Dark Ararat - Brian Stableford [71]
Lynn Gwyer came over to him, but even she hesitated. “Go back with Rand,” she advised him. “You’ll need to take it easy for a while, and Ike’s right about needing to sort this stuff out. I’ll catch up with you in half an hour or so.”
“We made it, Lynn,” Matthew said, softly. “We made it. Across the void, across the centuries. You might have grown used to it, but I haven’t.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, only a trifle belatedly. “I do know how you feel. I only wish that Bernal could be here too.”
Mercifully, Blackstone refrained from pointing out that if Delgado were still able to be here, Matthew would still be in the deep-freeze.
“I’m sorry that we had to meet under such unfortunate circumstances, Dr. Gwyer,” Solari said, watching her like a hawk.
The bald woman was content to stare back at the detective as if she were watching a dangerous dog for signs of imminent aggression.
“Come on, Matthew,” Blackstone said, gruffly. “We’re wasting time.” He set off without waiting for Matthew to give any indication that he was ready to follow his lead.
Matthew’s last recourse was to lock eyes with Vince Solari. “Come on, Vince,” he said. “Better do as we’re told.” Solari, who must have known that Blackstone’s careful repetition of Matthew’s name had been a deliberate snub, seemed grateful for the invitation.
SEVENTEEN
Matthew and Solari set off in the Australian’s wake, but Matthew made no attempt to draw level, preferring to keep company with Solari. For the moment, at least, Blackstone seemed content with that arrangement.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Matthew said to Solari, speaking loudly enough for Blackstone to hear in the hope of easing the tension. “It looked good on screen, but that’s a poor preparation for the real thing.”
Blackstone shrugged slightly, as if adjusting his load. Beautiful was obviously not the first adjective that sprang to his mind nowadays when he looked around him. Solari, on the other hand, readily followed the lead of Matthew’s gaze as it swept through a 180 degree tour.
The shallow slope they were ascending was one of many. Although the terrain was insufficiently precipitous to be called mountainous it was not gentle enough to be merely hilly. Had its physical geography not been so strangely dressed Matthew might have been reminded of Scandinavia, but the contrast between Scandinavia’s evergreen forests and the purple “trees” was too great to facilitate any such comparison. Pines grew very straight, and their needles and cones had always seemed to Matthew to be decorous and disciplined. Nothing here grew straight; what each of the dendrites they passed had instead of a trunk and boughs was like something that might be plucked out of a chaotic heap of corkscrews and lathe-turnings. Nor was there anything in the least decorous or disciplined about what the local vegetation had instead of leaves and cones.
If the dendrites bore ready comparison to anything, Matthew thought, it was absurdly overdressed dancers in some cheap casino show, all ruffles, pompoms and flares … and yet, there was not the slightest suggestion that these monstrous growths were ready to hurl themselves into an energetic cancan. There was, as he had already noted, an eerie stillness here. The rain was noisy in the branches, but the branches did not shake and rustle as Earthly branches would have done. They creaked a little, and moaned rather plaintively, but they gave the impression that they would bend, however grudgingly, to any pressure.
There was no birdsong to disturb the air, nor any insect hum, but there were other whispers at the very threshold of aural perception, like white noise magnified by dead Earthly seashells into the sound of waves breaking softly on a very distant shore. There was nothing in his memory to which Matthew could meaningfully connect that barely audible murmur. On Earth, tiny sounds that were never consciously apprehended could nevertheless be categorized and filed by the brain according to a habit-formed system. Here … well, he decided, here there was a lot of learning still to do, a lot of