Dark Ararat Page 13

  “Unfortunately,” Matthew said, “the answer to that one depends on the answers to all the other questions—including the ones Lityansky didn’t want to address, like the possible relevance of serial chimeras. Maybe the relative dearth of chitin and hard bone isn’t the product of a blind spot in the protein-coding mechanism. Maybe there’s another factor militating against rigidity.”

  “Serial chimeras?,” Solari echoed. “Like werewolves, you mean.”

  “Not exactly—but I’ll have to devote some time to figuring out what I might mean. What have you been doing while I’ve been taking lessons in xenobiology?”

  “Checking the list of murder suspects.”

  “Really?” The news was sufficiently interesting to make Matthew lift his head a little higher and turn to lie sideways, supporting himself on his elbow.

  Solari had obviously been practicing his keyboard skills, because it required no more than a casual sweep of his fingers to replace the single image on the wallscreen with a mosaic consisting of seven faces arranged in two ranks, four on the upper and three on the lower. Matthew took due note of the symbolism of the empty square at the right-hand end of the bottom rank: the blank where a photograph of one of the alien humanoids might be, if the alien humanoids still existed. Even at a relatively oblique angle, Matthew had no difficulty identifying two of the faces.

  “The second from the left on the top row’s Ikram Mohammed,” he said. “A first-rate experimental genomicist. Did some remarkable work on intron architecture and functional gene-nesting. I met him a dozen times at conferences. Bernal would have known him fairly well too—whatever Bernal was working on or thinking about, he’d have shared it with Ike. More of an acquaintance than a friend, but I feel confident saying that he’s not a likely murderer.”

  “I’ve looked at his CV,” Solari said, noncommittally. “Do you know any of the others?”

  “Lynn Gwyer, directly below him. Genetic engineer specializing in agricultural pharmaceutical production. Did a lot of work on bananas. Regarded by some—but certainly not by me—as a plague-war draft dodger, mainly because she dedicated her efforts to attempts to protect Third World innocents rather than First World software engineers. Bernal probably knew her better than I did, maybe better than he knew Ike Mohammed. Again, an acquaintance rather than a friend, but also not a likely murderer, in my opinion. In fact, a highly unlikely murderer.”

  “None of them is a likely murderer,” Solari said, a trifle impatiently. “Few murderers are, alas—especially when it comes to domestics. This has to be reckoned a domestic of sorts. They’d all been living together for months. One big happy—or not-so happy—family.”

  “Why not so happy?”

  “There’s always friction in living space that small. There were disagreements. Personal as well as theoretical.” He didn’t elaborate, presumably because it was gossip rather than real evidence.

  “Who are the others?” Matthew asked.

  Solari started at the top left-hand corner, with a man who might have passed for Shen Chin Che’s son in a dim light. “Tang Dinh Quan,” he reported. “Analytical biochemist. Very accomplished, apparently. Two daughters still in SusAn, but no partner—just like you. Reported to be showing signs of strain and acute anxiety in the last few months, becoming increasing vocal in his support for the Base One party advocating withdrawal from the world.”

  “Reported by whom?” Matthew inquired.

  “The resident doctor, Godert Kriefmann,” Solari said, passing on to the image on the other side of Ikram Mohammed’s face, of a solidly built, square-jawed man whose head had been comprehensively depilated. “He’s a medical researcher too, of course, but the doctors on the surface have had more work to do than they expected. The smartsuits designed for surface use are reasonably strong, and they seem to work very well inside the body, protecting the lungs and the gut from orthodox invasion, but some of the local wildlife is pretty dangerous. Some wormlike things have nasty stings and surprisingly powerful jaws, and some of the mammal-equivalents have tongues like harpoons. To make a smartsuit capable of resisting all the local armaments would inhibit movement considerably. Fortunately, the toxins are more painful than life-threatening, and Kriefmann’s working to develop antisera with Maryanne Hyder, toxicologist.” Solari’s finger dropped to the image beneath Kriefmann’s. It was a study in contrasts: Maryanne Hyder’s face was slender, almost elfin, and she had an abundance of carefully coiffed blond hair.

  “She seems to be the one that Bernal was playing happy families with at the time of his death,” Solari reported. “Very cut up by his loss, apparently. Quiet and methodical beforehand, now more hysterical than Tang. On the surface, the least likely of all the suspects—but if it is a domestic, she’s the closest thing we have to a spouse, which might put her under the microscope ahead of all the rest if this weren’t such a bizarre crime. In my experience, domestic murders don’t often involve alien artifacts, real or faked, and they almost always take place inside the home, not in a field two miles away.”

  The policeman’s finger moved on to the only remaining woman, whose picture was at the far end of the top row. She was darker than any of the others, and her face was extensively scarred, as if by smallpox or some other supposedly extinct disease.

  “Dulcie Gherardesca, anthropologist,” Solari reported. “The most recent arrival at the base, sent to study the ruins of the city in the hope of building a fuller picture of the technological resources and folkways of the humanoids. Spent less time safely enclosed in the bubbles than most of the others, although Hyder and Mohammed both picked up more injuries. Probably better equipped to fake alien artifacts than any of the others, and with more opportunity to do it, but everything else in her background makes her just as unlikely a murderer as the others. A victim of plague war in infancy, very nearly died—said to be fiercely dedicated to her work.”

  The last remaining picture showed a blond man wearing a hat and a wide smile. He was carrying a rifle.

  “Rand Blackstone,” Solari reported. “Specialist in survival skills. Professional soldier, served with UN forces in half a dozen shooting wars—all spinoff from the plague wars. Argumentative type, but most of his arguments seem to have been with Tang, not Delgado. No doubt at all that he’s capable of killing, but he was there to protect the people at Base Three, and losing one of them is a blot on his reputation. If Milyukov’s right about there being a conspiracy to protect the murderer, it’s difficult to believe that he’d be in on it. Insofar as there’s been an investigation, he’s done it—but he’s no detective. He seems to have made up his mind very quickly that it wasn’t any of the people stationed at the base, and must therefore have been an alien, even though he hasn’t seen the slightest sign of a humanoid since he was commissioned to help set up the operation—he was part of the original group sent over from Base One, along with Mohammed, Gwyer, and Delgado. The others shuttled down a couple of weeks later.”

  “Does anyone except Tang have family still in SusAn?” Matthew asked, curiously.

  “No, but Kriefmann has a wife, also a doctor, at Base One. Gwyer’s ovaries were stripped and the eggs placed in storage in the gene banks, so I suppose she could be said to have potential children up here—but then, all the males have made sperm donations. Gherardesca’s the odd one out on that score. She was sterilized by a plague-war agent that nearly killed her. Nothing as refined as a chiasmalytic disruptor—an artificial variant of systemic lupus erythromatosus, whatever that is.”

  “A very nasty virus,” Matthew told him. “That would explain the scars—although she could have had them removed by elementary somatic engineering.”

  “Making a political point, apparently,” Solari told him. “Thought the effects of plague war on the disadvantaged ought to be made manifest. Made herself into a kind of walking ad. Your friend Gwyer would presumably have sympathized.”

  “There’s no need to sound contemptuous,” Matthew objected. “I sympathize.”

&nb
sp; “You would,” Solari observed. “As an adman yourself, I mean.”

  “I wasn’t an adman,” Matthew told him. “If I was a trifle over-theatrical it was because I was trying to ram home an unwelcome message. As William Randolph Hearst himself was fond of saying, the news is what somebody wants to stop you spreading—it’s the rest that’s the ads. I was spreading the news. So was Lynn Gwyer. So, apparently, was Dulcie Gherardesca. We had to work hard at it because it was news that a lot of people seemed determined not to hear. We had to make them pay attention. Apparently, we succeeded. If we hadn’t, Earth could have been devastated all the way down to the bacterial level.”

  “Okay,” Solari conceded. “I’m not trying to pick a fight. Well-intentioned or not, Gherardesca’s an oddball. She was frozen down not long after you—part of the same intake as Delgado. Lucky to be here, I guess. She might have been eliminated from consideration if Shen and his collaborators hadn’t been so idiosyncratic, although I suppose she’s as clonable as the next person. Why do you think that someone having family in SusAn might have a bearing on Delgado’s murder?”

  “I don’t. I was wondering whether it might have had an effect on Tang’s state of mind and his conversion to the party demanding withdrawal. As you pointed out, I have two daughters in SusAn myself. If I became convinced that the surface was direly unsuitable for colonization, I might not be prepared to expose them to risks I’d gladly face myself.”

  “Is it direly unsuitable?” Solari wanted to know. “Can we establish a colony here or not?”

  “I don’t know,” Matthew told him. “But I can understand why the people on the surface don’t want to wait around for Andrei Lityansky and the one-step-at-a-time brigade to come to a firm conclusion.”

  “Maybe we could do something about it even if there turned out to be awkward problems,” Solari said.

  “Maybe,” Matthew agreed. “In theory we could probably dose the entire world with weed killer, a few hectares at a time, and replace the alien ecosphere with a duplicate of our own, converting it into an authentic replica of Earth. It might be the case that releasing Earthly organisms into the planetary ecosphere will eventually have that effect anyway, because it would begin a competition of replicator molecules that would eventually be settled by the absolute victory of DNA over its alien rivals. Unfortunately, you don’t have to be a radical Gaean to think that murdering an entire ecosphere, or standing back and letting DNA do the dirty work for us, would be an unforgivable crime.

  “What we actually want is to be able to set up a situation that would allow DNA’s rival replicators to continue to flourish, and also allow us to benefit from the bounty of their natural technology. How easy that might be to achieve I can’t even begin to guess—and given the unanticipated complexity and flexibility of the local ecosphere, it might be exceedingly difficult to come up with a confident answer in the space of a single lifetime. The seven hundred years it took to get here might be needed to be doubled before we can be certain that any colony we found is genuinely secure. The worst-case scenario is that this isn’t our Ararat at all, but our Roanoke.”

  Solari nodded to indicate that he understood the reference to the most famous of America’s lost colonies. “Yeah,” he said. “Well, we’ll have to find out the hard way—on the surface. I’m not going to solve this case by looking at pictures and CVs. The sooner we can get down there the better, from my point of view. I’m not looking forward to this suit-fitting business, but the quicker we get kitted out the sooner we can get stuck in.”

  He blanked the screen and hopped up onto his own bed, stretching himself out in much the same pose as Matthew’s. Matthew let himself relax onto his back again, but he didn’t close his eyes. He knew that he, like Solari, wouldn’t even be able to begin to fit the pieces of his puzzle together until he was actually on the surface, able to gather evidence at first hand, but he still had a lot of preparatory thinking to do. When the opportunity arrived to see the wood in spite of the trees, he had to be as ready as he possibly could.

  FOURTEEN

  In theory, the suit fitting should not have been an unduly unpleasant experience. It wasn’t unduly uncomfortable, in purely physical terms, and probably wouldn’t have been alarmingly painful even if Matthew’s IT had not been ready to muffle anything worse than the mildest discomfort, because the human body had few pain receptors ready to react to the kind of invasion that the suit mounted. The fact that the problem was psychological rather than physical didn’t make it any less troublesome, though.

  Matthew belonged to a generation that had grown used to the idea of smart clothing. Even as a baby he had been swathed in living fibers charged with taking care of the various wastes that his body produced, but he had also been used to smartsuits as things a man could put on and take off at will. He had never worn “dead clothes” but he had nevertheless thought of his smartsuits as clothing to be changed at regular intervals, or whenever the whim took him, rather than as symbiotic companions more intimate than any lover.

  The various kinds of physiological assistance his previous smartsuits rendered had always seemed valuable but peripheral, essentially subsidiary to matters of display and appearance, fashion and style. The smartsuits he had worn on the moon and in L-5 had been “heavy duty” suits that might have become vital to his survival had there ever been a serious mishap, but he had not lingered long in either location, and had never fallen victim to a life-threatening accident. There was nothing in his experience that had even begun to bring about a fundamental change of attitude. He was, therefore, quite unprepared for the kind of suit he would need to wear on the surface of the new world.

  As a biologist, Matthew had always known that everyday notions of what was “inside” and “outside” his body were not very precise, and that there was a significant sense in which the long and tangled tube constituting his gut was “outside” rather than “inside.” His new smartsuit, unlike the ones he had worn at home, really would have to cover and protect his entire body, which meant that it would have to line his gut from mouth to anus, forming an extra layer over every nook and cranny of his intestines. Strictly speaking, he would not be able to “feel” the growth-process that would extend the new layer of surface once he had swallowed the initial bolus, but he was conscious of its progress nevertheless, and his imagination readily supplied the slight unease that his stomach and bowel refused to generate.

  It would have been even worse, he thought, as he lay on his bed while the application was completed, if the new membrane had had to descend all the way into his lungs, to coat every single alveolus, but the air filter did not need to be quite as sensitive or capable as the food filter, and the crucial barrier was established in his bronchii. Nita Brownell assured him that he had no need to be anxious that it might leave him short of breath in crisis—quite the reverse, given that it maintained an emergency supply of oxygen—but his imagination was not yet ready to take that on trust. He was able to see, quite literally, that the extra layer added to his conjunctiva did not threaten his eyesight in the least, but he was unable to extend the analogy as easily as the doctor could have wished. She too was an ex-corpsicle, but she had been awake for three long years and had spent far longer in various low-gee environments before being frozen down.

  “Just take it easy for a few hours,” Dr. Brownell instructed him, severely. “If you can lie still, the process will proceed with maximum efficiency.” She was still annoyed with him for the shame that he had allegedly brought on the entire population of sleepers by virtue of his vicious attack on Riddell and Lamartine.

  “How useful is the suit, really?” Matthew wanted to know. “According to Vince, the stings and fangs with which most of the local wildlife seem to be equipped go through it almost as easily as they’d go through bare skin. Even if Lityansky’s right about the unlikelihood of any biological infection, anything that gets injected that way is likely to be toxic.”

  “Very few of the organisms you’ll meet on a day-to-d
ay basis have stings or fangs,” the doctor assured him, “and they seem to be as reluctant to use them as Earthly organisms. They’re last-resort defenses, not means of aggression. Even the most poisonous ones haven’t killed anyone yet. Not that we’re complacent—we’re working flat-out to produce more effective defenses, but we’re only partway there. The main problem is the sheer profusion of likely reactions. So, no matter how good your IT is it’ll hurt like hell if you get stung by anything bigger than my thumb, and it might take as much as a week to clear all the poisonous debris out of the affected tissues.

  “The suits are far from perfect, as yet—but they’re no less vital for that. If you didn’t have an artificial gut lining and air filter you’d be in deep trouble the moment you stepped down on to the surface. If he stayed inside the big bubble at Base One, drinking sterilized water and irradiated food, a man without a suit would probably get by, but you’re going to Base Three and you’ll be spending a lot of time outside. You’ll probably need all the protection the suit can provide, even if you don’t get bitten or stung.”

  When she had turned away Matthew lifted his arm so that he could inspect the fabric of the suit. Once the molecular layers were properly set he would be able to reprogram the outer layer for color and certain modifications of shape, but for the time being the syntheflesh covering the hand was transparent and the “sleeve” beginning above the wrist was matt black. When he flexed his fingers he could hardly feel the extra epidermal layers, but the back of his hand looked odd because the suit had dissolved the hairs that normally grew there. He lifted his hand to touch the top of his head, and was relieved to discover that the hair growing there had been allowed to grow through. His sideburns were neatly excised at the point he had selected twenty years ago.