Dark Ararat

by Brian Stableford

  The point was that it was believable. On this occasion, in these circumstances, it could pass for the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

  It was reason enough for Dulcie Gherardesca to step away from the edge of the precipice, and step away she did—but before she stepped away, she looked down.

  After that, there was no possibility whatsoever of her jumping.

  Anything she might have said would have sounded incongruous on her lips, but it was Matthew, when his gaze followed the direction of her pointing finger, who spoke.

  “Oh fuck!” he said, with all the feeling he had left.

  THIRTY-ONE

  The two chain saws were already roaring into life again, but it was obvious that they weren’t going to be much use. Matthew was already scrambling for the rifle too, but it was equally obvious that the gun wouldn’t be much use either.

  If Ike and Lynn hadn’t been so absorbed in the early stages of the 3-D jigsaw that was Voconia they’d have noticed the problem much sooner. If Matthew and Dulcie hadn’t been so absorbed in the question of whether Dulcie was going to hurl herself off the cliff to her death they might have noticed it instead—but on Tyre, everything was purple, and if Matthew hadn’t managed to spill an oversized carton of snow-white boat-food the extent of the problem might not have been obvious to observers on the clifftop even now.

  From Matthew’s vantage point the newcomers looked like giant leeches, but that was a reflection of the way they moved rather than an insult to their lifestyle. They were long, flat, dark-hued worms, each half a meter to two meters long, and there were hundreds of them. So far, at least, there were hundreds of them. They were still coming, oozing avidly out of the uncrushed undergrowth like slimline slugs on amphetamine.

  Were they dangerous? Ike and Lynn obviously hadn’t been sure at first. When they started the chain saws the first poses they took were defensive. They waited, unwilling to start cutting up the worms unless and until it seemed necessary. When the vanguard reached their legs, however, and began to curl around and climb them, they decided that it was definitely necessary. Matthew would have come to exactly the same conclusion at exactly the same moment.

  The worms weren’t hard to cut. Indeed, they seemed to be absurdly easy to slice and shred. But there were hundreds of them already, and more were coming.

  Matthew was momentarily astonished by the floods of red that fountained from the severed worms, although he had known perfectly well that Tyre’s animal-analogues had a hemoglobin-analogue in their blood-analogue. The red mingled with the pulpy purple backcloth soon enough, though, dissolving into it and subtly altering its shade. It held its redness only where it spattered Ike’s and Lynn’s additional armor, whose ground color was an ochreous yellow. There the lavishly spilled blood mingled with a light patina of manna-dust, making a dull pink. Had they only been wearing their surface suits the supersmart fibers would already have absorbed the boatfood, and would have made an immediate start on the blood, but the armor was stupid. The red-and-pink splashes stood out like garish items of abstract art.

  Matthew didn’t raise the rifle to his shoulder. There was nothing to shoot at but leech soup, and he knew that shooting soup was a fool’s game. He kept the gun in his free hand, though, as he yanked the basket onto the ledge and held it there for Dulcie Gherardesca.

  She didn’t hesitate. Like him, she had no clear idea of what they could do once they got to the bottom, but they knew that they had to help. When she was safely in he had to pass her the gun in order to launch the basket over the edge, or he would not have been able to step into it himself, but he kept hold of the control box that signaled to its motor. As soon as he was safely inside and the basket had swung clear of the cliff’s edge, he thumbed the button on the control box, and the descent began.

  The basket was still swinging, and its soft fabric felt far less reassuring than Matthew could have wished, but he had watched enough loads go down to know that he and Dulcie were not nearly heavy enough to test its strength.

  Meanwhile, Ike and Lynn were managing to stay free of climbing worms, even though the total number of visible worms was still increasing. The various heaps of unshipped cargo and disassembled boat were not as fortunate; they had been overrun. There were too many piles of boxes and equipment, and the piles were too awkwardly spaced, for two humans with chain saws to stand much chance of defending them.

  It was not yet obvious that the worms posed any danger at all to people, or to the tough fabric of the boat’s hull, but the avidity of the flood was unmistakable, and Matthew could not doubt that they were bent on consuming something.

  Nor was that any longer the whole of the rapidly developing problem; before the basket was halfway through its descent he saw the first of the larger creatures following in the wake of the worms. There were “killer anemones” among them—large ones, though none so large as to qualify as super killer anemones by his yardstick—but there were other animal-analogues too: froglike forms and things that might have passed for monkey-analogues had they not been scaly and rubber-limbed. For days they had been trying without success to catch more than a glimpse of creatures like these, and now they were being subjected to a veritable plague of them.

  Matthew wondered, briefly, if the chain saws were actually making things worse, by bringing about such a rapid increase in the supply of ready-chopped foodstuffs. It seemed only too plausible—but the thought had not yet occurred to Lynn or Ike.

  There was now something to shoot at, if the rifle could only be aimed properly—but Dulcie Gherardesca still held it, and she had not yet attempted to aim it. The basket was still swaying, and she probably would not have been able to shoot straight enough to guarantee that she would not hit Lynn or Ike, who were now moving apart, swinging their chain saws as they went.

  Then the cable jammed, and the basket’s descent was abruptly halted.

  Dulcie managed to keep hold of the gun, and Matthew managed to keep hold of the control box, but they both had considerable difficulty keeping their feet, and would certainly have fallen had the basket’s elastic sides not bulked so high about them.

  Matthew immediately began pumping the control button with his thumb. The groaning of the motor told him that the machine was trying hard to obey the signal, but it was a stupid machine without any robotic ingenuity at all. The basket only moved from side to side, turning about its axis as it swung.

  Lynn Gwyer’s chain saw ran out of fuel and died.

  Any hope that this might have been a good thing vanished within an instant. She was already surrounded by a living carpet. While she was still on the move with the saw going full blast the worms had made little attempt to swarm up her ankles and calves, and the newcomers had seemed far more interested in the liberally shed blood of the worms than in her, but there was nothing to intimidate them now. The confusion seething around her was so utter and so awful that Matthew could not blame her in the least for what she did next.

  She was less than five meters from what seemed to be a calm refuge, almost perfectly placid and apparently clear. Once she had dropped the chain saw it only required four long leaping strides to carry her to the river’s bank, and a headlong dive to carry her over.

  She met the water gracefully enough, her arms extended before her.

  She must have known that there would be an undertow, because she knew perfectly well that the water cascading over the edge of the plateau was flowing away as quickly as it arrived. Panicked as she was, she had presumably factored that into her calculations, and she must have expected to be carried away by the current. She knew that the greatest danger was becoming entangled close to the shore, so she struck out for the open water even as she disappeared beneath the surface. When her head popped up again, she was thirty meters downstream and ten meters away from the bank—and she was content, for the moment, to go with the flow. She did not want to strike back toward the bank until she had put a hundred meters or more between her intended landfall and the crawl
ing mass that had overwhelmed the expedition’s possessions.

  The motor propelling Ikram Mohammed’s chain saw sputtered and died a moment later, but he was further away from the bank and more determined to protect Voconia’s cargo. He continued using the saw, not so much as a weapon of mass destruction as a spade or a scoop, trying to clear the creatures away without doing overmuch damage. He knew that he had to stay clear of stinging tentacles and avid mouths, but he obviously thought that he could do it. He was, after all, much stronger and nimbler than any individual in the crowd he was fighting to deter.

  Matthew continued to pump the useless button, but whatever had got into the cable mechanism was wedged good and hard, and the cable could not slide past it. He felt doubly helpless, because he could not see what difference the two of them could make even if the basket were to complete its descent. Shooting might help to clear away the bigger and more responsive creatures, as much by noise as by bloodshed, but the elongated slugs were everywhere now, and he could not imagine that their tide could be turned with a few loud bangs.

  Dulcie thrust the rifle into his hands, briefly tapping the fingers that were clutching the control.

  “What….?” he objected

  “I’m going to dive,” she told him. “But first we have to increase the amplitude of the swing. We have to get the turning point far enough out over the water. You have to help me.”

  Matthew’s first instinct was to protest, but he knew that there was no point in staying where they were. Lynn was still visible in the water, seemingly unhurt and swimming freely, despite having to fight the current. If Dulcie could dive into the deep pool at the foot of the waterfall she would have a great deal of turbulence to contend with, but a strong swimmer ought to be able to cope.

  Matthew knew, on the other hand, that a man with an injured arm could not be expected to succeed in such a venture, no matter how good a swimmer he was when fully fit.

  “Help me!” Dulcie demanded, as she grasped the cable and began to use her body to exaggerate the basket’s pendular swing.

  “Oh shit!” said Matthew—but he dropped the gun and the control box into the bottom of the basket, and gripped the cable with his good hand, forcing himself to complement the insistent movements of the anthropologist’s body.

  It was surprisingly easy to increase the amplitude of the basket’s swing, and it only required a couple of minutes to extend the far point into the spray of the falls. The pressure of the water immediately began to confuse their efforts, but Dulcie let go then and grasped the edge of the basket, ready to hurl herself over on the next pass.

  Matthew was tempted to call her crazy, but hardly any time seemed to have passed since she had stood on the ledge and thought seriously about casting herself down on to the rocks. This time, she was aiming for the water; to call the effort suicidal would have been a ludicrous insult.

  She jumped.

  Given her starting position, there was no way that Dulcie could contrive a dive as neat as Lynn’s, and she didn’t even try to adjust her attitude as she fell, preferring to cartwheel her legs as if she were trying to run in midair. She was, indeed, attempting to gain a little extra distance, to make sure that she fell into the calmest and deepest water she could possibly reach.

  Droplets from the almighty splash she made would probably have dashed against Matthew’s face had the movement of the basket not become so wild. He ducked down and did what he could to protect his injured arm as it threatened to dash him against the rock face. He sat on the control box, and his coccyx managed to do what his thumb had not. The cable groaned as the basket tried to spin, and suddenly jerked free—but only for a moment. It only dropped him two or three meters before it was snagged again.

  When he came back to his feet Matthew saw Dulcie’s head in the water, well clear of the cataract, and saw that she was as safe as could be expected. He could no longer see Lynn Gwyer, but that was presumably because she had attained the purple shore and was even now pulling herself back on to dry land.

  Ike was still standing, still using the dead chain saw as a crude device for sweeping long flat worms and bulkier creatures this way and that, but not making much of a difference to the sum of the confusion. He did not seem to have been stung, as yet.

  Now that he was using his weight to quell the swinging of the basket rather than to increase it, Matthew was quite prepared to let it bump against the cliff face, provided that it did so without bruising him. He wanted to steady it sufficiently to let fly with the rifle, not because he thought he had the slightest chance of hitting anything but because he wanted to make use of its deterrent clamor if there was any such use to be made.

  He fired one shot into the air, holding the gun in his left hand, but he had grossly underestimated the force of the recoil. For a moment he feared that he had lost effective use of both his arms—but his overstrained IT eliminated the pain and no serious physical damage seemed to have been done.

  The sound of the gunshot made very little difference to the confusion below, although the more agile of the second-wave invaders did indeed respond to it, several of them deciding that the game was not worth the candle. Unfortunately, that left the tentacled stingers with no obvious target for their armaments but Ike. He was using the chain saw two-handed now, like a broadsword, but his muscles had almost reached the end of their energy reserves and his strokes were becoming slow and ponderous.

  “Give it up, Ike!” Matthew shouted to him. “Take to the water!”

  The water still appeared to be safe in spite of the turbulence near the cataract and the undertow further away from it, but Matthew could not think highly of his own chances of diving directly into the pool, let alone swimming strongly enough thereafter to steer him out of trouble. He felt that he had only one option before him, which was to slit the fabric of the basket with his knife, if the blade was sharp enough, to turn it into a dangling blanket from whose trailing edge he could hang—two-handed if he could possibly manage it—and then drop to the ground.

  It would still be an uncomfortable drop, even if he could manage the preparatory maneuver, but his bootless feet would be slightly cushioned by the biomass that had accumulated on the rocky apron. It seemed to be the only possible way that he was ever going to get down. But when should he attempt it? To do it now seemed dangerously akin to leaping from a frying pan into a fire.

  Ikram Mohammed had not taken his advice. Whether it was because he had formed a better idea of the situation or because he didn’t think he was a strong enough swimmer, he had decided to go the other way, through the remaining bushes and into the shelter of the grass canopy. By going that way, he had avoided the necessity of dropping the chain saw, and he had even managed to select a route that took him to the particular supply dump that held the fuel necessary to give its motor a new lease of life.

  Matthew knew that Ike had got out in one piece when he heard the power tool’s roar again, By that time, Dulcie was also out of view, and he felt awkwardly alone.

  Down below, the “killer anemones” seemed to be in the process of taking possession of the battlefield, although a few reptile-analogues were still prepared to dispute it. The tentacled slugs were moving back and forth with considerable speed and purpose, apparently mopping up the awful mass of pulverized branches, spilled boatfood and sliced flesh with an appetite that was positively awesome. The stench was appalling. Matthew decided that any plans for further descent ought to be put on hold for quite some time, if not indefinitely. He waited, forcing himself to watch even though the spectacle was so appalling. He chided himself for having lulled himself into the tacit expectation that this seemingly quiet world was incapable of producing events as ferocious and as feverish as this one. He chided himself too for having provided the probable trigger when he carelessly allowed the box of biomotor-fuel to tumble over the edge.

  It occurred to Matthew eventually that there was something he could and ought to be doing even while he was stuck in a basket halfway down a cliff.
He took his phone from his belt and pressed the button that would send out Dulcie’s code signal.

  She answered immediately.

  “It’s Matthew,” he said. “The worst seems to be over, but you might be better to stay where you are for a while. The stinging slugs will probably disperse again, but not for quite some time. I’ll let you know if it begins to look safe before nightfall.”

  “I’m with Lynn,” Dulcie reported. “She sprained an ankle in the shallows, but we both got out of the water okay. We’re only a few hundred meters downstream, but it would probably take us a while to get back in any case. We don’t even have a machete to help us through the undergrowth.”

  Without breaking the connection Matthew signaled Ike and repeated his estimation of the situation.

  “I’m okay,” Ike assured him, after switching off the chain saw. “I was lucky back there. The stupid way I went about things I should have been stung half-a-dozen times. This is a weird place, and the light’s none too good further in, but I’ll stay close to the shafts of sunlight so that I don’t get lost. I’m sure that I can navigate my way back when I have to, even if it gets dark. I don’t know which of us is going to climb the cliff to free up the cable mechanism, Matthew, but it could be a long walk to the nearest spot where an ascent looks feasible. Shall I try while the light lasts?”

  “No,” Matthew said. “I’m safe here. Don’t push your luck too far. If you can, it might be a good idea to link up with Lynn and Dulcie. They could probably do with a little help from the chain saw—and you’re right about the light lasting. These short days are getting to be a real pain.”

  Matthew knew that he ought to report the incident to Tang and Godert Kriefmann, but he decided that it had stopped far enough short of a disaster to make the call urgent. The sun was already hovering above the western horizon, and he wanted to use the last of the light to take a longer look at the nauseating spectacle beneath him, in case there was anything more to be learned from it.