Dark Ararat - Brian Stableford [111]
“We didn’t quarrel about it,” she told him, defensively. “I told your friend that even if we had, the quarrel would never have turned violent. Never. Anyway, he hadn’t made up his mind. He was determined not to make up his mind until he’d been downriver.”
“In search of ska?”
“In search of whatever there is to be found. God says Tang stood aside to let you take Bernal’s place. You must have impressed him.”
“I’m not sure that I did. I think he was content with the fact that he’d obviously impressed me. He knows that I’ve got an open mind, because it hasn’t had time to fill up. More important, though, he simply doesn’t want to go. He doesn’t want to go out on a limb, not because he’s a coward but because he understands as well as anyone does how badly the crew have screwed things up. He wants to take his work back to orbit because he thinks that’s the right place for it until we know a lot more about the mysteries of Tyre. He’s grateful to me for being so enthusiastic to put my head into the lion’s mouth instead of his.”
“Bernal didn’t think it was so very dangerous.”
“But you didn’t want him to go,” Matthew guessed.
“That was personal.”
“And you didn’t quarrel about it. Did you know he was making imitation alien spearheads and arrowheads way out in the fields?”
Again she shook her head, more vigorously this time.
Matthew contemplated going back to his room and leaving her to sleep, but he hesitated. There were a couple of questions on the mental list he’d been compiling all day that she was best placed to answer, and he didn’t expect to have another conversation with her before the boat set off.
“If one of the local mammal-equivalents had met up with the critter you ran into,” he said, “it would presumably be dead.”
“Almost certainly,” she confirmed, although she was obviously puzzled by the change of tack.
“Why almost?”
“The toxin’s a blunt instrument, physiologically speaking. That’s why it works as well in the context of an alien metabolism as it does in target flesh—but it’s an organic venom, to which local organisms might be able to build up a degree of tolerance. Nonlethal stings inflicted by smaller organisms could provide an opportunity to do that.”
“Is it purely defensive, or could it also be a way of killing prey?”
The question increased her puzzlement, but again she provided a straight answer. “If you’d asked me yesterday,” she said, “I’d have guessed that it’s purely defensive—but I didn’t know how big they grew, then. That was a fearsome specimen. Trust me to walk right into it! Because they photosynthesize and don’t move around much in daylight they seem very meek, but they can move quite quickly when they need to. I’m not so sure now that they aren’t hunter-killers.”
“They can photosynthesize,” Matthew said, issuing a mild correction. “But they don’t seem to be very enthusiastic, do they? They skulk in the shadows, even though they don’t seem to have much to fear from predators. At least, the little ones skulk in the shadows. How big do you think they are when they’re fully grown?”
“If you’d asked me yesterday …” she began, but left it at that. After a pause, she added: “Bernal said they probably had some surprises in store. He didn’t mention giants, but he did wonder whether the ones we’d seen might be immature. Ike had told him they had much bigger genomes than they were exhibiting, and he was trying to figure out why that might be.”
“Was he wondering whether they might be larval stages, capable of further metamorphosis into something completely different?”
“He mentioned the possibility,” Maryanne confirmed.
On a sudden impulse, Matthew said: “What did Bernal call them? Not in his reports, but in his casual speech. Did he have some kind of nickname for them?”
Maryanne thought about that for a moment before saying: “He called them killer anemones a couple of times—because the tentacle-cluster made them look like sea anemones.”
“K-A,” Matthew said, immediately. “S-K-A. Super killer anemone. There are no seasons to speak of in these parts, so there’s never been any pressure on complex organisms