Dark Ararat - Brian Stableford [134]
If anything, the anthropologist’s intensity increased as she continued: “Matthew’s right—probably righter than he imagines. What we need before we can feel at home here is better cooks, and it might well prove that the best route to a recovery of the crew’s loyalty to the mission is through their stomachs. And what we’ll probably need if we’re ever to make common cause with the humanoids, if they exist, is a way to sit down with them, and break bread together, and share the delights of fire. At the end of the day, no matter how you ritualize it, sex divides, because that’s its nature. Cooking unites, because cooking makes relationships palatable. Sex couldn’t be the basis of human society, because it was the chief problem society had to overcome. The strategies of that problem’s solution had to begin elsewhere: in the primal biotechnologies and the rituals they facilitated.”
Lynn was taken aback momentarily, but she was quick to smile. “Fifty-eight light-years and seven centuries,” she said, amiably, “and it’s still the same old thing. Nature versus nurture, biologists versus human scientists. Makes you feel quite at home, doesn’t it? And isn’t that what we all want? To feel at home here.”
“If we can,” Ike reminded her. “Home is where, when you go there, they have to let you in—but there’ll always be places where they simply won’t, no matter how hard you try. The universe might be full of them. We just don’t know.”
“True,” Matthew said. “But at least it’s us who get to knock on the door and find out. Who among us would prefer to leave the job to someone else?”
He was glad to see that none of his companions was prepared to raise her—or even his—hand in response to that invitation.
THIRTY
The cliff beside the cataract was more than thirty meters high. On the left bank, where Voconia’s motley crew had moored the boat fifty meters short of the falls, the cliff was sheer, falling away no more than a couple of degrees from the vertical. When he first stepped back onto solid ground, however, the configuration of the cliff was the least of Matthew’s concerns. He wanted to look out over the mysterious signal-blocking canopy of the “glasslands”: at the densely packed grasslike structures whose seemingly anomalous dimensions would reduce him yet again to the imaginary status of an elfin spider-rider adrift in a microcosmic wonderland.
From the cliff’s edge, alas, it was impossible to see much more than he had already seen in mute pictures collected by flying eyes. He was too high up, as yet, to be anything other than a remote observer, from whose vantage the canopy proper resembled a vast petrified ocean, littered with all manner of strange flotsam. Its true extent was undoubtedly awesome, but the Tyrian horizon seemed no less and no more distant than an Earthly horizon, and the restriction of his vision by that natural range seemed rather niggardly. The real revelation would not come, he knew, until he was down there, looking up at the canopy from within; that was the sight that Hope’s insectile flying eyes had so far been unable to capture. He was pleased to see that the fringe vegetation rimming the river and the fault extended for no more than fifty yards before mingling with the “grasses” and no more than a hundred before giving way entirely to the seeming monoculture.
The other side of the river looked more user-friendly to Matthew than the one on which they had stopped, because it had a slope so gentle that he could imagine himself stumbling down it, even with an injured right arm. If they had moored on that side, though, they would have had to carry the dismantled boat and all its cargo by hand, making trip after trip after trip. On the left bank there was plenty of space to erect a winch,