Dark Ararat Read online

  “Good luck,” the captain said—but he was looking at Vince Solari, and it was to the policeman that he extended his hand.

  “Thanks,” Solari said, shaking it.

  Matthew deliberately turned away, returning his attention to the narrow space into which he was being invited to climb. “What if I turn out to be claustrophobic?” he said to the doctor.

  Nita Brownell peered through the airlock into the narrow crevice that was his allotted berth. “If your adrenaline level shoots up your IT will put you to sleep,” she informed him, unsympathetically. “You’ll be able to breathe normally, and quite easily.”

  Matthew sighed. The cavity was, he supposed, loosely describable as a couch, but the loose festoons of silky material that almost filled the available space seemed ominous. The captain’s briefing had referred to the flight-preparation process as “cocooning,” but Matthew couldn’t help thinking about what happened to flies entangled and entrapped in spiderwebs.

  “Reminds me of a body bag,” Solari murmured. He obviously came equipped with his own repertoire of disturbing analogies.

  “There are more than a thousand people on the surface,” Milyukov put in. “They all went through this. Admittedly, you’re the first two to travel as a pair rather than a foursome, but that should make it even safer. The cargo’s perfectly secure.”

  There was no reason to doubt the last assurance. Before it had been packed the cargo must have been an awkward jumble of irregular shapes, but now that it was in place it had all the compactness of an ingenious three-dimensional jigsaw. Everything that the people at Base Three needed to put the finishing touches to their riverboat was in there somewhere, along with scientific equipment, foodstuffs, biocontainment apparatus, specialized sursuits, and numerous unlabeled parcels whose content Matthew could not guess.

  “Well,” Matthew muttered, in a voice so low that no one but Solari could hear him, “if Bernal was killed because someone has it in for ecological genomicists, I hope the killer didn’t have an opportunity to sabotage this thing.”

  “Me too,” Solari echoed, presumably hoping that no one had it in for detectives either.

  Matthew put procrastination aside and climbed in. Solari waited for him to wriggle into his slot and make himself comfortable before following. Matthew placed the personal possessions that he had brought with him across the gulf of time on his chest, but he made no effort to position them upon his beating heart. There was such a thing as taking symbolism too far.

  As soon as Matthew had wedged himself into the crevice and stretched himself out at an angle of thirty degrees the smart spidersilk got to work, weaving itself into an elastic chrysalis. Matthew knew that he ought to be grateful for the protection, which was intended to keep him safe from impact effects even if the dandelion seed did come down a little too precipitately, but it was difficult. It was like being embraced by an amorous blanket of intelligent cotton wool.

  He did feel a flicker of momentary panic as his sight was obscured, but nothing actually touched his eyes and he was able to open them again after a moment’s uncertainty.

  He kept them open, even though there was nothing to see but a silvery mist. He wanted to remain in control, to keep his adrenaline in check by the authority of his will. To be blanked out by his protective IT, he thought, would be an undue humiliation.

  “Matthew?” said Solari’s voice, coming from a point not much more than a meter away now that the detective was ensconced in his own cocoon.

  “I’m here,” Matthew replied. “I guess it’s not so bad. How long did the captain say the drop is scheduled to take?”

  “We should be down within an hour,” Solari said. “Some fall.”

  Matthew already felt virtually weightless, and wondered if he would be able to tell when Hope expelled the landing craft. The moment would have to be very carefully picked, to minimize the amount of maneuvering that the craft would have to do on its own behalf once it was adrift in the atmosphere.

  When the expulsion eventually took place, though, he felt the shift distinctly, and was almost immediately seized by dizzying vertigo. He knew that the reaction was psychosomatic, produced by his imagination rather than any rude agitation of the statocysts in his inner ear, but he couldn’t help gasping. He knew that his adrenaline level must have taken a jolt, but he fought to suppress the flow, to keep it below the threshold at which his internal guardians would take fright. Subjectively, the biofeedback training he had undergone at school was less than forty years behind him. It should still have been second nature even though he’d never had much call to test its limits while he was on Earth, but exercising self-control seemed to be a struggle now.

  “Are you okay, Matt?” Solari said again.

  Matthew knew that the policeman was seeking reassurance on his own behalf, but he certainly did not begrudge it. “Fine,” he said. “You?”

  “It’s not so bad. A roller-coaster freak wouldn’t think twice about it. Never liked them myself. Too much imagination, I guess. Saw too many traffic accidents before robotization became compulsory—and too many afterward, come to think of it.”

  Matthew had been frozen down while the debate about the right to drive had still been fierce. He had even taken part in televised debates in which spokesmen for the drivers’ lobby had argued that robotization would only make “joyriders” and “highwaymen” more reckless, as well as turning them into criminals. He had only seen the victims of traffic accidents on film, but he had not needed any more intimate contact to make him nervous.

  “There’ll be fresh air waiting for us at the other end,” he said, by way of building morale. “Fresh-ish anyway, once our suits have filtered it. There’ll be open sky and things like trees, and hills and a river. Not unlike home, as seen though lilac-tinted spectacles, with gravity just a fraction less than normal. Better than that damned ship with its twisting corridors and off-color lights and green-tinted crew.”

  “Perfect,” Solari said drily. “Pity they won’t be pleased to see us, isn’t it? Well, maybe they’ll be glad to see you—and I’ve had plenty of practice bearing bad news to victims and staring down the hostility of suspects. It’ll be home-dyed purple, like you say. I think I could get used to weightlessness, you know, if all I had to do in zero-gee was lie down. It’s the clumsiness that I hate.”

  “Sure. This is okay. I can even bear to think about what’s really happening. Do you think we’ve hit the atmosphere yet?”

  “No idea.” After a pause, Solari continued: “This is what we came for, isn’t it. I almost forgot that, you know, with all this stuff about the murder and the revolution. It was only a few days ago, subjectively speaking, but that long gap’s still there. I lost touch a little, with the motives that brought me here. This was what it was all about: the chance to shuttle down to a brand new world, to have a second chance, to have a hand in starting something momentous. Everything that happened to us till now was just a prelude to this moment. We’re both the same age now, you know, give or take a couple of months, even though we were born years apart. Forty-eight years of active life from the moments of our birth to this one. Forty-eight years and fifty-eight light-years. We wanted a new start, and this is it. Ararat, Tyre, whatever … this is it. The rest is just so much trivia. I’ve been falling since the moment I was born; this is just the landing phase.”

  It was an oddly poignant speech, and an effective one. It reminded Matthew of his own reasons for being here—reasons that had somehow been shunted aside by the tide of information that had deluged him since the moment of his awakening. It reminded him that this was supposed to be the turning point of his life, an end and a beginning. Until he had quit Hope he had still been trapped by the hard and soft artifices of his old life, but now, cocooned though he was in artifacts of similar provenance, he was breaking free. When he emerged from his chrysalis onto the surface of the new world he would be a new being. This was, as Solari said, merely the landing phase of a fall that had begun the moment he was born
. Seen from the viewpoint of the present, his old life had been something he was passing through, on the way to this.

  “This is it,” Matthew agreed, echoing Solari’s judgment. “The first footfall of the most prodigious leap in human history. My first footfall, anyway. Nothing will ever be the same again, no matter how things work out aboard Hope. Humanity is an interstellar species, and you and I are part of the vanguard. Maybe we’re three years behind the first landing, but what’s three years in the cosmic timescale? With luck, you’ll be the first man here to identify and arrest a murderer. There are worse precedents to set.”

  “It’s not a matter of luck,” Solari assured him. “It’s a matter of procedure. Procedure and patience.”

  They were still falling. They seemed to have been falling for a long time. Matthew wished that he had some way to tell how many minutes had actually passed. He had been given his wrist-unit along with his other personal possessions, and had immediately strapped it on, but he could not look at the face of his watch now. He had not thought to put his goggles on, so that he could summon virtual displays by blinking his eyes.

  “Will procedure and patience be enough, given that so much time has passed since the actual event?” Matthew asked, reflexively.

  “I have to believe so,” the policeman told him, scrupulously. “I’ve made a good start on the data relayed back by Blackstone and the material already on file. It’s just a matter of following through.”

  “You already have a prime suspect?” Matthew asked, surprised that Solari hadn’t seen fit to mention it.

  “Not exactly. It doesn’t do to jump conclusions. Guesswork can confuse your objectivity. You start twisting things to fit your hypothesis. Like you, I’d rather none of them was guilty—but I don’t want it to be aliens either. That would be a pity too, maybe the worst scenario of all. We were supposed to meet the alien openhanded, ready to join forces as friends and collaborators.”

  “So we were,” Matthew murmured. It was true. The idea that man and alien would have to meet as enemies, competitors in a Darwinian struggle for existence that extended across the entire cosmic stage, had come to seem horribly twentieth century even to hard Darwinians. Hope had been called Hope because she lent new hope to humankind’s prospects of surviving the ecocatastrophic Crash that had destabilized Earth’s biosphere, but she was an incarnation of all kinds of other hopes too. One such hope—perhaps the most important—had been the hope that if the ship did manage to find an “Earthlike” world complete with smart aliens, they might be able to recognize an intellectual kinship and contrive some kind of mutual aid.

  How much easier would that have been if the panspermists or the extreme convergence theorists had been right, he wondered. How much difference did it make now that they had been proved wrong—doubly wrong if you added the biochemical version of Gause’s axiom to the package? How much hope was left, when even Hope had been riven by conflict and virtually torn in two, each part far less than the ruined whole? What comfort was there in having to hope that one of the seven humans at Base Three had killed their colleague, because the alternative was even more discomfiting?

  “Matthew?” Solari said, again, although it was he who had let the silence fall.

  “Still here,” Matthew said. “Still awake. A petty triumph, I suppose, but one I can still treasure.”

  “I keep waiting for the bump,” Solari said. “Utterly pointless tensing my muscles, I know, but I can’t help it.”

  Until Solari had mentioned it, Matthew hadn’t tensed his own muscles at all, but now that the subject had been raised he felt himself flinching in anticipation … then relaxing…. then flinching again …

  “We’ll be down soon enough,” he muttered, trying to jerk himself out of the absurd pattern.

  And soon enough, they were.

  The impact was distinct, but not in the least dangerous. It felt like an elevator coming to rest after sliding down the core of a building.

  “What happens now?” Solari asked.

  The glorified dandelion seed provided his answer by splitting apart, as if it were indeed some kind of seed. The silvery mist before Matthew’s eyes was oddly illuminated, as if the threads of his cocoon were transmitting the sparkling light and reflecting it at the same time, dividing the rays of the new sun into a million glittering shards.

  Then the cocoon began to split too, to deliver its precious cargo to the peak of Ararat, the broad sweep of Tyre … or whatever.

  Matthew took firmer hold of the bag containing the essence of his former life, and began to struggle free of the disintegrating wrapping that had confined him. He hoped that there would be a crowd to greet him, even if circumstance dictated that it could not possibly be more than seven strong. He had always liked to look upon faces that were pleased to see him, and this was the kind of moment that demanded a veritable host of sympathetic witnesses.

  PART TWO

  Delving into the Past

  SIXTEEN

  Had the landing worked out exactly as planned it would only have been necessary for Matthew to step down onto the new world’s surface, exactly as he had imagined doing. Unfortunately, the braking shuttle had been driven by the wind into an inconvenient stand of treelike structures, where the parachute-web had become entangled with the branches. Although the capsule itself was far too heavy to be prevented from descending to solid ground it had come to a rest at an awkward tilt.

  The hatchway from which Matthew had to make his escape was three meters above the ground and his egress was blocked by clustered “leaves,” which bore more resemblance to plastic plates and leathery fans than the leaves of Earthly trees. Some of these structures had shattered, leaving jagged shards hanging loosely from broken branches, but the majority were whole, their more elastic elements having grudgingly made way for the arrival of the capsule in their midst.

  He could see through the tangle that there was a crowd hurrying to greet him—seven strong, as he had hoped—but they were still some way off, descending a slope made treacherous by loose gravel. He knew that he must be almost completely hidden from them, and had not space to wave a greeting. The manner of his entrance was obviously going to leave much to be desired: he would have to force his way through the purple tangle in a most ungainly fashion, confused as much by the peculiar textures of the barrier as by the sudden recovery of almost all his Earthly weight.

  “Can you get down?” Vince Solari asked, having divined that there were problems.

  “It’s okay,” Matthew assured him, after further investigation. “Not many thorns, no vicious wildlife. It’s just a matter of treading carefully.”

  Fortunately, the branches of the dendrite seemed strong enough and dense enough to facilitate a gradual descent. He hesitated slightly over the business of thrusting himself into their midst, because he was wary of the sudden intimate contact with any local life-form, no matter how innocuous it seemed to be, but he wanted to proceed with an appropriate boldness and he did.

  The twisted “boughs” of the dendrite looked and felt more like a work of art than an active organism, the foundations in which the plates and fans were set having a texture more like vulcanized rubber than wood. He was glad that there would be no need to handle any of the bulbous structures that were suspended from the end of each branch, although he had no reason to think that they were dangerous.

  Eventually, he arrived on the ground and scrambled out into the open.

  By this time the people he had seen approaching were all gathered about the thicket, but they hung back and waited for him to emerge, having realized that pressing forward would only make things more difficult.

  Lynn Gwyer was the first to step forward and the only one to hug him, although Ikram Mohammed’s greeting was only marginally less enthusiastic. It was Ikram Mohammed who introduced him to the others, but the round of handshakes was hectically confused. He had expected to be able to recognize the faces readily enough from the photographs Vince Solari had displayed on the wallscr
een, but the heavy-duty smartsuits made more difference than he had expected to their coloring and their hairstyles. Maryanne Hyder had preserved her blond tresses, albeit in a more economical form, but Lynn Gwyer had opted to go bald. Dulcie Gherardesca’s scars were no longer visible beneath the extra dermal layer and Godert Kriefmann looked a good deal younger than his picture. Tang Dinh Quan and Rand Blackstone were the only two who had contrived to maintain their Earthly appearances; the fact that Blackstone was wearing a wide-brimmed hat and carrying a rifle only served to emphasize his image.

  Matthew was slightly disappointed by the hesitancy of so many of their responses, and wondered for a moment whether they had mistaken him for the policeman sent to interrogate them, improbable as that might seem. It only took a few seconds, however, to realize that they were almost as awkward with one another as they were with him. It occurred to him that they might not have assembled into a single company for some time. They were, apparently, divided among themselves. Bernal Delgado’s death had presumably emphasized those divisions rather than bringing them together.

  The manner in which the capsule had come to rest posed obvious problems so far as unloading the cargo was concerned, but the difficulties should have been easily overcome. As soon as Rand Blackstone began barking orders the mood of the seven seemed to suffer a further deterioration. No one actually started a quarrel over the tall man’s dubious right of command, and the instructions he gave were sensible enough, but the resentment was almost palpable. Having been briefed by Solari, Matthew had no difficulty figuring out that Tang Dinh Quan and Maryanne Hyder were the two most seriously at odds with the Australian, and that none of the other scientists wanted to take his side unequivocally.