“Even if we found a humanoid,” Ike continued, pensively, “there’d be no guarantee that analyzing his—or more likely its—genes would illuminate the fundamental issues. On the other hand, there might be some unobtrusive little creature minding its own business in the shadows, whose cells are working overtime in a special way that would do exactly that. So we have to keep looking. Do you want to call it a day and watch the sunset?”
“Sure,” Matthew said. “And tonight, I want a really good night’s sleep, to get me ready for the cliff-descent. If my arm will let me sleep, that is.”
“Your IT will see to it,” Ike assured him, as they made their way out on to the deck. Lynn and Dulcie were already there, having abandoned their own labors a little earlier.
As on the previous evening, the character of the river fauna changed quite markedly as the light faded through dark blue to dark gray, but the most noticeable aspect of the change this time was auditory. The noises emanating from the forest increased in volume and complexity, although the crescendo was relatively brief.
“Is it just me,” Dulcie Gherardesca asked, “or is the chorus progressing from quaintly plaintive to almost harrowing?”
“It’s just the numbers,” Ike told her. “There must be thousands. No birds, though. Squirrels and monkeys and whistling lizards. Great lungs, though. Can we assume that they’re marking territories and summoning mates, do you think, or should we be bending our minds to wonder what other functions that kind of caterwauling might serve?”
Nobody bothered to answer that, or to remind the speaker that what he really meant was squirrel- and monkey-analogues.
“The biodiversity might be limited by comparison with home,” Lynn observed, “but there are plenty of critters out there. Maybe we ought to moor for a spell and take a look. The forest’s quite different hereabouts, nothing like the hills around the ruins.”
“Better to do it on the way back,” Ike said. “We came to take a look at the vitreous grasslands. They’re the great unknown, the ultimate Tyrian wilderness.”
The urgent phase of the chorus faded soon enough, although it never dissolved into silence. Almost as soon as the stars came out in force the boat bumped something, and then bumped it again. The impacts were slight but distinctly tangible. Matthew’s first thought was that they were nudging dangerous underwater rocks, but it only required a glance to inform him that the river was easily wide enough to allow the AI to steer a course through any such hazard. Whatever was bumping Voconia was moving under its own power to create the collisions, and it had to be at least as big as a human, if not bigger.
“We need a picture,” Ike was quick to say. “I’ll feed the AI’s visuals through to the big screen.”
Matthew and the two women returned immediately to the cabin, but the results were disappointing. There were no more bumps, and the recorded images were worthless. The AI had the means to compensate for near-darkness, but not for the turbidity of the water. They could see that something had thumped the boat repeatedly, but whether it was merely a big eel-analogue or something less familiar remained frustratingly unclear.
“Here be mermaids,” Matthew murmured.
“Or maybe manatees,” Dulcie said, drily. “Genuine exotics.”
Matthew knew what she meant. Manatees had been extinct before he was born, along with Steller’s sea cow and the dugong, and their DNA was unbanked. Humans would never see their like again—but mermaids, being safely imaginary, would always be present in the chimerical imagination. On the other hand, this was Tyre, where chimerization was built into the picture at the most fundamental level, even though the vast majority of individuals didn’t seem to be exhibiting it at the moment of their observation. If there were mermaids anywhere, this was the kind of place in which one might expect to find them.
“It was big,” Ike reported. “The AI estimates not much less than half a ton. That’s really big. There’s nothing like that around the base. I bet there’ll be even bigger ones further downstream, and more of them. We’ll catch up with them tomorrow. It’s only a matter of time.”
“It’s about time we found some sizable grazers,” Matthew opined. “Dense forests always favor pygmies, but rivers and their floodplains usually have far more elbowroom. There used to be hippos in Earthly rivers and elephants on plains, until people crowded them out. Even if there are humanoids lurking in the long grass of the glass savannah, they surely can’t be so numerous that they’ve driven the big herbivores to extinction. If they were that effective, we’d have found proof of their existence easily enough.”
“They couldn’t have driven the big herbivores to extinction recently,” Dulcie put in, by way of correction. “This is an old world. What would the biodiversity of Earth have been like a billion years hence, if humans had never invented genetic engineering?”
“It isn’t coming back,” Lynn observed. “We must have passed through its stamping ground. But there’ll be others.”
“They can’t do us any damage,” Ike said. “They won’t even wake us up, unless they can stay close enough to start chewing up the biomotor outlets.”
“Is that possible?” Matthew asked, suddenly realizing that there might be a downside to Voconia’s employment of organic structural materials and an artificial metabolism that used lightly converted local produce as fuel.
“No, it’s not,” Lynn assured him. “The AI defenses can take care of anything that conspicuous. There’s no need for anyone to sit in the stern with Rand’s gun.”
Matthew, knowing that big grazers usually congregated in herds, was not entirely convinced by this reassurance, but he was prepared to let it go for the time being. There might well be bigger animals in the lower part of the watercourse, where its progress became ever more leisurely as it meandered patiently toward the distant ocean, but Voconia was not bound for the sea. Her first mooring would be in the more active waters immediately below the cataract, and it would be from there that their first expedition inland would be mounted. Given that the “grasslands” grew so tall as to be virtual forests, they would be more likely to be inhabited by pygmies than giants—always provided, of course, that the logic that pertained on Earth was reproducible here.
The evening meal’s main course was a surprisingly accurate imitation of Earthly ravioli. Matthew wondered at first whether his IT had responded to his earlier dislike to filter out some of the less pleasant taste sensations from the Tyrian manna, but he decided on closer examination that his positive reaction was partly a matter of gradual acclimatization and partly a matter of the skill with which the programmer—Dulcie—had concocted a masking sauce.
“Congratulations,” he said to her, when they were done. “I think you’ve cracked the problem. What this colony needs more than anything else, at this stage of its history, is a Brillat-Savarin. At the end of the day, there’s nothing like a pleasant taste to create a sense of welcome. Hope could do with a good chef or two—soon put an end to all that revolutionary nonsense.”
“I’m an anthropologist,” she reminded him. “Cooking is the foundation stone of all human culture, the first of the two primary biotechnologies. Unfortunately, that might be exactly why my talents will be wasted if we do make contact with intelligent aborigines. Whatever the fundamental pillars supporting their cultures are, they can’t include cooking. Clothing maybe, but not cooking.”
“I’d have thought that the probable absence of sex was a far more radical alienation,” Lynn Gwyer put in, trying to turn the joke into something more serious. “People get a little carried away with this primary biotechnology stuff, in my opinion. The real foundations of human society lie in parental strategies for the care and protection of children. Families, marriage ceremonies, incest taboos: the whole business of the determination and regulation of sexual relationships. Take away that—as we may have to—and the fact that they don’t cook begins to seem utterly trivial.”
Matthew expected Dulcie to dismiss the objection with a gentle reminder that
she had not been serious, but that wasn’t what happened. Instead, Dulcie said, with sudden deadly earnest: “You’re wrong, Lynn. That’s nature, not culture. All animals regulate their sexual relationships according to their sociobiology, and that kind of regulation is mostly hardwired. What culture adds to it is ritual dressing, and all ritual is based in primal technology. In humans, culture takes over from nature at the Promethean moment when fire ceases to be a natural phenomenon and comes under technical and cultural control.”
If anything, the anthropologist’s intensity increased as she continued: “Matthew’s right—probably righter than he imagines. What we need before we can feel at home here is better cooks, and it might well prove that the best route to a recovery of the crew’s loyalty to the mission is through their stomachs. And what we’ll probably need if we’re ever to make common cause with the humanoids, if they exist, is a way to sit down with them, and break bread together, and share the delights of fire. At the end of the day, no matter how you ritualize it, sex divides, because that’s its nature. Cooking unites, because cooking makes relationships palatable. Sex couldn’t be the basis of human society, because it was the chief problem society had to overcome. The strategies of that problem’s solution had to begin elsewhere: in the primal biotechnologies and the rituals they facilitated.”
Lynn was taken aback momentarily, but she was quick to smile. “Fifty-eight light-years and seven centuries,” she said, amiably, “and it’s still the same old thing. Nature versus nurture, biologists versus human scientists. Makes you feel quite at home, doesn’t it? And isn’t that what we all want? To feel at home here.”
“If we can,” Ike reminded her. “Home is where, when you go there, they have to let you in—but there’ll always be places where they simply won’t, no matter how hard you try. The universe might be full of them. We just don’t know.”
“True,” Matthew said. “But at least it’s us who get to knock on the door and find out. Who among us would prefer to leave the job to someone else?”
He was glad to see that none of his companions was prepared to raise her—or even his—hand in response to that invitation.
THIRTY
The cliff beside the cataract was more than thirty meters high. On the left bank, where Voconia’s motley crew had moored the boat fifty meters short of the falls, the cliff was sheer, falling away no more than a couple of degrees from the vertical. When he first stepped back onto solid ground, however, the configuration of the cliff was the least of Matthew’s concerns. He wanted to look out over the mysterious signal-blocking canopy of the “glasslands”: at the densely packed grasslike structures whose seemingly anomalous dimensions would reduce him yet again to the imaginary status of an elfin spider-rider adrift in a microcosmic wonderland.
From the cliff’s edge, alas, it was impossible to see much more than he had already seen in mute pictures collected by flying eyes. He was too high up, as yet, to be anything other than a remote observer, from whose vantage the canopy proper resembled a vast petrified ocean, littered with all manner of strange flotsam. Its true extent was undoubtedly awesome, but the Tyrian horizon seemed no less and no more distant than an Earthly horizon, and the restriction of his vision by that natural range seemed rather niggardly. The real revelation would not come, he knew, until he was down there, looking up at the canopy from within; that was the sight that Hope’s insectile flying eyes had so far been unable to capture. He was pleased to see that the fringe vegetation rimming the river and the fault extended for no more than fifty yards before mingling with the “grasses” and no more than a hundred before giving way entirely to the seeming monoculture.
The other side of the river looked more user-friendly to Matthew than the one on which they had stopped, because it had a slope so gentle that he could imagine himself stumbling down it, even with an injured right arm. If they had moored on that side, though, they would have had to carry the dismantled boat and all its cargo by hand, making trip after trip after trip. On the left bank there was plenty of space to erect a winch, from which a generous basket could be lowered on a cable to arrive on a relatively flat apron of rock beside the capacious pool into which the waters of the river tumbled.
“It’s not much of a target,” Matthew complained to Lynn Gwyer. “The water might look fairly placid on top, but that’s an illusion. The edge will be too close for comfort once you start unloading, let alone when the time comes to start putting Humpty-Voconia together again. The bushes down there might look unintimidating by comparison with the giant grasses but they’ll be a lot tougher at close range than they look—and the empire of the giant grasses begins less than thirty strides away. From up here the whole thing looks like a calm ocean, rippling gently in a benign wind, but it’ll look very different at close range, once we’re under the canopy.”
“It’ll be okay,” Lynn assured him. “The target’s small enough, admittedly, but the laden basket won’t swing much, and we’ll use the chain saws to clear a much bigger working space. Even if they’re the kind of bushes that the humanoids used to make tools from, the saw blades will cut through them easily enough, shattering anything that won’t shear. It’ll be a fair amount of work for a party of three, but we’ve got all day. You wouldn’t have been able to do as much as the rest of us anyway, even if you hadn’t hurt your arm. You’re not fully acclimatized yet.”
“If I had been,” Matthew muttered, “I might not have dislocated my shoulder in the first place.”
There was, as Lynn had observed, a lot of work for a party of three. Matthew did his utmost to make himself useful, and bitterly regretted it when it became painfully obvious that he was neither as strong nor as skilful as the least of his three companions. He quickly became tired, and his arm would have been agonized if his IT had not muffled the pain—but the IT was too dutiful to allow him to do further damage by insulating him from the consequences of reckless action, so it began to let the distress signals through as soon as the damaged tendons and ligaments provided it with evidence of further strain. Long before midday, therefore, Matthew was relegated to the humblest task available: working the electric motor that controlled the winch. Ike, Lynn, and Dulcie did the lion’s share of the unloading, then carried the bulk of the cargo to the cliff’s edge. Ike was the one delegated to establish a more generous bridgehead down below while Dulcie and Lynn—who knew exactly what they were doing—set about the delicate work of taking the boat itself to pieces.
“Do you want the gun?” Matthew said to Ike, when the genomicist got into the basket to make his first descent. “We don’t know what might be lurking in those bushes.”
“Well, if it’s anything that can stand up to a chain saw it’ll be big enough for you to shoot it from way up here,” Ike said. “Anyway, we don’t know what might be lurking in the bushes up here on the plateau—there’s no reason to think that the gun’s more likely to be needed down there than up here.” Ike had already donned heavy boots and protective armor, and he seemed to feel that he was well-nigh invulnerable.
Matthew stopped worrying when Ike started up the chain saw and got to work on the bushes. The saw made such a racket, and cut with such devastating effect, that any sensible creature would have taken off in the opposite direction as fast as it could run or slither. The storage space grew with astonishing rapidity, although the contrast between the bare gray rock and the purple-littered ground beyond remained as sharp as ever to the naked eye. If the bushes did have vitreous trunks and branches they shattered easily enough, and no needlelike shards shot like darts into Ike’s flesh. His booted feet trampled the foliage down with mechanical efficiency as he marched stolidly into the territory he had claimed. Various globular fruits were rushed along with the “leaves.”
As the boat slowly came apart Matthew insisted on shuttling back and forth across the fifty-meter safety margin, adding what he could to the various stacks of goods queued up by the basket, but his earlier efforts had taken their toll and he was glad to take control of
the winch again once Ike signaled that he was ready to begin taking delivery of more cargo.
The manna-supplies were the last to go down before the parts of the actual boat, and it was not until then that the first accident occurred. Inevitably, it was Matthew who made the mistake, his out-of-tune reflexes and his injured arm combining to make him drop one of the heaviest boxes before he could get it into the basket. It fell in such a way that it bounced toward the edge of the cliff.
For one tantalizing moment it looked as if the box might come to a halt at the edge, but it had gathered too much momentum. To make matters worse the packaging split at the last point of impact, and the manna began to spill out as soon as the carton began its precipitate descent.
Mercifully, Ike was too far away from the edge to be at any risk—but he stood and watched with annoyance and wonder as the powdered manna became a cataract in its own right, expanding like a cloud of spray. Almost all of it landed on the carpet of crushed vegetation, dusting the purple pulp like icing on a party cake.
“It’s okay,” Lynn was quick to say. “It was only a box of biomotor-food. The converter churns out that stuff a great deal faster than produce for human consumption, and Ike’s amassed a far bigger heap of litter down there than any we ever built up in the ruins. Once we’ve got the rest of the stuff down I’ll unpack the converter and start bundling the stuff into the hopper. Boatfood’s the least of our worries right now. It would have been a hell of a lot worse if you’d dropped part of the rudder, or the AI’s brain.”
“I know,” Matthew retorted, bitterly. “I’m trying to stick to the least important items for exactly that reason. There’s an awful indignity, you know, in setting out on a pioneering voyage on a virgin world, with the possibility of meeting all manner of spectacular monsters, then rendering oneself entirely useless by falling out of bed.”
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