Dark Ararat - Brian Stableford [128]
After a while, he had recovered sufficient sense of proportion to realize that it was probably for the best that it was he who had suffered the worst effects of the accident. He was the only one who knew next to nothing about the design and operation of the boat. He was, in effect, the only authentic passenger. Had one of the others been disabled, even temporarily, it would have left a gap into which he would have been ill-equipped to step.
As things were, the problem with the legs had generated a certain amount of reparatory and precautionary work that his companions were able to undertake with reasonable efficiency that afternoon, alongside the routine work of taking samples from the river and its banks. They had done less of that kind of work the day before because the boat had been negotiating familiar territory, but the landscape had undergone several significant changes during the night. The banks of the river were more sharply defined here, and the shallows no longer supported the bushy broad-leaved plants that had bordered the upper reaches. The attitude of the dendrites whose branches now hung down toward the surface reminded Matthew a little of willow trees, but they were not really “trees” and their “foliage” was far less delicate and discreet.
Had he been in a slightly different frame of mind the branches might have reminded Matthew of serpentine dragons with as many tiny wings as millipedes had legs. They writhed slowly, but they did writhe. Although their termini were not equipped with mouths, let alone fangs, they did have curious spatulate extensions that an imaginative man might have likened to a cobra’s hood.
The more distant vegetation was just as strange. Its elements—those he could see, at any rate—were much taller, but it would have taken a very generous eye to liken them to stately poplars or aged redwoods. Matthew found that if he visualized a giant squid extended vertically, with the body at the base and the tentacles reaching skyward, he had a model of sorts for the basic form, but there were all kinds of arbitrary embellishments to be added to the picture, some of which were literal frills and others merely metaphorical.
There was no wind this afternoon, but the straining tentacles moved nevertheless, idling as if in a sluggish current, posing like dress designers lazily displaying festoons of fabric to the admiring and appreciative eye of the benign sun. There were few animals to be seen hereabouts, but Tang had been right about the lowland soundscape; there were more to be heard. They did not sing like birds or stridulate like crickets, but they whistled and fluted in a fashion that sounded rather mournful to Matthew, although he could not suppose that the cacophony sounded mournful to the intended listeners. On an alien world, natural music could not carry the same emotional connotations as on Earth—or could it?
He might have devoted some time to the contemplation of that issue had he not been interrupted.
“How are you feeling now?” Lynn asked him.
“Not so bad,” he confessed. “I’ll let you know for sure when we’ve got through the second whitewater stretch.”
“Dulcie did a good job with your shoulder, you know,” she told him. “I’d probably have botched it.”
“I’m grateful,” Matthew assured her, although his tone was lukewarm. “Anything interesting in the water?”
“The nets are picking up more now that the AI’s stoked up the biomotor, but there are no real surprises as yet. No crocodiles, no crabs, no fancy fish.”
“Anything edible?”
“I don’t know. Would you like to try a little sliced eely thing for dinner, with some minijellyfish soup as a starter?”
“Not really. What about the snare that grabbed the leg last night? Another kind of killer anemone?