Dark Ararat (23 page)

“But you’re convinced that they came up the river.”

“And then they stopped coming,” she agreed. “Whether the city-dwellers died here or left, their plains-dwelling cousins presumably decided to stay where they were. If they died out too, they died where they’d always lived, presumably as nomadic hunter-gatherers. Like all the hominid species of Earth, except one.”

Matthew thought that was a strange way of putting it—but then he saw what she was getting at. Nobody really knew what had happened to all the Australopithecine species that had coexisted with the remotest ancestors of Homo sapiens, or the other hominid species that had fallen by the evolutionary wayside in later eras. The conventional assumption was that they had been out-competed and driven to extinction by genus
Homo
, but nobody knew. There wasn’t enough evidence left to settle the question. Maybe they had died out for other reasons. How would anyone ever be sure?

“It took Homo sapiens hundreds of thousands of years to invent agriculture,” Dulcie Gherardesca pointed out, “and not much more than ten thousand to bring Earth’s ecosphere to the brink of rack and ruin. Maybe our ancestors should have figured out that it was a bad idea too, and returned to their hunter-gatherer roots as soon as possible.”

“We wouldn’t be here to worry about these guys if they had,” Matthew observed—but he knew that what she was really getting at was that if humans had returned to their hunter-gatherer roots after living for a while in the first cities of Egypt or Sumeria they would probably have died out in the next ecocatastrophe. Even as things were, humankind’s ancestors had squeezed through a desperately narrow population bottleneck.

Matthew handed back his bowl, having done his best to finish the meal. Dulcie made as if to leave, but he checked her retreat with another question. “When will the boat be finished?” he asked.

“Tomorrow, or the day after,” she told him. “We could have set out days ago if we’d been prepared to go without the last few frills, but we were instructed to wait for Solari to arrive, so that we could help with his inquiries. Some of us wanted to say no, if only on the grounds that the instruction came from people who had no authority to give us orders, but…. well, we’re just about getting used to the notion that we’re no longer united, even among ourselves. I suppose you want to come with us.”

“Yes, I do,” Matthew said.

“I suppose you even think you’re entitled, because you’re Bernal’s substitute.”

“That too.”

“But you’ve only been awake four days. You know next to nothing about this world. You’d be a passenger.”

“Sometimes,” Matthew said, mildly, “a fresh pair of eyes can be useful. Not to mention a fresh mind …”

“Bullshit,” she said. “Tang has the educated eye, the educated mind. If it were my boat, I’d want him.”

“And you need an ecologist,” Matthew continued. “All the people I talked to on
Hope
are too narrowly focused, on scientific and political issues alike. They’re drowning in biochemical data—there’s so much of it, and it’s so resolutely peculiar, that they’ve almost lost sight of the actual living organisms.”

“That hasn’t happened here,” she snapped back—but then she blinked, and might even have displayed a blush had she not been wearing a surface-suit. “Well,” she conceded, after a pause, “maybe a little. Most of the animals hereabouts are slugs and worms—the mammal-analogues seem to steer clear of the ruins, and the presence of the domes must be even more inhibiting.”

“I
would
like to go,” Matthew said, deciding that conciliation might be in order. “But I’d rather do it without upsetting anyone. Can we settle the matter amicably?”

“I don’t know,” Dulcie admitted. “The crew had the Revolution, but we’re the ones who can’t figure out who owns what and who has the authority to make decisions. Back in the system it was all cut and dried, but even if Shen Chin Che were still running things like the last of the great dictators we’d all have begun to wonder what gave him the right to keep on giving us orders. As things are, we don’t even have anything in place to overthrow. Can you imagine that we were stupid enough, at first, to think that we didn’t need to worry about it—that we were a community of scientists, all working for the common good? It’s taken us three years to begin putting the fundamental apparatus of a democracy in place at Base One—and it’ll be three years too late to command the respect and consent it needs. Whichever way the Base One vote on future policy goes, it’ll just be more poison in the system.”

“We’re not at Base One,” Matthew pointed out. “Surely the nine of us can settle our differences without going to war.”

“Better talk to Tang, then,” she said, as she moved toward the door again. “Maybe you can settle it between you—unless Rand wants to have another go at persuading us that the last place should go to the guy with the biggest gun.”

This time, Matthew let her leave. It seemed to be the diplomatic thing to do. She closed the privacy-curtain behind her. Instead of getting up immediately he flicked the keyboard of Bernal Delgado’s notepad, bringing page after page of field notes to the tiny screen.

Like most notes designed for purely personal reference, the vast majority of Bernal’s jottings were as gnomic as they were trivial. The computer was host to dozens of other data-fields, but almost all of them would be commonly held stocks and it would take a lot of searching to turn up anything that wasn’t. Matthew played with the keyboard for a few minutes more, but he knew that he was wasting time. He finally gave way to necessity and raised himself from the bed. The surface suit needed to discharge its processed excreta exactly as Matthew would have done had he not been wearing one, so he had to take a few minutes to investigate and use the room’s facilities before leaving.

When he got out into the corridor he found that he couldn’t remember the way to the communal space at the heart of the bubble, but it only took a few tentative steps to get his bearings. When he arrived, however, the only person present was Dulcie Gherardesca, sitting at a big table. She seemed to be waiting for him, but the expression on her face testified that it was a matter of duty.

“Godert’s in the lab,” she told him. “The others are all out. Your friend the policeman must have moved on to suspect number three.”

“His name’s Vincent,” Matthew reminded her. “Vince to his friends. Maybe I should take a look at the boat myself.”

“There’s time,” she assured him. Her tone was conciliatory now; she seemed to be regretting her slight loss of temper. “Lynn wants to give you the grand tour. The people bringing in the last batch of cargo ought to be back any minute—when they arrive we can all get together. It’ll give us a chance to make a better job of the introductions than we did yesterday. We ought to do that.”

Matthew sat down opposite her, letting the width of the table symbolize the distance between them. “I don’t mean to get in anyone’s way,” he said, adopting a conciliatory tone himself. “But I really do believe that I’m a better substitute for Bernal than someone from another field. You may know me as a talking head spewing out sound bites for TV, but I’m a first-rate ecologist, just as he was.”

“I dare say the crew showed you his formal reports,” the anthropologist said, noncommittally.

“Some,” Matthew admitted. “Andrei Lityansky showed me a vast amount of stuff, far too quickly for me to take it all in. It was all dumped in my own notepad before I got my belt back.”

“Bernal said that Lityansky’s pretty good, for a space-born who never saw a blade of grass on a heath or a tree in a forest,” Dulcie admitted. “He also said that no matter how good a biochemist might be, he could never begin to understand ecology—which took in Tang as well as Lityansky, I suppose.”

“He’s right about Lityansky,” Matthew said, carefully.

“I know. Aboard the ship, everything’s too controlled, too organized, too neat, even after the expectable deterioration and the civil war. There’s not enough chaos, not enough spontaneity—not the right kinds, anyway. Bernal said that if
he
couldn’t figure out what had happened here, and what was
still
happening, there was only one man who could. He meant you.”

“I’m flattered,” Matthew acknowledged, generously, “but I understand your reservations. I didn’t mean to suggest that Lynn, Ike, and you weren’t competent to interpret whatever you might find downriver.”

“I’m just an anthropologist,” she said. “I’m the one who brought your breakfast because I didn’t have enough real work to keep me busy. The only thing I’ve discovered since I relocated here is that a background in anthropology doesn’t give you much of a head start in the attempt to understand an alien culture on the basis of archaeological evidence. That’s another reason why I’m desperate to go downriver to the plain: sheer frustration. There’s no reason to believe that we’ll find anything to which my expertise is relevant. I suppose that if Tang won’t give way, I ought to be the one to step down in your favor.”

“But you don’t want to?” Matthew said, stating the obvious.

“No,” was her bald reply.

Ikram Mohammed came into the room then. He seemed slightly surprised to find the anthropologist there, but it was Matthew he was looking for. “I thought you’d be up by now,” he said to Matthew. “Lynn’s right behind me and Rand’s bringing in the last load from the shuttle with Maryanne. Tang was with them, but he’s under interrogation now. I know the policeman’s only doing his job, but we’ve already been through it all a hundred times between ourselves. If we’d been able to figure out who did it, we would have.”

“Captain Milyukov seems to think that you have figured it out, and that you’re keeping quiet about it,” Matthew observed.

The genomicist made a disgusted face. “Milyukov’s seriously disturbed,” he said. “Not to mention seriously disturbing. He wants to use this business in one of his convoluted political games, although I doubt that any reasonable person could work out how or why. We always knew that there was a chance that the crew would develop weird ideas after several generations of space flight, but who could have figured that it would be so difficult to straighten them out again? This insistence that we have to learn to fend for ourselves on the surface within a single generation, in order that they can get rid of all the Earthborn sleepers and take complete control of their militarized socialist republic is crazy.”

Dulcie Gherardesca had slipped out while Ikram Mohammed was talking. Matthew got up from his chair and stretched his leaden limbs. He took advantage of what might prove to be a rare moment of confidentiality to say: “I don’t suppose, Ike, that
you
have a theory as to who killed Bernal and why?”

“No,” Ike retorted. “All I know for sure is that it wasn’t me.”

Matthew decided to believe him, even though there was something in his manner that suggested that it was not the
whole
truth. Even if he had wanted to challenge the statement, though, he wouldn’t have had the opportunity, because Rand Blackstone’s strident voice could already be heard, calling desperately for help.

NINETEEN

B
lackstone had entered the dome before sounding his clamorous alarm, and less than three seconds passed before he burst into the room where Ikram Mohammed and Matthew were standing. He was cradling Maryanne Hyder in his arms, trying to hold her still.

The small woman seemed to be in a bad way. Even with the aid of her IT she seemed barely able to suppress screams of agony. Her face was contorted and flushed, and she was trembling with shock as well as experiencing convulsive muscle spasms in her arms and legs.

Blackstone set her down on the tabletop, but Ikram Mohammed and Matthew had to help him hold her there. Had they not taken hold of her limbs the convulsions might have carried her over the edge. Matthew had grabbed her right arm; he was surprised by the strength of the reflexes that fought against his gentle restraint. Small she might be, but Maryanne Hyder was muscular.

“What happened?” Matthew asked—but Blackstone had turned away to face one of the newcomers that were hurrying into the room: the doctor, Godert Kriefmann.

“Slug-sting,” Blackstone said. “Big bugger—twice the size of any I’d seen before. Tentacles twenty centimeters long, maybe more, at least as thick as my thumb….” He might have continued if Kriefmann hadn’t interrupted him.

“Get back out there
now
and find the thing,” Kriefmann said. “Be as careful as you need to be, but get it back here
alive
. Use a thick bag to transport it, but get it into the biocontainment unit as soon as you can.”

Blackstone obeyed immediately, running back into the corridor as soon as he had cleared a way to the door by thrusting Dulcie Gherardesca—who had come in behind the doctor—firmly aside. Kriefmann took up a position beside Matthew, bending over his patient anxiously.

It was obvious to Matthew, even at first glance, that the wounds were serious. They were clustered on the outside of the right thigh, from just above the knee to halfway to the hip. The ragged edges of the smartsuit had not yet had a chance to begin healing—but that seemed to be as well, given that Kriefmann was armed with a pair of tweezers, which he was already using to pull alien tissue out of the wounds.

Dulcie Gherardesca scrambled past Matthew to fetch a plastic petri dish in which the doctor could deposit the tissue.

“If it’s new,” Kriefmann said to Dulcie, “I’ll need a toxin profile as quickly as possible. Where’s Tang? He’ll have to take care of it while Maryanne’s out of action.”

Matthew and Ikram Mohammed both opened their mouths to tell the doctor that Tang Dinh Quan was with Solari, but they shut them again as soon as they observed that it was no longer true. Lynn Gwyer had arrived before him, but she was already moving aside to make way for the biochemist. Vince Solari was bringing up the rear.

“Here,” the doctor said, as he handed the dish to Tang. “Get started on these sting-cell fragments.
Now
.”

Tang Dinh Quan was as quick to respond as Blackstone had been, seizing and covering the petri dish without further ado and heading off in another direction, presumably racing for his lab. Matthew took a certain comfort from the way in which the team had suddenly reassembled itself, setting aside the disagreements of the preceding day. Faced with an emergency, these people were perfectly capable of working together, all on the same side.