Dark Ararat Read online

  Matthew decided that it was time to follow Solari’s example and try to cut through the crap. “Where’s Shen Chin Che?” he asked.

  Milyukov was ready for him; the glaucous gaze did not waver. “Somewhere on the microworld,” he said, calmly. “I don’t know where, exactly. It is a microworld now, of course, although the recently awakened habitually refer to it as a ship. If Hope really were a mere ship, a man could hardly contrive to hide for long, but her inner structure now has the floor space of a sizable Earthly town.”

  “Shen’s in hiding?” Matthew said, incredulously. “Why?” He already knew why, of course. Shen had built the Ark. Shen had owned the Ark. Shen must have come out of SusAn believing that he still owned the Ark, and that he had the final voice in any adventure undertaken by the Ark. The crew had obviously taken a different view—but they had been unable to persuade Shen to align his view with theirs, and they had been unable to hold on to him when he had decided to go his own way.

  “Because he laid claim to an authority that was no longer his,” was Milyukov’s version, “and because he resorted to violence in a hopeless attempt to reclaim it. He, more than anyone else, is responsible for the deterioration of the relationship between crew and colonists, and for the factional divisions that have subsequently arisen.”

  “He was one of the prime movers in the construction of the four Arks,” Matthew pointed out. “Second in importance only to Narcisse himself. Hope was his personal contribution to the great quest. You can hardly blame him for harboring proprietorial sentiments.”

  “Shen Chin Che did not build the original Hope,” Milyukov retorted, flatly. “He did not shape a single hull-plate, nor did he drive home a single rivet. He merely directed the flow of finance, and the money that he regarded as his was, in fact, the product of long-term dishonest manipulation of markets and financial institutions. Perhaps, within the corrupt economic and political system that then embraced Earth and the extraplanetary extensions of Earthly society, that was sufficient to establish ownership to the original vessel, but even if that claim were justified, Hope is a very different structure now. We—the crew—were the builders of the new Hope, in a perfectly literal sense. We planned the reconstruction, and we carried it out. Hope is ours now, and always will be.”

  “Are you telling me there’s been a mutiny?” Matthew said, knowing well enough what Milyukov’s counterclaim would be but wanting to hear it formally stated.

  “What I’m telling you, Professor Fleury,” the captain retorted, coldly, “is that there has been a revolution. Hope’s crew and cargo have been liberated from the crude restraints imposed by the obsolete political and economic system that was temporarily in force when the original Hope was constructed.”

  Matthew did not want to reply too swiftly to this news. He knew perfectly well that 700 years was a long time in the evolution of a human society, even one that was probably no more than a few hundred strong. It was not difficult to imagine that successive generations of crewmen could have come to a notion of their role in the scheme of things quite different from that imagined by their original employers. It might have been stranger had they contrived to avoid coming to the conclusion, by slow degrees, that the ship they were reshaping again and again was theirs and ought to remain theirs.

  Solari was not as shy as Matthew. “A revolution,” he repeated, guardedly. “A socialist revolution, you mean?”

  “It’s not a word we use,” the captain informed him, “but labels are unimportant. What matters is that we, the makers and inhabitants of the new Hope, have set aside all the claims made by the original Hope’s so-called owners, on the grounds that they have no proper moral foundation.”

  “But what kind of new society are we talking about?” Solari demanded. “A democracy, or an autocracy? Are you telling us that you run everything now, or do we still get a vote?”

  “It’s not as simple as that,” Milyukov said, as Matthew had expected him to.

  “You must always have known that the Chosen wouldn’t play ball,” Solari went on, recklessly. “So you decided to get rid of them at the earliest opportunity. They were promised an Earth-clone, and they don’t think this world qualifies—but you don’t care. You want to maroon them here, whether they have a real chance of survival or not. You’ve turned pirate.”

  “Absolutely not,” was Milyukov’s unsurprising judgment of that allegation. “It is, in fact, the crew who are, and always have been, intent on fulfilling their manifest destiny: the role in human affairs that they, and perhaps they alone at present, are capable of fulfilling. Everything we have done in reshaping Hope has been devoted to that end. They only pirates aboard Hope are Shen Chin Che and his gang of saboteurs.”

  Solari had been slightly wrong-footed by the reference to “manifest destiny” but Matthew knew what it must mean.

  “The crew have decided that this is the first in a potentially infinite series of seedings,” he told Solari. “They do want to set up a successful colony here, and they’re probably becoming desperate in their attempt to believe that it’s an attainable goal, but their long-term goal is to repeat the exercise again and again. Some of the would-be colonists are realistic enough to settle for delaying Hope’s departure for as long as possible, but the rest are holding out for a better Earth-clone. The captain is obviously a reasonable man, so he’s willing to come to an agreement with the former group, but he wants Shen Chin Che out of his hair and down on the surface. He’s trying to persuade us that we should see things his way, by necessity if not by choice.”

  “So where does Delgado’s murder fit into the argument?” Solari asked, pointedly addressing the question to Matthew rather than to their host.

  “He doesn’t know,” Matthew guessed. “But he daren’t neglect the possibility that if he can’t find a way to use it, someone else will. Bernal’s testimony as to the long-term prospects of the colony might well have been vital to whichever cause he decided to support, not just because he was a leading expert in ecological genomics back on Earth but because of the reputation he brought with him as a prophet and a persuader.”

  “I must repeat,” Milyukov said, finally letting his irritation show, “that the situation is more complicated than you can possibly guess. You bring to it an understanding that is seven hundred years out of date. Earth has changed out of all recognition since you went into SusAn, just as Hope has, and all the assumptions you brought with you are quite obsolete now.”

  Matthew had to restrain himself from expressing aloud the opinion that this was nonsense. The political and economic systems now in place within Earth’s solar system were of no particular relevance to Hope’s situation, but the ideologies and ambitions that the would-be colonists had brought into SusAn were very relevant indeed. Whether or not there were still Hardinists on Earth, there was an abundance of them among Shen Chin Che’s Chosen People, and not one of them was likely to accept that his or her politics were now “obsolete” simply because the crew had decided to stage a takeover bid. Earth—a planet apparently still occupied by billions, even after a near-terminal ecocatastrophe—had surely had time for a dozen revolutions, counterrevolutions, and counter-counterrevolutions of its own, and its inhabitants would doubtless react to news of Hope’s discovery as they saw fit, but how could that make an iota of difference to the reactions of the awakened colonists? Perhaps the machines ruled Earth now, as some of his rival prophets had warned, operating the Ultimate Autocracy, or perhaps the anarchists had finally contrived a rule of law without corruptible leaders, but here in the new world’s system, all the popular shades of twenty-first century Hardinism, all the nuances of Green Conservatism and all the factions of Gray Libertarianism were alive. Some of them might still be frozen down, but those that were not would be kicking.

  Shen Chin Che, whom many had considered to be the boldest of all the pharaohs of Earthly Capitalism, had awakened to find himself a stranger in a society that had reshaped itself in his absence, but it was absurd to imagine t
hat he could ever have accepted a new status quo meekly. Shen had gone to his long sleep not merely a builder and an owner but a hero and a messiah. If he had woken up to find himself an overthrown dictator, fit only for ritual humiliation as the representative of an obsolete order, he would instantly have transformed himself into a revolutionary: a zealot bent on the restitution of the old order. How could Milyukov’s people have failed to anticipate that? By the same token, Matthew thought, how could Shen not have anticipated the possibility of exactly such a revolution as Milyukov’s ancestors had carried out? He must have. Might he actually have expected it to happen? Perhaps. And if he had, might he not have made provisions?

  That, Matthew guessed—in spite of Konstantin Milyukov’s assurance that guesswork would not be enough—was why everybody kept telling him that things were not as simple as he had been ready to assume, and why an armed guard had been stationed outside his room, and why the people in the corridor had acted so quickly to ensure that no one could pollute his mind before the captain had briefed him. Perhaps it also accounted for the fact that the ship seemed to be in such a poor state of repair. Shen and his “gang of saboteurs” were not merely in hiding. They were in active opposition. If the shooting had not already started, it soon would—unless a compromise could be attained, and a treaty made.

  Matthew felt a sudden wave of despair sweep through his weakened body. Hope had been intended to escape all of the curses that had brought Earth to the brink of destruction, not to reproduce them with further savage twists. What hope could there possibly be for the future of humankind, if Hope itself were now embroiled by an orgy of internal strife that could very easily lead to the mutual destruction of all involved? Even Gaea had proved so fragile as to have avoided destruction by a fluke; the ecosphere-in-miniature that was her pale shadow here could not tolerate a similar strain.

  Vince Solari must have been mulling over the same awkward possibilities and dire anxieties, but his approach was as practical as ever. “So who, exactly, am I supposed to be working for now?” the policeman demanded. “You?” His voice was not disdainful, but it was certainly skeptical.

  “For the human race,” Captain Milyukov told him, without a trace of irony. “For the truth. For justice. For all the future generations whose fate will depend on what we can accomplish in the years to come.”

  “In other words, for you,” Solari repeated, making no attempt to keep his own voice free of sarcasm.

  “No,” Milyukov said, making the contradiction seem effortless although his manner was still aggressively insistent. “I am the captain of Hope. My responsibility begins and ends in the microworld. Your future will be spent on the surface, within whatever society is eventually established there. If your people want to make Shen Chin Che—or anyone else—the owner of the planet, or the emperor of its human colony, that is entirely their affair. If your people want to design and implement their own political system, they are entirely free to do so. But they must realize and accept that we have the same right, and that we will exercise it. Hope does not belong to the colonists, and they have no power of command over her.

  “It would obviously be best for everyone if your people and mine could work together, in full agreement as to our goals, our methods and our timetable—but if we cannot agree by mutual consent, agreement will certainly not be coerced by Shen Chin Che or anyone else. If we cannot agree, then we shall have to be content to disagree. When I say that you are working for the human race, for truth, for justice and for future generations, I mean exactly what I say. Perhaps such formulations seem vague or pompous to you—I cannot pretend to understand how the men of the distant past reacted to ideas and situations—but they are taken very seriously aboard Hope.”

  Vince Solari looked sideways at Matthew. The policeman did not know how to react to this strangely strident declaration, and Matthew could not blame him.

  “When Hope was under construction,” Matthew said, treading very carefully, “the assumption was that all of its resources would be devoted to the support of any colony it succeeded in establishing. Although it could never land, the intention was that it would remain in orbit around the colony world, an integral part of of the endeavor.”

  “We shall, of course, provide the colony with the support it needs to become self-sufficient,” Milyukov said. “But our ultimate purpose and manifest destiny is to go on toward the center of the galaxy, spreading the seed of humanity as widely as we can.”

  “But you’re only carrying so much human cargo,” Matthew pointed out. “The embryos in the gene banks could be split repeatedly, I suppose, cloning entire new sets, with only a small percentage loss at each stage, but you can’t replace the people in SusAn: the primary colonists.”

  “Of course we can,” Milyukov retorted. He didn’t elaborate, electing instead merely to stare at Matthew. The stare implied that a man of Matthew’s intelligence ought to have no difficulty following the thread of his argument.

  What Captain Milyukov was thinking, Matthew had to suppose, was that the living colonists could indeed be replaced. Their genetic resources could be duplicated by nuclear transfer cloning, and the resultant children could be educated aboard Hope to something like the same level of attainment as the donors. When their education was deemed to be complete they could be replaced in the empty SusAn chambers, ready for decanting all over again. There would be an attrition rate, of course—but even the amnesiacs whose minds had not survived the 700 years of stasis could still be counted a genetic resource, replaceable as biological individuals. Assuming that Hope was still in contact with probes sent out from Earth—and with Earth itself, although a 58-year transmission time would make meaningful dialogue enormously difficult—the gradual loss of inbuilt knowledge and expertise could probably be compensated by imported wisdom.

  There was nothing intrinsically impossible about the crew’s new plan. Hope might indeed seed a dozen worlds rather than one, if her indefatigable crew could find a dozen that were sufficiently hospitable—but any estimate of her chances of success would have to take into account her experience in attempting to seed this one. If this colony succeeded, others would probably succeed too, but if it failed, the crew’s “ultimate purpose” and “manifest destiny” might begin to seem horribly impractical. This was the critical point, at which the whole scheme might be most easily aborted. Milyukov knew and understood that. He knew that the future he and his people had planned for themselves depended very heavily on what happened here and now. If the colony succeeded, in spite of the fact that the world was a marginal candidate for acceptance as an Earth-clone, the prospects of further success would seem very rosy, but if this attempt ended in disaster the crew would have to reassess the fruits of their revolution.

  “Now I understand why you need me,” Matthew said, mildly. “It will need an ecologist of genius to figure out whether a colony deposited on the surface and abandoned by Hope could ever be viable, and a televangelist of genius to sell the idea.”

  The dull green gaze fixed itself upon him. “Nobody expects miracles from you, Professor Fleury,” Milyukov assured him, unable now to suppress a note of sarcasm. “You have been fully awake for less than twenty hours, and cannot hope to catch up with everything that has been learned during these last three years—but your opinion will doubtless be weighed for what it is worth. No one, incidentally, has proposed that the colony be abandoned. Everyone recognizes that there will come a time when the colony no longer needs pseudo-parental supervision—when it too, can declare its independence, its freedom, its ability to decide and define its own destiny. What we all need from the scientists on the surface is a carefully measured and meticulously reasoned account of the best strategy that will lead us to that goal. If you are to make any contribution to that mission you will need to do a great deal of work. Andrei Lityansky is ready to begin your education at a moment’s notice. He’ll give you as much help as he can while your surface-suits are made ready.”

  Matthew was careful to rem
ain impassive, although it required an effort. “You’re absolutely right, captain,” he said, calmly. “I really should get on with that as soon as possible.” He stood up immediately and moved toward the door. When Solari put his hands on the arms of his own chair, as if to lever himself up, Matthew added: “That’s okay, Vince. I dare say the captain wants to give you such details of the crime as he’s managed to collect. I’m sure our friend with the gun can take me where I need to go. I’ll see you back in the sick bay.”

  He opened the door and stepped out, without bothering to look back at Konstantin Milyukov.

  NINE

  The man with the sidearm was still waiting patiently outside, as Matthew had expected. He seemed slightly surprised to see Matthew emerge unaccompanied, but he nodded readily enough when Matthew asked to be taken to see Andrei Lityansky. He took a phone from his belt and thumbed the buttons. He didn’t put it to his ear: the text-display obviously told him what he wanted to know.

  “He’s not in the lab just now,” Riddell reported, “but I’ve paged him. He’ll meet us there as soon as he can. This way.”

  Once they’d rounded a couple of bends and taken a branching corridor Matthew could no longer tell whether they were heading in the same direction as the one from which they had come or a completely different one, but he took note of the fact that there were not nearly as many people about now that he had been fed the captain’s point of view.

  He glanced behind several times, catching glimpses of another man who was obviously heading for the same destination but seemed to prefer that the curves of the corridors obscured him from sight. The follower did not seem to be carrying a gun.

  Having no idea how long the journey would be, Matthew felt constrained to act quickly. He waited until they came abreast of one of the blacked-out corridors, and then turned on Riddell without warning, grabbing him by the throat and attempting to slam the man’s head against the corridor wall. Had he been fully fit the power of his muscles would have been easily adequate to the task, but his coordination was awry. Riddell sustained a nasty bump but he ducked far enough forward to make sure that he was not knocked out.