“I’m sorry,” was what she said, as her distressed gaze flickered between left and right, probably without bringing either Matthew or Solari into clearer focus. “You must think I’m so stupid.”
“Maybe it was a step too far in the study of local toxins,” Matthew murmured, “but everyone seems to think you’ve done your job well enough in the past to save yourself now. It could have happened to anyone. Vince and I wouldn’t even have known what to look out for. Take it easy.” He touched her arm again, but merely by way of reassurance. He was satisfied that there was no further need for restraint.
“He’s right, Maryanne,” Lynn Gwyer said. She had worked her way round to Matthew’s side, interposing herself between him and the doctor. “Actually, he’s always right. I knew him back home, and that was his speciality. The last of the great prophets—always an egomaniac, even before he practically took over the news channels. Those who cannot learn from prophecies are condemned to fulfil them.” She looked at Matthew then. “Maryanne was part of a much later intake, one of the last recruits to Hope. She doesn’t remember you at all—must have had a sheltered upbringing. Well, Matthew, this is what everyday life on Tyre is like. Or did you have time enough in orbit to get used to calling it Ararat?”
“Tyre will do fine so far as I’m concerned,” Matthew said. “I seem to have arrived at a bad time, in more ways than one.”
“I think the serum is working,” Maryanne Hyder announced, with slightly more relief than astonishment. She looked at Matthew too. “It must have been the usual kind—just bigger. We don’t really know how big they can grow, or whether they routinely get bigger as they get older. We don’t know much about the life cycles of the animals or the plants. No eggs, no seeds, no ready-made alternative model to put in place of the birds and the bees.”
“I guess it was a Rand Blackstone among slugs, as opposed to the Maryanne Hyder version,” Lynn Gwyer put in. “Maybe they’ll all grow as fat if we keep up our cultivation experiments.”
“I hope not,” the patient replied, with a groan. “It hurts.”
“You won’t be walking again for a few days,” Kriefmann told her. He seemed much more relaxed now that he was confident that the second shot had done the trick. “It’s going to take time to repair that muscle. You’ll be limping for a while once you’re back on your feet again. Ike, can you give me a hand to get Mary to her bunk?”
“Sure,” said Ikram Mohammed. “Will we need a stretcher?”
The patient tried to say no, but she was summarily overruled. While Ike went to get a stretcher Kriefmann took the time to thank Matthew for pitching in. “Welcome to chaos,” he said, drily.
“It looks as if the meeting has been postponed,” Lynn Gwyer said to Matthew. “We might as well get on with the guided tour.”
Matthew was a little reluctant to leave while the toxicologist was still in trouble, but Ikram Mohammed was already returning with a stretcher.
Matthew glanced at Vince Solari, but the detective merely shrugged his shoulders.
As soon as Matthew and Lynn went outside they saw Rand Blackstone hurrying back to the bubbledome, carrying a transparent plastic sack. Matthew had to admit that the creature contained within it was impressively ugly. He had seen giant slugs in the Earthly tropics, and huge sea anemones in the shallows of the Indian Ocean, but he had never seen anything that combined the worst features of both. The creature’s purple coloration was, however, oddly attenuated; it was distributed in blotches about a transparent tegument, putting him as much in mind of a gargantuan planarian worm or liver fluke as of a slug. The smaller versions he had seen on film while he was on Hope had seemed much more deeply and more uniformly pigmented.
“Can’t stop,” Blackstone said, as he brushed past them. “Got to get this to Tang.”
“Sure,” Matthew said. “I’ll have time to take a closer look later.”
When the big man had gone inside, Lynn Gwyer looked Matthew in the eye, with obvious concern. “Did Ike have a chance to fill you in on what’s what down here?” she asked. “I don’t know what they told you on Hope, but you’ll have figured out that we have very different problems down here.”
“He didn’t get the chance to say as much as he’d probably have liked,” Matthew told her. “Dulcie Gherardesca brought me breakfast, and she was still around when Ike came back. She had a point of view to put across, just as Blackstone had when he walked us back yesterday. I’m beginning to fit the pieces together, but listening to a calmer voice would be a considerable relief.”
“I would have walked you back myself,” she said, “but it’s not easy to get in Rand’s way when he’s determined to have first shot. I suppose he was hoping that you had a message from Shen Chin Che?”
“He was. I suppose he wanted it so desperately in order to boost morale in the Tyrian Counterrevolutionary Front.”
“Don’t be so quick to make a joke of it, Matthew,” the genetic engineer replied, frowning. “Did you have a message?”
“Not as such. Shen’s back’s to the wall, but he didn’t seem to be in any mood to give in yet. If he has any cards left to play he didn’t dare show them to me—but if he doesn’t, it’s only a matter of time before the crew winkle him out. He’s too old to fight a long campaign. The crew have the upper hand, and all the time in the microworld.”
Lynn Gwyer nodded, as if the judgment was exactly what she’d expected. “Rand’s okay, behind the bold pioneer act,” she said. “We really do have a hell of a problem down here, you know, which everybody on Hope—and I mean everybody—seems to be bent on ignoring. It takes more than a breathable atmosphere to make an Earth-clone world, and this is not an Earth-clone world in the sense that you and I would mean. If the probe data Milyukov claims to have is accurate, it may be the nearest thing to an Earthlike world we’ll find within a couple of hundred light-years of Earth, and I’m certainly not as ready to give up on it as some of the people at Base One, but we really do have a major problem to solve, and I don’t mean who killed Bernal. His death was a big blow, because of what we might have lost, but launching a witch-hunt to fit someone up for his murder won’t bring him back, and it might compound the damage.”
“Vince Solari is okay too,” Matthew assured her. “He’s not here to hunt witches or fit anybody up. Why would it compound the problem if the murderer were identified and charged?”
“That depends who it is,” the woman replied. “If it’s one of us—well, we’re stretched beyond the limit already. If he really was killed by an alien humanoid that might be even worse, in terms of tying further knots in the situation. I wish I could believe in a sneaky invader from Base One, but I can’t—which seems to me to leave the bad possibility and the worse possibility.”
“You do believe the aliens exist, then?” Matthew deduced. “You think it’s unlikely that an alien hand wielded the glass dagger, but you don’t believe they’re extinct?”
“No, I don’t,” Lynn confirmed. “I think they’re giving the ruins a wide berth, just like the other mammal-analogues, but I think they’re alive and well downriver. They might not be easy to find, but I don’t think extinction as we know it is a common event on Tyre.”
“Gradual chimerical renewal,” Matthew said. “The Miller Effect, built in to the ecosphere at a fundamental level, in a way that makes it far less ruinous to the learning process. But if everything here’s emortal, how does evolution happen?”
“Did Lityansky tell you about the second genome?” Lynn asked.
“He showed me the diagrams, but he said that no one knows what it does. He wouldn’t speculate. What do you think?”
“You mean, what did Bernal think?”
“I dare say you tossed the ideas back and forth between you—and Ike too. What’s your best guess?”
“We think it’s a homeobox. We think that our own genome may suffer some crucial disadvantages because the homeotic genes are mixed in with all the rest.”
“Homeotic genes control embryon
ic development,” Matthew said, slightly puzzled. “I thought you hadn’t managed to find any embryos.”
“Homeotic genes control anatomical organization,” Lynn said. “On Earth, that’s mostly a matter of controlling embryonic development, but there are sometimes further metamorphic changes to be managed. If Tyrian plants and animals really are emortal, they might have much more scope in that regard, and they’d need a genomic system equipped to orchestrate that extra scope. We can’t prove it until we can study some actual metamorphoses, but we’re quietly confident that we’re on the right track. Even Tang thinks we’re on the right track, and he’s a hard man to please. The three-dimensional coding complex is a fancy homeobox—fancier by far than anything our one-string genome could contrive.”
Matthew nodded slowly. “I see,” he said. “So evolution happens as organisms change. Natural selection without genetic load. Metamorphosis instead of death.”
“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
While 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 loca
l 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.
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