Dark Ararat (28 page)

While Matthew ate, Kriefmann quizzed him about his condition, and advised him to try not to overtax himself during his first few days on the surface. The chance, Matthew thought, would be a fine thing. As soon as he had dumped the remains of his meal and its packaging in the recycler, Vince Solari stood up, obviously expecting him to follow. He signaled his apologies to Lynn.

Once they were outside the bubble Solari led the way downhill, in a direction almost exactly opposite to the one Matthew had taken on his earlier expedition. They made more rapid progress, though, partly because flamethrowers had been plied with such reckless abandon that the way was clearer and partly because Vince Solari’s mind was focused on more practical matters than Lynn Gwyer’s had been. Matthew noticed, however, that he was already moving a little more freely and comfortably than the policeman, who reacted to his own clumsiness with casual impatience.

Come nightfall, Matthew thought, Solari’s surface-suit and IT would be working overtime on the bruises generated by his purposeful hurrying.

“Have you reported your find to anyone else?” Matthew asked him, interested to know how fully Solari intended to cooperate with Konstantin Milyukov.

“I dare say they’ll know as soon as you do,” Solari told him, not bothering to specify who he meant by
they
. He was assuming, of course, that their surface-suits might have been bugged in some unobtrusive manner. Matthew had not been convinced that Shen’s anxieties regarding the temporary smartsuit he had been given on
Hope
were anything more than paranoia, but he knew that it would be foolish to take anything for granted. So sophisticated had surveillance methods become in the years before he left Earth that every wall in the world had been collecting eyes and ears by the dozen, many of them undetectable by human observers. For all he knew, his new suit might even be rigged for visual transmission—in which case, “they” might not have to wait for Solari to spell anything out in conversation; “they” might already have seen whatever he had seen, and interpreted it with equal intelligence.

From the top of the mound that he and Lynn had climbed Matthew had seen the city’s fields laid out like a vast purple-blanketed maze, with their vaguely outlined protective walls seeming no more impressive than lines doodled on a page. From within, though, the fragmentary network of partly fallen walls seemed positively oppressive. They loomed up haphazardly, curving this way and that, almost as enigmatically as the corridors of
Hope
. Those closest to the bubble-complex were mostly between one and three meters tall, but the further Matthew and Solari went the taller the fragments became.

The route Solari took involved little actual climbing, but the penalty they paid for that convenience was that it was by no means straight. At these close quarters it was easy to see that the wall-builders had made their own provision for laborers to pass from field to field, equipping their citadel-fields with gateways whose gates had long since decomposed, but they had not taken the trouble to make arterial roads that radiated from the city proper like the spokes of a wheel. Perhaps that was because they were anxious that such highways might be too convenient for traffic coming the other way, Matthew thought—or perhaps it was merely because the endeavor had spread out in an untidily improvised manner.

Some of the fields had obviously had blockhouses in the corners, perhaps to provide temporary accommodation, or to house sentries, or to store tools, or for any combination of those reasons. Others had had stone shelves built into the angles where walls intersected, but any staircases that had led up to the tops of the walls must have been made of perishable materials; there was not the least trace of any such structure now.

The walk was a long one—more than twice as long as the one Matthew had taken with Lynn Gwyer—and it took a proportionate toll of their unready bodies. At first, Matthew told himself that it was bound to be easier because their route was mostly downhill, but it was a false assumption. When he remembered that Solari had already made the uphill climb once he began to understand the effort that the policeman had put in, and the strength of the motive that had led him to insist on making a second trip almost immediately, with Matthew in tow.

“We’re not doing this just because you need somebody to talk to, are we?” he said, when that became clear to him. “You really do need my help to figure out the significance of what you’ve found.”

“Yes,” said Solari, his terseness now owing to shortness of breath rather than any disinclination to show his hand to possible suspects.

“Why?” Matthew persisted.

“Because you knew the man,” Solari said, laboriously. “You’re far better able to guess what he might have been up to than I am.”

“Up to?” Matthew queried—but Solari didn’t want to put in the effort of compiling an elaborate explanation when he had evidence waiting that would speak more eloquently for itself.

When they finally reached the spot where Bernal had been killed there was nothing to indicate where the body had been found. Matthew had not been expecting a bloodstain, let alone a silhouette in white chalk, but he had been expecting
something
, and it seemed somehow insulting that there was nothing at all. Any vegetation that had been crushed had recovered its former vigor. The place was screened from everything further uphill by a very solid and intimidating wall some ten or twelve meters to the north of the place where the body had been found. It met another, equally high and solid, twenty meters to the left. There was a ledge set in the angle, but it was too high up to be a shelf and it was angled downward. It looked like a place where laborers a long way from home might huddle together and shelter from the rain.

“What was he doing way out here?” Matthew wondered, aloud.

“The same question occurred to me,” Solari said. “According to the bubble’s log, he’d been spending a lot of time out here during the weeks before his death, even though his preparatory analysis of the local ecosystem was supposedly done and dusted. He must have been caught in the rain more than once, maybe for long enough for his idle hands to get restless.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Matthew said.

Solari took him to the angle of where the walls met: to the gloomy covert under the down-slanting ledge.

The wall seemed solid enough to a cursory glance, but when Solari reached up to remove a stone set slightly above waist height it came out neatly enough. There was a space behind it: a lacuna in what otherwise seemed to be a solid
wall
. Matthew recalled that the artifacts Dulcie Gherardesca had recovered had been found in cavities in the walls, where they had enjoyed a measure of protection from the forces of decay.

“It’s a hidey-hole,” Solari said. “Built for that purpose a
very
long time ago. Still serviceable, though.”

The policeman removed several objects from the hole, one by one. Most of them were were blackly vitreous. Three looked like knives, or perhaps spearheads. Three more were similar in design but much smaller—perhaps arrowheads. The nonvitreous items were stone: two appeared to be crude chipping-stones of a kind that might well have been used by a Stone Age craftsman for working flint. One was some kind of scraper. There were numerous pieces of raw “glass,” of a convenient size for working into useful objects.

“There aren’t any shafts for spears or arrows,” Solari said. “He hadn’t gotten around to that. He was still practicing.”

“He?” Matthew echoed, with an implicit query.

“Delgado.”

Matthew thought about that for a couple of minutes. Then he said: “Are you sure that
Bernal
was making the spearheads and arrowheads? Maybe he found someone else making them. Maybe he was killed because he found out that someone else was making imitation alien artifacts.”

“I can’t be absolutely sure,” Solari said, scrupulously. “The surface-suits are too thick and too resilient to permit easy DNA-analysis of their excreta, and the murder weapon itself had been handled by too many people before I got to it, but the fact that the only contaminants on these are Delgado’s makes it highly unlikely that someone else had put the necessary hours into making them. Unless someone’s gone to enormous trouble to erect an evidential smokescreen, Delgado was the one who faked the artifact with which he was killed. He had already faked others, and he was in the process of faking more. Maybe it began while he was whiling away the time waiting for a shower to pass, but it must have become purposive soon enough. He made time for the work; he must have had a plan for the results. Whoever killed him found out about it. Maybe they knew about the hidey-hole and maybe they didn’t. If they did, they probably took the trouble to tidy up a little after he was dead—but if they expected that I wouldn’t be able to find the evidence, they were wildly optimistic. Anyone could have found it, if they’d bothered to look. Delgado’s friends—the murderer’s friends—didn’t bother to look.”

This speech seemed to exhaust Solari’s strength, and he had to lean against the wall, but he seemed relieved that he’d made his point.

“It doesn’t make sense,” Matthew said, after a pause.

“That won’t wash, Matt,” Solari replied. “It has to make sense. You say that you knew him as well as anyone—maybe better than anyone here, even though their acquaintance was more recent. So tell me. Why would he be faking alien artifacts?”

“He wouldn’t. He was a scientist.”

“But he was.”

“No.
Faking
is your word, your interpretation. He was
making
artifacts of the same kinds as those found elsewhere in the ruins, but it doesn’t mean that he had any intention of trying to pass them off as the real thing. Maybe someone else leapt to the same conclusion you did, but it has to be wrong. He was just experimenting with local manufacturing techniques. He
couldn’t
have intended to attempt to fool anyone into believing that the blades and arrowheads had been made by aliens.”

“Not even if he had a powerful motive for persuading people that the aliens aren’t extinct?” It was obvious from Solari’s tone that he didn’t believe Matthew’s version of events. The policeman had found what seemed to him to be a plausible motive: that Bernal had been determined to prove that the aliens were still around, and that somebody else had been determined to stop him.

“Whatever he was doing,” Matthew said, stubbornly, “I can’t see that it would provide a motive for his murder. If someone
were
planning to run that kind of fraud, and got caught red-handed,
he
might be tempted to do something to prevent the story coming out, but why would the person who caught him want to silence the person he’d caught? It doesn’t make sense—and it certainly doesn’t get you any closer to identifying the murderer.”

“Somehow,” Solari persisted, doggedly, “it
has
to make sense. You say that Delgado wouldn’t do a thing like this—but he did. I know he was your friend, but you must see that this stuff about experimenting with alien manufacturing techniques is too feeble for words. He wouldn’t have gone to this much trouble without a much better reason than
that
. How obvious the fakes would have been if they’d been found in less compromising circumstances I can’t tell—but that might not matter. Maybe he knew that they’d be tagged as fakes sooner or later, but maybe he was prepared to settle for later, given that the colonists’ big argument was about to come to a head.”

“You think he was doing this to influence a vote that probably doesn’t have any meaning whichever way it goes?” Matthew said, skeptically. “I don’t think so. That’s even more feeble than my story.”

“So think of a better one. I mean it, Matt. I have to put a case together.”

“Against Lynn Gwyer?”

Solari was suitably taken aback by that, but he was too good at his job to let his reaction give anything away. “Have you some reason for thinking that Gwyer might be guilty?” he asked, swiftly.

“Quite the contrary,” Matthew said. “But she seems to think that you have her in the frame.”

“Don’t try that distraction crap with me, Matt,” the policeman came back. “I thought you and I were becoming friends. Please don’t start giving me the same runaround as these clowns.”

“It must be hard to run a good cop–bad cop routine all on your own,” Matthew observed, drily.

Solari seemed genuinely disappointed by that response—but that was his job. “Look, Matt,” he said, earnestly, “neither of us knows how important this impending vote has come to seem to the people who’ve been down here for three years. Neither of us knows how deep anyone’s paranoia cuts, or how weirdly it’s con-figured. But if the planet were really inhabited, by an intelligent species on the ecological brink, that might seem to some people to be a powerful reason for letting it alone, don’t you think? Given that we all signed up for this mission because our own species was on the brink, facing what looked like a terminal ecocatastrophe, don’t you think that some people here might have powerful conscientious objections to the possibility of precipitating an ecological crisis here that might condemn another species—a
brother
species—to extinction?”

Matthew already knew that Solari was no fool, and he knew that Solari was absolutely right to say that no one who had only been awake for a matter of days could possibly comprehend the complexity of the evolving situation into which they’d both been precipitated—but Bernal Delgado had been his colleague, his rival, his collaborator, his fellow prophet, his mirror image in all but private and personal matters. Matthew could not imagine any circumstances in which
he
might be led to commit the kind of betrayal that Solari had imagined, so he was extremely reluctant to accept that Bernal might have been led to it. But to what hypothetical extreme would he have to go in order to construct a story that could conserve Bernal’s innocence?

Could the evidence Solari had found so very easily, as soon as he began to look, have been faked, just like the arrowheads themselves? Could the conspiracy of which the murder was a part be far more complicated than Solari was yet prepared to suspect? How complicated could this mystery be? Was it not far too complicated already?