Dark Ararat - Brian Stableford [115]
“Legs?” Matthew echoed, in helpless amazement.
“We’re quite a lot higher than the lowland plateau here,” she explained. “The watercourse is fairly smooth and comfortably deep for long stretches, but there are a couple of whitewater canyons. The keel’s retractable, but the boat still draws too much water to get through the difficult stretches without bumping against the rocks. The hull’s made of smart fabric, of course—it has a few tricks of its own and it heals quickly if it’s ripped—but we can’t afford the luxury of laying up for days at a time. Bernal decided that it would be best if she could take the worst sections in her stride, literally. I’d have thought three legs each side would be okay, according to the conventional insect model, but Bernal opted for eight. That’s why we call her Voconia.”
Having had the benefit of this introduction, Matthew had no trouble deducing that the black spots in Voconia’s prow were compound eyes of some kind. The water was clear enough for him to see that the lines of sensors extended below the water, doubtless to ensure that the craft could take soundings as it went. The wheelhouse was too narrow for comfort, but that was only to be expected; the rudder and biomotor would be under AI control for the greater part of the journey, although there had to be a set of manual controls for use in an emergency.
The hold in which the supplies and equipment were stored was crammed to bursting, and there was a certain amount of overspill stacked in the corners of the cabin. This meant that the cabin was less roomy than was desirable, even when the dining table and bunks were folded back, but Matthew figured that extra space would be generated at a reasonably rapid rate as Voconia’s biomotor and passengers worked their way steadily through the bales of manna. He could see that it wasn’t going to be easy to dismantle the craft, transport the pieces down a steep cliff and then reassemble it, but he assumed that the hull’s “smartness” extended to the inclusion of convenient abscission layers that could be activated by the AI.
“Pity you didn’t fit it out with wings,” Matthew commented, although he knew perfectly well why bio-inspired design ran into severe practical limitations when it came to mimicking the mechanisms of flight. Locusts and herons were near-miraculous triumphs of engineering; the only ornithopter produced on twenty-first-century Earth that had been capable of carrying a human passenger had been the ungainliest machine ever devised. If the engineers of twenty-ninth-century Earth had been able to improve on it, the secret hadn’t yet been passed on to the crew of Hope.
“We had to keep it simple,” Lynn told him. “Going downstream will be easy, though, provided that the biomotor finds the locally derived wholefood adequate to its needs. The real trial will begin when we turn around to come back. Coming back under our own power will test the boat’s resources to the limit. We can arrange for an emergency food and equipment drop from Hope if we need one, and maybe some sort of rescue mission if things get really desperate, but there are matters of pride to be considered. She’s our baby—we want her to do well.”
Everyone but Maryanne Hyder was on the riverbank to see them off, and the good-byes seemed reasonably effusive by comparison with the awkward hellos that had greeted Matthew a couple of days earlier.
Rand Blackstone made a considerable fuss about presenting his rifle to Matthew. “I won’t need it up here,” he said. “You might.”
“Why give it to me rather than one of the others?” Matthew asked.
“I used to watch you on TV,” the Australian told him. “I could see that you got out and about at lot, sometimes in dangerous places. You didn’t live in a lab like Ike or Lynn. Besides which, I’ve seen the others try to shoot. Your reflexes may not be attuned yet, but you can’t be any worse than them. I ought to be going with you, of course—but Delgado was insistent that he needed educated eyes. Mine didn’t qualify, apparently.”
“Nor would mine,” Vince Solari told him,