Dark Ararat - Brian Stableford [92]
“Another good question,” Lynn conceded. “Not hiding from predators, that’s for sure. They don’t seem to have any enemies hereabouts but us.” She let the foliage fall back to its original position and dropped her hand, taking care not to let any part of her surface-suit get into range of the sting-cells. She made no move to capture or kill the creature. “I’m not sure whether their numbers are actually increasing or whether we’re just getting better at spotting them,” she mused.
“I didn’t spot it,” Matthew pointed out, bringing himself upright and looking anxiously at the wall against which he had stumbled. “That was the whole problem.”
Mercifully, there was no sign of any animal life lurking beneath the screen of vegetable flesh—but when he extended his fearful glance to take in the whole of the surrounding terrain he immediately saw the second animal he had seen since leaving the bubble that morning: a pair of ratlike eyes staring at him from higher and denser growth. As soon as he met their stare, though, the eyes drew back into the tangled plants. There was only the softest of rustling sounds as the creature’ invisible body slipped swiftly away.
“Did you see that?” he demanded.
“Local mammal,” Lynn told him. “Shy, seemingly harmless. A rare sight, though—you’re lucky.”
“Harmless? What about the ones with the hypodermic tongues?”
“None of those sighted in these parts to date,” she assured him. “The local reptile- and mammal-analogues seem to be mostly herbivores, and the ones that aren’t seem to specialize in smaller worms—they wouldn’t go after something like the one you nearly grabbed. They’re too thin to be cuddly, but temperamentally they’re more rabbit and kitten than rat and monkey. They’re curious, but way too nervous to be intrusive. So far, that is—they might get bolder as time goes by. He was purple too, of course, but he’s not out soaking up the sun either. Even the ones that only come out at night are purple, although we think that they only keep chloroplast-substitutes for purposes of cryptic coloration. The medusa is certainly capable of photosynthesizing, but the species doesn’t seem to have any instinctive imperative to make the most of the noonday sun. Unlike our beautiful pea-green boat, which is charging its storage cells as we speak. Odd, isn’t it?”
It was odd. Why, Matthew wondered, would animals that could boost their energy supplies by fixing solar energy be hiding in the shadows? Was it just because there were people tramping through their territory, or was there another reason? Earthly herbivores and insectivores were shy for exactly the reason that Lynn had mentioned: they had to keep out of the way of the top predators, and hiding was the strategy they’d adopted. That was precisely the reason why photosynthetic apparatus would be no good to them. If you were the kind of organism that fixed solar energy, you had to be out in the sun, which meant that you had to deter things that wanted to eat you by some other means: thorns or poisons. The slug with the sting-cells had both, after a fashion, but the mammal-analogue with the disconcerting stare apparently had neither. So why were both of them purple, and why were both of them skulking in the shadows?
“Do you want to see more?” Lynn asked.
Matthew was very tired by now, as well as a trifle bruised. He was far from certain whether he wanted to take the rest of the grand tour now, even though time was pressing.
“What more have you got?”
She tilted her head thoughtfully. “We’ve got a few trenches,” she said. “Dulcie dug them. Nothing much in them though. We’ve got a few glass artifacts, but they’re back at the bubble—all I can show you here are the holes in the walls they came out of. I can take you along the other paths, if you like, but now that you’ve had the best view the rest might seem anticlimactic. We ought to go down into the fields, I suppose, although there’s not a lot to see with the naked eye but