Dark Ararat (3 page)

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 monastic. 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
un
familiar, 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 about 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.”

“The captain is just as anxious to see you as you are to see him, professor,” the young man replied, blithely ignoring the second part of the statement. “He’ll send for you as soon as Dr. Brownell has made perfectly certain that you’re fit and well. Now, can I get you anything before I go?”

“You could turn the TV on,” Matthew said. “I’d like to catch the next news bulletin.”

“We don’t have broadcast TV,” the youth informed him. “The captain broadcasts occasionally, but we don’t need routine news bulletins. Everybody knows everybody. All we have to do is talk to one another.”

“What about the people on the ground?” Matthew asked.

“They make their reports, of course. They all have beltphones, just like on Earth. We’ve established a chain of comsats. But Base One doesn’t have broadcast TV either. There’s no need. We have VE-hoods for entertainment. I’m sorry—I hear that you used to be on TV a lot, on Earth.”

The youth said it as if he were trying to frame a compliment, but Matthew couldn’t hear it as one. He might have been slightly flattered to think that his reputation had preceded him, even at this distance from Earth and the twenty-first century, but his mind was elsewhere. To him, not having broadcast TV—not even having
news
—seemed a far more significant symptom of a breakdown in communication than the fact that the doctor was reluctant to talk to him and that a cabin boy had been sent to answer his immediate questions.

“Things have gone wrong, haven’t they,” he murmured. “Badly wrong.”

Frans Leitz blushed again, but the blush seemed as odd and unhealthy as its predecessor. “No,” he said. “Not really. Not yet. But they might, if the people on the surface can’t see sense. Everything depends on them—on their willingness to do what they came to do.”

“After seven hundred years of SusAn, they’re not sure whether they’re willing to do what they risked
everything
to do? Surely you mean their
ability
to do it?”

“Well, that’s what they say, of course,” the young crewman replied, ingenuously. “But it’s only a matter of determination. It
is
an Earth-clone world, even though it’s a little peculiar. Maybe you’ll be able to make them see that, Professor Fleury. We certainly have an urgent need for somebody who can.”

THREE

M
atthew was enthusiastic to try out his legs, but Nita Brownell seemed to be in no hurry to complete the disconnection process and let him get out of bed. Frans Leitz helped her, with an easy alacrity. The fact that the young man had obviously been trained to operate as a medical orderly made Matthew feel slightly guilty about continuing to think of him as a “cabin boy” but it didn’t stop him doing it.