Ikram Mohammed turned around, obviously out of breath. The genomicist’s surface-suit did not allow the least bead of sweat to show upon his face, but it did not inhibit the deeper coloration that spread across his cheeks and forehead. “You go on, Matt,” he said. “It’s going to take some time to sort this stuff out.”
“I’ll be back as soon as I can,” Blackstone put in, smugly.
Matthew tried to catch Lynn Gwyer’s eye, feeling oddly irritated that none of the others seemed in the least eager to make his acquaintance. Even those he had not met must have known his name. Like Vince Solari, they must have seen him on TV. He had been a famous man, at least in the circles these people had inhabited. He was fifty-eight light-years from home and three years late out of the freezer, but he could not believe that he had become less interesting than the inanimate objects shipped down with him. He noticed Tang Dinh Quan eyeing him surreptitiously yet again, but the moment Matthew’s gaze tried to fix upon his eyes the biochemist looked away.
Well, Matthew thought, if they aren’t deliberately shielding a murderer, they’re sure as hell ashamed of something.
Lynn Gwyer came over to him, but even she hesitated. “Go back with Rand,” she advised him. “You’ll need to take it easy for a while, and Ike’s right about needing to sort this stuff out. I’ll catch up with you in half an hour or so.”
“We made it, Lynn,” Matthew said, softly. “We made it. Across the void, across the centuries. You might have grown used to it, but I haven’t.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, only a trifle belatedly. “I do know how you feel. I only wish that Bernal could be here too.”
Mercifully, Blackstone refrained from pointing out that if Delgado were still able to be here, Matthew would still be in the deep-freeze.
“I’m sorry that we had to meet under such unfortunate circumstances, Dr. Gwyer,” Solari said, watching her like a hawk.
The bald woman was content to stare back at the detective as if she were watching a dangerous dog for signs of imminent aggression.
“Come on, Matthew,” Blackstone said, gruffly. “We’re wasting time.” He set off without waiting for Matthew to give any indication that he was ready to follow his lead.
Matthew’s last recourse was to lock eyes with Vince Solari. “Come on, Vince,” he said. “Better do as we’re told.” Solari, who must have known that Blackstone’s careful repetition of Matthew’s name had been a deliberate snub, seemed grateful for the invitation.
SEVENTEEN
Matthew and Solari set off in the Australian’s wake, but Matthew made no attempt to draw level, preferring to keep company with Solari. For the moment, at least, Blackstone seemed content with that arrangement.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Matthew said to Solari, speaking loudly enough for Blackstone to hear in the hope of easing the tension. “It looked good on screen, but that’s a poor preparation for the real thing.”
Blackstone shrugged slightly, as if adjusting his load. Beautifulwas obviously not the first adjective that sprang to his mind nowadays when he looked around him. Solari, on the other hand, readily followed the lead of Matthew’s gaze as it swept through a 180 degree tour.
The shallow slope they were ascending was one of many. Although the terrain was insufficiently precipitous to be called mountainous it was not gentle enough to be merely hilly. Had its physical geography not been so strangely dressed Matthew might have been reminded of Scandinavia, but the contrast between Scandinavia’s evergreen forests and the purple “trees” was too great to facilitate any such comparison. Pines grew very straight, and their needles and cones had always seemed to Matthew to be decorous and disciplined. Nothing here grew straight; what each of the dendrites they passed had instead of a trunk and boughs was like something that might be plucked out of a chaotic heap of corkscrews and lathe-turnings. Nor was there anything in the least decorous or disciplined about what the local vegetation had instead of leaves and cones.
If the dendrites bore ready comparison to anything, Matthew thought, it was absurdly overdressed dancers in some cheap casino show, all ruffles, pompoms and flares … and yet, there was not the slightest suggestion that these monstrous growths were ready to hurl themselves into an energetic cancan. There was, as he had already noted, an eerie stillnesshere. The rain was noisy in the branches, but the branches did not shake and rustle as Earthly branches would have done. They creaked a little, and moaned rather plaintively, but they gave the impression that they would bend, however grudgingly, to any pressure.
There was no birdsong to disturb the air, nor any insect hum, but there were other whispers at the very threshold of aural perception, like white noise magnified by dead Earthly seashells into the sound of waves breaking softly on a very distant shore. There was nothing in his memory to which Matthew could meaningfully connect that barely audible murmur. On Earth, tiny sounds that were never consciously apprehended could nevertheless be categorized and filed by the brain according to a habit-formed system. Here … well, he decided, here there was a lot of learning still to do, a lot of custom yet to be established.
“It doesn’t matter that Earth didn’t die,” Vince Solari said, joining in with Matthew’s determination to make the most of the moment in spite of the awkward attitude of his suspects. “What matters is that we’re here. We’ve found an island in the void: a haven; a land of opportunity. Our Ararat.”
Solari’s eyes were roaming the horizons that could be glimpsed between the twisted purple masses. Matthew wondered whether he was trying to deflect Rand Blackstone’s attention from the fact that he was a policeman—but even if that were the case, he sounded perfectly sincere.
“This planet,” Rand Blackstone said over his shoulder, with enviable certainty, “is called Tyre. New Earth is for unimaginative sentimentalists. Ararat is a crew name. Murex is too fancy. Down here, this is Tyre, and always will be. Might as well take it aboard now—you won’t be going back to crew territory, whatever Tang may think.”
An old-style alpha male, Matthew thought. Playing the role of colonist so zealously that he’s become a parody. Now that Blackstone’s gun had had the full force of the new world’s gravity upon it for several minutes it had begun to put a severe strain on his arms, so he shifted its weight on to his shoulder, trying to disregard the absurdly macho pose that he was assuming. His legs were already protesting the effort of walking, but he only had to shorten his stride by a fraction to cause Blackstone to take note of his weakness. The Australian was quick to assure him that the walk to the bubble-complex was “very short,” without “too many” upslopes.
It didn’t take long for Matthew to appreciate just how relative such terms could be. He revised his estimate regarding the accuracy of Milyukov’s boasts; the welcome party had obviously arrived so quickly because they’d got a fix on the likely landing place long before the capsule touched down.
Matthew half-expected Blackstone to fall into step with Vince Solari as soon as the policeman demonstrated that he was the stronger of the two newcomers, but the Australian shortened his own step to take up a position at Matthew’s shoulder, letting Solari take the lead. Now that he knew what direction to take, Solari accepted the responsibility. Matthew realized why Blackstone had made the move when the tall man murmured in his ear: “Is Shen ready to take the ship yet?”
“What?” was Matthew’s astonished response.
Blackstone looked down at him impatiently. “You haveseen Shen?” Rumors obviously bounded from world to world as rapidly in the new system as they had in the old. Solari hadn’t turned around, but Matthew knew that the policeman must be listening hard.