“Not really, I stepped in a hole while climbing out of the shallows—stupid thing to do, but Dulcie came to help me. It’s one of those awkward situations where your IT’s programmed to force you to rest up, so it lets the pain through if I try to walk. I’ll be okay in a couple of days. Ike and Dulcie will be able to put the boat together, if they get the chance. We really screwed things up, didn’t we? Did everything wrong we possibly could.”
“It wasn’t that bad,” Matthew said. “I suppose, with the aid of hindsight, that the first person down should have lit a fire on the bank to deter visitors. Maybe you should have used the flame-thrower instead of the chain saws—but how could we know? If you can unpack the flamethrower tomorrow, without getting too close to the killer anemones, you should be able to scare them away in a matter of minutes—or roast them, if they’re stubborn.”
“They took us by completely by surprise,” Lynn lamented. “We should have been on our guard. We knew that the experience we brought down from the hills might be worthless here—but who could have expected anything to happen so soon and so fast? How much stuff has been damaged, do you think? Will we be able to carry on, or do we have to hang about waiting to be rescued?”
“There’s not that much damage,” Matthew assured her. “As far as I could see, the big worms were only interested in the spilled boatfood, and most of the things that came after them were only interested in them. The stingers are omnivores, but they’ve got plenty of vegetable matter to gorge themselves on. They won’t hurt the boat itself or the equipment.”
“I’m sure we made it worse by cutting up the worms and exposing their soft centers,” Lynn told him. “Mercifully, there weren’t any sharks in the water when I made my dive. I suppose it was only to be expected that the scent of blood would attract all kinds of nasties, but we weren’t thinking. We overreacted.”
“Nobody else would have done any better,” Matthew consoled her. “Some might have done a lot worse. Can you hear the midnight chorus in the bubble, or is the fabric soundproof?”
“It’s audible, but muffled,” she said. “Will it keep you awake all night, do you think?”
“I hope not. I’ll have to try to sleep—tomorrow could be a demanding day.”
“Me too,” she said. “Better say good night.”
The call had made Matthew feel slightly better, but no sleepier. With the folds of the pliable basket gathered about his horizontal frame he was beginning to feel rather claustrophobic, and the rigid extent of the rifle laid alongside his body made it even more difficult for him to find a position that did not put undue pressure on his damaged arm. He knew that his IT would still be working steadfastly on the strained tendons and ligaments, but he had to suppose that the day’s dramatics had undone most or all of the work they had done beforehand, and perhaps a little more besides.
After two further Earth-hours of failing to settle Matthew felt so cramped that he had to stand upright for a while. The sky was cloudier than it had been on the two previous nights, but a few stars were visible in the shifting gaps. Somewhat to his surprise, he caught sight of a faint glimmer of light in the grass-forest, just about visible in the gap between the tops of the nearer bushes and the lower reaches of he canopy. His surprise faded into reassurance, though, when he realized that it must be the bubble-tent. Made of smarter fabric than the basket, its opacity was adjustable and its three inhabitants must have decided that keeping a light on was likely to deter more nocturnal creatures than it attracted.
The noise was less intense now; the chorus of moans and whistles was lapsing into a calmer mood. Matthew decided to take that as a good sign. He settled down again, confident at last that he might be able to sleep, but had hardly begun to drift off into a light delirium when his phone sounded again. He snatched it up immediately, stifling the reflexive curse that rose to his lips as his censorious IT let a little pain through to remind him that he ought to be more careful.
“It’s Lynn again, Matthew. We just had a visitor. Big, possibly bipedal.”
Any annoyance he might have felt evaporated on the instant. What Lynn meant, obviously, was possibly humanoid—but she didn’t dare tempt fate by saying so.
“How close did it come?” Matthew asked.
“I wouldn’t have known it was there if it hadn’t come close enough actually to touch the tent—but the reflections from the fabric made it impossible to see more than a shadow. It backed off as soon as I sat up.”
“The monkey-analogues are probably inquisitive,” Matthew reminded her. But not as curious as humanoids would be, he added, mentally. However badly we messed up our entrance, we certainly broadcast the news that we were here far and wide. If they can be persuaded to come to us, instead of letting us hunt for days on end for spoor and signs….
He stood up again, and looked out in the direction of the glimmer of light he had noticed before. The area beneath him was in deep shadow; there could have been a dozen fascinated tribes-men standing there looking up at him and he would not have known. He cocked an ear, trying hard to detect signs of movement. The continuing chorus from the forest made it difficult to hear anything else, but he was half-convinced that he didhear something moving: something too big to be stealthy. It could have been a hopeful illusion, but if not it was something—or several somethings—moving among the stacks of equipment.
After a few minutes more he was almost certain that some of the boxes and pieces of the boat were being moved in a relatively careful fashion. If so, he thought, then handsmust surely be at work. He was suddenly aware of the fact that his foot was touching Rand Blackstone’s rifle, but he made no move to pick it up.
“Just don’t steal any essential bits of the boat,” he murmured. “Help yourself to all the food you want, and all the tools, glass or metal—but please don’t take anything vital.” He regretted not having asked Ike to try to throw a flashlight up to him, although he knew that he had been right to judge the risk too great.
He listened dutifully for a few minutes more, waiting for the sounds to die away before reporting back to Lynn. “I can’t be absolutelysure that it’s not my imagination,” he said, in a voice tremulous with anticipation and triumph, “but I’m pretty sure that we’ve just been investigated by an alien intelligence.”
“Shall I wake Ike, or try to take a look myself?” Lynn asked.
“No. Stay where you are, as quiet as quiet can be. If they’ve come to us, the last thing we want is to scare them off. In the morning, we’ll know for sure whether they exist or not, and we can make proper plans. Yesterday wasn’t such a disaster after all—maybe it was the best possible beacon we could have planted. Now, we have to tread carefully.”
“Not the best choice of words,” she told him, ruefully.
“We have to wait for morning,” he said, as much to himself as to her. “If they’ve taken anything, we’ll know. Then the new ball game begins. Everything changes. Bad arms and ankles notwithstanding, we have to get busy—but we have to do it right.”
“Will you call the base—or Hope?”
“Not yet,” he said. “We have to know, to be in a position to confound all skeptics, however unreasonable. This has to be handled right. Can you stay awake?”
“I doubt that I have the choice,” she retorted, drily. “Can you?”
“Same thing. Trying to see in the dark, hear significant sounds against the white-noise background. Probably pointless, but … call again if they come back to you.”
They left it at that, but when Matthew returned his phone to his belt he found that he was trembling with excitement. If it is them, he thought, they know more about us than we know about them. They could see into the lighted tent. They sorted through our stuff. They may be nervous, but they’re bound to keep us under observation. We’re the most interesting thing that’s happened to them since they decided to give up on civilization, and they must know it. Even if they don’t want to make contact now, they’ll want to know exactly where we are and where we’re going. They won’t go far, and they’ll be back. All we have to do is wait, and make our plans with due care. Everything else is subsidiary now; this is the spearhead of Hope’s mission, the determining fact of all our futures. And I’m on the spot, running the show. Destiny needed a prophet, and it picked me. Whatever it needed to get me here, it had to have me. This is it. This is what it was all for: every moment of every one of those forty-eight years. Dulcie was just an innocent part of the apparatus of fate, like Shen Chin Che and the cometary blizzard and the Crash, and fifteen billion years of the prehistory of the universe. It was all leading down to this: to Matthew Fleury’s advent in the New World, and his first meeting with the Other Human Race. This is my moment, my winning play, my reason for being. This is the beginning of the New Era. It was easy to forget, in the circumstances, that he was stuck halfway down a cliff with a worse-than-useless rifle and a nonfunctional control box.