Dark Ararat - Brian Stableford [146]
“Thanks,” Matthew said, knowing that Milyukov wasn’t the only one who might derive a certain grim satisfaction from knowing that he was stuck halfway down a cliff, suspended over the scene of a wildlife massacre. He took his phone out of the loop as soon as he’d ascertained that all was as well as could be expected with Lynn and Dulcie.
By the time the twilight had faded, he had reconciled himself to spending the night where he was.
What they had just witnessed, Matthew decided, had to be a feeding frenzy. Something in the lightly converted boatfood had sent out an olfactory signal powerful enough to attract every leechlike worm for kilometers around. The spilled sap and raw flesh of the vegetation cleared by the two chain saws must also have advertised its availability as food. The larger creatures would probably have followed the leechlike worms in any case, either aiming for the same target or for the worms themselves, but the intensity of the second wave must have been further increased when Ike and Lynn continued to deploy the chain saws, adding a rich leavening of worm blood to the irresistible feast they had accidentally laid on.
If the NV in Bernal’s final jottings did refer to “nutritional versatility,” what he had just seen might qualify as an admittedly extreme example of nutritional versatility. It might be evidence of a remarkable tendency to overreact when an unusually abundant food supply became suddenly available. If so, there must be a natural trigger that corresponded to the one accidentally released by the invaders.
On Earth, feeding frenzies were correlated with the spawning of ocean creatures. Certain reproductive strategies, involving the mass production of young among whom less than one in a thousand could be expected to survive, were associated with rare but avidly anticipated natural banquets. That might add up, if the ER to which Bernal’s NV had been speculatively correlated really was “exotic reproduction.” There was no evidence, thus far, that any of the new world’s versatile animals used mass-production reproductive strategies—but given that there was scant evidence, as yet, of any reproductive strategies other than modified binary fission, the possibility had to be considered open.
“Well,” Matthew murmured, aloud, “we certainly know how to make a entrance, don’t we?”
THIRTY-TWO
The basket was not a comfortable place to bed down, but it could have been far worse. It was big enough to allow Matthew to stretch himself out, almost as if he were in a hammock, and he felt reasonably safe. Nor was his arm as troublesome as it might have been, considering the miscellaneous stresses to which he had subjected it. Even so, he could not sleep. The discrepancy between Tyre’s twenty-one-and-a-half-hour days and his Earth-trained circadian rhythms had finally caught up with him. He huddled where he was, becoming increasingly miserable, listening to the many sounds of the alien night.
The area in which Ike and Lynn had piled all the expedition’s stores and equipment was quieter than the grassland itself—presumably because the silent stinging slugs were still around, acting as a powerful deterrent to the approach of other creatures—but he was close enough to the high canopy to provide an audience for an entire orchestra of fluters, clickers, and whistlers. The sounds were oddly blurred, partly by echoes from the cliff face behind him but also by strange refractory effects within the canopy itself.
He was reluctant to disturb his companions, lest their exertions should have left them direly in need