Текст книги "Dark Ararat"

Автор книги: Brian Stableford

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“What orphan?” Solari put in, while Matthew was still working out how to phrase a more pertinent question.

“A sunless but life-bearing world we bypassed in interstellar space. It was long before my time, but it’s all on record, including the genomic analyses. It was a sludgeworld—nothing bigger than a bacterium. There are others, apparently, able to support life because their internal heat and thick atmospheres keep the surfaces warm and wet. Lots of probes came this way after us, all traveling faster—it’s easier to accelerate when you’re small—and we’ve harvested a lot of information from them. There’s nothing else like this world, though—not yet. It’s the one-and-only Earth-clone, for the time being. It’s not just yourworld. So far as everyone here is concerned, it really is theworld.”

“Long before your time,” Matthew echoed, anxious to stake a conversational claim before Solari asked another question. “I presume that means you’re as young as you look. Dr. Brownell said that the people back on Earth are emortal now—does that apply to the crew too? Do you have the means to modify us?”

“It’s not as simple as that,” Leitz countered. “Yes, I’m as young as I look—nineteen. No, I’m not emortal, and never will be. True emortality has to be built in from scratch by genetic engineering of a fertilized egg-cell. Our rejuve technologies have improved a little since we left Earth, but we haven’t been able to develop our nanotech nearly as rapidly as the folks back home. I can’t tell you how long you or I will live, barring accidents, because I don’t know how much we’ll benefit from further progress, but two hundred years is generally reckoned to be a fair guess. By Earthly standards, we’re primitives. On Earth, survivors of the Old Human Race are freaks.”

“What happened to Bernal Delgado?” Solari asked, presumably feeling that theoretical issues could safely be left to one side until more practical issues had been addressed. “Who killed him?”

The youth’s eyes swiveled away from Matthew to meet the detective’s. Matthew was slightly surprised to find himself relieved: the green gaze had been slightly disconcerting, although it had seemed guileless enough.

“We’re hoping that you can find that out,” Leitz told Solari. “It looksas if he was killed by aborigines—”

“The world’s inhabited?” Matthew interrupted—but Leitz continued looking at Solari.

“But it can’t be the way it looks, because all the evidence says that the aborigines are extinct. Which probably means that it was set up to look like Delgado was killed by aborigines, maybe just to deflect attention away from whoever did kill him, but maybe to persuade people that the aborigines aren’t extinct at all. That would change things, you see, and it might not take more than a few votes swung from one side to the other to create a new majority among the groundlings. If they were all to get behind a formal request for a withdrawal, that could cause realproblems for the captain … and for everyone else.”

Matthew could see that Vince Solari was just as astonished by this puzzling flood of information as he was. The detective had no immediate follow-up ready, so Matthew was able to step into the breach again. “Are you telling us,” he said, slowly, “that after seven hundred years, we’ve arrived at the only Earth-clone world that any of Earth’s probes has so far managed to locate, but that the colonists you’ve so far managed to land are split right down the middle as to whether or not they want to pull out?”

Frans Leitz shrugged his bony shoulders. “It seems crazy to nearly everyone up here,” he admitted. “But yes, there are a lot of people on the ground who want out, for one reason or another. Mostly, they don’t think the world is anywhere near Earthlike enough. Some are scared because the local humanoids have become extinct—others are worried that if the aborigines aren’t quiteextinct, our arrival will tip them over the edge. The bioscientists can’t seem to agree about what will happen to the local ecosphere if we establish a colony here … or, for that matter, to the ecosystems we introduce. This may not be a sludgeworld, some say, but it’s a real can of worms. It’s not easy for me to judge, being ship-born and ship-committed. I’m crew—my future’s here no matter what”

“And what about Shen Chin Che?” Matthew wanted to know. “What does hethink?”

The boy’s face had been quite relaxed before, but it became suddenly taut now, and there was a flash of wildness in those eerie eyes. “I don’t know,” he said, guardedly. “He’s not involved in the discussion.”

“Is that because you haven’t woken him up?” Matthew was quick to ask.

“No,” the boy said. “It’s a bit more complicated than that.”

Matthew had already opened his mouth to ask another question before he realized—belatedly, it seemed—that he might already have asked at least one too many. Frans Leitz might be just a glorified cabin boy, and Nita Brownell a bona fide doctor with a businesslike bedside manner, but that didn’t mean that every word that he and Vincent Solari spoke wasn’t being overheard elsewhere in the ship, and very carefully studied. Matthew had no idea what side he was likely to be on in the ongoing dispute, because he had only just realized that there wereany sides, but now he knew that there were, he wondered whether he ought to be careful. Newly hatched into a situation that obviously wasn’t as simple as it ought to be, he might need to get his bearings before showing his hand to interested parties.

He had been awakened, it seemed, to replace the other member of his pair, who had been murdered. However the land lay down on “the surface,” this was a matter of life and death.

It had always been a matter of life and death, from the very first moment he had exchanged polite bows with Shen Chin Che, but Matthew knew that he must not lose sight now of the fact that within the larger matters of life and death—upon which hung the fate of worlds—there were tangled threads upon which his own life dangled. It was not impossible that whoever had wanted Bernal dead might want him dead too—and until he knew whyBernal had been killed, it might be as well to be careful.

“I think we need to see the captain as soon as possible,” Matthew said to Frans Leitz. “In fact, I can’t help wondering why he sent you to talk to us, instead of coming himself.”

“The captain is just as anxious to see you as you are to see him, professor,” the young man replied, blithely ignoring the second part of the statement. “He’ll send for you as soon as Dr. Brownell has made perfectly certain that you’re fit and well. Now, can I get you anything before I go?”

“You could turn the TV on,” Matthew said. “I’d like to catch the next news bulletin.”

“We don’t have broadcast TV,” the youth informed him. “The captain broadcasts occasionally, but we don’t need routine news bulletins. Everybody knows everybody. All we have to do is talk to one another.”

“What about the people on the ground?” Matthew asked.

“They make their reports, of course. They all have beltphones, just like on Earth. We’ve established a chain of comsats. But Base One doesn’t have broadcast TV either. There’s no need. We have VE-hoods for entertainment. I’m sorry—I hear that you used to be on TV a lot, on Earth.”

The youth said it as if he were trying to frame a compliment, but Matthew couldn’t hear it as one. He might have been slightly flattered to think that his reputation had preceded him, even at this distance from Earth and the twenty-first century, but his mind was elsewhere. To him, not having broadcast TV—not even having news—seemed a far more significant symptom of a breakdown in communication than the fact that the doctor was reluctant to talk to him and that a cabin boy had been sent to answer his immediate questions.

“Things have gone wrong, haven’t they,” he murmured. “Badly wrong.”

Frans Leitz blushed again, but the blush seemed as odd and unhealthy as its predecessor. “No,” he said. “Not really. Not yet. But they might, if the people on the surface can’t see sense. Everything depends on them—on their willingness to do what they came to do.”

“After seven hundred years of SusAn, they’re not sure whether they’re willing to do what they risked everythingto do? Surely you mean their abilityto do it?”

“Well, that’s what they say, of course,” the young crewman replied, ingenuously. “But it’s only a matter of determination. It isan Earth-clone world, even though it’s a little peculiar. Maybe you’ll be able to make them see that, Professor Fleury. We certainly have an urgent need for somebody who can.”

THREE

Matthew was enthusiastic to try out his legs, but Nita Brownell seemed to be in no hurry to complete the disconnection process and let him get out of bed. Frans Leitz helped her, with an easy alacrity. The fact that the young man had obviously been trained to operate as a medical orderly made Matthew feel slightly guilty about continuing to think of him as a “cabin boy” but it didn’t stop him doing it.

The moment he was released from the machines Matthew tried to spring into action, but immediately realized that his mental tiredness was a symptom of a general physical weakness. It was astonishingly difficult to sit up, let alone to step down to the floor.

When Matthew expressed surprise at his weakness, Nita Brownell—who was perfectly willing to be loquacious about purely medical matters—explained that the vitrifying agent that had protected his cells from damage while he was frozen down had only been able to preserve the basic structures. Many of the proteins involved in routine cell metabolism had suffered degradation, and had therefore required replacement. Unfortunately, the messenger-RNA system for transcribing exons from nuclear DNA and establishing templates in the cytoplasm had also been partly disabled, and was not yet fully restored.

“You must have been warned before going into SusAn that we couldn’t just defrost you,” she told him sternly, as if it were his fault that he had not remembered that particular item of information. “We had to give your cells time to get their internal acts together, and then restore function to your tissues. Even with IT support, it’s been a slow process. The machines kept you asleep as long as possible, but the final phases of the tune-up have to be completed while you’re alert and active. You’ll feel a lot better in a few hours, and you’ll probably be able to leave the room this time tomorrow. You’ll be shuttling down as soon as possible—within fifty hours, if all goes well.”

“Fifty hours!” Matthew exclaimed.

“Sorry,” the doctor said. “That’s ship hours. Five days, in the old reckoning.”

Five days still sounded a trifle hurried to Matthew, although he knew that if he’d been kept aboard ship for an extended period he would soon have become impatient. It was difficult to believe the reassurance that he’d be back to his old self within five days when the effort of standing up seemed so extreme, and the prospect of taking a step almost impossible, but once he’d actually contrived a step and had found it merely uncomfortable, he buckled down to the serious business of reminding his body what human existence was like.

For the first couple of hours of relative freedom, Matthew and Vince Solari were too wrapped up in what was happening to them to pester their helpers with awkward questions about the situation aboard ship, but the easing of their concerted interrogative pressure didn’t seem to lighten the minds of their coy informants; everything either of them said or did seemed to touch slightly raw nerves.

Given that the ship’s spin was only simulating half Earth’s gravity, Matthew was not surprised to find that once his muscles had got the hang of working again they soon began to feel quite powerful. Unfortunately, learning to move about efficiently and economically in the unfamiliar gravity-regime was frustratingly difficult. His memories seemed to be virtually unaffected by their long storage, so the exercises and tricks he had learned as he passed from Earth to the moon, and then to remoter parts of the system, were still fresh in his mind. Unfortunately, his body had spent forty years adapting to Earth and a mere matter of months in variable low-gee. All the old expectations were still built in.

“Don’t worry about it,” Nita Brownell advised him, while she studied the manner of his blundering with a connoisseur’s eye. “It doesn’t matter if you’re awkward and clumsy up here—in fact, it’s better that you don’t have time to begin getting settled. The real task ahead of you is adaptation to the surface. That’s oh point ninety-two Earth-gravity, but you’ll find that oh point oh-eight makes more difference than you’d imagine.”

“If it’s oh point ninety-two Earth-normal down on the surface,” Matthew growled, “wouldn’t it make more sense to simulate oh point ninety-two up here?”

“Well, yes it would,” said Nita Brownell, cautiously—but she was immediately interrupted by Frans Leitz.

“This is crew territory,” Leitz said, brusquely. “It’s adapted to our requirements. It’s always been this way, and there’s no reason to change.”

“ Yourrequirements,” Matthew repeated. “ Yours, as opposed to ours. Since when did youand webecome opposed sides, with contrasted interests?”

He realized as he framed the words that it was a stupid question. Since when? Since the twenty-first century, obviously. The corpsicles’ yesterday, the crew’s ancient history. A lot could happen in 700 years, even in a mini-ecosphere set to maintain itself far more rigidly than Mama Gaea. The crew had obviously developed ideas of their own as to what their purpose and destiny ought to be. But how, exactly, had they brought them into conflict with the colonists whose needs they had been put aboard to serve? From what he had been told so far, it was the colonists, not the crew, who were having doubts about their role.

Nita Brownell had already reverted to what she obviously considered safer ground. “As soon as you go on to autopilot on the surface,” she was saying, “the old reflexes will come into play, and you’ll find that you’re just that little bit out of step. You’ll need to take the adaptation process seriously. Do your exercises. Play some ball games, if you can, and don’t get too frustrated by your initial inability to judge a catch or a throw. It’ll take weeks, at least, maybe months. Longer than you think, at any rate. The lingering impression of being in the wrong place will sink to a subliminal level, but someone of your age could easily be troubled for years. We think that’s one of the major reasons for …”

She paused, the momentum of her discourse having carried her away from the safe ground to which she had resolved to stick.

“For what?” Solari prompted.

She took up the sentence readily enough, if a trifle guardedly. “For the sense of unease and disorientation that seems to have taken near-permanent hold of many of the surface-dwellers,” she said.

“Near-permanent?” Matthew queried.

“We believe that it will wear off eventually,” she insisted, before hurling herself back into her work with a concentration that excluded further inquiry. Matthew wondered whether she really counted herself part of that particular we.

Dr. Brownell had seemed relentless in her pursuit of possible gaps in their memories and possible failings of intellectual ability, but that had not been her primary field of expertise. Now that she was checking on the efficiency of their organs and metabolic pathways she had stepped up another gear. She had been bare-headed before but she was wearing a tiara now with side-lenses placed at the edges of her peripheral vision, and her eyes were constantly flicking back and forth as they read the data transmitted to the tiny screens. Some of it was reportage of tests carried out elsewhere, on samples extracted from the newly defrosted bodies, but most was the result of “live” transmission from the cleverer elements of their Internal Technology as they put the various parts of their bodies through a battery of tests.

“There’s a certain amount of peripheral cell-failure in most of your tissues,” she told them both, when they collapsed back on to their beds, their tiredness transformed to utter exhaustion, “but you’ve both been lucky. Because the vitrification and cooling processes proceeded unevenly, and there was a similar unevenness in their undoing, there’s always a slight problem at every tissue-boundary, especially where the cells are unalike, but neither of you has suffered unusually heavy losses anywhere. Vincent’s worst problems are in the dermal layers, while Matthew’s are the shrouds of the long bones, but both deficits should be fully remedied in a matter of days.

“Your alimentary canals and kidneys will take longer to make up the shortfall and flush out the debris, so you might both have some slight trouble with your digestive systems. I won’t program your IT to blot out the discomfort because I may need all the warning signs I can get. Don’t get paranoid about slight bellyaches, but if there’s any sign of allergic reactions of any kind let me know immediately. The tailors are already at work on your surface suits. We won’t be fitting them today but they’ll have to be well grown-in before you’re ready to shuttle down. This part of the ship is supposedly an ultrasafe environment, so we won’t be issuing you with specialized ship suits at all—but when I say supposedlyI mean that we can’t be absolutely certain, so it might not be wise to go wandering around, and certainly not without a guide.”

“What’s wrong with the other parts of the ship?” Solari wanted to know.

Again, it was Leitz who answered what appeared to be a ticklish question. “We’ve suffered some systems failures,” he said. “Their effects are variable, but we’ve been forced to close some sections temporarily. Even the sections over which we have full control can be hazardous to non-crew members, though. The ship isn’t a homogenous environment, of course, even within the inner shell. When you came aboard it was probably no more than a glorified steel box, but once we’d hitched a ride in the comet core the hybrid began to evolve, and it’s been evolving ever since. Seven hundred years is a long time in the history of a world as small as this one, and we’ve been making progress all the while. It’s not just a matter of needing suits to go out into the ice—there are a dozen intermediary regions, and only a couple are exclusively AI territory. You’ll find the surface very strange, Inspector Solari, but don’t make the mistake of thinking that Hopeis a little slice of home. In its own fashion, it’s a good deal stranger. If the people below understood that better, none of them would be laboring under the delusion that they’d be better off aborting the colony.”

“Okay,” Matthew said, blandly, when it became obvious that the sermon was over. “Message understood. We won’t take any long walks without a guide. These surface suits you mentioned, Dr. Brownell. How thickly do we need to be insulated down there?”

“They’re not much bulkier than ordinary clothing,” she assured him. The air filters are unobtrusive, although you’ll be aware of them in the sinuses and throat until they settle in, and they’ll modify your voice slightly. It hasn’t been necessary to take them all the way down into the lungs, although the whole of your gut will have to be resurfaced. You won’t be consciously aware of the gutskin at all, although its extension is the most difficult part of the fitting. We’re operating on a precautionary principle, of course—everything’s assumed to be biohazardous until it’s proved otherwise.

“Once you’ve been briefed by the crew’s genomicists you’ll probably be better able to assess the risk factors than I am, but so far as we can tell the local bacs aren’t at all enthusiastic to set up home in Earthly flesh, and mammalian immune systems are perfectly capable of forming antibodies against native proteins. They’re so competent, in fact, that the main difficulty is over-response. Animals exposed to the whole chemical symphony of the surface environment tend to go into reaction-overdrive; those that don’t collapse with anaphylactic shock develop high fevers and lapse into comas when their blood is glutted with defensive factors. More gradual exposure allows them to adapt, but it’s a slow process. It could take generations to produce Earthly domestic animals that can operate naked on the surface and feed themselves adequately on local produce. It’s the same for people—except, of course, that human generation times are a lot longer. The colonists and their crop-plants will be living in bubbles for a long time yet—but they will make progress. Slowly but surely, they’ll make themselves at home.” She said it stoutly, but she didn’t sound entirely convinced of the last assertion.

“But theydon’t think so, do they?” Solari said. “They don’t think this is an Earth-clone world at all. They think they’re in greater danger here than they were on Earth. They think they’ve jumped out of the frying pan into the fire.”

“No,” said Leitz, firmly. “They don’t. All those who aren’t cowards know full well that they can live here, if they’re prepared to make the effort. The greater part of the surface community is in full agreement with the crew that the colony hasto go ahead.”

“And how big is the majority?” the policeman countered, scornfully. “Not so big, apparently, that a few votes couldn’t swing a demand for withdrawal.”

“Votes don’t matter, inspector,” the boy said, rattled to the point of recklessness. “The people on the surface aren’t in a position to make demands. The only way they’ll get back up here is if we take them in—and we won’t. The colony has to stay, and it has to succeed. We wouldn’t have woken the two of you up if we didn’t think that you would both work toward that end.”

“Was Bernal Delgado working toward that end?” Matthew asked, keeping his own voice scrupulously level.

“Yes, he was,” Leitz replied, flatly—but Vince Solari was on to that inconsistency as fast as he’d taken hold of the other.

“And maybethat’s why he was killed,” the policeman said. “Or maybe not. Maybe he was killed because he was about to switch to the other side.”

“What end is Shen Chin Che working toward?” Matthew asked—but that was one question the boy wasn’t about to answer. Had Matthew and Solari still been hooked up to all the life-support apparatus, Nita Brownell would probably have sent them off to sleep again, but she couldn’t. All she and Leitz could do was beat a retreat, and they didn’t manage that until Solari had lodged an insistent request for a suit of clothes, of whatever kind might be available, and the personal possessions—including his notepad and beltphone—that had been put into store for him.

Nita Brownell promised to see what she could do, but Matthew got the impression that she might not be able to do very much.

When they’d gone, Solari said: “This isn’t quite the awakening I envisaged. The party atmosphere isn’t up to much, is it?”

“It was always a danger,” Matthew reminded him, soberly. “There was no shortage of prophets to tell the people of my generation that we couldn’t escape Earth’s problems by running away, because we’d only freeze them down along with us: all the festering conflicts; all the innate self-destructive tendencies. Those who fail to learn from prophecies are doomed to enact them. I can understand the differences of opinion—what I can’t understand is how they’ve become so bitter. We were all supposed to be on the same side—that was the heart and soul of the whole enterprise. How can it have soured so badly? What are they still not telling us?”

“The crew have had seven hundred years to develop their own ideas and their own internal conflicts,” Solari said, pensively. “It’s not just their feet that they’ve modified. The ship is theirterritory, the kid said. They have plans of their own—perhaps more than one, maybe with a few undecided votes holding the balance up here too. One of the things they’re not telling us is what’s happened to Shen Chin Che. Did you know him personally?”

“Yes, I did,” Matthew said, wondering how much the people who must be presumed to be listening in on the conversation knew about his relationship with the Ark’s owner, “and I’d certainly like to know where he is.”

“Jail, maybe?”

“Maybe. But holding out on us isn’t the right way to win us to their side, is it? Quite the reverse, in fact.” He was speaking as much to the hypothetical eavesdroppers as to Solari, and the policeman understood that.

“Right,” Solari confirmed. “If I were the captain, I’d be down here right now, laying everything on the line. I can’t understand why he isn’t.”

“Me neither,” Matthew lied. He presumed that the reason the captain wasn’t laying his cards on the table was that the captain wanted to know exactly where his new guests stood before doing so. The captain wanted to know which way they were likely to jump, once they understood what was at stake and how many different sides there were in the conflict. But to what lengths might he be willing to go, if he decided that they were likely to take a side of which he didn’t approve?

“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.