Dark Ararat (19 page)

A sideways glance at Vince Solari told Matthew that the policeman was as dismayed as he was.

“It’s perfectly safe,” the captain assured him. “We haven’t lost a single life or sustained a serious injury during any of the drops. It’s disposable, of course—the only reason the shuttles you were used to looked so very different is that they were designed to go up and come back rather than simply going down. You’re a biologist, Professor Fleury—think of it as an extremely tough and extremely smart dandelion seed. It’ll float you down so gently you probably won’t even feel the bump. The method’s accurate to within a few hundred meters—it’ll put you down right on the doorstep of Base Three’s main bubble.”

It occurred to Matthew as he continued to stare at the vehicle that if all the would-be colonists and all their equipment had been landed by analogous means, the task of bringing them up again—were any such necessity ever to arise—would pose an entirely different technological challenge. Shen Chin Che must have made contingency plans for a planetary rescue, but it was not obvious that any such plan could be implemented unless the battle for control of
Hope
’s systems were won without inflicting any substantial damage. In any case, neither Konstantin Milyukov nor Shen Chin Che would have the slightest desire to implement such a plan in anything less than a disaster situation.

“I can’t see the TV cameras I asked for,” Matthew said, his brow still furrowed by uncertainty.

“We couldn’t fit them in,” Milyukov told him, blandly. “Oddly enough, Professor Delgado had made a similar request, so they would have been included in the cargo had the necessity not arisen of accommodating you and Inspector Solari. We had to make some difficult decisions as to what to hold over. Dr. Gwyer and Dr. Gherardesca were extremely insistent that materials for the boat they and Delgado were building had to be given priority. Your cameras will be included in the next consignment, I can assure you.”

“That might be too late,” Matthew objected. “If this boat that they’re building is going downriver to investigate the so-called grasslands I’ll be on board.”

“That’s your decision, of course,” Milyukov said. “Or theirs, of course.” His voice was silky, but he was making no effort whatsoever to conceal his hostility. Matthew knew that he was being punished, but he resented the childishness of Milyukov’s petty obstructions. He was distracted from his ire by Nita Brownell, who gave him the bag containing the last of the personal possessions that had been frozen down with him. His beltphone and notepad had already been returned to him, having been carefully checked out and upgraded by the crew’s engineers. The bag contained less utilitarian items of the kind that were precious precisely because they were superfluous. He had pictures of Alice and Michelle stored in his notepad, ready for display in any of a dozen different forms, but the solid images he had in the private pack were fragile, unique, and talismanic.

He could have clipped the bag to his belt, but he preferred to keep hold of it. It gave him something to do with his hands.

“We’ll need the cameras downriver,” Matthew told the captain. “Getting pictures through the canopy is a straightforward power problem, so they won’t be subject to the same restrictions as the flying eyes. If there are humanoids living there, however primitive their circumstances, it’ll be the most significant discovery ever made off Earth. Everybody will want to know about it. You have to let me have the cameras.”

“Perhaps we can arrange another drop before you go,” Milyukov said, making it perfectly obvious that his pretended cooperativeness was only pretended. “In the event of an emergency, of course, we could even deliver them directly to the grasslands—our targeting really is
very
good. Perhaps we should find our wild geese
before
we attempt to take pictures of them.”

He doesn’t want me broadcasting, Matthew realized. He doesn’t want anyone broadcasting other than himself, but now that I’ve seen Shen I’m public enemy number two in his eyes—and he’s seen my old tapes. I bet he stalled Bernal’s requests too. But that’s proof of his own desperation. If his authority were secure, he wouldn’t be so fearful.

“Good luck,” the captain said—but he was looking at Vince Solari, and it was to the policeman that he extended his hand.

“Thanks,” Solari said, shaking it.

Matthew deliberately turned away, returning his attention to the narrow space into which he was being invited to climb. “What if I turn out to be claustrophobic?” he said to the doctor.

Nita Brownell peered through the airlock into the narrow crevice that was his allotted berth. “If your adrenaline level shoots up your IT will put you to sleep,” she informed him, unsympathetically. “You’ll be able to breathe normally, and quite easily.”

Matthew sighed. The cavity was, he supposed, loosely describable as a couch, but the loose festoons of silky material that almost filled the available space seemed ominous. The captain’s briefing had referred to the flight-preparation process as “cocooning,” but Matthew couldn’t help thinking about what happened to flies entangled and entrapped in spiderwebs.

“Reminds me of a body bag,” Solari murmured. He obviously came equipped with his own repertoire of disturbing analogies.

“There are more than a thousand people on the surface,” Milyukov put in. “They all went through this. Admittedly, you’re the first two to travel as a pair rather than a foursome, but that should make it even safer. The cargo’s perfectly secure.”

There was no reason to doubt the last assurance. Before it had been packed the cargo must have been an awkward jumble of irregular shapes, but now that it was in place it had all the compactness of an ingenious three-dimensional jigsaw. Everything that the people at Base Three needed to put the finishing touches to their riverboat was in there somewhere, along with scientific equipment, foodstuffs, biocontainment apparatus, specialized sursuits, and numerous unlabeled parcels whose content Matthew could not guess.

“Well,” Matthew muttered, in a voice so low that no one but Solari could hear him, “if Bernal was killed because someone has it in for ecological genomicists, I hope the killer didn’t have an opportunity to sabotage this thing.”

“Me too,” Solari echoed, presumably hoping that no one had it in for detectives either.

Matthew put procrastination aside and climbed in. Solari waited for him to wriggle into his slot and make himself comfortable before following. Matthew placed the personal possessions that he had brought with him across the gulf of time on his chest, but he made no effort to position them upon his beating heart. There was such a thing as taking symbolism too far.

As soon as Matthew had wedged himself into the crevice and stretched himself out at an angle of thirty degrees the smart spidersilk got to work, weaving itself into an elastic chrysalis. Matthew knew that he ought to be grateful for the protection, which was intended to keep him safe from impact effects even if the dandelion seed did come down a little too precipitately, but it was difficult. It was like being embraced by an amorous blanket of intelligent cotton wool.

He did feel a flicker of momentary panic as his sight was obscured, but nothing actually touched his eyes and he was able to open them again after a moment’s uncertainty.

He kept them open, even though there was nothing to see but a silvery mist. He wanted to remain in control, to keep his adrenaline in check by the authority of his will. To be blanked out by his protective IT, he thought, would be an undue humiliation.

“Matthew?” said Solari’s voice, coming from a point not much more than a meter away now that the detective was ensconced in his own cocoon.

“I’m here,” Matthew replied. “I guess it’s not so bad. How long did the captain say the drop is scheduled to take?”

“We should be down within an hour,” Solari said. “Some fall.”

Matthew already felt virtually weightless, and wondered if he would be able to tell when
Hope
expelled the landing craft. The moment would have to be very carefully picked, to minimize the amount of maneuvering that the craft would have to do on its own behalf once it was adrift in the atmosphere.

When the expulsion eventually took place, though, he felt the shift distinctly, and was almost immediately seized by dizzying vertigo. He knew that the reaction was psychosomatic, produced by his imagination rather than any rude agitation of the statocysts in his inner ear, but he couldn’t help gasping. He knew that his adrenaline level must have taken a jolt, but he fought to suppress the flow, to keep it below the threshold at which his internal guardians would take fright. Subjectively, the biofeedback training he had undergone at school was less than forty years behind him. It should still have been second nature even though he’d never had much call to test its limits while he was on Earth, but exercising self-control seemed to be a struggle now.

“Are you okay, Matt?” Solari said again.

Matthew knew that the policeman was seeking reassurance on his own behalf, but he certainly did not begrudge it. “Fine,” he said. “You?”

“It’s not so bad. A roller-coaster freak wouldn’t think twice about it. Never liked them myself. Too much imagination, I guess. Saw too many traffic accidents before robotization became compulsory—and too many afterward, come to think of it.”

Matthew had been frozen down while the debate about the right to drive had still been fierce. He had even taken part in televised debates in which spokesmen for the drivers’ lobby had argued that robotization would only make “joyriders” and “highwaymen” more reckless, as well as turning them into criminals. He had only seen the victims of traffic accidents on film, but he had not needed any more intimate contact to make him nervous.

“There’ll be fresh air waiting for us at the other end,” he said, by way of building morale. “Fresh-ish anyway, once our suits have filtered it. There’ll be open sky and things like trees, and hills and a river. Not unlike home, as seen though lilac-tinted spectacles, with gravity just a fraction less than normal. Better than that damned ship with its twisting corridors and off-color lights and green-tinted crew.”

“Perfect,” Solari said drily. “Pity they won’t be pleased to see us, isn’t it? Well, maybe they’ll be glad to see
you
—and I’ve had plenty of practice bearing bad news to victims and staring down the hostility of suspects. It’ll be home-dyed purple, like you say. I think I could get used to weightlessness, you know, if all I had to do in zero-gee was lie down. It’s the clumsiness that I hate.”

“Sure. This is okay. I can even bear to think about what’s really happening. Do you think we’ve hit the atmosphere yet?”

“No idea.” After a pause, Solari continued: “This is what we came for, isn’t it. I almost forgot that, you know, with all this stuff about the murder and the revolution. It was only a few days ago, subjectively speaking, but that long gap’s still
there
. I lost touch a little, with the motives that brought me here. This was what it was all about: the chance to shuttle down to a brand new world, to have a second chance, to have a hand in starting something momentous. Everything that happened to us till now was just a prelude to this moment. We’re both the same age now, you know, give or take a couple of months, even though we were born years apart. Forty-eight years of active life from the moments of our birth to this one. Forty-eight years and fifty-eight light-years. We wanted a new start, and this is it. Ararat, Tyre, whatever … this is
it
. The rest is just so much trivia. I’ve been falling since the moment I was born; this is just the landing phase.”

It was an oddly poignant speech, and an effective one. It reminded Matthew of his own reasons for being here—reasons that had somehow been shunted aside by the tide of information that had deluged him since the moment of his awakening. It reminded him that this was supposed to be the turning point of his life, an end and a beginning. Until he had quit
Hope
he had still been trapped by the hard and soft artifices of his old life, but now, cocooned though he was in artifacts of similar provenance, he was breaking free. When he emerged from his chrysalis onto the surface of the new world he would be a new being. This was, as Solari said, merely the landing phase of a fall that had begun the moment he was born. Seen from the viewpoint of the present, his old life had been something he was passing through, on the way to
this
.

“This is it,” Matthew agreed, echoing Solari’s judgment. “The first footfall of the most prodigious leap in human history.
My
first footfall, anyway. Nothing will ever be the same again, no matter how things work out aboard
Hope
. Humanity is an interstellar species, and you and I are part of the vanguard. Maybe we’re three years behind the first landing, but what’s three years in the cosmic timescale? With luck, you’ll be the first man here to identify and arrest a murderer. There are worse precedents to set.”

“It’s not a matter of luck,” Solari assured him. “It’s a matter of procedure. Procedure and patience.”

They were still falling. They seemed to have been falling for a long time. Matthew wished that he had some way to tell how many minutes had actually passed. He had been given his wrist-unit along with his other personal possessions, and had immediately strapped it on, but he could not look at the face of his watch now. He had not thought to put his goggles on, so that he could summon virtual displays by blinking his eyes.

“Will procedure and patience be enough, given that so much time has passed since the actual event?” Matthew asked, reflexively.

“I have to believe so,” the policeman told him, scrupulously. “I’ve made a good start on the data relayed back by Blackstone and the material already on file. It’s just a matter of following through.”

“You already have a prime suspect?” Matthew asked, surprised that Solari hadn’t seen fit to mention it.

“Not exactly. It doesn’t do to jump conclusions. Guesswork can confuse your objectivity. You start twisting things to fit your hypothesis. Like you, I’d rather none of them was guilty—but I don’t want it to be aliens either. That would be a pity too, maybe the worst scenario of all. We were supposed to meet the alien openhanded, ready to join forces as friends and collaborators.”