Dark Ararat Read online

  “The crew think I’m doing all this out of spite, because I won’t play the game unless I’m running the show,” Shen went on, “but you know me better than that, Matthew. You may not understand the situation as yet, but you do trust me. You know that I’m not just an old-fashioned capitalist clinging to his property like grim death because I can’t bear to let go. I’m a Hardinist through and through. A real Hardinist. The years haven’t changed me.” He seemed slightly anxious, as if he were not at all convinced that Matthew would still recognize and trust him. He did not carry the burden of his extra years lightly.

  “I know who you are,” Matthew assured him. “I do understand—better than Milyukov can, I think. All he’s ever known is Hope. He can’t really understand what was happening to Earth in the 2080s, or what it meant to people who loved their world enough to leave it. When the IT was pulling me gently out of SusAn, I dreamed I saw the Earth die. It was a vivid dream, even when it became lucid. It could have happened. Milyukov knows that it didn’t, but that knowledge prevents him from obtaining any real understanding of the wellsprings of our motivation.”

  “Those who fail to learn from prophesies are condemned to fulfil them,” Shen quoted, with the ghost of a smile. “The stupidest thing about this whole farce is that on the most essential point of all, Konstantin Milyukov and I are in complete agreement. His most fervent desire, and mine, is that the colony should succeed, and succeed gloriously. It would be a terrible irony of fate if our difference of opinion as to who should control Hope and its resources were to cause it to fail. I don’t know nearly enough about what’s going on down there, or why the people at the bases have been so badly spooked, but I do know that it would be a dreadful waste of an opportunity that might never come again if they were to throw in the towel and demand to be taken up again. I’m very grateful that you came to talk to me, Matthew—and if Milyukov has any sense he’ll be grateful too. I need you, Matthew. The colony needs you. We need your scientific expertise, and we need your rhetorical skills. They do remember you, Matthew—even the ones who never knew you know who and what you were. They need you.”

  “They had Bernal,” Matthew pointed out, uneasily. He was uneasy because he knew that few other people on Hope remembered him as fondly as Shen. Shen had been impressed by Matthew Fleury because Matthew Fleury was a kindred spirit: another lonely voice crying the same warnings in the same dread wilderness—but Shen had not spent much time on Earth during the 2070s, and none at all in the 2080s. He had come to see things from an extraterrestrial perspective, and a prejudiced one. Matthew, like the proverbial prophets of old, had been a man not much honored in his own country—and he had always thought of the whole world as his own country, his potential constituency.

  “They didn’t see Bernal as a potential leader,” Shen said, “and rightly so. He was a pleasure seeker at heart, too preoccupied with his prick.”

  “They won’t see me as a potential leader either,” Matthew said, soberly. “Not for the same reasons, maybe—but it takes more than a lack of romantic ambition to establish a man as a serious individual. To many of them, I’m more TV personality than scientist, and on Earth in the old days nothing trivialized a man like TV. There’s only one man in this solar system who could assert any kind of real authority over the people on the surface, and that’s you. Milyukov may have misjudged your capacity to hurt him, but so far as the people on the ground are concerned he’s managed to marginalize and neutralize you, Believe me, Shen, I’m no ready-made substitute. Milyukov must know that.”

  “He can’t,” Shen said, stubbornly. “He doesn’t know you. You can make a difference, Matthew. I know you can.”

  “Almost everyone down there has had three years’ head start,” Matthew countered. “Every single one of them will take it for granted that they understand the world far better than I do—and they’ll be right.”

  “You have the advantage of a fresh eye,” Shen pointed out.

  “That’s true,” Matthew conceded, perversely glad that he had found a point to concede. “I don’t suppose, by any chance, that you have any idea why Bernal was killed, or by whom?”

  “None,” the old man confirmed. “I am, as you must have surmised, somewhat out of touch.” He went straight back to what he thought was the important stuff. “I chose you for a reason, Matthew. Because you were an ecologist, able to see woods where others were only capable of seeing trees, but also because you were a hero. Bernal was as good an ecologist as you were, but he wasn’t as good a hero.”

  You heard my voice from far, Matthew thought, and recognized it as an echo of your own. But it wasn’t. It was always mine. The flattery was beginning to wear thin; he had already overdosed on it.

  “I can’t win here, Matthew,” Shen went on, his voice little more than a whisper. “I can hold Milyukov at bay, but I can’t win. Perhaps I and my successors can make certain that Hope remains in this system for a very long time, but that would be self-defeating if we prevent her from offering wholehearted support to the colony in the meantime. We all need a new way to look at things, Matthew, a new way to look forward. Nobody else seems to be capable of providing that. Not even Bernal, although I don’t doubt that he was working on it.”

  “I’m heartened by your confidence,” Matthew said, wishing that it might be truer than it was. “But it won’t be easy.”

  Shen turned his head, presumably to listen to someone out of shot. Matthew couldn’t hear what was being said, but he studied the nodding of Shen’s head as the old man responded. The motion seemed almost robotic. Shen was still the man that Matthew had known, albeit briefly, in the late 2080s, but his mannerisms had become more distinct. Matthew wondered how much mental flexibility he had lost, how much capacity for self-reinvention. He must be living a hand-to-mouth existence, unless he had sufficient control over a large enough fraction of the ship’s resources to maintain his internal technology and support his most cherished habits. Either way, Shen was an old man by the standards of the world he had left; his IT might be able to sustain his body and mind for another twenty years, but it could not maintain their agility.

  Matthew took advantage of the pause to wonder whether he might have made matters worse than they had been before by running away to meet Shen, given that he had not actually learned anything much to his advantage. If he’d inflicted more damage on Riddell or his friend than he’d intended, he might be facing criminal charges himself, without ever getting a chance to find out who had killed Bernal and why. If he had ever had a chance of persuading Konstantin Milyukov that he might be recruited to the crew’s cause, it had gone now. But he had needed to see Shen, if only to reassure myself that he really was alive and well.

  It occurred to him then that he could not be entirely reassured on that point. All he could see was an image, of a kind which even a stupid AI could maintain and animate.

  “Thanks for this, Matthew,” Shen said, returning his attention to the camera’s eye. “I wouldn’t have expected any less of you, and it would be a pity if Captain Milyukov were to hold it against you. Be careful, Matthew. Whatever the new world is, it’s certainly no Eden—but that doesn’t mean we can’t make our peace with it. Earth was never an Eden either, no matter what the Gaean mythologists may say. We have to make the most of our experience, and we have to make a stand somewhere, or we’ll be on the run forever.” It had the ring of a farewell, and a dismissal—and also, perhaps, the suggestion of an olive branch extended in Konstantin Milyukov’s direction.

  Matthew nodded, but realized that the light was too poor to allow the gesture’s meaning to be clear. “I’ll do my best,” he promised. “Not just for your sake, but for the sake of the children.” Shen would know that he meant all the children, not just Alice and Michelle.

  “Good-bye, Matthew,” Shen said. He didn’t add: This will be the last time you ever see me, but it was understood between them.

  The screen blanked out before he had time to reply.

  Matthew decided tha
t he had been right to make his break from Milyukov’s custody, no matter what effect it would have on the captain’s attitude and conduct. He had needed to see Shen. He had needed to see and know that the past wasn’t dead: that it had leapt the gulf of 700 years to extend itself rudely and proudly into the present. He had needed to get a grip on the fact that the mission was still in progress, and that the torch sustaining it had not begun to dim.

  Matthew had never been a Hardinist, nor any other kind of confirmed Capitalist, but he understood—as Konstantin Milyukov probably could not—exactly why Shen Chin Che was the hardest of Hardinists. He understood too exactly why Shen considered that no matter who, if anyone, eventually came to own the vast territories of the new world, he and his allies had an unassailable right to own the new Hope, just as they had owned the old.

  ELEVEN

  Shen Chin Che posted more green arrows to guide Matthew back through Hope’s inner maze, and Matthew followed them, confident that he would arrive soon enough at a place where Milyukov’s people could welcome him back. While he walked, less hurriedly than before, he tried to make sense of what he had discovered.

  Shen’s references to a “war” between his AIs and Milyukov’s had to be largely metaphorical. No armies of superviruses were hurling themselves upon one another in the dark wilderness of the ship’s software space. There were a few systems that were under Shen’s control and a lot that were under Milyukov’s control—but wherever those systems interfaced or performed actions that had consequences within the other there was no control at all, and hence no function. The “war” was a stalemate: a software gridlock whose ramifications were stifling 80 or 90 percent of the activity that should have been going on aboard the ship if it had been offering full support to its own inhabitants, let alone to the bases on the surfaces.

  It was no wonder that the people up here were as jittery as those on the ground—and no wonder that everyone had begun to doubt that the colony could ever become viable. But a stalemate was a kind of situation that could change very rapidly once it was broken, no matter how long it had endured. And once the situation became fluid, it became manipulable. The breaking of a stalemate was the ideal opportunity for a fresh voice to be heard—for a fresh message to be heard. It might not matter much if the voice were a voice from the past, even if it were a voice whose knowledge of the present left much to be desired; what mattered was that it could offer a new and brighter future.

  He knew that Shen had appealed to him out of sheer desperation, but that didn’t mean that Shen wasn’t right. There were moments in time made for prophets, and perhaps this was one of them. Perhaps Bernal Delgado had understood that. Perhaps whoever had killed him had understood it too. If Bernal had understood it, and had set out to prepare a way, there was a possibility that by stepping into Bernal’s shoes, Matthew might be able to carry his scheme through to completion rather than having to devise one of his own. And perhaps Bernal’s killer understood that too … or was he being too paranoid? The only danger facing him at present was that there were so many empty corridors around him, all cold and all dark. If the arrows were to vanish …

  He passed numerous intersections at which unlit corridors led away into the darkness. Now that he was not hurrying he had the opportunity to notice that most of them slanted “upward,” toward the zero-gee core: alien territory, for which even the crewmen were ill-adapted.

  The emptiness became increasingly disturbing. The darkness seemed so ominous now that he was no longer playing the buccaneer, that he was astonished by his earlier temerity in launching himself into it. As he walked on, Matthew began to feel unnaturally light, as if his imagination were finally coming to terms with the sensations associated with the low gravity. At the same time, though, he felt bone-weary, as if he had over-taxed himself to the point where he needed to lie down and sleep for hours. It was a curious, almost paradoxical, alloy of sensations, like nothing he had ever experienced before.

  On Earth, where he had spent all but a tiny fraction of his not-quite-fifty active years, exhaustion had always been echoed in heavy-seeming limbs, and alertness in a subliminal awareness of physical power. The present dislocation was presumably mild when compared to what long-term moon-dwellers must feel, but the moon had seemed such a radically alien place that every move he made there had been tentative. Hope was not quite alien enough, at least in this sector, to overturn his ingrained expectations—whose failure had, in consequence, come to seem like a kind of betrayal.

  On the surface, Matthew recalled, his weight would be 0.92 Earth-normal rather than 0.5. In theory, that ought to be a great deal more comfortable, posing problems of adaptation that were objectively trivial. But would that objective triviality be faithfully replicated in his subjective sensations? Might it not be the case that the narrowness of the difference between the new world’s surface on Earth would enhance the sensation of betrayal? And might not that too, add to the jitters that the people on the surface were feeling?

  He would find out soon enough.

  When two of the crew members finally did contrive to locate him, coming at him at a trot, he took due note of the fact that their first impulse, upon catching sight of him, was to reach for their guns. Only one of the two—a small, slender, short-haired woman who looked no older than eighteen or nineteen Earth-years—actually drew her weapon, but the difference was too small to be reassuring. Her companion, also a woman but considerably taller and a trifle more mature, had rested her fingers speculatively on the butt of her own weapon before deciding to leave it where it was. They both seemed very anxious, as if they expected him to charge them with waving fists.

  Matthew put his hands in the air, making the gesture as theatrical as he could.

  “Hey,” he said. “I’m just lost, that’s all. I’m not some alien marauder intent on taking the control room by storm.” He knew that Hope did not have a “control room” as such, or even a “bridge,” but he felt entitled to a modest theatrical license.

  The woman who had drawn her gun did not return the weapon to its holster. She didn’t say anything; she was still looking at him as if he were a mad dog, utterly unpredictable as well as dangerous. The taller woman had pulled out her phone instead of her gun, but she had turned away in order to speak into it, so that Matthew could not make out what she was saying.

  “Have you ever actually fired that thing?” he asked the younger one, letting his annoyance show. “If not, I’d rather you didn’t point it my way.”

  “It’s non-lethal,” she retorted. Matthew took that as a no. He also took the whole charade as an indicator of the fact that Konstantin Milyukov really did have it in mind to take his renegade systems back by brutal force of arms if there seemed to be no other way. Matthew didn’t dare to assume that it couldn’t be done. The crew had been building the ship for hundreds of years—the transition from Earth’s solar system to interstellar space had been only a minor punctuation mark in the long text of that endeavor—and they must know its present physical layout far better than Shen’s people, no matter how cleverly Shen had concealed his software shock troops.

  The taller woman still had her phone in her hand, and the line was presumably still open, but she had turned to face Matthew again and seemed to be waiting for him to say something more.

  “I had an appointment with Professor Lityansky,” Matthew told his captors, “but I fear that I’m a little late. I’m sure he’s as anxious to get on with it as I am, but I’m rather tired. Perhaps we could postpone it until tomorrow, when I’ll be more able to give my full attention to what he has to say. Can you take me back to my room?”

  “Did you hear that?” the older woman said, into the mouthpiece of her phone. The answer was presumably affirmative, but Matthew couldn’t hear any of the reply.

  “You shouldn’t have done that,” the taller woman told him, when she finally replaced the phone in her belt. “Riddell’s not badly hurt, but you broke Lamartine’s jawbone.”

  “I’m sorry ab
out that,” Matthew said, sincerely. “But it will mend. Fists are supposed to be non-lethal too, if you use them sensibly. Am I under arrest?”

  “You’ll be down on the surface soon enough,” was the only answer he received. “We’ll take you back to your room.” She gestured to her companion, who only hesitated for a couple of seconds before returning her weapon to its holster. Both women still seemed very nervous, unwilling to get too close to him. When they led him away they stayed ahead of him, and they didn’t look round.

  Seven hundred and twenty-seven years before 2090, Matthew calculated, would have been late medieval times in Europe. The Black Death would have come and gone, and populations would have been exploding again in a period of relative climatic generosity. Had a man of that era stepped out of a time warp to confront the people of Earth he would have seemed uncouth in the extreme, and his hosts would have taken it for granted, rightly or not, that his inevitable paranoia might explode into violence at any moment. These people had far more in common with him than the men of the twenty-first century would have had in common with a visitor from 1363—most importantly, a common language—but a tiny, self-enclosed society like that of the crew, afloat on a mote in the hostile void, had to look back on the history of Earth with a certain horror.

  The twenty-first century had only been the second most violent in human history, but one of the consequences of the spread of IT and the increasing capability of medical science had been the encouragement of widespread interest in extreme sports, including hobbyist combat of all kinds. Even as a boy, Matthew had never gone in for the kind of fighting that would put his IT to the test, but he belonged to a generation in which even the pettiest disputes had routinely escalated into brawls and knife fights. It had been easy enough to do what he had had to do in order to slip the leash of his subtle captivity, almost unthinkingly. It wasn’t too difficult now, though, to place himself imaginatively in the shoes of the two women from a very different place and time, in order to envisage what he had done as the act of a barbarian, or a dangerous psychopath.