Dark Ararat (42 page)

Droplets from the almighty splash she made would probably have dashed against Matthew’s face had the movement of the basket not become so wild. He ducked down and did what he could to protect his injured arm as it threatened to dash him against the rock face. He sat on the control box, and his coccyx managed to do what his thumb had not. The cable groaned as the basket tried to spin, and suddenly jerked free—but only for a moment. It only dropped him two or three meters before it was snagged again.

When he came back to his feet Matthew saw Dulcie’s head in the water, well clear of the cataract, and saw that she was as safe as could be expected. He could no longer see Lynn Gwyer, but that was presumably because she had attained the purple shore and was even now pulling herself back on to dry land.

Ike was still standing, still using the dead chain saw as a crude device for sweeping long flat worms and bulkier creatures this way and that, but not making much of a difference to the sum of the confusion. He did not seem to have been stung, as yet.

Now that he was using his weight to quell the swinging of the basket rather than to increase it, Matthew was quite prepared to let it bump against the cliff face, provided that it did so without bruising him. He wanted to steady it sufficiently to let fly with the rifle, not because he thought he had the slightest chance of hitting anything but because he wanted to make use of its deterrent clamor if there was any such use to be made.

He fired one shot into the air, holding the gun in his left hand, but he had grossly underestimated the force of the recoil. For a moment he feared that he had lost effective use of both his arms—but his overstrained IT eliminated the pain and no serious physical damage seemed to have been done.

The sound of the gunshot made very little difference to the confusion below, although the more agile of the second-wave invaders did indeed respond to it, several of them deciding that the game was not worth the candle. Unfortunately, that left the tentacled stingers with no obvious target for their armaments but Ike. He was using the chain saw two-handed now, like a broadsword, but his muscles had almost reached the end of their energy reserves and his strokes were becoming slow and ponderous.

“Give it up, Ike!” Matthew shouted to him. “Take to the water!”

The water still appeared to be safe in spite of the turbulence near the cataract and the undertow further away from it, but Matthew could not think highly of his own chances of diving directly into the pool, let alone swimming strongly enough thereafter to steer him out of trouble. He felt that he had only one option before him, which was to slit the fabric of the basket with his knife, if the blade was sharp enough, to turn it into a dangling blanket from whose trailing edge he could hang—two-handed if he could possibly manage it—and then drop to the ground.

It would still be an uncomfortable drop, even if he could manage the preparatory maneuver, but his bootless feet would be slightly cushioned by the biomass that had accumulated on the rocky apron. It seemed to be the only possible way that he was ever going to get down. But
when
should he attempt it? To do it now seemed dangerously akin to leaping from a frying pan into a fire.

Ikram Mohammed had not taken his advice. Whether it was because he had formed a better idea of the situation or because he didn’t think he was a strong enough swimmer, he had decided to go the other way, through the remaining bushes and into the shelter of the grass canopy. By going that way, he had avoided the necessity of dropping the chain saw, and he had even managed to select a route that took him to the particular supply dump that held the fuel necessary to give its motor a new lease of life.

Matthew knew that Ike had got out in one piece when he heard the power tool’s roar again, By that time, Dulcie was also out of view, and he felt awkwardly alone.

Down below, the “killer anemones” seemed to be in the process of taking possession of the battlefield, although a few reptile-analogues were still prepared to dispute it. The tentacled slugs were moving back and forth with considerable speed and purpose, apparently mopping up the awful mass of pulverized branches, spilled boatfood and sliced flesh with an appetite that was positively awesome. The stench was appalling. Matthew decided that any plans for further descent ought to be put on hold for quite some time, if not indefinitely. He waited, forcing himself to watch even though the spectacle was so appalling. He chided himself for having lulled himself into the tacit expectation that this seemingly quiet world was incapable of producing events as ferocious and as feverish as this one. He chided himself too for having provided the probable trigger when he carelessly allowed the box of biomotor-fuel to tumble over the edge.

It occurred to Matthew eventually that there was something he could and ought to be doing even while he was stuck in a basket halfway down a cliff. He took his phone from his belt and pressed the button that would send out Dulcie’s code signal.

She answered immediately.

“It’s Matthew,” he said. “The worst seems to be over, but you might be better to stay where you are for a while. The stinging slugs will probably disperse again, but not for quite some time. I’ll let you know if it begins to look safe before nightfall.”

“I’m with Lynn,” Dulcie reported. “She sprained an ankle in the shallows, but we both got out of the water okay. We’re only a few hundred meters downstream, but it would probably take us a while to get back in any case. We don’t even have a machete to help us through the undergrowth.”

Without breaking the connection Matthew signaled Ike and repeated his estimation of the situation.

“I’m okay,” Ike assured him, after switching off the chain saw. “I was lucky back there. The stupid way I went about things I should have been stung half-a-dozen times. This is a weird place, and the light’s none too good further in, but I’ll stay close to the shafts of sunlight so that I don’t get lost. I’m sure that I can navigate my way back when I have to, even if it gets dark. I don’t know which of us is going to climb the cliff to free up the cable mechanism, Matthew, but it could be a long walk to the nearest spot where an ascent looks feasible. Shall I try while the light lasts?”

“No,” Matthew said. “I’m safe here. Don’t push your luck too far. If you can, it might be a good idea to link up with Lynn and Dulcie. They could probably do with a little help from the chain saw—and you’re right about the light lasting. These short days are getting to be a real pain.”

Matthew knew that he ought to report the incident to Tang and Godert Kriefmann, but he decided that it had stopped far enough short of a disaster to make the call urgent. The sun was already hovering above the western horizon, and he wanted to use the last of the light to take a longer look at the nauseating spectacle beneath him, in case there was anything more to be learned from it.

If there was, it wasn’t obvious. The tide of leechlike worms that had started the mad race had turned so comprehensively that no living specimen could be seen. Of the other creatures, only the tentacled worms lingered now, seemingly proud of their unchallenged possession of the arena. One by one, their remaining competitors had given up, leaving them to their insistent crisscrossing of the red-augmented purple mess that had pooled around and liberally splashed the bases of the various piles of human imported goods.

The creatures showed no inclination to climb the steeper heaps, and Matthew realized that if Ike and Lynn had leapt on top of the two of the sturdier piles of goods in order to stay out of harm’s way, the whole incident might have passed with far less bloodshed and somewhat less fuss. There was no evidence that the first wave of worms had been dangerous; their attempts to climb the legs of their self-appointed adversaries might have been mere instinct, devoid of any aggressive intent. On the other hand, Matthew could sympathize with Lynn’s and Ike’s desire not to take that chance.

Ike called him back as dusk fell. “It’s okay,” he reported. “I’ve got Lynn and Dulcie through the tangled stuff—the ground’s clearer out here. I got close enough to one of the dumps to grab a bubble-tent and a couple of flashlights, so we should be safe enough once the fabric’s set. If you can bear to spend the night where you are, we ought to be able to get you down in the morning. I’ll report our situation to the Base and the ship to save everyone else the embarrassment—Milyukov might be tempted to gloat if it came from you.”

“Thanks,” Matthew said, knowing that Milyukov wasn’t the only one who might derive a certain grim satisfaction from knowing that he was stuck halfway down a cliff, suspended over the scene of a wildlife massacre. He took his phone out of the loop as soon as he’d ascertained that all was as well as could be expected with Lynn and Dulcie.

By the time the twilight had faded, he had reconciled himself to spending the night where he was.

What they had just witnessed, Matthew decided, had to be a feeding frenzy. Something in the lightly converted boatfood had sent out an olfactory signal powerful enough to attract every leechlike worm for kilometers around. The spilled sap and raw flesh of the vegetation cleared by the two chain saws must also have advertised its availability as food. The larger creatures would probably have followed the leechlike worms in any case, either aiming for the same target or for the worms themselves, but the intensity of the second wave must have been further increased when Ike and Lynn continued to deploy the chain saws, adding a rich leavening of worm blood to the irresistible feast they had accidentally laid on.

If the NV in Bernal’s final jottings did refer to “nutritional versatility,” what he had just seen might qualify as an admittedly extreme example of nutritional versatility. It might be evidence of a remarkable tendency to overreact when an unusually abundant food supply became suddenly available. If so, there must be a natural trigger that corresponded to the one accidentally released by the invaders.

On Earth, feeding frenzies were correlated with the spawning of ocean creatures. Certain reproductive strategies, involving the mass production of young among whom less than one in a thousand could be expected to survive, were associated with rare but avidly anticipated natural banquets. That might add up, if the ER to which Bernal’s NV had been speculatively correlated really was “exotic reproduction.” There was no evidence, thus far, that any of the new world’s versatile animals used mass-production reproductive strategies—but given that there was scant evidence, as yet, of
any
reproductive strategies other than modified binary fission, the possibility had to be considered open.

“Well,” Matthew murmured, aloud, “we certainly know how to make a entrance, don’t we?”

THIRTY-TWO

T
he basket was not a comfortable place to bed down, but it could have been far worse. It was big enough to allow Matthew to stretch himself out, almost as if he were in a hammock, and he felt reasonably safe. Nor was his arm as troublesome as it might have been, considering the miscellaneous stresses to which he had subjected it. Even so, he could not sleep. The discrepancy between Tyre’s twenty-one-and-a-half-hour days and his Earth-trained circadian rhythms had finally caught up with him. He huddled where he was, becoming increasingly miserable, listening to the many sounds of the alien night.

The area in which Ike and Lynn had piled all the expedition’s stores and equipment was quieter than the grassland itself—presumably because the silent stinging slugs were still around, acting as a powerful deterrent to the approach of other creatures—but he was close enough to the high canopy to provide an audience for an entire orchestra of fluters, clickers, and whistlers. The sounds were oddly blurred, partly by echoes from the cliff face behind him but also by strange refractory effects within the canopy itself.

He was reluctant to disturb his companions, lest their exertions should have left them direly in need of sleep, but he was considering calling the base, or even the ship, when his own phone beeped. He snatched it up gratefully.

“Sorry to disturb you, Matthew,” Lynn Gwyer said, in a low voice. “Ike and Dulcie are asleep but my ankle feels
wrong
in spite of the IT anaesthetic. I figured that your shoulder might be just as bad.”

“I can’t sleep either,” Matthew assured her. “Insufficient exertion, I guess. Is the ankle very bad?”

“Not really, I stepped in a hole while climbing out of the shallows—stupid thing to do, but Dulcie came to help me. It’s one of those awkward situations where your IT’s programmed to force you to rest up, so it lets the pain through if I try to walk. I’ll be okay in a couple of days. Ike and Dulcie will be able to put the boat together, if they get the chance. We really screwed things up, didn’t we? Did everything wrong we possibly could.”

“It wasn’t that bad,” Matthew said. “I suppose, with the aid of hindsight, that the first person down should have lit a fire on the bank to deter visitors. Maybe you should have used the flame-thrower instead of the chain saws—but how could we know? If you can unpack the flamethrower tomorrow, without getting too close to the killer anemones, you should be able to scare them away in a matter of minutes—or roast them, if they’re stubborn.”

“They took us by completely by surprise,” Lynn lamented. “We should have been on our guard. We knew that the experience we brought down from the hills might be worthless here—but who could have expected anything to happen so soon and so fast? How much stuff has been damaged, do you think? Will we be able to carry on, or do we have to hang about waiting to be rescued?”

“There’s not that much damage,” Matthew assured her. “As far as I could see, the big worms were only interested in the spilled boatfood, and most of the things that came after them were only interested in them. The stingers are omnivores, but they’ve got plenty of vegetable matter to gorge themselves on. They won’t hurt the boat itself or the equipment.”

“I’m sure we made it worse by cutting up the worms and exposing their soft centers,” Lynn told him. “Mercifully, there weren’t any sharks in the water when I made my dive. I suppose it was only to be expected that the scent of blood would attract all kinds of nasties, but we weren’t thinking. We overreacted.”