Dark Ararat (44 page)

“You have to get rid of the killer anemones, Ike,” Matthew said, deciding that the time had come to take command. “Use the flamethrowers. Then you have to check the equipment and the supplies, to make sure exactly what’s missing. Then you have to get me down.”

“Haven’t you got that in the wrong order?” Ike objected. “It’ll take at least two of us to clear those monsters way.” He had obviously seen the current occupants of the disputed area.

“We have to find Dulcie first,” Lynn said.

“No,” Matthew put in, knowing that he had to make good his bid for authority if he were to make it stick. “Ike’s right. It’ll take two of you to take the territory back—but you have to be careful. If Dulcie can make her own way back, that’s great. If not … we have to make ourselves safe first. There’s no time to waste. You have to get moving
now
.”

This time, they accepted the necessity. Ike appeared on the edge of the ill-cleared area within minutes, clad in ochreous armor. Matthew watched while he spent a few minutes making sure of the lie of the land, testing the speed at which the giant slugs could move.

“Just kill the bloody things, will you,” Matthew shouted down to him. It wasn’t the sort of thing an ecologist ought to say, but the urgency of the situation overrode other considerations.

Ike had already taken an opportunity to begin delving in one of the ragged heaps of cargo, freeing the flamethrower. He carefully fitted the canister of propellant to his back and placed protective goggles over his eyes, while the tentacled slugs went contentedly about their business. When he eventually let fly, in a series of short but lethal bursts, he managed to roast more than twenty of the monsters without placing the boat or its cargo in the least danger. He had to pick off half-a-dozen more one by one, using more subtle but equally lethal instruments, but he completed the task as quickly as was humanly possible.

Only then did Lynn limp out of the purple backcloth. She had put on her own armor, but she was moving as freely as anyone could have expected, given her injury.

The stink was appalling. Matthew’s nasal filters had carefully screened him from those complex organic odorants to which he might have been allergic, but the cruder fumes of burnt flesh posed no threat of that kind, and he was permitted to experience the full measure of their unpleasantness.

Lynn set to work immediately. “It’s okay,” she said to Ike. “I’m fine as long as I don’t have to walk far. I’ll take care of the inventory while you find a way of getting up to the cliff top and freeing the cable. When that’s done, we can all pitch in. It’s about time Matthew started doing his share.”

“What if more of them come?” Ike asked.

“Matthew can drop the rifle down to me so that I can blast them at short range.”

“We didn’t come here to conduct a holocaust,” Ike said, sorrowfully. “This is getting way out of hand.”

“We’ll go back to being Mr. Nice Guys when we’ve got back to being Mr. Safe Guys,” she countered, grimly. “We’ll put a cosmetic gloss on the story when we relay it back to Tang if you like, but until further notice I’m the original devil-may-care shoot-anything-that-looks-at-me-sideways colonist, okay?”

“If you say so,” Ike conceded, a little stiffly. He raised his voice to say: “I’m on my way, Matthew. Just sit tight for one more hour.”

“Whatever you do,” Matthew shouted down “for heaven’s sake
don’t fall
.”

Ike’s only response to that was a gesture of contempt.

Having watched Ike do his painful work. Matthew now had to watch Lynn doing hers—but she didn’t have to call for the gun. The odor of cooked flesh was entirely alien to Tyre, and it seemed to function as powerfully as a deterrent as their spillage of the day before had functioned as bait.

It wasn’t obvious that the work of reassembling the boat could be completed that day, but Lynn seemed determined to do it on her own if need be. She was moving with the same quasi-mechanical stiffness and efficiency that Dulcie had demonstrated the day before. She paused occasionally to take a drink of water or a few mouthfuls of food, but she was so solidly locked into her trance of determination that Matthew made no attempt to converse with her.

He tried to call Dulcie, but she still wasn’t answering her phone. He hesitated over calling Tang Dinh Quan, but decided that it could wait until he had more definite news.

Instead, he continued thinking about possible correlations between nutritional versatility and exotic reproduction, and the reasons why intelligent bipeds might be favored by evolution on a world like Tyre, and the reasons why civilization might fail on such a world in spite of the fact that its walls had never been exposed to cannon fire or fire of any other sort. He thought too about the probable ecological impact that a species like humankind might have on a world like this one, given the scenes to which he had recently been witness.

This isn’t bad, he told himself. Not yet. If we’re lucky, it could be good. And we are lucky. We’re riding a streak, and we can ride it all the way. I can do this. Cometh the hour, cometh the man. Shen was right. Leader or not, I can light the way, with just a little help from my friends.

THIRTY-THREE

S
ome of the equipment is definitely missing,” Lynn said, as soon as Ike had freed the cable and allowed Matthew to complete his descent to the sticky black ground. The downside of using the flamethrower to dispose of the tentacled slugs was that the enigmatically transfigured masses on which they had set themselves had been devastated. Only a handful of the bulbous protuberances remained intact. The probability was that their contents had been damaged, if not thoroughly cooked.

“What’s gone?” Matthew asked, tersely.

“Nothing absolutely vital to the reassembly, although we might be a couple of hull plates down and some leg elements are definitely gone. Some machetes are missing—three, unless one or two are still packed away where I can’t find them. Some rope. A bale of bubble-fabric. A canister of fuel oil—fuel for the inorganic motor, that is.”

Matthew’s heart leapt with exultation, even though he’d fully expected some such news. “Did they take Bernal’s artifacts?” he asked, swiftly.

“I don’t know,” Lynn confessed. “I can’t find them—but I don’t know where Dulcie packed them.”

“Can we get by without the hull plates and leg parts?” Ike wanted to know.

“We have patches to replace damaged hull plates,” Lynn said. “We weren’t carrying enough spares to fix all the legs, but the loss isn’t critical. It certainly wasn’t any kind of worm that mounted the raid. It
could
have been monkey-analogues, but …”

“It was the humanoids,” Matthew told her, firmly. “They know we’re here—and we know they’re curious. Maybe curious enough to …”

That was when his phone began to beep. His first assumption was that it was Tang or Vince Solari, impatient to know how the night had passed, but it wasn’t. This time his heart seemed to leap all the way into his throat.

“Dulcie!” he exclaimed, raising his voice to make sure that Ike and Lynn would respond without delay. They immediately picked up their own phones and tapped into the call.

“Can you hear me?” Dulcie asked, anxiously. She was whispering, but Matthew knew that wasn’t what was worrying her; she was afraid that she might have gone so far into the glassy forest that her signal could no longer get out.

“Yes,” he said, tersely. “Go on.”

“Sorry to worry you all,” she said. “I didn’t want my phone beeping in case it alerted them. I thought I could follow them without them knowing. It seemed plenty dark enough, and I felt sure they hadn’t spotted me when I first caught sight of them—but I guess they were stringing me along all the time. They probably wanted to lure me away from the bubble. I didn’t even know how many of them there were. Stupid.”

“What’s your situation now?” Matthew asked, as waves of nauseous fear stirred in his empty belly.

“Under observation, I suppose. They haven’t made a hostile move—yet. They seem to have quite a lot of our stuff, including some very wicked steel knives as well as Bernal’s things. They have spears of their own too. I can count twenty-two, but there might be a few I can’t see. If they do attack, I don’t stand a chance, but they still seem wary. They know I’m doing something now, but they seem more intrigued than alarmed. They know they have me surrounded, and they know that I know, but they’re holding back, still half in hiding.”

“
Which way
?” Lynn demanded—then realized that the answer wouldn’t mean anything. “We’ll be there with the gun and the chain saws as soon as we can,” she added, ignoring the fervent gestures Matthew was making in the hope of shutting her up, “but you’ll have to guide us in—there’s no way we can triangulate your position until we spread out.”

“Don’t be stupid!” Dulcie retorted, with even more scorn than Matthew could have contrived. “I have to try to make contact,
now
. I phoned you first because you need to listen in—to know what I’m doing in case it goes horribly wrong.” She didn’t have to ask whether the call was being recorded—all the phones would do that automatically.

“Absolutely right,” Matthew said, swiftly. “What do they look like, Dulcie?”

Lynn Gwyer was obviously still in a devil-may-care shoot-anything-that-looks-at-me-sideways mood, but Ikram Mohammed put a hand on her arm to clam her down. “We’d never find her,” he whispered, holding the mouthpiece of his phone away from his face. “Not quickly enough …” He broke off as Dulcie began answering Matthew’s question.

“Either we looked at the rock drawings with an optimistic eye or these aren’t the same folk,” the anthropologist said, her voice so unemotional and matter-of-fact that it seemed almost parodic to Matthew. “They’re all shorter than I am, none taller than a meter and a half, and they’re thin. Disproportionately long limbs, very odd hands. Looks to me like seven longish fingers, or five fingers and two thumbs, and the way they grip their spears and the stolen goods is very weird, always leaving at least a couple of fingers spare. Slender torsos. Purple skin, of course, not scaly but not hairy either. No clothes. No hair on the head or anywhere else. No breasts, no balls, no navels, no babes in arms, no toddlers, no kids at all. Like plastic dolls, in a way—except for the faces. We—I—always thought of them as having faces vaguely like ours, but they don’t. Very large eyes. Even larger noses—snouts might be a better term. Complicated mouth parts, almost insectile but soft—and real teeth.
Big
teeth, but not sharp. No ears that I can identify with confidence, although I’m pretty sure they can hear. Something like a double crest lying to either side of the head, mostly collapsed but occasionally raised—
might
be ears but probably not. Other flaps of flesh under the arms, probably capable of extension—function unclear. They make noises, but nothing like human speech. Clicks and groans.”

She paused, but no one interrupted. Matthew was holding his breath.

“They’re clicking and groaning away like crazy right now,” she went on, “presumably holding a conference to decide what to do next. The discussion seems pretty democratic—no obvious signs of a pecking order. I’m showing them my open hand, and they seem to be reacting, but whether they recognize it as a peaceful gesture or think it’s a joke because it’s only got five stubby fingers I don’t know. They’re creeping a little closer all the while, but none of them seems anxious to take the lead. They all seem very nervous, even though they’ve got all the weapons, not to mention the advantages of height, reach, and home ground. Even if they didn’t see us with the chain saws they must have seen what the chain saws did. I’m trying to seem unthreatening, but I’m not sure they’d recognize anything I said to them as speech, let alone appreciate a soothing tone. I’m standing in the open, looking as harmless as I possibly can, but they don’t seem convinced. They don’t seem to have a clue what to do, although they’re going to have to do something when they come within touching range, if not before.”

She paused again. The silence on the line would have been profound had it not been for a faint background crackle. The microphone could not pick up the clicks and groans of the humanoids.

“Maybe it’s lack of imagination,” she continued, “but the only friendly gesture I can think of right now is to turn my smartsuit purple, matching the shade as closely to theirs as I can. It’ll have to run through a pretty wide spectrum before it gets there, but it won’t take long—wow! That got their attention. Everybody’s stopped. Lots of blinking. If anything, they’re more scared than they were before, but I’m there now. Short of growing a snout like an ugly bat with a mouthful of worms, there’s nothing more I can do to try to fit in. I’m going to try an approach, nice and slow. I’ll pick one that doesn’t have a spear—one that’s carrying some of our stuff.”

Matthew had to let his breath out, but he let it out slowly and silently. “I wish I had something I could offer as a gift,” Dulcie went on, “but I’m certainly not going to unfold the clasp knife from my belt or offer them my notepad or phone. I’m not sure they’d be able to decipher the gesture anyway. I’m still relying on the empty palm. The one I’m moving closer to doesn’t know what to do, but at least it isn’t making any hostile move. I’m reaching out now, palm first, inviting a peaceful touch, but I can’t tell whether it knows—oh no! They’re coming at me, Matthew. They’re com—”

Although the sound of her voice was cut off, the link was still open. Matthew could hear other noises, but very faintly. Either Dulcie had dropped the phone or it had been snatched from her hand.

Ike cursed; Lynn seemed utterly numb. Matthew had known before that there was no time to waste; now he had a giddy sensation of having been overtaken by events. He groped for crumbs of comfort. “If she’d screamed,” he said, keenly aware of the hammering of his heart and the difficulty of drawing further breath, “she could have made herself heard. She didn’t scream.” He didn’t lower his phone, and neither did Ike or Lynn. They all continued listening, while the faint susurrus of background noise taunted them.