The route Solari took involved little actual climbing, but the penalty they paid for that convenience was that it was by no means straight. At these close quarters it was easy to see that the wall-builders had made their own provision for laborers to pass from field to field, equipping their citadel-fields with gateways whose gates had long since decomposed, but they had not taken the trouble to make arterial roads that radiated from the city proper like the spokes of a wheel. Perhaps that was because they were anxious that such highways might be too convenient for traffic coming the other way, Matthew thought—or perhaps it was merely because the endeavor had spread out in an untidily improvised manner.
Some of the fields had obviously had blockhouses in the corners, perhaps to provide temporary accommodation, or to house sentries, or to store tools, or for any combination of those reasons. Others had had stone shelves built into the angles where walls intersected, but any staircases that had led up to the tops of the walls must have been made of perishable materials; there was not the least trace of any such structure now.
The walk was a long one—more than twice as long as the one Matthew had taken with Lynn Gwyer—and it took a proportionate toll of their unready bodies. At first, Matthew told himself that it was bound to be easier because their route was mostly downhill, but it was a false assumption. When he remembered that Solari had already made the uphill climb once he began to understand the effort that the policeman had put in, and the strength of the motive that had led him to insist on making a second trip almost immediately, with Matthew in tow.
“We’re not doing this just because you need somebody to talk to, are we?” he said, when that became clear to him. “You really do need my help to figure out the significance of what you’ve found.”
“Yes,” said Solari, his terseness now owing to shortness of breath rather than any disinclination to show his hand to possible suspects.
“Why?” Matthew persisted.
“Because you knew the man,” Solari said, laboriously. “You’re far better able to guess what he might have been up to than I am.”
“Up to?” Matthew queried—but Solari didn’t want to put in the effort of compiling an elaborate explanation when he had evidence waiting that would speak more eloquently for itself.
When they finally reached the spot where Bernal had been killed there was nothing to indicate where the body had been found. Matthew had not been expecting a bloodstain, let alone a silhouette in white chalk, but he had been expecting something, and it seemed somehow insulting that there was nothing at all. Any vegetation that had been crushed had recovered its former vigor. The place was screened from everything further uphill by a very solid and intimidating wall some ten or twelve meters to the north of the place where the body had been found. It met another, equally high and solid, twenty meters to the left. There was a ledge set in the angle, but it was too high up to be a shelf and it was angled downward. It looked like a place where laborers a long way from home might huddle together and shelter from the rain.
“What was he doing way out here?” Matthew wondered, aloud.
“The same question occurred to me,” Solari said. “According to the bubble’s log, he’d been spending a lot of time out here during the weeks before his death, even though his preparatory analysis of the local ecosystem was supposedly done and dusted. He must have been caught in the rain more than once, maybe for long enough for his idle hands to get restless.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Matthew said.
Solari took him to the angle of where the walls met: to the gloomy covert under the down-slanting ledge.
The wall seemed solid enough to a cursory glance, but when Solari reached up to remove a stone set slightly above waist height it came out neatly enough. There was a space behind it: a lacuna in what otherwise seemed to be a solid wall. Matthew recalled that the artifacts Dulcie Gherardesca had recovered had been found in cavities in the walls, where they had enjoyed a measure of protection from the forces of decay.
“It’s a hidey-hole,” Solari said. “Built for that purpose a very long time ago. Still serviceable, though.”
The policeman removed several objects from the hole, one by one. Most of them were were blackly vitreous. Three looked like knives, or perhaps spearheads. Three more were similar in design but much smaller—perhaps arrowheads. The nonvitreous items were stone: two appeared to be crude chipping-stones of a kind that might well have been used by a Stone Age craftsman for working flint. One was some kind of scraper. There were numerous pieces of raw “glass,” of a convenient size for working into useful objects.
“There aren’t any shafts for spears or arrows,” Solari said. “He hadn’t gotten around to that. He was still practicing.”
“He?” Matthew echoed, with an implicit query.
“Delgado.”
Matthew thought about that for a couple of minutes. Then he said: “Are you sure that Bernal was making the spearheads and arrowheads? Maybe he found someone else making them. Maybe he was killed because he found out that someone else was making imitation alien artifacts.”
“I can’t be absolutely sure,” Solari said, scrupulously. “The surface-suits are too thick and too resilient to permit easy DNA-analysis of their excreta, and the murder weapon itself had been handled by too many people before I got to it, but the fact that the only contaminants on these are Delgado’s makes it highly unlikely that someone else had put the necessary hours into making them. Unless someone’s gone to enormous trouble to erect an evidential smokescreen, Delgado was the one who faked the artifact with which he was killed. He had already faked others, and he was in the process of faking more. Maybe it began while he was whiling away the time waiting for a shower to pass, but it must have become purposive soon enough. He made time for the work; he must have had a plan for the results. Whoever killed him found out about it. Maybe they knew about the hidey-hole and maybe they didn’t. If they did, they probably took the trouble to tidy up a little after he was dead—but if they expected that I wouldn’t be able to find the evidence, they were wildly optimistic. Anyone could have found it, if they’d bothered to look. Delgado’s friends—the murderer’s friends—didn’t bother to look.”
This speech seemed to exhaust Solari’s strength, and he had to lean against the wall, but he seemed relieved that he’d made his point.
“It doesn’t make sense,” Matthew said, after a pause.
“That won’t wash, Matt,” Solari replied. “It has to make sense. You say that you knew him as well as anyone—maybe better than anyone here, even though their acquaintance was more recent. So tell me. Why would he be faking alien artifacts?”
“He wouldn’t. He was a scientist.”
“But he was.”
“No. Faking is your word, your interpretation. He was making artifacts of the same kinds as those found elsewhere in the ruins, but it doesn’t mean that he had any intention of trying to pass them off as the real thing. Maybe someone else leapt to the same conclusion you did, but it has to be wrong. He was just experimenting with local manufacturing techniques. He couldn’t have intended to attempt to fool anyone into believing that the blades and arrowheads had been made by aliens.”
“Not even if he had a powerful motive for persuading people that the aliens aren’t extinct?” It was obvious from Solari’s tone that he didn’t believe Matthew’s version of events. The policeman had found what seemed to him to be a plausible motive: that Bernal had been determined to prove that the aliens were still around, and that somebody else had been determined to stop him.
“Whatever he was doing,” Matthew said, stubbornly, “I can’t see that it would provide a motive for his murder. If someone were planning to run that kind of fraud, and got caught red-handed, he might be tempted to do something to prevent the story coming out, but why would the person who caught him want to silence the person he’d caught? It doesn’t make sense—and it certainly doesn’t get you any closer to identifying the murderer.”
> “Somehow,” Solari persisted, doggedly, “it has to make sense. You say that Delgado wouldn’t do a thing like this—but he did. I know he was your friend, but you must see that this stuff about experimenting with alien manufacturing techniques is too feeble for words. He wouldn’t have gone to this much trouble without a much better reason than that. How obvious the fakes would have been if they’d been found in less compromising circumstances I can’t tell—but that might not matter. Maybe he knew that they’d be tagged as fakes sooner or later, but maybe he was prepared to settle for later, given that the colonists’ big argument was about to come to a head.”
“You think he was doing this to influence a vote that probably doesn’t have any meaning whichever way it goes?” Matthew said, skeptically. “I don’t think so. That’s even more feeble than my story.”
“So think of a better one. I mean it, Matt. I have to put a case together.”
“Against Lynn Gwyer?”
Solari was suitably taken aback by that, but he was too good at his job to let his reaction give anything away. “Have you some reason for thinking that Gwyer might be guilty?” he asked, swiftly.
“Quite the contrary,” Matthew said. “But she seems to think that you have her in the frame.”
“Don’t try that distraction crap with me, Matt,” the policeman came back. “I thought you and I were becoming friends. Please don’t start giving me the same runaround as these clowns.”
“It must be hard to run a good cop–bad cop routine all on your own,” Matthew observed, drily.
Solari seemed genuinely disappointed by that response—but that was his job. “Look, Matt,” he said, earnestly, “neither of us knows how important this impending vote has come to seem to the people who’ve been down here for three years. Neither of us knows how deep anyone’s paranoia cuts, or how weirdly it’s con-figured. But if the planet were really inhabited, by an intelligent species on the ecological brink, that might seem to some people to be a powerful reason for letting it alone, don’t you think? Given that we all signed up for this mission because our own species was on the brink, facing what looked like a terminal ecocatastrophe, don’t you think that some people here might have powerful conscientious objections to the possibility of precipitating an ecological crisis here that might condemn another species—a brother species—to extinction?”
Matthew already knew that Solari was no fool, and he knew that Solari was absolutely right to say that no one who had only been awake for a matter of days could possibly comprehend the complexity of the evolving situation into which they’d both been precipitated—but Bernal Delgado had been his colleague, his rival, his collaborator, his fellow prophet, his mirror image in all but private and personal matters. Matthew could not imagine any circumstances in which he might be led to commit the kind of betrayal that Solari had imagined, so he was extremely reluctant to accept that Bernal might have been led to it. But to what hypothetical extreme would he have to go in order to construct a story that could conserve Bernal’s innocence?
Could the evidence Solari had found so very easily, as soon as he began to look, have been faked, just like the arrowheads themselves? Could the conspiracy of which the murder was a part be far more complicated than Solari was yet prepared to suspect? How complicated could this mystery be? Was it not far too complicated already?
“They could have been planted,” he said to Solari, although he knew exactly how desperate the suggestion was. “Given that we all wear heavy-duty smartsuits, you can’t have much in the way of forensic evidence. Maybe this whole setup is fake—rotten through and through. Maybe the bubble’s logs have been altered too.”
“So who did fake it all?” Solari countered, plainly exasperated. “Why? Which of the seven had the motive, the time, the skill to do the murder and the cover-up? Come on, Matt. We have to do better than that.”
“I don’t know,” Matthew said, helplessly, knowing that if he had to stay ahead of the game he had to improvise something much better. “What I want to think is that Bernal really did find the artifacts, that they really are evidence of the continued existence of the indigenes … but that someone didn’t want him to reveal that fact. Maybe the artifacts are real. That’s another thing neither of us is competent to judge.”
“Unfortunately,” Solari observed, drily, “it’s difficult to think of anyone who is. But it still won’t wash. If they really were made by aliens, Delgado would have shouted the news from the rooftops the moment it broke. Nobody could have imagined, even for a moment, that they could keep it quiet—and if they had they certainly wouldn’t have used one of the alien artifacts to commit the murder while they had a perfectly good stainless steel knife in their belt, would they?”
Matthew had to concede that it was all true. He was thoroughly ashamed of himself. He had always thought of himself as an unusually accomplished improviser, especially under pressure. He knew that he ought to be able to make up a better story, even if he couldn’t actually intuit the truth. He was recently arrived on an alien world, exhausted and ill-fed, but none of those circumstances constituted an acceptable excuse.
“I’ll work it out,” he told Solari, grimly. “I promise you that. I’ll work it all out. Every last piece of every last puzzle. I’m Bernal’s replacement as well as his friend. It’s up to me to carry through his plan, whatever it was, and that’s what I intend to do. You can spread that around if you like, on the off chance that it will make the murderer take a pop at me. But either way, I’m going to sort this mess out. Properly.”
Solari finally cracked a smile. “That’s what I wanted, Matt,” he said, softly. “Just be sure you let me in on it first, okay?”
TWENTY-THREE
When Matthew and Solari returned to the bubble Solari decided that the time had come to interview Maryanne Hyder about Delgado’s murder. Matthew decided, for his part, that it was time to confront Tang Dinh Quan.
The biochemist was in his laboratory, patiently monitoring the results on an electrophoretic analysis. The robot-seeded slides were so small that he had to use a light microscope to read the results. The shelves to either side of him were full of jars containing preserved specimens of tissues and whole organisms—mostly worms of various kinds—but pride of place on his largest work-surface was given to the massive biocontainment cell into which he had decanted the tentacled slug that Blackstone had brought in that morning. The interior of the cell was fitted with robot hands that Tang could use to manipulate the specimen, administer injections, and take tissue samples, but the slug seemed perfectly serene and relaxed. It was easy to imagine that its tiny eyespots were focused on its tormentor, while its distributed nervous system contemplated revenge for all the indignities he might care to heap up on it.
Matthew knew that Tang was one of numerous surface-based scientists working on the proteomics that would eventually supplement the genomic analyses carried out by Andrei Lityansky’s counterparts at Bases One and Two. Proteomic analyses had never acquired the same glamor as the genomic analyses upon which they were usually considered to be parasitic, but biochemists tended to regard theirs as the real work. Hunting and sequencing exons was a fully automated procedure, while the patient work of figuring out exactly what the proteins the exons produced actually did, in the context of a functioning physiology, required a talent for collation and cross-correlation that even the cleverest AIs had not yet mastered.
Forearmed by Lityansky, Matthew already knew that the proteomics of the complex organisms of the Tyrian ecosphere was likely to be just as convoluted as the proteomics of Earth’s “higher” organisms. On both worlds the genomes of the most sophisticated organisms had accumulated many idiosyncrasies as the improvisations of natural selection had built more potential into them. But Ararat-Tyre had an extra complication: the supplementary genome that might or might not be an independent homeobox.
“Is there anything new that I need to know about?” Matthew asked, figuring that it would be better to begin on a thoroughly p
rofessional basis.
Mercifully, Tang wasn’t the kind of man to quibble about the meaning of need. He was ready to share his discoveries with all apparent frankness.
“My colleagues at Base One are beginning to make progress with their analyses of the cellular metabolism of a wide range of plants and animals,” he said. “As you’d expect from the fundamentals, many of the functional proteins made by the nucleic acid analogue are very similar to those made by DNA. The functions of the second coding-molecule are much more arcane. There are no earthly analogues for the relatively few molecules we’ve so far identified as products of that system, all of which are protein-lipid hybrids. Until we can establish an artificial production system it will be difficult to test the hypothesis that its functions are mainly homeotic, but we have found that high concentrations of key hybrid compounds are associated with growth. This specimen may be very useful to us in that respect; now that I know what to look for I may be able to confirm that its exceptional size is correlated with unusual activity of the second replicator. If I can prove that the slugs can alter their size in response to environmental circumstance, and that growth isn’t an ongoing, unidirectional process, it will be the first step in establishing a key difference between Tyrian and Earthly organisms. Proving that they’re emortal will be harder, and testing the limits of their metamorphic potential harder still, but it is a start. We know now that the apparent similarities between Tyrian animals and their Earthly analogues conceals radical differences, and that the entire ecosphere is far more alien than it seemed at first.”
“Have you been able to do much work on the higher animals?” Matthew asked. “Lityansky didn’t seem to have looked at anything as complicated as the slug, let alone the mammal-analogues.”
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