Dark Ararat - Brian Stableford [91]
“Try telling that to Tang. On second thought, don’t. You’ll stand a better chance of getting that berth if you don’t upset him. Ike and I want you to have it, but that might not be enough.”
“So I’d gathered,” Matthew said. “Lynn, who the hell could have killed Bernal—and why?”
“As I told your friend Solari, I don’t know. If he thinks it was me, he’s barking up the wrong tree.”
“Why should he think it was you?”
“Because I’m the nearest thing to a scorned woman he can find. Cherchez la femme—isn’t that the detective’s motto?”
“Oh,” Matthew said, momentarily unable to think of anything else to say. It wasn’t a line of argument he wanted to pursue. He thought about Tang Dinh Quan instead, and the two daughters Tang had in SusAn. For Tang, he knew, any argument about the future of the colony had to cut further and deeper than “We’re stuck with it for the foreseeable future, so we might as well get on with it.” When the time came for him to talk to Tang he had to have something better than that to say to him. Tang’s daughters, like Alice and Michelle Fleury, still had all their options open.
The worst scenario that Matthew could readily imagine was that Alice and Michelle might be whisked away in the tender care of Konstantin Milyukov’s Revolutionary Tribunal while their father was marooned, whether the world on which he was marooned was capable of sustaining human life in the longer term or not—but how could that possibly happen, he asked himself, given Rand Blackstone’s calculations?
Matthew had relaxed considerably now that they were retracing their steps, but that was a mistake. He was still tired, and he had grown used to putting his hand out sideways to rebalance himself and provide a little extra support. While descending from the mound he had been placing it on bare stone, but now they were walking along a narrow path the walls to either side were covered in vegetation. Because he found the feel of the alien “stems” and “leaves” slightly disconcerting, he had developed a subliminal preference for reaching through the purple curtain to touch the stone behind it—but it was an unwariness that he quickly came to regret.
It was only out of the corner of his eye that he saw the flicker of movement as a clutch of tentacles began writhing like Medusa’s hair, but the glimpse was enough to flood him with terror.
He snatched his hand away with the utmost urgency—and immediately understood how minutely his autonomic nervous system had been tuned to Earthly conditions. It felt as if his arm had been seized by some alien power and thrown aside. There was no real reason for him to stumble, but the sense of dislocation that suddenly swept over him made it all-but-impossible for him to maintain his stance. He lurched to one side, crashing into the wall opposite the one from which he had removed his hand. He had tripped over his own foot.
While he was cursing volubly Lynn was quick to snatch a long-bladed knife from her belt. She used the blade to part the purple foliage and expose the creature more fully.
Although he was still fighting for balance, Matthew immediately realized how small the monster was by comparison with the one that Rand Blackstone had brought back to the bubble after Maryanne Hyder had been stung. The creature’s body was no bigger than his hand, and was shaped not unlike a hand laid flat, save for the tentacles bedded where the first joint of the middle finger would have been had it actually been a hand. The tentacles themselves were much thinner than a finger; they seemed surprisingly pale—almost translucent—and rather delicate. The flat-worm-like body was a deeper purple than Blackstone’s specimen, and the eyespots were much less prominent.
“It’s okay,” Lynn said. “Even if it had stung you it wouldn’t have been any worse than a bee sting, unless you had a massive allergic reaction.”
“What’s the bloody thing doing lurking in there?” Matthew growled, to cover his embarrassment.