Dark Ararat (43 page)

“Nobody else would have done any better,” Matthew consoled her. “Some might have done a lot worse. Can you hear the midnight chorus in the bubble, or is the fabric soundproof?”

“It’s audible, but muffled,” she said. “Will it keep you awake all night, do you think?”

“I hope not. I’ll have to try to sleep—tomorrow could be a demanding day.”

“Me too,” she said. “Better say good night.”

The call had made Matthew feel slightly better, but no sleepier. With the folds of the pliable basket gathered about his horizontal frame he was beginning to feel rather claustrophobic, and the rigid extent of the rifle laid alongside his body made it even more difficult for him to find a position that did not put undue pressure on his damaged arm. He knew that his IT would still be working steadfastly on the strained tendons and ligaments, but he had to suppose that the day’s dramatics had undone most or all of the work they had done beforehand, and perhaps a little more besides.

After two further Earth-hours of failing to settle Matthew felt so cramped that he had to stand upright for a while. The sky was cloudier than it had been on the two previous nights, but a few stars were visible in the shifting gaps. Somewhat to his surprise, he caught sight of a faint glimmer of light in the grass-forest, just about visible in the gap between the tops of the nearer bushes and the lower reaches of he canopy. His surprise faded into reassurance, though, when he realized that it must be the bubble-tent. Made of smarter fabric than the basket, its opacity was adjustable and its three inhabitants must have decided that keeping a light on was likely to deter more nocturnal creatures than it attracted.

The noise was less intense now; the chorus of moans and whistles was lapsing into a calmer mood. Matthew decided to take that as a good sign. He settled down again, confident at last that he might be able to sleep, but had hardly begun to drift off into a light delirium when his phone sounded again. He snatched it up immediately, stifling the reflexive curse that rose to his lips as his censorious IT let a little pain through to remind him that he ought to be more careful.

“It’s Lynn again, Matthew. We just had a visitor. Big, possibly bipedal.”

Any annoyance he might have felt evaporated on the instant. What Lynn meant, obviously, was
possibly humanoid
—but she didn’t dare tempt fate by saying so.

“How close did it come?” Matthew asked.

“I wouldn’t have known it was there if it hadn’t come close enough actually to touch the tent—but the reflections from the fabric made it impossible to see more than a shadow. It backed off as soon as I sat up.”

“The monkey-analogues are probably inquisitive,” Matthew reminded her. But not as curious as humanoids would be, he added, mentally. However badly we messed up our entrance, we certainly broadcast the news that we were here far and wide. If they can be persuaded to come to us, instead of letting us hunt for days on end for spoor and signs….

He stood up again, and looked out in the direction of the glimmer of light he had noticed before. The area beneath him was in deep shadow; there could have been a dozen fascinated tribes-men standing there looking up at him and he would not have known. He cocked an ear, trying hard to detect signs of movement. The continuing chorus from the forest made it difficult to hear anything else, but he was half-convinced that he
did
hear something moving: something too big to be stealthy. It could have been a hopeful illusion, but if not it was something—or several somethings—moving among the stacks of equipment.

After a few minutes more he was almost certain that some of the boxes and pieces of the boat were being moved in a relatively careful fashion. If so, he thought, then
hands
must surely be at work. He was suddenly aware of the fact that his foot was touching Rand Blackstone’s rifle, but he made no move to pick it up.

“Just don’t steal any essential bits of the boat,” he murmured. “Help yourself to all the food you want, and all the tools, glass or metal—but please don’t take anything vital.” He regretted not having asked Ike to try to throw a flashlight up to him, although he knew that he had been right to judge the risk too great.

He listened dutifully for a few minutes more, waiting for the sounds to die away before reporting back to Lynn. “I can’t be
absolutely
sure that it’s not my imagination,” he said, in a voice tremulous with anticipation and triumph, “but I’m pretty sure that we’ve just been investigated by an alien intelligence.”

“Shall I wake Ike, or try to take a look myself?” Lynn asked.

“No. Stay where you are, as quiet as quiet can be. If they’ve come to us, the last thing we want is to scare them off. In the morning, we’ll know for sure whether they exist or not, and we can make proper plans. Yesterday wasn’t such a disaster after all—maybe it was the best possible beacon we could have planted. Now, we have to tread carefully.”

“Not the best choice of words,” she told him, ruefully.

“We have to wait for morning,” he said, as much to himself as to her. “If they’ve taken anything, we’ll know. Then the new ball game begins. Everything changes. Bad arms and ankles notwithstanding, we have to get busy—but we have to do it
right
.”

“Will you call the base—or
Hope
?”

“Not yet,” he said. “We have to
know
, to be in a position to confound all skeptics, however unreasonable. This has to be handled
right
. Can you stay awake?”

“I doubt that I have the choice,” she retorted, drily. “Can you?”

“Same thing. Trying to see in the dark, hear significant sounds against the white-noise background. Probably pointless, but … call again if they come back to you.”

They left it at that, but when Matthew returned his phone to his belt he found that he was trembling with excitement. If it is them, he thought, they know more about us than we know about them. They could see into the lighted tent. They sorted through our stuff. They may be nervous, but they’re bound to keep us under observation. We’re the most interesting thing that’s happened to them since they decided to give up on civilization, and they must know it. Even if they don’t want to make contact now, they’ll want to know exactly where we are and where we’re going. They won’t go far, and they’ll be back. All we have to do is wait, and make our plans with due care. Everything else is subsidiary now; this is the spearhead of
Hope
’s mission, the determining fact of all our futures. And I’m on the spot, running the show. Destiny needed a prophet, and it picked me. Whatever it needed to get me here, it had to have me. This is it. This is what it was all for: every moment of every one of those forty-eight years. Dulcie was just an innocent part of the apparatus of fate, like Shen Chin Che and the cometary blizzard and the Crash, and fifteen billion years of the prehistory of the universe. It was all leading down to this: to Matthew Fleury’s advent in the New World, and his first meeting with the Other Human Race. This is my moment, my winning play, my reason for being. This is the beginning of the New Era. It was easy to forget, in the circumstances, that he was stuck halfway down a cliff with a worse-than-useless rifle and a nonfunctional control box.

He spent the rest of the night forgetting it, in the cause of making grander plans—and now the twenty-one-and-a-half-hour Tyrian cycle of day and night didn’t seem too short at all, but far too long. Eventually, he lay down again and tried to sleep, knowing that he was going to need every atom of intelligence he had to see him through the crises of the next few days, but he couldn’t do it. His IT wasn’t up to the job; there was too much adrenaline in his system and no matter how hard the nanobots worked they couldn’t stop his adrenal cortex producing more and more.

It was a
very
long night—subjectively, the longest in his life. But it came to an end eventually, as all his nights were bound to do. When dawn broke, he was more than ready to greet it. He waited until the light was a little better before he actually struggled to his feet again, but the precaution was unnecessary. The sight that met his eyes would not have disappointed his appetite for startlement no matter how dimly it had been lit.

The first casual sweep of his gaze over the area of devastation told him that the tentacled slugs still had secure tenure over their empire, and they had grown prodigiously during their occupation. He knew, at the back of his mind, that there was a second possibility—that the moderately sizable specimens that had held the terrain when dusk fell had been driven out during the night by more powerful competitors—but he never gave it a moment’s serious thought. He had confidence in his guesses now, and he was certain in his own mind that the creatures had grown fat, processing food into flesh with un-Earthly rapidity.

On another occasion he might have been more surprised by the changes that had overtaken the battlefield on which the serial killer anemones’ victory had been won, but in his present mood he saw it as an inevitable confirmation of his most recent speculations.

If giant slugs had been making their way back and forth across the scattered debris of a thousand shredded bushes, they too would have left the terrain embalmed in slime, but it could not have been so vitreous, nor so dramatically uneven. It would not have been studded with the upper hemispheres of glass basketballs, or the bubble domes of half-embedded footballs … or the pyramidal extrusions of “bipolar spinoid extensions.” Had there not been more urgent matters of concern, Matthew would have paused to wonder, but as things were he merely clocked up one more lucky guess to his rapidly escalating score.

He phoned Lynn, thinking that it was he who had news to impart, but he didn’t get a chance to speak.

“Matthew,” she said. “Thank heaven you’re all right. Can you see Ike or Dulcie?”

“No,” said Matthew, darting his eyes rapidly from side to side. “Should I be able to?”

“Dulcie’s gone, Matthew. If her phone’s still working, she’s not answering. Ike went off to look for her as soon as he gave up thinking that she must have stepped out to relieve herself.”

Ike joined in the conversation almost immediately. “No sign,” he said. “She must have been crazy. The worms are still around—mostly above head height, admittedly, curled around the stalks beneath the seed heads, but too close for comfort if you’re wandering in the gloom. It was just after first light when she went, but it’s way too dim in here to be wandering around without a flashlight.”

“Oh
shit
,” Matthew murmured. “I was
so sure
I’d talked her out of it.”

“Out of what?” Lynn wanted to know. She and Ike had had too much on their minds to notice Dulcie’s awkward pose on the lip of the cliff, or to interpret it correctly if they had.

“She nearly jumped off the cliff yesterday.”

“
What?
Why?”

“Guilt.” He didn’t bother to specify what it was that Dulcie felt guilty about. He knew they’d work it out quickly enough.

“No!” The complaint came from Lynn. “You think she’s gone off to have another go?”

“Maybe just to think about it. But she
knows
how much we need her. Hell, she even made that crazy leap into the pool so that she could go after you. You
did
tell her about the night visitor when she woke up.”

“Of course I did,” Lynn said. “I didn’t tell her it was a
humanoid
, because I didn’t know, but …”

“She shouldn’t have gone outside on her own, even to take a leak,” Ike put in. “Maybe whatever it was that touched the tent last night didn’t go away. Maybe it was biding its time … but there’s no sign that I can see. No footprints, of any kind. No sign of any struggle that I can see.”

“Maybe she wanted to make an early start on scaling the cliff, for your sake,” Lynn suggested, although it was obvious that she didn’t believe it. “Did Solari tell you that she killed Bernal?”

“No. I got sidetracked thinking he suspected you. I should have known better. I didn’t guess until I saw her with the artifacts. It still took time to figure out how she’d cultivated enough suppressed rage to explode when she found him with them—but it was all a mistake from beginning to end. She figured out afterward why Bernal was making the spearheads, knives, and arrowheads, and so did I. It wasn’t forgery, or just an experiment. It was flattery.”

“What?”

“As in imitation, the sincerest form of. Bernal always believed that the humanoids were here, in spite of the failure of the flying eyes to catch a glimpse of them. He wanted to make contact, but he didn’t have enough information about them to make a decent plan and he didn’t want to presume too much. He wanted to use the one thing we
did
know: the artifacts. He intended to leave them lying around, as communicative bait. He wanted to demonstrate to the aliens that we could make them too, that we have at least that much in common. He would have let you in on it, but he wanted to be sure that he could make a good job of it first—and maybe he wanted to keep the people on
Hope
and at Base One in the dark as to where exactly he stood on the great debate, in anticipation of being the one to break the big news. Spin works
so
much better if it’s unanticipated.”

“None of that matters now,” Ike said, a little sharply. “What matters is finding Dulcie. Her phone was working last night, so it should be working now. The fuel cell can’t have run out so quickly. Is it possible that the humanoids have got her, do you think?”

Matthew knew that Ike had posed the question that way because it was uncomfortably close to the substance of cheap melodrama—but he understood that they been tipped into a melodrama as soon as they made their descent from the uplands. If they took Bernal’s artifacts from our luggage, he thought, his plan’s already past phase one. The humanoids must have grabbed her. She must have thought about it too. She can’t have been thinking of killing herself until the impulse actually came upon her. She’s an anthropologist, and she’s had all the time in the world to figure out how to handle this, if that’s really what’s happened. But we have to be sure. Before we shout
Eureka!
we have to be sure.”