Dark Ararat - Brian Stableford [113]
“There’s no real reason to think you’ll find it downriver if we haven’t found it here,” she pointed out, scrupulously.
“Bernal didn’t think so,” Matthew pointed out. “Why was that?”
“Simply because we’d looked here and not found anything very exciting,” she told him. “He thought that it was time to look somewhere else. He didn’t think they were ever going to find anything on Base One’s island, because the priority there is on usurpation of land, the production of Earth-analogue soils, and the growth of Earthly crops. Base Two’s attention is similarly restricted, with exploitation still taking a higher priority than exploration. The grasslands are the most extensive ecosystemic complexes on at least two of the four continents—but it was hope that was guiding Bernal’s expectations, not the calculus of probability.”
“I understand that,” Matthew told her.
“So do I,” she admitted. “But I’m biased. I loved him.”
“You weren’t the only one,” Matthew assured her. “You weren’t even the only one here, were you?”
“But she didn’t kill him,” Maryanne was quick to say.
“Who?”
“Lynn. She really didn’t mind. Not that much. She knew him years ago. She’d been through it all before. She understood what he was like. She didn’t kill him.”
“Did you tell Solari that Bernal had been sleeping with Lynn before he took up with you?” Matthew wanted to know.
“He already knew,” she told him. “He knew before he left Hope. He asked Lynn about it, and he asked me. But I can’t believe that she killed him. She wouldn’t. She couldn’t.”
Matthew thought about it for a moment, and then said: “No, she wouldn’t. We may be twenty-first-century barbarians, but we’re not nineteenth-century barbarians. We’re mortals, but we’re civilized, and we have other things to think about. More important things. We have a seemingly Earth-clone world that isn’t an Earth-clone at all, and a race of city-dwellers who couldn’t hang on to the habit. We’re uneasy, scared, jumpy … but even here we have our VE sex-kits, our IT, our missionary zeal. You’re right. Lynn couldn’t have killed Bernal, and if Vince thinks she did, he’s tuned into the wrong wavelength. But somebody did.”
“I don’t know who,” Maryanne insisted.
“Neither do I—but however it came about, I have to try to step into Bernal’s shoes. I have to try to see things as he had begun to see them, to take advantage of his accumulated knowledge of the world. I need to know what was in his mind when he coined the phrase super killer anemone. I need to know, even if it was hope and hope alone that set his compass, what he expected to find downriver. If there’s anything more you can tell me, I wish you’d tell me now. We’ll have our beltphones with us, but talking on the phone isn’t the same as talking face-to-face.”
“I don’t know what to tell you,” she insisted. “I’m sorry, but I just don’t know. I’m a toxicologist, not an ecologist. To me, a worm with tentacles is just a liquiject full of interesting poisons. There are too many poisons hereabouts, which would be even more lethal to creatures like us than to the enemies they were designed for, if it weren’t for the safeguards built into our suits and our IT. There are a million ways to fuck up a functioning metabolism, and very few of them are choosy.”
“It reminds Rand Blackstone of home,” Matthew observed.
“So it should,” she said. “On Earth, all toxicologists turn toward Australia when they pray. Until we arrived here, it was poison paradise. An alien world on the surface of the Earth—until the dingoes and the rabbits moved in. Has it occurred to you that the s in ska might stand for something other than super, even if the k and the a stand for killer anemone?”
“Sure,” Matthew