Dark Ararat

by Brian Stableford

  “We’ve done the hard work,” Matthew told his companion. “Now we need the luck. We’ve kept them on tenterhooks long enough. It’s time for the denouement. Why aren’t they here? They were plenty curious enough when we first arrived—why have they suddenly turned shy? They didn’t even take the bait we left outside the bubble when I went to sleep last night. Why not?”

  “Maybe they’ve got something else on their minds,” Ike suggested.

  Matthew didn’t have to ask what that something else might be. They had Dulcie. Although they hadn’t left her body where her phone had fallen, they might have killed her and taken the body with them—but the likelihood was that she had been carried away alive. While they had her, still alive, they had a far more convenient focus for their curiosity than Matthew and Ike—and she wouldn’t die any time soon of hunger, even if she only had alien food to eat. A carbohydrate was a carbohydrate, and sugar was always sweet.

  It all came down to Dulcie: Dulcie the anthropologist-turned-murderer-turned-ambassador; Dulcie the tarnished heroine.

  “Do you think she’s all right?” Ike asked, having divined the reason for Matthew’s sudden descent into sobriety.

  “Of course she is,” Matthew said, valiantly. “She’s in her element. This is what she was defrosted for, what she’s lived her whole life for. She’s fine. She’ll come through. She has to. We just have to spin out the story while we’re waiting. We have to do a session on feeding frenzies, speculate about the kinds of triggers that might set off orgies of chimerization and humanoid pyramid building. I got halfway through working out an analogy involving the boat, switching between engines as it turned around to go upstream—we can use that. There’s also a useful analogy to be drawn between the photosynthesizing pyramids and our bubble-domes. Maybe we can draw a useful analogy between the humanoids and the crewpeople, if we try hard enough….”

  “Okay,” Ike said. “I get the picture. We go on and on until it’s done, no mater how silly it gets.”

  “It’s not silly,” Matthew insisted, earnestly. “Even if only a tenth of it is true, that tenth is marvelous. We have to help the crew and colonists alike to understand that this business is far bigger than any biotech bonanza or potential death trap. It’s a whole new way of life. Maybe it isn’t better than sex, but it’s weirder. Remember what Dulcie said: sex divides, cooking unites.

  “We have to stay here, Ike. We have to stay because it isn’t enough to let the aliens go their own way, culturally unpolluted. We have to help them out of their evolutionary blind alley. We have to extend them hospitality, share food, share technologies, share everything. We’re all on the same side, Ike, and we all have to realize that. Everybody on Hope—and I mean everybody, including Konstantin Milyukov—has to realize that destiny has put them here because here’s where it’s at, so they can be part of it too.

  “Even though we’re making it all up, it’s not silly. It’s the most important work there is. However rough the draft might be, we’re writing chapter one of the story of the future of humankind, and all the stranger humankinds we’ve yet to meet.”

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  In spite of his exhaustion, Matthew had trouble sleeping. When he did drift off, he dreamed.

  And then awareness returned, as belated reflex forced Matthew to let his breath out and suck in another avid draught of plentiful air, and to stretch his limbs out to their full extent, and to hear what was being said to him, and to put out his own groping hand to still the one that was shaking him …

  He was as sober as he had ever been since awakening from SusAn.

  “What is it?” he demanded, blindly.

  “Lights,” said Ikram Mohammed. “Lots of them.”

  Matthew opened his eyes then, and looked out through the transparent fabric of the bubble-tent.

  The curved fabric distorted the points of light, making them scintillate like stars. For one confused moment, Matthew thought they might actually be stars, and that the infinite purple canopy had condescended to undergo one of the rare flamboyant transformations of which it surely had to be capable, drawing itself apart in order to display the sky.

  Then he scrambled out of the tent, following his companion.

  It was Ike, not he, who whispered: “Get the camera! For heaven’s sake, get the camera!”

  Matthew did as he was told. At first, he pointed it at Ike, but Ike knocked the lens away, angrily. “Are they receiving?” Ike demanded. “Are they putting this out?”

  Matthew didn’t know—but when he was finally able to clear the last vestiges of sleep away and focus his eyes on what Ike was pointing at, he knew immediately what was needed. He dared not shout, but he spoke firmly to whoever was on the other end of the link, instructing the crewman not merely to activate the TV relay but to sound an alarm that would wake up every single member of the crew, and every single colonist on the ground.

  He realized, belatedly, that he need not have worried about the crew. He had forgotten that surface-days and ship-days were out of phase. It was midday on Hope, not midnight.

  Everyone on Hope was awake; everyone was watching; everyone was party to the miracle.

  All Matthew had to do was point the camera.

  The scene at which it was pointing told its own story.

  There must have been at least a hundred humanoids: an entire tribe, in all likelihood. They came close enough to make themselves obvious, and then they paused. In fact, they posed—not for the camera, of whose nature they knew nothing, but for the sake of their own dignity and pride, and to signify their own sense of triumph. The crowd distributed itself in a huge semicircle, partly to display itself more bravely and partly because its every member wanted to be able to see the weird aliens, their peculiar hut, and their strange machinery.

  They were curious. They were probably more than a little afraid, but they were certainly curious.

  At least half their number carried spears, but Matthew couldn’t be bothered to try to make out what the shafts and tips were made of. Some of them carried ropes, some baskets, some hammers, some artifacts of their own making to which he could not put a name. To all of this, he paid scant attention, because the dozen who drew his gaze and made it captive were the ones who were carrying spherical bowls ablaze with light, supported on squat cylinders. The bowls must have been harvested from the treetops, and the cylinders too. They had been carefully shaped, neatly dovetailed, and ingeniously augmented with wicks and devices to deliver the wicks into the bowls by slow degrees.

  The twelve aliens were carrying lamps: lamps with reservoirs of oil and burning wicks.

  Sex divides, Dulcie Gherardesca had told Lynn Gwyer, with a measure of passion that Matthew had not fully understood at the time. Sex divides, but cooking unites. The foundation of culture was the capacity to delight in the sharing of fire; the beginning of culture—of the meeting of minds and the forging of the elementary social contract—was the Promethean Moment.

  Only three of Dulcie’s alien apostles were also carrying stolen machetes, but they were holding them up to the light, showing them to Matthew and Ike—and also, although they did not know it, to every human being in the system who had responded to Matthew’s urgent call.

  Through this crowd-within-a-crowd came Dulcie herself, striding confidently to greet her friends. Her surface-suit was no longer brown or purple; it was silver-and-gold.

  Her arms were quite relaxed, swinging at her sides, but her hands spoke nevertheless, casually drawing attention to her achievement, her gift, her repentance, her redemption, her denouement.

  Fire and iron, Matthew thought. There, but for the grace of fire and iron …

  And he knew, now that he was absolutely sure that he really had awakened from his febrile dream, that the Ark named Hope had not merely found its Ararat, but had also sealed its Covenant.

  EPILOGUE

  When Michelle Fleury finally came to stand before her father’s tomb in the so-called Palace of Civitas Solis all the carefully repressed
bitterness came flooding back. She had heard the explanation for his desertion three times—from the doctor who had supervised her awakening, Frans Leitz; from her stepmother, Dulcie Gherardesca; and from the purple-skinned native with the voice box that formed the human syllables his own natural equipment could not—but she had not yet been able to bring herself to accept it as a valid excuse.

  “He couldn’t know that he would die without seeing you again,” Dr. Leitz had said, while he was fitting her surface-suit. “He expected to live another hundred years. We’ve only just begun to realize the full extent of the toll that living on an alien world has exacted from us, and it wasn’t until the technical support began to arrive that we were able to refine our rejuve technologies. He delayed your awakening for the very best of reasons. He wanted you to wake up to a world that was fit to receive you: to a world that could provide for you as a parent should.”

  The tomb wasn’t quite as elaborate as Michelle had expected. Alien hands had built it: emortal alien hands, which had never built a tomb before. She hadn’t expected a pyramid—pyramids had an entirely different significance in the native cultures of Tyre—but she had expected something more like a Victorian mausoleum than a mere kiln. It might have seemed more appropriate if the inscriptions on the faces of the shaped stones hadn’t been incomprehensible, but she hadn’t yet learned to decipher the written version of the local language.

  “Shall I translate?” Dulcie asked. Dulcie had insisted on coming with her, although she’d had the grace to hang back in the deeper shadows for a few minutes while Michelle came to stand beside the tomb.

  “No,” Michelle said, reaching out a hand so that she could trace a few of the engraved hieroglyphics with her right forefinger. “I know more or less what it says. He always wanted to be a messiah. When it became obvious that he couldn’t save his own world, he set out in search of one that might be more open to salvation, and more grateful. This says that he got his wish.”

  “That’s not how they thought of him,” Dulcie told her, her voice putting on a show of patient forbearance. “It’s not how they thought of me, either. Maybe from our side we looked like the Prometheus team, bringing the light of the gods to the people of the forest, but they have a very different set of myths based in a very different way of life. To them, everybody is a teacher, because everybody has to be. The active members of society are the custodians of hundreds of thousands of years of accumulated knowledge and tradition, which they have to pass on to the rejuvenate twins and triplets when they emerge from their own natural version of SusAn. They don’t have hero myths, because they don’t have outstanding individuals. All their efforts are collective and cooperative. To them, we’re very bizarre, and it was partly in recognition of that strangeness that they made Matthew a tomb. They could never quite make sense of the fact that the human population of the city elected him mayor, because they never single out leaders or symbolic figureheads—but they respected his position, and they decided to mark it. I think he’d have been pleased. I know he would.”

  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!