“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 secondanimal 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 wasodd. 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 bothof 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 more walls. You might be more interested in Tang’s proteonomic studies—he’s got some recent data that augments and amplifies what Lityansky has, but only slightly.”
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 somuch 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 menhere, 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 humanoidspecies—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 wasn’t at all sure that he wanted to pander to that kind of provocation—or, for that matter, to enter into any kind of apparent conspiracy. There seemed to be way too many conspiracies already festering on and above the new world.