Dark Ararat - Brian Stableford [93]
What Matthew would have liked to do was to take a walk on his own, in the hope of getting a better feel for the environment, but he wasn’t sure that he was up to it. It wasn’t just the problems caused by the necessity of readjusting to 0.92 Earth-normal gravity; the closeness of his encounter with the stinging worm had reminded him that there were dangers here to which he was not yet properly alert.
“All in all,” he decided, aloud, “Lunch seems like a good idea.”
“Right,” Lynn said. “You’ll probably find your appetite running away with you a bit for the first few days, but once the awful tedium of the food becomes obvious to your stomach it’ll lose its enthusiasm. Are you okay?”
“As well as can be expected,” Matthew told her. She nodded, as if she knew that he wasn’t just talking about his physical condition. She knew as well as he did that he’d been unceremoniously tossed into the deep end of this particular pool, without the benefit of swimming lessons. She didn’t seem to resent the time she’d had to spend showing him the view from the city; he was a new face as as well as an old one, a welcome distraction from the work routines she’d established since accepting the posting. She too was doing as well as could reasonably be expected.
“It’s a fabulous discovery,” she said, quietly, as she began to lead the way back to the bubble. “Even more fabulous, in a way, than the world itself. We’re entitled to be disappointed, I think, that the principle of convergent evolution didn’t hold up better at the genomic level—it would make things so much easier if the local life were DNA-based—but we’re surely entitled to be delighted as well as astounded by the fact that it held up so well at the level of actual organisms. There were men here, Matthew. I don’t think any of us, here or at the other bases, has really been able to take the enormity of that fact aboard. This was a city, which makes them civilized men. Whatever happened to them, they were here … and so are we.”
Matthew could see what she was getting at. Across the void, across the centuries, two sentient, intelligent, civilized species—two sentient, intelligent, civilized humanoid species—had come into such close proximity that one was now aware of the other. They had not yet contrived to meet, or to touch, but even if one of them did turn out to be extinct, it had become known to the other in spite of that fact. At the very least, its passing could be mourned, and some of its lessons relearned. That was a matter of importance, no matter how frustrating all the remaining mysteries might be.
“So are we,” Matthew echoed, to show that he understood—and she nodded, to accept his understanding.
TWENTY-TWO
After programming the cooker Matthew sat down at the table with Lynn and Godert Kriefmann. The doctor opened his mouth, presumably to offer news of Maryanne Hyder’s condition, but he closed it again abruptly when Vince Solari came into the room. The temperature was thermostatically controlled, but it seemed to drop a degree anyhow. Matthew noticed that Lynn was clearly discomfited, and realized that she had not been joking when she had confessed her fear that Solari suspected her.
The policeman came to sit beside Matthew. He seemed to be slightly discomfited himself by the reaction his entrance had caused. He leaned toward Matthew in a confidential fashion that was only a trifle overacted. “There’s something I need to show you,” he said.
“Is there time to eat first?” Matthew wanted to know.
“If you like—but it’s important.”
Lynn and the doctor were trying hard not to look as if they were hanging on Solari’s every word, but they weren’t succeeding. Kriefmann looked just as worried as Lynn.
“It’s about Bernal’s murder?” Matthew said, just to make certain.
“Yes.”
Solari’s terseness was obviously intended to display the implication that he didn’t want to say too much in the present company, but Matthew