He spent the rest of the night forgetting it, in the cause of making grander plans—and now the twenty-one-and-a-half-hour Tyrian cycle of day and night didn’t seem too short at all, but far too long. Eventually, he lay down again and tried to sleep, knowing that he was going to need every atom of intelligence he had to see him through the crises of the next few days, but he couldn’t do it. His IT wasn’t up to the job; there was too much adrenaline in his system and no matter how hard the nanobots worked they couldn’t stop his adrenal cortex producing more and more.
It was a verylong night—subjectively, the longest in his life. But it came to an end eventually, as all his nights were bound to do. When dawn broke, he was more than ready to greet it. He waited until the light was a little better before he actually struggled to his feet again, but the precaution was unnecessary. The sight that met his eyes would not have disappointed his appetite for startlement no matter how dimly it had been lit.
The first casual sweep of his gaze over the area of devastation told him that the tentacled slugs still had secure tenure over their empire, and they had grown prodigiously during their occupation. He knew, at the back of his mind, that there was a second possibility—that the moderately sizable specimens that had held the terrain when dusk fell had been driven out during the night by more powerful competitors—but he never gave it a moment’s serious thought. He had confidence in his guesses now, and he was certain in his own mind that the creatures had grown fat, processing food into flesh with un-Earthly rapidity.
On another occasion he might have been more surprised by the changes that had overtaken the battlefield on which the serial killer anemones’ victory had been won, but in his present mood he saw it as an inevitable confirmation of his most recent speculations.
If giant slugs had been making their way back and forth across the scattered debris of a thousand shredded bushes, they too would have left the terrain embalmed in slime, but it could not have been so vitreous, nor so dramatically uneven. It would not have been studded with the upper hemispheres of glass basketballs, or the bubble domes of half-embedded footballs … or the pyramidal extrusions of “bipolar spinoid extensions.” Had there not been more urgent matters of concern, Matthew would have paused to wonder, but as things were he merely clocked up one more lucky guess to his rapidly escalating score.
He phoned Lynn, thinking that it was he who had news to impart, but he didn’t get a chance to speak.
“Matthew,” she said. “Thank heaven you’re all right. Can you see Ike or Dulcie?”
“No,” said Matthew, darting his eyes rapidly from side to side. “Should I be able to?”
“Dulcie’s gone, Matthew. If her phone’s still working, she’s not answering. Ike went off to look for her as soon as he gave up thinking that she must have stepped out to relieve herself.”
Ike joined in the conversation almost immediately. “No sign,” he said. “She must have been crazy. The worms are still around—mostly above head height, admittedly, curled around the stalks beneath the seed heads, but too close for comfort if you’re wandering in the gloom. It was just after first light when she went, but it’s way too dim in here to be wandering around without a flashlight.”
“Oh shit,” Matthew murmured. “I was so sureI’d talked her out of it.”
“Out of what?” Lynn wanted to know. She and Ike had had too much on their minds to notice Dulcie’s awkward pose on the lip of the cliff, or to interpret it correctly if they had.
“She nearly jumped off the cliff yesterday.”
“ What?Why?”
“Guilt.” He didn’t bother to specify what it was that Dulcie felt guilty about. He knew they’d work it out quickly enough.
“No!” The complaint came from Lynn. “You think she’s gone off to have another go?”
“Maybe just to think about it. But she knowshow much we need her. Hell, she even made that crazy leap into the pool so that she could go after you. You didtell her about the night visitor when she woke up.”
“Of course I did,” Lynn said. “I didn’t tell her it was a humanoid, because I didn’t know, but …”
“She shouldn’t have gone outside on her own, even to take a leak,” Ike put in. “Maybe whatever it was that touched the tent last night didn’t go away. Maybe it was biding its time … but there’s no sign that I can see. No footprints, of any kind. No sign of any struggle that I can see.”
“Maybe she wanted to make an early start on scaling the cliff, for your sake,” Lynn suggested, although it was obvious that she didn’t believe it. “Did Solari tell you that she killed Bernal?”
“No. I got sidetracked thinking he suspected you. I should have known better. I didn’t guess until I saw her with the artifacts. It still took time to figure out how she’d cultivated enough suppressed rage to explode when she found him with them—but it was all a mistake from beginning to end. She figured out afterward why Bernal was making the spearheads, knives, and arrowheads, and so did I. It wasn’t forgery, or just an experiment. It was flattery.”
“What?”
“As in imitation, the sincerest form of. Bernal always believed that the humanoids were here, in spite of the failure of the flying eyes to catch a glimpse of them. He wanted to make contact, but he didn’t have enough information about them to make a decent plan and he didn’t want to presume too much. He wanted to use the one thing we didknow: the artifacts. He intended to leave them lying around, as communicative bait. He wanted to demonstrate to the aliens that we could make them too, that we have at least that much in common. He would have let you in on it, but he wanted to be sure that he could make a good job of it first—and maybe he wanted to keep the people on Hopeand at Base One in the dark as to where exactly he stood on the great debate, in anticipation of being the one to break the big news. Spin works somuch better if it’s unanticipated.”
“None of that matters now,” Ike said, a little sharply. “What matters is finding Dulcie. Her phone was working last night, so it should be working now. The fuel cell can’t have run out so quickly. Is it possible that the humanoids have got her, do you think?”
Matthew knew that Ike had posed the question that way because it was uncomfortably close to the substance of cheap melodrama—but he understood that they been tipped into a melodrama as soon as they made their descent from the uplands. If they took Bernal’s artifacts from our luggage, he thought, his plan’s already past phase one. The humanoids must have grabbed her. She must have thought about it too. She can’t have been thinking of killing herself until the impulse actually came upon her. She’s an anthropologist, and she’s had all the time in the world to figure out how to handle this, if that’s really what’s happened. But we have to be sure. Before we shout Eureka!we have to be sure.”
“You have to get rid of the killer anemones, Ike,” Matthew said, deciding that the time had come to take command. “Use the flamethrowers. Then you have to check the equipment and the supplies, to make sure exactly what’s missing. Then you have to get me down.”
“Haven’t you got that in the wrong order?” Ike objected. “It’ll take at least two of us to clear those monsters way.” He had obviously seen the current occupants of the disputed area.
“We have to find Dulcie first,” Lynn said.
“No,” Matthew put in, knowing that he had to make good his bid for authority if he were to make it stick. “Ike’s right. It’ll take two of you to take the territory back—but you have to be careful. If Dulcie can make her own way back, that’s great. If not … we have to make ourselves safe first. There’s no time to waste. You have to get moving now.”