Dark Ararat (22 page)

Blackstone was unimpressed by the implication that he must be joking. He stopped briefly in order to readjust the distribution of his inconvenient load.

“Yeah,” he said. “Shen must have been looking the other way when that lot snuck aboard. Imagine coming fifty-eight light-years to plant a colony and then finding you’ve got a gaggle of whingers aboard who can’t stand the thought of polluting a virgin ecosphere. How else can we find a place to live?”

“I thought the reservations of the doubters had more to do with Tyre’s radically different genomics than the idea that we have no right to introduce ourselves into
any
alien ecosphere,” Matthew said, just about managing to get through the sentence without gasping.

“
Radically different
,” Blackstone echoed, disgustedly. “It’s purple, damn it. When you get right down to it, that’s all it is. Okay, the grass on the plain is tree-high, and the tree-high things in the hills look and sometimes feel like the debris from an explosion in a barbed-wire factory, and a lot of the local critters are poisonous as well as not too pretty—but what did we expect? I come from Australia, where
everything
’s weird and
everything
’s pretty much poisonous. Believe me, anyone who’s seen Aussie spiders, let alone been bitten by Aussie snakes and stung by Aussie jelly-fish, isn’t likely to get the wind up about a few giant rats with hypodermic tongues and slugs with tentacles. My ancestors lived alongside redbacks and funnel-webs all their lives—had them in the house, the garden, everywhere—and none of them ever got bit. Far as I can judge, the really dangerous species hereabouts are as rare and shy as Tasmanian tigers, so why the hell are the idiots at Base One, who live on an island and never stick their noses out of their bubbles anyway, getting their knickers in a twist? We’re all here, and we’re all here to stay, and everything would be going a hell of a lot more smoothly if everybody could just get used to the idea. We need to get our heads straight here, so that we can get this colony licked into shape. Here’s the big bubble, by the way—you look as if you need a rest.”

Matthew’s head had dropped as the rifle had become increasingly burdensome, and it wasn’t until Blackstone gave him the cue to look up that he realized that they had almost reached their destination. He realized too that whatever else Blackstone was right or wrong about, the ex-soldier was certainly right about his needing a rest.

As soon as they were inside the double door Blackstone said: “I’ll just get rid of this stuff, then I’ll show you where you’re bunking. We put you in together, if that’s okay.”

Matthew nearly asked why he couldn’t have Bernal Delgado’s bunk, but he remembered in time what Solari had said about Bernal and Maryanne Hyder playing “happy families.” He put Blackstone’s gun down, resting it against the plastic outer wall of the dome. Then he leaned against it himself, glad of the respite.

While they were briefly alone, Solari took the opportunity to say: “I didn’t expect it to be
this
bad. There were plenty of places back home where a cop was as welcome as a plague-bearing rat, but I didn’t expect this to be one of them.”

“It’s not just you,” Matthew said. “I reckon we came in on the end of a
big
argument—and I suspect that was only one item in an ongoing war. There’s been a serious breakdown of consensus here. Bernal’s death might have caused the cracks to widen, but there’s a lot more to it than that.”

“So what caused today’s big argument?” Solari wanted to know.

Blackstone returned just in time to field the question. “The boat,” he said, succinctly. “Four berths, one of which fell vacant when Delgado was killed. If anyone was its captain, he was, which means that no one knows how to decide whether the empty slot goes to Matthew here, or whether Tang should take it.”

“I should get it,” Matthew was quick to say. “I’m down here as Bernal’s replacement.”

“And Lynn will back you up. Ike Mohammed too. They think that’s a majority, since they were the other two-thirds of the original transfer team and still are two-thirds of the remnant of the boat’s intended crew. Tang isn’t happy with that way of deciding things. Maryanne’s on Tang’s side in everything now. Dulcie didn’t want to commit herself; God never does; I wanted to meet you before casting a vote, if I have one. Democracy in action!”

Matthew assumed that “God never does” was a criticism of Kriefmann’s indecisiveness rather than the Almighty’s.

“What about me?” Solari put in. “Do I have a voice?”

“Don’t tell me
you
want to go too,” Blackstone said.

“That’s not what I meant,” Solari said. “I was asking whether I have any voice in who goes and who stays … and
when
the boat is cleared for departure.” He obviously felt that the answer ought to be yes in both cases—which would allow him to hold the expedition back until he’d completed his investigation, lest the murderer should slip away unapprehended.

“No, you don’t,” Blackstone told him, brusquely. “The boat trip’s scientific business—nothing to do with you. Long overdue. The moment we figured out that the aliens had to be downriver in the glass-roofed grass forest we should have set off to find them. I was ready to walk, but I got outvoted. I even got voted off the expedition in favor of Dulcie.”

“If it’s scientific business,” Solari pointed out, “it’s nothing to do with you, either.”

“Maybe it isn’t,” Blackstone came back at him, “but if they run into trouble down there, they might need a man who can shoot straight. That’s why I was sent here in the first place, when we thought they might still be skulking in the hills. If it were up to me,
I
’d be the one taking Bernal’s place.”

“It’s not up to you,” Matthew put in. “I’m Bernal’s replacement. The berth has to be mine, if I want it.”

“Do you?” Blackstone wanted to know.

“Yes.”

Blackstone opened his mouth to offer some further objection, but he was seized by a sudden doubt and hesitated. He deliberated, lowered his voice and said: “Look, I’m sorry about all this. We know we shouldn’t be in this mess. If we could get out of it with a few handshakes and a group hug we would. I wish I could say that your arrival will help, but it won’t. Some of us think the last thing we need is a cop asking questions, trying to make one of us into a murderer. Some others probably think the second last is someone who just came out of the freezer thinking he can solve all our other problems when people who’ve been here for years haven’t even scratched the surface. Sorry, but that’s the way it is.”

Matthew was too taken aback by the change of conversational pace to reply, but Vince Solari wasn’t. “I’m not trying to make one of you into a murderer,” he said, quietly. “Whoever killed Bernal Delgado did that.”

“It wasn’t one of us,” Blackstone said. Matthew had rarely heard a sentence uttered with less conviction. The Australian hesitated again, almost as if he’d resolved as a child always to count to ten before losing his temper. “Personally,” he said, eventually, “I don’t mind either of you being here, as long as you don’t start making waves before you understand what’s what. But even I have to admit that Mr. Solari is an extra complication in a situation that already has a few too many. Can I show you to your bunks now? I have to get back to the shuttle—it’s going to take at least three trips to get all the cargo back here.”

“Fine,” said Matthew, although he felt in his heart of hearts that it was anything but.

EIGHTEEN

M
atthew slept far longer than he intended to, and far longer than was comfortable, considering the quality of his dreams. Although the images fled as soon as he was shaken awake he was left with a bitter taste in his dry mouth and a fugitive memory of having struggled in vain to move out of harm’s way, while various no-longer-specifiable dangers threatened to wreak havoc with his lumpen and overly massive body.

The first thing he did when he opened his eyes was check out the other bunk, but it was empty. Vince Solari had been very enthusiastic to get on with the job. The room wasn’t empty for long, though; almost as soon as he moved the privacy curtain slid into its daybed and a woman he recognized as Dulcie Gherardesca appeared in the gap. She had brought him a mug of tea and a bowl of what looked like fortified rice-manna.

“It’s the fresh air that knocked you out,” she said, as he stretched his muscles and rubbed his eyes. “The weight isn’t so bad, but even when it’s filtered the air is flavored and perfumed with all manner of subliminal sensations. It’s a real jolt to the system.”

“Thanks,” he said, as he drained the mug. “I needed that. You’re right about the jolt. I never anticipated the subtle differences. The big ones, yes, but not the ones that hover just out of reach of direct perception. Blackstone seems to be oblivious to them, though—to him, this seems to be the outback painted purple. Or maybe Botany Bay.”

“Rand believes in taking bulls by the horns,” the anthropologist said. “And it wasn’t entirely kindness that brought me here. Your friend Vincent didn’t waste any time at all. I was the one who found the body, so I was the one he came after first. I needed an excuse to make a graceful exit. I guess that’ll make him all the keener to make me a suspect.”

“Vince is a bull-by-the-horns kind of guy himself,” Matthew told her. “But he seems pretty levelheaded to me. He’ll do his best to sort this business out properly, and he isn’t the type to be led astray by preconceptions. You’ve nothing to fear from him—unless, of course, you did it. I’m assuming you didn’t.”

“Nobody here wants to think that any of their friends and colleagues could do such a thing,” she told him, quietly. “Not just because they’d have to worry about being next on the list, but because nobody wants to think anybody else capable of doing that to a man like Bernal.”

“Whereas if it had been a man like Blackstone …” Matthew said, jokingly. He saw immediately that the joke had been ill-advised. Dulcie Gherardesca had been living with the fact of the murder for some time. She had not the slightest wish to consider the question of how much difference it would have made to her feelings and fears if someone else had been the victim. “Sorry,” he said. To cover his embarrassment he thanked her again for bringing his breakfast. Then he took a mouthful of the manna porridge and almost withdrew his thanks.

“Sorry about that,” she said. “We’ve been cutting the manna shipped down from
Hope
with the produce of our own converters. It’s certified edible, but edible and palatable aren’t quite the same thing. Base One has food-tech people working on the problem, but it’ll be a while before the delicacies are sorted out. As you say, it’s the subtle differences that make the most impact.”

“It’s not that bad,” he assured her, insincerely.

“I’m sure Lynn would have brought you breakfast if she’d been here,” Dulcie said, awkwardly. “She’s working on the boat with Ike while Maryanne and Tang help Blackstone with the last of the dropship’s cargo. She’s told us a good deal about you—more than Ike has, although I gathered that he knew you better.”

“Ike wouldn’t want to talk about me in case it looked as if he was bragging about knowing someone who was on TV a lot,” Matthew guessed. “Nonsense, of course—but it’s often the people who would never dream of bragging who are most afraid of being caught.”

“I’ve seen you on TV myself,” Dulcie Gherardesca admitted. “I suppose we all did. Couldn’t really miss you in the mid-eighties, could we?”

“And you probably thought me less of a scientist because of it,” Matthew said, a little too glibly. “Bernal too, I dare say. Not our fault, really. Once the ecocatastrophe was well under way ecologists started getting the attention they’d always warranted, and a lot more besides. Pity the prophet whose prophecies begin to come true—what happens then makes living without the honor of one’s countrymen seem like a piece of cake. No wonder Bernal and I were so desperate to get away from it all.”

“I don’t think anyone here thinks any less of you for trying so hard to jerk the world out of its complacency,” she said, “or for trying to get remedial measures moving once the Crash hit hard. I brought you Bernal’s notepad. I figured that you’d be as anxious to get started as Inspector Solari. I’ve checked through it myself, of course—we all have. We can’t find anything epoch-making, but we didn’t really expect to. After all, when Archimedes leapt out of the bath he didn’t go looking for a stylus so he could write
Eureka!
on the nearest piece of papyrus—and even if he had, it wouldn’t have begun to tell anyone what he’d actually discovered. So even if we could figure out what
ska
means, it might not get us any closer to the truth.”

While she was speaking she pressed the keys of the notepad to bring up what Matthew presumed to be the last “page” of Bernal Delgado’s jottings. The last entries of all read:

NV correlated with ER?

Ans driver: ska?

“It’s a kind of music,” the anthropologist added. “But I don’t think that’s what it means here. Nobody knows what an ans driver is, although we favor the hypothesis that
ans
is short for answer and
driver
for downriver.
NV
and
ER
could be anything, although the general consensus is that NV probably stands for
nutritional versatility
. If you look back at earlier notes you’ll see that NV crops up several times and ER once, but
ska
doesn’t. We’ve always thought that the answers to our most urgent unanswered questions might be found downriver—that’s why we’ve been building the boat—but we’ve always known that it might be wishful thinking.”

“Which most urgent unanswered questions?” Matthew mumbled, his mouth half-full of manna that was proving difficult to swallow.

“Where did the city-builders come from—and where did they go, if they didn’t die here?”

“Why do you think they didn’t?”

“We don’t know whether they did or not. Even if they’d been human they might not have left much trace, and we think the bones of the local mammals are more prone to decay than ours. The only relics we’ve found were artifacts secreted in holes in the walls, and only the hardest kinds of glass have survived. We don’t know how old the city is, because we haven’t established any reliable yardstick that could tell us. We talk about a hundred thousand years, but it’s pure guesswork. It might be out by an order of magnitude. So far as we can tell, they settled here, established their fields, built their homes and their walls—all of which must have taken centuries—and then they vanished. If there were other upland settlements, we haven’t found them yet. If there are any settlements still in existence, we haven’t found
them
. If the humanoids still exist, it looks as if they’ve abandoned agriculture—and cooking, so far as cooking requires fire-making and fire-keeping. While we only have the one site to look at we’ve no basis for generalization.”