Dark Ararat - Brian Stableford [89]
“What about the spearhead that killed Bernal?”
“What about it? Dulcie says it’s a fake. Even if it isn’t, it’s recent, and even if it weren’t recent, it would only be evidence of hunting, not warfare.”
Matthew shrugged his shoulders. Although his smartsuit only presented the illusion of clothing, he couldn’t quite escape the false sensation that something clammy was clinging to his back like a sweat-soaked shirt.
“Given that the local plants don’t make storage-proteins to supply seeds,” he said, seeking further distraction from his discomfort, “the staple crop couldn’t have been a grain-analogue, even though the plants in the drawings I saw on Hope look a bit like corncobs.”
“That’s right,” Lynn confirmed. “We’re not sure how they persuaded their food-plants to put on so much bulk—that’s why we’re doing the test plantings of candidate types. The fields have been reclaimed by local varieties, though—the city-builders probably brought their crop-plants with them from the plain. We don’t really know why they didn’t cultivate the land on the banks of the river, but we figure it must have had something to do with the difficulty of clearing ground and keeping it free from weeds. Those giant grasses are probably more resilient than the hill-dwelling dendrites—too difficult to dislodge.
“I’ll show you the murals when we go down again. We think they might have been colored in at one time, but organic paints would have been stripped off by slugs and snails almost immediately, except where heavy metals in inorganic pigments made them too poisonous. We have a few flakes of what might have been paint, but the only decipherable images are the engravings in the photos.”
Matthew examined the exposed remains of a stone wall on the edge of the platform from which they were looking down. It had been scraped clean of its various encrustations. The blocks of stone from which it had been constructed were relatively small and easily portable, in stark contrast to the bigger foundation blocks that had been similarly cleared.
The mortar sealing the wall gave the impression of being resinous, albeit set as hard as the stone itself, although it could not have survived if it had been organic. Although he could see half-a-dozen places in the immediate neighborhood where similar walls must have been cracked, broken and eventually pulled down by the combined efforts of severe weather and the overgrowing vegetation, this particular fragment looked as if it might stand for thousands of years yet to come, and perhaps hundreds of thousands.
It had been built to last, and it had lasted.
Alas, the civilization it had been built to contain had not. Matthew could hardly help wondering whether any civilization that Hope’s passengers put in place might be bound to meet a similar fate.
TWENTY-ONE
Why didn’t more people come here from Base One when Milyukov refused to supply a proper staff?” Matthew asked Lynn Gwyer. “They’re all Earth-born. They all saw the same VE-dramas you and I grew up on. They must have a proper appreciation of the mythic significance of first contact. The mere possibility that there might be aliens should have had them flocking here in droves.”
“It’s a long way,” she pointed out. “All our aircraft are tiny, and we haven’t finished building and securing a chain of refueling stops. At first, they expected the crew to send down more people. The realization that it wasn’t going to happen was slow to grow, and it grew alongside other arguments. Bernal thought he could change that, if only he could broadcast to Base One, but Milyukov procrastinated over sending the TV cameras he asked for. In the end, we got you instead.”
“He must have chuckled over that one,” Matthew said, meaning Milyukov. “He took an unreasonable relish in informing me that he couldn’t give me the cameras I asked for. He can’t keep me incommunicado, but he knows as well as I do that it’s not easy to persuade large numbers of people to tune in when all you’ve got is a beltphone.”
While he was speaking