Dark Ararat (27 page)

The worst scenario that Matthew could readily imagine was that Alice and Michelle might be whisked away in the tender care of Konstantin Milyukov’s Revolutionary Tribunal while their father was marooned, whether the world on which he was marooned was capable of sustaining human life in the longer term or not—but how could that possibly happen, he asked himself, given Rand Blackstone’s calculations?

Matthew had relaxed considerably now that they were retracing their steps, but that was a mistake. He was still tired, and he had grown used to putting his hand out sideways to rebalance himself and provide a little extra support. While descending from the mound he had been placing it on bare stone, but now they were walking along a narrow path the walls to either side were covered in vegetation. Because he found the feel of the alien “stems” and “leaves” slightly disconcerting, he had developed a subliminal preference for reaching
through
the purple curtain to touch the stone behind it—but it was an unwariness that he quickly came to regret.

It was only out of the corner of his eye that he saw the flicker of movement as a clutch of tentacles began writhing like Medusa’s hair, but the glimpse was enough to flood him with terror.

He snatched his hand away with the utmost urgency—and immediately understood how minutely his autonomic nervous system had been tuned to Earthly conditions. It felt as if his arm had been seized by some alien power and thrown aside. There was no real reason for him to stumble, but the sense of dislocation that suddenly swept over him made it all-but-impossible for him to maintain his stance. He lurched to one side, crashing into the wall opposite the one from which he had removed his hand. He had tripped over his own foot.

While he was cursing volubly Lynn was quick to snatch a long-bladed knife from her belt. She used the blade to part the purple foliage and expose the creature more fully.

Although he was still fighting for balance, Matthew immediately realized how small the monster was by comparison with the one that Rand Blackstone had brought back to the bubble after Maryanne Hyder had been stung. The creature’s body was no bigger than his hand, and was shaped not unlike a hand laid flat, save for the tentacles bedded where the first joint of the middle finger would have been had it actually been a hand. The tentacles themselves were much thinner than a finger; they seemed surprisingly pale—almost translucent—and rather delicate. The flat-worm-like body was a deeper purple than Blackstone’s specimen, and the eyespots were much less prominent.

“It’s okay,” Lynn said. “Even if it had stung you it wouldn’t have been any worse than a bee sting, unless you had a massive allergic reaction.”

“What’s the bloody thing doing lurking in there?” Matthew growled, to cover his embarrassment. “What’s the point of having photosynthetic pigments in your skin if you’re going to skulk in the shadows while the sun’s at zenith?”

“Another good question,” Lynn conceded. “Not hiding from predators, that’s for sure. They don’t seem to have any enemies hereabouts but us.” She let the foliage fall back to its original position and dropped her hand, taking care not to let any part of her surface-suit get into range of the sting-cells. She made no move to capture or kill the creature. “I’m not sure whether their numbers are actually increasing or whether we’re just getting better at spotting them,” she mused.

“I didn’t spot it,” Matthew pointed out, bringing himself upright and looking anxiously at the wall against which he had stumbled. “That was the whole problem.”

Mercifully, there was no sign of any animal life lurking beneath the screen of vegetable flesh—but when he extended his fearful glance to take in the whole of the surrounding terrain he immediately saw the
second
animal he had seen since leaving the bubble that morning: a pair of ratlike eyes staring at him from higher and denser growth. As soon as he met their stare, though, the eyes drew back into the tangled plants. There was only the softest of rustling sounds as the creature’ invisible body slipped swiftly away.

“Did you see
that
?” he demanded.

“Local mammal,” Lynn told him. “Shy, seemingly harmless. A rare sight, though—you’re lucky.”

“Harmless? What about the ones with the hypodermic tongues?”

“None of those sighted in these parts to date,” she assured him. “The local reptile- and mammal-analogues seem to be mostly herbivores, and the ones that aren’t seem to specialize in smaller worms—they wouldn’t go after something like the one you nearly grabbed. They’re too thin to be cuddly, but temperamentally they’re more rabbit and kitten than rat and monkey. They’re curious, but way too nervous to be intrusive. So far, that is—they might get bolder as time goes by. He was purple too, of course, but he’s not out soaking up the sun either. Even the ones that only come out at night are purple, although we think that they only keep chloroplast-substitutes for purposes of cryptic coloration. The medusa is certainly capable of photosynthesizing, but the species doesn’t seem to have any instinctive imperative to make the most of the noonday sun. Unlike our beautiful pea-green boat, which is charging its storage cells as we speak. Odd, isn’t it?”

It
was
odd. Why, Matthew wondered, would animals that could boost their energy supplies by fixing solar energy be hiding in the shadows? Was it just because there were people tramping through their territory, or was there another reason? Earthly herbivores and insectivores were shy for exactly the reason that Lynn had mentioned: they had to keep out of the way of the top predators, and hiding was the strategy they’d adopted. That was precisely the reason why photosynthetic apparatus would be no good to them. If you were the kind of organism that fixed solar energy, you had to be out in the sun, which meant that you had to deter things that wanted to eat you by some other means: thorns or poisons. The slug with the sting-cells had both, after a fashion, but the mammal-analogue with the disconcerting stare apparently had neither. So why were
both
of them purple, and why were both of them skulking in the shadows?

“Do you want to see more?” Lynn asked.

Matthew was very tired by now, as well as a trifle bruised. He was far from certain whether he wanted to take the rest of the grand tour now, even though time was pressing.

“What more have you got?”

She tilted her head thoughtfully. “We’ve got a few trenches,” she said. “Dulcie dug them. Nothing much in them though. We’ve got a few glass artifacts, but they’re back at the bubble—all I can show you here are the holes in the walls they came out of. I can take you along the other paths, if you like, but now that you’ve had the best view the rest might seem anticlimactic. We ought to go down into the fields, I suppose, although there’s not a lot to see with the naked eye but more walls. You might be more interested in Tang’s proteonomic studies—he’s got some recent data that augments and amplifies what Lityansky has, but only slightly.”

What Matthew would have liked to do was to take a walk on his own, in the hope of getting a better feel for the environment, but he wasn’t sure that he was up to it. It wasn’t just the problems caused by the necessity of readjusting to 0.92 Earth-normal gravity; the closeness of his encounter with the stinging worm had reminded him that there were dangers here to which he was not yet properly alert.

“All in all,” he decided, aloud, “Lunch seems like a good idea.”

“Right,” Lynn said. “You’ll probably find your appetite running away with you a bit for the first few days, but once the awful tedium of the food becomes obvious to your stomach it’ll lose its enthusiasm. Are you okay?”

“As well as can be expected,” Matthew told her. She nodded, as if she knew that he wasn’t just talking about his physical condition. She knew as well as he did that he’d been unceremoniously tossed into the deep end of this particular pool, without the benefit of swimming lessons. She didn’t seem to resent the time she’d had to spend showing him the view from the city; he was a new face as as well as an old one, a welcome distraction from the work routines she’d established since accepting the posting. She too was doing as well as could reasonably be expected.

“It’s a fabulous discovery,” she said, quietly, as she began to lead the way back to the bubble. “Even more fabulous, in a way, than the world itself. We’re entitled to be disappointed, I think, that the principle of convergent evolution didn’t hold up better at the genomic level—it would make things
so
much easier if the local life were DNA-based—but we’re surely entitled to be delighted as well as astounded by the fact that it held up so well at the level of actual organisms. There were
men
here, Matthew. I don’t think any of us, here or at the other bases, has really been able to take the enormity of that fact aboard. This was a city, which makes them civilized men. Whatever happened to them, they were
here
… and so are we.”

Matthew could see what she was getting at. Across the void, across the centuries, two sentient, intelligent, civilized species—two sentient, intelligent, civilized
humanoid
species—had come into such close proximity that one was now aware of the other. They had not yet contrived to meet, or to touch, but even if one of them did turn out to be extinct, it had become known to the other in spite of that fact. At the very least, its passing could be mourned, and some of its lessons relearned. That was a matter of importance, no matter how frustrating all the remaining mysteries might be.

“So are we,” Matthew echoed, to show that he understood—and she nodded, to accept his understanding.

TWENTY-TWO

A
fter programming the cooker Matthew sat down at the table with Lynn and Godert Kriefmann. The doctor opened his mouth, presumably to offer news of Maryanne Hyder’s condition, but he closed it again abruptly when Vince Solari came into the room. The temperature was thermostatically controlled, but it seemed to drop a degree anyhow. Matthew noticed that Lynn was clearly discomfited, and realized that she had not been joking when she had confessed her fear that Solari suspected her.

The policeman came to sit beside Matthew. He seemed to be slightly discomfited himself by the reaction his entrance had caused. He leaned toward Matthew in a confidential fashion that was only a trifle overacted. “There’s something I need to show you,” he said.

“Is there time to eat first?” Matthew wanted to know.

“If you like—but it’s important.”

Lynn and the doctor were trying hard not to look as if they were hanging on Solari’s every word, but they weren’t succeeding. Kriefmann looked just as worried as Lynn.

“It’s about Bernal’s murder?” Matthew said, just to make certain.

“Yes.”

Solari’s terseness was obviously intended to display the implication that he didn’t want to say too much in the present company, but Matthew wasn’t at all sure that he wanted to pander to that kind of provocation—or, for that matter, to enter into any kind of apparent conspiracy. There seemed to be way too many conspiracies already festering on and above the new world.

“Do you know who did it?” Matthew demanded.

“Not for certain.” It was another calculated provocation, although he didn’t go so far as to favor anyone with a meaningful look. Matthew began to feel just as uncomfortable as his two companions.

“Where?” Matthew asked, anxious to have done with the conversation.

“Outside. I’ll take you.”

Matthew knew that Solari had been at the crime scene for most of the morning. He couldn’t imagine that there would be any useful forensic evidence left after a week of imperfect weather, but Solari obviously thought that he had found something significant—something that he wanted to talk over with the only person on the Base who couldn’t possibly have committed the murder.

“Okay,” Matthew said, brusquely. “Give me twenty minutes. Are you eating?”

Solari shook his head. “I took a packed lunch with me,” he said. “Thought I might be gone all day—didn’t expect to find anything so soon.”

Matthew turned to the doctor and said: “How’s Maryanne?”

“Better,” Kriefmann told him. “She won’t be running, skipping or jumping for a couple of days, but she’ll be able to sit up in bed, read, even answer stupid questions….” The final remark was obviously slanted toward Solari.

“I met one of the monsters just now,” Matthew reported. “Just a little one. Lurking in the vegetation—odd, that, for a creature able to fix solar energy, with no apparent natural enemies in the vicinity.”

“Its instincts probably can’t figure out that it’s in a safe area,” Kriefmann pointed out, grateful for the distraction. “Maybe it won’t be safe for long—if the critters really are becoming more common, the predators will begin to move in soon enough.”

“I’ve only seen pictures of the predators,” Matthew said. “Things like big rats with crocodile snouts and things like frilly lizards. Have you ever seen anything like that in the flesh?”

“Nothing particularly scary,” Kriefmann told him. “There are lizards up here, but they mostly stick to the treetops. Mammal-equivalents too, but mostly herbivores and moppers-up of little worms. The serious hunters only come out at night, though, so there might be more around than we suppose. By day, the ruins seem unusually peaceful by comparison with Earthly subtropics. According to the evidence gathered by the flying eyes things are busier downriver—but that may be an illusion. It may be our presence that’s scaring the wildlife away. A pity, if so. There are lots of worms, of every size imaginable, but worms don’t hum like flies or sing like birds. It’s noisier as well as more crowded downriver, so I’m told. More species down there use sound signals.”

While Matthew collected his meal, Lynn Gwyer asked Solari where he had worked back on Earth. Having already heard the story, Matthew felt free to concentrate on his food. This was a prepackaged meal sent down with him in the shuttle, so it didn’t have the slightly offensive taste and texture of the locally extracted manna substrate, but it was as bland and unappetizing as the meals he’d had on
Hope
. The colonists had food technology that would allow them to do better in time, but they were obviously still thinking in stern utilitarian terms. Matthew didn’t doubt that the wheat-manna pancakes and thinly sliced synthetic vegetables would serve his nutritional needs, but he couldn’t help wondering whether the humans on the surface might have felt slightly more welcome here if they’d paid more attention to matters of aestheticization.