Dark Ararat Page 16

  “What’s the hurry?” Matthew asked, when he had tried and failed to introduce the newly arrived Vince Solari to the company. “There’s nothing in there likely to rot.”

  “It’s going to rain,” was the answer he got from Blackstone. A glance at the sky told him that it was true, although it hardly seemed excuse enough for the impoliteness.

  The blatant tokenism of the responses Solari did receive to his tentative greetings suggested that the seven were exceedingly unenthusiastic about welcoming the policeman into their midst, but Matthew wasn’t certain whether that could be taken as a sign of collective guilt. Unhappily, he let Solari draw him aside, so that they would not inhibit Blackstone’s attempts to organize a human chain to begin unshipping the cargo.

  “The doctor was right about the weight,” Solari complained. “It doesn’t feel too oppressive, as yet, but it does feel distinctly peculiar.”

  Matthew had been too preoccupied with the minutiae of his descent to pay too much heed to the restoration of nearly all his Earthly weight, but as soon as Solari mentioned it he became acutely conscious of the additional drag. As the policemen said, it didn’t feel too uncomfortable, as yet, but it did feel odd. The oddness didn’t seem to be confined within him, though—it seemed to have accommodated itself automatically to the general alienness of the environment.

  It wasn’t until he concentrated hard on his own inner state that Matthew realized that his heart was pounding and that his breathing was awkward. His internal technology had masked the extra effort, but he realized that even standing still was putting a strain on him. Adaptation to the new gravity regime was going to take time.

  He looked up reflexively, in the direction from which he had come, almost as if he expected to see Hope glinting in the sky. Even the sun was invisible behind a mass of gray clouds, but there was a margin of clear sky visible behind the hilltops in what Matthew assumed to be the north. The sky was blue, but not the pure pale blue of Earth’s sky; there was a hint of purple there too.

  In every other direction, the purple coloration of the landscape seemed to leap out at his wandering gaze in a fashion akin to insult, if not to flagrant contempt. The color was not in the least unexpected, of course, but everything he had seen on Hope’s screens—even the large wallscreen—had been bordered and contained. The colors had been true, but the frame surrounding them had robbed them of a certain awe-inspiring vividness, and of their subtler sensual context.

  Matthew had imagined stepping down onto alien soil a thousand times before, amid vegetation that was as bizarre as he could visualize, but he had seen too many “alien planets” in VE melodramas to be prepared for the sensory immediacy of the real thing. Even the best VE suits were incapable of duplicating the complexity of real touch sensations, let alone the senses of smell and taste. His surface-suit, by contrast, was geared to making the most of all the molecules whose passage was not forbidden. The air of the new world presumably smelled and tasted even more peculiar than it was allowed to seem to him, but the seeming was all the more striking to a man who had been enclosed in sterilized recycled air since the moment of his reawakening, and for some considerable time before.

  Matthew felt dizzy. His reawakened senses reeled, and he had to take a sudden step back.

  “Are you okay, Matthew?” Ikram Mohammed asked. He was the only one who had paused in his work long enough to take note of Matthew’s reactions. Blackstone had organized the others to cut and shape an easily navigable path to the hatchway, and they still seemed more than ready to direct their resentful attention exclusively to the Australian rather than the newcomers.

  “We’re fine, Ike,” Matthew assured him. “Just give us a minute or two to get our heads together.”

  Vince Solari stood on one leg, experimentally, then on the other. “Not so bad, all things considered,” was his judgment. “Could be worse, I guess.” Although the direct reference was to the renewal of his weight, his tone suggested that he felt that the unreadiness of his suspects to approve of his arrival was a trifle overdone.

  The bubble-domes of Base Three were not visible from where they stood, although Matthew assumed that Milyukov’s boast about the accuracy of his delivery system had been justified. The expectant crowd could not have assembled so quickly had the base been more than three or four hundred meters away.

  Matthew was still clutching the bag containing his personal possessions, but he finally condescended to clip it to his belt. He rubbed his hands as if in anticipation of getting to work, but he resisted the temptation to force his way back into the tangled vegetation in pursuit of the machete-wielding scientists. He suspected that his Earth-trained reflexes were not yet sufficiently reaccommodated to let him grapple with the branches as skillfully as his new companions, and would certainly betray him if he tried to take a place in the human chain that was now taking definitive shape.

  “Sorry about this, Matthew,” Ikram Mohammed said, waving an arm at the remainder of the company, who were working away with their backs to Matthew and Solari. “We’re not used to visitors, and Milyukov’s made us wait for an extra week to get the last few pieces of the boat.” He stepped closer and lowered his voice before adding: “He said that it didn’t make sense to send two consignments—which is true, of course, but it didn’t stop us thinking that what he really wanted to do was make sure that we all had to stay at the base until his detective arrived to finger one of us as a murderer. No offense, Mr. Solari.”

  “None taken,” Solari assured him, insincerely.

  “I’ll talk to you later, Matthew,” the genomicist said. “Got to pull my weight. Don’t try to join in yet—wait till you get your land legs. Look around.”

  Matthew did as he was told. He took another look at the sullen sky, from which the first raindrops were just beginning to fall, rattling the leaves of the dendrites. He searched the bushes for signs of animal life, but nothing seemed to be moving. There was hardly any wind, and everything but the thicket where the capsule had come down seemed still and somnolent. The ground between the stands of trees was mostly bare, exposing black rock and gray scree slopes. The more distant slopes were already blurring behind curtains of rain, except where the ribbon of bluish sky still maintained its defiant stance. There, the many shades of lilac and purple stood out far more clearly.

  But I’m standing here on my own two feet, Matthew reminded himself, naked but for an artificial skin that’s no more than a millimeter thick save for the soles of my feet and the codpiece. It’s a strange place, but it’s a place where human beings can breathe, and live, and work, and play. It’s a place that could be home. Isn’t it?

  One or two of the reluctant laborers were glancing back at him now, some more furtively than others. Lynn Gwyer flashed him a smile, rolling her eyes apologetically as if to assure him that she would be glad to offer a proper welcome when the crowd had dispersed. Tang Dinh Quan’s glances were speculative, trying to weigh him up. Godert Kriefmann and Dulcie Gherardesca seemed to be paying more attention to Solari than to him. Maryanne Hyder didn’t seem to be meeting anybody’s eye—certainly not Blackstone’s—although there was something about her bearing that suggested that her fierce concentration was by no means evidence of self-sufficiency.

  “At least the crew were all on the same side,” Solari whispered in Matthew’s ear, having obviously made similar observations of his own.

  “No they weren’t,” Matthew replied, in a similarly confidential tone. “They just put on a better act for our sake. Here, the strains show—and with Bernal not long dead, a victim to violence, I’m not surprised.” But they are all on the same side, he added, privately. Underneath the stresses and the strains, they know that. They have to be on the same side, and so do we. The only undecided matter is how well we’re going to play the game.

  Enough cargo had now been transferred back to the bare ground to facilitate its separation into individual units. More glances were being exchanged as the potential carriers measured the mass and awk
wardness of various piles. It was, inevitably, Rand Blackstone who stepped up to one that seemed too much for any one man and said: “I’ll take this one.” Before picking up his chosen burden, though, he picked up the rifle he had set down on his arrival—the rifle that he carried to protect his fellows from attack by humanoids that none of them had ever seen—and handed it to Matthew. “Can you take care of this?” he demanded.

  The weapon seemed ridiculously heavy, and its length made it remarkably inconvenient, but Matthew resisted the temptation to pass it on to Solari. “Okay,” he said.

  “You’d better come back with me, Matthew,” Blackstone added. “Nothing much you can do here—can’t go throwing stuff around down here when you’ve been up in half-gravity for the last few days. If you didn’t hurt yourself you’d be sure to drop something.”

  Matthew took immediate offence at this assumption, although he knew that it was not entirely unjustified. He realized that the Australian wanted to separate himself from the rest of the company, and to take Matthew with him. Matthew’s first impulse—like everyone else’s, apparently—was to refuse to play along with the Australian. He looked around for a preferable companion. “I’ll wait for Ike,” he said.

  Ikram Mohammed turned around, obviously out of breath. The genomicist’s surface-suit did not allow the least bead of sweat to show upon his face, but it did not inhibit the deeper coloration that spread across his cheeks and forehead. “You go on, Matt,” he said. “It’s going to take some time to sort this stuff out.”

  “I’ll be back as soon as I can,” Blackstone put in, smugly.

  Matthew tried to catch Lynn Gwyer’s eye, feeling oddly irritated that none of the others seemed in the least eager to make his acquaintance. Even those he had not met must have known his name. Like Vince Solari, they must have seen him on TV. He had been a famous man, at least in the circles these people had inhabited. He was fifty-eight light-years from home and three years late out of the freezer, but he could not believe that he had become less interesting than the inanimate objects shipped down with him. He noticed Tang Dinh Quan eyeing him surreptitiously yet again, but the moment Matthew’s gaze tried to fix upon his eyes the biochemist looked away.

  Well, Matthew thought, if they aren’t deliberately shielding a murderer, they’re sure as hell ashamed of something.

  Lynn Gwyer came over to him, but even she hesitated. “Go back with Rand,” she advised him. “You’ll need to take it easy for a while, and Ike’s right about needing to sort this stuff out. I’ll catch up with you in half an hour or so.”

  “We made it, Lynn,” Matthew said, softly. “We made it. Across the void, across the centuries. You might have grown used to it, but I haven’t.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, only a trifle belatedly. “I do know how you feel. I only wish that Bernal could be here too.”

  Mercifully, Blackstone refrained from pointing out that if Delgado were still able to be here, Matthew would still be in the deep-freeze.

  “I’m sorry that we had to meet under such unfortunate circumstances, Dr. Gwyer,” Solari said, watching her like a hawk.

  The bald woman was content to stare back at the detective as if she were watching a dangerous dog for signs of imminent aggression.

  “Come on, Matthew,” Blackstone said, gruffly. “We’re wasting time.” He set off without waiting for Matthew to give any indication that he was ready to follow his lead.

  Matthew’s last recourse was to lock eyes with Vince Solari. “Come on, Vince,” he said. “Better do as we’re told.” Solari, who must have known that Blackstone’s careful repetition of Matthew’s name had been a deliberate snub, seemed grateful for the invitation.

  SEVENTEEN

  Matthew and Solari set off in the Australian’s wake, but Matthew made no attempt to draw level, preferring to keep company with Solari. For the moment, at least, Blackstone seemed content with that arrangement.

  “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Matthew said to Solari, speaking loudly enough for Blackstone to hear in the hope of easing the tension. “It looked good on screen, but that’s a poor preparation for the real thing.”

  Blackstone shrugged slightly, as if adjusting his load. Beautiful was obviously not the first adjective that sprang to his mind nowadays when he looked around him. Solari, on the other hand, readily followed the lead of Matthew’s gaze as it swept through a 180 degree tour.

  The shallow slope they were ascending was one of many. Although the terrain was insufficiently precipitous to be called mountainous it was not gentle enough to be merely hilly. Had its physical geography not been so strangely dressed Matthew might have been reminded of Scandinavia, but the contrast between Scandinavia’s evergreen forests and the purple “trees” was too great to facilitate any such comparison. Pines grew very straight, and their needles and cones had always seemed to Matthew to be decorous and disciplined. Nothing here grew straight; what each of the dendrites they passed had instead of a trunk and boughs was like something that might be plucked out of a chaotic heap of corkscrews and lathe-turnings. Nor was there anything in the least decorous or disciplined about what the local vegetation had instead of leaves and cones.

  If the dendrites bore ready comparison to anything, Matthew thought, it was absurdly overdressed dancers in some cheap casino show, all ruffles, pompoms and flares … and yet, there was not the slightest suggestion that these monstrous growths were ready to hurl themselves into an energetic cancan. There was, as he had already noted, an eerie stillness here. The rain was noisy in the branches, but the branches did not shake and rustle as Earthly branches would have done. They creaked a little, and moaned rather plaintively, but they gave the impression that they would bend, however grudgingly, to any pressure.

  There was no birdsong to disturb the air, nor any insect hum, but there were other whispers at the very threshold of aural perception, like white noise magnified by dead Earthly seashells into the sound of waves breaking softly on a very distant shore. There was nothing in his memory to which Matthew could meaningfully connect that barely audible murmur. On Earth, tiny sounds that were never consciously apprehended could nevertheless be categorized and filed by the brain according to a habit-formed system. Here … well, he decided, here there was a lot of learning still to do, a lot of custom yet to be established.

  “It doesn’t matter that Earth didn’t die,” Vince Solari said, joining in with Matthew’s determination to make the most of the moment in spite of the awkward attitude of his suspects. “What matters is that we’re here. We’ve found an island in the void: a haven; a land of opportunity. Our Ararat.”

  Solari’s eyes were roaming the horizons that could be glimpsed between the twisted purple masses. Matthew wondered whether he was trying to deflect Rand Blackstone’s attention from the fact that he was a policeman—but even if that were the case, he sounded perfectly sincere.

  “This planet,” Rand Blackstone said over his shoulder, with enviable certainty, “is called Tyre. New Earth is for unimaginative sentimentalists. Ararat is a crew name. Murex is too fancy. Down here, this is Tyre, and always will be. Might as well take it aboard now—you won’t be going back to crew territory, whatever Tang may think.”

  An old-style alpha male, Matthew thought. Playing the role of colonist so zealously that he’s become a parody. Now that Blackstone’s gun had had the full force of the new world’s gravity upon it for several minutes it had begun to put a severe strain on his arms, so he shifted its weight on to his shoulder, trying to disregard the absurdly macho pose that he was assuming. His legs were already protesting the effort of walking, but he only had to shorten his stride by a fraction to cause Blackstone to take note of his weakness. The Australian was quick to assure him that the walk to the bubble-complex was “very short,” without “too many” upslopes.

  It didn’t take long for Matthew to appreciate just how relative such terms could be. He revised his estimate regarding the accuracy of Milyukov’s boasts; the welcome party had obvious
ly arrived so quickly because they’d got a fix on the likely landing place long before the capsule touched down.

  Matthew half-expected Blackstone to fall into step with Vince Solari as soon as the policeman demonstrated that he was the stronger of the two newcomers, but the Australian shortened his own step to take up a position at Matthew’s shoulder, letting Solari take the lead. Now that he knew what direction to take, Solari accepted the responsibility. Matthew realized why Blackstone had made the move when the tall man murmured in his ear: “Is Shen ready to take the ship yet?”

  “What?” was Matthew’s astonished response.

  Blackstone looked down at him impatiently. “You have seen Shen?” Rumors obviously bounded from world to world as rapidly in the new system as they had in the old. Solari hadn’t turned around, but Matthew knew that the policeman must be listening hard.

  “Yes, I saw him,” he admitted, “but not for long, and only on a screen.”

  “So what’s the word? Surely he gave you a message to deliver. You can trust me—I wouldn’t go so far as to say that we’re all on his side down here, because most of the bastards at Base One can’t seem to see further than their own noses, but nobody in his right mind could want that slimeball Milyukov to press on with his crazy hijack plans. Even Tang wants Shen in charge up top—he thinks he can deal with Shen.”

  “Shen didn’t give me any message,” Matthew said. “He couldn’t. I was carrying bugs Milyukov’s people had planted on me.”

  Blackstone sighed. “Okay, so he had to be discreet. I suppose you’re still worried about the bugs. All I want to know is whether there’ll be a settlement soon. Every day that passes raises the anxiety level down here just a little further—and that’s bad. It’s way too high already.”

  “I got the impression that the situation on the ship is an impasse,” Matthew told him. “Nothing suggested that it would be resolved any time soon.”

  Blackstone cursed under his breath. “It’s all so stupid,” he said. “Everybody knows that it will be at least two hundred years before the ship could leave, even if anyone were crazy enough to be in a hurry. Milyukov will be dead by then and a whole new generation will be calling themselves the crew. The so-called revolution will belong to a period of their history so obviously dead and so obviously irrelevant that no amount of propaganda is going to make anything stick on Milyukov’s say-so.”