Dark Ararat

by Brian Stableford

  “We wouldn’t be here to worry about these guys if they had,” Matthew observed—but he knew that what she was really getting at was that if humans had returned to their hunter-gatherer roots after living for a while in the first cities of Egypt or Sumeria they would probably have died out in the next ecocatastrophe. Even as things were, humankind’s ancestors had squeezed through a desperately narrow population bottleneck.

  Matthew handed back his bowl, having done his best to finish the meal. Dulcie made as if to leave, but he checked her retreat with another question. “When will the boat be finished?” he asked.

  “Tomorrow, or the day after,” she told him. “We could have set out days ago if we’d been prepared to go without the last few frills, but we were instructed to wait for Solari to arrive, so that we could help with his inquiries. Some of us wanted to say no, if only on the grounds that the instruction came from people who had no authority to give us orders, but…. well, we’re just about getting used to the notion that we’re no longer united, even among ourselves. I suppose you want to come with us.”

  “Yes, I do,” Matthew said.

  “I suppose you even think you’re entitled, because you’re Bernal’s substitute.”

  “That too.”

  “But you’ve only been awake four days. You know next to nothing about this world. You’d be a passenger.”

  “Sometimes,” Matthew said, mildly, “a fresh pair of eyes can be useful. Not to mention a fresh mind …”

  “Bullshit,” she said. “Tang has the educated eye, the educated mind. If it were my boat, I’d want him.”

  “And you need an ecologist,” Matthew continued. “All the people I talked to on Hope are too narrowly focused, on scientific and political issues alike. They’re drowning in biochemical data—there’s so much of it, and it’s so resolutely peculiar, that they’ve almost lost sight of the actual living organisms.”

  “That hasn’t happened here,” she snapped back—but then she blinked, and might even have displayed a blush had she not been wearing a surface-suit. “Well,” she conceded, after a pause, “maybe a little. Most of the animals hereabouts are slugs and worms—the mammal-analogues seem to steer clear of the ruins, and the presence of the domes must be even more inhibiting.”

  “I would like to go,” Matthew said, deciding that conciliation might be in order. “But I’d rather do it without upsetting anyone. Can we settle the matter amicably?”

  “I don’t know,” Dulcie admitted. “The crew had the Revolution, but we’re the ones who can’t figure out who owns what and who has the authority to make decisions. Back in the system it was all cut and dried, but even if Shen Chin Che were still running things like the last of the great dictators we’d all have begun to wonder what gave him the right to keep on giving us orders. As things are, we don’t even have anything in place to overthrow. Can you imagine that we were stupid enough, at first, to think that we didn’t need to worry about it—that we were a community of scientists, all working for the common good? It’s taken us three years to begin putting the fundamental apparatus of a democracy in place at Base One—and it’ll be three years too late to command the respect and consent it needs. Whichever way the Base One vote on future policy goes, it’ll just be more poison in the system.”

  “We’re not at Base One,” Matthew pointed out. “Surely the nine of us can settle our differences without going to war.”

  “Better talk to Tang, then,” she said, as she moved toward the door again. “Maybe you can settle it between you—unless Rand wants to have another go at persuading us that the last place should go to the guy with the biggest gun.”

  This time, Matthew let her leave. It seemed to be the diplomatic thing to do. She closed the privacy-curtain behind her. Instead of getting up immediately he flicked the keyboard of Bernal Delgado’s notepad, bringing page after page of field notes to the tiny screen.

  Like most notes designed for purely personal reference, the vast majority of Bernal’s jottings were as gnomic as they were trivial. The computer was host to dozens of other data-fields, but almost all of them would be commonly held stocks and it would take a lot of searching to turn up anything that wasn’t. Matthew played with the keyboard for a few minutes more, but he knew that he was wasting time. He finally gave way to necessity and raised himself from the bed. The surface suit needed to discharge its processed excreta exactly as Matthew would have done had he not been wearing one, so he had to take a few minutes to investigate and use the room’s facilities before leaving.

  When he got out into the corridor he found that he couldn’t remember the way to the communal space at the heart of the bubble, but it only took a few tentative steps to get his bearings. When he arrived, however, the only person present was Dulcie Gherardesca, sitting at a big table. She seemed to be waiting for him, but the expression on her face testified that it was a matter of duty.

  “Godert’s in the lab,” she told him. “The others are all out. Your friend the policeman must have moved on to suspect number three.”

  “His name’s Vincent,” Matthew reminded her. “Vince to his friends. Maybe I should take a look at the boat myself.”

  “There’s time,” she assured him. Her tone was conciliatory now; she seemed to be regretting her slight loss of temper. “Lynn wants to give you the grand tour. The people bringing in the last batch of cargo ought to be back any minute—when they arrive we can all get together. It’ll give us a chance to make a better job of the introductions than we did yesterday. We ought to do that.”

  Matthew sat down opposite her, letting the width of the table symbolize the distance between them. “I don’t mean to get in anyone’s way,” he said, adopting a conciliatory tone himself. “But I really do believe that I’m a better substitute for Bernal than someone from another field. You may know me as a talking head spewing out sound bites for TV, but I’m a first-rate ecologist, just as he was.”

  “I dare say the crew showed you his formal reports,” the anthropologist said, noncommittally.

  “Some,” Matthew admitted. “Andrei Lityansky showed me a vast amount of stuff, far too quickly for me to take it all in. It was all dumped in my own notepad before I got my belt back.”

  “Bernal said that Lityansky’s pretty good, for a space-born who never saw a blade of grass on a heath or a tree in a forest,” Dulcie admitted. “He also said that no matter how good a biochemist might be, he could never begin to understand ecology—which took in Tang as well as Lityansky, I suppose.”

  “He’s right about Lityansky,” Matthew said, carefully.

  “I know. Aboard the ship, everything’s too controlled, too organized, too neat, even after the expectable deterioration and the civil war. There’s not enough chaos, not enough spontaneity—not the right kinds, anyway. Bernal said that if he couldn’t figure out what had happened here, and what was still happening, there was only one man who could. He meant you.”

  “I’m flattered,” Matthew acknowledged, generously, “but I understand your reservations. I didn’t mean to suggest that Lynn, Ike, and you weren’t competent to interpret whatever you might find downriver.”

  “I’m just an anthropologist,” she said. “I’m the one who brought your breakfast because I didn’t have enough real work to keep me busy. The only thing I’ve discovered since I relocated here is that a background in anthropology doesn’t give you much of a head start in the attempt to understand an alien culture on the basis of archaeological evidence. That’s another reason why I’m desperate to go downriver to the plain: sheer frustration. There’s no reason to believe that we’ll find anything to which my expertise is relevant. I suppose that if Tang won’t give way, I ought to be the one to step down in your favor.”

  “But you don’t want to?” Matthew said, stating the obvious.

  “No,” was her bald reply.

  Ikram Mohammed came into the room then. He seemed slightly surprised to find the anthropologist there, but it was Matthew he was looking for.
“I thought you’d be up by now,” he said to Matthew. “Lynn’s right behind me and Rand’s bringing in the last load from the shuttle with Maryanne. Tang was with them, but he’s under interrogation now. I know the policeman’s only doing his job, but we’ve already been through it all a hundred times between ourselves. If we’d been able to figure out who did it, we would have.”

  “Captain Milyukov seems to think that you have figured it out, and that you’re keeping quiet about it,” Matthew observed.

  The genomicist made a disgusted face. “Milyukov’s seriously disturbed,” he said. “Not to mention seriously disturbing. He wants to use this business in one of his convoluted political games, although I doubt that any reasonable person could work out how or why. We always knew that there was a chance that the crew would develop weird ideas after several generations of space flight, but who could have figured that it would be so difficult to straighten them out again? This insistence that we have to learn to fend for ourselves on the surface within a single generation, in order that they can get rid of all the Earthborn sleepers and take complete control of their militarized socialist republic is crazy.”

  Dulcie Gherardesca had slipped out while Ikram Mohammed was talking. Matthew got up from his chair and stretched his leaden limbs. He took advantage of what might prove to be a rare moment of confidentiality to say: “I don’t suppose, Ike, that you have a theory as to who killed Bernal and why?”

  “No,” Ike retorted. “All I know for sure is that it wasn’t me.”

  Matthew decided to believe him, even though there was something in his manner that suggested that it was not the whole truth. Even if he had wanted to challenge the statement, though, he wouldn’t have had the opportunity, because Rand Blackstone’s strident voice could already be heard, calling desperately for help.

  NINETEEN

  Blackstone had entered the dome before sounding his clamorous alarm, and less than three seconds passed before he burst into the room where Ikram Mohammed and Matthew were standing. He was cradling Maryanne Hyder in his arms, trying to hold her still.

  The small woman seemed to be in a bad way. Even with the aid of her IT she seemed barely able to suppress screams of agony. Her face was contorted and flushed, and she was trembling with shock as well as experiencing convulsive muscle spasms in her arms and legs.

  Blackstone set her down on the tabletop, but Ikram Mohammed and Matthew had to help him hold her there. Had they not taken hold of her limbs the convulsions might have carried her over the edge. Matthew had grabbed her right arm; he was surprised by the strength of the reflexes that fought against his gentle restraint. Small she might be, but Maryanne Hyder was muscular.

  “What happened?” Matthew asked—but Blackstone had turned away to face one of the newcomers that were hurrying into the room: the doctor, Godert Kriefmann.

  “Slug-sting,” Blackstone said. “Big bugger—twice the size of any I’d seen before. Tentacles twenty centimeters long, maybe more, at least as thick as my thumb….” He might have continued if Kriefmann hadn’t interrupted him.

  “Get back out there now and find the thing,” Kriefmann said. “Be as careful as you need to be, but get it back here alive. Use a thick bag to transport it, but get it into the biocontainment unit as soon as you can.”

  Blackstone obeyed immediately, running back into the corridor as soon as he had cleared a way to the door by thrusting Dulcie Gherardesca—who had come in behind the doctor—firmly aside. Kriefmann took up a position beside Matthew, bending over his patient anxiously.

  It was obvious to Matthew, even at first glance, that the wounds were serious. They were clustered on the outside of the right thigh, from just above the knee to halfway to the hip. The ragged edges of the smartsuit had not yet had a chance to begin healing—but that seemed to be as well, given that Kriefmann was armed with a pair of tweezers, which he was already using to pull alien tissue out of the wounds.

  Dulcie Gherardesca scrambled past Matthew to fetch a plastic petri dish in which the doctor could deposit the tissue.

  “If it’s new,” Kriefmann said to Dulcie, “I’ll need a toxin profile as quickly as possible. Where’s Tang? He’ll have to take care of it while Maryanne’s out of action.”

  Matthew and Ikram Mohammed both opened their mouths to tell the doctor that Tang Dinh Quan was with Solari, but they shut them again as soon as they observed that it was no longer true. Lynn Gwyer had arrived before him, but she was already moving aside to make way for the biochemist. Vince Solari was bringing up the rear.

  “Here,” the doctor said, as he handed the dish to Tang. “Get started on these sting-cell fragments. Now.”

  Tang Dinh Quan was as quick to respond as Blackstone had been, seizing and covering the petri dish without further ado and heading off in another direction, presumably racing for his lab. Matthew took a certain comfort from the way in which the team had suddenly reassembled itself, setting aside the disagreements of the preceding day. Faced with an emergency, these people were perfectly capable of working together, all on the same side.

  “How bad is it likely to be?” Matthew asked Ikram Mohammed, not wanting to distract the doctor, who was still busy with the tweezers and a replacement Petri dish provided by Dulcie Gherardesca.

  “I don’t know,” the genomicist replied. “That’s a bad wound—worse than any I’ve seen. On the other hand, most of the tentacled slugs are very closely related—differentiation into species isn’t anywhere near as clear here as it is on Earth—and the differences between their toxins are usually slight. Our existing antisera ought to be able to help Maryanne’s IT suppress the symptoms. Even if it is a genuinely new variety, using poisons we haven’t met before, her IT should have enough capacity to keep her going until Tang can do a full analysis and come back with a plan for more precise countermeasures.”

  “The worst-case scenario is that it might take a couple of days to synthesize antitoxins and her IT might have to put her into a protective coma,” Lynn Gwyer put in. “We have the know-how to counter local toxins—we even have the fundamental components of a Tyre-biochemistry protein manufactory, thanks to Tang—but we don’t have Base One’s facilities. Unfortunately, while Maryanne’s incapacitated we won’t have the benefit of her toxicological expertise.”

  “I’m going to give her a shot,” Kriefmann announced to his rapt audience. “Got to relax her muscles. Her IT can take care of the pain, but it doesn’t have the facilities to deal with this kind of reaction.”

  “Are you sure it won’t do any harm?” Dulcie Gherardesca asked, anxiously.

  “No, I’m not,” said Kriefmann, “But the symptoms are consistent with the smaller wounds I’ve treated before, so it ought to be okay. Keep hold of her, will you.”

  “It’s okay,” Ikram Mohammed assured the doctor. The convulsions were not so emphatic now, and Matthew modified his grip so as to put less pressure on the arm.

  Kriefmann left the room. Worried glances were exchanged but no one spoke. They were all waiting anxiously. The doctor came back two minutes later with two sterile packs in his right hand, each containing a liquiject syringe. His left was clutching a handful of plastic bottles. Kriefmann scattered the bottles on the tabletop in order to free the hand that held them, then liberated the first syringe. He filled the liquiject from one of the bottles and positioned the head of the nozzle above a blue vein that showed on the inner side of Maryanne Hyder’s left forearm.

  When he pressed the button, his patient’s whole body jerked in response. Matthew hoped that it was a reflex born of fear rather than a physical response to the injected drug.

  The spasms in Maryanne’s muscles began to die down almost immediately, and Matthew let the arm he was holding go limp. He let go of it, wondering if all the convulsions might have been the result of a psychological response rather than a physiological one.

  One final frisson seemed to release the toxicologist’s tongue. She began to swear, and then to babble. “God, I’m sorry,” she sai
d, when she finally obtained sufficient control over herself to string a coherent sentence together. “I never saw it—carrying those boxes in my arms—so careless.”

  “It’s okay, Maryanne,” Kriefmann replied. “It could have happened to anyone.”

  “They’ve been creeping closer since we established the test plantings,” Ikram Mohammed told Matthew. “They’re just like the slugs back home in one respect—they take it for granted that everything gardeners do is for their benefit.” Then he turned back to Maryanne Hyder. “It wasn’t your fault,” he said. “Rand should have seen it if he was where he was supposed to be, leading the way.”

  “You know Rand,” the stricken woman replied, in a thicker and slower tone. “He was in the lead all right, but he was carrying three times as much as me, all piled up. Couldn’t have seen a pitfall full of sharpened stakes.”

  “Don’t go to sleep if you can help it, Maryanne,” Kriefmann went on. “Stay with us, if you can. Get a grip on your IT—don’t let it slip you into a coma.” While he was speaking he had been preparing a second shot. This time he positioned the nozzle halfway up Maryanne’s thigh, just above the topmost wound in the cluster. Matthew hadn’t seen him look for a vein, but he presumed that this must be the antitoxin and that he intended to spread it generously around the afflicted tissue as well as the circulatory system.

  This time, the woman did not react to the shot. Her Internal Technology had damped out all feeling in the damaged tissue—but she was fighting its wider effects, as she had been instructed. Her IT didn’t know that she needed to retain consciousness, but she knew.

  “Hang in there,” Kriefmann advised. “The antitoxin will kick in any second, if it’s up to the job. Once it does, your IT will register the effect and begin to ease up. Keep talking, if you can. You’ve met Matthew Fleury, haven’t you? He’s our new ecological genomicist.” Kriefmann knew perfectly well that Maryanne already knew that, but he obviously felt that he had to keep talking himself and didn’t know what else to say. “Mr. Solari’s been asking us questions,” he went on. “He’ll want to talk to you as soon as possible—which might not be the best reason in the world to stay awake, but …” He stopped as soon as he saw that the woman on the table was trying to say something in reply.