Dark Ararat (24 page)

“How bad is it likely to be?” Matthew asked Ikram Mohammed, not wanting to distract the doctor, who was still busy with the tweezers and a replacement Petri dish provided by Dulcie Gherardesca.

“I don’t know,” the genomicist replied. “That’s a bad wound—worse than any I’ve seen. On the other hand, most of the tentacled slugs are very closely related—differentiation into species isn’t anywhere near as clear here as it is on Earth—and the differences between their toxins are usually slight. Our existing antisera ought to be able to help Maryanne’s IT suppress the symptoms. Even if it is a genuinely new variety, using poisons we haven’t met before, her IT should have enough capacity to keep her going until Tang can do a full analysis and come back with a plan for more precise countermeasures.”

“The worst-case scenario is that it might take a couple of days to synthesize antitoxins and her IT might have to put her into a protective coma,” Lynn Gwyer put in. “We have the know-how to counter local toxins—we even have the fundamental components of a Tyre-biochemistry protein manufactory, thanks to Tang—but we don’t have Base One’s facilities. Unfortunately, while Maryanne’s incapacitated we won’t have the benefit of her toxicological expertise.”

“I’m going to give her a shot,” Kriefmann announced to his rapt audience. “Got to relax her muscles. Her IT can take care of the pain, but it doesn’t have the facilities to deal with this kind of reaction.”

“Are you sure it won’t do any harm?” Dulcie Gherardesca asked, anxiously.

“No, I’m not,” said Kriefmann, “But the symptoms are consistent with the smaller wounds I’ve treated before, so it ought to be okay. Keep hold of her, will you.”

“It’s okay,” Ikram Mohammed assured the doctor. The convulsions were not so emphatic now, and Matthew modified his grip so as to put less pressure on the arm.

Kriefmann left the room. Worried glances were exchanged but no one spoke. They were all waiting anxiously. The doctor came back two minutes later with two sterile packs in his right hand, each containing a liquiject syringe. His left was clutching a handful of plastic bottles. Kriefmann scattered the bottles on the tabletop in order to free the hand that held them, then liberated the first syringe. He filled the liquiject from one of the bottles and positioned the head of the nozzle above a blue vein that showed on the inner side of Maryanne Hyder’s left forearm.

When he pressed the button, his patient’s whole body jerked in response. Matthew hoped that it was a reflex born of fear rather than a physical response to the injected drug.

The spasms in Maryanne’s muscles began to die down almost immediately, and Matthew let the arm he was holding go limp. He let go of it, wondering if all the convulsions might have been the result of a psychological response rather than a physiological one.

One final frisson seemed to release the toxicologist’s tongue. She began to swear, and then to babble. “God, I’m sorry,” she said, when she finally obtained sufficient control over herself to string a coherent sentence together. “I never saw it—carrying those boxes in my arms—so careless.”

“It’s okay, Maryanne,” Kriefmann replied. “It could have happened to anyone.”

“They’ve been creeping closer since we established the test plantings,” Ikram Mohammed told Matthew. “They’re just like the slugs back home in one respect—they take it for granted that everything gardeners do is for their benefit.” Then he turned back to Maryanne Hyder. “It wasn’t your fault,” he said. “Rand should have seen it if he was where he was supposed to be, leading the way.”

“You know Rand,” the stricken woman replied, in a thicker and slower tone. “He was in the lead all right, but he was carrying three times as much as me, all piled up. Couldn’t have seen a pitfall full of sharpened stakes.”

“Don’t go to sleep if you can help it, Maryanne,” Kriefmann went on. “Stay with us, if you can. Get a grip on your IT—don’t let it slip you into a coma.” While he was speaking he had been preparing a second shot. This time he positioned the nozzle halfway up Maryanne’s thigh, just above the topmost wound in the cluster. Matthew hadn’t seen him look for a vein, but he presumed that this must be the antitoxin and that he intended to spread it generously around the afflicted tissue as well as the circulatory system.

This time, the woman did not react to the shot. Her Internal Technology had damped out all feeling in the damaged tissue—but she was fighting its wider effects, as she had been instructed. Her IT didn’t know that she needed to retain consciousness, but she knew.

“Hang in there,” Kriefmann advised. “The antitoxin will kick in any second, if it’s up to the job. Once it does, your IT will register the effect and begin to ease up. Keep talking, if you can. You’ve met Matthew Fleury, haven’t you? He’s our new ecological genomicist.” Kriefmann knew perfectly well that Maryanne already knew that, but he obviously felt that he had to keep talking himself and didn’t know what else to say. “Mr. Solari’s been asking us questions,” he went on. “He’ll want to talk to you as soon as possible—which might not be the best reason in the world to stay awake, but …” He stopped as soon as he saw that the woman on the table was trying to say something in reply.

“I’m sorry,” was what she said, as her distressed gaze flickered between left and right, probably without bringing either Matthew or Solari into clearer focus. “You must think I’m
so
stupid.”

“Maybe it was a step too far in the study of local toxins,” Matthew murmured, “but everyone seems to think you’ve done your job well enough in the past to save yourself now. It could have happened to anyone. Vince and I wouldn’t even have known what to look out for. Take it easy.” He touched her arm again, but merely by way of reassurance. He was satisfied that there was no further need for restraint.

“He’s right, Maryanne,” Lynn Gwyer said. She had worked her way round to Matthew’s side, interposing herself between him and the doctor. “Actually, he’s always right. I knew him back home, and that was his speciality. The last of the great prophets—always an egomaniac, even before he practically took over the news channels.
Those who cannot learn from prophecies are condemned to fulfil them
.” She looked at Matthew then. “Maryanne was part of a much later intake, one of the last recruits to
Hope
. She doesn’t remember you at all—must have had a sheltered upbringing. Well, Matthew, this is what everyday life on Tyre is like. Or did you have time enough in orbit to get used to calling it Ararat?”

“Tyre will do fine so far as I’m concerned,” Matthew said. “I seem to have arrived at a bad time, in more ways than one.”

“I think the serum is working,” Maryanne Hyder announced, with slightly more relief than astonishment. She looked at Matthew too. “It must have been the usual kind—just bigger. We don’t really know how big they can grow, or whether they routinely get bigger as they get older. We don’t know much about the life cycles of the animals
or
the plants. No eggs, no seeds, no ready-made alternative model to put in place of the birds and the bees.”

“I guess it was a Rand Blackstone among slugs, as opposed to the Maryanne Hyder version,” Lynn Gwyer put in. “Maybe they’ll all grow as fat if we keep up our cultivation experiments.”

“I hope not,” the patient replied, with a groan. “It hurts.”

“You won’t be walking again for a few days,” Kriefmann told her. He seemed much more relaxed now that he was confident that the second shot had done the trick. “It’s going to take time to repair that muscle. You’ll be limping for a while once you’re back on your feet again. Ike, can you give me a hand to get Mary to her bunk?”

“Sure,” said Ikram Mohammed. “Will we need a stretcher?”

The patient tried to say no, but she was summarily overruled. While Ike went to get a stretcher Kriefmann took the time to thank Matthew for pitching in. “Welcome to chaos,” he said, drily.

“It looks as if the meeting has been postponed,” Lynn Gwyer said to Matthew. “We might as well get on with the guided tour.”

Matthew was a little reluctant to leave while the toxicologist was still in trouble, but Ikram Mohammed was already returning with a stretcher.

Matthew glanced at Vince Solari, but the detective merely shrugged his shoulders.

As soon as Matthew and Lynn went outside they saw Rand Blackstone hurrying back to the bubbledome, carrying a transparent plastic sack. Matthew had to admit that the creature contained within it was impressively ugly. He had seen giant slugs in the Earthly tropics, and huge sea anemones in the shallows of the Indian Ocean, but he had never seen anything that combined the worst features of both. The creature’s purple coloration was, however, oddly attenuated; it was distributed in blotches about a transparent tegument, putting him as much in mind of a gargantuan planarian worm or liver fluke as of a slug. The smaller versions he had seen on film while he was on
Hope
had seemed much more deeply and more uniformly pigmented.

“Can’t stop,” Blackstone said, as he brushed past them. “Got to get this to Tang.”

“Sure,” Matthew said. “I’ll have time to take a closer look later.”

When the big man had gone inside, Lynn Gwyer looked Matthew in the eye, with obvious concern. “Did Ike have a chance to fill you in on what’s what down here?” she asked. “I don’t know what they told you on
Hope
, but you’ll have figured out that we have very different problems down here.”

“He didn’t get the chance to say as much as he’d probably have liked,” Matthew told her. “Dulcie Gherardesca brought me breakfast, and she was still around when Ike came back. She had a point of view to put across, just as Blackstone had when he walked us back yesterday. I’m beginning to fit the pieces together, but listening to a calmer voice would be a considerable relief.”

“I would have walked you back myself,” she said, “but it’s not easy to get in Rand’s way when he’s determined to have first shot. I suppose he was hoping that you had a message from Shen Chin Che?”

“He was. I suppose he wanted it so desperately in order to boost morale in the Tyrian Counterrevolutionary Front.”

“Don’t be so quick to make a joke of it, Matthew,” the genetic engineer replied, frowning. “
Did
you have a message?”

“Not as such. Shen’s back’s to the wall, but he didn’t seem to be in any mood to give in yet. If he has any cards left to play he didn’t dare show them to me—but if he doesn’t, it’s only a matter of time before the crew winkle him out. He’s too old to fight a long campaign. The crew have the upper hand, and all the time in the microworld.”

Lynn Gwyer nodded, as if the judgment was exactly what she’d expected. “Rand’s okay, behind the bold pioneer act,” she said. “We really do have a hell of a problem down here, you know, which everybody on
Hope
—and I mean
everybody
—seems to be bent on ignoring. It takes more than a breathable atmosphere to make an Earth-clone world, and this is
not
an Earth-clone world in the sense that you and I would mean. If the probe data Milyukov claims to have is accurate, it may be the nearest thing to an Earthlike world we’ll find within a couple of hundred light-years of Earth, and I’m certainly not as ready to give up on it as some of the people at Base One, but we really do have a major problem to solve, and I don’t mean who killed Bernal. His death was a big blow, because of what we might have lost, but launching a witch-hunt to fit someone up for his murder won’t bring him back, and it might compound the damage.”

“Vince Solari is okay too,” Matthew assured her. “He’s not here to hunt witches or fit anybody up. Why would it compound the problem if the murderer were identified and charged?”

“That depends who it is,” the woman replied. “If it’s one of us—well, we’re stretched beyond the limit already. If he really was killed by an alien humanoid that might be even worse, in terms of tying further knots in the situation. I wish I could believe in a sneaky invader from Base One, but I can’t—which seems to me to leave the bad possibility and the worse possibility.”

“You do believe the aliens exist, then?” Matthew deduced. “You think it’s unlikely that an alien hand wielded the glass dagger, but you don’t believe they’re extinct?”

“No, I don’t,” Lynn confirmed. “I think they’re giving the ruins a wide berth, just like the other mammal-analogues, but I think they’re alive and well downriver. They might not be easy to find, but I don’t think extinction as we know it is a common event on Tyre.”

“Gradual chimerical renewal,” Matthew said. “The Miller Effect, built in to the ecosphere at a fundamental level, in a way that makes it far less ruinous to the learning process. But if everything here’s emortal, how does evolution happen?”

“Did Lityansky tell you about the second genome?” Lynn asked.

“He showed me the diagrams, but he said that no one knows what it does. He wouldn’t speculate. What do you think?”

“You mean, what did Bernal think?”

“I dare say you tossed the ideas back and forth between you—and Ike too. What’s your best guess?”

“We think it’s a homeobox. We think that our own genome may suffer some crucial disadvantages because the homeotic genes are mixed in with all the rest.”

“Homeotic genes control embryonic development,” Matthew said, slightly puzzled. “I thought you hadn’t managed to find any embryos.”

“Homeotic genes control anatomical organization,” Lynn said. “On Earth, that’s mostly a matter of controlling embryonic development, but there are sometimes further metamorphic changes to be managed. If Tyrian plants and animals really are emortal, they might have much more scope in that regard, and they’d need a genomic system equipped to orchestrate that extra scope. We can’t prove it until we can study some actual metamorphoses, but we’re quietly confident that we’re on the right track. Even Tang thinks we’re on the right track, and he’s a hard man to please. The three-dimensional coding complex is a fancy homeobox—fancier by far than anything our one-string genome could contrive.”

Matthew nodded slowly. “I see,” he said. “So evolution happens as organisms change. Natural selection without genetic load. Metamorphosis instead of death.”