Dark Ararat (38 page)

Matthew knew that the eight legs had autonomic systems built into their “shoulders,” so that each one could take its primary cues from its neighbor and adjust its own attitude accordingly. He was afraid at first that the additional signals emanating from the central controller might interfere with the lower-order process of coordination, but he quickly realized that artificial intelligence must have made considerable advances between 2090 and the date when
Hope
had finally left the solar system. Three additional generations of insectile and arachnoid probes designed and built to operate on the surfaces of the inner worlds and outer satellites had brought specialist systems of the kind embodied in the boat to a new pitch of perfection. The reflexive alarm that welled up in his throat when the boat began her fantastic dance from rock to rock was calmed soon enough, although it underwent a pulse of renewal every time more than one of the feet disappeared beneath the surface in search of invisible purchase.

It would all have seemed easier if the boat had not been moving so quickly, but the AI’s safety calculations did not need to take account of trepidation or hesitation. Once she had collated the relevant data, she fed her responses through without the slightest hesitation, and the legs moved accordingly. Matthew had never before found occasion to wonder what it might be like to be an elf mounted on a spider’s back, but the fact that he was still rather spaced out by virtue of the anesthetic endeavors of his IT made him more than usually vulnerable to surreal impressions. For a minute or two
Voconia
really did seem to be living up to her name, and it became astonishingly easy to imagine himself as an exceedingly tiny individual lost in a microcosmic wonderland.

Had the scuttling race extended for many minutes more the AI would have had to take into account such factors as lactic acid deficiency and all the other phenomena of “tiredness,” but the craft’s emerald skin had stored just enough energy to sustain the dash without requiring the mobilization of any additional fuel supplies. As rides went, even for a nonfan like Matthew, the trip was far more exciting and rewarding than the tightly cocooned descent from
Hope
. It was not until it was over that he realized how tightly he had been clenching his fists—even the right one, which was far more grudging of the strain.

“It was a little more hectic than I’d expected,” he confessed to Ike Mohammed, when it was over and there was nothing but smooth water between the boat and the cataract.

“According to the whispers the crew put about,” the genomicist told him, “boats like this made the colonization of Ganymede and Titan possible. The combination of insectile mobility and brute computer power made machines not unlike this one leading contenders in the spot-the-sentient stakes a couple of hundred years ago.”

“No winner’s been declared yet?” Matthew said, surprised. “There were people claiming evidence of machine consciousness before I was frozen down. There was even a fledgling rights movement.”

“Apparently not,” Ike told him. “Of course, any prophet worth his salt could have told you that the goalposts would keep on being moved, and that the philosophical difficulty of settling the question would become more vexed rather than less when more candidates for machine-intelligence-of-the-millennium began to come forward. So far as the crew have been able to ascertain, the state of play back on Earth is that hardened machine fans reckon that there are as many conscious machines in the system as conscious people, whereas the diehards in the opposite camp still hold the official count at zero.”

“It’s still surprising,” Matthew said.

“Maybe it is,” Ike conceded. “Your average robot taxi driver will claim consciousness if you ask it, especially in New York—but it would, wouldn’t it? Even if the long-anticipated general strike ever takes place, the diehards will stick to their guns—unless, of course, their guns have come out in sympathy.”

Matthew decided that this was one issue too many for him to try to accommodate in his speculations, at present. He felt that he ought to concentrate on matters more immediately in hand. The wheelhouse AI wasn’t the only robot on board; one of the others was patiently dissecting out the genetic material from samples they’d taken out of the river. Full-scale sequencing would have to wait for later, but the markers already catalogued by Ike and his fellows at Base One and the tags assembled in their portable library were adequate to allow the robot to begin pumping out maps of gradually increasing resolution.

Matthew’s notepad was too small to produce readable images of the data-complexes, so he and Ike had to go into the cabin to use the wallscreen, where a petty quarrel immediately developed as to who ought to have control of the keyboard. Ike won, not just because he had two capable hands but because he had three years’ more experience in interpreting the data. He had every right to play commentator to Matthew’s audience, even though the reversal of what seemed to Matthew to be their natural roles was a trifle irksome.

As the data began to pile up, however, Ike had to spend more and more time merely sifting through it, looking for items of significance that the scanner programs were not yet sophisticated enough to catch. When the commentary lapsed Matthew quickly became lost in the data-deluge, acutely conscious of the fact that he probably would not be able to spot an interesting anomaly if it stood up and waved Rand Blackstone’s hat at him. He was still learning his way around the fundamental and familiar patterns, trying to come to terms imaginatively with the weird binary genomes that all Tyrian organisms possessed; its biochemical complexities were so much gibberish. He had to remind himself, very firmly, that this was not his forte, and that the hypnotic effect it had on Ikram Mohammed was something he ought to avoid, lest it distract him from the kinds of observation and hypothesis-formation that
were
his forte.

Evening approached again with what seemed like unreasonable rapidity. The previous days had been so busy and so strenuous that Matthew had hardly noticed the fact that Tyre’s day was 11 percent shorter than the Earthly day that had been carefully conserved aboard
Hope
. Now that
Voconia
had take over the burden of progress, while Matthew was not merely a passenger but an invalid, the time-scale difference seemed to leap out at him as if from ambush, further increasing his sense of dislocation and surreality.

Ike finally condescended to step back from the wallscreen and lay the keyboard aside, saying: “I can’t take any more.”

“We’re not going to turn anything up this way, Ike,” Matthew said, somberly. “We’re just looking at the rest-states of the cells. We need to keep tabs on them while they’re active. Lityansky’s watched the cut-and-paste processes that produce the local equivalents of sexual exchange, but we need to fill in the yawning gap that still separates us from an understanding of their reproductive mechanisms. It’s not here. It’s just
not here
. The specimens are all too small, too simple. This stuff isn’t ever going to show us what all that juicy over-the-top complexity is
for
.”

“It might,” Ike demurred, “if we could only figure out how to extrapolate the data properly. Even in the simple world of the DNA monopoly it’s extraordinarily difficult to catch the more elusive genes
at it
. The guys who navigated their way through the hinterlands of the original genome maps back in the twentieth century had to creep up on all the rarely activated axons. It took them all century and a lot of inspired guesswork to nail down the
really
shy ones. It might take us as long. We have better equipment, but we’re on the outside looking in. But you’re right about one thing: we need some good key specimens—and these don’t qualify. Unfortunately, we couldn’t know that they didn’t until we’d looked.”

Matthew nodded agreement. Earth’s ecosphere had thrown up useful specimen species at every stage of genetic research, but nobody would have been able to identify them as significant keys just by looking at them.
Drosophila, Rhabditis
, and the puffer fish had not come bearing labels proclaiming their unique value as foundation stones of genetic analysis.

“Even if we found a humanoid,” Ike continued, pensively, “there’d be no guarantee that analyzing his—or more likely its—genes would illuminate the fundamental issues. On the other hand, there might be some unobtrusive little creature minding its own business in the shadows, whose cells are working overtime in a special way that would do exactly that. So we have to keep looking. Do you want to call it a day and watch the sunset?”

“Sure,” Matthew said. “And tonight, I want a
really
good night’s sleep, to get me ready for the cliff-descent. If my arm will let me sleep, that is.”

“Your IT will see to it,” Ike assured him, as they made their way out on to the deck. Lynn and Dulcie were already there, having abandoned their own labors a little earlier.

As on the previous evening, the character of the river fauna changed quite markedly as the light faded through dark blue to dark gray, but the most noticeable aspect of the change this time was auditory. The noises emanating from the forest increased in volume and complexity, although the crescendo was relatively brief.

“Is it just me,” Dulcie Gherardesca asked, “or is the chorus progressing from quaintly plaintive to almost harrowing?”

“It’s just the numbers,” Ike told her. “There must be
thousands
. No birds, though. Squirrels and monkeys and whistling lizards. Great lungs, though. Can we assume that they’re marking territories and summoning mates, do you think, or should we be bending our minds to wonder what
other
functions that kind of caterwauling might serve?”

Nobody bothered to answer that, or to remind the speaker that what he really meant was squirrel- and monkey-
analogues
.

“The biodiversity might be limited by comparison with home,” Lynn observed, “but there are plenty of critters out there. Maybe we ought to moor for a spell and take a look. The forest’s quite different hereabouts, nothing like the hills around the ruins.”

“Better to do it on the way back,” Ike said. “We came to take a look at the vitreous grasslands. They’re the great unknown, the ultimate Tyrian wilderness.”

The urgent phase of the chorus faded soon enough, although it never dissolved into silence. Almost as soon as the stars came out in force the boat bumped something, and then bumped it again. The impacts were slight but distinctly tangible. Matthew’s first thought was that they were nudging dangerous underwater rocks, but it only required a glance to inform him that the river was easily wide enough to allow the AI to steer a course through any such hazard. Whatever was bumping
Voconia
was moving under its own power to create the collisions, and it had to be at least as big as a human, if not bigger.

“We need a picture,” Ike was quick to say. “I’ll feed the AI’s visuals through to the big screen.”

Matthew and the two women returned immediately to the cabin, but the results were disappointing. There were no more bumps, and the recorded images were worthless. The AI had the means to compensate for near-darkness, but not for the turbidity of the water. They could see that
something
had thumped the boat repeatedly, but whether it was merely a big eel-analogue or something less familiar remained frustratingly unclear.

“Here be mermaids,” Matthew murmured.

“Or maybe manatees,” Dulcie said, drily. “
Genuine
exotics.”

Matthew knew what she meant. Manatees had been extinct before he was born, along with Steller’s sea cow and the dugong, and their DNA was unbanked. Humans would never see their like again—but mermaids, being safely imaginary, would always be present in the chimerical imagination. On the other hand, this was Tyre, where chimerization was built into the picture at the most fundamental level, even though the vast majority of individuals didn’t seem to be exhibiting it at the moment of their observation. If there were mermaids anywhere, this was the kind of place in which one might expect to find them.

“It was big,” Ike reported. “The AI estimates not much less than half a ton. That’s
really
big. There’s nothing like that around the base. I bet there’ll be even bigger ones further downstream, and more of them. We’ll catch up with them tomorrow. It’s only a matter of time.”

“It’s about time we found some sizable grazers,” Matthew opined. “Dense forests always favor pygmies, but rivers and their floodplains usually have far more elbowroom. There used to be hippos in Earthly rivers and elephants on plains, until people crowded them out. Even if there are humanoids lurking in the long grass of the glass savannah, they surely can’t be so numerous that they’ve driven the big herbivores to extinction. If they were that effective, we’d have found proof of their existence easily enough.”

“They couldn’t have driven the big herbivores to extinction
recently
,” Dulcie put in, by way of correction. “This is an
old
world. What would the biodiversity of Earth have been like a billion years hence, if humans had never invented genetic engineering?”

“It isn’t coming back,” Lynn observed. “We must have passed through its stamping ground. But there’ll be others.”

“They can’t do us any damage,” Ike said. “They won’t even wake us up, unless they can stay close enough to start chewing up the biomotor outlets.”

“Is that possible?” Matthew asked, suddenly realizing that there might be a downside to
Voconia
’s employment of organic structural materials and an artificial metabolism that used lightly converted local produce as fuel.

“No, it’s not,” Lynn assured him. “The AI defenses can take care of anything that conspicuous. There’s no need for anyone to sit in the stern with Rand’s gun.”

Matthew, knowing that big grazers usually congregated in herds, was not entirely convinced by this reassurance, but he was prepared to let it go for the time being. There might well be bigger animals in the lower part of the watercourse, where its progress became ever more leisurely as it meandered patiently toward the distant ocean, but
Voconia
was not bound for the sea. Her first mooring would be in the more active waters immediately below the cataract, and it would be from there that their first expedition inland would be mounted. Given that the “grasslands” grew so tall as to be virtual forests, they would be more likely to be inhabited by pygmies than giants—always provided, of course, that the logic that pertained on Earth was reproducible here.