Dark Ararat

“The hard way, according to Dulcie. There’s little enough advantage in wheels, or even in using logs as rollers, on terrain as uneven as this, and you’ve probably noticed that the local tree-substitutes aren’t much given to the production of nice straight logs with a circular cross-section. They had no beasts of burden, so they had to carry the stones themselves, one by one, or maybe a few at a time slung in hammocks from poles and frames carried by small parties of humanoids. But the real question—the bigquestion—is whythey felt they had to move the blocks.”

“They had enemies,” Matthew said, making the obvious deduction. “Their fields were precious, and had to be defended.”

“Maybe it’s not so surprising,” Ly

Matthew noticed the tacit assumption that the “enemies” the city-builders wanted to keep out were others of their own kind, but he didn’t call attention to it. Instead, he asked: “Which hypothesis do you like? The inspirational leap or the existential crisis?”

“The crisis scenario always made more sense to me as an explanation of our own prehistory,” Ly

“It sounds plausible,” Matthew agreed.

“Not to Dulcie,” Ly

“What about the spearhead that killed Bernal?”

“What about it? Dulcie says it’s a fake. Even if it isn’t, it’s recent, and even if it weren’t recent, it would only be evidence of hunting, not warfare.”

Matthew shrugged his shoulders. Although his smartsuit only presented the illusion of clothing, he couldn’t quite escape the false sensation that something clammy was clinging to his back like a sweat-soaked shirt.

“Given that the local plants don’t make storage-proteins to supply seeds,” he said, seeking further distraction from his discomfort, “the staple crop couldn’t have been a grain-analogue, even though the plants in the drawings I saw on Hopelook a bit like corncobs.”

“That’s right,” Ly

“I’ll show you the murals when we go down again. We think they might have been colored in at one time, but organic paints would have been stripped off by slugs and snails almost immediately, except where heavy metals in inorganic pigments made them too poisonous. We have a few flakes of what might have been paint, but the only decipherable images are the engravings in the photos.”

Matthew examined the exposed remains of a stone wall on the edge of the platform from which they were looking down. It had been scraped clean of its various encrustations. The blocks of stone from which it had been constructed were relatively small and easily portable, in stark contrast to the bigger foundation blocks that had been similarly cleared.

The mortar sealing the wall gave the impression of being resinous, albeit set as hard as the stone itself, although it could not have survived if it had been organic. Although he could see half-a-dozen places in the immediate neighborhood where similar walls must have been cracked, broken and eventually pulled down by the combined efforts of severe weather and the overgrowing vegetation, this particular fragment looked as if it might stand for thousands of years yet to come, and perhaps hundreds of thousands.

It had been built to last, and it had lasted.

Alas, the civilization it had been built to contain had not. Matthew could hardly help wondering whether any civilization that Hope’s passengers put in place might be bound to meet a similar fate.

TWENTY-ONE

Why didn’t more people come here from Base One when Milyukov refused to supply a proper staff?” Matthew asked Ly

“It’s a long way,” she pointed out. “All our aircraft are tiny, and we haven’t finished building and securing a chain of refueling stops. At first, they expected the crew to send down more people. The realization that it wasn’t going to happen was slow to grow, and it grew alongside other arguments. Bernal thought he could change that, if only he could broadcast to Base One, but Milyukov procrastinated over sending the TV cameras he asked for. In the end, we got you instead.”

“He must have chuckled over that one,” Matthew said, meaning Milyukov. “He took an unreasonable relish in informing me that he couldn’t give me the cameras I asked for. He can’t keep me incommunicado, but he knows as well as I do that it’s not easy to persuade large numbers of people to tune in when all you’ve got is a beltphone.”

While he was speaking they completed their descent from the top of the mound—“the tower,” as Ly