Dark Ararat - Brian Stableford [120]
It was on this seething mass that the larger creatures came to feed: massive eel-like monsters as thick as his arm and half again as long; ciliated wheels as big as the palm of his hand that spun with remarkable rapidity; tangled masses of avid tentacles; aquatic lizard-analogues like miniature crocodiles. Occasionally he saw ripples that suggested the presence of something even more massive, but he never caught more than a glimpse of an oval hump or a diaphanous fluke. The show was entrancing—so much so that Matthew could hardly spare more than an occasional glance for the vegetation clustered on the banks, which was now too distant to allow him to make out the multitudinous prying eyes. Occasionally there would be a flurry of movement and a dull clatter that testified to the swift movement of some creature at least half as big as a man, but the shadows were now so dense and so complex that he had no chance of divining its shape or even its position with any accuracy.
Matthew was tempted to put his hand over the side in order to scoop up a few of the organisms he could see, in order that he might see them more clearly, but Lynn Gwyer had taken care to warn him that the danger of being stung was too great. She had not told him exactly what kinds of organisms might do him harm, probably because no one had taken a sufficiently thorough census, but he leapt easily enough to the conclusion that the creatures that looked like bundles of tentacles detached from the back of a “killer anemone” were prime suspects. If they were, he thought, that might be a good reason to suppose that the tentacles carried by the giant flatworms were used for offense as well as defense. It might also be grounds for suspecting that the flatworms thus armed had begun their evolutionary careers as arbitrary chimeras, although their genomes had subsequently been rationalized by natural selection to the point at which the cells making up the stinger-bundles were genetically indistinguishable from those making up the remainder of the body.
The idea suddenly occurred to Matthew that it might be the other way around. Habit had made him think of chimerization as a process of fusion: the bringing together of disparate elements into a new whole—but it was a potentiality that might work both ways. Perhaps the complex creature resembled the ancestor of the simpler ones, and the tentacular bundles were “organs” that had been enabled to make a bid for functional independence by the peculiar and as-yet-enigmatic reproductive mechanisms employed by Tyrian life.
Alas, the twilight did not last for long. Tyre was an orderly world where the transition between light and darkness was relatively smooth. As the face of the river faded into gloom Matthew lifted his head to look up into the sky.
This was the first wholly clear night he had experienced since shuttling down, and the sight of the stars was breathtaking.
He had looked at the stars from the surface of the moon, as everyone in transit through its sublunar habitats took the trouble to do at least once, and he had been suitably impressed by the extreme contrast between the airless lunar sky and the dense, moisture-laden, light-polluted skies of Earth. But the lunar sky had to be viewed through a lens of glass or clear plastic, and no matter how cunningly the windows in question were contrived they were always reminiscent of screens, and of the kinds of optical illusion that granted depth to virtual environments. Even the Earthbound could look at naked skies in VE, and marvel at the awesome density of visible stars, but everyone knew that VEs were fake and everyone knew how to detect the fakery if they wanted to revoke the suspension of their disbelief. For that reason, there always seemed to be something slightly suspicious about the view from a lunar window: the impression that it might be mere artifice was hard to shake off. Here, there was no such problem.
Here, Matthew was blanketed by an atmosphere of approximately the same thickness as