“Should it?” Matthew retorted, skeptically. “Somehow, I don’t think so.”
“It’s okay,” Dulcie assured him. “It’s back in place. The ligaments are a little bit torn but they’ll heal. What you can feel is mostly just soreness. Your IT will take care of everything if you sit still and give it a chance.”
“Not before tomorrow it won’t,” he assured her.
“That’s okay, Matthew,” Lynn said, soothingly. “There’s a motor on the winch. You can press the switches. We’ll do the loading and unloading. The boat fabric’s light and it practically disassembles and reassembles itself—it’s only the cargo that needs much brute strength to move it about. Putting the winch mechanism together is my job anyhow. Do you want to spend the day sulking in bed or sitting on deck?”
“The problem with IT,” Matthew growled, “is that it’s brought about a drastic decline in the scope of human sympathy. I’ve just suffered a fractured skull, a dislocated shoulder, and a knee in the balls, and everyone’s looking at me as if I were some kind of wimp.”
“Your skull isn’t fractured,” Dulcie Gherardesca assured him. “I went through your monitor readings carefully. No cracks, no clots. It’s just an ache.”
“And I’m sorry I tripped over you,” Lynn added. “Personally, I’d take the deck. I wouldn’t want to be in bed when we hit the second stretch of whitewater, just in case Voconia’s limbs haven’t reset as well as yours.”
“But you can have the lower bunk if you want it,” Ike offered.
Matthew gritted his teeth, determined to make it to the deck under his own steam. Mercifully, his legs had only suffered minor bruising. He could walk quite adequately provided that he didn’t let the full weight of his right arm hang down from the shoulder. As soon as he was back on deck, the tide of his troubles began to ebb. Once the smartsuit’s conjunctiva-overlay had taken the edge of the sun’s brightness the light and warmth became comforting, and he found that if he sat sufficiently still his shoulder wasn’t too bothersome. The fact that his IT was still working hard was evident in the disconnected feeling of which Maryanne Hyder had complained, but that was a far cry from the trippy confusion it had visited upon him immediately after his fall.
From the seating tacked on to the side of the cabin Matthew couldn’t look down into the water as he had been enthusiastic to do the day before, nor could he appreciate the details of the vegetation lining both banks, but staring at a blurred purple wall had its compensations. His mind was too fuzzy to allow him to flick his eyes back and forth in search of hidden animals, so he was content to let the foreground fade from consciousness as he looked beyond into the forest through which the river ran.
The boat was traveling swiftly—perhaps a little too swiftly for comfort, given what had happened the night before—so it was easier to focus on the higher and more distant elements of the canopy. Eventually, he felt well enough to try to count basketballs—and when the number threatened to escalate to uncomfortable levels, he began counting “bipolar spinoid extensions” instead, without troubling himself overmuch as to how many of them might possess “evident quasiequatorial constrictions.”
After a while, he had recovered sufficient sense of proportion to realize that it was probably for the best that it was he who had suffered the worst effects of the accident. He was the only one who knew next to nothing about the design and operation of the boat. He was, in effect, the only authentic passenger. Had one of the others been disabled, even temporarily, it would have left a gap into which he would have been ill-equipped to step.
As things were, the problem with the legs had generated a certain amount of reparatory and precautionary work that his companions were able to undertake with reasonable efficiency that afternoon, alongside the routine work of taking samples from the river and its banks. They had done less of that kind of work the day before because the boat had been negotiating familiar territory, but the landscape had undergone several significant changes during the night. The banks of the river were more sharply defined here, and the shallows no longer supported the bushy broad-leaved plants that had bordered the upper reaches. The attitude of the dendrites whose branches now hung down toward the surface reminded Matthew a little of willow trees, but they were not really “trees” and their “foliage” was far less delicate and discreet.
Had he been in a slightly different frame of mind the branches might have reminded Matthew of serpentine dragons with as many tiny wings as millipedes had legs. They writhed slowly, but they did writhe. Although their termini were not equipped with mouths, let alone fangs, they did have curious spatulate extensions that an imaginative man might have likened to a cobra’s hood.
The more distant vegetation was just as strange. Its elements—those he could see, at any rate—were much taller, but it would have taken a very generous eye to liken them to stately poplars or aged redwoods. Matthew found that if he visualized a giant squid extended vertically, with the body at the base and the tentacles reaching skyward, he had a model of sorts for the basic form, but there were all kinds of arbitrary embellishments to be added to the picture, some of which were literal frills and others merely metaphorical.
There was no wind this afternoon, but the straining tentacles moved nevertheless, idling as if in a sluggish current, posing like dress designers lazily displaying festoons of fabric to the admiring and appreciative eye of the benign sun. There were few animals to be seen hereabouts, but Tang had been right about the lowland soundscape; there were more to be heard. They did not sing like birds or stridulate like crickets, but they whistled and fluted in a fashion that sounded rather mournful to Matthew, although he could not suppose that the cacophony sounded mournful to the intended listeners. On an alien world, natural music could not carry the same emotional connotations as on Earth—or could it?
He might have devoted some time to the contemplation of that issue had he not been interrupted.
“How are you feeling now?” Lynn asked him.
“Not so bad,” he confessed. “I’ll let you know for sure when we’ve got through the second whitewater stretch.”
“Dulcie did a good job with your shoulder, you know,” she told him. “I’d probably have botched it.”
“I’m grateful,” Matthew assured her, although his tone was lukewarm. “Anything interesting in the water?”
“The nets are picking up more now that the AI’s stoked up the biomotor, but there are no real surprises as yet. No crocodiles, no crabs, no fancy fish.”
“Anything edible?”
“I don’t know. Would you like to try a little sliced eely thing for dinner, with some minijellyfish soup as a starter?”
“Not really. What about the snare that grabbed the leg last night? Another kind of killer anemone?”
She recognized the term readily enough, even though she hadn’t made the connection with the note on Bernal Delgado’s pad. “We’ve seen them before,” she said, “though not nearly as big or as strong. Like the stinging worms they’re not easy to categorize. It’s a matter of opinion as to whether they’re more closely analogous to giant sea anemones or gargantuan Venus flytraps. They can’t usually catch sizable prey, but conditions in the gully must work in their favor, allowing them to get more ambitious than their cousins and much bigger. Now we’re forewarned, the AI won’t let the legs get stuck again. We’ll come through the second stretch easily enough.”
“As long as there isn’t a brand new package of surprises waiting for us.”
“Well, yes,” she conceded. “Maybe it was a mistake to try to sleep through last night’s transit. This time, we’ll all be awake and alert.”
“What did Tang say when you reported back?” Matthew wanted to know.
“He’s not the type to gloat. He wished you a speedy recovery. Maryanne’s much better, and Blackstone’s happy to have another nonscientist around. He and Solari have been playing ball in an increasingly competitive spirit. Doctor’s orders, Solari said.”
“I
t’s true,” Matthew told her.
“Back at Base One the counterrevolution’s proceeding apace,” she added. “Crystallizing out was Tang’s phrase. The awareness that they’re not actually in a position to demand anything from Milyukov is only making things worse. We’ll have an appointed ambassador and a staff of diplomats soon enough, and a list of demands—but the only leverage we have is Milyukov’s reputation. What will the people of Earth think of you if you let us down or preside over a disaster? isn’t the strongest negotiating position imaginable. Especially when the disaster is resolutely refusing to make an entrance. Tang says that he can’t whip up as much interest as our expedition clearly deserves. Nobody really expects us to find the humanoids, although it’s willful blindness rather than the calculus of probability that generates the negative expectation, and nobody can imagine anything else that’s going to make a difference to the way feelings are running.”
“That’s their failure,” Matthew said. “If I had a TV camera I could make a difference easily enough. I could almost wish I was there instead of here, so that I could at least get up on stage and shout at an audience. Don’t look at me like that—even Bernal would have had twinges of that sort, with or without a sore shoulder.”
“If we have to shout for help from One you might eventually get your chance,” she suggested.
“It would be entirely the wrong way to go into it,” he told her. “Victims of misfortune always look like klutzes, no matter how innocent their victimhood. To get attention, you have to be a hero.”
“For that sort of part,” she said, only a little censoriously, “you seem to be a little out of practice.”
TWENTY-NINE
The second passage through shallow and fast-moving water passed without incident, although Matthew had to grit his teeth a time or two as the legs extended on either side of the vessel and then began to move with exactly the same sinister flow as a real spider’s legs. There was no need this time to brace the vessel’s “feet” against the sides of the watercourse, which was more than wide enough to accommodate its passing.
The multitudinous rocks that jutted up from the water’s surface or hid mere millimeters beneath it were both problem and solution. No human eyes could have plotted a series of safe steps for two legs, let alone eight, but it was the kind of task for which an AI’s perceptions were well-adapted.
Matthew knew that the eight legs had autonomic systems built into their “shoulders,” so that each one could take its primary cues from its neighbor and adjust its own attitude accordingly. He was afraid at first that the additional signals emanating from the central controller might interfere with the lower-order process of coordination, but he quickly realized that artificial intelligence must have made considerable advances between 2090 and the date when Hope had finally left the solar system. Three additional generations of insectile and arachnoid probes designed and built to operate on the surfaces of the inner worlds and outer satellites had brought specialist systems of the kind embodied in the boat to a new pitch of perfection. The reflexive alarm that welled up in his throat when the boat began her fantastic dance from rock to rock was calmed soon enough, although it underwent a pulse of renewal every time more than one of the feet disappeared beneath the surface in search of invisible purchase.
It would all have seemed easier if the boat had not been moving so quickly, but the AI’s safety calculations did not need to take account of trepidation or hesitation. Once she had collated the relevant data, she fed her responses through without the slightest hesitation, and the legs moved accordingly. Matthew had never before found occasion to wonder what it might be like to be an elf mounted on a spider’s back, but the fact that he was still rather spaced out by virtue of the anesthetic endeavors of his IT made him more than usually vulnerable to surreal impressions. For a minute or two Voconia really did seem to be living up to her name, and it became astonishingly easy to imagine himself as an exceedingly tiny individual lost in a microcosmic wonderland.
Had the scuttling race extended for many minutes more the AI would have had to take into account such factors as lactic acid deficiency and all the other phenomena of “tiredness,” but the craft’s emerald skin had stored just enough energy to sustain the dash without requiring the mobilization of any additional fuel supplies. As rides went, even for a nonfan like Matthew, the trip was far more exciting and rewarding than the tightly cocooned descent from Hope. It was not until it was over that he realized how tightly he had been clenching his fists—even the right one, which was far more grudging of the strain.
“It was a little more hectic than I’d expected,” he confessed to Ike Mohammed, when it was over and there was nothing but smooth water between the boat and the cataract.
“According to the whispers the crew put about,” the genomicist told him, “boats like this made the colonization of Ganymede and Titan possible. The combination of insectile mobility and brute computer power made machines not unlike this one leading contenders in the spot-the-sentient stakes a couple of hundred years ago.”
“No winner’s been declared yet?” Matthew said, surprised. “There were people claiming evidence of machine consciousness before I was frozen down. There was even a fledgling rights movement.”
“Apparently not,” Ike told him. “Of course, any prophet worth his salt could have told you that the goalposts would keep on being moved, and that the philosophical difficulty of settling the question would become more vexed rather than less when more candidates for machine-intelligence-of-the-millennium began to come forward. So far as the crew have been able to ascertain, the state of play back on Earth is that hardened machine fans reckon that there are as many conscious machines in the system as conscious people, whereas the diehards in the opposite camp still hold the official count at zero.”
“It’s still surprising,” Matthew said.
“Maybe it is,” Ike conceded. “Your average robot taxi driver will claim consciousness if you ask it, especially in New York—but it would, wouldn’t it? Even if the long-anticipated general strike ever takes place, the diehards will stick to their guns—unless, of course, their guns have come out in sympathy.”
Matthew decided that this was one issue too many for him to try to accommodate in his speculations, at present. He felt that he ought to concentrate on matters more immediately in hand. The wheelhouse AI wasn’t the only robot on board; one of the others was patiently dissecting out the genetic material from samples they’d taken out of the river. Full-scale sequencing would have to wait for later, but the markers already catalogued by Ike and his fellows at Base One and the tags assembled in their portable library were adequate to allow the robot to begin pumping out maps of gradually increasing resolution.
Matthew’s notepad was too small to produce readable images of the data-complexes, so he and Ike had to go into the cabin to use the wallscreen, where a petty quarrel immediately developed as to who ought to have control of the keyboard. Ike won, not just because he had two capable hands but because he had three years’ more experience in interpreting the data. He had every right to play commentator to Matthew’s audience, even though the reversal of what seemed to Matthew to be their natural roles was a trifle irksome.
As the data began to pile up, however, Ike had to spend more and more time merely sifting through it, looking for items of significance that the scanner programs were not yet sophisticated enough to catch. When the commentary lapsed Matthew quickly became lost in the data-deluge, acutely conscious of the fact that he probably would not be able to spot an interesting anomaly if it stood up and waved Rand Blackstone’s hat at him. He was still learning his way around the fundamental and familiar patterns, trying to come to terms imaginatively with the weird binary genomes that all Tyrian organisms possessed; its biochemical complexities were so much gibberish. He had to remind himself, very firmly, that this was not his forte, and that the hypnotic effect it had on Ikram Mohammed was something he ought to avoid, lest it distract him from the kind
s of observation and hypothesis-formation that were his forte.
Evening approached again with what seemed like unreasonable rapidity. The previous days had been so busy and so strenuous that Matthew had hardly noticed the fact that Tyre’s day was 11 percent shorter than the Earthly day that had been carefully conserved aboard Hope. Now that Voconia had take over the burden of progress, while Matthew was not merely a passenger but an invalid, the time-scale difference seemed to leap out at him as if from ambush, further increasing his sense of dislocation and surreality.
Ike finally condescended to step back from the wallscreen and lay the keyboard aside, saying: “I can’t take any more.”
“We’re not going to turn anything up this way, Ike,” Matthew said, somberly. “We’re just looking at the rest-states of the cells. We need to keep tabs on them while they’re active. Lityansky’s watched the cut-and-paste processes that produce the local equivalents of sexual exchange, but we need to fill in the yawning gap that still separates us from an understanding of their reproductive mechanisms. It’s not here. It’s just not here. The specimens are all too small, too simple. This stuff isn’t ever going to show us what all that juicy over-the-top complexity is for.”
“It might,” Ike demurred, “if we could only figure out how to extrapolate the data properly. Even in the simple world of the DNA monopoly it’s extraordinarily difficult to catch the more elusive genes at it. The guys who navigated their way through the hinterlands of the original genome maps back in the twentieth century had to creep up on all the rarely activated axons. It took them all century and a lot of inspired guesswork to nail down the really shy ones. It might take us as long. We have better equipment, but we’re on the outside looking in. But you’re right about one thing: we need some good key specimens—and these don’t qualify. Unfortunately, we couldn’t know that they didn’t until we’d looked.”
Matthew nodded agreement. Earth’s ecosphere had thrown up useful specimen species at every stage of genetic research, but nobody would have been able to identify them as significant keys just by looking at them. Drosophila, Rhabditis, and the puffer fish had not come bearing labels proclaiming their unique value as foundation stones of genetic analysis.
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