“He’s right, Maryanne,” Lynn Gwyer said. She had worked her way round to Matthew’s side, interposing herself between him and the doctor. “Actually, he’s always right. I knew him back home, and that was his speciality. The last of the great prophets—always an egomaniac, even before he practically took over the news channels. Those who cannot learn from prophecies are condemned to fulfil them.” She looked at Matthew then. “Maryanne was part of a much later intake, one of the last recruits to Hope. She doesn’t remember you at all—must have had a sheltered upbringing. Well, Matthew, this is what everyday life on Tyre is like. Or did you have time enough in orbit to get used to calling it Ararat?”
“Tyre will do fine so far as I’m concerned,” Matthew said. “I seem to have arrived at a bad time, in more ways than one.”
“I think the serum is working,” Maryanne Hyder announced, with slightly more relief than astonishment. She looked at Matthew too. “It must have been the usual kind—just bigger. We don’t really know how big they can grow, or whether they routinely get bigger as they get older. We don’t know much about the life cycles of the animals orthe plants. No eggs, no seeds, no ready-made alternative model to put in place of the birds and the bees.”
“I guess it was a Rand Blackstone among slugs, as opposed to the Maryanne Hyder version,” Lynn Gwyer put in. “Maybe they’ll all grow as fat if we keep up our cultivation experiments.”
“I hope not,” the patient replied, with a groan. “It hurts.”
“You won’t be walking again for a few days,” Kriefmann told her. He seemed much more relaxed now that he was confident that the second shot had done the trick. “It’s going to take time to repair that muscle. You’ll be limping for a while once you’re back on your feet again. Ike, can you give me a hand to get Mary to her bunk?”
“Sure,” said Ikram Mohammed. “Will we need a stretcher?”
The patient tried to say no, but she was summarily overruled. While Ike went to get a stretcher Kriefmann took the time to thank Matthew for pitching in. “Welcome to chaos,” he said, drily.
“It looks as if the meeting has been postponed,” Lynn Gwyer said to Matthew. “We might as well get on with the guided tour.”
Matthew was a little reluctant to leave while the toxicologist was still in trouble, but Ikram Mohammed was already returning with a stretcher.
Matthew glanced at Vince Solari, but the detective merely shrugged his shoulders.
As soon as Matthew and Lynn went outside they saw Rand Blackstone hurrying back to the bubbledome, carrying a transparent plastic sack. Matthew had to admit that the creature contained within it was impressively ugly. He had seen giant slugs in the Earthly tropics, and huge sea anemones in the shallows of the Indian Ocean, but he had never seen anything that combined the worst features of both. The creature’s purple coloration was, however, oddly attenuated; it was distributed in blotches about a transparent tegument, putting him as much in mind of a gargantuan planarian worm or liver fluke as of a slug. The smaller versions he had seen on film while he was on Hopehad seemed much more deeply and more uniformly pigmented.
“Can’t stop,” Blackstone said, as he brushed past them. “Got to get this to Tang.”
“Sure,” Matthew said. “I’ll have time to take a closer look later.”
When the big man had gone inside, Lynn Gwyer looked Matthew in the eye, with obvious concern. “Did Ike have a chance to fill you in on what’s what down here?” she asked. “I don’t know what they told you on Hope, but you’ll have figured out that we have very different problems down here.”
“He didn’t get the chance to say as much as he’d probably have liked,” Matthew told her. “Dulcie Gherardesca brought me breakfast, and she was still around when Ike came back. She had a point of view to put across, just as Blackstone had when he walked us back yesterday. I’m beginning to fit the pieces together, but listening to a calmer voice would be a considerable relief.”
“I would have walked you back myself,” she said, “but it’s not easy to get in Rand’s way when he’s determined to have first shot. I suppose he was hoping that you had a message from Shen Chin Che?”
“He was. I suppose he wanted it so desperately in order to boost morale in the Tyrian Counterrevolutionary Front.”
“Don’t be so quick to make a joke of it, Matthew,” the genetic engineer replied, frowning. “ Didyou have a message?”
“Not as such. Shen’s back’s to the wall, but he didn’t seem to be in any mood to give in yet. If he has any cards left to play he didn’t dare show them to me—but if he doesn’t, it’s only a matter of time before the crew winkle him out. He’s too old to fight a long campaign. The crew have the upper hand, and all the time in the microworld.”
Lynn Gwyer nodded, as if the judgment was exactly what she’d expected. “Rand’s okay, behind the bold pioneer act,” she said. “We really do have a hell of a problem down here, you know, which everybody on Hope—and I mean everybody—seems to be bent on ignoring. It takes more than a breathable atmosphere to make an Earth-clone world, and this is notan Earth-clone world in the sense that you and I would mean. If the probe data Milyukov claims to have is accurate, it may be the nearest thing to an Earthlike world we’ll find within a couple of hundred light-years of Earth, and I’m certainly not as ready to give up on it as some of the people at Base One, but we really do have a major problem to solve, and I don’t mean who killed Bernal. His death was a big blow, because of what we might have lost, but launching a witch-hunt to fit someone up for his murder won’t bring him back, and it might compound the damage.”
“Vince Solari is okay too,” Matthew assured her. “He’s not here to hunt witches or fit anybody up. Why would it compound the problem if the murderer were identified and charged?”
“That depends who it is,” the woman replied. “If it’s one of us—well, we’re stretched beyond the limit already. If he really was killed by an alien humanoid that might be even worse, in terms of tying further knots in the situation. I wish I could believe in a sneaky invader from Base One, but I can’t—which seems to me to leave the bad possibility and the worse possibility.”
“You do believe the aliens exist, then?” Matthew deduced. “You think it’s unlikely that an alien hand wielded the glass dagger, but you don’t believe they’re extinct?”
“No, I don’t,” Lynn confirmed. “I think they’re giving the ruins a wide berth, just like the other mammal-analogues, but I think they’re alive and well downriver. They might not be easy to find, but I don’t think extinction as we know it is a common event on Tyre.”
“Gradual chimerical renewal,” Matthew said. “The Miller Effect, built in to the ecosphere at a fundamental level, in a way that makes it far less ruinous to the learning process. But if everything here’s emortal, how does evolution happen?”
“Did Lityansky tell you about the second genome?” Lynn asked.
“He showed me the diagrams, but he said that no one knows what it does. He wouldn’t speculate. What do you think?”
“You mean, what did Bernal think?”
“I dare say you tossed the ideas back and forth between you—and Ike too. What’s your best guess?”
“We think it’s a homeobox. We think that our own genome may suffer some crucial disadvantages because the homeotic genes are mixed in with all the rest.”
“Homeotic genes control embryonic development,” Matthew said, slightly puzzled. “I thought you hadn’t managed to find any embryos.”
“Homeotic genes control anatomical organization,” Lynn said. “On Earth, that’s mostly a matter of controlling embryonic development, but there are sometimes further metamorphic changes to be managed. If Tyrian plants and animals really are emortal, they might have much more scope in that regard, and they’d need a genomic system equipped to orchestrate that extra scope. We can’t prove it until we can study some actual metamorphoses, but we’re quietly confident that we’re on the right track. Even Tang thinks we’re on the right track, and he’s a hard man to please. The three-dimensional coding complex is a fancy homeobox—fancier by far than anything our one-string genome could contrive.”