Dark Ararat - Brian Stableford [114]
“Strange. Sinister. Solitary. Son of the. Spawn of the.”
“I still like super—oh shit, no I don’t. It’s a joke. It’s just a bloody joke.”
She waited patiently for him to tell her what he meant.
“Serial killer anemone,” Matthew said. “I should have seen it immediately. It has to be.”
“Forgive me if I don’t laugh,” she said. “I’m sorry I don’t know more about what Bernal was thinking. He wasn’t quite the talker you are—not so far as shoptalk was concerned, anyway.”
Matthew wasn’t sure whether to take offense at that or not. “We all have our specialisms,” he said. “Maybe I’m a little more obsessive than Bernal was—or a little less.”
“I did see you on TV, now I come to think about it,” she said. “You always looked so serious. Not that Bernal wasn’t—but he had style.”
“Now that is an insult,” Matthew said. “I have style. It might not be the same sort of style as Bernal’s, but it is style.”
“That’s what Lynn said,” Maryanne recalled. “When we heard you were coming, she was the one who was glad. But she knew you in the flesh, didn’t she? So to speak.”
Matthew realized, rather belatedly, that it was her turn to go fishing for information.
“Just good friends,” he said. “Not even that, really. If she and Bernal were intimate back on Earth I didn’t know about it, but I probably wouldn’t have even if they were. She and I never were.”
“Well, it’s a whole new world now,” the blond woman said, softly. “One fresh start after another.”
“Does it matter?”
“What matters,” she informed him, mournfully, “is that he’s dead. If I weren’t so absurdly spaced out, so remotely detached from all my feelings …”
“Yeah,” said Matthew, sympathetically. “When I said I knew the feeling, I forgot the exclusion effect. But Bernal was my friend, my ally … in Shen Chin Che’s reckoning, my counterpart. I can imagine how you feel. I’m truly sorry that we had to meet like this. I wish he could be here.”
“When you do find out who did it—” she began, but cut the sentence short with abrupt determination.
“Vince already knows,” Matthew reminded her, gently.
“When you find out,” she repeated, adding the emphasis.
“What?” he prompted.
“Tell them I forgive them. Tell them that I wish them no harm.”
She was spaced out, disconnected from her feelings: from her grief, from her anger, from her pain. She knew that. She also meant what she said.
“Them?” Matthew queried. “Not him, or her?”
“I honestly don’t know,” she murmured. “If I gave Solari the last piece of the jigsaw, I had no idea where it fit. But he was right all along—if we’d really wanted to know, we could have worked it out. We didn’t, even before I stepped on the worm.”
“It’s a whole new world now,” Matthew quoted, to show that he understood. “One fresh start after another. We may be twenty-first-century barbarians in an era when Earth is populated by emortal superscientists, but we’re doing our best to make progress. We can figure out our penal code when we have more time. For now, we have to move forward on other fronts. If I can complete the work that Bernal began … I was right to claim the berth, you now. Tang is needed here. He’ll figure out the mystery eventually, working from the biochemistry up, but if there’s a shortcut to the truth, it’ll need an ecologist’s eye to capture it. Seeing the wood in spite of the trees is our speciality.”
“I wish you the best of luck,” she said.
He knew how costly the wish had been, and thanked her accordingly.
TWENTY-SIX
Seen from the mound in the ruined city the boat had been no more than an anomalous patch of color, so Matthew was quite unprepared for the peculiarity it displayed at closer range. There was nothing so very unusual about the basic shape of its hull or its cabin and wheelhouse, but its construction material was exotic and the hull was ornamented with a complex network of striations. It was as if each of the vessel’s flanks were overlaid by a set of articulated hawsers.
“Those are the legs,” Lynn informed him. “They’re quite spectacular