Dark Ararat

“A very nasty virus,” Matthew told him. “That would explain the scars—although she could have had them removed by elementary somatic engineering.”

“Making a political point, apparently,” Solari told him. “Thought the effects of plague war on the disadvantaged ought to be made manifest. Made herself into a kind of walking ad. Your friend Gwyer would presumably have sympathized.”

“There’s no need to sound contemptuous,” Matthew objected. “ Isympathize.”

“You would,” Solari observed. “As an adman yourself, I mean.”

“I wasn’t an adman,” Matthew told him. “If I was a trifle over-theatrical it was because I was trying to ram home an unwelcome message. As William Randolph Hearst himself was fond of saying, the news is what somebody wants to stop you spreading—it’s the rest that’s the ads. I was spreading the news. So was Ly

“Okay,” Solari conceded. “I’m not trying to pick a fight. Well-intentioned or not, Gherardesca’s an oddball. She was frozen down not long after you—part of the same intake as Delgado. Lucky to be here, I guess. She might have been eliminated from consideration if Shen and his collaborators hadn’t been so idiosyncratic, although I suppose she’s as clonable as the next person. Why do you think that someone having family in SusAn might have a bearing on Delgado’s murder?”

“I don’t. I was wondering whether it might have had an effect on Tang’s state of mind and his conversion to the party demanding withdrawal. As you pointed out, I have two daughters in SusAn myself. If I became convinced that the surface was direly unsuitable for colonization, I might not be prepared to expose them to risks I’d gladly face myself.”

“Is it direly unsuitable?” Solari wanted to know. “Can we establish a colony here or not?”

“I don’t know,” Matthew told him. “But I can understand why the people on the surface don’t want to wait around for Andrei Lityansky and the one-step-at-a-time brigade to come to a firm conclusion.”

“Maybe we could do something about it even if there turned out to be awkward problems,” Solari said.

“Maybe,” Matthew agreed. “In theory we could probably dose the entire world with weed killer, a few hectares at a time, and replace the alien ecosphere with a duplicate of our own, converting it into an authentic replica of Earth. It might be the case that releasing Earthly organisms into the planetary ecosphere will eventually have that effect anyway, because it would begin a competition of replicator molecules that would eventually be settled by the absolute victory of DNA over its alien rivals. Unfortunately, you don’t have to be a radical Gaean to think that murdering an entire ecosphere, or standing back and letting DNA do the dirty work for us, would be an unforgivable crime.

“What we actually wantis to be able to set up a situation that would allow DNA’s rival replicators to continue to flourish, and also allow us to benefit from the bounty of their natural technology. How easy that might be to achieve I can’t even begin to guess—and given the unanticipated complexity and flexibility of the local ecosphere, it might be exceedingly difficult to come up with a confident answer in the space of a single lifetime. The seven hundred years it took to get here might be needed to be doubled before we can be certain that any colony we found is genuinely secure. The worst-case scenario is that this isn’t our Ararat at all, but our Roanoke.”

Solari nodded to indicate that he understood the reference to the most famous of America’s lost colonies. “Yeah,” he said. “Well, we’ll have to find out the hard way—on the surface. I’m not going to solve this case by looking at pictures and CVs. The sooner we can get down there the better, from my point of view. I’m not looking forward to this suit-fitting business, but the quicker we get kitted out the sooner we can get stuck in.”

He blanked the screen and hopped up onto his own bed, stretching himself out in much the same pose as Matthew’s. Matthew let himself relax onto his back again, but he didn’t close his eyes. He knew that he, like Solari, wouldn’t even be able to begin to fit the pieces of his puzzle together until he was actually on the surface, able to gather evidence at first hand, but he still had a lot of preparatory thinking to do. When the opportunity arrived to see the wood in spite of the trees, he had to be as ready as he possibly could.

FOURTEEN

In theory, the suit fitting should not have been an unduly unpleasant experience. It wasn’t unduly uncomfortable, in purely physical terms, and probably wouldn’t have been alarmingly painful even if Matthew’s IT had not been ready to muffle anything worse than the mildest discomfort, because the human body had few pain receptors ready to react to the kind of invasion that the suit mounted. The fact that the problem was psychological rather than physical didn’t make it any less troublesome, though.

Matthew belonged to a generation that had grown used to the idea of smart clothing. Even as a baby he had been swathed in living fibers charged with taking care of the various wastes that his body produced, but he had also been used to smartsuits as things a man could put on and take off at will. He had never worn “dead clothes” but he had nevertheless thought of his smartsuits as clothing to be changed at regular intervals, or whenever the whim took him, rather than as symbiotic companions more intimate than any lover.

The various kinds of physiological assistance his previous smartsuits rendered had always seemed valuable but peripheral, essentially subsidiary to matters of display and appearance, fashion and style. The smartsuits he had worn on the moon and in L-5 had been “heavy duty” suits that might have become vital to his survival had there ever been a serious mishap, but he had not lingered long in either location, and had never fallen victim to a life-threatening accident. There was nothing in his experience that had even begun to bring about a fundamental change of attitude. He was, therefore, quite unprepared for the kind of suit he would need to wear on the surface of the new world.

As a biologist, Matthew had always known that everyday notions of what was “inside” and “outside” his body were not very precise, and that there was a significant sense in which the long and tangled tube constituting his gut was “outside” rather than “inside.” His new smartsuit, unlike the ones he had worn at home, really would have to cover and protect his entire body, which meant that it would have to line his gut from mouth to anus, forming an extra layer over every nook and cra

It would have been even worse, he thought, as he lay on his bed while the application was completed, if the new membrane had had to descend all the way into his lungs, to coat every single alveolus, but the air filter did not need to be quite as sensitive or capable as the food filter, and the crucial barrier was established in his bronchii. Nita Brownell assured him that he had no need to be anxious that it might leave him short of breath in crisis—quite the reverse, given that it maintained an emergency supply of oxygen—but his imagination was not yet ready to take that on trust. He was able to see, quite literally, that the extra layer added to his conjunctiva did not threaten his eyesight in the least, but he was unable to extend the analogy as easily as the doctor could have wished. She too was an ex-corpsicle, but she had been awake for three long years and had spent far longer in various low-gee environments before being frozen down.