Dark Ararat (25 page)

“Emortality’s not immortality,” Lynn reminded him. “Things die here. There’s eating—herbivorous
and
carnivorous. There’s predation and parasitism. Lots of death—but the organisms that don’t die may not be existentially stuck the way we are. They may be able to go on renewing themselves and changing themselves indefinitely—although it’ll take a long time to prove it.”

“Maybe Vince’s werewolves weren’t such a silly idea after all,” Matthew said. “Maybe you can sell him on the idea that it was a werewolf-analogue that killed Bernal. Not exactly a healthy scenario for a first contact, though, is it? I see what you mean about the bad alternative and the worse one. I can see why you didn’t want to address the question, and don’t want Vince to address it either.”

“That’s not fair, Matthew,” the bald woman said, defensively. “It’s the
world
that’s the important puzzle. That’s the mystery we need to solve—because that’s the mystery that could be the death of every last one of us, if we don’t solve it.”

“I know that,” Matthew assured her. “So let’s get on with the grand tour, shall we?”

TWENTY

W
hile waiting to shuttle down, Matthew had studied most of the available film of the ruined city, using the VE-hood above his bed to take a virtual tour along the same route that Lynn Gwyer was following, so he was now beset by an eerie feeling that he was acting out a half-forgotten dream. He’d had similar experiences back on Earth, when he’d visited established tourist attractions in VE in order to work out exactly what he wanted to see when he got to the real thing. He was already familiar with the ways in which real tours expanded the horizons of virtual ones, offering a better appreciation of size and context.

The film clips had, of course, concentrated on those parts of the city that had been partially cleared of the enshrouding vegetation. It was not until he saw the remainder in all its glory that Matthew realized why the flying eyes entrusted with the work of mapping and surveying the new world had not been able to pick it out for more than a year. So completely were the stone walls overgrown, overlaid, and obscured that it had taken a revelatory freak of chance to provide the first evidence of artifice.

Matthew soon came to understand, as Lynn led him over the ridge separating the Base Three bubbles from the nearest wall of the city, that even after a further year-and-a-half of searching, there might easily be other structures of a similar kind as yet undiscovered.

“Your methods of clearance seem to have been rather brutal,” Matthew commented, as he followed the makeshift path.

“There were only four of us at first,” Lynn reminded him. “We would have liked more reinforcements, but Milyukov wouldn’t send them. He blamed the trouble aboard the ship, but I think he was afraid we’d find what we were looking for. If we do find intelligent aliens, Tang’s case will look a lot stronger. Milyukov wants to delay any discovery until he’s settled his domestic difficulties, and he’s campaigning hard for the conference at Base One to come up with a vote in favor of staying put. So we didn’t really have much choice. We moved on from machetes to chain saws in a matter of days, then figured we might as well go the whole hog and started blasting away with flamethrowers. If we’d had any authentic archaeologists to help us out they’d have fainted with horror, but Dulcie’s not that delicate.

“When we get up to the top you’ll be able to see the outlines of the lesser walls, but you won’t be able to make out their true extent and shape. Even with flamethrowers we haven’t been able to clear more than a tiny fraction of the whole array. The distinction between changes in the contours of the hills and the artificial constructs is hard to see, even with a practiced eye.”

As they toiled up the slope, following a pathway that was far from straight, Matthew’s limbs soon began to ache with the effort. It seemed that every time he came close to a crucial adjustment to circumstance he immediately began to put a renewed strain on his long-frozen muscles. Lynn was moving slowly, continually pausing to lend him a helping hand whenever he allowed his unsteadiness to show, but he knew that he had to make his own way.

At least the stress of climbing distracted him from the ever-present unease caused by the fact that his reflexes were slightly out of tune with the gravity-regime. That would doubtless surface again when he got down to lab work, or when someone pressed him into an educative ballgame.

Further distraction was provided by an increasingly keen awareness of the inadequacy of his eyes. As Lynn had warned, it was easy enough to see where human hands had been at work peeling vegetation away from the walls and burning back the debris, but where there had been no obvious interference it was very difficult to see the evidence of nonhuman work beneath the camouflage of nature.

Wherever patches of stonework had actually been cleared their artificial nature was starkly obvious, but where the purple plants still overlay them the alienness of the life-forms confused all earthly expectations. There were organisms analogous to lichens, to fungi, to mosses, and to creepers, as well as the curious dendrites, but all the appearances were deceptive and that deceptiveness swallowed up every sign that humanlike hands had ever been at work.

As they climbed higher more territory became visible, at least periodically, but the panorama remained utterly confusing to the naked eye, at least until Matthew glimpsed something that stuck out like the proverbial sore thumb.

“What’s
that
!” he demanded, pointing.

Lynn chuckled. “That’s ours,” she said. “It’s the cabin of Bernal’s boat. The lake and the river are still mostly obscured, but you’ll be able to see the lake and the lower part of the watercourse from the tower.”

“Whose idea was it to paint the damn thing
pea green
?” Matthew demanded. “I never thought of Bernal as an Edward Lear fan.”

“It won’t be going all the way to the sea,” she reminded him, to indicate that she understood the reference, “and it certainly won’t be manned by an owl and a pussycat, no matter who gets the final berth. It isn’t painted—that’s chlorophyll, to feed the biomotor.”

“It’s powered by a biomotor? Not built for speed, then.”

“It has a conventional engine too, but there’s a fuel problem. Bernal figured that we wouldn’t really need the inorganic engine till the return journey, when we’ll be coming upstream. We wouldn’t actually have to carry a huge stock of fuel, given that we’ve got converters that can process local vegetation into a usable alcohol mix, but gathering material to feed the converter takes a lot of work and the converter uses up fuel at a fair rate itself. Given that we needed to equip the boat with certain other bioanalogous features, and the desirability of a fail-safe backup, Bernal decided that it would be best to double up. He was careful to point out that it’s in keeping with local traditions too.”

Matthew was quick to pick up on that point. “Bernal was trying to figure out the logic of nutritional versatility—the lack of distinction between fixers and eaters. So he wanted to use the boat to … to what, exactly? To make a point? To explore a hypothesis?”

“His argument was that if so many of the local invertebrates can function as plants or as animals, there must be a reward for versatility. Given that the world itself isn’t very active, and the weather patterns are so benign, he figured that it couldn’t be a response to the inorganic frame. He’d have liked to build a link to the gradual chimerical renewal business, but he couldn’t swallow the notion that emortal animals might be routinely capable of turning into emortal trees—and even if they were, he couldn’t see any reason why the homeobox shouldn’t make chloroplast-analogues for plant forms and get rid of them completely in animal forms. So he—that is, we—figured it had to be something to do with the way the organisms interact with one another. There must be ecosystemic factors of some kind that determine the usefulness of switching back and forth between modes of nourishment on an ad hoc basis: something analogous, however esoterically, to a boat whose energy-requirements change abruptly whenever it switches from going downstream to going upstream. It’s not exactly making a point or exploring a hypothesis … more a sort of heuristic device: an aid to inspiration.”

That was Bernal all over, Matthew thought. He had always been a lateral thinker, ceaselessly trying to find increasingly odd angles from which to approach intractable problems. He was—had been—exactly the kind of man to think it desirable to make an odyssey into alien territory in a vehicle that was “in keeping with local traditions.” Bernal had not recorded any of this in his notepad—but it was exactly the kind of mental exercise that was difficult to commit to text, even as a series of doodles. Bernal must have spent the last few months of his life trying to figure out what analogues of “upstream” and “downstream” the local ecosystems possessed, whose subtle effects favored versatility in so many of the local organisms.

“Instead of seasons,” Matthew murmured.

“What?” Lynn queried.

“Just a stray thought,” Matthew said, slowly. He had to take a deep breath before carrying on, but talking was a lot less energy-expensive than climbing and he certainly didn’t want to move on too quickly. “On Earth,” he said, pensively, “the versatility of organisms is mostly a series of responses to seasonal variations. In winter, deciduous trees shed their leaves and some vertebrates hibernate. Most flowering plants and most invertebrate imagos die, leaving their seeds and eggs to withstand the cold spell. Large numbers of species opt for an annual life cycle, because the year-on-year advantages gained thereby far outweigh the problems raised by occasional disruptive ecocatastrophes. There are seasons even in the tropics—dry and rainy—generated by ocean currents.”

“Not here,” Lynn told him, although he’d already noted the fact. “Tyre’s axial tilt is less pronounced, and the ocean is as stable as the atmosphere. That constancy seems to be reflected in the relative lack of biodiversity—and, of course, in the dearth of species with dramatic life cycles, like metamorphic insects. Bernal said it wasn’t quite that simple, though, because of the complicity of ecosystems and their inorganic environment.”

“That’s right,” Matthew agreed. “Ecosystems aren’t helpless prisoners of their inorganic frames. Life manages its own atmosphere; to some extent, it manages its own weather too. The rain that falls on rain forests evaporates from the rain forests in a disciplined fashion—take away the forest and the rain goes too. Here, where the world’s axial tilt is less, seasonal variations would be less extreme anyway, but the ecosphere may well play an active role massaging them into near-uniformity, thus nullifying the kinds of advantages insects and other ephemerae derive from their chimerical life cycles. It’s easy enough to grasp the fact that there’s a whole new ballgame here, with a very different set of constraints and strategic opportunities—but it’s not easy to imagine what they might be. Take winter and summer out of the equation, and what might substitute for them as forces of variation? Is there another kind of cycle, or something much more arbitrary? If there is a cycle, it might take a lot longer than three years to work through—and if there isn’t … how often, and how swiftly, do major changes happen? Confusing as it is,
this
can’t be the whole picture.”

As he voiced the last sentence Matthew drew a wide arc with his right arm, taking in the limited panorama spread out before them and a much greater one whose horizons they were not yet in a position to see.

“Yeah,” said Lynn, quietly. “That’s
exactly
what Bernal sounded like, when he got going. Did you really know him that well, or is it a case of great minds thinking alike?”

“We were two peas in a pod,” Matthew told her, his gaze lingering for a moment longer on the visible fragment of the distant boat. Then he turned away, saying: “Okay, I’m rested. Onward and upward.”

Having visited several of the ancient walled cities of Earth, Matthew had a reasonably good idea of the way in which the scale of cities had shifted with the centuries. His memory retained a particularly graphic image of the Old City of Jerusalem surrounded by its vast sprawl of twentieth-century concrete suburbs. He was not unduly surprised, therefore, to find that what had apparently been the living space of the aliens’ city was mostly compressed into an area not much more than a couple of kilometers square—although the shape of the hills meant that it was anything but square, and only vaguely round.

Like ancient Rome, the city seemed to have been built on seven hills, although the hills were very various in size and reach. Lynn was guiding him toward the summit of the highest of them all. His limbs felt like lead, and he was glad that Rand Blackstone was not present to witness his weakness.

Had they not been walking through the relics of ancient streets the surrounding territory would have yielded much more to Matthew’s enquiring eyes, but they always seemed to be closely surrounded by huge hedgerows that stopped him seeing anything at all except multitudes of purple flaps, fans, spikes, and florets. Eventually, though, they began to climb something that looked like—and presumably was—a flight of ancient steps. It took them to the top of a lumpen mount that must once have been a building of some kind.

Matthew was exceedingly glad to reach the top. He mopped his brow with the back of his right hand, awkwardly conscious of the fact that both the hand and the moist forehead were intangibly encased in false skin.

The sun was high in the sky now, and its glare was uninterrupted by clouds. Although he knew that the faint purpling of the blue sky had nothing to do with ultraviolet light, Matthew could not help feeling that the alien light might somehow be dangerous, and Blackstone’s wide-brimmed hat suddenly seemed far less ridiculous than it had the previous day. But Lynn had no hat, and no hair either, so he was probably being oversensitive.

From the summit of the mound, the extensive vistas surrounding him seemed quite different from the limited ones accessible from the lower vantage point.