Dark Ararat (33 page)

“Reproduction,” Matthew said. “Or gradual chimerical renewal. Unless, of course, they’re the same thing. What did he tell you about gradual chimerical renewal?”

“He told me not to think in terms of werewolves,” she said, obviously having seized upon the same mythical bad example as Solari. “Nor insects. He thought we’d need to be more original than that.”

“Did he suggest any possible explanations for the fact that there don’t seem to be any insect-analogues here?”

“He thought it had something to do with the fact that sex didn’t seem to have caught on as an organism-to-organism sort of thing. He said that flight had more to do with sex than most people realized, and more to do with death than people who thought of souls taking wing for Heaven had ever dared to imagine.”

“It’s another part of the same equation,” Matthew realized, following the train of thought. “Death is so commonplace on Earth because it’s a correlate of the reliance on sex as a means of shuffling the genetic deck. Flight is so commonplace for the same reason: it’s at least as much a matter of bringing mates together and distributing eggs as it is of dodging predators. Flying insects occupy a privileged set of niches on Earth because of the role they play in pollination—a role that doesn’t seem to exist here, at least not on a day-to-day basis. Factoring chimerization into the sex-death equation must have all kinds of logical consequences that we’re ill-equipped to imagine, let alone work out in detail. To borrow another hoary catchphrase, this place might not just be queerer than we imagine, but queerer than we
can
imagine. Is it possible, do you think—is it even remotely conceivable—that the missing humanoids might be a lot more closely related to the worms than we’ve assumed, for the simple reason that
everything
here is much more closely related to everything else than we’ve assumed?”

“The genomics say no, according to Ike and Bernal,” she told him. “Almost all the chimeras we’ve analysed are cousin-aggregations, made up of closely related cells.”

“So closely related,” Matthew said, remembering what Tang had told him about the same matter, “that it’s difficult to see where the selective advantage lies. But what about the chimeras we haven’t analyzed, or even glimpsed? Probably queerer than we can imagine, even after three years of patient work—but Lityansky’s jumped to his optimistic conclusions half a lifetime too soon. My gut reaction was a lot cleverer than he was prepared to credit. Whatever hidden potential this world’s hoarding, it’s something we haven’t even begun to grasp.”

“There’s no real reason to think you’ll find it downriver if we haven’t found it here,” she pointed out, scrupulously.

“Bernal didn’t think so,” Matthew pointed out. “Why was that?”

“Simply because we’d looked here and not found anything very exciting,” she told him. “He thought that it was time to look somewhere else. He didn’t think they were ever going to find anything on Base One’s island, because the priority there is on usurpation of land, the production of Earth-analogue soils, and the growth of Earthly crops. Base Two’s attention is similarly restricted, with exploitation still taking a higher priority than exploration. The grasslands are the most extensive ecosystemic complexes on at least two of the four continents—but it was hope that was guiding Bernal’s expectations, not the calculus of probability.”

“I understand that,” Matthew told her.

“So do I,” she admitted. “But I’m biased. I loved him.”

“You weren’t the only one,” Matthew assured her. “You weren’t even the only one
here
, were you?”

“But she didn’t kill him,” Maryanne was quick to say.

“Who?”

“Lynn. She really didn’t mind. Not
that
much. She knew him years ago. She’d been through it all before. She understood what he was like. She didn’t kill him.”

“Did you tell Solari that Bernal had been sleeping with Lynn before he took up with you?” Matthew wanted to know.

“He already knew,” she told him. “He knew before he left
Hope
. He asked Lynn about it, and he asked me. But I can’t believe that she killed him. She wouldn’t. She couldn’t.”

Matthew thought about it for a moment, and then said: “No, she wouldn’t. We may be twenty-first-century barbarians, but we’re not nineteenth-century barbarians. We’re mortals, but we’re civilized, and we have other things to think about. More important things. We have a seemingly Earth-clone world that isn’t an Earth-clone at all, and a race of city-dwellers who couldn’t hang on to the habit. We’re uneasy, scared, jumpy … but even here we have our VE sex-kits, our IT, our missionary zeal. You’re right. Lynn couldn’t have killed Bernal, and if Vince thinks she did, he’s tuned into the wrong wavelength. But somebody did.”

“I don’t know who,” Maryanne insisted.

“Neither do I—but however it came about, I have to try to step into Bernal’s shoes. I have to try to see things as he had begun to see them, to take advantage of his accumulated knowledge of the world. I need to know what was in his mind when he coined the phrase
super killer anemone
. I need to know, even if it was hope and hope alone that set his compass, what he expected to find downriver. If there’s anything more you can tell me, I wish you’d tell me now. We’ll have our beltphones with us, but talking on the phone isn’t the same as talking face-to-face.”

“I don’t know what to tell you,” she insisted. “I’m sorry, but I just don’t know. I’m a toxicologist, not an ecologist. To me, a worm with tentacles is just a liquiject full of interesting poisons. There are too many poisons hereabouts, which would be even more lethal to creatures like us than to the enemies they were designed for, if it weren’t for the safeguards built into our suits and our IT. There are a million ways to fuck up a functioning metabolism, and very few of them are choosy.”

“It reminds Rand Blackstone of home,” Matthew observed.

“So it should,” she said. “On Earth, all toxicologists turn toward Australia when they pray. Until we arrived here, it was poison paradise. An alien world on the surface of the Earth—until the dingoes and the rabbits moved in. Has it occurred to you that the
s
in
ska
might stand for something other than
super
, even if the
k
and the
a
stand for
killer anemone
?”

“Sure,” Matthew said. “But when you’re guessing, first guesses are often the best. What did you have in mind?”

“Strange. Sinister. Solitary. Son of the. Spawn of the.”

“I still like super—oh shit, no I don’t. It’s a joke. It’s just a bloody
joke
.”

She waited patiently for him to tell her what he meant.

“
Serial
killer anemone,” Matthew said. “I should have seen it immediately. It has to be.”

“Forgive me if I don’t laugh,” she said. “I’m sorry I don’t know more about what Bernal was thinking. He wasn’t quite the talker you are—not so far as shoptalk was concerned, anyway.”

Matthew wasn’t sure whether to take offense at that or not. “We all have our specialisms,” he said. “Maybe I’m a little more obsessive than Bernal was—or a little less.”

“I did see you on TV, now I come to think about it,” she said. “You always looked so serious. Not that Bernal wasn’t—but he had style.”

“Now that
is
an insult,” Matthew said. “I have style. It might not be the same sort of style as Bernal’s, but it
is
style.”

“That’s what Lynn said,” Maryanne recalled. “When we heard you were coming, she was the one who was glad. But she knew you in the flesh, didn’t she? So to speak.”

Matthew realized, rather belatedly, that it was her turn to go fishing for information.

“Just good friends,” he said. “Not even that, really. If she and Bernal were intimate back on Earth I didn’t know about it, but I probably wouldn’t have even if they were. She and I never were.”

“Well, it’s a whole new world now,” the blond woman said, softly. “One fresh start after another.”

“Does it matter?”

“What matters,” she informed him, mournfully, “is that he’s
dead
. If I weren’t so absurdly spaced out, so remotely detached from all my feelings …”

“Yeah,” said Matthew, sympathetically. “When I said I knew the feeling, I forgot the exclusion effect. But Bernal was my friend, my ally … in Shen Chin Che’s reckoning, my counterpart. I
can
imagine how you feel. I’m truly sorry that we had to meet like this. I wish he could be here.”

“When you do find out who did it—” she began, but cut the sentence short with abrupt determination.

“Vince already knows,” Matthew reminded her, gently.

“When
you
find out,” she repeated, adding the emphasis.

“What?” he prompted.

“Tell them I forgive them. Tell them that I wish them no harm.”

She was spaced out, disconnected from her feelings: from her grief, from her anger, from her pain. She knew that. She also meant what she said.

“Them?” Matthew queried. “Not
him
, or
her
?”

“I honestly don’t know,” she murmured. “If I gave Solari the last piece of the jigsaw, I had no idea where it fit. But he was right all along—if we’d really wanted to know, we could have worked it out. We didn’t, even before I stepped on the worm.”

“It’s a whole new world now,” Matthew quoted, to show that he understood. “One fresh start after another. We may be twenty-first-century barbarians in an era when Earth is populated by emortal superscientists, but we’re doing our best to make progress. We can figure out our penal code when we have more time. For now, we have to move forward on other fronts. If I can complete the work that Bernal began … I was right to claim the berth, you now. Tang is needed here. He’ll figure out the mystery eventually, working from the biochemistry up, but if there’s a shortcut to the truth, it’ll need an ecologist’s eye to capture it. Seeing the wood in spite of the trees is our speciality.”

“I wish you the best of luck,” she said.

He knew how costly the wish had been, and thanked her accordingly.

TWENTY-SIX

S
een from the mound in the ruined city the boat had been no more than an anomalous patch of color, so Matthew was quite unprepared for the peculiarity it displayed at closer range. There was nothing so very unusual about the basic shape of its hull or its cabin and wheelhouse, but its construction material was exotic and the hull was ornamented with a complex network of striations. It was as if each of the vessel’s flanks were overlaid by a set of articulated hawsers.

“Those are the legs,” Lynn informed him. “They’re quite spectacular when they’re extended.”

“
Legs
?” Matthew echoed, in helpless amazement.

“We’re quite a lot higher than the lowland plateau here,” she explained. “The watercourse is fairly smooth and comfortably deep for long stretches, but there are a couple of whitewater canyons. The keel’s retractable, but the boat still draws too much water to get through the difficult stretches without bumping against the rocks. The hull’s made of smart fabric, of course—it has a few tricks of its own and it heals quickly if it’s ripped—but we can’t afford the luxury of laying up for days at a time. Bernal decided that it would be best if she could take the worst sections in her stride, literally. I’d have thought three legs each side would be okay, according to the conventional insect model, but Bernal opted for eight. That’s why we call her
Voconia
.”

Having had the benefit of this introduction, Matthew had no trouble deducing that the black spots in
Voconia
’s prow were compound eyes of some kind. The water was clear enough for him to see that the lines of sensors extended below the water, doubtless to ensure that the craft could take soundings as it went. The wheelhouse was too narrow for comfort, but that was only to be expected; the rudder and biomotor would be under AI control for the greater part of the journey, although there had to be a set of manual controls for use in an emergency.

The hold in which the supplies and equipment were stored was crammed to bursting, and there was a certain amount of overspill stacked in the corners of the cabin. This meant that the cabin was less roomy than was desirable, even when the dining table and bunks were folded back, but Matthew figured that extra space would be generated at a reasonably rapid rate as
Voconia
’s biomotor and passengers worked their way steadily through the bales of manna. He could see that it wasn’t going to be easy to dismantle the craft, transport the pieces down a steep cliff and then reassemble it, but he assumed that the hull’s “smartness” extended to the inclusion of convenient abscission layers that could be activated by the AI.

“Pity you didn’t fit it out with wings,” Matthew commented, although he knew perfectly well why bio-inspired design ran into severe practical limitations when it came to mimicking the mechanisms of flight. Locusts and herons were near-miraculous triumphs of engineering; the only ornithopter produced on twenty-first-century Earth that had been capable of carrying a human passenger had been the ungainliest machine ever devised. If the engineers of twenty-ninth-century Earth had been able to improve on it, the secret hadn’t yet been passed on to the crew of
Hope
.

“We had to keep it simple,” Lynn told him. “Going downstream will be easy, though, provided that the biomotor finds the locally derived wholefood adequate to its needs. The real trial will begin when we turn around to come back. Coming back under our own power will test the boat’s resources to the limit. We can arrange for an emergency food and equipment drop from
Hope
if we need one, and maybe some sort of rescue mission if things get really desperate, but there are matters of pride to be considered. She’s our baby—we want her to do well.”

Everyone but Maryanne Hyder was on the riverbank to see them off, and the good-byes seemed reasonably effusive by comparison with the awkward hellos that had greeted Matthew a couple of days earlier.