“Congratulations,” he said to her, when they were done. “I think you’ve cracked the problem. What this colony needs more than anything else, at this stage of its history, is a Brillat-Savarin. At the end of the day, there’s nothing like a pleasant taste to create a sense of welcome. Hopecould do with a good chef or two—soon put an end to all that revolutionary nonsense.”
“I’m an anthropologist,” she reminded him. “Cooking is the foundation stone of all human culture, the first of the two primary biotechnologies. Unfortunately, that might be exactly why my talents will be wasted if we do make contact with intelligent aborigines. Whatever the fundamental pillars supporting theircultures are, they can’t include cooking. Clothing maybe, but not cooking.”
“I’d have thought that the probable absence of sex was a far more radical alienation,” Lynn Gwyer put in, trying to turn the joke into something more serious. “People get a little carried away with this primary biotechnology stuff, in my opinion. The real foundations of human society lie in parental strategies for the care and protection of children. Families, marriage ceremonies, incest taboos: the whole business of the determination and regulation of sexual relationships. Take away that—as we may have to—and the fact that they don’t cookbegins to seem utterly trivial.”
Matthew expected Dulcie to dismiss the objection with a gentle reminder that she had not been serious, but that wasn’t what happened. Instead, Dulcie said, with sudden deadly earnest: “You’re wrong, Lynn. That’s nature, not culture. All animals regulate their sexual relationships according to their sociobiology, and that kind of regulation is mostly hardwired. What culture adds to it is ritual dressing, and all ritual is based in primal technology. In humans, culture takes over from nature at the Promethean moment when fire ceases to be a natural phenomenon and comes under technical and cultural control.”
If anything, the anthropologist’s intensity increased as she continued: “Matthew’s right—probably righter than he imagines. What we need before we can feel at home here is better cooks, and it might well prove that the best route to a recovery of the crew’s loyalty to the mission is through their stomachs. And what we’ll probably need if we’re ever to make common cause with the humanoids, if they exist, is a way to sit down with them, and break bread together, and share the delights of fire. At the end of the day, no matter how you ritualize it, sex divides, because that’s its nature. Cooking unites, because cooking makes relationships palatable. Sex couldn’t be the basis of human society, because it was the chief problem society had to overcome. The strategies of that problem’s solution had to begin elsewhere: in the primal biotechnologies and the rituals they facilitated.”
Lynn was taken aback momentarily, but she was quick to smile. “Fifty-eight light-years and seven centuries,” she said, amiably, “and it’s still the same old thing. Nature versus nurture, biologists versus human scientists. Makes you feel quite at home, doesn’t it? And isn’t that what we all want? To feel at home here.”
“If we can,” Ike reminded her. “Home is where, when you go there, they have to let you in—but there’ll always be places where they simply won’t, no matter how hard you try. The universe might be full of them. We just don’t know.”
“True,” Matthew said. “But at least it’s us who get to knock on the door and find out. Who among us would prefer to leave the job to someone else?”
He was glad to see that none of his companions was prepared to raise her—or even his—hand in response to that invitation.
THIRTY
The cliff beside the cataract was more than thirty meters high. On the left bank, where Voconia’s motley crew had moored the boat fifty meters short of the falls, the cliff was sheer, falling away no more than a couple of degrees from the vertical. When he first stepped back onto solid ground, however, the configuration of the cliff was the least of Matthew’s concerns. He wanted to look out over the mysterious signal-blocking canopy of the “glasslands”: at the densely packed grasslike structures whose seemingly anomalous dimensions would reduce him yet again to the imaginary status of an elfin spider-rider adrift in a microcosmic wonderland.
From the cliff’s edge, alas, it was impossible to see much more than he had already seen in mute pictures collected by flying eyes. He was too high up, as yet, to be anything other than a remote observer, from whose vantage the canopy proper resembled a vast petrified ocean, littered with all manner of strange flotsam. Its true extent was undoubtedly awesome, but the Tyrian horizon seemed no less and no more distant than an Earthly horizon, and the restriction of his vision by that natural range seemed rather niggardly. The real revelation would not come, he knew, until he was down there, looking up at the canopy from within; that was the sight that Hope’s insectile flying eyes had so far been unable to capture. He was pleased to see that the fringe vegetation rimming the river and the fault extended for no more than fifty yards before mingling with the “grasses” and no more than a hundred before giving way entirely to the seeming monoculture.
The other side of the river looked more user-friendly to Matthew than the one on which they had stopped, because it had a slope so gentle that he could imagine himself stumbling down it, even with an injured right arm. If they had moored on that side, though, they would have had to carry the dismantled boat and all its cargo by hand, making trip after trip after trip. On the left bank there was plenty of space to erect a winch, from which a generous basket could be lowered on a cable to arrive on a relatively flat apron of rock beside the capacious pool into which the waters of the river tumbled.
“It’s not much of a target,” Matthew complained to Lynn Gwyer. “The water might look fairly placid on top, but that’s an illusion. The edge will be too close for comfort once you start unloading, let alone when the time comes to start putting Humpty- Voconiatogether again. The bushes down there might look unintimidating by comparison with the giant grasses but they’ll be a lot tougher at close range than they look—and the empire of the giant grasses begins less than thirty strides away. From up here the whole thing looks like a calm ocean, rippling gently in a benign wind, but it’ll look very different at close range, once we’re under the canopy.”
“It’ll be okay,” Lynn assured him. “The target’s small enough, admittedly, but the laden basket won’t swing much, and we’ll use the chain saws to clear a much bigger working space. Even if they’re the kind of bushes that the humanoids used to make tools from, the saw blades will cut through them easily enough, shattering anything that won’t shear. It’ll be a fair amount of work for a party of three, but we’ve got all day. You wouldn’t have been able to do as much as the rest of us anyway, even if you hadn’t hurt your arm. You’re not fully acclimatized yet.”
“If I had been,” Matthew muttered, “I might not have dislocated my shoulder in the first place.”
There was, as Lynn had observed, a lotof work for a party of three. Matthew did his utmost to make himself useful, and bitterly regretted it when it became painfully obvious that he was neither as strong nor as skilful as the least of his three companions. He quickly became tired, and his arm would have been agonized if his IT had not muffled the pain—but the IT was too dutiful to allow him to do further damage by insulating him from the consequences of reckless action, so it began to let the distress signals through as soon as the damaged tendons and ligaments provided it with evidence of further strain. Long before midday, therefore, Matthew was relegated to the humblest task available: working the electric motor that controlled the winch. Ike, Lynn, and Dulcie did the lion’s share of the unloading, then carried the bulk of the cargo to the cliff’s edge. Ike was the one delegated to establish a more generous bridgehead down below while Dulcie and Lynn—who knew exactly what they were doing—set about the delicate work of taking the boat itself to pieces.