Dark Ararat

by Brian Stableford

  “But Tang’s given way?”

  “I wouldn’t say that. He’s in control. He’s just a little more sensitive than some. So’s Maryanne.”

  “And Bernal?”

  “Maybe he was more sensitive than he wanted to be. Maybe he fought it a bit too hard. I don’t know. Ike thinks so, but Bernal and I had … drifted apart. I don’t know.”

  Matthew thought about that for a moment, then shrugged his shoulders. If Ike was right, he would find out soon enough, and he was damned if he was going to let the power of suggestion take him over in the meantime. “An idea occurred to me,” he said, emphasizing the change of subject with a summary gesture. “A possible reason why everything here retains photosynthetic pigment, even when following habits and ways of life that aren’t conducive to photosynthesis. Maybe natural selection favors the retention of such options because chimerization works in two directions. It allows organisms with different genetic complements to get together and pool their abilities, but it also allows organisms to dissociate different genetic subsets—speciation by binary fission, if you like, although ‘speciation’ might not be an appropriate term. Photosynthesis might be a useful fallback in situations like that.”

  Lynn seemed slightly relieved that the subject had been changed, and was more than ready to mull over the suggestion.

  “It’s too crude,” she said. “The exemplary model doesn’t have to be as definite as that. You could argue, more generally, that the predominance here of chimerization weakens the individual integrity of organisms, so that different parts of the same body can—and routinely do—make different arrangements for their own sustenance. Genetic engineers back on Earth were beginning to put together chimeras that were more like closely related colonies than individuals—but even natural selection produced entities like that occasionally: slime-molds, Portugese men-of war. You’d expect colonial quasi-organisms to be more common here on Tyre. Patchwork nutritional systems wouldn’t be particularly odd in that sort of context. Even on Earth, evolutionary theorists on the fringes of respectability have tried to make use of genomic aggregation, ranging from virus-incorporation all the way to parasitic proto-brains. Here, accounts like that would be bound to seem more plausible.”

  “That’s true,” Matthew admitted. “I wish people like Lityansky had paid more attention to the range of the available genomic data. I suspect that too much effort has been invested in fundamental analysis of the wonders of the hybrid genome, and not enough in the study of how the genomes operate within actual organisms.”

  “It’s only been three years, Matthew,” Lynn pointed out, defensively. “Three understaffed, underequipped, underorganized years, conducted in the shadow of Milyokov’s stupid revolution and his determination to retain his hold on Hope no matter what it costs the rest of us.”

  “I realize that,” Matthew said. “It needed ten thousand years of social progress on Earth before our forebears cracked the basics of organic chemistry, let alone the mysterious working of DNA. The crew should have done much more work before they started shuttling our people down. They jumped the gun. It’s no use saying now that we can’t run before we can walk—we have to. Do you think Ike might have fed me all that stuff about psychological cycles, creeping dread and the fact that whoever killed Bernal must have been experiencing a moment of lunacy because he was the one who wielded the fatal blade?”

  “He told you because it’s true,” she said, flatly. “He felt that you were due a warning. He didn’t kill Bernal. I’m certain of that.”

  “Nor did you. Which leaves Dulcie.”

  “I can’t believe that either. Which brings us back to square one. Or the aliens.”

  “Or the aliens,” Matthew admitted. “Standing in the bow of the boat for hours on end searching the undergrowth for inquisitive eyes makes the aliens seem far more plausible, doesn’t it? It’s easy enough to imagine them crouching in the bushes, spears in hand, watching the crazy multicolored people go by.” Although his own smartsuit had been programmed to display a discreet black, Matthew had taken due note of the fact that he was the odd one out. Lynn was wearing yellow, Dulcie brown, Ike dark red. Set against the backcloth of the green boat they must indeed have seemed a colorful band of brothers.

  “Yes it is,” Lynn agreed. “Let’s just hope they haven’t taken advantage of the division of our numbers to launch an attack on the bubbles. Rand would be so disappointed that he no longer has the wherewithal to shoot them—but I suppose he’d improvise. We only brought one of the flamethrowers with us. Doesn’t bear thinking about, does it?”

  “If the aliens were to attack the boat,” Matthew pointed out, “I’d have to try to shoot them down.”

  “Yes,” she said. “But every shot you fired really would hurt you worse than it hurt them. Rand doesn’t have that kind of sensitivity.”

  “We shouldn’t even be joking about it,” Matthew observed, soberly. “The very casualness of the conversation illustrates the ease with which we still fall prey to the myth of the savage. We ought to remember that the alien cultures of Earth were mostly far too peaceful for their own good. That’s why it was so easy for our ancestors to wipe them out, and then make up stories to prove that they deserved it.”

  “Something tells me,” Lynn said, sardonically, “that if they do attack us, you’re not going to be all that effective as a line of defense. Maybe you ought to give me the gun. I’m a better markswoman than Rand seems to think.”

  “If you want it,” Matthew said, “You’re more than welcome to it. Let’s eat.”

  Dinner consisted of spun protein steaks, manna fries, and synthetic courgettes. The taint of processed alien vegetation was evident in every bite, but Matthew was getting used to it by now.

  “It could be worse,” he said, heroically.

  “It will be if we get stranded without the converter and have to eat the boat food while we’re waiting to be rescued,” Ike told him. “It’s concentrated nutritional goodness, guaranteed nontoxic, but it’s distinctly pungent.”

  When the remains of the meal had been cleared away Matthew made as if to fold up the table but Dulcie Gherardesca told him to leave it. She went to her personal luggage and took out a cloth-wrapped bundle. Matthew was surprised to see, when she unwrapped it, that it contained the natural-glass spearheads and arrowheads that Vince Solari had found near the crime scene.

  “What are you doing with those?” he asked.

  She looked up at him quizzically, as if she’d expected him to understand. “Verstehen,” she said. “I want to handle them while I think, to use them as an imaginative aid.”

  “That’s not quite what I meant,” Matthew said, apologetically. “I was wondering how you pried them out of Vince’s possession. Aren’t they evidence?”

  “I suppose they are,” she said, “But it wasn’t difficult to persuade him that my need was greater than his. He kept the one that really matters.” She meant the murder weapon. “Care to join me?”

  “Okay,” he said. “I didn’t get a chance to fondle them before, and I guess we’re less than forty-eight hours from the big waterfall. Real hours, that is—not the metric crap the crew have invented.”

  He sat down, and picked up one of the carefully shaped spearheads. He ran his finger lightly along the sharpened edge, marveling at its keenness. The sensation seemed to encapsulate both the unearthliness of the vegetation that could produce such a peculiar material and the delicacy of the hand that could work it into a useful shape.

  He tried to pretend, as Dulcie was undoubtedly doing and Bernal undoubtedly would have done, that the hand in question had not been Bernal Delgado’s at all but an alien hand, perhaps hairy and perhaps glabrous, perhaps with more or fewer than five fingers, perhaps knobbly with knucklebones or perhaps quasi-tentacular.

  He closed his eyes and hoped for inspiration.

  Remarkably, inspiration arrived, far too quickly to be the kind of inspiration he had actually sought. Matthew had no more idea than he had ha
d before of what the new world might look like through the intelligent eyes of its legitimate inheritors, but he was convinced that he now knew exactly why Bernal Delgado had made these imitation alien artifacts—and, incidentally, the identity of his murderer.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Everything aboard Voconia was in perfectly good order when Matthew and his companions retired to their bunks. In spite, or perhaps because of the fact he had done nothing strenuous all day, Matthew slept better than he had since waking from his sleep of 700 years. Had he not been so deeply and peacefully asleep, though, he might not have been so rudely awakened.

  When the boat lurched and turned abruptly to starboard Matthew was so relaxed that he was thrown out of the bunk. That would not have been so bad had he not been in the upper one of the pair, but the first moment of returning consciousness found him still in midair, flailing helplessly as he fell.

  There was a crazy half-second when Matthew had no idea where he was. Perhaps, subconsciously, his mind accepted his free-falling condition as evidence that he was in his own solar system, in one of the various zero-gee environments he had briefly experienced while en route from Earth’s gravity-well to the metal shell that was to become the core of Hope. There may have been a tiny moment when his unconscious mind reassured its conscious partner that he was safe, because he wasn’t really falling at all. Alas, he was—and for whatever reason, he realized the fact far too late.

  He could hardly have had time to begin framing a constructive thought before he hit the deck, but his reflexes were a little quicker off the mark. Perhaps they would have served him better had he not been falling under the influence of 0.92 Earth-gravity instead of the regime to which they were attuned, but perhaps not. Either way, he had hardly begun to extend a protective arm, and that very awkwardly, before the moment of impact.

  He landed very badly. The upper part of his right arm took the brunt of the impact, and the pain seemed to sear through his shoulder like a hot knife before his IT leapt into action to save him from further agony.

  After the moment of impact things became very confused. The compensatory flood of anesthetic released by his artificial defenses was dizzying rather than merely numbing. Matthew didn’t lose consciousness, but he lost the sense of consciousness, and couldn’t quite tell whether he was awake or dreaming, or which way was up, let alone how badly he was hurt or what could possibly be happening.

  There were lights and there were voices, but the moment Matthew tried to move or to direct his attention toward light or sound the lances of pain took further toll of his protesting flesh. He tried to raise himself from the deck, automatically using the palm of his right hand as a support, but the lever he applied was composed of pure unadulterated pain, and his IT would not let him bear it. His face made contact with the boat’s fleshy fabric for a second time, as if it were rudely demanding a kiss from his tortured lips.

  He tried to lie still then, refusing the demands of lights and the voices alike. If he had been able to go back to sleep he would have done so, only too happy to persuade himself that it had all been a dream, and that he was still safe in his bunk, unfallen and unhurt.

  But he wasn’t, and he couldn’t quite contrive to escape that awareness.

  Later, Matthew was able to piece together what had happened for the benefit of his dutiful memory, but for at least ten minutes he was quite helpless, locked into his sick and bulbous head with his growing sense of catastrophe.

  He felt trampling feet descend upon him and trip over him, but he could not count them or make the slightest move to defend himself from them. It might even have been fortunate that a glancing blow to his groin finally contrived to activate a useful reflex that curled him up into a fetal ball, but even that was not without cost, because it brought another flood of agony from his shoulder.

  By this time, his mind was clear enough to feel alarm, but not yet clear enough to feel much else. The sense of acute danger overpowered him.

  Matthew had been equipped with good IT for most of his life, although the suites that were already on the market when he was born, in 2042, had been expensive as well as elementary. Had he only had his academic salary to draw on he would never have been able to keep up with the forefront of the rapidly progressive technology, but his sideline as a media whore had given him the means to keep up and his status as an outspoken advocate of the myriad applications of biotech had virtually obliged him to do so. Unlike the macho brats who had taken the insulation of IT as a license to court danger, though, he had never been a devotee of extreme sports or brawling, and had never been in the least interested in testing the limits of his IT’s pain-controlling facility. This was, in consequence, the first time in his life that an opportunity to explore those limitations had been thrust upon him. He wasn’t in any condition to savor the experience. All he could think, when he became more easily capable of thought, was that he had been betrayed: that the IT that was supposed to protect him from distress as well as disease and injury had seriously failed in its duty. He was hurt and he was damaged, and instead of protecting him as they should, his additional internal resources were making him sick.

  Eventually, he was able to figure out that he had been in a far worse position than anyone else when the boat ran into trouble. Ikram Mohammed, to whom the bunk below his had been allotted, had not even been in it at the time. Knowing that the first deployment of the boat’s “legs” was due, Ike had got up and gone to the wheelhouse to monitor the AI’s performance. Because Dulcie Gherardesca and Lynn Gwyer had been in the bunks on the starboard side the momentum that had hurled Matthew into empty air had merely jolted them against the side of the boat, inflicting no significant injury and insufficient pain to cause overmuch confusion. Unfortunately, when Dulcie had leapt out of bed to find out what was happening, she had landed on top of Matthew’s supine body, and when Lynn had tripped over him her knee had added an extra measure to his tribulations. Because their first priority had been to find out what had happened neither woman had stayed behind to help him.

  It was not until a full half-hour later that the second part of Matthew’s ordeal began, when his three companions had had to reach an agreement as to which of them was going to reset his dislocated shoulder.

  “Why don’t you draw lots?” he suggested, bitterly, as the discussion of relevant qualifications became positively surreal.

  In the end, it came down to a matter of volunteering. It was Dulcie Gherardesca who finally accepted the responsibility.

  By this time, Matthew’s IT was at full stretch, and it had no available response to the new flood of agony but to put him out like a light—a mercy for which he was duly grateful, although he came round again to find that although the job had been properly done his nerves seemed reluctant to concede the point.

  His right arm felt utterly useless, and his head still felt as if a riveter had driven a bolt through the cerebellum from right to left. He had no idea how much time had passed, but the sun had come up and the cabin was bright with its light.

  “What the hell went wrong?” he demanded, trying to expel his distress as righteous wrath.

  “Unanticipated problem,” Ike informed him. “First major stretch of fast shallow water. The underwater sensors worked perfectly, and she steered like a dream. For a few minutes I thought we might not need the legs at all, but when the time came we may have been going just a little too fast. When we tested the legs back at the ruins it was only a matter of letting them pick the hull up and walk sedately along for a while, until it was time to drop it again. The real thing was a lot more challenging. Theoretically, the AI should have been able to decelerate smoothly enough—but the theory hadn’t taken account of the kind of vegetation that was growing along the canyon walls.

  “You saw the stuff we were passing by all day yesterday—thoroughly innocuous. Not here. Here there are active plants that dangle tentacles in the water, ready to entangle eely things whose maneuvrability has been impaired by the current. They’re progr
ammed to grab at anything and hold hard, below the surface and above. The lead leg on the starboard side had to put down hard to begin the deceleration process, but it should have released itself almost immediately. It couldn’t—and as soon as the AI perceived that something was awry she immediately pulled the other legs out of harm’s way. It probably saved the boat from being trapped, but that might not have been so bad, given that we’re carrying the chain saws. The net effect of pulling seven legs in and using the momentum of the boat to tear the other one free was that Voconia executed a very abrupt right turn, which resulted in a nasty collision with a very solid rock face. Followed, of course, by total confusion. The legs had to get busy then, to save us from being carried into the rocks by the wayward current.

  “In all fairness, the AI did a fine job. She extracted the trapped leg, got us righted, managed to keep us from smashing up on the rocks, and eventually slowed us right down. Voconia got badly scraped below the waterline, of course, but she didn’t spring a leak. None of the legs actually broke, although a couple suffered the same problem you did—mercifully, I don’t have to stand waist-deep in the water to put the joints back into their sockets, because they’re self-righting.

  “All in all, we’re a bit bruised, but we’re all in one piece—including Voconia. Until the next time.”

  “The next time?” Matthew queried, blearily.

  “There’s one more steep-and-shallow stretch to go. We should get there late this afternoon, if we’re on schedule. After that, it should be easy going all the way to the cataract. That’s when the real work will begin. Hopefully, your arm should be a lot better by then.”