Dark Ararat (18 page)

He opened and closed his mouth experimentally, running his tongue around his teeth. They did feel slightly strange, but he couldn’t tell whether it was the extra layer of tissue on the tongue or the extra layer on the teeth that was responsible for the difference. There was a peculiar taste in his mouth, like slightly moldy dough. His breathing seemed slightly labored, but he didn’t feel that he was in any danger of choking. He wondered whether the filters in his bronchii could keep water out of his lungs if he were ever in danger of drowning, and whether the artificial tissue could extract enough oxygen from water to let him continue breathing if he were immersed.

Although Nita Brownell had told him to lie still he decided, in the end, that stillness was exaggerating his psychosomatic symptoms, and that it would be better to put himself through the program of exercises that the doctor had designed to test and develop his inner resources. At first he stayed on the bed, but when stretching his arms and legs rhythmically back and forth began to relieve his feelings of queasiness he leapt down to the floor to practice push-ups and sit-ups.

Solari made no attempt to copy him. “I’m glad this is an Earthlike planet,” the policeman commented, as he inspected his own forearms minutely. “Imagine what we’d be wearing if it weren’t.”

“It’s because it’s Earthlike that the problems are so awkward,” Matthew told him, as he counted sit-ups. “It’s not just food allergies we have to worry about. We may not seem very appetizing to the local worms, and we’re probably not nearly as nutritious as their natural hosts, but an amino acid is an amino acid and sugars are always sweet. Just because there’ve been no recorded cases of infection or parasitism so far doesn’t mean that we’ll be safe indefinitely. Everything local that we come into contact with, deliberately or accidentally, is likely to retaliate by trying to eat us. We have all the technological advantages, but the locals are fighting on their own turf, and they have a few tricks that we’ve never encountered before.”

“You’re still worried about the insect thing, aren’t you? Not to mention the werewolves.”

“Werewolves are a red herring,” Matthew told him. “There’s a difference between serial chimeras and shapeshifting. The absence of insects may be less significant than I first thought, given the absence of flowering plants.”

“Do the plants really have glass thorns?” Solari asked. “That’s what Delgado was killed with, you know—a glass dagger. Or maybe a glass spearhead.”

“It’s not as simple as that,” Matthew told him. “But in crude terms, yes. Plants and animals alike seem to use vitrification processes to produce their strongest structural tissues. Most of the products are more like sugar crystals than window glass, but some of the upland plants that grow around the ruins have rigid tissues that can be splintered like glass to make sharp edges, and filed like glass to make sharp points. Photographs taken from above the canopy of the so-called grasslands show multitudinous globular structures like goldfish bowls that
might
be reproductive structures of some kind. I’d like to have a closer look at those.”

“I can’t make head nor tail of it myself,” Solari admitted. “I suppose I’ll have to try, though, if I’m going to spend the rest of my life down there.”

“It might be as well,” Matthew agreed.

“So tell me the difference between serial chimeras and werewolves—in terms I can understand.”

“Caterpillars become butterflies. Tadpoles become frogs. It’s a gradual progressive metamorphosis, not a matter of switching back and forth every full moon.”

“So you think the reason we didn’t see any young animals is that the animals we did see might really be different forms of the same animal?”

“Different
forms
,” Matthew echoed. “That might be the essence of it. On a world of chimeras, it might not make sense to think of different
kinds
of plants and animals—only of different forms. Everything related to everything else. Creatures that don’t just use gradual chimerical renewal as a means of achieving emortality, but as a means of achieving continual evolution.”

Solari sat up and began stroking his limbs experimentally, as if savoring the sensations of his new skin. Matthew still felt the need of distraction, so he continued his callisthenics.

“So the city-builders might not have died out,” Solari said. “They might just have changed into something else. They tried humanity and didn’t like it, so they moved on.”

“It sounds unlikely,” Matthew said, “but everything’s conceivable, given that nobody seems to have taken the trouble to find out where the limits of the chimerization processes actually lie. No—that’s unfair. I mean, nobody’s been able to figure out a way of finding out where the limits lie. If the natural metamorphoses are slow and gradual it might need more than a human lifetime just to observe them.”

As Nita Brownell had promised, Matthew felt a lot better now than he had the previous day. His body, assisted by his dutiful IT, had been working overtime to make good the deficits incurred by his organs during their suspended animation. The acceleration of his cellular-repair processes was probably going to knock a year or two off his potential lifespan, but he figured that if he could hang around until the crew obtained more information about contemporary longevity technology from Earth he would surely get some compensatory benefit from that. True emortality was apparently out of reach, but seven centuries of progress must have produced much better ways of keeping unengineered individuals healthier for longer.

“So, all in all,” Solari said, “you don’t think Delgado could have been murdered by a humanoid who shifted out of some other form and then shifted back?”

“I don’t know enough yet to rule it out completely,” Matthew said, cautiously, figuring that it would be unwise to say that
anything
was impossible until he had a much firmer grasp of the facts. “I’d have to say, though, that it seems extremely unlikely by comparison with the hypothesis that one of your seven suspects stabbed him for reasons we haven’t yet determined. Or, for that matter, with the hypothesis that someone sneaked over from Base One in a microlite aircraft.”

“It’s a hell of a long way,” Solari said. “The people at Base One have started establishing fuel dumps and supply caches to make long-distance travel feasible, but it would be extremely difficult for anyone to make an intercontinental flight without making elaborate preparations. To do it without anyone else knowing about it would be extremely difficult, especially with comsat eyes in the sky. My money has to be on one of the seven. But which one?”

“The real question,” Matthew observed, “is
why
? I can’t believe that any of them would have gone so far as to kill a man in order to prevent him revealing some discovery he’d made. Not so much because all of them except Blackstone are scientists—although that would surely be reason enough—but because they’re all Shen’s Chosen People. No one would have signed up for this crazy expedition unless he or she had a very powerful commitment to the notion of starting over with a clean sheet, trying to avoid
all
the mistakes that cursed the development of human history on Earth. They must all have arrived here with a strong determination to keep murder out of the picture for as long as humanly possible. If one of the seven did do it, I can’t imagine the kind of shame he—or she—must be feeling, knowing that his—or her—name will go down in history as this world’s Cain.”

“Maybe that’s why they’re not keen to own up,” the policeman said, drily. “You do have a point, though, about the kind of baggage we brought with us. I dare say you took the same kind of flak I did when you told your friends you were shipping out—probably a lot more, given your celebrity. I didn’t mind being called a coward, but being called a fool stung a little harder. I don’t know how many times I was told that we couldn’t possibly solve Earth’s problems by setting out to spoil another world. I wish I’d had a better answer to give all the people who just assumed that we’d simply repeat all the same mistakes we’d made on Earth, individually and collectively.”

“I was the man who kept reciting the formula that people who fail to learn from prophecies are condemned to enact them,” Matthew reminded him. “If I hadn’t thought that we were capable of learning, I wouldn’t have bothered, but if I hadn’t thought that it was extremely difficult, I wouldn’t have had to.”

“You did take a lot of stick, didn’t you,” Solari remembered, frowning as he tried to think back more than twenty subjective years, to his childhood. “You had the newsvids on your back as well as your friends. The price of fame.”

“I had two daughters to use as an excuse,” Matthew told him. “The newsvids always liked family values.”

“How many of us would have been murderers if we’d have stayed on Earth?” Solari wondered aloud, his voice becoming gradually more somber. “And how many of us would have been murder victims? According to Milyukov, Earth’s in good shape now, but it had to go through hell in order to get there. I never killed anyone, but I was lucky not to have had to. If I’d stayed, I might have had to kill hundreds, if I’d been able to avoid getting killed myself. We may all have come here with the best of intentions, Matt, but that doesn’t mean that we could avoid bringing some pretty sick stuff in our mental luggage. If I was a potential killer back in 2114, I still am—and that applies to everyone else. It’s nothing to do with being a policeman or a scientist—it’s to do with what we’d have done to survive when the crunch came. Everyone here was willing to be frozen down in order to have a chance of escaping the worst, and my bet is that people willing to do that would have been willing to do almost anything to survive when the collapse came. Wouldn’t you?”

“I don’t know,” Matthew said, truthfully. “But that was there, and this is here. We’re not a bunch of rats trapped in a decaying box—we’re a tiny handful of people confronted with a strange and hostile world. Nobody is disposable. The situation aboard
Hope
makes it all the more necessary for the people on the ground to help and support one another no matter what differences of opinion they have. Murder has no place down there. I only met two of your seven suspects back home, but I can’t believe that
any
of them would commit cold-blooded premeditated murder.”

“Maybe it wasn’t cold-blooded—or premeditated.”

“If whoever did it forged an alien artifact as a murder weapon, it had to be premeditated—and cold-blooded.”

“If,” Solari repeated, mechanically. “But yes, it looks that way. And I don’t want to believe it of any of the seven, any more than you do—but I hear that you came very close to committing murder yourself out in that corridor, having already planned to make your break before you left me alone with the captain, and for no better reason than resentment of the fact that you were under guard.”

“I wanted to see Shen,” Matthew countered.

“And you had no reason whatsoever to think you could find him,” Solari pointed out. “Like I said—we all brought some pretty sick stuff in our mental luggage. Reflexes shaped by Earthly distress and paranoia. Reflexes that make us lash out, even at people adapted for life in half-gee, who might not be able to take the punches. Maybe it was a reflex of exactly the same kind that killed Delgado. Maybe the glass spearhead was never intended as a murder weapon—maybe it was just the first thing that came to hand. The person who stabbed him might have seen those knife-fight VE-tapes they were beginning to peddle back on Earth, and got the impression that good IT could protect people from wounds of that sort. Delgado was unlucky, you know—if the blade hadn’t slid between his ribs and penetrated his heart he’d have been okay. Any of them could have done it, Matt. Even the ones you think you know. If you didn’t have such a good alibi, I’d have to suspect you. You’d be suspect number one, after what you did to that poor guy’s jaw.”

“Okay,” Matthew said, conceding the point. “That was a mistake. I’m ashamed—but the bastard was following me, and he was on to me as soon as I’d tried and failed to put the gunman down. Maybe he didn’t have the power to hurt me the way I hurt him, but it wouldn’t have stopped him trying. It wasn’t me who decided that crew and cargo are no longer on the same side. That was the so-called revolutionaries.”

“The people on the surface also seem to have decided that they aren’t all on the same side any more,” Solari pointed out. “And having decided that … we all come from a violent society, Matt. Even those of us who never lifted a hand against anyone. I wish we had arrived here with a determination to do no violence to anyone, but the simple fact is that we haven’t had the practice necessary to lend force to any such determination.”

Matthew could see his point. He could also see that, given the situation aboard
Hope
, the potential for further violence—not merely of murder but of all-out war—was far too considerable for comfort.

FIFTEEN

T
he shuttle in which Matthew had left Earth had been a reassuringly solid construction shaped as a shuttle ought to be shaped, with extendable delta wings for use on reentry. It had, admittedly, been hitched to an intimidatingly massive rocket cylinder, which he could not help but imagine as a potential bomb, but the statistics of past failure and success had made the possibility of disaster seem comfortingly remote.

The knowledge that if the rocket were to turn bomb he would die instantaneously without realizing the fact had further reduced the awfulness of the seeming threat.

The shuttle in which Captain Milyukov intended to send him down to the surface of the new world was an entirely different proposition. It did not look solid, it had no wings and its shape was like no real or imaginary aircraft or spacecraft that Matthew had ever seen depicted. The teardrop-shaped chamber in which Milyukov proposed to stow Matthew and Solari—
stow
seeming the operative word, given the amount of cargo that was to be crammed in with them—was equipped with a conical shield at the base, made from some kind of organic material, but it was alarmingly thin. A long, slender and supple rod extended from the top of the chamber to a limp structure that looked more like a folded spiderweb than a parachute.