“I realize that,” Matthew said. “It needed ten thousand years of social progress on Earth before our forebears cracked the basics of organic chemistry, let alone the mysterious working of DNA. The crew should have done muchmore work before they started shuttling our people down. They jumped the gun. It’s no use saying now that we can’t run before we can walk—we haveto. Do you think Ike might have fed me all that stuff about psychological cycles, creeping dread and the fact that whoever killed Bernal must have been experiencing a moment of lunacy because he was the one who wielded the fatal blade?”
“He told you because it’s true,” she said, flatly. “He felt that you were due a warning. He didn’t kill Bernal. I’m certain of that.”
“Nor did you. Which leaves Dulcie.”
“I can’t believe that either. Which brings us back to square one. Or the aliens.”
“Or the aliens,” Matthew admitted. “Standing in the bow of the boat for hours on end searching the undergrowth for inquisitive eyes makes the aliens seem far more plausible, doesn’t it? It’s easy enough to imagine them crouching in the bushes, spears in hand, watching the crazy multicolored people go by.” Although his own smartsuit had been programmed to display a discreet black, Matthew had taken due note of the fact that he was the odd one out. Lynn was wearing yellow, Dulcie brown, Ike dark red. Set against the backcloth of the green boat they must indeed have seemed a colorful band of brothers.
“Yes it is,” Lynn agreed. “Let’s just hope they haven’t taken advantage of the division of our numbers to launch an attack on the bubbles. Rand would be sodisappointed that he no longer has the wherewithal to shoot them—but I suppose he’d improvise. We only brought one of the flamethrowers with us. Doesn’t bear thinking about, does it?”
“If the aliens were to attack the boat,” Matthew pointed out, “ I’d have to try to shoot them down.”
“Yes,” she said. “But every shot you fired really would hurt you worse than it hurt them. Rand doesn’t have that kind of sensitivity.”
“We shouldn’t even be joking about it,” Matthew observed, soberly. “The very casualness of the conversation illustrates the ease with which we still fall prey to the myth of the savage. We ought to remember that the alien cultures of Earth were mostly far too peaceful for their own good. That’s why it was so easy for our ancestors to wipe them out, and then make up stories to prove that they deserved it.”
“Something tells me,” Lynn said, sardonically, “that if they do attack us, you’re not going to be all that effective as a line of defense. Maybe you ought to give me the gun. I’m a better markswoman than Rand seems to think.”
“If you want it,” Matthew said, “You’re more than welcome to it. Let’s eat.”
Dinner consisted of spun protein steaks, manna fries, and synthetic courgettes. The taint of processed alien vegetation was evident in every bite, but Matthew was getting used to it by now.
“It could be worse,” he said, heroically.
“It will be if we get stranded without the converter and have to eat the boat food while we’re waiting to be rescued,” Ike told him. “It’s concentrated nutritional goodness, guaranteed nontoxic, but it’s distinctly pungent.”
When the remains of the meal had been cleared away Matthew made as if to fold up the table but Dulcie Gherardesca told him to leave it. She went to her personal luggage and took out a cloth-wrapped bundle. Matthew was surprised to see, when she unwrapped it, that it contained the natural-glass spearheads and arrowheads that Vince Solari had found near the crime scene.
“What are you doing with those?” he asked.
She looked up at him quizzically, as if she’d expected him to understand. “ Verstehen,” she said. “I want to handle them while I think, to use them as an imaginative aid.”
“That’s not quite what I meant,” Matthew said, apologetically. “I was wondering how you pried them out of Vince’s possession. Aren’t they evidence?”
“I suppose they are,” she said, “But it wasn’t difficult to persuade him that my need was greater than his. He kept the one that really matters.” She meant the murder weapon. “Care to join me?”
“Okay,” he said. “I didn’t get a chance to fondle them before, and I guess we’re less than forty-eight hours from the big waterfall. Real hours, that is—not the metric crap the crew have invented.”
He sat down, and picked up one of the carefully shaped spearheads. He ran his finger lightly along the sharpened edge, marveling at its keenness. The sensation seemed to encapsulate both the unearthliness of the vegetation that could produce such a peculiar material and the delicacy of the hand that could work it into a useful shape.
He tried to pretend, as Dulcie was undoubtedly doing and Bernal undoubtedly would have done, that the hand in question had not been Bernal Delgado’s at all but an alien hand, perhaps hairy and perhaps glabrous, perhaps with more or fewer than five fingers, perhaps knobbly with knucklebones or perhaps quasi-tentacular.
He closed his eyes and hoped for inspiration.
Remarkably, inspiration arrived, far too quickly to be the kind of inspiration he had actually sought. Matthew had no more idea than he had had before of what the new world might look like through the intelligent eyes of its legitimate inheritors, but he wasconvinced that he now knew exactly why Bernal Delgado had made these imitation alien artifacts—and, incidentally, the identity of his murderer.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Everything aboard Voconiawas in perfectly good order when Matthew and his companions retired to their bunks. In spite, or perhaps because of the fact he had done nothing strenuous all day, Matthew slept better than he had since waking from his sleep of 700 years. Had he not been so deeply and peacefully asleep, though, he might not have been so rudely awakened.
When the boat lurched and turned abruptly to starboard Matthew was so relaxed that he was thrown out of the bunk. That would not have been so bad had he not been in the upper one of the pair, but the first moment of returning consciousness found him still in midair, flailing helplessly as he fell.
There was a crazy half-second when Matthew had no idea where he was. Perhaps, subconsciously, his mind accepted his free-falling condition as evidence that he was in his own solar system, in one of the various zero-gee environments he had briefly experienced while en route from Earth’s gravity-well to the metal shell that was to become the core of Hope. There may have been a tiny moment when his unconscious mind reassured its conscious partner that he was safe, because he wasn’t really fallingat all. Alas, he was—and for whatever reason, he realized the fact far too late.
He could hardly have had time to begin framing a constructive thought before he hit the deck, but his reflexes were a little quicker off the mark. Perhaps they would have served him better had he not been falling under the influence of 0.92 Earth-gravity instead of the regime to which they were attuned, but perhaps not. Either way, he had hardly begun to extend a protective arm, and that very awkwardly, before the moment of impact.
He landed very badly. The upper part of his right arm took the brunt of the impact, and the pain seemed to sear through his shoulder like a hot knife before his IT leapt into action to save him from further agony.
After the moment of impact things became very confused. The compensatory flood of anesthetic released by his artificial defenses was dizzying rather than merely numbing. Matthew didn’t lose consciousness, but he lost the senseof consciousness, and couldn’t quite tell whether he was awake or dreaming, or which way was up, let alone how badly he was hurt or what could possibly be happening.