Dark Ararat - Brian Stableford [168]
“We came to find a new homeworld. An Earth-clone.”
“That was always the wrong way to think,” Matthew said, with a sigh. “What we should have set our sights on, right from the beginning, was an Earth-with-a-difference. That was what we were always likely to find, and always likely to find more interesting.”
“If you say so,” Ike said. “But you do realize, I suppose, that you’ve used up nearly all your ammunition—and Lityansky now has the floor for at least five times as long as you.”
“They’ll be queuing up everywhere to take him on,” Matthew said. “Every biologist with a pet theory will want to air it, and Milyukov won’t be able to hold them back. Even if no one supports me—and it’s a good enough story to let me hope—the cat’s among the pigeons. The interchange of ideas is well and truly unblocked, and things can only get weirder. All we have to do to get center stage back again is to find the aliens—and that’ll be easy, because we only have to keep walking long enough to make sure they decide that they have to let us find them.”
“I hope you’re right,” Ike said.
Matthew didn’t dare say so do I because he didn’t want his companion to know that he was anything less than 100 percent confident. If he’d had a choice, he’d have kept it secret even from himself.
THIRTY-SIX
The night passed without incident—which was perhaps as well, given that Matthew slept very deeply. He could have used chemical support to stay awake, at least to share sentry duty with Ikram Mohammed, but he didn’t want to do that because he knew that two consecutive nights without sleep would take a heavy toll of his articulacy and powers of concentration. Fortunately, Ike agreed to take on the chemical burden, on the grounds that he had slept for several hours the night before.
It was not until he woke up again that Matthew realized that he must have been in a slightly abnormal state of consciousness throughout the preceding day. Now that his IT had made good progress with the repair of his damaged shoulder and no longer needed to anesthetize him he was fully restored to his normal self. At first, he felt annoyed with himself for having been carried away with such wild abandon, but having reconsidered the events of the previous two days carefully and critically he decided that his manic state had produced as many good effects as bad ones. It would, at any rate, be far better to go with the flow than to change direction.
It had rained during the night, but the sky hidden by the canopy was obviously still overcast. The morning was decidedly gloomy, but not so bad as to require them to use flashlights to find their way.
As soon as he began to make hasty plans for his next broadcast Matthew realized that Ike had been right. He had used up almost all of his best material on day one. The terrain they had covered was insufficiently various to warrant much further camera study, and he was perilously close to running out of speculative fuel for his wayward flight of fancy.
He was glad to find that some relief was at hand when he began his reintroductory session, in the form of further debate—but Milyukov had belatedly realized that Andrei Lityansky might not be the best man for this particular job, and Matthew found himself faced with sterner opposition. The subsequent discussion of the tactics of sporulation, the mechanics of gradual chimerical renewal, and the limitations of reproduction