Dark Ararat (51 page)

Michelle understood only too well that Dulcie Gherardesca had known her father far better than she ever had. Dulcie had, after all, shared his life for a hundred years, while Michelle had seen precious little of him even during the years they had allegedly spent “together” on Earth. He and Dulcie had made the first contact with the aliens, had made common cause with the aliens, had accompanied the alien contingent that had decided to return to the abandoned city and rebuild it. He and Dulcie had guided the revolution of ideas that had reinvolved
Hope
’s crew in the education of the aliens—including the ones who had decided to remain in the forest—and he and Dulcie had spearheaded the development of the new technological discipline of genomic engineering. Together they had seen the birth or rebirth of a dozen Tyrean cities…. all the while leaving
her
to sleep alongside her sister, excluded from everything.

This was the only reunion left to her now: to stand beside her father’s tomb, in a monstrous edifice whose inner darkness belied the name that Matthew Fleury had attached, on humanity’s behalf, to the city that had become the focal point of the great collaboration: the collaboration that would change humankind as sharply and as irrevocably as it had changed humankind’s new partners in evolution.

“We should have been with him,” Michelle whispered. “He shouldn’t have left us out.” Alice was still
left out
, one of the few colonists still in SusAn aboard the microworld. Michelle intended to get her out as soon as she was allowed to take the decision. It was not only right but necessary that they should be together.

She took her hand back, knowing that she had not really touched the surface at all. Her own fingers were overlaid by the surface-suit Leitz had provided, which still seemed alien to her: an interface separating her from a world that was not her own.

“He wasn’t leaving you out,” Dulcie Gherardesca told her. “He was trying to prepare the way for your return. He missed you, always. He wanted to see you again, desperately—but he wanted to make things right first. You can’t imagine how messed up things were when he came out of SusAn. Everything was wrong. The world wasn’t as Earthlike as it was supposed to be. It posed all kinds of puzzles and problems. The colony was on the brink of failure for a long time—long after we met the aliens. Matthew was the one who pulled us together when we nearly fell apart, by making everyone understand that we had to make it work, not just for our sake but for the sake of the natives. There was so much we could teach them, and so much they could teach us. Matthew did more than anyone else to unite us in that cause—certainly more than Konstantin Milyukov and Shen Chin Che, who carried their feud to their own graves. He knew before anyone else—although Andrei Lityansky has done his level best to take the credit—that there was an opportunity here for us to develop a new technology of emortality quite different from the one they use on Earth. Some of his guesses were a little wide of the mark, of course, but he was the first person on this world who actually
saw
what was going on here, and what the differences between this world’s genomics and Earth’s actually
meant
, in terms of the probable history and possible futures of complex life in the galaxy … in the universe. He wanted you to benefit from the new technologies, Michelle. He didn’t want you to die before you could reap the reward of all his endeavors. He left you and Alice where you were because he
loved
you, more than anything else in the universe. He wanted you with him, but there was something else he wanted even more. He wanted you to have the gifts that this world offers. He wanted you to have a chance to be emortal.”

“He could have put himself back into SusAn,” Michelle countered. “He could have waited
with us
, to become emortal himself.”

“No, he couldn’t,” Dulcie said, softly.

That was true, of course. Michelle understood that much. Somebody had to do the work. An entire generation of mortals had had to commit itself to the labor of making sure that the generations that came after would be better equipped. To have walked away from that responsibility, even if his companions had sanctioned it, would have been a terrible dereliction of duty. Her father had always understood that messiahs usually had to be martyrs too, and if he hadn’t been prepared to accept that he’d never have joined Shen’s chosen people.

I could have been a martyr too, Michelle thought. I could have helped do the work that would give future generations opportunities we didn’t have, I could have been with him. I could have died with him.

And that, she knew, was precisely the point.

“Come up to the roof,” Dulcie said. “His body may be in there, but his legacy is all around us, as far as the eye can see. That’s the way to get in touch with him, to understand what he did and why.”

Michelle knew that there was no point in asking for more time. The tomb was an alien creation, an alien testament. It had nothing more to say to her. Meekly, she followed Dulcie Gherardesca up a series of stone staircases, cunningly illuminated by arrays of rectangular windows. The steps felt strange beneath the thickened soles of her augmented feet, and there was a curious odor hanging in the air. It could not be the stones themselves, or the mortar sealing them in place, so it had to be something clinging to them: a translucent vegetable veneer. Even the walls of the city had a false skin. The air was cool in spite of the sunlight streaming through the windows, and the filters to which she had not yet become accustomed made it seem thin and curiously unsatisfying.

The roof of the palace carried a massive TV mast studded with satellite dishes. There was a telescope mounted on the parapet to which Dulcie Gherardesca led her, but the xenanthropologist ignored it; she had brought Michelle here to see the broad panorama of Civitas Solis, not to pick out hidden details upon its horizon.

Michelle had to admit that the city was impressive, even though the walls she had seen on ancient photographs had all been dismantled so that their constituent stones might be put to better uses. The multitudinous domes were the brightest elements because they reflected the light of the ruddy sun, but the walls that soaked up the same light with such avidity provided a magnificently elaborate setting for the hemispherical jewels. And then there were the fields: huge tracts of land glowing purple or green or purple-and-green, hugging the valleys and the lakeside, and following the river downstream as far as the eye could see. With the ingenuity of human biotechnology to protect them, even the alien fields no longer had any need of walls of stone: and their new protective devices would not fail, no matter what pestilential chimerical legions might gather to assault them.

The streets and shops of the city were as busy with human traffic as native crowds. Michelle knew that the population now numbered 40,000, evenly divided between the two races. Higher in the hills she could see three vivid pyramids that testified to the efforts that the natives were making to increase their population further, in frank opposition to the weight of tradition. The humans had done the same, after their own fashion. While she and other children of the
Hope
’s pioneers had languished in the freezer, new individuals had been created in their thousands as soon as full details of the Zaman transformation and the equipment to implement it had arrived—not from Earth, so rumor had it, but from a nearer source: a base established on an uninhabitable but material-rich world by AI miners and manufacturers. How strange to obtain the secret of human emortality from machines!

Michelle looked to her right and left, and then turned around—but when she turned around her eyes were caught by the communications mast and she could not help following its reach into the lilac-tinted sky. That, she thought, was a better symbol of her father’s life and nature than the teeming confusion of the city. He had never been a builder, an agent of civilization. He had been a man who loved to talk, to captivate an audience. He had been a man who would rather invent fantasies than reserve his counsel. She had seen tapes of the broadcasts he had made immediately before the contact, and had listened to Frans Leitz going through his guesses one by one, marveling at the fact that so many of them had turned out to be so nearly right.

“Nobody else had put it all together,” the doctor had said. “Nobody else had been able to. And he carried on putting things together, more cleverly than anyone imagined possible.”

But the one thing he had neglected to put together was his family. How clever was that?

“Matthew always said that this was a more important world than Earth,” Dulcie told her. “He said that the people on Earth, having survived the Crash, would always have to put the safety of the Earth first: to guard it as jealously and as carefully as any cradle. The torch of progress has to be handed on to the other worlds which have accepted humankind: the worlds that have no alternative but to embrace change, and welcome change, and make the most of change. This is the first meeting place, the first melting pot, the first location in which humankind can take its place in the wondrous confusion of all possible modes of life. Earth is alpha, he said, and it has to maintain itself as alpha, preserving its value as a refuge and a reservation—but the future of humankind is an expedition to omega: the ultimate limit of achievement. This is where the omega expedition really begins, he said. This is where we first met alien intelligence, and began our collaboration with alien intelligence. This is where the true horizons of possibility were finally opened up to the imagination.”

“I recognize the rhetorical style,” Michelle told her. “He practiced hard.”

“Yes,” Dulcie admitted. “He certainly did. Do you think you’ll ever be able to forgive him? He’d have expected you to understand.”

That was true too, and Michelle knew it. She turned around again, to look back over the parapet at the city. In the photographs she’d seen of its condition when it was first discovered it had seemed utterly dead, literally enshrouded in imperial purple. Now, it was boldly, relentlessly, stubbornly alive, and astonishingly
clean
. Even though it was pockmarked here and there by building-sites, from which plumes of dust and smoke rose up to stain the crystalline, its lines were sharp and proud and perfectly clear.

Whatever else he had brought here, and whatever else he had left behind, Matthew Fleury had given the city a future, and the energy to hurry into it.

“I’ll try,” Michelle said—and knew as soon as she said it, by the way that Dulcie Gherardesca smiled, that she might as well have said that she would. For her, a commitment to try was as good as a commitment to do everything possible and to succeed in any merely human task, because she was her father’s daughter—and always would be, for as long as she now might live.

eBook Info

Title:

Dark Ararat

Creator:

Brian Stableford

Subject:

Fiction

Publisher:

A Tom Doherty Associates Book

Contributor:

Brian Stableford

Date:

2002

Type:

Novel

Format:

text/html

Identifier:

0-312-70559-X

Source:

PDF

Language:

en

Rights:

Copyright © 2002 by Brian Stableford