Dark Ararat - Brian Stableford [150]
“No,” said Matthew, darting his eyes rapidly from side to side. “Should I be able to?”
“Dulcie’s gone, Matthew. If her phone’s still working, she’s not answering. Ike went off to look for her as soon as he gave up thinking that she must have stepped out to relieve herself.”
Ike joined in the conversation almost immediately. “No sign,” he said. “She must have been crazy. The worms are still around—mostly above head height, admittedly, curled around the stalks beneath the seed heads, but too close for comfort if you’re wandering in the gloom. It was just after first light when she went, but it’s way too dim in here to be wandering around without a flashlight.”
“Oh shit,” Matthew murmured. “I was so sure I’d talked her out of it.”
“Out of what?” Lynn wanted to know. She and Ike had had too much on their minds to notice Dulcie’s awkward pose on the lip of the cliff, or to interpret it correctly if they had.
“She nearly jumped off the cliff yesterday.”
“What? Why?”
“Guilt.” He didn’t bother to specify what it was that Dulcie felt guilty about. He knew they’d work it out quickly enough.
“No!” The complaint came from Lynn. “You think she’s gone off to have another go?”
“Maybe just to think about it. But she knows how much we need her. Hell, she even made that crazy leap into the pool so that she could go after you. You did tell her about the night visitor when she woke up.”
“Of course I did,” Lynn said. “I didn’t tell her it was a humanoid, because I didn’t know, but …”
“She shouldn’t have gone outside on her own, even to take a leak,” Ike put in. “Maybe whatever it was that touched the tent last night didn’t go away. Maybe it was biding its time … but there’s no sign that I can see. No footprints, of any kind. No sign of any struggle that I can see.”
“Maybe she wanted to make an early start on scaling the cliff, for your sake,” Lynn suggested, although it was obvious that she didn’t believe it. “Did Solari tell you that she killed Bernal?”
“No. I got sidetracked thinking he suspected you. I should have known better. I didn’t guess until I saw her with the artifacts. It still took time to figure out how she’d cultivated enough suppressed rage to explode when she found him with them—but it was all a mistake from beginning to end. She figured out afterward why Bernal was making the spearheads, knives, and arrowheads, and so did I. It wasn’t forgery, or just an experiment. It was flattery.”
“What?”
“As in imitation, the sincerest form of. Bernal always believed that the humanoids were here, in spite of the failure of the flying eyes to catch a glimpse of them. He wanted to make contact, but he didn’t have enough information about them to make a decent plan and he didn’t want to presume too much. He wanted to use the one thing we did know: the artifacts. He intended to leave them lying around, as communicative bait. He wanted to demonstrate to the aliens that we could make them too, that we have at least that much in common. He would have let you in on it, but he wanted to be sure that he could make a good job of it first—and maybe he wanted to keep the people on Hope and at Base One in the dark as to where exactly he stood on the great debate, in anticipation of being the one to break the big news. Spin works so much better if it’s unanticipated.”
“None of that matters now,” Ike said, a little sharply. “What matters is finding Dulcie. Her phone was working last night, so it should be working now. The fuel cell can’t have run out so quickly. Is it possible that the humanoids have got her, do you think?”
Matthew knew that Ike had posed the question that way because it was uncomfortably close to the substance of cheap melodrama—but he understood that they been tipped into a melodrama as soon as they made their descent from the uplands. If they took Bernal’s artifacts from our luggage, he thought, his plan’s already past phase one. The humanoids must have grabbed her. She must have thought about it too. She can’t have been thinking of killing herself until the