Dark Ararat (7 page)

The mountains had no craters; they did not seem to be the relics of volcanoes. Perhaps, Matthew mused, the continents of the New World had been as richly dotted with extinct and active volcanoes as the continents of Earth a billion years ago, but a billion years was a long time, even in the lifetime of a world. Perhaps, on the other hand, the New World had been just as different then, or even more different. If it qualified as an Earth-clone at all, it was because its atmosphere had much the same precious mix of gases as Earth’s, calculated to sustain a similar carbon-hydrogen-nitrogen biochemistry, not because it was actually Gaea’s twin sister. Perhaps
Earth-clone
was entirely the wrong word, applied too hastily and too ambitiously because truer clones had proved so very hard to find—but Matthew reminded himself of what he had told Leitz. He would be better able to make up his mind when he knew all the facts.

The viewpoint became even more intimate, picking out a strange collection of objects that looked like a huge, white diamond solitaire set amid a surrounding encrustation of tinier gems. The whole ensemble was situated on a low-lying island some twenty or twenty-five kilometers from one of the major continental masses.

“Base One,” Leitz told them. “The soil inside the big dome was sterilized to a depth of six meters and reseeded with Earthly life, but there are dozens of experimental plots mixing the produce of the two ecospheres in the satellite domes.”

“Is that where Delgado was killed?” Solari wanted to know.

“Oh, no—he was at Base Three, in the mountains of the broadleaf spur of Continent B.”

“Continent B?” Matthew echoed. “You can’t agree on a name for the world, you’re numbering your bases and you’re calling its continents after letters of the alphabet? No wonder you don’t feel at home here.”

Leitz didn’t react verbally to his use of the word
you
, but the gaze of his green eyes seemed to withdraw slightly as he retorted: “It’s not the crew’s place to name the world or any of its features, and it’s not the crew’s fault that the colonists are so reluctant.”

But it was the crew who selected and surveyed this world, and decided to call it an Earth-clone, Matthew said to himself. If the colonists have discovered that they’ve bitten off more than they can chew, why shouldn’t they blame the people who woke them up with reckless promises? But why would the crew jump the gun? Why would they decide that the world was ripe for colonization if it wasn’t? He didn’t voice the questions, because maturing suspicions had made him wary and because an appointment had now been set for him to see the captain—the man with all the answers. He would be in a better position to listen and understand when his body had caught up with his brain and he was a little less tired.

“How big is Base Three, compared with Base One?” Solari asked, still clinging to his own tight focus on practical matters.

“Tiny,” Leitz told him. “Only a couple of satellite domes. It wasn’t part of the original plan—Base Two is in the mountain-spine of Continent A, only a few hundred kilometers from Base One, and there was no plan to establish a third base so far away from the first—but when the surveyor’s eyes spotted the ruins the groundlings had to improvise. They’re establishing supply dumps and airstrips in order to create a proper link, but it was very difficult to transport the first party, and we had to top up the personnel with a new drop.”

“Why did it take so long to find the ruins?” Matthew asked.

“The overgrowing vegetation obscured what’s left of the dwellings and broke up the lines of the fortifications. We had trouble surveying Continent B because it’s very difficult to get signals back from ground level. Flying eyes are too small to carry powerful transmitters, and the crowns of the giant grasses and trees block them out. Standard beltphones aren’t much better, so anyone calling from Base Three or its surrounds has to be sure to stand in the open.”

“Can we get a picture of Base Three?” Solari interrupted.

Leitz played with the keyboard for a few moments, and the viewpoint shifted to a more intimate and slow-moving aerial view of hilly terrain.

To Matthew, who had seen the Andes and the Himalayas at close range, this seemed a fairly poor example of a mountain range, not so much because of its lack of elevation as the relatively gentle contours of its individual elements. There was a big river meandering through the lowlands, which the viewpoint followed from the edge of the grassy plain towards its distant source.

A couple of minutes went by before they saw the bubble-domes comprising the Base. It wasn’t too hard to understand why the nearby ruins hadn’t been easy to pick out from directly above, given that the treelike forms had taken it over so completely. Now that there were extensive patches of cleared ground and paths running between them it was easy to see the stark outlines of artificial structures, but it was impossible to tell how extensive the ruins were.

“You can just about see the outlines of the fortifications in the undulations of the overgrowth,” Leitz said, pointing.

At first, because they followed the contours of the hillsides and because there were so many of them, Matthew thought that the “fortifications” to which Leitz was referring must really be terraces from which some or all of the enclosed soil had been leached by centuries of rainfall. But when he was able to compare cleared sections of the walls with the buildings at the core of the vast complex, the proportions suggested that they really
might
have been fortifications. Against what adversaries, he wondered, could a maze like that have been erected? What kind of enemy could have made such lunatic industry conceivable, let alone necessary?

Close-ups showed various sections of wall in much greater detail, including two into which pictures had been carved. The pictures were primitive and cartoonish, but Matthew drew in his breath sharply as he realized that the bipedal stick figures could have passed for a child’s representation of human beings. Apart from the humanoid figures the sketches also showed arrays of bulbous entities, vaguely reminiscent of obese corncobs, and much bigger structures, triangular in silhouette, that might have been conical or pyramidal.

“They’re
people
!” Solari exclaimed.

“They appear to have been humanoid,” Leitz admitted.

“So what killed them off?” the policeman wanted to know.

“That’s one of the things the people at Base Three are trying to find out,” Leitz said. “It isn’t easy, because their specialisms are only peripherally related to the job. The Chosen People didn’t include any archaeologists—the nearest thing we could find when we thawed out personnel to make up the second half of the team was an anthropologist.”

“Why are you so sure they’re extinct?” Matthew asked. “If your flying eyes can’t get information back from ground level, the whole continent must qualify as terra incognita. The fact that the city-dwellers abandoned the site doesn’t mean that their cousins aren’t still around.”

“We’ve done what we can to find them,” the young man assured him. “Agricultural activity should be easy enough to detect, even at a far more restricted level, and even hunter-gatherers need fires. If anyone had lit a single cooking fire in the last three years, anywhere on the world’s surface, we’d have been able to home in on it. If they were alive somewhere out in the long grass, invisible from the air, they’d have to have gone back to the very beginning, eating what they hunt and gather in its raw state. That seems unlikely. Incredible, even. The people on the ground who believe that the aliens are still around have their own reasons for wanting to believe it.”

“The human race had some pretty narrow squeaks,” Matthew said, pensively. “There used to be more genetic variation in a single chimpanzee troop than in the entire human race, before chimps became extinct. Mitochondrial Eve had lived not much more than a hundred and forty thousand years before
Hope
’s odyssey began. Animals as big as humans are more vulnerable to catastrophes of all kinds than their smaller and humbler cousins. If these guys had never domesticated fire, they’d be even more vulnerable than our ancestors. Still …”

“Which side was Delgado on?” Solari asked Frans Leitz. “On the extinction question, I mean.”

“I don’t know—but he was enthusiastic about building the boat.”

“What boat?” Solari asked.

“I think it was Dr. Gherardesca’s idea. She’s the anthropologist. She figured that if it wasn’t possible to recover data about ground-level activity in the grasslands from flying eyes, the best way to do it would be to take a boat downriver. It was just about ready when Professor Delgado was killed, although they’d asked for one last consignment of equipment—we’re holding that so that we can send you down with it.”

“How many other people were working at Base Three along with Delgado?” Solari persisted.

“Seven.”

“Seven!” Matthew could hardly believe it. “You found a ruined city made by intelligent humanoids, and you sent
seven
people to investigate it! The biggest news story in history, and
seven
people is all you can spare to follow it up.”

“There
were
eight,” Leitz pointed out, blushing grayly yet again as his discomfort increased by an order of magnitude. “And will be again, once you’re there.” He was already turning away to resume his interrupted retreat. “I really must go now. You’ll soon get the hang of the keypads if you keep playing with them. There’s plenty more library material. Someone will pick you up when it’s time for you to see Captain Milyukov.”

SIX

V
ince Solari waited until the young man had left the room before saying: “Milyukov? Wasn’t the original captain called Ying?”

“That was seven hundred years ago,” Matthew pointed out. “
Captain
isn’t a hereditary title. A ship’s crew has to be run on strictly meritocratic principles—supposedly.”

“Why supposedly?” Solari had relaxed, allowing the keyboard to hang loosely from his tired hand. The image on the screen had frozen while displaying the internally lit bubble-domes of Base Three, strangely forlorn in a gathering evening that was turning everything purple to matt black.

“Seven hundred years is a long time,” Matthew said, “and the ship was always capable of running itself between big decisions. Five or six lifetimes, maybe as many as twenty generations, can produce considerable social and political changes, and meritocracies always have a habit of backsliding.”

Solari nodded, slowly. “I see,” he said. “There’s another factor that needs consideration too. Most of the Chosen—including you, I guess—were frozen down before the new generation of plagues had begun to do their worst. Interplanetary distances weren’t quarantine enough to keep the chiasmalytic transformers and their vicious kin on Earth. At least some of the crew must have been sterilized before
Hope
left the system. They must have been forced to adopt whatever countermeasures allowed the reconstruction of Earthly society.”

“How bad did things get before you left?” Matthew asked, quietly.

“I was frozen down twenty-four years after you,” Solari reminded him. “The chiasmalytic transformers were running riot. Nobody had given up hope of finding a cure, but they were stripping the eggs out of the ovaries of aborted fetuses and little girls, and splitting viable embryos so that they could keep the clones as spares … all kinds of weird stuff. And every week seemed to bring news of some new breakthrough in longevity technology that
might
beat the Miller Effect, and
might
put us all on the escalator to emortality, and
might
make it possible for civilization to go on forever even if no one ever had another baby for as long as the ecosphere lasted. Not that it made a jot of difference to the doomsayers and the defeatists, the neohysterics or the hyperhedonists. You missed some crazy times, Matt. Times that only a prophet could have relished. I remember seeing you on TV, you know, when I was a kid. Couldn’t really miss you, until you dropped out of sight.”

“If you hadn’t been a kid,” Matthew told him, leaning back against his bed so as to take some of the weight off his aching feet, “you’d have understood that I was never the kind of prophet who could take delight in saying
I told you so
. I knew what the chiasmalytic transformers might do—what they were
made
to do—but I never relished the thought.”

“Made to do? I remember you as a bit of a ranter, but I didn’t have you pegged as a conspiracy theorist. The official line always said that the seetees were Mother Nature’s ultimate backlash—Gaea’s last line of self-defense. The idea that they were a final solution cooked up in a lab was supposed to be a neohysteric fantasy.”

Matthew winced slightly at the casual suggestion that he had been
a bit of a ranter
, although people had called him a lot worse things. “It matters not whence Nemesis comes,” he said, recalling another of his not-so-classic sound bites as if it had only been yesterday when he had last deployed it. “It only matters where she goes.”

“They might have found a cure after I was frozen down, I guess,” Solari said, pensively. “We ought to look that up, oughtn’t we? We’ve got a lot of history to catch up on.”

“And not enough time,” Matthew said. “Not until we’re down on the surface, at any rate, and probably not then. Still, it looks as if your job won’t be as hard as it might have been, so you might be able to get back to your homework fairly soon.”

“Seven suspects,” Solari mused, lifting the keypad up to his face and studying the layout of the keys with minute care. “Eight if you count the hypothetical alien. It doesn’t sound too difficult—but I’ll be way too late to get much from the crime scene. Until I have the facts …”

“If the murderer
is
an alien,” Matthew observed, “I don’t suppose we’ll attempt to bring him to trial. The discovery would be far more momentous than any mere murder. The greatest discovery ever—and they seem almost determined not to make it. Maybe the crew don’t quite understand, but the people fresh from the freezer … I can’t understand
their
attitude at all.”