Dark Ararat - Brian Stableford [136]
The manna-supplies were the last to go down before the parts of the actual boat, and it was not until then that the first accident occurred. Inevitably, it was Matthew who made the mistake, his out-of-tune reflexes and his injured arm combining to make him drop one of the heaviest boxes before he could get it into the basket. It fell in such a way that it bounced toward the edge of the cliff.
For one tantalizing moment it looked as if the box might come to a halt at the edge, but it had gathered too much momentum. To make matters worse the packaging split at the last point of impact, and the manna began to spill out as soon as the carton began its precipitate descent.
Mercifully, Ike was too far away from the edge to be at any risk—but he stood and watched with annoyance and wonder as the powdered manna became a cataract in its own right, expanding like a cloud of spray. Almost all of it landed on the carpet of crushed vegetation, dusting the purple pulp like icing on a party cake.
“It’s okay,” Lynn was quick to say. “It was only a box of biomotor-food. The converter churns out that stuff a great deal faster than produce for human consumption, and Ike’s amassed a far bigger heap of litter down there than any we ever built up in the ruins. Once we’ve got the rest of the stuff down I’ll unpack the converter and start bundling the stuff into the hopper. Boatfood’s the least of our worries right now. It would have been a hell of a lot worse if you’d dropped part of the rudder, or the AI’s brain.”
“I know,” Matthew retorted, bitterly. “I’m trying to stick to the least important items for exactly that reason. There’s an awful indignity, you know, in setting out on a pioneering voyage on a virgin world, with the possibility of meeting all manner of spectacular monsters, then rendering oneself entirely useless by falling out of bed.”
“It’s your mind we need, not your muscles,” she assured him—but Matthew was well aware that her muscles were working heroically in association with her mind, and that he would not have the slightest idea how to reassemble the boat again if that responsibility were his.
Dulcie was working even harder, with quasi-mechanical concentration and purpose. She had hardly said a word for hours, and seemed to have adapted to the requirements of long, hard labor by retreating into herself.
Matthew had no alternative but to take up his station by the lift’s control button yet again, pretending as hard as he could that there was a valuable dexterity involved in controlling the descent of the basket and guiding it to a soft landing. An AI could probably have done the job far better, but a winch was far too primitive a machine to warrant the addition of any supervising brain but a human’s.
When the disassembly process was complete, Lynn announced that she had better join Ike down below, because there would be more work to be done there from now on.
“Do you want to take the gun?” Matthew asked, for a second time, as she carefully put her armor on.
“It’s okay,” she assured him, grimacing slightly as she forced her feet into smart boots that were still rather unyielding, having never been properly worn in. “I’ll have to break out the second chain saw, so that I can clear a second platform further downriver for the reassembly. As Ike says, anything brave enough to take that on will have to be big enough to make an easy target, even for a one-armed man shooting wrong-handed. If the worst comes to the worst, pass the gun to Dulcie. She’s good at everything.”
Dulcie did, indeed, seem to be good at everything. Having finished the skilled work she was now back to hard labor, moving the last sections of their craft into the queue for the basket, stacking them with the utmost care in such a way that the basket could be filled quickly and safely. He was impressed by the way she plugged on so relentlessly, long after Lynn had started