Dark Ararat - Brian Stableford [135]
“It’s not much of a target,” Matthew complained to Lynn Gwyer. “The water might look fairly placid on top, but that’s an illusion. The edge will be too close for comfort once you start unloading, let alone when the time comes to start putting Humpty-Voconia together again. The bushes down there might look unintimidating by comparison with the giant grasses but they’ll be a lot tougher at close range than they look—and the empire of the giant grasses begins less than thirty strides away. From up here the whole thing looks like a calm ocean, rippling gently in a benign wind, but it’ll look very different at close range, once we’re under the canopy.”
“It’ll be okay,” Lynn assured him. “The target’s small enough, admittedly, but the laden basket won’t swing much, and we’ll use the chain saws to clear a much bigger working space. Even if they’re the kind of bushes that the humanoids used to make tools from, the saw blades will cut through them easily enough, shattering anything that won’t shear. It’ll be a fair amount of work for a party of three, but we’ve got all day. You wouldn’t have been able to do as much as the rest of us anyway, even if you hadn’t hurt your arm. You’re not fully acclimatized yet.”
“If I had been,” Matthew muttered, “I might not have dislocated my shoulder in the first place.”
There was, as Lynn had observed, a lot of work for a party of three. Matthew did his utmost to make himself useful, and bitterly regretted it when it became painfully obvious that he was neither as strong nor as skilful as the least of his three companions. He quickly became tired, and his arm would have been agonized if his IT had not muffled the pain—but the IT was too dutiful to allow him to do further damage by insulating him from the consequences of reckless action, so it began to let the distress signals through as soon as the damaged tendons and ligaments provided it with evidence of further strain. Long before midday, therefore, Matthew was relegated to the humblest task available: working the electric motor that controlled the winch. Ike, Lynn, and Dulcie did the lion’s share of the unloading, then carried the bulk of the cargo to the cliff’s edge. Ike was the one delegated to establish a more generous bridgehead down below while Dulcie and Lynn—who knew exactly what they were doing—set about the delicate work of taking the boat itself to pieces.
“Do you want the gun?” Matthew said to Ike, when the genomicist got into the basket to make his first descent. “We don’t know what might be lurking in those bushes.”
“Well, if it’s anything that can stand up to a chain saw it’ll be big enough for you to shoot it from way up here,” Ike said. “Anyway, we don’t know what might be lurking in the bushes up here on the plateau—there’s no reason to think that the gun’s more likely to be needed down there than up here.” Ike had already donned heavy boots and protective armor, and he seemed to feel that he was well-nigh invulnerable.
Matthew stopped worrying when Ike started up the chain saw and got to work on the bushes. The saw made such a racket, and cut with such devastating effect, that any sensible creature would have taken off in the opposite direction as fast as it could run or slither. The storage space grew with astonishing rapidity, although the contrast between the bare gray rock and the purple-littered ground beyond remained as sharp as ever to the naked eye. If the bushes did have vitreous trunks and branches they shattered easily enough, and no needlelike shards shot like darts into Ike’s flesh. His booted feet trampled the foliage down with mechanical efficiency as he marched stolidly into the territory he had claimed. Various globular fruits were rushed along with the “leaves.”
As the boat slowly came apart Matthew insisted on shuttling back and forth across the fifty-meter safety margin, adding what he could to the various stacks of goods queued