Dark Ararat - Brian Stableford [132]
“Sure,” Matthew said. “And tonight, I want a really good night’s sleep, to get me ready for the cliff-descent. If my arm will let me sleep, that is.”
“Your IT will see to it,” Ike assured him, as they made their way out on to the deck. Lynn and Dulcie were already there, having abandoned their own labors a little earlier.
As on the previous evening, the character of the river fauna changed quite markedly as the light faded through dark blue to dark gray, but the most noticeable aspect of the change this time was auditory. The noises emanating from the forest increased in volume and complexity, although the crescendo was relatively brief.
“Is it just me,” Dulcie Gherardesca asked, “or is the chorus progressing from quaintly plaintive to almost harrowing?”
“It’s just the numbers,” Ike told her. “There must be thousands. No birds, though. Squirrels and monkeys and whistling lizards. Great lungs, though. Can we assume that they’re marking territories and summoning mates, do you think, or should we be bending our minds to wonder what other functions that kind of caterwauling might serve?”
Nobody bothered to answer that, or to remind the speaker that what he really meant was squirrel- and monkey-analogues.
“The biodiversity might be limited by comparison with home,” Lynn observed, “but there are plenty of critters out there. Maybe we ought to moor for a spell and take a look. The forest’s quite different hereabouts, nothing like the hills around the ruins.”
“Better to do it on the way back,” Ike said. “We came to take a look at the vitreous grasslands. They’re the great unknown, the ultimate Tyrian wilderness.”
The urgent phase of the chorus faded soon enough, although it never dissolved into silence. Almost as soon as the stars came out in force the boat bumped something, and then bumped it again. The impacts were slight but distinctly tangible. Matthew’s first thought was that they were nudging dangerous underwater rocks, but it only required a glance to inform him that the river was easily wide enough to allow the AI to steer a course through any such hazard. Whatever was bumping Voconia was moving under its own power to create the collisions, and it had to be at least as big as a human, if not bigger.
“We need a picture,” Ike was quick to say. “I’ll feed the AI’s visuals through to the big screen.”
Matthew and the two women returned immediately to the cabin, but the results were disappointing. There were no more bumps, and the recorded images were worthless. The AI had the means to compensate for near-darkness, but not for the turbidity of the water. They could see that something had thumped the boat repeatedly, but whether it was merely a big eel-analogue or something less familiar remained frustratingly unclear.
“Here be mermaids,” Matthew murmured.
“Or maybe manatees,” Dulcie said, drily. “Genuine exotics.”
Matthew knew what she meant. Manatees had been extinct before he was born, along with Steller’s sea cow and the dugong, and their DNA was unbanked. Humans would never see their like again—but mermaids, being safely imaginary, would always be present in the chimerical imagination. On the other hand, this was Tyre, where chimerization was built into the picture at the most fundamental level, even though the vast majority of individuals didn’t seem to be exhibiting it at the moment of their observation. If there were mermaids anywhere, this was the kind of place in which one might expect to find them.
“It was big,” Ike reported. “The AI estimates not much less than half a ton. That’s really big. There’s nothing like that around the base. I bet there’ll be even bigger ones further downstream, and more of them. We’ll catch up with them tomorrow. It’s only a matter of time.”
“It’s about time we found some sizable grazers,” Matthew opined. “Dense forests always favor pygmies, but rivers and their floodplains usually have far more elbowroom.