“I told you so,” Matthew said to Lynn, who was waiting for them on the hastily reassembled boat, ready to extend a gangplank to the shore. “Everybody wants in on this now,” he added. “Everybody’s heard Dulcie’s final phone call, and everybody wants to know what happened to her. We couldn’t have a better story if we’d hired a scriptwriter.”
“If we’d hired a scriptwriter,” Ike pointed out, “we’d know how it was going to come out. This way, we don’t even now ifit’s going to come out. You and I could march for days through that wilderness and find precisely nothing. How long do you think it will take for your audience to get impatient? Who do you think they’re going to blame if we can’t deliver?”
“Not you,” Matthew assured him. “You’ll be the one pointing the camera. I’ll be the talking head. If I can’t keep them in suspense until we can contrive a punchline, I’ll be the one they go for. But you don’t need to worry. The aliens are as curious as they’re anxious, and they’re acquisitive too. They’re not going to let us wander around their forest indefinitely. If Dulcie’s still alive they’ll bring her back, because it’s the only unambiguous gesture of amity they can make.” While he was speaking he was already assembling the pack that he’d have to carry on his back for the next few days. Ike was doing likewise.
“ Ifshe’s alive,” Lynn echoed, dubiously, “and iftheir reasoning works the same way as ours.”
“Reasoning’s reasoning,” Matthew told her. “Two and two always make four. Now that they’ve had a chance to test our machetes, they’ll want to find a way of getting more. Bernal was right to think that the best first offering would be stuff they already have—or had, when they were city-builders—but it’s too late now to worry about explosive cultural pollution. Their thievery’s cut right through that kind of crap. It’s make-do time now, whether we like it or not … and whether theylike it or not.”
“Why do I have this nagging feeling that you like it way too much?” Lynn came back.
He smiled, in what he hoped was a reassuring fashion. “Okay,” he said. “I’m all set. Ike?”
Ike nodded, but Lynn was still hesitant. “Aren’t you taking Rand’s gun?” she asked. “They couldbe dangerous.”
“ “We’ve got too much to carry as it is,” Matthew told her. “If they kill us, we’ll just have to go down shooting with the camera. Don’t worry about it. However it goes, it’ll be an epoch-making event in human history—at least as significant, in its way, as the development of true emortality back home on Earth—and it’s ours. Rumor has it that there are billions of people in the solar system who have just about everything they ever wanted now, but they don’t have this and we do. The one thing we can trade for the attention and support we need and deserve is first contact, and a text message saying Eureka!isn’t going to inspire anything like the same engagement as the coupling of Dulcie’s last phone call and TV coverage of our rescue mission. However it comes out, it’ll grab their guts, and if it comes out well, it’ll prove to everyonethat notwithstanding the crew’s revolution and the abject failure of the would-be colonists to get a grip on anything, Hopereally has lived up to her name. This is our chance to establish Hope’s quest as the heroic enterprise we all signed up for. Whatever loss of faith you’ve suffered in the last three years, that dream is still fresh in my mind.”
Lynn shook her head, but all she said to Ike was: “He’s in rehearsal already.”
Ike shrugged his shoulders. “We have to get going,” he said. “Will you be all right?”
“Sure,” she said. “If you don’t come back, I’ll be the sole survivor. And if there are any interesting formations in that unholy mess we made on the shore, I’ll be the one to find them. Just make sure you find Dulcie, if it’s humanly possible.”
Matthew and Ike had already triangulated the location where Dulcie’s phone still lay, and it only took them a few minutes to reach it. The battery was still active and the line was still open, but Matthew turned it off as soon as he had picked it up. It was less than a kilometer from the place where the bubble-tent had been pitched, but they were already in the depths of the so-called grassland.
It only took a slight effort of imagination for Matthew to recover the impression of being very tiny, lost in a wilderness made strange by inflation. For the first time, he could see why the crew’s mapmakers had decided to favor this place with such an odd label. Although the structures surrounding him were certainly high enough to be considered elements of a forest, the “tree trunks” really were remarkably reminiscent of wheat stalks and blades of lawn grass. Some were rounded and very smooth, others spatulate and barbed. When he looked up into the canopy he could see structures reminiscent of corncobs and structures reminiscent of barley heads, although there were others that looked, quite literally, like nothing on Earth. From above, the canopy had looked like an ocean stirred by waves and littered with flotsam, but from below it seemed as if he were staring up into the vaulted ceiling of an infinite crystal cathedral, lavishly decorated with all kinds of sprays and chandeliers, droplets and honeycombs.
The light that crept through this bizarre prismatic array was by no means bright, but it was strangely even. Such undergrowth as it supported looked more like a slightly undulant carpet of vitreous tiles than the mossy leaf litter of an Earthly forest but it did seem to be alive. It was easy to walk on, and the supportive stalks and blades were far enough apart to allow perfectly comfortable passage for Matthew and Ike. Forewarned by experimental forays, they had not troubled to bring a chain saw although they both had machetes dangling from their belts in case they ran into different conditions in some future phase of their journey.
“I think they went this way,” Ike said, having examined the ground around the spot from which Dulcie had made her final call. “The ground doesn’t take footprints very well, but you can see where junctions between the platelets have cracked. If we follow this heading and keep an eye out for more signs, we’ll probably be moving in the right direction—unless you have a better idea.”
“First things first,” Matthew said. He had always intended to make his first broadcast from the place where the phone had fallen—or, as he represented it, the very spot where the momentous and long-anticipated first contact between humankind and intelligent aliens had taken place.
He explained to his audience that he and Ike were going to keep on walking in the direction in which the aliens had been heading before they paused to capture their inquisitive pursuer, on the assumption that whatever destination they had had in mind must lie that way. He played back a recording of Dulcie’s last message in order to establish a “picture” of the aliens in the minds of his audience, and he asked Ike to pan the camera over the canopy and the ground, pointing out the salient features.
He refrained from mentioning that Dulcie had killed Bernal Delgado, and silently hoped that Vince Solari would have the sense to do likewise. Having made the computations necessary to convert Earthly hours into the metric hours that had displaced them aboard Hope, he promised to make further twenty-minute broadcasts at regular intervals, whenever he and Ike paused to rest—every two ship-hours, approximately, except for one longer interval that would allow him to get some sleep.
“What are you going to tell them?” Ike wanted to know, once the camera was off and they had started walking. “The scenery’s not going to change much, so there isn’t a lot to show them except for your face.”
“I’m going to give them a grand tour of the enigmas of local genomics,” he said. “I’m going to offer some intelligent speculations about possible solutions to those puzzles. It doesn’t matter whether I’m right or not as long as I keep pumping out food for thought and material for discussion. You’re probably right about the scenery, but its very constancy might be a useful talking point. I suspect that interesting changes happen veryrarely, barring episodes like the one we precipitated with our blundering, but it’s not impossible that we might come across bigger versions of the formations you had to scorch in order to get rid of the stinging slugs. I’d really like to see a pyramid, although my gut feelings tell me that they’re once-in-a-century or once-in-a-millennium constructions in these parts.”