Dark Ararat

by Brian Stableford

  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

  When 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. Matthe
w 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.

  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 l
ong 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.”