Dark Ararat

“Are you an ecologist too?” Matthew asked his companion, dazedly.

“No,” Solari told him, a trifle abstractedly, having been following his own train of thought. “I’m a policeman.”

“A policeman?” Matthew echoed, taken completely by surprise. “Why should Bernal’s death create an urgent need for a policeman?” He had addressed the question to Nita Brownell, but she wasn’t in any hurry to answer it.

“It wouldn’t,” Solari pointed out, having evidently given the question some consideration already. “Unless, of course, he was murdered. Washe murdered, Dr. Brownell?”

“Yes,” she said, brusquely. “The captain will brief you, just as soon as …”

She left the sentence dangling, trailing the implication that she had work to do, and that they would get their answers sooner if they let her do it. Her concern was their bodily welfare, not the reasons for their reawakening—but when she eventually left the room again it seemed to Matthew that she was ru

“Whatever the story is,” Matthew observed, “she’s embarrassed to tell us. She thinks we’re going to disapprove. However they’ve screwed up, they’re obviously self-conscious about it.”

“The machines must have reassured her that we’re doing okay physically,” Solari said. “She already checked our memories. Maybe now she’ll let someone come in to tell us what’s gone wrong. Apart from Delgado being murdered, that is. Somehow, I get the feeling that that’s just the tip of the iceberg—if they have icebergs on. Did she mention the world’s name?”

“No,” Matthew said. “She didn’t.”

The door opened again. This time, it was a young man who stepped through.

There had been nothing conspicuously out of the ordinary about Nita Brownell. She hadn’t looked a day over thirty, according to the “natural” standard that had already become obsolescent when the construction of Hopebegan, although she was actually in her mid-forties in terms of actively experienced time. Her appearance and her ma

The newcomer was different.

The moment the newcomer met his eye, Matthew knew that the young man was space-born and ship-nurtured.

The Ark could, in theory, have been navigated by its cleverest AIs, but Shen Chin Che and his fellow protégés of the New Noah would never have entertained the notion of putting Hope’s cargo in the care of Artificial Intelligences. Hopehad always been intended to cross the gulf between the stars under the guidance and governance of a human crew: a crew whose members had had a life-expectancy of 120 years when Matthew had been frozen down. Perhaps they still had the same life-expectancy, but it was at least possible that they had been able to benefit from the great leap forward that Earth–based-longevity technologies had made after Hopehad left the system. This youth—if the appearance that he was little more than a boy could be trusted—might be eighth- or tenth-generation crew, or maybe only third- or fourth-. He was thin and spare. His blue-gray uniform was a smart one-piece without much slack, but its lack of fashion-conscious shape contrived to make it look almost monastic. He moved like a creature long-used to low gravity, with a ma

The whole ensemble was unsettlingly unfamiliar, almost to the point of being alien, even though the only thing about him that looked wholly exotic was his feet.

Matthew thought at first that the young man was barefoot, although he realized almost immediately that the smart clothing must extend over the youth’s feet, as it did over his hands and face, in a fashion so discreet that it had become a near-invisible second skin. The feet were decidedly odd; the toes were elongated, like fingers. Although the youth was standing quite still, the ma

“Hi,” the newcomer said. “I’m Frans Leitz, crew medical orderly. I’m Dr. Brownell’s assistant. The captain has asked me to send you his compliments and welcome you back to consciousness. He’s anxious to see you as soon as you’re free of all this paraphernalia, and to tell you everything you need to know about the situation, but he’s asked me to answer any preliminary questions you might have. You’re Professor Fleury, I suppose? And you’re Detective Solari?”

“I’m an inspector, not a detective,” Solari said. Matthew decided that it wasn’t worth the bother of trying to explain that he wasn’t, strictly speaking, a professor. Niceties of rank were Old World matters—except, perhaps, where the crew was concerned. The boy’s uniform bore no obvious insignia, but Matthew was certain that a medical orderly didn’t qualify as an officer. Had the captain really sent a glorified cabin boy to “answer any preliminary questions he and Solari might have,” Matthew wondered. If so, what did that say about the captain’s opinion of them, and of the urgent needthat had occasioned their awakening? And what did it say about the captain’s attitude to Nita Brownell, who seemingly couldn’t be trusted to answer their questions herself? What had happened to drive a wedge between the crew and the reawakened Chosen People?

“What’s the new world called?” Matthew asked, softly.

“Well,” said the boy, amiably, “there’s a certain amount of disagreement about that, so it’s still under negotiation. Some members of the first landing party wanted to call it Hope, after the ship, but the crew mostly want to call it Ararat, in keeping with the Ark myth. Several other alternatives have been suggested by way of compromise—some favor New Earth, some Murex, some Tyre—but that’s only served to complicate the situation. Mostly, we call it the world, or the surface.”

“Why Murex?” Solari wanted to know.

“Because the vegetation is mostly purple,” Leitz replied. “All the grass and trees, almost all the animals … except that the trees aren’t really trees, and the animals aren’t really animals, and the giant grass is made of glass. You’ll be briefed on all of that by our senior genomicist, of course, Professor Fleury. It’ll be a lot to take in, and it all sounds pretty weird to me, but you’re a biologist, so you’ll get the hang of it soon enough.”

“Start off,” Matthew said. “If you’re the doctor’s assistant, you must know somebiology.”

The boy blushed slightly, although the color of his skin made the blush seem more gray than pink. It took him a couple of seconds to decide that he couldn’t play toodumb.

“The panspermists and the chemical convergence theorists were wrong, it seems,” he said. “Evolution here and on the orphan followed distinct and different paths. DNA isn’t universal. Nor is chlorophyll, obviously, or the world wouldn’t be purple. The surface looks pretty enough in pictures, but the people on the ground say that it’s rather disturbing up close.”

“What orphan?” Solari put in, while Matthew was still working out how to phrase a more pertinent question.

“A sunless but life-bearing world we bypassed in interstellar space. It was long before my time, but it’s all on record, including the genomic analyses. It was a sludgeworld—nothing bigger than a bacterium. There are others, apparently, able to support life because their internal heat and thick atmospheres keep the surfaces warm and wet. Lots of probes came this way after us, all traveling faster—it’s easier to accelerate when you’re small—and we’ve harvested a lot of information from them. There’s nothing else like this world, though—not yet. It’s the one-and-only Earth-clone, for the time being. It’s not just yourworld. So far as everyone here is concerned, it really is theworld.”