Dark Ararat (32 page)

“Really?” Solari came back, feigning incredulity.

“Verstehen,”
Dulcie Gherardesca put in, softly. “Intuitive understanding. The basis on which members of a human society can obtain understanding of other societies, with different norms and rules.”

“And individuals of one another,” Matthew added. “I can’t believe that a man like Bernal would ever have planned to perpetrate a scientific fraud. I think he was trying to put himself in the place of an alien, by doing the only thing that he knew for sure that the aliens did: making tools out of natural glass harvested from local plants. Maybe someone who found out what he was doing leapt to the wrong conclusion, but we mustn’t be tempted to do the same.”

“I’m prepared to buy that,” Solari said, although Matthew immediately recognized it as another ploy, inviting a confession. “It was an accident, then. A misunderstanding.”

No one offered a confession, or gave any sign of wanting to do so.

But we’re not all here, Matthew thought. And Vince has only talked to one person since last telling me he had no suspect. Maybe Blackstone has the wrong suspect in mind. But if Solari’s fishing, he must think he’s fishing in the right pond. Which implies that Maryanne Hyder didn’t do it—but that she might know who did.

When the silence had gone on long enough, Solari let out a slight sigh, and said: “Okay. Nobody wants to come clean. Nobody wants to know. Nobody wants to hold up the boat trip. Fair enough—if the excursion means more to you than the murder, you might as well exercise your priorities. I’m just a humble policeman, after all. You’re
scientists
.”

Even Matthew felt the contemptuous sting of that remark, but he also felt compelled to leap to the defense of his new colleagues. “There really are bigger questions at stake, Vince,” he said. “And there’s a point that Tang didn’t make. Whoever killed Bernal reacted atypically, and part of the reason they reacted atypically is that everyone here is in a radically alien environment, isolated from the main body of the investigative team. Everyone here is uneasy and anxious, and no matter how ashamed they are of being frightened—because walking on the surface of an alien but Earthlike world is exactly what everyone here signed up for—they can’t help being prey to fear. The world played its part in Bernal’s death, and it might yet be the cause of many more. No matter how determined we may be to follow through our good intentions, there isn’t anyone here who doesn’t know that the crew jumped the gun in their haste to be rid of their inconvenient cargo. This world might be a potential death trap, not just for the nine of us but for everyone at Base One and everyone still in SusAn.

“We need to know what the chances really are of establishing a colony here, and we need to know it sooner rather than later. Milyukov shouldn’t be exerting further pressure on us with arbitrary deadlines, but that’s a trivial matter: the real deadline will be set by the world itself, and we have to make haste to meet it even though we haven’t the slightest idea when it will fall. This trip downriver might not tell us anything definite, but it’s an opportunity we have to seize. It’s more important than knowing who killed Bernal, and far more important than figuring out what we ought to do with the murderer. If that’s a scientist’s view rather than a policeman’s … well, so be it. Bernal was my friend, but I have far more important things to worry about just now than wreaking vengeance on his killer.”

Solari considered this, and then shrugged. Matthew had been fairly confident that he would. He’d already tested the policeman’s response to the phrase “potential death trap.”

“Okay,” Solari said. “The boat sails tomorrow, with the agreed crew. I stay here with Rand, Tang, Godert, and Maryanne. I do my best to make myself useful. No arrests, no charges, no reports to Base One or
Hope
. Until you get back, at least.
If
you get back.”

“If we don’t,” Ikram Mohammed said, quietly, “I think we’ll have proved that there are issues that take precedence—and your suspect will probably be dead.”

It was the closest anyone had come to naming a name or making an admission, but it stopped there. The genomicist said nothing more, and no one had anything further to add. It said something for the tolerance of the assembled suspects that they were perfectly happy to eat together, with Solari in their midst. The main course was imitation pizza whose toppings were spread on a base that combined imported wheat-manna with local produce; Matthew was glad to discover that the synthetic cheese and tomato masked the inadequate palatability of the base. Had the conversation been less tense it would certainly have been the most enjoyable meal he had had since waking from SusAn—but he put both those circumstances down to the fact that he had had an unusually tiring day.

When the assembly finally broke up and Matthew returned to his bunk, accompanied by Solari, he took the first possible opportunity to say: “Okay, it’s just you and me now. Who did it?”

He was only mildly astonished by Solari’s reply, which was: “There is no
just you and me
, Matt. You sided with them. You endorsed their willful ignorance. If you want to know, you can work it out for yourself. All you have to do is look closely at the data in the automatic logs, compare the alibis and ask the right people the right questions. Never mind the motive: concentrate on the opportunity.”

“Fair enough,” Matthew said. “Maybe I’ll go see how Maryanne’s feeling before I turn in. I could probably do with a few words of advice about how to cope with worm stings, in case the worst comes to the worst.”

TWENTY-FIVE

M
aryanna Hyder was alone in the accommodation she had shared with Bernal Delgado, but Matthew was not the first visitor she had had since Solari had played his hand. Godert Kriefmann had left the common room before anyone else in order to check her condition.

“God’s already asked me,” she said, as soon as she saw Matthew. “I didn’t finger anyone and I certainly didn’t confess. If it was something I said that tipped the policeman off it was something whose significance I didn’t realize myself.”

“How are you feeling?” Matthew asked, figuring that he might as well go through with his cover story anyway. He sat down on the folding chair that had been set beside the bed to accommodate visitors.

“Much better,” was the answer. “No pain, thanks to my IT, but the cost is that I feel somewhat disconnected from my body—not quite here, even though there’s no place else to be.”

“I know the feeling,” Matthew confirmed.

“They have much better IT on Earth now, allegedly,” she told him. “A member of the new human race probably wouldn’t even have felt the sting, and certainly wouldn’t be laid up with it.”

“The new human race,” Matthew echoed. “Is that what Tang calls them?”

“It’s what they call themselves, according to Captain Milyukov.”

“You seem a trifle skeptical,” Matthew observed.

“Do I? Everything we’ve been told about the state of affairs back home comes from Milyukov. Milyukov has a vested interest in persuading us that we can get better support from home than we can from
Hope
, if we can just hang on until the cavalry arrives. Not that we’ll know that it’s even set off for another hundred-and-thirteen years.”

“Do you think Milyukov’s lying?”

She moved her head slightly from side to side, stirring the silky halo of her blond hair. She didn’t think that the captain was
lying
, exactly. It was just that she was reserving judgment as to the manner in which he had filtered and organized the truth.

“Tang thinks that we should be content to hold the fort until they arrive,” Matthew observed.

“I know. Lately, I’ve begun to agree with him, albeit reluctantly.”

“Why reluctantly?”

“If we withdraw to orbit, we’ll be lucky to live long enough to see the beginning of serious colonization, let alone its completion. The crew signed on for a multigenerational enterprise, but I didn’t. And look what it did to the crew.”

“What did Bernal think?” Matthew asked. It was an innocent question, but she didn’t take it that way.

“We didn’t quarrel about it,” she told him, defensively. “I told your friend that even if we had, the quarrel would never have turned violent.
Never
. Anyway, he hadn’t made up his mind. He was determined not to make up his mind until he’d been downriver.”

“In search of
ska
?”

“In search of whatever there is to be found. God says Tang stood aside to let you take Bernal’s place. You must have impressed him.”

“I’m not sure that I did. I think he was content with the fact that he’d obviously impressed me. He knows that I’ve got an open mind, because it hasn’t had time to fill up. More important, though, he simply doesn’t want to go. He doesn’t want to go out on a limb, not because he’s a coward but because he understands as well as anyone does how badly the crew have screwed things up. He wants to take his work back to orbit because he thinks that’s the right place for it until we know a lot more about the mysteries of Tyre. He’s grateful to me for being so enthusiastic to put my head into the lion’s mouth instead of his.”

“Bernal didn’t think it was so very dangerous.”

“But you didn’t want him to go,” Matthew guessed.

“That was personal.”

“And you didn’t quarrel about it. Did you know he was making imitation alien spearheads and arrowheads way out in the fields?”

Again she shook her head, more vigorously this time.

Matthew contemplated going back to his room and leaving her to sleep, but he hesitated. There were a couple of questions on the mental list he’d been compiling all day that she was best placed to answer, and he didn’t expect to have another conversation with her before the boat set off.

“If one of the local mammal-equivalents had met up with the critter you ran into,” he said, “it would presumably be dead.”

“Almost certainly,” she confirmed, although she was obviously puzzled by the change of tack.

“Why
almost
?”

“The toxin’s a blunt instrument, physiologically speaking. That’s why it works as well in the context of an alien metabolism as it does in target flesh—but it’s an organic venom, to which local organisms might be able to build up a degree of tolerance. Nonlethal stings inflicted by smaller organisms could provide an opportunity to do that.”

“Is it purely defensive, or could it also be a way of killing prey?”

The question increased her puzzlement, but again she provided a straight answer. “If you’d asked me yesterday,” she said, “I’d have guessed that it’s purely defensive—but I didn’t know how big they grew, then. That was a fearsome specimen. Trust me to walk right into it! Because they photosynthesize and don’t move around much in daylight they seem very meek, but they can move quite quickly when they need to. I’m not so sure now that they aren’t hunter-killers.”

“They
can
photosynthesize,” Matthew said, issuing a mild correction. “But they don’t seem to be very enthusiastic, do they? They skulk in the shadows, even though they don’t seem to have much to fear from predators. At least, the little ones skulk in the shadows. How big do you think they are when they’re fully grown?”

“If you’d asked me yesterday …” she began, but left it at that. After a pause, she added: “Bernal said they probably had some surprises in store. He didn’t mention giants, but he did wonder whether the ones we’d seen might be immature. Ike had told him they had much bigger genomes than they were exhibiting, and he was trying to figure out why that might be.”

“Was he wondering whether they might be larval stages, capable of further metamorphosis into something completely different?”

“He mentioned the possibility,” Maryanne confirmed.

On a sudden impulse, Matthew said: “What did Bernal
call
them? Not in his reports, but in his casual speech. Did he have some kind of nickname for them?”

Maryanne thought about that for a moment before saying: “He called them
killer anemones
a couple of times—because the tentacle-cluster made them look like sea anemones.”

“
K-A,
” Matthew said, immediately. “
S-K-A. Super
killer anemone. There are no seasons to speak of in these parts, so there’s never been any pressure on complex organisms to develop annual life cycles. They can take all the time they need, or all the time they
want
. We don’t have the slightest idea how long any of the local life-forms hang around if they don’t fall victim to predators or disease.”

“I’m not the best one to ask,” Maryanne pointed out. “But I don’t think Bernal knew. He did say something about the difficulty of adding chimerization to the sex-death equation. A wild variable, he called it.”

“The
sex-death equation
,” Matthew said. “That’s right. Never underestimate the power of a man’s favorite catchphrases. Back in sound-bite-land that was one of his ways of dramatizing the population problem.”

“I know,” she said. “I used to see him on TV when I was a kid.”

“Another latecomer to the ranks of the Chosen,” Matthew observed. “Did you see me too?”

“Probably,” she said. “I don’t really remember.”

His ego suitably deflated, Matthew muttered: “He was always the good-looking one—always attractive to the very young.”

“I’m an adult
now
,” she reminded him, tersely. “Only five years younger than Dulcie and ten years younger than Lynn, in terms of
elapsed
time.”

“No insult was intended,” Matthew assured her. “What else did Bernal say about the killer anemones? Not the kind of stuff he’d put in his reports—the kind he’d produce when he was speculating, fantasizing? What did he have to say about
super
killer anemones?”

“If he’d had anything at all to say, I’d have realized what
ska
meant myself,” she told him, still annoyed in spite of his assurance that no insult had been intended. “He thought it was odd that the ecosphere seems so conspicuously underdeveloped, in terms of animal species, despite the fact that its complexity seemed so similar to that of Earth. He knew that the extant species had to have a hidden versatility that we hadn’t yet had the opportunity to observe, but he couldn’t figure out what it was for.”