Dark Ararat Read online

  Knowing that reinforcements would arrive within seconds rather than minutes, Matthew brought his knee up into the other man’s groin, then threw his whole body sideways in order to slam his victim into the wall for a second time.

  It was ugly and untidy, but it worked. Riddell went limp.

  Matthew grabbed at the gun, but he was far too clumsy to be able to snatch it out of the holster. Indeed, he was so far off balance in the unfamiliar gravity regime that he slammed into the wall himself, bruising his arm. He had no time to nurse the bruise—he had to regain his footing immediately in order to respond to the follower’s rapid approach. Knowing that brute force was his only option, he lashed out with his uninjured arm. The attacker tried to duck, but he had been in too much of a hurry. The punch caught him under the nose, and snapped his head back with a horrible click.

  Matthew cursed volubly, fearing that he had broken at least one of his knucklebones, but he still had the presence of mind to hurl himself into the dark corridor and run as fast as he could along it.

  No lights came on as he passed through the corridor; it was presumably dark because the lighting had failed. That was his first stroke of luck. His second was that he did not cannon into anything solid before stabilizing his lurching run and sticking out a hand so that he could trail the fingers along the wall, tracking its contours.

  Running blind was more difficult than he had anticipated, but he slowed to a walk quickly enough. He took a left turn, then a right, then backtracked to avoid light up ahead. He was already completely lost, in an environment whose layout and dimensions were utterly unknown to him, but knew that if he failed in what he was trying to do he could always surrender to the crew.

  In the meantime, he just kept moving, clinging to the darkness.

  The darkness, he now assumed, must be a result of Shen Chin Che’s “sabotage.” The darkness was where the territory that Shen had reclaimed from Milyukov had to be. There might, however, be an awful lot of darkness. If Hope had the floor space of a sizable Earthly town, there might be a lot of empty space to which no one had bothered to lay claim. To judge by the photographs in Milyukov’s office the crew had recently been busy increasing their numbers, but they had started from a tiny base; they had hardly begun to implement their “manifest destiny.”

  He was beginning to wonder whether he might have made a horrible mistake when he saw an anomalous light in the distance: a green light. One of the dead wallscreens had come to life. He hurried forward, and was relieved to find that the green glow was shaped like an arrow. A single word was etched in black on the shaft of the arrow: Follow.

  He followed the arrow. The corridors’ overhead lighting remained inactive, but screens continued to light up as he came to junctions and corners. The next few arrows were mute, but the sixth had the word Hurry incorporated into its shaft.

  Matthew tried to accelerate his pace, but he was too clumsy. By the time he had rounded half a dozen gentle corners he had lurched into the wall twice, cursing the fact that his mass remained the same no matter how light his weight might be. He ignored the pain and tried to concentrate on following the course at a steady pace. Running was out of the question anyway; he was out of condition and already out of breath. He was unable to take long strides because he was so utterly unused to the conditions and so incompetent in the management of his momentum. He had plenty of time thereafter to be astonished by the length and intricacy of the route he was following.

  When Milyukov had said that Hope had the floor space of a town, Matthew had automatically pictured the area in question as a circular arena crisscrossed by thousands of mazy walls, but Hope’s metallic kernel was more ameboid than spherical and there was also a third dimension to be taken into account. There were no flights of steps and not very many doors and airlocks to negotiate, but Matthew soon became aware of subtle variations in his weight as he was guided closer to the ship’s inner core, then away again, then back and forth for a second time. His newly light head began to spin, and he could not quell the rising tide of dizziness even with the aid of his IT.

  He tried hard not to fall, palming himself off the wall as he stumbled, but he paused too late. His inner ear gave up the unequal fight and he collapsed, flattening himself against the floor as if it were a vertical surface from which he might begin to slide at any moment. Not until he had remained perfectly still for more than three minutes—his minutes, not ship-minutes—did he recover possession of himself.

  The darkness and the dereliction seemed to be weighing down on him, mocking him. He had already worked out, on a purely intellectual level, the magnitude of the trouble that Hope was in, but now he felt the cold antipathy of circumstance. He had not noticed the cold so much while he was walking, but now he was lying down it was seeping from the floor into his bones. He was acutely aware of his own tininess by comparison with the artifact in which he was contained—but he was aware too, of the tininess of the artifact itself. Sheathed in cometary ice as it was, it must be gleaming in the skies of the world it was orbiting, but it was no more than a spark in the void: a spark whose name had taken on a cruelly ironic gloss now that its internal community was riven with such awkward disagreements.

  Whether the new colony was fundamentally viable or not, Matthew realized, it could not succeed without far better support than Konstantin Milyukov was presently minded to deliver. The crew knew that, and the colonists knew it, but three years of strife had made them stubborn—stubborn enough for their own internal divisions to be widening into cracks, slowly but inexorably. Everyone had someone else to blame for the mission’s predicament. He, newly arrived without the stain of any original sin, could blame everybody, and he did.

  Except, of course, that he was no longer quite without sin. He had attacked Riddell, and hurt the other man set to watch him. He was involved now; he had planted his own flag, and stood ready to defend it as stubbornly as anyone.

  But the real enemy, he knew, was the darkness and emptiness of the void. Although Hope had arrived in a new solar system, the void was still here, still everywhere.

  He sat up, peering into the darkness of the inclined corridor.

  At first, he could see nothing through the gloom but an arrow of light, but after a few minutes the arrow changed into a text message.

  Not Much Further, it said.

  Matthew groaned, and hauled himself back to his feet. The arrow was restored, and Matthew followed it.

  He was passing through doorways more frequently now, but the winding corridors were so extensive and so utterly deserted that Hope was beginning to seem a ghost ship: a starfaring Mary Celeste. There was living space here for tens of thousands, Matthew realized, perhaps hundreds of thousands. The crew must have been working on the inner architecture of Hope ever since she had left the system, but their robots had been put away for the time being and they had yet to move on to the next stage in the process of evolution: the one that would make the ship into an authentic microworld, with a microworld’s population. Had they begun to fill these spaces with their own descendants immediately after their departure from the solar system, the reawakened parent-colonists would have found themselves a very tiny minority indeed, but the revolution must have happened in the later phases of the voyage. That part of the revolutionaries’ scheme was still in its early stages—and what disaster might Shen Chin Che’s counterrevolution have precipitated if these spaces had not been empty? Perhaps they would not have been filled in any case, given that space would have had to be reserved for the colonists’ future clone-children, whose generative nuclei had not been removable until they were unfrozen.

  Matthew was expecting a return to the light and a genuine rendezvous, but he was disappointed. Instead of a room as homely as Milyukov’s, all he found at the end of his rat-run was one more wallscreen at a darkened corner, displaying a half-familiar face.

  There was a camera eye positioned above the screen, but Matthew did not suppose that the glimmer of reflected light could do justice to
his features. That, he thought, was a pity. He realized that he had not seen his own face since he came out of SusAn, but he was sure that it could not possibly have changed as much as the face that was peering at him from the wall.

  “Shen,” he said, to acknowledge that he could see the face. For the moment, he couldn’t say anything more.

  “I’m sorry, Matthew,” the face said. “I can’t take the risk of bringing you in.”

  This wasn’t the kind of welcome Matthew had been expecting. It wasn’t the kind of greeting he felt they were both entitled to, after the kind of epic journey they had made.

  Had Shen actually been present, Matthew could have bowed first, then thrown his arms around the smaller man … but as things were, he could only stare at the unexpected image on the screen.

  Shen Chin Che looked a good deal older than he had been in 2090, when Matthew had last seen him. Matthew realized, belatedly, that what had been a matter of days for him must have been a matter of years, or decades, for the other man.

  “We made it, Shen,” he said, defiantly. “No matter how badly the hired help has contrived to fuck it up, we made it! Fifty-eight light-years. Seven hundred years.”

  Shen Chin Che blinked in surprise, as if he too had forgotten to factor the difference in their ages into the equation. “It has been a long time, Matthew,” he conceded.

  Matthew remembered what Nita Brownell had told him about the vulnerability of memory, and wondered how well Shen’s memories of him compared to his memories of Shen. He also remembered that the first great prophet to lead his people to a Promised Land, across a wilderness that must have seemed just as intimidating as the desert of the void had seemed to the men of the twenty-first century, had not lived to join his people in that land, seeing it only from a distance. Shen’s age, Matthew realized, might be the greatest advantage Konstantin Milyukov had in the struggle for possession of Hope.

  The Chosen People had been subject to an age restriction; the idea had been that the parental generation must be old enough to have proved their wisdom, but young enough to have more than half a century of life before them. Shen had obviously made an exception of himself. Shen had remained awake to supervise the building and equipping of his Ark—perhaps a little too long.

  “When were you frozen down?” Matthew asked, soberly.

  “Not till 2139,” Shen told him.

  Matthew made the calculation easily enough, although he couldn’t be sure of the exact fraction of the three years since Hope had arrived in orbit that Shen had lived through.

  Shen Chin Che was about fifty years older than he had been when Matthew saw him last, when he had already been the older man by more than a decade. He was now more than a hundred years old—and it was probably safe to assume that he would not easily get the benefit of any advances in longevity technology to which the crew had gained access en route.

  “Why are we meeting like this?” Matthew asked him, trying not to seem too aggrieved.

  “There’s a possibility that Milyukov woke you up in order that you might serve as a Judas goat,” Shen told him. “Even if that wasn’t his sole intention, he’s bound to have sowed your suitskin with the cleverest bugs his people can devise. They have some new tricks, thanks to their exchanges of information with the probes that overtook them—if they hadn’t, I’d have won by now.”

  “Well,” Matthew said, philosophically, “it’s good to see you anyway.”

  “It’s good to see you too, Matthew,” the old man assured him. “Your memory’s good, I hope—you must remember our last meeting a great deal better than I do.”

  “I remember it very well,” Matthew said. “I won’t say that you don’t look a day older, but you always wore well.”

  It was true. Shen Chin Che was not a tall man, nor had he entirely resisted a certain inherited tendency to rotundity, but on and off Earth he had been a man of iron discipline as well as a man possessed of state-of-the-art IT and smart clothing. He always had worn well. His light brown skin still seemed to have the same near-golden glow that Matthew remembered, undulled by age or by recent years spent beneath the meager glare of the ship’s artificial lighting, but it was wrinkled now.

  “We may not have much time,” Shen said. “Some day, I’ll fill you in on the history of my last half century, but that will have to wait. We have to do the important stuff first, in case we never get a chance to do the rest.” His voice was harrowingly bleak.

  “I understand,” Matthew said, although he wasn’t entirely sure that he did. “So tell me the important stuff.”

  TEN

  I don’t have time to fight a long, drawn-out war of attrition,” Shen Chin Che admitted. “Which is a pity, given that it’s the kind of war I’ve been landed with. I can’t win it, so someone else will have to.” He didn’t name any names.

  “How many men have you got?” Matthew asked.

  “Let’s not bother with matters of trivial detail,” the face on the screen replied, politely reminding Matthew that even if their conversation were not being monitored it was almost certainly being recorded. “It’s not the number of men that counts. The real battles were fought by AIs. The crew thought they’d disabled all my Trojan horses before they brought me back, but they hadn’t. Unfortunately, they had contrived to equip some of their own systems with better defenses than I’d anticipated. This siege seems likely to continue for a lot longer than ten years, whether I survive to lead it or not.”

  Matthew realized that Shen Chin Che was talking through him as well as to him. Among other things, their conversation was the latest move in a long-running war of words.

  “You knew I’d try to make a break when I realized that I was a prisoner, didn’t you?” Matthew said. “That’s what the commotion in the corridor was for—to drive home the point in case I hadn’t noticed. You needn’t have worried. Milyukov was just as keen to annoy me as you were to have me annoyed. He knew that I’d make a break too. Maybe he wanted me to run to you, so that he could tell the people on the surface that they wouldn’t be getting a replacement ecologist after all, due to circumstances beyond his control.”

  “He’s not that devious, Matthew,” Shen replied, earnestly. “He’s a man completely out of his depth, and I think he’s beginning to realize the fact. You and I know more about politics and public relations than he’ll ever be able to learn. If he were cleverer, he’d be easier to deal with. He thinks he can’t lose this contest in the long run because he has more guns, more people, and more time, but he doesn’t understand that it’s not the kind of war that can be won by force. If force wins, we all lose. The only way to win is to work together—all of us.”

  “It’s not going to be easy to forge a consensus,” Matthew observed. “I’ve only been awake two days, but I’ve heard enough to know how bad things are.”

  “We need something new,” Shen told him. “We need an issue that will allow us to put aside our differences and look to the future. We need a common cause, like the one that brought us all together in the first place.”

  “What brought us all together in the first place was the urgent threat of an all-encompassing disaster,” Matthew reminded him. “I remember it as if it were the day before yesterday.”

  “Of course you do,” Shen Chin Che retorted, venturing a wry smile. “You were there. You weren’t responsible for the disaster, but you did lend a helping hand to the urgency. I knew its value, even if others didn’t. You were as important to the Ark project as I was, in your own way. I had the money, but I didn’t have the hearts and minds. You were my prophet, my messiah. Cometh the hour, cometh the man. The hour has come around again, Matthew—and so have you. It’s the first stroke of luck I’ve had.”

  “I’m a little late,” Matthew felt obliged to point out, even though the flattery was music to his ears. “I don’t have the authority of celebrity any more, even among the Chosen. I was frozen down while most of them were children. The crew don’t even have TV—just VE tapes and mute pictures relayed
by flying eyes.”

  “I know,” Shen said. “But you can change things. It’s what you do.”

  “Two days, Shen,” Matthew murmured. “If you send me back, they’ll put me down on the surface within another three—four at the most. It won’t be easy to catch up. Impossible, even.”

  “It won’t stop you, if you’re determined enough,” Shen told him. That, at least, was what his lips said. What his eyes were saying—in a manner that was surely invisible to any bugs Milyukov had planted, no matter how clever they might be—was something else entirely.

  What Shen Chin Che’s eyes were saying, loud and clear, was: You’re the only hope I’ve got left. I’m finished. If you can’t pull the irons out of the fire, no one can.

  As “important stuff” went, there wasn’t much to it—but Matthew had to admit that it was something he needed to know.

  “I’m not in a good position, Shen,” he said. “Worse now than before. I showed my hand when I hit Riddell. Milyukov won’t give me any kind of platform.”

  “Milyukov’s authority over his own people is slipping,” Shen told him. “Not quickly enough, I admit—but all it will take is one good push to set him sliding. The people on the surface will be ready to listen to you. More than willing. They have no leader, Matthew. They have no direction. They’re losing heart, and they need to get it back. If you can’t find a way to give it to them, no one can.”

  Matthew couldn’t help shivering. The cold that had entered into his flesh while he lay on the floor was still there. He knew how desperate Shen must be, to seize such a feeble straw in this fashion. What a foul reward for all that he had done in the home system! He had anticipated—even expected—that the descendants of the crew might have developed their own agenda, but he had underestimated the extent and effectiveness of their treason. Seven centuries had been too long an interval—but the fact that it had taken seven centuries to find a world that even the hopeful pilgrims of Hope thought unsatisfactory was eloquent testimony to the difficulty and necessity of their mission.