Dark Ararat

Dark
Ararat

Tor Books by Brian Stableford

Inherit the Earth
Architects of Emortality
The Fountains of Youth
The Cassandra Complex
Dark Ararat

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

DARK ARARAT

Copyright © 2002 by Brian Stableford

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

Edited by David G. Hartwell

A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010

www.tor.com

Tor
^®
is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

ISBN 0-312-70559-X

www.ebookyes.com

First Edition: March 2002

For Jane, and all who are able to learn from prophecy

Acknowledgments

Throughout the series, of which this is the fifth-published and penultimate volume, I have made much of the concept of
emortality
without acknowledging my debt to the man who coined the word—Alvin Silverstein, author of
Conquest of Death
(Macmillan, 1979). I should like to make amends for that omission now, with profuse apologies for having left it so long. I should also like to thank Jane Stableford, for proofreading services and helpful commentary; the late Don Wollheim, for encouraging my earlier endeavors in planetary romance and ecological mystery fiction; and David Hartwell, for seeing the series through to its soon-to-be-forthcoming end.

Dark
Ararat

PART ONE
Falling into the Future

ONE

H
aving just taken a single step that had carried him out of the twenty-first century and into the twenty-ninth, across fifty-eight light-years of the void, Matthew had a million questions to ask. Unfortunately, the doctor—whose name was Nita Brownell—had a million and one, and a selfish tendency to favor her own agenda. Because Matthew felt rather weak and a trifle disoriented she had no difficulty in imposing her will upon the situation.

All that Matthew found out before being beaten down by the hailstorm of Nita Brownell’s inquisition was that
Hope
had arrived in the solar system that was its present lodging in 2814, according to the ship’s calendar. It was now 2817.

The doctor—who was, of course, a cryonics expert—had been one of the first people to be thawed out, and the three years she had aged in the interim had to be added to the extra aging-time she had lost in the home system. She had been frozen down in 2111, twenty-one years after Matthew. Although Matthew had been born in 2042 and Nita Brownell in 2069 they were now pretty much the same physical age, and the gap in their real ages seemed fairly trivial given that he was now 769 and she was 748.

The doctor didn’t mind his taking a few moments out of her schedule to complete these calculations, because his ability to do mental arithmetic was one of the things she was intent on testing. What she was primarily concerned to interrogate, however, was his memory.

That was frustrating, because everything he could remember, apart from his dreams, related to the twenty-first century, to Alice and Michelle, to the ecospasmically afflicted Earth, to the journey to the moon and to the one brief glance of
Hope
that he and his daughters had been permitted before they joined her cargo of corpsicles. All that belonged to the past, and what Matthew was interested in was the present, and the future. He was, after all, a prophet.

One other statistic the doctor soon let slip, more marvelous than the rest in a rather ironic fashion, was that
Hope
had not actually left the solar system—if the Oort Halo were accepted as its outer boundary—until 2178, more than a century after Matthew had been frozen down. By that time, the crew that Shen Chin Che had left in charge of his Ark, when he had joined the corpsicles himself, already knew that Earth’s sixth great mass extinction had climaxed in the last plague war of all. Chiasmalytic transformers not unlike the one whose existence had been revealed to Matthew shortly before his entry into SusAn had sterilized the human population between 2095 and 2120. This disaster had helped to avert the greater disasters that prophets like Matthew Fleury and Shen Chin Che had foreseen and feared, and had saved the ecosphere from a devastation so extreme as to make further human existence impossible.

Even though the world had not learned much, if anything, from Matthew’s prophecies, its people had not been forced to enact them.

But the Ark had not turned back.

Who could ever have imagined for a moment that it might?

When Matthew was not responding to Nita Brownell’s questions he slept. He did not want to sleep, but she had control of some kind of switch that gave him no choice. He was shrouded by machinery, with various leads connected to his anatomy in inconvenient and embarrassing places, and he was drugged up to the eyeballs. The doctor was in no hurry to concede him an adequate measure of self-control; for the time being, he was a piece of meat that required tender defrosting, allowed to think and speak only to confirm that his defrosted body was still inhabited by the same mind that had gone to sleep therein 727 years before.

He did have the opportunity, while answering the doctor’s petty questions, to study his surroundings. Alas, the room itself seemed stubbornly uninformative. It had several screens, but none of them was switched on. By far its most interesting fixture, for the time being, was a second bed, which was occupied by a second defrostee.

Matthew was able to elicit the information that the other man’s name was Vincent Solari, but it seemed that several hours passed thereafter before he was actually able to talk to his companion and introduce himself.

“Call me Vince,” Solari said, when the introduction had finally been accomplished.

Matthew did, but he noticed that Dr. Brownell continued to use “Vincent.” She seemed to be slightly uneasy, deliberately keeping a certain distance between herself and her patients.

Matthew didn’t invite anyone to call him Matt. He had always thought of Matt as part of the phrase
matte black
, and he was a Fleury, always colorful. He knew from experience, though, that there were plenty of people who didn’t feel that they needed an invitation to shorten his name. That was part of the downside of being a TV personality; he was forever meeting people who thought that they knew him, when they didn’t really know him at all.

Once the two returnees were allowed to remain awake simultaneously they were able to benefit from the answers to all the questions they had managed to sneak into the interstices of the doctor’s methodical interrogation. It was while observing Nita Brownell’s responses to Solari’s enquiries that Matthew began to understand how uncomfortable she was, and how unreasonably terse most of her answers were.

At first, Matthew told himself that the woman was simply impatient, eager to get through her own program so that she could get on with other new awakeners in other rooms like theirs, but he guessed soon enough that there had to be more to it than that.

The doctor was pressing forward with such iron resolve because she didn’t want to submit to the flood of their questions, and the reason she feared their questions so much was that she was intent on hiding certain items of information from them.

But why?

Matthew’s newly defrosted imagination was not yet up to speed, and his capacity to feel anxiety was inhibited by the drugs he was being fed, but he struggled nevertheless with the spectrum of possibilities.

Assuming that Nita Brownell was acting under instructions from above, someone in authority over her must have forbidden her to tell them the whole truth about their present situation—or, at the very least, must have persuaded her that it was not in her patients’ best interests to be told too much too soon.

It seemed to stand to reason that any news they weren’t being told had to be bad. But how bad could it be?

Seven hundred years, Matthew chided himself, and you wake up paranoid. That’s no way to greet a new world, even for a prophet.

Once it had possessed him, though, it wasn’t difficult to feel that kind of paranoia even while his brain was soaked with tranks. Was the room he and Solari were in too sparsely furnished? Were the machines gathered around their beds a trifle ramshackle? Was Nita Brownell a woman under undue stress, a custodian of secrets that she found uncomfortable to bear?

Perhaps. Perhaps not.

Perhaps, Matthew decided, it was best to concentrate on happier thoughts. The happiest thought of all, surely—the one item of news that could not possibly be bad—was that after seven hundred years,
Hope
had reached an Earth-clone world. That was an idea to savor: a new Earth; a new home; another Ararat; another chance.

One, at least, of the New Noah’s Arks had reached its goal.

Shen had done it. Like Moses, he had brought his Chosen People to the Promised Land.

But the paranoia lingered.

Reading between the lines with a suspicious eye wasn’t a kind of game that Matthew relished, but it was one that he could play like a pro. While he did his level best to provide accurate answers to the questions that bombarded him, therefore, he reserved part of his mind to the task of fitting together the bits of information that Nita Brownell did see fit to provide, and supplementing them with whatever he could deduce from an examination of his surroundings.

The basics seemed simple enough.
Hope
had arrived in orbit around a planet orbiting a G-type star a billion years older than Earth’s sun. It had an atmosphere and a hydrosphere very similar to Earth’s, and an ecosphere with much the same biomass. So far, so good—but he noticed that Nita Brownell was slightly reluctant to use the word
Earth-clone
or to endorse its use. There was some kind of problem there.

There was, apparently, no recent news of the other two Arks that had exited the Oort Halo circa 2180, nor was there any reason to believe that the fourth Ark—the so-called Lost Ark—had eventually contrived to follow in their train.
Faith
and
Courage
were presumably still searching, if they had avoided ecocatastrophes of their own, while
Charity
, for whatever reason, was still locked in a cometary orbit around the sun. No good news there, but nothing especially terrible either.

If the calculations of
Hope
’s patient AIs could be trusted—Dr. Brownell called them sloths, but that was a term with which Matthew was not familiar and whose meaning he had had to ask—then
Hope
’s announcement of its arrival would reach Earth in 2872. If the gleanings of
Hope
’s equally patient homeward-directed eyes could be trusted, there would certainly be people on Earth to hear the glad tidings, and to be glad on
Hope
’s behalf. There would be billions of them—and billions more elsewhere in the system. No bad news there.