Dark Ararat - Brian Stableford [159]
He refrained from mentioning that Dulcie had killed Bernal Delgado, and silently hoped that Vince Solari would have the sense to do likewise. Having made the computations necessary to convert Earthly hours into the metric hours that had displaced them aboard Hope, he promised to make further twenty-minute broadcasts at regular intervals, whenever he and Ike paused to rest—every two ship-hours, approximately, except for one longer interval that would allow him to get some sleep.
“What are you going to tell them?” Ike wanted to know, once the camera was off and they had started walking. “The scenery’s not going to change much, so there isn’t a lot to show them except for your face.”
“I’m going to give them a grand tour of the enigmas of local genomics,” he said. “I’m going to offer some intelligent speculations about possible solutions to those puzzles. It doesn’t matter whether I’m right or not as long as I keep pumping out food for thought and material for discussion. You’re probably right about the scenery, but its very constancy might be a useful talking point. I suspect that interesting changes happen very rarely, barring episodes like the one we precipitated with our blundering, but it’s not impossible that we might come across bigger versions of the formations you had to scorch in order to get rid of the stinging slugs. I’d really like to see a pyramid, although my gut feelings tell me that they’re once-in-a-century or once-in-a-millennium constructions in these parts.”
“You think the thing in the drawing really was a pyramid?” Ike queried.
“Not a stone pyramid. Glass, maybe, or something similar. But not a tomb. Almost the reverse, in fact—but not a straightforward baby factory either. If Lynn can get enough live samples out of the mess we left behind she’ll lay the foundations for a more accurate understanding, but it doesn’t matter much that she won’t be able to feed the information through to me. I’ll have to make the most of my guesswork regardless.”
“But you’re not going to give me a preview?”
“I’m still working on the script. Trust me, Ike—if you hold the camera, I’ll improvise the show.”
Privately, Matthew wasn’t nearly as confident as he seemed, but he didn’t have any alternative. Now the stakes had been laid—and how could he possibly have refused to play or demanded a lower level of risk?—he was committed. If the world would not deliver an adequate story on cue, he would have to make one up.
Ike’s suspicions about the constancy of the environment were fully justified; it changed so little that its wonders soon became tedious. They heard other creatures, but rarely saw them. Most of the animals that lived hereabouts lived in the canopy, and those that did not fled their approach.
Matthew opened his second broadcast by reviewing the last few notes that Bernal Delgado had keyed into his notepad.
“What do they mean?” he asked, rhetorically. “Answer downriver seems obvious enough, and we now believe that ska might mean serial- or super-killer anemone—a reference to the creatures that brought our expedition to the brink of disaster when we cleared the ground beneath the cliff in order to bring our equipment down. But what about the NV that’s supposedly correlated with ER? If anyone has any suggestions as to what those terms might signify, I’ll be glad to hear them when I’m able to take phone calls again, but in the meantime I’m working on the assumption that they stand for nutritional versatility and exotic reproduction. Those are two of the most stubborn mysteries we’ve had to confront as we’ve undertaken a painstaking analysis of the ecosphere of the world that some of you call Ararat and others Tyre.
“Nutritional versatility may seem at first glance to be a non-problem. So organisms whose activity and tendency to eat everything in sight entitles them to be thought of as animals also have the purple chloroplast-equivalents that allow them to fix solar energy, just as plants