Dark Ararat

by Brian Stableford

  “Well,” Solari said, “it could have been worse. We might never have come out of the freezer at all. We might have come out without our most cherished memories. The mere fact that we’re here makes us winners—and if nobody else is prepared to celebrate, let’s raise a salute to one another.”

  Matthew raised his arm willingly enough, and met Vince Solari’s desperately tired gaze as frankly and as forthrightly as he could.

  “Congratulations, Vince,” he said. “A tiny step in humankind’s conquest of the galaxy, but a great leap forward for you and me.”

  “Congratulations, Matt,” Solari replied. “Wherever we are, we sure as hell made it. Whatever we’re mixed up in, we’re already way ahead of the game. Amen.”

  “Amen,” Matthew echoed, and meant it.

  FOUR

  The smartsuits Matthew and Solari were given to wear while their surface suits were being tailored were very similar to the ones they’d worn in the months before being frozen down, and not much different from the ones Matthew had worn on Earth—he’d never been a follower of fashion or a devotee of exotic display. They were, however, conspicuously unlike the white exterior presented by Nita Brownell or the pale blue-gray one manifested by Frans Leitz, which were presumably the “specialized ship suits” they weren’t being given. The main color of the smartsuits was modifiable, but only from dark blue to black and back again, and such style as they possessed was similarly restricted. Matthew guessed that if he and Solari were to go a-wandering they would stick out like sore thumbs in any line of sight they happened to cross.

  The doctor told them that they’d get their personal possessions back “in due course.”

  By the time that he and Solari finally got to eat an authentic meal, in the middle of the second day of their new life, Matthew was expecting a veritable orgy of sensual delights. He was disappointed; the flavors were too bland for his taste, the textures too meltingly soft and the net effect slightly nauseating. The doctor and her assistant had left them to it, so they had no one to complain to but one another.

  “It is the food, or us?” Solari asked.

  “Mainly us, I think,” Matthew told him. “Our expectations were probably too high. Until our stomachs are back to normal they’ll be sending out queasiness signals. On the other hand, the crew have had seven hundred years of cultural isolation, so their tastes have probably changed quite markedly.”

  “Have to wait till we get to the surface, then,” Solari said, philosophically. “At least they’ll have had three years practice growing Earthly crops.”

  “I don’t suppose it’ll be a great deal better,” Matthew said, “given that their staples will be whole-diet wheat-and rice-mannas. If we’re lucky, though, these gutskins they’re going to extend from our lips to our arseholes via our intestinal labyrinths will enhance taste sensations rather than muffling them, and nausea will be out of the question.”

  “I’m beginning to get a sense of how long I’ve been away,” Solari mused. “The fitter I get, the more obvious the differences become. Bound to happen, of course.”

  “It was always going to be a wrench,” Matthew agreed. “But things are definitely more awkward than we could have wished. I suppose we have to be patient, with ourselves as well as our careful hosts. We’ll rediscover all the pleasures, given time—and we’ll probably find that the keyboards attached to those hoods and display screens are a lot more user-friendly than they seem at first glance. Seven hundred years of progress can’t have obliterated the underlying logic. Once we get used to them, we’ll presumably have access to the ship’s data banks—and then we can catch up with all the news, good and bad alike.”

  Solari looked over his shoulder at the consoles behind his bedhead, then up at the hoods and dangling keyboards. He pulled down a hood and fitted it over his head and eyes, but had to lift it up again to reach for a keyboard.

  Now that the two of them were free to sit up in their beds, or even reconfigure the beds as chairs, it was easy enough to bring down the hoods over their heads or activate wraparound screens, and use any of half a dozen touchpads. Unfortunately, no one had taken the trouble as yet to brief them on the use of the controls. In theory, everything they might want to know was probably at their fingertips, but Hope’s crew seemed to be in no hurry to educate their fingertips in their art of searching.

  “We could probably figure them out, given time,” Solari said, as he pushed the hood back up again. “But will we have the time? They seem keen to send us down to the surface before we can figure out exactly what’s going on up here. There’s a hell of a lot to be learned and we’ve been thrown in at the deep end. The colony’s first bases are already in place, if not exactly up and running—although the endeavor’s obviously made enough progress to produce its first major crime.”

  “Its first unsolved major crime,” Matthew said. “The first, at any rate, that has proved so awkwardly problematic as to provoke demands for an investigation by fresh and practiced eyes—and a replacement for the victim. Thrown in at the deep end is probably an understatement.”

  Solari had decided that he had had enough to eat some time before Matthew finally decided to give up. The detective had pushed his plate away in order to begin playing with the overhead apparatus, but he gave up on that now in favor of more adventurous action. He took one last swig of water before swinging his legs over the side of the bed and dropping lightly to the floor. Once he had tested the strength of his limbs he went to the door of the room and pressed the release-pad.

  The door slid open immediately, affording Matthew some slight reassurance, although he knew that it wasn’t actually necessary to lock a door in order to secure a prison.

  When Solari stepped out into the corridor the door slid shut behind him, cutting off the sound of his voice as soon as he had begun to speak.

  Matthew shoved his own food away and took a last sip of water before stepping down from his own bed. He looked speculatively at the door, but there was a certain luxury in being alone for the first time since his emergence from SusAn, so he took time out to dispose of the degradable plates and utensils they had employed.

  By the time he had finished clearing up the door had opened again and Solari was coming back into the room.

  The policeman came to stand very close to him and spoke in a confidential whisper, although he must have known that lowering his voice was unlikely to be enough to prevent his being overheard.

  “There’s a man standing guard outside,” he said. “He says his name’s Riddell. Same uniform as the boy—except for the sidearm. Same feet too. He says he’ll be only too glad to take one or both of us anywhere we might want to go, when we’re well enough.”

  “What kind of sidearm?” Matthew wanted to know.

  “Looks like a darter. Probably non-lethal, but that’s not the point.”

  It certainly wasn’t, Matthew thought. No matter how quick the man outside their door had been to reassure Solari that he wasn’t there to keep them prisoner, his armed presence spoke volumes. What it said, first and foremost, was that there were people on the ship who might want to talk to the newly awakened, and might have to be actively deterred from so doing. Who? And why were the captain’s men determined to stop them? Matthew looked at the hoods and keyboards, then at the wallscreens. Even if there was no broadcast TV on Hope, there had to be a telephone facility. Either no one had attempted to call them, or their calls had not been put through. Was that why their personal belongings, including their beltphones, had not yet been returned to them?

  “Seven hundred years of progress,” Matthew said, keeping his own voice low even though he knew as well as well as Solari did how futile the gesture was, “and even Hope is home to armed men. For all we know, there’s a full-scale civil war in progress. If Shen Chin Che were dead, he’d be spinning in his grave. If he’s not …”

  He wanted to follow that train of thought further, but Solari was keeping a tighter focus on the matter in hand. “Whoever killed Delg
ado on the surface may have friends up here,” the policeman observed. “Mr. Riddell might be there to protect us.” He didn’t sound as if he believed it.

  “We were all supposed to be on the same side,” Matthew went on, angling the trajectory of his conversation very slightly to take aboard Solari’s comment. “Crew and human cargo, scientists and colonists, all working together in the same great scheme. The whole point of building the Ark was to leave behind the divisions and the stresses that were standing in the way of saving Earth. We were all supposed to be united in a common cause, having put the past behind us. How could that go badly wrong in three short years?”

  “And seven hundred long ones,” Solari reminded him.

  “Are we being too paranoid, do you think?” Matthew asked.

  Solari didn’t have time to answer that one before Frans Leitz came back in. “The captain will see you both at eight-zero,” the boy said. “He apologizes for not having been there to greet you when Dr. Brownell brought you out of the induced coma for the last time, but he’s very busy.”

  Matthew realized that he had no idea what the present time was, and couldn’t be sure what eight-zero might signify. There was no clock on the wall of the room, and he remembered now that Nita Brownell had said something odd about fifty hours being the equivalent of five days of “old time.”

  When he asked for an explanation, Leitz explained to him that the ship operated on metric time, using an Earth-day as a base because it suited the Circadian rhythms built into crew physiology. Each day was divided up into ten hours of a hundred minutes, which were further subdivided into a hundred seconds. Surface time had kept the same basic structure, but had adopted the local day as a base, thus resulting in a desynchronization of ship and surface time. The local day, determined by the planet’s rotation, was 0.89 of a ship day.

  “We think that’s another of the reasons for the groundlings’ continuing unease,” Leitz told them. “It’s proved to be surprisingly difficult to modify the physiology of Circadian rhythms, but we’re sure that they’ll solve the problem soon. If only they could be patient … anyhow, the planet’s year is one point twenty-eight Earth-standard, but its axial tilt is very slight, so its temperate-zone seasons aren’t nearly as extreme. That’s not problematic, although Professor Lityansky thinks it has something to do with the strange pattern of local evolution. He’ll explain it when he briefs you tomorrow, Professor Fleury. That’s at three-zero, provided that you’re up to it. How do you feel now?”

  “Better,” Matthew assured him, drily. “Professor Lityansky’s busy too, I dare say.”

  “Extremely busy,” the boy replied. “He’s working flat-out trying to figure out exactly what we need to do to make the colony work. He’s under a great deal of pressure, because the groundlings hold him primarily responsible for the decision that the world is sufficiently Earthlike to qualify as a clone. The decision to go ahead with the colonization wasn’t entirely his, of course, but his genomic analyses provided the relevant data and his judgment of their significance was crucial. He feels badly let down by some of the people on the surface.”

  “How come their judgment is so different?” Matthew asked.

  Leitz hesitated, but eventually decided to answer the question. He was becoming more relaxed now, and a certain boyish enthusiasm was beginning to show through. “Our data was limited, of course,” the youth conceded. “Our nanotech is way behind Earth’s, and we haven’t been able to improve our probes to anything like the same degree while we’ve been in transit. Apart from evidence gathered at long-range by our instruments, we had a very limited range of surface-gathered samples to work from. They were adequate for genomic analysis, but most of what we had on which to base our decision was fundamental biochemical data. The photographs taken by our flying eyes showed us what the local plant life looked like, but we didn’t have any real notion of the ecology of the world, or even of its diversity, let alone its evolutionary history. Once the first landing was complete, the biologists on the ground began to fill in the other parts of the picture—and they began to get alarmed.

  “Some of the groundlings began to argue that Professor Lityansky had made a bad mistake, because he hadn’t been able to think through the consequences of his genomic analyses. The extreme view is that the colonization should have been put on hold as soon as it was realized that the local ecosphere wasn’t DNA-based—but that’s absurd, isn’t it, Professor Fleury?”

  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 tha
t 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?”