“Not before tomorrow it won’t,” he assured her.
“That’s okay, Matthew,” Lynn said, soothingly. “There’s a motor on the winch. You can press the switches. We’ll do the loading and unloading. The boat fabric’s light and it practically disassembles and reassembles itself—it’s only the cargo that needs much brute strength to move it about. Putting the winch mechanism together is my job anyhow. Do you want to spend the day sulking in bed or sitting on deck?”
“The problem with IT,” Matthew growled, “is that it’s brought about a drastic decline in the scope of human sympathy. I’ve just suffered a fractured skull, a dislocated shoulder, and a knee in the balls, and everyone’s looking at me as if I were some kind of wimp.”
“Your skull isn’t fractured,” Dulcie Gherardesca assured him. “I went through your monitor readings carefully. No cracks, no clots. It’s just an ache.”
“And I’m sorry I tripped over you,” Lynn added. “Personally, I’d take the deck. I wouldn’t want to be in bed when we hit the second stretch of whitewater, just in case Voconia’s limbs haven’t reset as well as yours.”
“But you can have the lower bunk if you want it,” Ike offered.
Matthew gritted his teeth, determined to make it to the deck under his own steam. Mercifully, his legs had only suffered minor bruising. He could walk quite adequately provided that he didn’t let the full weight of his right arm hang down from the shoulder. As soon as he was back on deck, the tide of his troubles began to ebb. Once the smartsuit’s conjunctiva-overlay had taken the edge of the sun’s brightness the light and warmth became comforting, and he found that if he sat sufficiently still his shoulder wasn’t too bothersome. The fact that his IT was still working hard was evident in the disconnected feeling of which Maryanne Hyder had complained, but that was a far cry from the trippy confusion it had visited upon him immediately after his fall.
From the seating tacked on to the side of the cabin Matthew couldn’t look down into the water as he had been enthusiastic to do the day before, nor could he appreciate the details of the vegetation lining both banks, but staring at a blurred purple wall had its compensations. His mind was too fuzzy to allow him to flick his eyes back and forth in search of hidden animals, so he was content to let the foreground fade from consciousness as he looked beyond into the forest through which the river ran.
The boat was traveling swiftly—perhaps a little too swiftly for comfort, given what had happened the night before—so it was easier to focus on the higher and more distant elements of the canopy. Eventually, he felt well enough to try to count basketballs—and when the number threatened to escalate to uncomfortable levels, he began counting “bipolar spinoid extensions” instead, without troubling himself overmuch as to how many of them might possess “evident quasiequatorial constrictions.”
After a while, he had recovered sufficient sense of proportion to realize that it was probably for the best that it was he who had suffered the worst effects of the accident. He was the only one who knew next to nothing about the design and operation of the boat. He was, in effect, the only authentic passenger. Had one of the others been disabled, even temporarily, it would have left a gap into which he would have been ill-equipped to step.
As things were, the problem with the legs had generated a certain amount of reparatory and precautionary work that his companions were able to undertake with reasonable efficiency that afternoon, alongside the routine work of taking samples from the river and its banks. They had done less of that kind of work the day before because the boat had been negotiating familiar territory, but the landscape had undergone several significant changes during the night. The banks of the river were more sharply defined here, and the shallows no longer supported the bushy broad-leaved plants that had bordered the upper reaches. The attitude of the dendrites whose branches now hung down toward the surface reminded Matthew a little of willow trees, but they were not really “trees” and their “foliage” was far less delicate and discreet.
Had he been in a slightly different frame of mind the branches might have reminded Matthew of serpentine dragons with as many tiny wings as millipedes had legs. They writhed slowly, but they did writhe. Although their termini were not equipped with mouths, let alone fangs, they did have curious spatulate extensions that an imaginative man might have likened to a cobra’s hood.
The more distant vegetation was just as strange. Its elements—those he could see, at any rate—were much taller, but it would have taken a very generous eye to liken them to stately poplars or aged redwoods. Matthew found that if he visualized a giant squid extended vertically, with the body at the base and the tentacles reaching skyward, he had a model of sorts for the basic form, but there were all kinds of arbitrary embellishments to be added to the picture, some of which were literal frills and others merely metaphorical.
There was no wind this afternoon, but the straining tentacles moved nevertheless, idling as if in a sluggish current, posing like dress designers lazily displaying festoons of fabric to the admiring and appreciative eye of the benign sun. There were few animals to be seenhereabouts, but Tang had been right about the lowland soundscape; there were more to be heard. They did not sing like birds or stridulate like crickets, but they whistled and fluted in a fashion that sounded rather mournful to Matthew, although he could not suppose that the cacophony sounded mournful to the intended listeners. On an alien world, natural music could not carry the same emotional connotations as on Earth—or could it?
He might have devoted some time to the contemplation of that issue had he not been interrupted.
“How are you feeling now?” Lynn asked him.
“Not so bad,” he confessed. “I’ll let you know for sure when we’ve got through the second whitewater stretch.”
“Dulcie did a good job with your shoulder, you know,” she told him. “I’d probably have botched it.”
“I’m grateful,” Matthew assured her, although his tone was lukewarm. “Anything interesting in the water?”
“The nets are picking up more now that the AI’s stoked up the biomotor, but there are no real surprises as yet. No crocodiles, no crabs, no fancy fish.”
“Anything edible?”
“I don’t know. Would you like to try a little sliced eely thing for dinner, with some minijellyfish soup as a starter?”
“Not really. What about the snare that grabbed the leg last night? Another kind of killer anemone?”
She recognized the term readily enough, even though she hadn’t made the connection with the note on Bernal Delgado’s pad. “We’ve seen them before,” she said, “though not nearly as big or as strong. Like the stinging worms they’re not easy to categorize. It’s a matter of opinion as to whether they’re more closely analogous to giant sea anemones or gargantuan Venus flytraps. They can’t usually catch sizable prey, but conditions in the gully must work in their favor, allowing them to get more ambitious than their cousins and muchbigger. Now we’re forewarned, the AI won’t let the legs get stuck again. We’ll come through the second stretch easily enough.”
“As long as there isn’t a brand new package of surprises waiting for us.”
“Well, yes,” she conceded. “Maybe it was a mistake to try to sleep through last night’s transit. This time, we’ll all be awake and alert.”
“What did Tang say when you reported back?” Matthew wanted to know.
“He’s not the type to gloat. He wished you a speedy recovery. Maryanne’s much better, and Blackstone’s happy to have another nonscientist around. He and Solari have been playing ball in an increasingly competitive spirit. Doctor’s orders, Solari said.”