Dark Ararat - Brian Stableford [173]
“We’ve done the hard work,” Matthew told his companion. “Now we need the luck. We’ve kept them on tenterhooks long enough. It’s time for the denouement. Why aren’t they here? They were plenty curious enough when we first arrived—why have they suddenly turned shy? They didn’t even take the bait we left outside the bubble when I went to sleep last night. Why not?”
“Maybe they’ve got something else on their minds,” Ike suggested.
Matthew didn’t have to ask what that something else might be. They had Dulcie. Although they hadn’t left her body where her phone had fallen, they might have killed her and taken the body with them—but the likelihood was that she had been carried away alive. While they had her, still alive, they had a far more convenient focus for their curiosity than Matthew and Ike—and she wouldn’t die any time soon of hunger, even if she only had alien food to eat. A carbohydrate was a carbohydrate, and sugar was always sweet.
It all came down to Dulcie: Dulcie the anthropologist-turned-murderer-turned-ambassador; Dulcie the tarnished heroine.
“Do you think she’s all right?” Ike asked, having divined the reason for Matthew’s sudden descent into sobriety.
“Of course she is,” Matthew said, valiantly. “She’s in her element. This is what she was defrosted for, what she’s lived her whole life for. She’s fine. She’ll come through. She has to. We just have to spin out the story while we’re waiting. We have to do a session on feeding frenzies, speculate about the kinds of triggers that might set off orgies of chimerization and humanoid pyramid building. I got halfway through working out an analogy involving the boat, switching between engines as it turned around to go upstream—we can use that. There’s also a useful analogy to be drawn between the photosynthesizing pyramids and our bubble-domes. Maybe we can draw a useful analogy between the humanoids and the crewpeople, if we try hard enough….”
“Okay,” Ike said. “I get the picture. We go on and on until it’s done, no mater how silly it gets.”
“It’s not silly,” Matthew insisted, earnestly. “Even if only a tenth of it is true, that tenth is marvelous. We have to help the crew and colonists alike to understand that this business is far bigger than any biotech bonanza or potential death trap. It’s a whole new way of life. Maybe it isn’t better than sex, but it’s weirder. Remember what Dulcie said: sex divides, cooking unites.
“We have to stay here, Ike. We have to stay because it isn’t enough to let the aliens go their own way, culturally unpolluted. We have to help them out of their evolutionary blind alley. We have to extend them hospitality, share food, share technologies, share everything. We’re all on the same side, Ike, and we all have to realize that. Everybody on Hope—and I mean everybody, including Konstantin Milyukov—has to realize that destiny has put them here because here’s where it’s at, so they can be part of it too.
“Even though we’re making it all up, it’s not silly. It’s the most important work there is. However rough the draft might be, we’re writing chapter one of the story of the future of humankind, and all the stranger humankinds we’ve yet to meet.”
THIRTY-SEVEN
In spite of his exhaustion, Matthew had trouble sleeping. When he did drift off, he dreamed.
And then awareness returned, as belated reflex forced Matthew to let his breath out and suck in another avid draught of plentiful air, and to stretch his limbs out to their full extent, and to hear what was being said to him, and to put out his own groping hand to still the one that was shaking him …
He was as sober as he had ever been since awakening from SusAn.
“What is it?” he demanded, blindly.
“Lights,” said Ikram Mohammed. “Lots of them.”
Matthew opened his eyes then, and looked out through the transparent fabric of the bubble-tent.