Dark Ararat

by Brian Stableford

  He took note of the fact that the ship must be spinning, albeit at a slightly slower velocity than he might have contrived had the choice been his. Everything obviously had weight, but maybe only three times as much weight as it would have had in Mare Moscoviense. It was difficult to be sure while he was still half-cocooned, but half Earth-gravity was the best estimate he could make.

  In theory, Matthew knew, his muscles should still be tuned for Earth gravity. The somatic modifications he had undergone, the special IT with which he had been fitted, and the rigorous exercise programs that he had followed since leaving the home-homeworld should have seen to that. He also knew, though, that he and Vince Solari would have to shuttle down to the new world in a matter of days if the low-weight environment wasn’t to begin taking a toll. Maybe that was why none of his old acquaintances was here: Hope was crew territory, save for specialisms the crew didn’t include, like Nita Brownell’s. Had the half-gravity always been part of Shen Chin Che’s plan? He couldn’t remember.

  In any case, he and Solari would presumably be turned over to a very different set of machines once they were allowed out of bed, to make sure that their muscles would be able to take the strain.

  Within himself, and apart from his paradoxical tiredness, Matthew felt pretty fit. Seven hundred years in SusAn hadn’t left him with any discernible weakness or nagging pain—or if it had, the machine-maintained sleep in which he’d dreamed of Earth’s destruction had seen him through it while his IT did its curative work.

  His dream of Earth’s destruction had, it seemed, been born of needless anxiety—but while Nita Brownell could hesitate over the when of his daughters’ reawakening, and could seem so anxious about matters she was not prepared to spell out, there was definitely cause for anxiety of another kind.

  TWO

  When Dr. Brownell came back the conversational tables were turned. Matthew had a good dozen questions ready. The doctor must have flagged him as the man more likely to ask awkward questions, though, because she went to Solari first and showed blatant prejudice in attending to what he had to say.

  It didn’t do her much good. Solari had his own questions ready, and they were awkward enough. What fraction of Hope’s human cargo had so far been defrosted? Less than a fifth, she admitted. Why so few, in three long years? Because further awakenings were only being initiated, for the time being, on the basis of urgent need.

  Curiouser and curiouser, Matthew thought.

  “What urgent need?” Vince Solari asked, grimly—wanting to know, of course, what urgent need had forced his own emergence.

  Perhaps it was the grimness of his tone that made Dr. Brownell repent of her earlier favoritism and turn to Matthew, or perhaps she felt that she had nowhere else to turn.

  “Dr. Delgado’s death,” she said, following her medically sanctioned policy of cutting every answer to the bone.

  That, Matthew remembered, was one of the things he had not been able to remember in his dream. The Chosen People had been appointed to the Arks in twos, for safety’s sake, and he had not been able to recall the name of his counterpart, his adopted twin.

  Bernal Delgado was the name he had not been able to pluck from the vault of memory: Bernal Delgado, expert in ecological genomics; Bernal Delgado, media celebrity and prophet; Bernal Delgado, long-term friend, rival, role model, and companion-in-arms to the slightly younger Matthew Fleury. Not that the mirror image had been perfect; there had also been Bernal Delgado, ladies’ man, who fancied himself the twenty-first century’s answer to Don Juan. Bernal Delgado was a single man, not a widowed father of two bright and beautiful daughters …

  Except that it wasn’t was but had been.

  Bernal Delgado, it appeared, was dead.

  “Bernal’s dead!” Matthew exclaimed, a little belatedly. It didn’t qualify as a question in Dr. Brownell’s opinion, and she was making herself busy in any case with the battery of machines that was still holding him captive, ignoring him as resolutely as she was now ignoring Vince Solari. Matthew had no alternative but to think the matter through himself.

  Bernal Delgado had died on the New World, on the peak of the other Ararat, before Matthew had had a chance to join him and shake his hand in joyous congratulation. He had died in sparse company, because new awakenings were only being initiated on the basis of “urgent need.” The colonization plan had stalled. Something was wrong with the Earth-clone world. There was a serpent in Eden. Matthew had been revived in order to take Bernal’s place. Why, then, had Vince Solari been yanked out of the freezer?

  “Are you an ecologist too?” Matthew asked his companion, dazedly.

  “No,” Solari told him, a trifle abstractedly, having been following his own train of thought. “I’m a policeman.”

  “A policeman?” Matthew echoed, taken completely by surprise. “Why should Bernal’s death create an urgent need for a policeman?” He had addressed the question to Nita Brownell, but she wasn’t in any hurry to answer it.

  “It wouldn’t,” Solari pointed out, having evidently given the question some consideration already. “Unless, of course, he was murdered. Was he murdered, Dr. Brownell?”

  “Yes,” she said, brusquely. “The captain will brief you, just as soon as …”

  She left the sentence dangling, trailing the implication that she had work to do, and that they would get their answers sooner if they let her do it. Her concern was their bodily welfare, not the reasons for their reawakening—but when she eventually left the room again it seemed to Matthew that she was running away, with her work not quite done.

  “Whatever the story is,” Matthew observed, “she’s embarrassed to tell us. She thinks we’re going to disapprove. However they’ve screwed up, they’re obviously self-conscious about it.”

  “The machines must have reassured her that we’re doing okay physically,” Solari said. “She already checked our memories. Maybe now she’ll let someone come in to tell us what’s gone wrong. Apart from Delgado being murdered, that is. Somehow, I get the feeling that that’s just the tip of the iceberg—if they have icebergs on. Did she mention the world’s name?”

  “No,” Matthew said. “She didn’t.”

  The door opened again. This time, it was a young man who stepped through.

  There had been nothing conspicuously out of the ordinary about Nita Brownell. She hadn’t looked a day over thirty, according to the “natural” standard that had already become obsolescent when the construction of Hope began, although she was actually in her mid-forties in terms of actively experienced time. Her appearance and her mannerisms had seemed familiar; the moment Matthew had set eyes on her he had made the assumption—without even bothering to think twice about it, that she was a well-educated, well-groomed twenty-first century utilitarian, crisis-modified version. Like Matthew, Nita Brownell had been playing Sleeping Beauty for centuries, for exactly the same reasons. She was an Earthwoman in strange surroundings, not an alien.

  The newcomer was different.

  The moment the newcomer met his eye, Matthew knew that the young man was space-born and ship-nurtured.

  The Ark could, in theory, have been navigated by its cleverest AIs, but Shen Chin Che and his fellow protégés of the New Noah would never have entertained the notion of putting Hope’s cargo in the care of Artificial Intelligences. Hope had always been intended to cross the gulf between the stars under the guidance and governance of a human crew: a crew whose members had had a life-expectancy of 120 years when Matthew had been frozen down. Perhaps they still had the same life-expectancy, but it was at least possible that they had been able to benefit from the great leap forward that Earth–based-longevity technologies had made after Hope had left the system. This youth—if the appearance that he was little more than a boy could be trusted—might be eighth- or tenth-generation crew, or maybe only third- or fourth-. He was thin and spare. His blue-gray uniform was a smart one-piece without much slack, but its lack of fashion-conscious shape contrived to make it look almost monasti
c. He moved like a creature long-used to low gravity, with a mannered grace that put Matthew in mind of a nimble but easygoing lemur, too laid back to have evolved into a fully-fledged monkey. His skin was papery pale, but not Caucasian off-white; it had a tint to it that was more green than brown or yellow. His eyes were green too, but far more vivid.

  The whole ensemble was unsettlingly unfamiliar, almost to the point of being alien, even though the only thing about him that looked wholly exotic was his feet.

  Matthew thought at first that the young man was barefoot, although he realized almost immediately that the smart clothing must extend over the youth’s feet, as it did over his hands and face, in a fashion so discreet that it had become a near-invisible second skin. The feet were decidedly odd; the toes were elongated, like fingers. Although the youth was standing quite still, the manner in which they were set upon the floor gave the impression that they were trained to grip, and perhaps to grapple.

  “Hi,” the newcomer said. “I’m Frans Leitz, crew medical orderly. I’m Dr. Brownell’s assistant. The captain has asked me to send you his compliments and welcome you back to consciousness. He’s anxious to see you as soon as you’re free of all this paraphernalia, and to tell you everything you need to know about the situation, but he’s asked me to answer any preliminary questions you might have. You’re Professor Fleury, I suppose? And you’re Detective Solari?”

  “I’m an inspector, not a detective,” Solari said. Matthew decided that it wasn’t worth the bother of trying to explain that he wasn’t, strictly speaking, a professor. Niceties of rank were Old World matters—except, perhaps, where the crew was concerned. The boy’s uniform bore no obvious insignia, but Matthew was certain that a medical orderly didn’t qualify as an officer. Had the captain really sent a glorified cabin boy to “answer any preliminary questions he and Solari might have,” Matthew wondered. If so, what did that say about the captain’s opinion of them, and of the urgent need that had occasioned their awakening? And what did it say about the captain’s attitude to Nita Brownell, who seemingly couldn’t be trusted to answer their questions herself? What had happened to drive a wedge between the crew and the reawakened Chosen People?

  “What’s the new world called?” Matthew asked, softly.

  “Well,” said the boy, amiably, “there’s a certain amount of disagreement about that, so it’s still under negotiation. Some members of the first landing party wanted to call it Hope, after the ship, but the crew mostly want to call it Ararat, in keeping with the Ark myth. Several other alternatives have been suggested by way of compromise—some favor New Earth, some Murex, some Tyre—but that’s only served to complicate the situation. Mostly, we call it the world, or the surface.”

  “Why Murex?” Solari wanted to know.

  “Because the vegetation is mostly purple,” Leitz replied. “All the grass and trees, almost all the animals … except that the trees aren’t really trees, and the animals aren’t really animals, and the giant grass is made of glass. You’ll be briefed on all of that by our senior genomicist, of course, Professor Fleury. It’ll be a lot to take in, and it all sounds pretty weird to me, but you’re a biologist, so you’ll get the hang of it soon enough.”

  “Start off,” Matthew said. “If you’re the doctor’s assistant, you must know some biology.”

  The boy blushed slightly, although the color of his skin made the blush seem more gray than pink. It took him a couple of seconds to decide that he couldn’t play too dumb.

  “The panspermists and the chemical convergence theorists were wrong, it seems,” he said. “Evolution here and on the orphan followed distinct and different paths. DNA isn’t universal. Nor is chlorophyll, obviously, or the world wouldn’t be purple. The surface looks pretty enough in pictures, but the people on the ground say that it’s rather disturbing up close.”

  “What orphan?” Solari put in, while Matthew was still working out how to phrase a more pertinent question.

  “A sunless but life-bearing world we bypassed in interstellar space. It was long before my time, but it’s all on record, including the genomic analyses. It was a sludgeworld—nothing bigger than a bacterium. There are others, apparently, able to support life because their internal heat and thick atmospheres keep the surfaces warm and wet. Lots of probes came this way after us, all traveling faster—it’s easier to accelerate when you’re small—and we’ve harvested a lot of information from them. There’s nothing else like this world, though—not yet. It’s the one-and-only Earth-clone, for the time being. It’s not just your world. So far as everyone here is concerned, it really is the world.”

  “Long before your time,” Matthew echoed, anxious to stake a conversational claim before Solari asked another question. “I presume that means you’re as young as you look. Dr. Brownell said that the people back on Earth are emortal now—does that apply to the crew too? Do you have the means to modify us?”

  “It’s not as simple as that,” Leitz countered. “Yes, I’m as young as I look—nineteen. No, I’m not emortal, and never will be. True emortality has to be built in from scratch by genetic engineering of a fertilized egg-cell. Our rejuve technologies have improved a little since we left Earth, but we haven’t been able to develop our nanotech nearly as rapidly as the folks back home. I can’t tell you how long you or I will live, barring accidents, because I don’t know how much we’ll benefit from further progress, but two hundred years is generally reckoned to be a fair guess. By Earthly standards, we’re primitives. On Earth, survivors of the Old Human Race are freaks.”

  “What happened to Bernal Delgado?” Solari asked, presumably feeling that theoretical issues could safely be left to one side until more practical issues had been addressed. “Who killed him?”

  The youth’s eyes swiveled away from Matthew to meet the detective’s. Matthew was slightly surprised to find himself relieved: the green gaze had been slightly disconcerting, although it had seemed guileless enough.

  “We’re hoping that you can find that out,” Leitz told Solari. “It looks as if he was killed by aborigines—”

  “The world’s inhabited?” Matthew interrupted—but Leitz continued looking at Solari.

  “But it can’t be the way it looks, because all the evidence says that the aborigines are extinct. Which probably means that it was set up to look like Delgado was killed by aborigines, maybe just to deflect attention away from whoever did kill him, but maybe to persuade people that the aborigines aren’t extinct at all. That would change things, you see, and it might not take more than a few votes swung from one side to the other to create a new majority among the groundlings. If they were all to get behind a formal request for a withdrawal, that could cause real problems for the captain … and for everyone else.”

  Matthew could see that Vince Solari was just as astonished by this puzzling flood of information as he was. The detective had no immediate follow-up ready, so Matthew was able to step into the breach again. “Are you telling us,” he said, slowly, “that after seven hundred years, we’ve arrived at the only Earth-clone world that any of Earth’s probes has so far managed to locate, but that the colonists you’ve so far managed to land are split right down the middle as to whether or not they want to pull out?”

  Frans Leitz shrugged his bony shoulders. “It seems crazy to nearly everyone up here,” he admitted. “But yes, there are a lot of people on the ground who want out, for one reason or another. Mostly, they don’t think the world is anywhere near Earthlike enough. Some are scared because the local humanoids have become extinct—others are worried that if the aborigines aren’t quite extinct, our arrival will tip them over the edge. The bioscientists can’t seem to agree about what will happen to the local ecosphere if we establish a colony here … or, for that matter, to the ecosystems we introduce. This may not be a sludgeworld, some say, but it’s a real can of worms. It’s not easy for me to judge, being ship-born and ship-committed. I’m crew—my future’s here no matter what”

  “And what abo
ut Shen Chin Che?” Matthew wanted to know. “What does he think?”

  The boy’s face had been quite relaxed before, but it became suddenly taut now, and there was a flash of wildness in those eerie eyes. “I don’t know,” he said, guardedly. “He’s not involved in the discussion.”

  “Is that because you haven’t woken him up?” Matthew was quick to ask.

  “No,” the boy said. “It’s a bit more complicated than that.”

  Matthew had already opened his mouth to ask another question before he realized—belatedly, it seemed—that he might already have asked at least one too many. Frans Leitz might be just a glorified cabin boy, and Nita Brownell a bona fide doctor with a businesslike bedside manner, but that didn’t mean that every word that he and Vincent Solari spoke wasn’t being overheard elsewhere in the ship, and very carefully studied. Matthew had no idea what side he was likely to be on in the ongoing dispute, because he had only just realized that there were any sides, but now he knew that there were, he wondered whether he ought to be careful. Newly hatched into a situation that obviously wasn’t as simple as it ought to be, he might need to get his bearings before showing his hand to interested parties.

  He had been awakened, it seemed, to replace the other member of his pair, who had been murdered. However the land lay down on “the surface,” this was a matter of life and death.

  It had always been a matter of life and death, from the very first moment he had exchanged polite bows with Shen Chin Che, but Matthew knew that he must not lose sight now of the fact that within the larger matters of life and death—upon which hung the fate of worlds—there were tangled threads upon which his own life dangled. It was not impossible that whoever had wanted Bernal dead might want him dead too—and until he knew why Bernal had been killed, it might be as well to be careful.

  “I think we need to see the captain as soon as possible,” Matthew said to Frans Leitz. “In fact, I can’t help wondering why he sent you to talk to us, instead of coming himself.”