Dark Ararat - Brian Stableford [76]
“Sorry about that,” she said. “We’ve been cutting the manna shipped down from Hope with the produce of our own converters. It’s certified edible, but edible and palatable aren’t quite the same thing. Base One has food-tech people working on the problem, but it’ll be a while before the delicacies are sorted out. As you say, it’s the subtle differences that make the most impact.”
“It’s not that bad,” he assured her, insincerely.
“I’m sure Lynn would have brought you breakfast if she’d been here,” Dulcie said, awkwardly. “She’s working on the boat with Ike while Maryanne and Tang help Blackstone with the last of the dropship’s cargo. She’s told us a good deal about you—more than Ike has, although I gathered that he knew you better.”
“Ike wouldn’t want to talk about me in case it looked as if he was bragging about knowing someone who was on TV a lot,” Matthew guessed. “Nonsense, of course—but it’s often the people who would never dream of bragging who are most afraid of being caught.”
“I’ve seen you on TV myself,” Dulcie Gherardesca admitted. “I suppose we all did. Couldn’t really miss you in the mid-eighties, could we?”
“And you probably thought me less of a scientist because of it,” Matthew said, a little too glibly. “Bernal too, I dare say. Not our fault, really. Once the ecocatastrophe was well under way ecologists started getting the attention they’d always warranted, and a lot more besides. Pity the prophet whose prophecies begin to come true—what happens then makes living without the honor of one’s countrymen seem like a piece of cake. No wonder Bernal and I were so desperate to get away from it all.”
“I don’t think anyone here thinks any less of you for trying so hard to jerk the world out of its complacency,” she said, “or for trying to get remedial measures moving once the Crash hit hard. I brought you Bernal’s notepad. I figured that you’d be as anxious to get started as Inspector Solari. I’ve checked through it myself, of course—we all have. We can’t find anything epoch-making, but we didn’t really expect to. After all, when Archimedes leapt out of the bath he didn’t go looking for a stylus so he could write Eureka! on the nearest piece of papyrus—and even if he had, it wouldn’t have begun to tell anyone what he’d actually discovered. So even if we could figure out what ska means, it might not get us any closer to the truth.”
While she was speaking she pressed the keys of the notepad to bring up what Matthew presumed to be the last “page” of Bernal Delgado’s jottings. The last entries of all read:
NV correlated with ER?
Ans driver: ska?
“It’s a kind of music,” the anthropologist added. “But I don’t think that’s what it means here. Nobody knows what an ans driver is, although we favor the hypothesis that ans is short for answer and driver for downriver. NV and ER could be anything, although the general consensus is that NV probably stands for nutritional versatility. If you look back at earlier notes you’ll see that NV crops up several times and ER once, but ska doesn’t. We’ve always thought that the answers to our most urgent unanswered questions might be found downriver—that’s why we’ve been building the boat—but we’ve always known that it might be wishful thinking.”
“Which most urgent unanswered questions?” Matthew mumbled, his mouth half-full of manna that was proving difficult to swallow.
“Where did the city-builders come from—and where did they go, if they didn’t die here?”
“Why do you think they didn’t?”
“We don’t know whether they did or not. Even if they’d been human they might not have left much trace, and we think the bones of the local mammals are more prone to decay than ours. The only relics we’ve found were artifacts secreted in holes in the walls, and only the hardest kinds of glass have survived. We don’t know how old the city is, because we haven’t established any reliable yardstick that could tell us. We talk about a hundred thousand years, but it’s pure guesswork.