Dark Ararat (34 page)

Rand Blackstone made a considerable fuss about presenting his rifle to Matthew. “I won’t need it up here,” he said. “You might.”

“Why give it to me rather than one of the others?” Matthew asked.

“I used to watch you on TV,” the Australian told him. “I could see that you got out and about at lot, sometimes in dangerous places. You didn’t live in a lab like Ike or Lynn. Besides which, I’ve seen the others try to shoot. Your reflexes may not be attuned yet, but you can’t be any worse than them. I ought to be going with you, of course—but Delgado was insistent that he needed educated eyes. Mine didn’t qualify, apparently.”

“Nor would mine,” Vince Solari told him, belatedly beginning the work of cultivating a sense of camaraderie with his new neighbors.

“Good luck,” was all that Godert Kriefmann said, but Tang was more forthcoming.

“I hope you have a productive journey,” the biochemist said. “If you can’t bring back the answers to the big questions, I’m sure you’ll make good progress on some of the smaller ones.”

Matthew took Vince Solari aside so that he could speak to him in confidence: “Is there anything you want to tell me?” he asked.

Solari was still sulking. “No,” he said. “We can always compare notes by phone, if necessary.”

“While we’re still sailing down the river, at least,” Matthew said. “Once we head off into the glassgrass forest, it might become more difficult. If our beltphones don’t have enough power to force a signal through the canopy that’s strong enough for the comsats to unscramble, they might not have much sideways range either. At least one of us will stay with the boat at all times, but keeping in touch with them might become a problem.”

“Have you complained to Milyukov about that?” Solari said. “It seems stupid to send you on an exploratory mission without adequate equipment.”

“Of course I did,” Matthew replied, sourly. “He assured me that better equipment was on standby, ready to drop at a moment’s notice in any emergency. I think he’d rather we didn’t stray too far into terra incognita. He’d rather we didn’t find anything too exotic while he’s still trying to reach a satisfactory agreement with the people at Base One, and doesn’t want to give broadcasting equipment to anyone down here in case they start putting out propaganda for Tang’s party. I’m sorry you didn’t get to arrest your murderer.”

“I will,” Solari assured him. He seemed more confident of that now than he had the previous evening. “And by the time you get back, I’ll have some kind of due process in place to carry the case forward.”

“So you are convinced that it’s one of my fellow expeditionaries.”

“Absolutely—but that should be the least of
your
worries. If you get through the canyons and past the cataract, you’ll still have all the unknown perils in front of you. If the plain is a potential death trap, I hope you’ll be quick enough on the uptake not to spring it.”

“Thanks,” Matthew said, drily.

After that, there was only the farewell waving to be done. Blackstone was the only one of the people left behind on the shore who was an enthusiastic waver, but that was probably because no one else cared to compete with the majestic sweeps of his hat.

The biomotor was silent, and it seemed at first that they were simply drifting on a leisurely current. Once they were comfortably set in the middle of the watercourse, though, Matthew became aware of the fact that
Voconia
’s hull wasn’t rigid, and that it was undergoing slight but distinct undulations in a horizontal plane.

“It’s
swimming
!” he said to Ikram Mohammed, who had joined him in the bow to watch the water go by.

“Not really,” Ike told him. “It’s just making minimal adjustments to reduce flow-resistance. Swimming would have required more elaborate musculature and more energy-rich food. Even if the fuel-consumption equations had added up better we’d have had to go to some trouble to rig the converters to produce the stuff. The kit we’ve got isn’t fussy, so we’ve been able to put the vegetation we cleared with machetes and chain saws straight into the machine for minimal treatment. It saved us the trouble of amassing huge waste heaps.”

Matthew leaned over the rail and peered at the water, hoping to catch sight of a few native swimmers whose fuel-consumption equations added up better than
Voconia
’s, but the sunlight reflected from the wave-stirred surface made it impossible to see much below the surface.”

“If we hit quiet water around dusk you might be able to see top-feeders at work,” Ike told him. “Otherwise, they’re very discreet. I tried fishing with a rod and line back at the base, but I must have been using the wrong bait. We’ve deployed a couple of trail nets, but they didn’t pick up much on the test runs. You’ll stand a better chance of spotting interesting wildlife if you scan the vegetation on the bank. You’ll see lizards, mammals. This green color seems garish to us, but it doesn’t seem to alarm the natives unduly, even though the clever ones do have color vision. The local species don’t seem to go in for warning coloration—camouflage is much more popular.”

Matthew discovered soon enough that Ike was right. It was possible to catch glimpses of animal life at the water’s edge, but glimpses were all he caught. There were no hawks circling in the sky, but there were presumably sharp-eyed predators lurking in the abundant undergrowth, ever-ready to creep up on any prey that displayed itself too flagrantly in the open. As time went by he became more expert in picking out the particular purples displayed by the scales of reptile-analogues. Once or twice he thought he recognized the darker shades of purple favored by the fur of mammal-equivalents, but he couldn’t be sure. The hectic background was too confusing to permit much certainty of perception.

After a while he tried to stop sorting out shades of purple and concentrated on trying to locate black dots that might be staring eyes, but that only made it slightly easier to pick out the bigger reptilians. As Ike had predicted, the lizard-analogues seemed quite unworried by the passage of the green boat, although many of them turned their heads in what seemed to be a negligent manner to watch it drift downriver. Matthew couldn’t help wondering whether they were at all curious about its nature or origins, and whether it would be any easier to read the expressions of the mammal-analogues if and when he got a chance to do so.

Matthew clung to his position in
Voconia
’s bow for more than two Earthly hours, determined to obtain a better sense of the nature of the riverside forests and their inhabitants. The shallows, mudflats and occasional marshlands were full of broad-leaved plants that would not have seemed un-Earthlike had it not been for their color, but the firmer ground was more exotically populated.

The prejudice that the local dendrite species seemed to have against orthodox branching-patterns seemed even more obvious now than it had when he had walked from the shuttle to the bubble-complex. The stems of these plants always grew in clusters rather than singly, usually coiling about one another. When they subdivided they did so into further clusters of intricately entangled helices. The resulting bundles were obviously strong, because the biggest dendrites could attain heights of twenty meters in spite of their lack of stoutness, but the competition between individuals and species seemed to be intense: the resultant crowding prevented all but the most powerful individuals from gaining any considerable dominance. The tallest crowns were the most lavishly equipped in terms of bright fans and other leaf substitutes, and it was also the tallest structures that supported the broadest globular structures, some of them as large as basketballs.

Matthew checked the data that had been downloaded into his notepad to see whether anyone had contrived to determine the nature of the globules, but most of the data related to the easily gatherable specimens that grew on the tips of more modest structures. Several observers had noted that DNA-analyses revealed that some of the globules were parasites with radically different chimerical compositions, although they were not obviously different in appearance from the rest. Many reports had recorded the impression that the globules were reminiscent of eggs in that they had unusually thick and resilient vitreous teguments protecting unusually soft and fluid inner tissues, but no one had yet been able to determine whether they had a reproductive function. Globules subjected to experimental “planting” had not so far contrived to generate new dendrites or anything else. In spite of this lack of success some of the experimenters clung hard to the supposition that they
must
be reproductive structures of some kind, but that no one had yet found the trigger that would cause them to “germinate.” One dutiful statistician—a crewman, not a groundling—who had taken the trouble to collate all the available data about the shape and size of “bulbous protuberant apical structures” had discovered that “ovate ellipsoids” were nearly twice as common as “oblate spheroids,” and that 70 percent of the structures that exhibited “evident quasiequatorial constrictions” also had “bipolar spinoid extensions.”

All in all, Matthew decided, the vast majority of the structures seemed to be no more exotic than a coconut, and considerably less weird than a pineapple. He went back to his patient search for signs of animal-equivalents. He was now quite adept at spotting lizard-analogues, even when their long bodies remained quite motionless, but his eye was continually attracted by subtle movements that turned out not to be animal movements at all. He began to realize for the first time that the plants clustered at the waterside were considerably more active than those he had seen in and around the ruins.

While he had been walking from the shuttle to the bubble-domes of Base Three it had been the odd quality of the background noise that had seemed to be the most alien component of the environment, but the lapping of the water against
Voconia
’s flanks seemed much more familiar. The movements of the bundled stems and their superficial plant-parasites now seemed the creepiest subliminal impression that his mind was picking up. He wondered whether the subtle not-quite-swimming deformations of the craft in which he was traveling helped him notice similar inclinations among the elements of the forest.

Eventually, Matthew became uneasily conscious of the fact that the relationship between the faint breezes that stirred the riverside canopy and the responses of the “leaves” was by no means a simple matter of pressure-and-deformation. But why, he asked himself, were the twisted stems, their radar-dish plates, and their coquettish fans moving so purposefully? Presumably, it was to catch the light more efficiently as the sun tracked across the sky. Why, then, did the movements seem so capricious and disordered? The competition between the plants was so intense that they had probably been forced to make more strenuous efforts to harvest their share of solar energy than their Earthly analogues—but was that the only reason for their subtle fidgeting? They had been guided by natural selection to make use of certain animal tricks—in much the same way, he could not help thinking, that the
Voconia
had been engineered to combine plant- and animal-inspired devices—but how versatile was that legerdemain?

In a way, he thought, the real wonder was that there was such a clear distinction on Earth between vegetable “creepers” and animal “creepy-crawlers.” When Pliny the elder had assembled his classic
Natural History
he had been unable to resist the imaginative allure of hypothetical creatures that combined the utilitarian attributes of stems and worms—so was it not surprising, in a way, that natural selection had been so firm in its actual discriminations? Was there not a certain
common sense
in the refusal of Tyre’s ecosphere to maintain such a stark apartheid? Why should Earthly plants be so restricted in their powers of movement, and Earthly animals so determined to place photosynthesis under rigid
taboo
? Why should Earth’s entire ecosphere be so determined to use a single coding molecule, when it was obvious
now
that there was a much greater range of opportunities lurking in the exotic hinterlands of organic chemistry?

The likely answer, of course, as Ike Mohammed had pointed out with brutal simplicity, was that the relevant fuel-consumption equations had never quite added up. Here, the sums had been done differently. Was the arithmetic more elegant or more efficient? Probably not—although the apparent lack of biodiversity among the vertebrate-analogues and arthropod-analogues ought not to be taken as a reliable indicator. But it was probably no
less
elegant, once one grasped the fundamental aesthetics. It would be foolish to assume that either ecosphere could be judged significantly superior, even on the simplest of comparative scales.

The more eyes Matthew noticed—especially when he began to glimpse pairs of forward-looking eyes, some of which presumably belonged to monkey-analogues—the more convinced he became that while he was studying the alien world, it was studying him. It was impossible to guess how much intelligence there was in the observing eyes—although he had no doubt that there was far less than there was behind his own—but it was observation nevertheless. The new world might not be alarmed by the presence of aliens, but it was sensitive to their arrival and continued presence; the invaders were not being
ignored
.

“You’ll see a little more when the sun’s not so bright,” said a voice from behind him, breaking into his reverie, “but you won’t
hear
a lot more until it’s dark. Rather frustrating, that.”

Matthew turned to look at Dulcie Gherardesca. “It’s the same in most places on Earth,” he reminded her. “Sensible animals only come out to play in the dark. Daylight’s for the primary producers and lumpen herbivores, darkness for the nimbler herbivores and the cleverer hunters. Except for birds. And people.”

“The people of the city were daylight-lovers too,” she said. “They were artists, after a fashion, as well as technologists. Artists and artificers have to work in the light, at least to begin with. The cave paintings our remotest ancestors made were celebrations of their mastery of firelight: the power to banish darkness. The Tyrian city-dwellers didn’t have that. They never domesticated fire, so they had to work in daylight.”