Dark Ararat (6 page)

Matthew could see what the young man was getting at. When
Hope
had set out from the solar system its scientists had not the slightest idea exactly how alien any alien life they discovered might turn out to be. Having only had a single ecosphere on which to base their expectations, they had no way to arbitrate between hypotheses that held that life throughout the universe was likely to be DNA-based, or that DNA would turn out to be a strictly local phenomenon unrepeated anywhere else.

Matthew had always had more sympathy for the former opinion, not because he lent any credence to the panspermist myth—which held that life had originated elsewhere and arrived on Earth while being dispersed throughout the expanding cosmos—but because it seemed to him that natural selection operating in the struggle for existence in the primordial sludge would probably have found the same optimum solution to the business of genetic coding that would materialize elsewhere. In the absence of any comparative cases, however, the matter had been pure guesswork—until Frans Leitz’s forbears had found the “sludgeworld” whose bacteria employed a different molecule.

Armed with that foreknowledge, Lityansky and his fellows would have been less surprised than their newly defrosted colleagues to find that the new world’s ecosphere also had a different coding-molecule. Indeed, Professor Lityansky might well have taken that as good evidence that DNA
was
a purely local phenomenon, unlikely to be repeated anywhere in the universe—given which, any would-be colonists of new worlds would simply have to take it as given that they could not expect to find conditions entirely to their liking.

“I wouldn’t call it absurd,” was what Matthew was prepared to say to Leitz at this stage. “People had argued about what might or might not qualify as an Earth-clone world long before
Hope
was a gleam in Shen Chin Che’s eye. It wouldn’t have been regarded as an extreme view to say that an ecosphere had to be DNA-based to qualify as a clone. On the other hand, we didn’t set out with the proviso that we had to find DNA in order to found a colony. We set out with the intention of making the best of whatever we could find.”

“Exactly,” said Leitz. “And that’s what we have to do. The fact that Earth came through its own ecocatastrophe doesn’t make any difference to our quest; there was never any question of going
back
. And the fact that the other probes sent out in this general direction haven’t located any other world that’s even remotely Earth-like means that we simply
can’t
pass up this chance. Isn’t that so?”

“I can’t answer that until I have more facts at my disposal,” Matthew said, “But aren’t you avoiding the most important issue of all? If this world is inhabited …”

“It isn’t,” Leitz was quick to say. “It was, but it’s not now. The colony had been active for more than a year before the so-called city was found. It was overgrown to such an extent that it was virtually invisible from the air. Nothing else has shown up, in spite of increased probe activity. The people at Base Three found not the slightest evidence of recent habitation, until …” He stopped.

“Until Bernal was murdered,” Matthew finished for him.

“By one of his colleagues,” Leitz said, stubbornly. “The killer may have used a weapon tricked up to look like a local product, but it
must
have been a human hand that wielded it. The people at Base Three seem to be determined not to carry out a full and proper investigation of their own, so we had no choice but to wake Inspector Solari.”

Matthew was still puzzled. “Are you implying that the people Bernal was working with are running some kind of scam?” he asked. “You think they’re
pretending
that he was killed by aliens? Why?”

Leitz’s discomfort deepened yet again. “I don’t know,” he said, defensively. “But there are certainly people at Base One who’ve added the possible continued existence of the aborigines—however unlikely the possibility may be—to the list of reasons why Professor Lityansky should never have initiated the landings. The people who want to withdraw from the planet are desperate for any justification they can find.”

“So why not let the ones who want out withdraw? Wouldn’t it be better to have a colony of committed volunteers than one whose members are fighting among themselves?” Matthew thought that he already knew the answer to that one, but he wanted to see Leitz’s response.

It was, as he’d anticipated, almost explosive. “But that’s the one thing we
can’t
do!” the youth exclaimed. “If the colony is to be viable, it will eventually need the full repertoire of the skills possessed by the cargo—and even if one member of each notional pair decided to stay, that would still leave the colony with a dangerously depleted gene pool. It’s absolutely vital that they
all
accept the necessity of making the colony work. You must see that, Professor Fleury. You
must
.”

Must I?
Matthew thought.

Vince Solari’s interest in genomics was limited, and he obviously wanted to get back to more immediate concerns. Matthew’s reluctance to endorse Leitz’s categorical imperative gave him the opportunity to butt in. “Why is the guard in the corridor wearing a gun, Mr. Leitz?” he asked, bluntly. “In fact, why should
anyone
aboard the ship be wearing a gun?”

Frans Leitz colored, but the greenish tint in his skin lent the blush a peculiar dullness. “It’s purely a precaution,” he said.

“I figured that,” Solari came back. “What I want to know is: against
what
?”

“There have been … policy disagreements concerning the administration of the ship and the control of its resources,” the boy admitted. “I’m really not competent to explain the details—I’m just a medical orderly, and a trainee at that. The captain will tell you everything. But it really is a precaution. No one on the ship has been injured, let alone killed, as a result of the … problem.”

“But who, exactly, is the precaution intended to deter?” Mathew said, modifying Solari’s question slightly without softening the insistence of the demand. “Are we talking about mutineers, or what?”

“I suppose so,” the boy replied, steadfastly refusing to elaborate—but he must have read in Vince Solari’s eyes that he wouldn’t be let off so easily. “The captain will tell you all that. He can explain it far better.”

“I’m sure he can,” Matthew said, drily, “but …”

Frans Leitz had had enough. “Eight-zero,” the boy said, as he turned to flee from the uncomfortable field of discussion. “Before you go,” Solari was quick to say, “can you give us a quick introduction to the equipment by our beds. There’s so much we need to know that the sooner we can make a start ourselves the better equipped we’ll be to ask questions of the captain.”

Leitz hesitated, but he had no grounds for refusal—and he knew that if he were busy lecturing the two of them on basic equipment skills he could probably override more awkward questions with ease.

“Sure,” he said, only a little less warmly than Matthew could have wished.

FIVE

W
hen the first picture of the new world came up on the wallscreen Matthew caught his breath. He had thought himself more than ready for it, but the reality still took him by surprise.

The image reminded him, as he had expected, of the classic twentieth-century images of the Earth as seen from the moon, but the differences leapt out at him much more assertively than he had imagined. The new world’s two moons were much smaller and closer than Earth’s, and they were both in the picture, which had obviously been synthesized from photographs taken from
Hope
while she was much further away than her present orbit.

The second thing Matthew noticed, after absorbing the shock of the two moons, was the similarity of the clouds. It was as if his mind were making a grab for something reassuring, and that it was able to take some comfort from the notion that the old Earth and the new were clad in identical tattered white shirts.

But everything else was different.

The land masses were, of course, completely different in shape, but that was a trivial matter. The
striking
difference was a matter of color. Matthew, having been forewarned, was expecting to see purple, but he had somehow taken it for granted that it would be the land rather than the sea that would be imperial purple, and it took him a moment or two to reverse his first impression.

Even at its most intense, the purple of this world’s land-based vegetation was paler than he had expected. It seemed somehow insulting to think in terms of
mauve
or
lilac
, although those shades were certainly the most common. So vague and careless had Matthew’s anticipations been that he had not factored in the oceans in at all, and would not have been at all surprised to find them as blue as Earth’s. They were not; they were gloriously and triumphantly purple, more richly and stridently purple than the land.

Matthew remembered that the first aniline dye to be synthesized from coal tar in Earth’s nineteenth century had been dubbed Tyrian purple. That, presumably, was why Tyre had been added to the list of potential names for “the world.” The murex, he supposed, must have been the source of the imperial purple of Rome, and there were probably mollusk-like creatures of a similar sort in the purple oceans of the new world, but Murex did not sound quite right to Matthew as the name of a world. Tyre and Ararat seemed somehow far more
fitting
.

Matthew might have paused for a while to wonder whether the oceans were so richly purple because they were abundantly populated by photosynthetic microorganisms and algae, or because of some unexpected trick of atmospheric refraction, but his companion had the keyboard and Solari was already racing ahead in search of more various, more intimate, and more detailed views, while Frans Leitz looked on approvingly. The former hypothesis, Matthew decided en passant, seemed more likely as well as more attractive—but so had the hypothesis that DNA would always be selected out by the struggle to produce true life from mere organic mire.

“Can you find a commentary?” Matthew asked.

Solari shook his head. “None available. I guess they haven’t had time to add the voiceovers yet.” He glanced at Leitz as he spoke.

“We didn’t think a commentary was required,” the crewman said.

Other surprises followed as the mute viewpoint moved a little closer to the surface. Matthew had not been expecting the desert areas to be so silvery, or the ice caps so neatly star-shaped. He saw both ice caps as the synthesized image rotated about two axes, always presenting a full disk to the AI-eye.

“The symmetry of the continents is a little weird,” Leitz put in, obviously feeling some slight obligation to substitute for the missing commentary. “The polar island-continents are so similar in size and shape that some of the first observers thought that the planet had been landscaped by continental engineers. The star is nearly a billion years older than the sun, so evolution has had a lot longer to work here than it had on Earth, but Professor Lityansky reckons that the relative lack of axial tilt and tidal drag haven’t added sufficient agitation to the surface conditions to move evolution along at a similar pace. He reckons that Earth was unusually lucky in that respect, and that’s why we seem to be the first starfaring intelligences in this part of the galaxy. The surface isn’t very active, volcanically speaking, and the climatic regimes are stable. The weather’s fairly predictable in all latitudes, although it varies quite sharply from one part of the pattern to another.”

The viewpoint was zooming in now, as if free-falling from orbit, then curving gracefully into a horizontal course a thousand meters or so above the surface.

The sky was bluish, but it had a distinct violet tinge, like an eerie echo of the vegetation.

At first, Matthew thought that the grassy plain over which the AI-eye was soaring wasn’t so very different from an Earthly prairie. The lack of any comparative yardstick made it difficult to adjust the supposition, but when Leitz told him that the stalks bearing the complex crowns were between ten and twenty meters tall he tried to get things into a clearer perspective.

“The rigid parts of the plants aren’t like wood at all,” Leitz said. “More like glass. Professor Lityansky will explain the biochemistry.”

There were very few tree-like forms on the plain, but when the point of view soared higher in order to pass over a mountain range, Matthew saw whole forests of structures that seemed to have as much in common with corals as with oaks or pines. They seemed to him to be the kind of trees that a nineteenth-century engineer—a steam-and-steel man—might have devised to suit a landscape whose primary features were mills and railroads: trees compounded out of pipes and wire, scaffolding and stamped plate. Given what Leitz had said about the structures being vitreous rather than metallic, the impression had to be reckoned illusory, but it still made the forests and “grasslands” seem radically un-Earthlike. If this world really could be counted as an Earth-clone, Matthew thought, it was a twin whose circumstances and experience had made a vast difference to its natural heritage.

When the low-flying camera eye finally reached the shore of a sea Matthew saw that its surface layer was indeed covered with a richer floating ecosystem than he had ever seen on any of Earth’s waters. The inshore waters were dappled with huge rafts of loosely tangled weed, and the seemingly calm deeper waters were mottled with vast gellike masses. Matthew did not suppose for an instant that they really were amoebas five or fifty miles across, but that was the first impression they made on his mind. He tried to think in terms of leviathan jellyfish, gargantuan slime-molds, oceanic lava lamps or unusually glutinous oil slicks, but it didn’t help. There was nothing in his catalog of Earthly appearances that could give him a better imaginative grip on what he was looking at.

It was difficult to make out much detail from the present height of the viewpoint, but that disadvantage was compensated by the sheer amount of territory that was covered. Matthew was able to see the black canyons splitting the polar ice caps, and the shifting dunes of the silvery deserts. He saw islands rising out of the sea like purple pincushions and he saw mountains rising out of the land like folds in a crumpled duvet.