Dark Ararat (4 page)

The moment he was released from the machines Matthew tried to spring into action, but immediately realized that his mental tiredness was a symptom of a general physical weakness. It was astonishingly difficult to sit up, let alone to step down to the floor.

When Matthew expressed surprise at his weakness, Nita Brownell—who was perfectly willing to be loquacious about purely medical matters—explained that the vitrifying agent that had protected his cells from damage while he was frozen down had only been able to preserve the basic structures. Many of the proteins involved in routine cell metabolism had suffered degradation, and had therefore required replacement. Unfortunately, the messenger-RNA system for transcribing exons from nuclear DNA and establishing templates in the cytoplasm had also been partly disabled, and was not yet fully restored.

“You must have been warned before going into SusAn that we couldn’t just defrost you,” she told him sternly, as if it were his fault that he had not remembered that particular item of information. “We had to give your cells time to get their internal acts together, and then restore function to your tissues. Even with IT support, it’s been a slow process. The machines kept you asleep as long as possible, but the final phases of the tune-up have to be completed while you’re alert and active. You’ll feel a lot better in a few hours, and you’ll probably be able to leave the room this time tomorrow. You’ll be shuttling down as soon as possible—within fifty hours, if all goes well.”

“Fifty hours!” Matthew exclaimed.

“Sorry,” the doctor said. “That’s ship hours. Five days, in the old reckoning.”

Five days still sounded a trifle hurried to Matthew, although he knew that if he’d been kept aboard ship for an extended period he would soon have become impatient. It was difficult to believe the reassurance that he’d be back to his old self within five days when the effort of standing up seemed so extreme, and the prospect of taking a step almost impossible, but once he’d actually contrived a step and had found it merely uncomfortable, he buckled down to the serious business of reminding his body what human existence was like.

For the first couple of hours of relative freedom, Matthew and Vince Solari were too wrapped up in what was happening to them to pester their helpers with awkward questions about the situation aboard ship, but the easing of their concerted interrogative pressure didn’t seem to lighten the minds of their coy informants; everything either of them said or did seemed to touch slightly raw nerves.

Given that the ship’s spin was only simulating half Earth’s gravity, Matthew was not surprised to find that once his muscles had got the hang of working again they soon began to feel quite powerful. Unfortunately, learning to move about efficiently and economically in the unfamiliar gravity-regime was frustratingly difficult. His memories seemed to be virtually unaffected by their long storage, so the exercises and tricks he had learned as he passed from Earth to the moon, and then to remoter parts of the system, were still fresh in his mind. Unfortunately, his body had spent forty years adapting to Earth and a mere matter of months in variable low-gee. All the old expectations were still built in.

“Don’t worry about it,” Nita Brownell advised him, while she studied the manner of his blundering with a connoisseur’s eye. “It doesn’t matter if you’re awkward and clumsy up here—in fact, it’s better that you don’t have time to begin getting settled. The real task ahead of you is adaptation to the surface. That’s oh point ninety-two Earth-gravity, but you’ll find that oh point oh-eight makes more difference than you’d imagine.”

“If it’s oh point ninety-two Earth-normal down on the surface,” Matthew growled, “wouldn’t it make more sense to simulate oh point ninety-two up here?”

“Well, yes it would,” said Nita Brownell, cautiously—but she was immediately interrupted by Frans Leitz.

“This is crew territory,” Leitz said, brusquely. “It’s adapted to our requirements. It’s always been this way, and there’s no reason to change.”

“
Your
requirements,” Matthew repeated. “
Yours
, as opposed to
ours
. Since when did
you
and
we
become opposed sides, with contrasted interests?”

He realized as he framed the words that it was a stupid question. Since when? Since the twenty-first century, obviously. The corpsicles’ yesterday, the crew’s ancient history. A lot could happen in 700 years, even in a mini-ecosphere set to maintain itself far more rigidly than Mama Gaea. The crew had obviously developed ideas of their own as to what their purpose and destiny ought to be. But how, exactly, had they brought them into conflict with the colonists whose needs they had been put aboard to serve? From what he had been told so far, it was the colonists, not the crew, who were having doubts about their role.

Nita Brownell had already reverted to what she obviously considered safer ground. “As soon as you go on to autopilot on the surface,” she was saying, “the old reflexes will come into play, and you’ll find that you’re just that little bit out of step. You’ll need to take the adaptation process seriously. Do your exercises. Play some ball games, if you can, and don’t get too frustrated by your initial inability to judge a catch or a throw. It’ll take weeks, at least, maybe months. Longer than you think, at any rate. The lingering impression of being in the wrong place will sink to a subliminal level, but someone of your age could easily be troubled for
years
. We think that’s one of the major reasons for …”

She paused, the momentum of her discourse having carried her away from the safe ground to which she had resolved to stick.

“For what?” Solari prompted.

She took up the sentence readily enough, if a trifle guardedly. “For the sense of unease and disorientation that seems to have taken near-permanent hold of many of the surface-dwellers,” she said.

“Near-permanent?” Matthew queried.

“We believe that it will wear off eventually,” she insisted, before hurling herself back into her work with a concentration that excluded further inquiry. Matthew wondered whether she really counted herself part of that particular
we
.

Dr. Brownell had seemed relentless in her pursuit of possible gaps in their memories and possible failings of intellectual ability, but that had not been her primary field of expertise. Now that she was checking on the efficiency of their organs and metabolic pathways she had stepped up another gear. She had been bare-headed before but she was wearing a tiara now with side-lenses placed at the edges of her peripheral vision, and her eyes were constantly flicking back and forth as they read the data transmitted to the tiny screens. Some of it was reportage of tests carried out elsewhere, on samples extracted from the newly defrosted bodies, but most was the result of “live” transmission from the cleverer elements of their Internal Technology as they put the various parts of their bodies through a battery of tests.

“There’s a certain amount of peripheral cell-failure in most of your tissues,” she told them both, when they collapsed back on to their beds, their tiredness transformed to utter exhaustion, “but you’ve both been lucky. Because the vitrification and cooling processes proceeded unevenly, and there was a similar unevenness in their undoing, there’s always a slight problem at every tissue-boundary, especially where the cells are unalike, but neither of you has suffered unusually heavy losses anywhere. Vincent’s worst problems are in the dermal layers, while Matthew’s are the shrouds of the long bones, but both deficits should be fully remedied in a matter of days.

“Your alimentary canals and kidneys will take longer to make up the shortfall and flush out the debris, so you might both have some slight trouble with your digestive systems. I won’t program your IT to blot out the discomfort because I may need all the warning signs I can get. Don’t get paranoid about slight bellyaches, but if there’s any sign of allergic reactions of any kind let me know
immediately
. The tailors are already at work on your surface suits. We won’t be fitting them today but they’ll have to be well grown-in before you’re ready to shuttle down. This part of the ship is supposedly an ultrasafe environment, so we won’t be issuing you with specialized ship suits at all—but when I say
supposedly
I mean that we can’t be absolutely certain, so it might not be wise to go wandering around, and certainly not without a guide.”

“What’s wrong with the other parts of the ship?” Solari wanted to know.

Again, it was Leitz who answered what appeared to be a ticklish question. “We’ve suffered some systems failures,” he said. “Their effects are variable, but we’ve been forced to close some sections temporarily. Even the sections over which we have full control can be hazardous to non-crew members, though. The ship isn’t a homogenous environment, of course, even within the inner shell. When you came aboard it was probably no more than a glorified steel box, but once we’d hitched a ride in the comet core the hybrid began to evolve, and it’s been evolving ever since. Seven hundred years is a long time in the history of a world as small as this one, and we’ve been making progress all the while. It’s not just a matter of needing suits to go out into the ice—there are a dozen intermediary regions, and only a couple are exclusively AI territory. You’ll find the surface very strange, Inspector Solari, but don’t make the mistake of thinking that
Hope
is a little slice of home. In its own fashion, it’s a good deal stranger. If the people below understood that better, none of them would be laboring under the delusion that they’d be better off aborting the colony.”

“Okay,” Matthew said, blandly, when it became obvious that the sermon was over. “Message understood. We won’t take any long walks without a guide. These surface suits you mentioned, Dr. Brownell. How thickly do we need to be insulated down there?”

“They’re not much bulkier than ordinary clothing,” she assured him. The air filters are unobtrusive, although you’ll be aware of them in the sinuses and throat until they settle in, and they’ll modify your voice slightly. It hasn’t been necessary to take them all the way down into the lungs, although the whole of your gut will have to be resurfaced. You won’t be consciously aware of the gutskin at all, although its extension is the most difficult part of the fitting. We’re operating on a precautionary principle, of course—everything’s assumed to be biohazardous until it’s proved otherwise.

“Once you’ve been briefed by the crew’s genomicists you’ll probably be better able to assess the risk factors than I am, but so far as we can tell the local bacs aren’t at all enthusiastic to set up home in Earthly flesh, and mammalian immune systems are perfectly capable of forming antibodies against native proteins. They’re so competent, in fact, that the main difficulty is over-response. Animals exposed to the whole chemical symphony of the surface environment tend to go into reaction-overdrive; those that don’t collapse with anaphylactic shock develop high fevers and lapse into comas when their blood is glutted with defensive factors. More gradual exposure allows them to adapt, but it’s a slow process. It could take generations to produce Earthly domestic animals that can operate naked on the surface and feed themselves adequately on local produce. It’s the same for people—except, of course, that human generation times are a lot longer. The colonists and their crop-plants will be living in bubbles for a long time yet—but they will make progress. Slowly but surely, they’ll make themselves at home.” She said it stoutly, but she didn’t sound entirely convinced of the last assertion.

“But
they
don’t think so, do they?” Solari said. “They don’t think this is an Earth-clone world at all. They think they’re in greater danger here than they were on Earth. They think they’ve jumped out of the frying pan into the fire.”

“No,” said Leitz, firmly. “They don’t. All those who aren’t cowards know full well that they can live here, if they’re prepared to make the effort. The greater part of the surface community is in full agreement with the crew that the colony
has
to go ahead.”

“And how big is the majority?” the policeman countered, scornfully. “Not so big, apparently, that a few votes couldn’t swing a demand for withdrawal.”

“Votes don’t matter, inspector,” the boy said, rattled to the point of recklessness. “The people on the surface aren’t in a position to make demands. The only way they’ll get back up here is if we take them in—and we won’t. The colony has to stay, and it has to succeed. We wouldn’t have woken the two of you up if we didn’t think that you would both work toward that end.”

“Was Bernal Delgado working toward that end?” Matthew asked, keeping his own voice scrupulously level.

“Yes, he was,” Leitz replied, flatly—but Vince Solari was on to that inconsistency as fast as he’d taken hold of the other.

“And
maybe
that’s why he was killed,” the policeman said. “Or maybe not. Maybe he was killed because he was about to switch to the other side.”

“What end is Shen Chin Che working toward?” Matthew asked—but that was one question the boy wasn’t about to answer. Had Matthew and Solari still been hooked up to all the life-support apparatus, Nita Brownell would probably have sent them off to sleep again, but she couldn’t. All she and Leitz could do was beat a retreat, and they didn’t manage that until Solari had lodged an insistent request for a suit of clothes, of whatever kind might be available, and the personal possessions—including his notepad and beltphone—that had been put into store for him.

Nita Brownell promised to see what she could do, but Matthew got the impression that she might not be able to do very much.

When they’d gone, Solari said: “This isn’t quite the awakening I envisaged. The party atmosphere isn’t up to much, is it?”

“It was always a danger,” Matthew reminded him, soberly. “There was no shortage of prophets to tell the people of my generation that we couldn’t escape Earth’s problems by running away, because we’d only freeze them down along with us: all the festering conflicts; all the innate self-destructive tendencies. Those who fail to learn from prophecies are doomed to enact them. I can understand the differences of opinion—what I can’t understand is how they’ve become so bitter. We were all supposed to be on the same side—that was the heart and soul of the whole enterprise. How can it have soured so badly? What are they still not telling us?”