Dark Ararat - Brian Stableford [119]
The more eyes Matthew noticed—especially when he began to glimpse pairs of forward-looking eyes, some of which presumably belonged to monkey-analogues—the more convinced he became that while he was studying the alien world, it was studying him. It was impossible to guess how much intelligence there was in the observing eyes—although he had no doubt that there was far less than there was behind his own—but it was observation nevertheless. The new world might not be alarmed by the presence of aliens, but it was sensitive to their arrival and continued presence; the invaders were not being ignored.
“You’ll see a little more when the sun’s not so bright,” said a voice from behind him, breaking into his reverie, “but you won’t hear a lot more until it’s dark. Rather frustrating, that.”
Matthew turned to look at Dulcie Gherardesca. “It’s the same in most places on Earth,” he reminded her. “Sensible animals only come out to play in the dark. Daylight’s for the primary producers and lumpen herbivores, darkness for the nimbler herbivores and the cleverer hunters. Except for birds. And people.”
“The people of the city were daylight-lovers too,” she said. “They were artists, after a fashion, as well as technologists. Artists and artificers have to work in the light, at least to begin with. The cave paintings our remotest ancestors made were celebrations of their mastery of firelight: the power to banish darkness. The Tyrian city-dwellers didn’t have that. They never domesticated fire, so they had to work in daylight.”
“They probably had less incentive as well as less opportunity to domesticate fire,” Matthew suggested. “Milder weather, fewer big predators to scare away, fewer forest fires. But it is odd, isn’t it? Agriculture without cooking. Culture without cooking. A fundamental difference between our ancestors and theirs. If they’d domesticated fire, maybe they’d have made a go of civilization. Do you think so?”
“It’s hard to tell,” she said. “Everything you know about genomics is DNA, so it’s difficult for you to imagine how things might develop when there’s another player on the pitch. Everything I know about cultures and civilizations involves fire-users, so figuring out the social evolution of nonusers is trying to see into the darkness in more ways than one. It’s such a simple thing, but if you remove it from the equation you have to use a whole new arithmetic.”
Her choice of analogies struck a chord, and Matthew couldn’t help feeling an intellectual kinship that he hadn’t felt before, when the situation had been far more awkward.
“That’s right,” he said. “Exactly right. We haven’t yet begun to see the possibilities. But it’s a beautiful place, don’t you think? There’s an aesthetic resonance. And those fugitive eyes—the fact that it’s so difficult to make out the lines of the bodies in which they’re set makes them stand out so much more. Maybe they think our glorious pea-green boat is the loveliest thing they’ve ever seen.”
“Maybe,” she echoed, skeptically—but she smiled. It was the first time Matthew had seen her smile.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Dusk lived up to its promise; as soon as the sun had disappeared from view and the sky’s color had darkened to indigo the activity in and beside the river increased markedly. The boat was sliding smoothly through water so calm that every ripple seemed to be narcotized. Now was the time that the surface-feeders drifted up from the muddy bed of the watercourse, and it was easy enough for Matthew to see why.
Now that the sun was no longer tinting the surface gold and silver he observed that there was a definite film upon it: an organic slick fed by detritus dislodged from the surrounding vegetation. The film was somewhat reminiscent of an oil slick, save for the fact that it was swarming with tiny creatures. Those which Matthew could make out were mostly wormlike, but there were others like tiny jellyfish and transparent brittle stars. He did not doubt that there must be many