Dark Ararat - Brian Stableford [147]
“Sorry to disturb you, Matthew,” Lynn Gwyer said, in a low voice. “Ike and Dulcie are asleep but my ankle feels wrong in spite of the IT anaesthetic. I figured that your shoulder might be just as bad.”
“I can’t sleep either,” Matthew assured her. “Insufficient exertion, I guess. Is the ankle very bad?”
“Not really, I stepped in a hole while climbing out of the shallows—stupid thing to do, but Dulcie came to help me. It’s one of those awkward situations where your IT’s programmed to force you to rest up, so it lets the pain through if I try to walk. I’ll be okay in a couple of days. Ike and Dulcie will be able to put the boat together, if they get the chance. We really screwed things up, didn’t we? Did everything wrong we possibly could.”
“It wasn’t that bad,” Matthew said. “I suppose, with the aid of hindsight, that the first person down should have lit a fire on the bank to deter visitors. Maybe you should have used the flame-thrower instead of the chain saws—but how could we know? If you can unpack the flamethrower tomorrow, without getting too close to the killer anemones, you should be able to scare them away in a matter of minutes—or roast them, if they’re stubborn.”
“They took us by completely by surprise,” Lynn lamented. “We should have been on our guard. We knew that the experience we brought down from the hills might be worthless here—but who could have expected anything to happen so soon and so fast? How much stuff has been damaged, do you think? Will we be able to carry on, or do we have to hang about waiting to be rescued?”
“There’s not that much damage,” Matthew assured her. “As far as I could see, the big worms were only interested in the spilled boatfood, and most of the things that came after them were only interested in them. The stingers are omnivores, but they’ve got plenty of vegetable matter to gorge themselves on. They won’t hurt the boat itself or the equipment.”
“I’m sure we made it worse by cutting up the worms and exposing their soft centers,” Lynn told him. “Mercifully, there weren’t any sharks in the water when I made my dive. I suppose it was only to be expected that the scent of blood would attract all kinds of nasties, but we weren’t thinking. We overreacted.”
“Nobody else would have done any better,” Matthew consoled her. “Some might have done a lot worse. Can you hear the midnight chorus in the bubble, or is the fabric soundproof?”
“It’s audible, but muffled,” she said. “Will it keep you awake all night, do you think?”
“I hope not. I’ll have to try to sleep—tomorrow could be a demanding day.”
“Me too,” she said. “Better say good night.”
The call had made Matthew feel slightly better, but no sleepier. With the folds of the pliable basket gathered about his horizontal frame he was beginning to feel rather claustrophobic, and the rigid extent of the rifle laid alongside his body made it even more difficult for him to find a position that did not put undue pressure on his damaged arm. He knew that his IT would still be working steadfastly on the strained tendons and ligaments, but he had to suppose that the day’s dramatics had undone most or all of the work they had done beforehand, and perhaps a little more besides.
After two further Earth-hours of failing to settle Matthew felt so cramped that he had to stand upright for a while. The sky was cloudier than it had been on the two previous nights, but a few stars were visible in the shifting gaps. Somewhat to his surprise, he caught sight of a faint glimmer of light in the grass-forest, just about visible in the gap between the tops of the nearer bushes and the lower reaches of he canopy. His surprise faded into reassurance, though, when he realized that it must be the bubble-tent. Made of smarter fabric than the basket, its opacity was adjustable and its three inhabitants must have decided that keeping a light on was likely to deter more nocturnal creatures than it attracted.
The noise was less intense now;