Dark Ararat (37 page)

It was not until a full half-hour later that the second part of Matthew’s ordeal began, when his three companions had had to reach an agreement as to which of them was going to reset his dislocated shoulder.

“Why don’t you draw lots?” he suggested, bitterly, as the discussion of relevant qualifications became positively surreal.

In the end, it came down to a matter of volunteering. It was Dulcie Gherardesca who finally accepted the responsibility.

By this time, Matthew’s IT was at full stretch, and it had no available response to the new flood of agony but to put him out like a light—a mercy for which he was duly grateful, although he came round again to find that although the job had been properly done his nerves seemed reluctant to concede the point.

His right arm felt utterly useless, and his head
still
felt as if a riveter had driven a bolt through the cerebellum from right to left. He had no idea how much time had passed, but the sun had come up and the cabin was bright with its light.

“What the hell went wrong?” he demanded, trying to expel his distress as righteous wrath.

“Unanticipated problem,” Ike informed him. “First major stretch of fast shallow water. The underwater sensors worked perfectly, and she steered like a dream. For a few minutes I thought we might not need the legs at all, but when the time came we may have been going just a little too fast. When we tested the legs back at the ruins it was only a matter of letting them pick the hull up and walk sedately along for a while, until it was time to drop it again. The real thing was a lot more challenging. Theoretically, the AI should have been able to decelerate smoothly enough—but the theory hadn’t taken account of the kind of vegetation that was growing along the canyon walls.

“You saw the stuff we were passing by all day yesterday—thoroughly innocuous. Not here. Here there are active plants that dangle tentacles in the water, ready to entangle eely things whose maneuvrability has been impaired by the current. They’re programmed to grab at anything and hold hard, below the surface
and
above. The lead leg on the starboard side had to put down hard to begin the deceleration process, but it should have released itself almost immediately. It couldn’t—and as soon as the AI perceived that something was awry she immediately pulled the other legs out of harm’s way. It probably saved the boat from being trapped, but that might not have been so bad, given that we’re carrying the chain saws. The net effect of pulling seven legs in and using the momentum of the boat to tear the other one free was that
Voconia
executed a very abrupt right turn, which resulted in a nasty collision with a very solid rock face. Followed, of course, by total confusion. The legs had to get busy then, to save us from being carried into the rocks by the wayward current.

“In all fairness, the AI did a fine job. She extracted the trapped leg, got us righted, managed to keep us from smashing up on the rocks, and eventually slowed us right down.
Voconia
got badly scraped below the waterline, of course, but she didn’t spring a leak. None of the legs actually
broke
, although a couple suffered the same problem you did—mercifully, I don’t have to stand waist-deep in the water to put the joints back into their sockets, because they’re self-righting.

“All in all, we’re a bit bruised, but we’re all in one piece—including
Voconia
. Until the next time.”

“The next time?” Matthew queried, blearily.

“There’s one more steep-and-shallow stretch to go. We should get there late this afternoon, if we’re on schedule. After that, it should be easy going all the way to the cataract. That’s when the real work will begin. Hopefully, your arm should be a lot better by then.”

“Should it?” Matthew retorted, skeptically. “Somehow, I don’t
think
so.”

“It’s okay,” Dulcie assured him. “It’s back in place. The ligaments are a little bit torn but they’ll heal. What you can feel is mostly just soreness. Your IT will take care of everything if you sit still and give it a chance.”

“Not before tomorrow it won’t,” he assured her.

“That’s okay, Matthew,” Lynn said, soothingly. “There’s a motor on the winch. You can press the switches. We’ll do the loading and unloading. The boat fabric’s light and it practically disassembles and reassembles itself—it’s only the cargo that needs much brute strength to move it about. Putting the winch mechanism together is my job anyhow. Do you want to spend the day sulking in bed or sitting on deck?”

“The problem with IT,” Matthew growled, “is that it’s brought about a drastic decline in the scope of human sympathy. I’ve just suffered a fractured skull, a dislocated shoulder, and a knee in the balls, and everyone’s looking at me as if I were some kind of wimp.”

“Your skull isn’t fractured,” Dulcie Gherardesca assured him. “I went through your monitor readings carefully. No cracks, no clots. It’s just an ache.”

“And I’m sorry I tripped over you,” Lynn added. “Personally, I’d take the deck. I wouldn’t want to be in bed when we hit the second stretch of whitewater, just in case
Voconia
’s limbs haven’t reset as well as yours.”

“But you can have the lower bunk if you want it,” Ike offered.

Matthew gritted his teeth, determined to make it to the deck under his own steam. Mercifully, his legs had only suffered minor bruising. He could walk quite adequately provided that he didn’t let the full weight of his right arm hang down from the shoulder. As soon as he was back on deck, the tide of his troubles began to ebb. Once the smartsuit’s conjunctiva-overlay had taken the edge of the sun’s brightness the light and warmth became comforting, and he found that if he sat sufficiently still his shoulder wasn’t too bothersome. The fact that his IT was still working hard was evident in the disconnected feeling of which Maryanne Hyder had complained, but that was a far cry from the trippy confusion it had visited upon him immediately after his fall.

From the seating tacked on to the side of the cabin Matthew couldn’t look down into the water as he had been enthusiastic to do the day before, nor could he appreciate the details of the vegetation lining both banks, but staring at a blurred purple wall had its compensations. His mind was too fuzzy to allow him to flick his eyes back and forth in search of hidden animals, so he was content to let the foreground fade from consciousness as he looked beyond into the forest through which the river ran.

The boat was traveling swiftly—perhaps a little too swiftly for comfort, given what had happened the night before—so it was easier to focus on the higher and more distant elements of the canopy. Eventually, he felt well enough to try to count basketballs—and when the number threatened to escalate to uncomfortable levels, he began counting “bipolar spinoid extensions” instead, without troubling himself overmuch as to how many of them might possess “evident quasiequatorial constrictions.”

After a while, he had recovered sufficient sense of proportion to realize that it was probably for the best that it was he who had suffered the worst effects of the accident. He was the only one who knew next to nothing about the design and operation of the boat. He was, in effect, the only authentic passenger. Had one of the others been disabled, even temporarily, it would have left a gap into which he would have been ill-equipped to step.

As things were, the problem with the legs had generated a certain amount of reparatory and precautionary work that his companions were able to undertake with reasonable efficiency that afternoon, alongside the routine work of taking samples from the river and its banks. They had done less of that kind of work the day before because the boat had been negotiating familiar territory, but the landscape had undergone several significant changes during the night. The banks of the river were more sharply defined here, and the shallows no longer supported the bushy broad-leaved plants that had bordered the upper reaches. The attitude of the dendrites whose branches now hung down toward the surface reminded Matthew a little of willow trees, but they were not really “trees” and their “foliage” was far less delicate and discreet.

Had he been in a slightly different frame of mind the branches might have reminded Matthew of serpentine dragons with as many tiny wings as millipedes had legs. They writhed slowly, but they did writhe. Although their termini were not equipped with mouths, let alone fangs, they did have curious spatulate extensions that an imaginative man might have likened to a cobra’s hood.

The more distant vegetation was just as strange. Its elements—those he could see, at any rate—were much taller, but it would have taken a very generous eye to liken them to stately poplars or aged redwoods. Matthew found that if he visualized a giant squid extended vertically, with the body at the base and the tentacles reaching skyward, he had a model of sorts for the basic form, but there were all kinds of arbitrary embellishments to be added to the picture, some of which were literal frills and others merely metaphorical.

There was no wind this afternoon, but the straining tentacles moved nevertheless, idling as if in a sluggish current, posing like dress designers lazily displaying festoons of fabric to the admiring and appreciative eye of the benign sun. There were few animals to be
seen
hereabouts, but Tang had been right about the lowland soundscape; there were more to be
heard
. They did not sing like birds or stridulate like crickets, but they whistled and fluted in a fashion that sounded rather mournful to Matthew, although he could not suppose that the cacophony sounded mournful to the intended listeners. On an alien world, natural music could not carry the same emotional connotations as on Earth—or could it?

He might have devoted some time to the contemplation of that issue had he not been interrupted.

“How are you feeling now?” Lynn asked him.

“Not so bad,” he confessed. “I’ll let you know for sure when we’ve got through the second whitewater stretch.”

“Dulcie did a good job with your shoulder, you know,” she told him. “I’d probably have botched it.”

“I’m grateful,” Matthew assured her, although his tone was lukewarm. “Anything interesting in the water?”

“The nets are picking up more now that the AI’s stoked up the biomotor, but there are no real surprises as yet. No crocodiles, no crabs, no fancy fish.”

“Anything edible?”

“I don’t know. Would you like to try a little sliced eely thing for dinner, with some minijellyfish soup as a starter?”

“Not really. What about the snare that grabbed the leg last night? Another kind of killer anemone?”

She recognized the term readily enough, even though she hadn’t made the connection with the note on Bernal Delgado’s pad. “We’ve seen them before,” she said, “though not nearly as big or as strong. Like the stinging worms they’re not easy to categorize. It’s a matter of opinion as to whether they’re more closely analogous to giant sea anemones or gargantuan Venus flytraps. They can’t usually catch sizable prey, but conditions in the gully must work in their favor, allowing them to get more ambitious than their cousins and
much
bigger. Now we’re forewarned, the AI won’t let the legs get stuck again. We’ll come through the second stretch easily enough.”

“As long as there isn’t a brand new package of surprises waiting for us.”

“Well, yes,” she conceded. “Maybe it was a mistake to try to sleep through last night’s transit. This time, we’ll all be awake and alert.”

“What did Tang say when you reported back?” Matthew wanted to know.

“He’s not the type to gloat. He wished you a speedy recovery. Maryanne’s much better, and Blackstone’s happy to have another nonscientist around. He and Solari have been playing ball in an increasingly competitive spirit. Doctor’s orders, Solari said.”

“It’s true,” Matthew told her.

“Back at Base One the counterrevolution’s proceeding apace,” she added. “
Crystallizing out
was Tang’s phrase. The awareness that they’re not actually in a position to demand anything from Milyukov is only making things worse. We’ll have an appointed ambassador and a staff of diplomats soon enough, and a list of demands—but the only leverage we have is Milyukov’s reputation.
What will the people of Earth think of you if you let us down or preside over a disaster?
isn’t the strongest negotiating position imaginable. Especially when the disaster is resolutely refusing to make an entrance. Tang says that he can’t whip up as much interest as our expedition clearly deserves. Nobody really expects us to find the humanoids, although it’s willful blindness rather than the calculus of probability that generates the negative expectation, and nobody can imagine anything else that’s going to make a difference to the way feelings are running.”

“That’s their failure,” Matthew said. “If I had a TV camera I could make a difference easily enough. I could almost wish I was there instead of here, so that I could at least get up on stage and shout at an audience. Don’t look at me like that—even Bernal would have had twinges of that sort, with or without a sore shoulder.”

“If we have to shout for help from One you might eventually get your chance,” she suggested.

“It would be entirely the wrong way to go into it,” he told her. “Victims of misfortune always look like klutzes, no matter how innocent their victimhood. To get attention, you have to be a hero.”

“For that sort of part,” she said, only a little censoriously, “you seem to be a little out of practice.”

TWENTY-NINE

T
he second passage through shallow and fast-moving water passed without incident, although Matthew had to grit his teeth a time or two as the legs extended on either side of the vessel and then began to move with exactly the same sinister flow as a real spider’s legs. There was no need this time to brace the vessel’s “feet” against the sides of the watercourse, which was more than wide enough to accommodate its passing.

The multitudinous rocks that jutted up from the water’s surface or hid mere millimeters beneath it were both problem and solution. No human eyes could have plotted a series of safe steps for two legs, let alone eight, but it was the kind of task for which an AI’s perceptions were well-adapted.