Dark Ararat

“Long before your time,” Matthew echoed, anxious to stake a conversational claim before Solari asked another question. “I presume that means you’re as young as you look. Dr. Brownell said that the people back on Earth are emortal now—does that apply to the crew too? Do you have the means to modify us?”

“It’s not as simple as that,” Leitz countered. “Yes, I’m as young as I look—nineteen. No, I’m not emortal, and never will be. True emortality has to be built in from scratch by genetic engineering of a fertilized egg-cell. Our rejuve technologies have improved a little since we left Earth, but we haven’t been able to develop our nanotech nearly as rapidly as the folks back home. I can’t tell you how long you or I will live, barring accidents, because I don’t know how much we’ll benefit from further progress, but two hundred years is generally reckoned to be a fair guess. By Earthly standards, we’re primitives. On Earth, survivors of the Old Human Race are freaks.”

“What happened to Bernal Delgado?” Solari asked, presumably feeling that theoretical issues could safely be left to one side until more practical issues had been addressed. “Who killed him?”

The youth’s eyes swiveled away from Matthew to meet the detective’s. Matthew was slightly surprised to find himself relieved: the green gaze had been slightly disconcerting, although it had seemed guileless enough.

“We’re hoping that you can find that out,” Leitz told Solari. “It looksas if he was killed by aborigines—”

“The world’s inhabited?” Matthew interrupted—but Leitz continued looking at Solari.

“But it can’t be the way it looks, because all the evidence says that the aborigines are extinct. Which probably means that it was set up to look like Delgado was killed by aborigines, maybe just to deflect attention away from whoever did kill him, but maybe to persuade people that the aborigines aren’t extinct at all. That would change things, you see, and it might not take more than a few votes swung from one side to the other to create a new majority among the groundlings. If they were all to get behind a formal request for a withdrawal, that could cause realproblems for the captain … and for everyone else.”

Matthew could see that Vince Solari was just as astonished by this puzzling flood of information as he was. The detective had no immediate follow-up ready, so Matthew was able to step into the breach again. “Are you telling us,” he said, slowly, “that after seven hundred years, we’ve arrived at the only Earth-clone world that any of Earth’s probes has so far managed to locate, but that the colonists you’ve so far managed to land are split right down the middle as to whether or not they want to pull out?”

Frans Leitz shrugged his bony shoulders. “It seems crazy to nearly everyone up here,” he admitted. “But yes, there are a lot of people on the ground who want out, for one reason or another. Mostly, they don’t think the world is anywhere near Earthlike enough. Some are scared because the local humanoids have become extinct—others are worried that if the aborigines aren’t quiteextinct, our arrival will tip them over the edge. The bioscientists can’t seem to agree about what will happen to the local ecosphere if we establish a colony here … or, for that matter, to the ecosystems we introduce. This may not be a sludgeworld, some say, but it’s a real can of worms. It’s not easy for me to judge, being ship-born and ship-committed. I’m crew—my future’s here no matter what”

“And what about Shen Chin Che?” Matthew wanted to know. “What does hethink?”

The boy’s face had been quite relaxed before, but it became suddenly taut now, and there was a flash of wildness in those eerie eyes. “I don’t know,” he said, guardedly. “He’s not involved in the discussion.”

“Is that because you haven’t woken him up?” Matthew was quick to ask.

“No,” the boy said. “It’s a bit more complicated than that.”

Matthew had already opened his mouth to ask another question before he realized—belatedly, it seemed—that he might already have asked at least one too many. Frans Leitz might be just a glorified cabin boy, and Nita Brownell a bona fide doctor with a businesslike bedside ma

He had been awakened, it seemed, to replace the other member of his pair, who had been murdered. However the land lay down on “the surface,” this was a matter of life and death.

It had always been a matter of life and death, from the very first moment he had exchanged polite bows with Shen Chin Che, but Matthew knew that he must not lose sight now of the fact that within the larger matters of life and death—upon which hung the fate of worlds—there were tangled threads upon which his own life dangled. It was not impossible that whoever had wanted Bernal dead might want him dead too—and until he knew whyBernal had been killed, it might be as well to be careful.

“I think we need to see the captain as soon as possible,” Matthew said to Frans Leitz. “In fact, I can’t help wondering why he sent you to talk to us, instead of coming himself.”

“The captain is just as anxious to see you as you are to see him, professor,” the young man replied, blithely ignoring the second part of the statement. “He’ll send for you as soon as Dr. Brownell has made perfectly certain that you’re fit and well. Now, can I get you anything before I go?”

“You could turn the TV on,” Matthew said. “I’d like to catch the next news bulletin.”

“We don’t have broadcast TV,” the youth informed him. “The captain broadcasts occasionally, but we don’t need routine news bulletins. Everybody knows everybody. All we have to do is talk to one another.”

“What about the people on the ground?” Matthew asked.

“They make their reports, of course. They all have beltphones, just like on Earth. We’ve established a chain of comsats. But Base One doesn’t have broadcast TV either. There’s no need. We have VE-hoods for entertainment. I’m sorry—I hear that you used to be on TV a lot, on Earth.”

The youth said it as if he were trying to frame a compliment, but Matthew couldn’t hear it as one. He might have been slightly flattered to think that his reputation had preceded him, even at this distance from Earth and the twenty-first century, but his mind was elsewhere. To him, not having broadcast TV—not even having news—seemed a far more significant symptom of a breakdown in communication than the fact that the doctor was reluctant to talk to him and that a cabin boy had been sent to answer his immediate questions.

“Things have gone wrong, haven’t they,” he murmured. “Badly wrong.”

Frans Leitz blushed again, but the blush seemed as odd and unhealthy as its predecessor. “No,” he said. “Not really. Not yet. But they might, if the people on the surface can’t see sense. Everything depends on them—on their willingness to do what they came to do.”

“After seven hundred years of SusAn, they’re not sure whether they’re willing to do what they risked everythingto do? Surely you mean their abilityto do it?”

“Well, that’s what they say, of course,” the young crewman replied, ingenuously. “But it’s only a matter of determination. It isan Earth-clone world, even though it’s a little peculiar. Maybe you’ll be able to make them see that, Professor Fleury. We certainly have an urgent need for somebody who can.”