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Authors: Brian Stableford
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relished. I remember seeing you on TV, you know, when I was a kid. Couldn’t really miss you, until you dropped out of sight.”
“If you hadn’t been a kid,” Matthew told him, leaning back against his bed so as to take some of the weight off his aching feet, “you’d have understood that I was never the kind of prophet who could take delight in saying I told you so . I knew what the chiasmalytic transformers might do—what they were made to do—but I never relished the thought.”
“Made to do? I remember you as a bit of a ranter, but I didn’t have you pegged as a conspiracy theorist. The official line always said that the seetees were Mother Nature’s ultimate backlash—Gaea’s last line of self-defense. The idea that they were a final solution cooked up in a lab was supposed to be a neohysteric fantasy.”
Matthew winced slightly at the casual suggestion that he had been a bit of a ranter , although people had called him a lot worse things. “It matters not whence Nemesis comes,” he said, recalling another of his not-so-classic sound bites as if it had only been yesterday when he had last deployed it. “It only matters where she goes.”
“They might have found a cure after I was frozen down, I guess,” Solari said, pensively. “We ought to look that up, oughtn’t we? We’ve got a lot of history to catch up on.”
“And not enough time,” Matthew said. “Not until we’re down on the surface, at any rate, and probably not then. Still, it looks as if your job won’t be as hard as it might have been, so you might be able to get back to your homework fairly soon.”
“Seven suspects,” Solari mused, lifting the keypad up to his face and studying the layout of the keys with minute care. “Eight if you count the hypothetical alien. It doesn’t sound too difficult—but I’ll be way too late to get much from the crime scene. Until I have the facts …”
“If the murderer is an alien,” Matthew observed, “I don’t suppose we’ll attempt to bring him to trial. The discovery would be far more momentous than any mere murder. The greatest discovery ever—and they seem almost determined not to make it. Maybe the crew don’t quite understand, but the people fresh from the freezer … I can’t understand their attitude at all.”
Solari obviously didn’t share Matthew’s wonderment. “Do you want to go on playing tourist flyby,” he asked, “or shall I try to find something more interesting?”
“Try to find something more interesting,” was Matthew’s vote. He had seen enough purple vegetation for the time being.
As yet, though, Solari wasn’t sufficiently familiar with the equipment to be able to exit from the image-catalog, and he stopped trying when the sequence moved on to animal life.
In the absence of any oral explanation it was difficult to determine the principles according to which the images had been filed and organized, but the first impression formulated in Matthew’s mind was that the new world was improbably rich in soft-bodied invertebrates. He couldn’t remember exactly what a murex looked like, but there was such a wealth of sluglike, clamlike and snaillike creatures among the images on the screen that he figured that there had to be a murex-analogue in there somewhere.
The worms were even more multitudinous, but worms were fundamentally boring, and Solari kept his thumb on the button that fast-forwarded through that section of the array before slowing down to take a closer look at various entities that seemed more interestingly chimerical.
“What’s that ?” Solari demanded, finally making use of his discovery of a pause function. He obviously thought that Matthew, being a biologist of sorts, ought to have been able to master the fundamental taxonomy of the local ecosphere by courtesy of the hectic sequence of glances he had laid on.
“I’ve no idea,” Matthew confessed. The creature in question looked like a cross between a giant liver fluke and
“If you hadn’t been a kid,” Matthew told him, leaning back against his bed so as to take some of the weight off his aching feet, “you’d have understood that I was never the kind of prophet who could take delight in saying I told you so . I knew what the chiasmalytic transformers might do—what they were made to do—but I never relished the thought.”
“Made to do? I remember you as a bit of a ranter, but I didn’t have you pegged as a conspiracy theorist. The official line always said that the seetees were Mother Nature’s ultimate backlash—Gaea’s last line of self-defense. The idea that they were a final solution cooked up in a lab was supposed to be a neohysteric fantasy.”
Matthew winced slightly at the casual suggestion that he had been a bit of a ranter , although people had called him a lot worse things. “It matters not whence Nemesis comes,” he said, recalling another of his not-so-classic sound bites as if it had only been yesterday when he had last deployed it. “It only matters where she goes.”
“They might have found a cure after I was frozen down, I guess,” Solari said, pensively. “We ought to look that up, oughtn’t we? We’ve got a lot of history to catch up on.”
“And not enough time,” Matthew said. “Not until we’re down on the surface, at any rate, and probably not then. Still, it looks as if your job won’t be as hard as it might have been, so you might be able to get back to your homework fairly soon.”
“Seven suspects,” Solari mused, lifting the keypad up to his face and studying the layout of the keys with minute care. “Eight if you count the hypothetical alien. It doesn’t sound too difficult—but I’ll be way too late to get much from the crime scene. Until I have the facts …”
“If the murderer is an alien,” Matthew observed, “I don’t suppose we’ll attempt to bring him to trial. The discovery would be far more momentous than any mere murder. The greatest discovery ever—and they seem almost determined not to make it. Maybe the crew don’t quite understand, but the people fresh from the freezer … I can’t understand their attitude at all.”
Solari obviously didn’t share Matthew’s wonderment. “Do you want to go on playing tourist flyby,” he asked, “or shall I try to find something more interesting?”
“Try to find something more interesting,” was Matthew’s vote. He had seen enough purple vegetation for the time being.
As yet, though, Solari wasn’t sufficiently familiar with the equipment to be able to exit from the image-catalog, and he stopped trying when the sequence moved on to animal life.
In the absence of any oral explanation it was difficult to determine the principles according to which the images had been filed and organized, but the first impression formulated in Matthew’s mind was that the new world was improbably rich in soft-bodied invertebrates. He couldn’t remember exactly what a murex looked like, but there was such a wealth of sluglike, clamlike and snaillike creatures among the images on the screen that he figured that there had to be a murex-analogue in there somewhere.
The worms were even more multitudinous, but worms were fundamentally boring, and Solari kept his thumb on the button that fast-forwarded through that section of the array before slowing down to take a closer look at various entities that seemed more interestingly chimerical.
“What’s that ?” Solari demanded, finally making use of his discovery of a pause function. He obviously thought that Matthew, being a biologist of sorts, ought to have been able to master the fundamental taxonomy of the local ecosphere by courtesy of the hectic sequence of glances he had laid on.
“I’ve no idea,” Matthew confessed. The creature in question looked like a cross between a giant liver fluke and
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