“Don’t try that distraction crap with me, Matt,” the policeman came back. “I thought you and I were becoming friends. Please don’t start giving me the same runaround as these clowns.”

“It must be hard to run a good cop–bad cop routine all on your own,” Matthew observed, drily.

Solari seemed genuinely disappointed by that response—but that was his job. “Look, Matt,” he said, earnestly, “neither of us knows how important this impending vote has come to seem to the people who’ve been down here for three years. Neither of us knows how deep anyone’s paranoia cuts, or how weirdly it’s con-figured. But if the planet were really inhabited, by an intelligent species on the ecological brink, that might seem to some people to be a powerful reason for letting it alone, don’t you think? Given that we all signed up for this mission because our own species was on the brink, facing what looked like a terminal ecocatastrophe, don’t you think that some people here might have powerful conscientious objections to the possibility of precipitating an ecological crisis here that might condemn another species—a brotherspecies—to extinction?”

Matthew already knew that Solari was no fool, and he knew that Solari was absolutely right to say that no one who had only been awake for a matter of days could possibly comprehend the complexity of the evolving situation into which they’d both been precipitated—but Bernal Delgado had been his colleague, his rival, his collaborator, his fellow prophet, his mirror image in all but private and personal matters. Matthew could not imagine any circumstances in which hemight be led to commit the kind of betrayal that Solari had imagined, so he was extremely reluctant to accept that Bernal might have been led to it. But to what hypothetical extreme would he have to go in order to construct a story that could conserve Bernal’s innocence?

Could the evidence Solari had found so very easily, as soon as he began to look, have been faked, just like the arrowheads themselves? Could the conspiracy of which the murder was a part be far more complicated than Solari was yet prepared to suspect? How complicated could this mystery be? Was it not far too complicated already?

“They could have been planted,” he said to Solari, although he knew exactly how desperate the suggestion was. “Given that we all wear heavy-duty smartsuits, you can’t have much in the way of forensic evidence. Maybe this whole setup is fake—rotten through and through. Maybe the bubble’s logs have been altered too.”

“So who didfake it all?” Solari countered, plainly exasperated. “Why? Which of the seven had the motive, the time, the skill to do the murder andthe cover-up? Come on, Matt. We have to do better than that.”

“I don’t know,” Matthew said, helplessly, knowing that if he had to stay ahead of the game he had to improvise something much better. “What I want to think is that Bernal really did findthe artifacts, that they really are evidence of the continued existence of the indigenes … but that someone didn’t want him to reveal that fact. Maybe the artifacts arereal. That’s another thing neither of us is competent to judge.”

“Unfortunately,” Solari observed, drily, “it’s difficult to think of anyone who is. But it still won’t wash. If they really were made by aliens, Delgado would have shouted the news from the rooftops the moment it broke. Nobody could have imagined, even for a moment, that they could keep it quiet—and if they had they certainly wouldn’t have used one of the alien artifacts to commit the murder while they had a perfectly good stainless steel knife in their belt, would they?”

Matthew had to concede that it was all true. He was thoroughly ashamed of himself. He had always thought of himself as an unusually accomplished improviser, especially under pressure. He knew that he ought to be able to make up a better story, even if he couldn’t actually intuit the truth. He was recently arrived on an alien world, exhausted and ill-fed, but none of those circumstances constituted an acceptable excuse.

“I’ll work it out,” he told Solari, grimly. “I promise you that. I’ll work it allout. Every last piece of every last puzzle. I’m Bernal’s replacement as well as his friend. It’s up to me to carry through his plan, whatever it was, and that’s what I intend to do. You can spread that around if you like, on the off chance that it will make the murderer take a pop at me. But either way, I’m going to sort this mess out. Properly.”

Solari finally cracked a smile. “That’s what I wanted, Matt,” he said, softly. “Just be sure you let me in on it first, okay?”

TWENTY-THREE

When Matthew and Solari returned to the bubble Solari decided that the time had come to interview Maryanne Hyder about Delgado’s murder. Matthew decided, for his part, that it was time to confront Tang Dinh Quan.

The biochemist was in his laboratory, patiently monitoring the results on an electrophoretic analysis. The robot-seeded slides were so small that he had to use a light microscope to read the results. The shelves to either side of him were full of jars containing preserved specimens of tissues and whole organisms—mostly worms of various kinds—but pride of place on his largest work-surface was given to the massive biocontainment cell into which he had decanted the tentacled slug that Blackstone had brought in that morning. The interior of the cell was fitted with robot hands that Tang could use to manipulate the specimen, administer injections, and take tissue samples, but the slug seemed perfectly serene and relaxed. It was easy to imagine that its tiny eyespots were focused on its tormentor, while its distributed nervous system contemplated revenge for all the indignities he might care to heap up on it.

Matthew knew that Tang was one of numerous surface-based scientists working on the proteomics that would eventually supplement the genomic analyses carried out by Andrei Lityansky’s counterparts at Bases One and Two. Proteomic analyses had never acquired the same glamor as the genomic analyses upon which they were usually considered to be parasitic, but biochemists tended to regard theirs as the real work. Hunting and sequencing exons was a fully automated procedure, while the patient work of figuring out exactly what the proteins the exons produced actually did, in the context of a functioning physiology, required a talent for collation and cross-correlation that even the cleverest AIs had not yet mastered.

Forearmed by Lityansky, Matthew already knew that the proteomics of the complex organisms of the Tyrian ecosphere was likely to be just as convoluted as the proteomics of Earth’s “higher” organisms. On both worlds the genomes of the most sophisticated organisms had accumulated many idiosyncrasies as the improvisations of natural selection had built more potential into them. But Ararat-Tyre had an extra complication: the supplementary genome that might or might not be an independent homeobox.

“Is there anything new that I need to know about?” Matthew asked, figuring that it would be better to begin on a thoroughly professional basis.

Mercifully, Tang wasn’t the kind of man to quibble about the meaning of need. He was ready to share his discoveries with all apparent frankness.

“My colleagues at Base One are beginning to make progress with their analyses of the cellular metabolism of a wide range of plants and animals,” he said. “As you’d expect from the fundamentals, many of the functional proteins made by the nucleic acid analogue are very similar to those made by DNA. The functions of the second coding-molecule are much more arcane. There are no earthly analogues for the relatively few molecules we’ve so far identified as products of that system, all of which are protein-lipid hybrids. Until we can establish an artificial production system it will be difficult to test the hypothesis that its functions are mainly homeotic, but we have found that high concentrations of key hybrid compounds are associated with growth. Thisspecimen may be very useful to us in that respect; now that I know what to look for I may be able to confirm that its exceptional size is correlated with unusual activity of the second replicator. If I can prove that the slugs can alter their size in response to environmental circumstance, and that growth isn’t an ongoing, unidirectional process, it will be the first step in establishing a key difference between Tyrian and Earthly organisms. Proving that they’re emortal will be harder, and testing the limits of their metamorphic potential harder still, but it isa start. We know now that the apparent similarities between Tyrian animals and their Earthly analogues conceals radical differences, and that the entire ecosphere is far more alien than it seemed at first.”