Dark Ararat - Brian Stableford [59]
When she had turned away Matthew lifted his arm so that he could inspect the fabric of the suit. Once the molecular layers were properly set he would be able to reprogram the outer layer for color and certain modifications of shape, but for the time being the syntheflesh covering the hand was transparent and the “sleeve” beginning above the wrist was matt black. When he flexed his fingers he could hardly feel the extra epidermal layers, but the back of his hand looked odd because the suit had dissolved the hairs that normally grew there. He lifted his hand to touch the top of his head, and was relieved to discover that the hair growing there had been allowed to grow through. His sideburns were neatly excised at the point he had selected twenty years ago.
He opened and closed his mouth experimentally, running his tongue around his teeth. They did feel slightly strange, but he couldn’t tell whether it was the extra layer of tissue on the tongue or the extra layer on the teeth that was responsible for the difference. There was a peculiar taste in his mouth, like slightly moldy dough. His breathing seemed slightly labored, but he didn’t feel that he was in any danger of choking. He wondered whether the filters in his bronchii could keep water out of his lungs if he were ever in danger of drowning, and whether the artificial tissue could extract enough oxygen from water to let him continue breathing if he were immersed.
Although Nita Brownell had told him to lie still he decided, in the end, that stillness was exaggerating his psychosomatic symptoms, and that it would be better to put himself through the program of exercises that the doctor had designed to test and develop his inner resources. At first he stayed on the bed, but when stretching his arms and legs rhythmically back and forth began to relieve his feelings of queasiness he leapt down to the floor to practice push-ups and sit-ups.
Solari made no attempt to copy him. “I’m glad this is an Earthlike planet,” the policeman commented, as he inspected his own forearms minutely. “Imagine what we’d be wearing if it weren’t.”
“It’s because it’s Earthlike that the problems are so awkward,” Matthew told him, as he counted sit-ups. “It’s not just food allergies we have to worry about. We may not seem very appetizing to the local worms, and we’re probably not nearly as nutritious as their natural hosts, but an amino acid is an amino acid and sugars are always sweet. Just because there’ve been no recorded cases of infection or parasitism so far doesn’t mean that we’ll be safe indefinitely. Everything local that we come into contact with, deliberately or accidentally, is likely to retaliate by trying to eat us. We have all the technological advantages, but the locals are fighting on their own turf, and they have a few tricks that we’ve never encountered before.”
“You’re still worried about the insect thing, aren’t you? Not to mention the werewolves.”
“Werewolves are a red herring,” Matthew told him. “There’s a difference between serial chimeras and shapeshifting. The absence of insects may be less significant than I first thought, given the absence of flowering plants.”
“Do the plants really have glass thorns?” Solari asked. “That’s what Delgado was killed with, you know—a glass dagger. Or maybe a glass spearhead.”
“It’s not as simple as that,” Matthew told him. “But in crude terms, yes. Plants and animals alike seem to use vitrification processes to produce their strongest structural tissues. Most of the products are more like sugar crystals than window glass, but some of the upland plants that grow around the ruins have rigid tissues that can be splintered like glass to make sharp edges, and filed like glass to make sharp points. Photographs taken from above