Dark Ararat

Earth had not died, but that did not mean that its people had had an easy ride in the wake of the Plague Wars. Earth, in the twenty-eighth century, had the secret of emortality, which the Earth he had left behind had not, so he might yet be a wi

Eventually, Nita Brownell’s dogged interrogation stuttered to an end, and she left her patients to get acquainted with one another. Matthew knew, however, that she would return soon enough. When she returned, she would be more vulnerable to hisquestions.

“How do you feel?” Vince Solari asked him.

“All things considered, pretty well,” Matthew told him. “Tired and tranquilized.” Turning to face his companion was extraordinarily difficult, but he figured it was worth the effort, if only to say hello.

“When were you frozen down?” he asked.

“Fourteen,” Solari replied, presumably meaning 2114. “I was a late applicant. You were one of the first wave, I guess—the real Chosen People. I was only in my twenties when you went into the freezer, but I guess we’re the same age now, give or take a few months.”

“We might both get to be a lot older,” Matthew observed, remembering that the great pioneers of SusAn technology had encouraged its development in order that they might sleep until their fellows had invented an efficient technology of longevity, rather than for the purpose of traveling to the stars.

“Crazy, isn’t it?” Solari said. “You sleep for seven hundred years, you wake up tired. Tireder than when they put me to bed. Good to be back, though, isn’t it?”

“Very good,” Matthew confirmed. “But I was expecting a warmer welcome. My daughters are still in SusAn, apparently, but it’s been three years, and I had a lot of friends—acquaintances, anyway—in the first wave of volunteers. Why aren’t they here with flowers and champagne?”

“I expect they’re already down on the surface,” Solari said. “Apart from people with the doctor’s special expertise, there’d be no need for any of the colonists to remain on the ship for very long. The crew don’t seem to have done much with the decor while they’ve been in flight, do they?”

Matthew looked around again. The room that he and Solari were in was as narrow and Spartan as any Lagrange compartment, although there were slots in the wall from which chairs and tables could be folded out. The screens were still blank. There were a couple of VE-hoods mounted over their beds, with extendable keyboards as well as overcomplicated consoles whose layouts seemed disturbingly unfamiliar to Matthew’s roaming eye, but they were out of reach as yet. Their beds were surrounded by as much equipment as any man in fear of his life and sanity could ever have desired to see, but Matthew was already enthusiastic for release. He wanted to stand on his own two feet. He wanted to be able to shake Vince Solari by the hand and say: “We made it.” He wanted to jump, and walk, and maybe even dance. He wanted to see what was outside the door: what Hopehad become, after 700 years of crew activity.

He took note of the fact that the ship must be spi

In theory, Matthew knew, his muscles should still be tuned for Earth gravity. The somatic modifications he had undergone, the special IT with which he had been fitted, and the rigorous exercise programs that he had followed since leaving the home-homeworld should have seen to that. He also knew, though, that he and Vince Solari would have to shuttle down to the new world in a matter of days if the low-weight environment wasn’t to begin taking a toll. Maybe that was why none of his old acquaintances was here: Hopewas crew territory, save for specialisms the crew didn’t include, like Nita Brownell’s. Had the half-gravity always been part of Shen Chin Che’s plan? He couldn’t remember.

In any case, he and Solari would presumably be turned over to a very different set of machines once they were allowed out of bed, to make sure that their muscles would be able to take the strain.

Within himself, and apart from his paradoxical tiredness, Matthew felt pretty fit. Seven hundred years in SusAn hadn’t left him with any discernible weakness or nagging pain—or if it had, the machine-maintained sleep in which he’d dreamed of Earth’s destruction had seen him through it while his IT did its curative work.

His dream of Earth’s destruction had, it seemed, been born of needless anxiety—but while Nita Brownell could hesitate over the when of his daughters’ reawakening, and could seem so anxious about matters she was not prepared to spell out, there was definitely cause for anxiety of another kind.

TWO

When Dr. Brownell came back the conversational tables were turned. Matthew had a good dozen questions ready. The doctor must have flagged him as the man more likely to ask awkward questions, though, because she went to Solari first and showed blatant prejudice in attending to what he had to say.

It didn’t do her much good. Solari had his own questions ready, and they were awkward enough. What fraction of Hope’s human cargo had so far been defrosted? Less than a fifth, she admitted. Why so few, in three long years? Because further awakenings were only being initiated, for the time being, on the basis of urgent need.

Curiouser and curiouser, Matthew thought.

“ Whaturgent need?” Vince Solari asked, grimly—wanting to know, of course, what urgent need had forced his own emergence.

Perhaps it was the grimness of his tone that made Dr. Brownell repent of her earlier favoritism and turn to Matthew, or perhaps she felt that she had nowhere else to turn.

“Dr. Delgado’s death,” she said, following her medically sanctioned policy of cutting every answer to the bone.

That, Matthew remembered, was one of the things he had not been able to remember in his dream. The Chosen People had been appointed to the Arks in twos, for safety’s sake, and he had not been able to recall the name of his counterpart, his adopted twin.

Bernal Delgado was the name he had not been able to pluck from the vault of memory: Bernal Delgado, expert in ecological genomics; Bernal Delgado, media celebrity and prophet; Bernal Delgado, long-term friend, rival, role model, and companion-in-arms to the slightly younger Matthew Fleury. Not that the mirror image had been perfect; there had also been Bernal Delgado, ladies’ man, who fancied himself the twenty-first century’s answer to Don Juan. Bernal Delgado was a single man, not a widowed father of two bright and beautiful daughters …

Except that it wasn’t wasbut had been.

Bernal Delgado, it appeared, was dead.

“Bernal’s dead!” Matthew exclaimed, a little belatedly. It didn’t qualify as a question in Dr. Brownell’s opinion, and she was making herself busy in any case with the battery of machines that was still holding him captive, ignoring him as resolutely as she was now ignoring Vince Solari. Matthew had no alternative but to think the matter through himself.

Bernal Delgado had died on the New World, on the peak of the other Ararat, before Matthew had had a chance to join him and shake his hand in joyous congratulation. He had died in sparse company, because new awakenings were only being initiated on the basis of “urgent need.” The colonization plan had stalled. Something was wrong with the Earth-clone world. There was a serpent in Eden. Matthew had been revived in order to take Bernal’s place. Why, then, had Vince Solari been yanked out of the freezer?