Dark Ararat (49 page)

It had rained during the night, but the sky hidden by the canopy was obviously still overcast. The morning was decidedly gloomy, but not so bad as to require them to use flashlights to find their way.

As soon as he began to make hasty plans for his next broadcast Matthew realized that Ike had been right. He
had
used up almost all of his best material on day one. The terrain they had covered was insufficiently various to warrant much further camera study, and he was perilously close to running out of speculative fuel for his wayward flight of fancy.

He was glad to find that some relief was at hand when he began his reintroductory session, in the form of further debate—but Milyukov had belatedly realized that Andrei Lityansky might not be the best man for this particular job, and Matthew found himself faced with sterner opposition. The subsequent discussion of the tactics of sporulation, the mechanics of gradual chimerical renewal, and the limitations of reproduction by fragmentation was far too evenly balanced to be gripping, even to an audience of experts.

To make matters worse, the captain had an even better spoiler still in reserve: Vince Solari. When Matthew went on the air for the second time, he discovered that all three surface bases had now acquired their own TV equipment, and that Solari had been interviewed and cross-questioned as to the progress of his investigation.

Scrupulous honesty had, inevitably, prevailed over evasive caution. Solari had not taken the trouble to avoid the word
fake
when reporting his conclusion that Bernal Delgado had been manufacturing spearheads and arrowheads from local plant products. He had obviously been talking to Lynn Gwyer, and the fact that it was technically hearsay had not prevented him from informing the world that Dulcie Gherardesca—who was, according to the logs and cross-correlated witness statements, the only person who had had the opportunity to commit the murder—had confessed to the crime while contemplating suicide the day before her capture.

Although Matthew had not been party to the subsequent discussion he soon gathered that a crime-of-passion defense was unlikely to find a sympathetic jury among the crew or the colonists.

Matthew knew that he had to counter these setbacks, even though he was no longer riding the same wave of assertive self-confidence that had carried him through the previous day.

Taking the easiest point first, he gave a suitably impassioned account of Bernal Delgado the man and the scientist. He explained, with measured but righteous anger, that Bernal Delgado had not been a forger or a faker, and that he could not possibly have intended his “alien artifacts” to fool anyone.

Bernal’s first motive, he insisted, must have been to work himself into a better position to understand how the aliens had lived: specifically, how they had developed a technology without the assistance of fire. Given the degraded state of the objects the people at Base Three had managed to recover from within the walls, he argued, it had been far from clear that they really were artifacts, or what their purposes might have been. It had not been clear, until Bernal had proved it, that the multitudinous vitreous substances produced by the plantlike organisms of the hill country were capable of being worked, shaped, and honed. Such a demonstration had been necessary.

Having made the artifacts, Matthew argued, Bernal had realized that they might be very useful in the context of the expedition downriver. When the humanoids had abandoned the city, or when the city-dwellers had died out, there must have been a substantial loss of technology because the resources of the region were different, and perhaps far richer, than those of the plain. What better way to attempt contact, therefore, than by offering the aliens of the plains recognizable artifacts that might now be rare and precious? What better way could there be of creating a bond between such very different species than demonstrating that the newcomers could work with native materials in exactly the same way that the indigenes had once worked with them?

By the same token, Matthew went on to argue, Bernal Delgado had not been a forger or a faker in the realm of emotions and human relationships. He carefully reproduced the account he had improvised for Dulcie, and did his best to turn it into a tragedy of classical proportions. He made much of Dulcie’s former insistence on wearing the scars that she had acquired in the plague wars, claiming that they constituted a heroic badge of courage, and of the sacrifice that the decision must have entailed. He insisted, too, that Bernal Delgado was the kind of man who would have understood, appreciated, and respected such a gesture. He did his utmost to turn Bernal and Dulcie into a middle-aged Romeo and Juliet, rudely torn apart by their sojourn in SusAn and by the failure of memory that had robbed Bernal of the great love of his life and driven Dulcie temporarily mad. He imagined the confrontation scene, when she had found him patiently at work on the alien artifacts, and had finally snapped under a strain that had been wound up so tightly as to have become unsustainable and unbearable.

When he had finished, he asked Ikram Mohammed how it had played. Ike, as usual, misunderstood what he had been doing.

“You don’t know that
any
of that is true,” the genomicist complained. “You made it all up, from beginning to end.”

“I had to,” Matthew pointed out. “Facts don’t speak for themselves, and the story Vince was hinting at was wrong from every possible viewpoint, except perhaps that of a policeman building a case.”

“Reality is what you can get away with? Do you really believe that, Matthew? What kind of a scientist does that make you?”

“Of course I don’t believe that reality is what you can get away with. Reality is what it is, and science is the best description of it we can possibly obtain. But you can’t test the hypotheses unless you come up with them, and even scientists need motivation. Everything has to start with fantasy, Ike. Knowledge is what you finish up with, if you’re lucky, after you’ve done the hard work—but the hard work needs passion to drive it. People need reasons to be interested, reasons to be committed, reasons to do their damnedest to find the truth. This mission has been floundering for three years, almost to the point of turning into a farce, because all the passion has gone into defining factions and formulating competing plans. That would never have happened if Shen Chin Che hadn’t been kept out of the picture, but it shouldn’t have happened in any case. It shouldn’t have been
allowed
to happen.

“I spent the greater part of my adult life trying to stop it happening on Earth, but I was fighting ten thousand years of history and ten million of prehistory. Here, we had a chance to start afresh. We still have that chance. What I’m doing is to remind people that what happens here is
important
—just as important, in its way, as everything that’s happened on Earth since we left. I’m trying to make it into a story because that’s what it
is
: a story of confrontation with the alien, of the attempt to understand the alien, to create a mutually profitable relationship between Earth and Tyre, Earthly life and Tyrian life, human and humanoid. I’m trying to make it the best story I can, with heroes for characters instead of fools, because that’s the kind of story it
is
.”

Matthew was glad to note, as he finished this tirade, that he was recovering something of the mental state that had carried him through his earlier orations.

“You’re going to broadcast that, aren’t you?” Ike said, shaking his head in mock-disbelief. “Even now, you’re still in rehearsal, still making up the script as you go.”

“You could join in,” Matthew pointed out.

“Imaginative fiction isn’t my forte.”

“No, but you’ve always been a first-rate experimental genomicist. They also serve who only ask the questions. Milyukov’s crewmen are still trying to knock me down, even though they ought to know better. What I need is a straight man who’ll help to build me up. You want to try it?”

After a pause, Ike said: “Lynn would have been better.”

“I’ll take that as a
yes
,” Matthew told him. “Do you want to rehearse? Ask me a question.”

Ike shook his head yet again, but he was grinning now. “Why did the city fail?” he said. “Why did social progress do a U-turn here?”

Matthew was ready for that one. “For exactly the same reason that it very nearly failed on Earth,” he said. “For the same reason, in fact, that you and I became so firmly convinced that Earth was doomed that we accepted the riskiest bet available and signed up for
Hope
.”

“What reason is that?” Ike said, falling into the role of straight man as if born to it.

“We think of the birth of agriculture and animal husbandry as a great leap forward,” Matthew went on, “because it represented the beginning of everything we now hold dear: the crucial step that made rapid technological progress possible. But for the people who did it, it was a desperation move. Their ancestors had been hunter-gatherers for the best part of a million years, manipulating their environment in all kinds of subtle ways: irrigation, the encouragement of useful plants; the elimination of competitors and predators. But they were too successful. Their numbers increased to the point at which they became their own worst enemy, literally as well as metaphorically.”

“You don’t know that, either,” Ike pointed out.

“Not for certain—but it makes sense. Agriculture and animal husbandry were desperation moves, because fields and herds were the only way they could increase their resources fast enough, and keep them safe enough from competitors, to sustain their exploding population. And that, in essence, was the story of the next ten thousand years. They had to keep on increasing the efficiency of the system, in terms of their means of production and their means of protection. Their technics had to keep getting better and better and better, and the faster their population growth accelerated the faster their technological growth accelerated, until the whole thing went Crash.
Hope
got out before the Crash hit bottom, because no one aboard her had any faith in humankind’s ability to pick itself up again, dust itself off, and work out a new modus vivendi. We were too pessimistic, it seems, but it was a damn close-run thing.

“As I see it, something similar must have happened here, with a couple of vital differences. The humanoids migrated from the plains to the hill country because that’s where the technological resources were: the glass and the stone. That’s where they could make their desperate stand against the competitors that had evolved alongside them. The vital difference was that
our
competitors—our
only
significant competitors—were our own kind. That wasn’t the case here. Here, the most successful creatures aren’t the handiest, or the keenest-eyed, or the biggest-brained. Here, the most successful creatures are the ones that make the cleverest use of the processes and opportunities of chimerization.”

“The worms and slugs,” Ike deduced.

“Especially the killer anemones,” Matthew agreed. “The killer anemones that became
serial
killer anemones, adapting themselves to whatever circumstances chance threw up, taking aboard new features or discarding them every time they had a chance to swap physical attributes with other bioforms in their periodic orgies of chimerical reorganization. There’s an analogy of sorts in something not so
very
different that happened to our ancestors. Agriculture and civilization were a mixed blessing for their inventors, but not for the other species that took full advantage of the opportunities thus provided. Which species were the favorites to outlast us if the Crash
had
proved fatal? Rats and cockroaches. So which species got the greatest benefits out of civilization? Us? Or rats and cockroaches?

“Here, I suspect, neither the rats nor the cockroaches ever stood a chance, because the worms and slugs were always there first: more aggressive, more effective, more adaptable. We saw what they could do when we came down that cliff. We saw how they responded to an unexpected, and perhaps unprecedented, feeding opportunity. How do you suppose they reacted to the humanoids’ establishment of
fields
: fields full of lovely, concentrated food?”

“It’s anyone’s guess,” Ike pointed out, dutifully—but he was nodding to show that he understood the force of the argument.

“We know how the city-builders reacted: they built walls. Those walls may well have had more to protect than food alone, but even if the crew scientists are right to wield Occam’s razor with such vigor when they talk about sporulation and progressive chimerical renewal, and even if the pyramids aren’t reproductive structures at all, the city-builders
still
built walls, and more walls, and even more walls … until they realized that they couldn’t win. Not, at any rate, with the technology they had. If they’d had fire and iron, who knows? They didn’t.

“At the end of the day, their cities—there
must
be more, still buried under purple carpets—were a gift to their competitors they couldn’t afford to go on giving. So they stopped. They probably had a Crash of their own, but when they got up and dusted themselves off they went back to the old ways. It could easily have happened to us. Perhaps it did, more than once. Perhaps it happened a hundred times before we finally became handy enough, and keen-sighted enough, and brainy enough, to run all the way to the stars. But we didn’t have the killer anemones and their kin to fight. All our chimeras were imaginary, creatures of fantasy. Not here.”

Ike was getting into the swim now. For the first time, he took up the argument himself. “Here, chimeras exist,” he said, “and they take all the extra opportunities that chimerization provides. At least, the worms and slugs do, because they’re the ones best fitted to do it.”

“And what makes them best fitted to do it,” Matthew said, “is that they’re so utterly and completely
stupid
. Swapping biomechanical bits back and forth between organisms is fine and dandy, just so long as the organisms are no smarter than
Voconia
, running their legs and tentacles on separable autonomic systems.”