Dark Ararat - Brian Stableford [124]
“We shouldn’t even be joking about it,” Matthew observed, soberly. “The very casualness of the conversation illustrates the ease with which we still fall prey to the myth of the savage. We ought to remember that the alien cultures of Earth were mostly far too peaceful for their own good. That’s why it was so easy for our ancestors to wipe them out, and then make up stories to prove that they deserved it.”
“Something tells me,” Lynn said, sardonically, “that if they do attack us, you’re not going to be all that effective as a line of defense. Maybe you ought to give me the gun. I’m a better markswoman than Rand seems to think.”
“If you want it,” Matthew said, “You’re more than welcome to it. Let’s eat.”
Dinner consisted of spun protein steaks, manna fries, and synthetic courgettes. The taint of processed alien vegetation was evident in every bite, but Matthew was getting used to it by now.
“It could be worse,” he said, heroically.
“It will be if we get stranded without the converter and have to eat the boat food while we’re waiting to be rescued,” Ike told him. “It’s concentrated nutritional goodness, guaranteed nontoxic, but it’s distinctly pungent.”
When the remains of the meal had been cleared away Matthew made as if to fold up the table but Dulcie Gherardesca told him to leave it. She went to her personal luggage and took out a cloth-wrapped bundle. Matthew was surprised to see, when she unwrapped it, that it contained the natural-glass spearheads and arrowheads that Vince Solari had found near the crime scene.
“What are you doing with those?” he asked.
She looked up at him quizzically, as if she’d expected him to understand. “Verstehen,” she said. “I want to handle them while I think, to use them as an imaginative aid.”
“That’s not quite what I meant,” Matthew said, apologetically. “I was wondering how you pried them out of Vince’s possession. Aren’t they evidence?”
“I suppose they are,” she said, “But it wasn’t difficult to persuade him that my need was greater than his. He kept the one that really matters.” She meant the murder weapon. “Care to join me?”
“Okay,” he said. “I didn’t get a chance to fondle them before, and I guess we’re less than forty-eight hours from the big waterfall. Real hours, that is—not the metric crap the crew have invented.”
He sat down, and picked up one of the carefully shaped spearheads. He ran his finger lightly along the sharpened edge, marveling at its keenness. The sensation seemed to encapsulate both the unearthliness of the vegetation that could produce such a peculiar material and the delicacy of the hand that could work it into a useful shape.
He tried to pretend, as Dulcie was undoubtedly doing and Bernal undoubtedly would have done, that the hand in question had not been Bernal Delgado’s at all but an alien hand, perhaps hairy and perhaps glabrous, perhaps with more or fewer than five fingers, perhaps knobbly with knucklebones or perhaps quasi-tentacular.
He closed his eyes and hoped for inspiration.
Remarkably, inspiration arrived, far too quickly to be the kind of inspiration he had actually sought. Matthew had no more idea than he had had before of what the new world might look like through the intelligent eyes of its legitimate inheritors, but he was convinced that he now knew exactly why Bernal Delgado had made these imitation alien artifacts—and, incidentally, the identity of his murderer.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Everything aboard Voconia was in perfectly good order when Matthew and his companions retired to their bunks. In spite, or perhaps because of the fact he had done nothing strenuous all day, Matthew slept better than he had since waking from his sleep of 700 years. Had he not been so deeply and peacefully asleep, though, he might not have been so rudely awakened.
When the boat lurched and turned abruptly to starboard Matthew was so relaxed that he was thrown out of the bunk. That would not have been so bad had he not been in the upper one of the pair,