Dark Ararat (2 page)

Earthly scientific progress had, apparently, faltered slightly in the early twenty-second century, but had picked up pace again soon enough. Biotechnology and nanotechnology had made good on some—perhaps most—of their promises. The people of Earth had discovered the secret of emortality, and had reconfigured their society to accommodate emortality comfortably. All good news there. With what the people of Earth now knew at
Hope
’s disposal—and what was not yet at
Hope
’s disposal would surely be placed there once Earth’s reply to
Hope
’s announcement of her discovery arrived, 116 years down the line—the colonists of the New Earth would surely be able to build a New World fit for their own emortal children.

Surely? When presented with that judgment, Nita Brownell’s reply was a calculatedly moderate “probably,” which seemed so weak as to be little better than a “possibly.”

When asked how the doubt arose, Dr. Brownell procrastinated. Matters weren’t as simple as they might appear. Things were complicated. There would be time for explanations later.

There were hints to be gleaned, but it was difficult to judge their relevance.

The failure-rate of
Hope
’s SusAn systems—or, more accurately, the deep-frozen bags of flesh, blood, and mind they had contained for so long—had been slightly higher and slightly more complicated than had been hoped. Mortality, if strictly defined, had been less than one percent, but kick-starting brains sometimes failed to recover the whole person. About one in four awakeners exhibited some degree of memory-loss: hence the intensive interrogation to which Matthew and Vince Solari were currently being subjected.

The problem afflicting the majority, Nita Brownell told them in dribs and drabs, was restricted to the process by which short-term memory was converted into long-term. Most sufferers had lost less than a couple of days, only a handful more than a week. Most of the lost time could be deemed “irrelevant,” in that it consisted entirely of preparation for freezing down—hours of dull routine spent in the Spartan environment of Lagrange-5 or Mare Moscoviense—or in riding a shuttle to the far side of Earth’s orbit, depending on the timing of the person’s invitation to join the Chosen People. A minority, on the other hand, had lost more than that. Some of the full-scale amnesiacs had recovered all or part of themselves eventually, but some had not.

Matthew and Vince were apparently among the luckier ones—but when Matthew remembered the long, lucid dream he had had while his IT was preparing to wake him, he could not help but wonder whether it had been a close-run thing.

Mercifully, by the time Matthew had wrinkled and worked all this out, Dr. Brownell had established that if either he or Vince Solari had lost anything, it was a matter of hours—irrelevant hours, if any hours out of a human life could be reckoned irrelevant.

Compared with 700 years of downtime, Matthew thought, a few hours might indeed be reckoned irrelevant. He remembered saying
au revoir
to Alice and Michelle, and that was the important thing. With luck, they would remember saying
au revoir
to him, when their turn came to be reawakened.

Except that Nita Brownell hesitated for just a fraction of a second over the word
when
, and that fleeting moment of evident doubt cast a dark shadow over everything she said thereafter. The problems of awakening from SusAn were not the
real
problems; they were the problems Nita Brownell was using as a screen to hide the problems that would have to be explained at another time, preferably by someone else. She was a doctor, it was not her job, not her place….

It was too easy to be paranoid, Matthew told himself, as sternly as he could while he was still spaced out. He had come from a bad place, and he had had bad dreams, but he was a winner in the game. He had cast his lot with Shen Chin Che, and he had pulled out a major prize.

Earth had not died, but that did not mean that its people had had an easy ride in the wake of the Plague Wars. Earth, in the twenty-eighth century, had the secret of emortality, which the Earth he had left behind had not, so he might yet be a winner twice over, of a New World
and
a new life. Given that he had awakened from his long sleep with his memories intact, to find
Hope
in orbit around a life-bearing planet with a breathable atmosphere, what could possibly be wrong? What kind of worm could possibly have infected the bud of his future?

Eventually, Nita Brownell’s dogged interrogation stuttered to an end, and she left her patients to get acquainted with one another. Matthew knew, however, that she would return soon enough. When she returned, she would be more vulnerable to
his
questions.

“How do you feel?” Vince Solari asked him.

“All things considered, pretty well,” Matthew told him. “Tired and tranquilized.” Turning to face his companion was extraordinarily difficult, but he figured it was worth the effort, if only to say hello.

“When were you frozen down?” he asked.

“Fourteen,” Solari replied, presumably meaning 2114. “I was a late applicant. You were one of the first wave, I guess—the real Chosen People. I was only in my twenties when you went into the freezer, but I guess we’re the same age now, give or take a few months.”

“We might both get to be a lot older,” Matthew observed, remembering that the great pioneers of SusAn technology had encouraged its development in order that they might sleep until their fellows had invented an efficient technology of longevity, rather than for the purpose of traveling to the stars.

“Crazy, isn’t it?” Solari said. “You sleep for seven hundred years, you wake up tired. Tireder than when they put me to bed. Good to be back, though, isn’t it?”

“Very good,” Matthew confirmed. “But I was expecting a warmer welcome. My daughters are still in SusAn, apparently, but it’s been three years, and I had a lot of friends—acquaintances, anyway—in the first wave of volunteers. Why aren’t they here with flowers and champagne?”

“I expect they’re already down on the surface,” Solari said. “Apart from people with the doctor’s special expertise, there’d be no need for any of the colonists to remain on the ship for very long. The crew don’t seem to have done much with the decor while they’ve been in flight, do they?”

Matthew looked around again. The room that he and Solari were in was as narrow and Spartan as any Lagrange compartment, although there were slots in the wall from which chairs and tables could be folded out. The screens were still blank. There were a couple of VE-hoods mounted over their beds, with extendable keyboards as well as overcomplicated consoles whose layouts seemed disturbingly unfamiliar to Matthew’s roaming eye, but they were out of reach as yet. Their beds were surrounded by as much equipment as any man in fear of his life and sanity could ever have desired to see, but Matthew was already enthusiastic for release. He wanted to stand on his own two feet. He wanted to be able to shake Vince Solari by the hand and say: “We made it.” He wanted to jump, and walk, and maybe even dance. He wanted to see what was outside the door: what
Hope
had become, after 700 years of crew activity.

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

W
hen 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.