Dark Ararat

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 Hopehad 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 begi

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 Hurryincorporated 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. Ru

When Milyukov had said that Hopehad 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 i

He tried hard not to fall, palming himself off the wall as he stumbled, but he paused too late. His i

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 Hopewas in, but now he feltthe 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 quitewithout 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 Hopehad 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 Hopewas begi

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.”