been devastated all the way down to the bacterial level.”

“Okay,” Solari conceded. “I’m not trying to pick a fight. Well-intentioned or not, Gherardesca’s an oddball. She was frozen down not long after you—part of the same intake as Delgado. Lucky to be here, I guess. She might have been eliminated from consideration if Shen and his collaborators hadn’t been so idiosyncratic, although I suppose she’s as clonable as the next person. Why do you think that someone having family in SusAn might have a bearing on Delgado’s murder?”

“I don’t. I was wondering whether it might have had an effect on Tang’s state of mind and his conversion to the party demanding withdrawal. As you pointed out, I have two daughters in SusAn myself. If I became convinced that the surface was direly unsuitable for colonization, I might not be prepared to expose them to risks I’d gladly face myself.”

“Is it direly unsuitable?” Solari wanted to know. “Can we establish a colony here or not?”

“I don’t know,” Matthew told him. “But I can understand why the people on the surface don’t want to wait around for Andrei Lityansky and the one-step-at-a-time brigade to come to a firm conclusion.”

“Maybe we could do something about it even if there turned out to be awkward problems,” Solari said.

“Maybe,” Matthew agreed. “In theory we could probably dose the entire world with weed killer, a few hectares at a time, and replace the alien ecosphere with a duplicate of our own, converting it into an authentic replica of Earth. It might be the case that releasing Earthly organisms into the planetary ecosphere will eventually have that effect anyway, because it would begin a competition of replicator molecules that would eventually be settled by the absolute victory of DNA over its alien rivals. Unfortunately, you don’t have to be a radical Gaean to think that murdering an entire ecosphere, or standing back and letting DNA do the dirty work for us, would be an unforgivable crime.

“What we actually wantis to be able to set up a situation that would allow DNA’s rival replicators to continue to flourish, and also allow us to benefit from the bounty of their natural technology. How easy that might be to achieve I can’t even begin to guess—and given the unanticipated complexity and flexibility of the local ecosphere, it might be exceedingly difficult to come up with a confident answer in the space of a single lifetime. The seven hundred years it took to get here might be needed to be doubled before we can be certain that any colony we found is genuinely secure. The worst-case scenario is that this isn’t our Ararat at all, but our Roanoke.”

Solari nodded to indicate that he understood the reference to the most famous of America’s lost colonies. “Yeah,” he said. “Well, we’ll have to find out the hard way—on the surface. I’m not going to solve this case by looking at pictures and CVs. The sooner we can get down there the better, from my point of view. I’m not looking forward to this suit-fitting business, but the quicker we get kitted out the sooner we can get stuck in.”

He blanked the screen and hopped up onto his own bed, stretching himself out in much the same pose as Matthew’s. Matthew let himself relax onto his back again, but he didn’t close his eyes. He knew that he, like Solari, wouldn’t even be able to begin to fit the pieces of his puzzle together until he was actually on the surface, able to gather evidence at first hand, but he still had a lot of preparatory thinking to do. When the opportunity arrived to see the wood in spite of the trees, he had to be as ready as he possibly could.

FOURTEEN

In theory, the suit fitting should not have been an unduly unpleasant experience. It wasn’t unduly uncomfortable, in purely physical terms, and probably wouldn’t have been alarmingly painful even if Matthew’s IT had not been ready to muffle anything worse than the mildest discomfort, because the human body had few pain receptors ready to react to the kind of invasion that the suit mounted. The fact that the problem was psychological rather than physical didn’t make it any less troublesome, though.

Matthew belonged to a generation that had grown used to the idea of smart clothing. Even as a baby he had been swathed in living fibers charged with taking care of the various wastes that his body produced, but he had also been used to smartsuits as things a man could put on and take off at will. He had never worn “dead clothes” but he had nevertheless thought of his smartsuits as clothing to be changed at regular intervals, or whenever the whim took him, rather than as symbiotic companions more intimate than any lover.

The various kinds of physiological assistance his previous smartsuits rendered had always seemed valuable but peripheral, essentially subsidiary to matters of display and appearance, fashion and style. The smartsuits he had worn on the moon and in L-5 had been “heavy duty” suits that might have become vital to his survival had there ever been a serious mishap, but he had not lingered long in either location, and had never fallen victim to a life-threatening accident. There was nothing in his experience that had even begun to bring about a fundamental change of attitude. He was, therefore, quite unprepared for the kind of suit he would need to wear on the surface of the new world.

As a biologist, Matthew had always known that everyday notions of what was “inside” and “outside” his body were not very precise, and that there was a significant sense in which the long and tangled tube constituting his gut was “outside” rather than “inside.” His new smartsuit, unlike the ones he had worn at home, really would have to cover and protect his entire body, which meant that it would have to line his gut from mouth to anus, forming an extra layer over every nook and cranny of his intestines. Strictly speaking, he would not be able to “feel” the growth-process that would extend the new layer of surface once he had swallowed the initial bolus, but he was conscious of its progress nevertheless, and his imagination readily supplied the slight unease that his stomach and bowel refused to generate.

It would have been even worse, he thought, as he lay on his bed while the application was completed, if the new membrane had had to descend all the way into his lungs, to coat every single alveolus, but the air filter did not need to be quite as sensitive or capable as the food filter, and the crucial barrier was established in his bronchii. Nita Brownell assured him that he had no need to be anxious that it might leave him short of breath in crisis—quite the reverse, given that it maintained an emergency supply of oxygen—but his imagination was not yet ready to take that on trust. He was able to see, quite literally, that the extra layer added to his conjunctiva did not threaten his eyesight in the least, but he was unable to extend the analogy as easily as the doctor could have wished. She too was an ex-corpsicle, but she had been awake for three long years and had spent far longer in various low-gee environments before being frozen down.

“Just take it easy for a few hours,” Dr. Brownell instructed him, severely. “If you can lie still, the process will proceed with maximum efficiency.” She was still annoyed with him for the shame that he had allegedly brought on the entire population of sleepers by virtue of his vicious attack on Riddell and Lamartine.

“How useful is the suit, really?” Matthew wanted to know. “According to Vince, the stings and fangs with which most of the local wildlife seem to be equipped go through it almost as easily as they’d go through bare skin. Even if Lityansky’s right about the unlikelihood of any biological infection, anything that gets injected that way is likely to be toxic.”

“Very few of the organisms you’ll meet on a day-to-day basis have stings or fangs,” the doctor assured him, “and they seem to be as reluctant to use them as Earthly organisms. They’re last-resort defenses, not means of aggression. Even the most poisonous ones haven’t killed anyone yet. Not that we’re complacent—we’re working flat-out to produce more effective defenses, but we’re only partway there. The main problem is the sheer profusion of likely reactions. So, no matter how good your IT is it’ll hurt like hell if you get stung by anything bigger than my thumb, and it might take as much as a week to clear all the poisonous debris out of the affected tissues.

“The suits are far from perfect, as yet—but they’re no less vital for that. If you didn’t have an artificial gut lining and air filter you’d be in deep trouble the moment you stepped down on to the surface. If he stayed inside the big bubble at Base One, drinking sterilized water and irradiated food, a man without a suit would probably get by, but you’re going to Base Three and you’ll be spending a lot of time outside. You’ll probably need all the protection the suit can provide, even if you don’t get bitten or stung.”

When she had turned away Matthew lifted his arm so that he could inspect the fabric of the suit. Once the molecular layers were properly set he would be able to reprogram the outer layer for color and certain modifications of shape, but for the time being the syntheflesh covering the hand was transparent and the “sleeve” beginning above the wrist was matt black. When he flexed his fingers he could hardly feel the extra epidermal layers, but the back of his hand looked odd because the suit had dissolved the hairs that normally grew there. He lifted his hand to touch the top of his head, and was relieved to discover that the hair growing there had been allowed to grow through. His sideburns were neatly excised at the point he had selected twenty years ago.

He opened and closed his mouth experimentally, running his tongue around his teeth. They did feel slightly strange, but he couldn’t tell whether it was the extra layer of tissue on the tongue or the extra layer on the teeth that was responsible for the difference. There was a peculiar taste in his mouth, like slightly moldy dough. His breathing seemed slightly labored, but he didn’t feel that he was in any danger of choking. He wondered whether the filters in his bronchii could keep water out of his lungs if he were ever in danger of drowning, and whether the artificial tissue could extract enough oxygen from water to let him continue breathing if he were immersed.

Although Nita Brownell had told him to lie still he decided, in the end, that stillness was exaggerating his psychosomatic symptoms, and that it would be better to put himself through the program of exercises that the doctor had designed to test and develop his inner resources. At first he stayed on the bed, but when stretching his arms and legs rhythmically back and forth began to relieve his feelings of queasiness he leapt down to the floor to practice push-ups and sit-ups.

Solari made no attempt to copy him. “I’m glad this is an Earthlike planet,” the policeman commented, as he inspected his own forearms minutely. “Imagine what we’d be wearing if it weren’t.”

“It’s because it’s Earthlike that the problems are so awkward,” Matthew told him, as he counted sit-ups. “It’s not just food allergies we have to worry about. We may not seem very appetizing to the local worms, and we’re probably not nearly as nutritious as their natural hosts, but an amino acid is an amino acid and sugars are always sweet. Just because there’ve been no recorded cases of infection or parasitism so far doesn’t mean that we’ll be safe indefinitely. Everything local that we come into contact with, deliberately or accidentally, is likely to retaliate by trying to eat us. We have all the technological advantages, but the locals are fighting on their own turf, and they have a few tricks that we’ve never encountered before.”

“You’re still worried about the insect thing, aren’t you? Not to mention the werewolves.”

“Werewolves are a red herring,” Matthew told him. “There’s a difference between serial chimeras and shapeshifting. The absence of insects may be less significant than I first thought, given the absence of flowering plants.”

“Do the plants really have glass thorns?” Solari asked. “That’s what Delgado was killed with, you know—a glass dagger. Or maybe a glass spearhead.”

“It’s not as simple as that,” Matthew told him. “But in crude terms, yes. Plants and animals alike seem to use vitrification processes to produce their strongest structural tissues. Most of the products are more like sugar crystals than window glass, but some of the upland plants that grow around the ruins have rigid tissues that can be splintered like glass to make sharp edges, and filed like glass to make sharp points. Photographs taken from above the canopy of the so-called grasslands show multitudinous globular structures like goldfish bowls that mightbe reproductive structures of some kind. I’d like to have a closer look at those.”

“I can’t make head nor tail of it myself,” Solari admitted. “I suppose I’ll have to try, though, if I’m going to spend the rest of my life down there.”

“It might be as well,” Matthew agreed.

“So tell me the difference between serial chimeras and werewolves—in terms I can understand.”

“Caterpillars become butterflies. Tadpoles become frogs. It’s a gradual progressive metamorphosis, not a matter of switching back and forth every full moon.”

“So you think the reason we didn’t see any young animals is that the animals we did see might really be different forms of the same animal?”

“Different forms,” Matthew echoed. “That might be the essence of it. On a world of chimeras, it might not make sense to think of different kindsof plants and animals—only of different forms. Everything related to everything else. Creatures that don’t just use gradual chimerical renewal as a means of achieving emortality, but as a means of achieving continual evolution.”

Solari sat up and began stroking his limbs experimentally, as if savoring the sensations of his new skin. Matthew still felt the need of distraction, so he continued his callisthenics.

“So the city-builders might not have died out,” Solari said. “They might just have changed into something else. They tried humanity and didn’t like it, so they moved on.”

“It sounds unlikely,” Matthew said, “but everything’s conceivable, given that nobody seems to have taken the trouble to find out where the limits of the chimerization processes actually lie. No—that’s unfair. I mean, nobody’s been able to figure out a way of finding out where the limits lie. If the natural metamorphoses are slow and gradual it might need more than a human lifetime just to observe them.”

As Nita Brownell had promised, Matthew felt a lot better now than he had the previous day. His body, assisted by his dutiful IT, had been working overtime to make good the deficits incurred by his organs during their suspended animation. The acceleration of his cellular-repair processes was probably going to knock a year or two off his potential lifespan, but he figured that if he could hang around until the crew obtained more information about contemporary longevity technology from Earth he would surely get some compensatory benefit from that. True emortality was apparently out of reach, but seven centuries of progress must have produced much better ways of keeping unengineered individuals healthier for longer.

“So, all in all,” Solari said, “you don’t think Delgado could have been murdered by a humanoid who shifted out of some other form and then shifted back?”