“Neither do I—but however it came about, I have to try to step into Bernal’s shoes. I have to try to see things as he had begun to see them, to take advantage of his accumulated knowledge of the world. I need to know what was in his mind when he coined the phrase super killer anemone. I need to know, even if it was hope and hope alone that set his compass, what he expected to find downriver. If there’s anything more you can tell me, I wish you’d tell me now. We’ll have our beltphones with us, but talking on the phone isn’t the same as talking face-to-face.”
“I don’t know what to tell you,” she insisted. “I’m sorry, but I just don’t know. I’m a toxicologist, not an ecologist. To me, a worm with tentacles is just a liquiject full of interesting poisons. There are too many poisons hereabouts, which would be even more lethal to creatures like us than to the enemies they were designed for, if it weren’t for the safeguards built into our suits and our IT. There are a million ways to fuck up a functioning metabolism, and very few of them are choosy.”
“It reminds Rand Blackstone of home,” Matthew observed.
“So it should,” she said. “On Earth, all toxicologists turn toward Australia when they pray. Until we arrived here, it was poison paradise. An alien world on the surface of the Earth—until the dingoes and the rabbits moved in. Has it occurred to you that the sin skamight stand for something other than super, even if the kand the astand for killer anemone?”
“Sure,” Matthew said. “But when you’re guessing, first guesses are often the best. What did you have in mind?”
“Strange. Sinister. Solitary. Son of the. Spawn of the.”
“I still like super—oh shit, no I don’t. It’s a joke. It’s just a bloody joke.”
She waited patiently for him to tell her what he meant.
“ Serialkiller anemone,” Matthew said. “I should have seen it immediately. It has to be.”
“Forgive me if I don’t laugh,” she said. “I’m sorry I don’t know more about what Bernal was thinking. He wasn’t quite the talker you are—not so far as shoptalk was concerned, anyway.”
Matthew wasn’t sure whether to take offense at that or not. “We all have our specialisms,” he said. “Maybe I’m a little more obsessive than Bernal was—or a little less.”
“I did see you on TV, now I come to think about it,” she said. “You always looked so serious. Not that Bernal wasn’t—but he had style.”
“Now that isan insult,” Matthew said. “I have style. It might not be the same sort of style as Bernal’s, but it isstyle.”
“That’s what Lynn said,” Maryanne recalled. “When we heard you were coming, she was the one who was glad. But she knew you in the flesh, didn’t she? So to speak.”
Matthew realized, rather belatedly, that it was her turn to go fishing for information.
“Just good friends,” he said. “Not even that, really. If she and Bernal were intimate back on Earth I didn’t know about it, but I probably wouldn’t have even if they were. She and I never were.”
“Well, it’s a whole new world now,” the blond woman said, softly. “One fresh start after another.”
“Does it matter?”
“What matters,” she informed him, mournfully, “is that he’s dead. If I weren’t so absurdly spaced out, so remotely detached from all my feelings …”
“Yeah,” said Matthew, sympathetically. “When I said I knew the feeling, I forgot the exclusion effect. But Bernal was my friend, my ally … in Shen Chin Che’s reckoning, my counterpart. I canimagine how you feel. I’m truly sorry that we had to meet like this. I wish he could be here.”
“When you do find out who did it—” she began, but cut the sentence short with abrupt determination.
“Vince already knows,” Matthew reminded her, gently.
“When youfind out,” she repeated, adding the emphasis.
“What?” he prompted.
“Tell them I forgive them. Tell them that I wish them no harm.”
She was spaced out, disconnected from her feelings: from her grief, from her anger, from her pain. She knew that. She also meant what she said.
“Them?” Matthew queried. “Not him, or her?”
“I honestly don’t know,” she murmured. “If I gave Solari the last piece of the jigsaw, I had no idea where it fit. But he was right all along—if we’d really wanted to know, we could have worked it out. We didn’t, even before I stepped on the worm.”
“It’s a whole new world now,” Matthew quoted, to show that he understood. “One fresh start after another. We may be twenty-first-century barbarians in an era when Earth is populated by emortal superscientists, but we’re doing our best to make progress. We can figure out our penal code when we have more time. For now, we have to move forward on other fronts. If I can complete the work that Bernal began … I was right to claim the berth, you now. Tang is needed here. He’ll figure out the mystery eventually, working from the biochemistry up, but if there’s a shortcut to the truth, it’ll need an ecologist’s eye to capture it. Seeing the wood in spite of the trees is our speciality.”
“I wish you the best of luck,” she said.
He knew how costly the wish had been, and thanked her accordingly.
TWENTY-SIX
Seen from the mound in the ruined city the boat had been no more than an anomalous patch of color, so Matthew was quite unprepared for the peculiarity it displayed at closer range. There was nothing so very unusual about the basic shape of its hull or its cabin and wheelhouse, but its construction material was exotic and the hull was ornamented with a complex network of striations. It was as if each of the vessel’s flanks were overlaid by a set of articulated hawsers.
“Those are the legs,” Lynn informed him. “They’re quite spectacular when they’re extended.”
“ Legs?” Matthew echoed, in helpless amazement.
“We’re quite a lot higher than the lowland plateau here,” she explained. “The watercourse is fairly smooth and comfortably deep for long stretches, but there are a couple of whitewater canyons. The keel’s retractable, but the boat still draws too much water to get through the difficult stretches without bumping against the rocks. The hull’s made of smart fabric, of course—it has a few tricks of its own and it heals quickly if it’s ripped—but we can’t afford the luxury of laying up for days at a time. Bernal decided that it would be best if she could take the worst sections in her stride, literally. I’d have thought three legs each side would be okay, according to the conventional insect model, but Bernal opted for eight. That’s why we call her Voconia.”
Having had the benefit of this introduction, Matthew had no trouble deducing that the black spots in Voconia’s prow were compound eyes of some kind. The water was clear enough for him to see that the lines of sensors extended below the water, doubtless to ensure that the craft could take soundings as it went. The wheelhouse was too narrow for comfort, but that was only to be expected; the rudder and biomotor would be under AI control for the greater part of the journey, although there had to be a set of manual controls for use in an emergency.
The hold in which the supplies and equipment were stored was crammed to bursting, and there was a certain amount of overspill stacked in the corners of the cabin. This meant that the cabin was less roomy than was desirable, even when the dining table and bunks were folded back, but Matthew figured that extra space would be generated at a reasonably rapid rate as Voconia’s biomotor and passengers worked their way steadily through the bales of manna. He could see that it wasn’t going to be easy to dismantle the craft, transport the pieces down a steep cliff and then reassemble it, but he assumed that the hull’s “smartness” extended to the inclusion of convenient abscission layers that could be activated by the AI.