“It’s hard to tell,” she said. “Everything you know about genomics is DNA, so it’s difficult for you to imagine how things might develop when there’s another player on the pitch. Everything I know about cultures and civilizations involves fire-users, so figuring out the social evolution of nonusers is trying to see into the darkness in more ways than one. It’s such a simple thing, but if you remove it from the equation you have to use a whole new arithmetic.”

Her choice of analogies struck a chord, and Matthew couldn’t help feeling an intellectual kinship that he hadn’t felt before, when the situation had been far more awkward.

“That’s right,” he said. “Exactly right. We haven’t yet begun to see the possibilities. But it’s a beautiful place, don’t you think? There’s an aesthetic resonance. And those fugitive eyes—the fact that it’s so difficult to make out the lines of the bodies in which they’re set makes them stand out so much more. Maybe they think our glorious pea-green boat is the loveliest thing they’ve ever seen.”

“Maybe,” she echoed, skeptically—but she smiled. It was the first time Matthew had seen her smile.

TWENTY-SEVEN

Dusk lived up to its promise; as soon as the sun had disappeared from view and the sky’s color had darkened to indigo the activity in and beside the river increased markedly. The boat was sliding smoothly through water so calm that every ripple seemed to be narcotized. Now was the time that the surface-feeders drifted up from the muddy bed of the watercourse, and it was easy enough for Matthew to see why.

Now that the sun was no longer tinting the surface gold and silver he observed that there was a definite film upon it: an organic slick fed by detritus dislodged from the surrounding vegetation. The film was somewhat reminiscent of an oil slick, save for the fact that it was swarming with tiny creatures. Those which Matthew could make out were mostly wormlike, but there were others like tiny jellyfish and transparent brittle stars. He did not doubt that there must be many more too small for their shapes to be discernible by the naked eye.

It was on this seething mass that the larger creatures came to feed: massive eel-like monsters as thick as his arm and half again as long; ciliated wheels as big as the palm of his hand that spun with remarkable rapidity; tangled masses of avid tentacles; aquatic lizard-analogues like miniature crocodiles. Occasionally he saw ripples that suggested the presence of something even more massive, but he never caught more than a glimpse of an oval hump or a diaphanous fluke. The show was entrancing—so much so that Matthew could hardly spare more than an occasional glance for the vegetation clustered on the banks, which was now too distant to allow him to make out the multitudinous prying eyes. Occasionally there would be a flurry of movement and a dull clatter that testified to the swift movement of some creature at least half as big as a man, but the shadows were now so dense and so complex that he had no chance of divining its shape or even its position with any accuracy.

Matthew was tempted to put his hand over the side in order to scoop up a few of the organisms he could see, in order that he might see them more clearly, but Lynn Gwyer had taken care to warn him that the danger of being stung was too great. She had not told him exactly what kinds of organisms might do him harm, probably because no one had taken a sufficiently thorough census, but he leapt easily enough to the conclusion that the creatures that looked like bundles of tentacles detached from the back of a “killer anemone” were prime suspects. If they were, he thought, that might be a good reason to suppose that the tentacles carried by the giant flatworms were used for offense as well as defense. It might also be grounds for suspecting that the flatworms thus armed had begun their evolutionary careers as arbitrary chimeras, although their genomes had subsequently been rationalized by natural selection to the point at which the cells making up the stinger-bundles were genetically indistinguishable from those making up the remainder of the body.

The idea suddenly occurred to Matthew that it mightbe the other way around. Habit had made him think of chimerization as a process of fusion: the bringing together of disparate elements into a new whole—but it was a potentiality that might work both ways. Perhaps the complex creature resembled the ancestor of the simpler ones, and the tentacular bundles were “organs” that had been enabled to make a bid for functional independence by the peculiar and as-yet-enigmatic reproductive mechanisms employed by Tyrian life.

Alas, the twilight did not last for long. Tyre was an orderly world where the transition between light and darkness was relatively smooth. As the face of the river faded into gloom Matthew lifted his head to look up into the sky.

This was the first wholly clear night he had experienced since shuttling down, and the sight of the stars was breathtaking.

He had looked at the stars from the surface of the moon, as everyone in transit through its sublunar habitats took the trouble to do at least once, and he had been suitably impressed by the extreme contrast between the airless lunar sky and the dense, moisture-laden, light-polluted skies of Earth. But the lunar sky had to be viewed through a lens of glass or clear plastic, and no matter how cunningly the windows in question were contrived they were always reminiscent of screens, and of the kinds of optical illusion that granted depth to virtual environments. Even the Earthbound could look at naked skies in VE, and marvel at the awesome density of visible stars, but everyone knew that VEs were fake and everyone knew how to detect the fakery if they wanted to revoke the suspension of their disbelief. For that reason, there always seemed to be something slightly suspicious about the view from a lunar window: the impression that it might be mere artifice was hard to shake off. Here, there was no such problem.

Here, Matthew was blanketed by an atmosphere of approximately the same thickness as Earth’s, equally confused by water vapor and other natural contaminants, but the light-pollution was insignificant. These stars stood out more clearly and more profusely than any other stars he had ever looked at directly, and the sensation was so dizzying that he could almost have believed that he could reach out and draw his fingers through them, as if they were silver sand on an infinite shore.

He knew that if he only looked closely enough, in the right directions, he would be able to make out at least some of the constellations that the ancient astronomers of Earth had defined, no more than slightly tattered by three-dimensional displacement, but that was exactly what he did not want to do. He wanted to appreciate the novelty and the strangeness of the sky. He wanted to make himself as acutely aware as he could be of the fact that this was an alien atmosphere he was breathing, and that this was an alien river whose patient course he was following.

He was fifty-eight light-years from Earth, and this was a different starscape. He wanted to soak up the sensation of that difference. He wanted to savor the miracle that had brought him here, and set him down, able to draw sweet air into his lungs and drink the water of another world, and marvel at the mysteries of an alien ecology.

We canlive here, he thought. Blackstone is right and Tang Dinh Quan is wrong. We can stand beneath the vault of this new firmament, and walk and weep and build and dig, as if this were a land promised to us by the unwritten covenant of destiny. We belong here, as we belong everywhere. We are not strangers in the universe, and Earth is not our ghetto. We are free, and we are welcome. Mortal we may be, barbarian too, but we are not bound to any mere patch of mud or cultivated plot. We are here, and we are here to stay. All that remains to be settled is a mere matter of timing, a matter of the eagerness of the embrace by which we take this world to our bosom and commit ourselves to its nurture. Blackstone is right and Shen Chin Che was right, and every one of the self-selected Chosen was right to seize the opportunity of Hope. We can do this. That is what this river journey will prove to us: that we can do what we must and be what we are, without fear and without shame.