Dark Ararat

The roof of the palace carried a massive TV mast studded with satellite dishes. There was a telescope mounted on the parapet to which Dulcie Gherardesca led her, but the xenanthropologist ignored it; she had brought Michelle here to see the broad panorama of Civitas Solis, not to pick out hidden details upon its horizon.

Michelle had to admit that the city was impressive, even though the walls she had seen on ancient photographs had all been dismantled so that their constituent stones might be put to better uses. The multitudinous domes were the brightest elements because they reflected the light of the ruddy sun, but the walls that soaked up the same light with such avidity provided a magnificently elaborate setting for the hemispherical jewels. And then there were the fields: huge tracts of land glowing purple or green or purple-and-green, hugging the valleys and the lakeside, and following the river downstream as far as the eye could see. With the ingenuity of human biotechnology to protect them, even the alien fields no longer had any need of walls of stone: and their new protective devices would not fail, no matter what pestilential chimerical legions might gather to assault them.

The streets and shops of the city were as busy with human traffic as native crowds. Michelle knew that the population now numbered 40,000, evenly divided between the two races. Higher in the hills she could see three vivid pyramids that testified to the efforts that the natives were making to increase their population further, in frank opposition to the weight of tradition. The humans had done the same, after their own fashion. While she and other children of the Hope’s pioneers had languished in the freezer, new individuals had been created in their thousands as soon as full details of the Zaman transformation and the equipment to implement it had arrived—not from Earth, so rumor had it, but from a nearer source: a base established on an uninhabitable but material-rich world by AI miners and manufacturers. How strange to obtain the secret of human emortality from machines!

Michelle looked to her right and left, and then turned around—but when she turned around her eyes were caught by the communications mast and she could not help following its reach into the lilac-tinted sky. That, she thought, was a better symbol of her father’s life and nature than the teeming confusion of the city. He had never been a builder, an agent of civilization. He had been a man who loved to talk, to captivate an audience. He had been a man who would rather invent fantasies than reserve his counsel. She had seen tapes of the broadcasts he had made immediately before the contact, and had listened to Frans Leitz going through his guesses one by one, marveling at the fact that so many of them had turned out to be so nearly right.

“Nobody else had put it all together,” the doctor had said. “Nobody else had been able to. And he carried on putting things together, more cleverly than anyone imagined possible.”

But the one thing he had neglected to put together was his family. How clever was that?

“Matthew always said that this was a more important world than Earth,” Dulcie told her. “He said that the people on Earth, having survived the Crash, would always have to put the safety of the Earth first: to guard it as jealously and as carefully as any cradle. The torch of progress has to be handed on to the other worlds which have accepted humankind: the worlds that have no alternative but to embrace change, and welcome change, and make the most of change. This is the first meeting place, the first melting pot, the first location in which humankind can take its place in the wondrous confusion of all possible modes of life. Earth is alpha, he said, and it has to maintain itself as alpha, preserving its value as a refuge and a reservation—but the future of humankind is an expedition to omega: the ultimate limit of achievement. This is where the omega expedition really begins, he said. This is where we first met alien intelligence, and began our collaboration with alien intelligence. This is where the true horizons of possibility were finally opened up to the imagination.”

“I recognize the rhetorical style,” Michelle told her. “He practiced hard.”

“Yes,” Dulcie admitted. “He certainly did. Do you think you’ll ever be able to forgive him? He’d have expected you to understand.”

That was true too, and Michelle knew it. She turned around again, to look back over the parapet at the city. In the photographs she’d seen of its condition when it was first discovered it had seemed utterly dead, literally enshrouded in imperial purple. Now, it was boldly, relentlessly, stubbornly alive, and astonishingly clean. Even though it was pockmarked here and there by building-sites, from which plumes of dust and smoke rose up to stain the crystalline, its lines were sharp and proud and perfectly clear.

Whatever else he had brought here, and whatever else he had left behind, Matthew Fleury had given the city a future, and the energy to hurry into it.

“I’ll try,” Michelle said—and knew as soon as she said it, by the way that Dulcie Gherardesca smiled, that she might as well have said that she would. For her, a commitment to try was as good as a commitment to do everything possible and to succeed in any merely human task, because she was her father’s daughter—and always would be, for as long as she now might live.

eBook Info

Title:

Dark Ararat

Creator:

Brian Stableford

Subject:

Fiction

Publisher:

A Tom Doherty Associates Book

Contributor:

Brian Stableford

Date:

2002

Type:

Novel

Format:

text/html

Identifier:

0-312-70559-X

Source:

PDF

Language:

en

Rights:

Copyright © 2002 by Brian Stableford

Table of Contents

DarkArarat

DarkAraratPART ONEFalling into the FutureONETWOTHREEFOURFIVESIXSEVENEIGHTNINETENELEVENTWELVETHIRTEENFOURTEENFIFTEENPART TWODelving into the PastPART TWODelving into the PastSIXTEENSEVENTEENEIGHTEENNINETEENTWENTYTWENTY-ONETWENTY-TWOTWENTY-THREETWENTY-FOURTWENTY-FIVETWENTY-SIXTWENTY-SEVENTWENTY-EIGHTTWENTY-NINETHIRTYTHIRTY-ONETHIRTY-TWOTHIRTY-THREETHIRTY-FOURTHIRTY-FIVETHIRTY-SIXTHIRTY-SEVENEPILOGUE

eBook Info