Dark Ararat (50 page)

“But the humanoids couldn’t do that,” Ike said.

“Right. In order to stay smart—and we have to assume that once they became self-consciously smart the humanoids wanted to stay that way—they had to cut right back on the joys of chimerization. That economy—the increasing strategic avoidance of all the kinds of chimerical renewal that might ruin their big and tightly organized brains—wasn’t particularly costly in reproductive terms, at first, because they’re naturally emortal. When it became costlier, though, as it must have done when they invented agriculture and opened up a whole new wonderland of opportunity to their rivals, they had to backtrack.
That
’s why social and technological progress did a U-turn here. And there, but for the grace of fire and iron … will that hold the stage for a little while longer, do you think?”

“You haven’t the slightest idea whether it’s true,” Ike pointed out, dutiful as ever. “But yes, as a
story
, I guess it will run, if only for a little while. Eventually, though, you’re going to have to face up to the fact that it’s all just talk.”

Matthew knew that Ike was right, but when he looked around, all he could see was sheer purple stalks, too slick for anything but a clever worm to climb, and serrated blades that would cut any climber but the most discreet to ribbons. The purple canopy was intriguingly complex, but it was far too dense for its details to be distinguished and defined. Enough light filtered through it to create delicate effects of shade and sparkle, but from the viewpoint of the camera’s eye it was mere wallpaper.

The ground on which they walked was by no means unpopulated by motile entities, but the light-starved population seemed to consist mainly of colorless saprophytes; its detail was not without scientific interest, but nor was it telegenic. There were undoubtedly animals around that were far more complex than worms, including reptile-analogues and mammal-analogues—ground-dwellers as well as canopy-climbers—but they were shy. It was well-nigh impossible to capture more of them on camera than their fleeing rear ends.

It would not have made very much difference, though, if the forest had been lavishly equipped with gorgeous flowers and monstrous insects. Everyone on
Hope
had already seen discreetly obtained flying-eye footage of thousands of different kinds of alien plants and hundreds of different kinds of alien animals. What they had not seen, and what Matthew had recklessly promised them, was a humanoid. That was what he had to deliver, in order to create the kind of consensus among the human emigrants that seemed so obviously lacking, and so obviously needed. In the meantime, he had to keep feeding them a story that was interesting enough to hold their interest.

So he and Ike did their double act.

Matthew put out every last thought that he had in reserve, but the day wore on and dusk arrived again, and the perpetual purple twilight faded to black for a second time.

They had covered more than forty kilometers since setting off from
Voconia
, and had not found so much as a mud hut or a broken arrow. Matthew felt mentally and physically exhausted, even though he had been able to rest his injured arm sufficiently to allow his IT to complete its healing work.

“We’ve done the hard work,” Matthew told his companion. “Now we need the luck. We’ve kept them on tenterhooks long enough. It’s time for the denouement. Why aren’t they here? They were plenty curious enough when we first arrived—why have they suddenly turned shy? They didn’t even take the bait we left outside the bubble when I went to sleep last night. Why not?”

“Maybe they’ve got something else on their minds,” Ike suggested.

Matthew didn’t have to ask what that something else might be. They had Dulcie. Although they hadn’t left her body where her phone had fallen, they
might
have killed her and taken the body with them—but the likelihood was that she had been carried away alive. While they had her, still alive, they had a far more convenient focus for their curiosity than Matthew and Ike—and she wouldn’t die any time soon of hunger, even if she only had alien food to eat. A carbohydrate was a carbohydrate, and sugar was always sweet.

It all came down to Dulcie: Dulcie the anthropologist-turned-murderer-turned-ambassador; Dulcie the tarnished heroine.

“Do you think she’s all right?” Ike asked, having divined the reason for Matthew’s sudden descent into sobriety.

“Of course she is,” Matthew said, valiantly. “She’s in her element. This is what she was defrosted for, what she’s lived her whole life for. She’s fine. She’ll come through. She has to. We just have to spin out the story while we’re waiting. We have to do a session on feeding frenzies, speculate about the kinds of triggers that might set off orgies of chimerization and humanoid pyramid building. I got halfway through working out an analogy involving the boat, switching between engines as it turned around to go upstream—we can use that. There’s also a useful analogy to be drawn between the photosynthesizing pyramids and our bubble-domes. Maybe we can draw a useful analogy between the humanoids and the crewpeople, if we try hard enough….”

“Okay,” Ike said. “I get the picture. We go on and on until it’s done, no mater how silly it gets.”

“It’s not silly,” Matthew insisted, earnestly. “Even if only a tenth of it is true, that tenth is
marvelous
. We have to help the crew and colonists alike to understand that this business is far bigger than any biotech bonanza or potential death trap. It’s a whole new way of life. Maybe it isn’t better than sex, but it’s weirder. Remember what Dulcie said: sex divides, cooking unites.

“We have to stay here, Ike. We have to stay because it isn’t enough to let the aliens go their own way, culturally unpolluted. We have to help them out of their evolutionary blind alley. We have to extend them hospitality, share food, share technologies, share everything. We’re all on the same side, Ike, and we all have to realize that. Everybody on
Hope
—and I mean
everybody
, including Konstantin Milyukov—has to realize that destiny has put them here because here’s where it’s at, so they can be part of it too.

“Even though we’re making it all up, it’s not silly. It’s the most important work there is. However rough the draft might be, we’re writing chapter one of the story of the future of humankind, and all the stranger humankinds we’ve yet to meet.”

THIRTY-SEVEN

I
n spite of his exhaustion, Matthew had trouble sleeping. When he did drift off, he dreamed.

And then awareness returned, as belated reflex forced Matthew to let his breath out and suck in another avid draught of plentiful air, and to stretch his limbs out to their full extent, and to hear what was being said to him, and to put out his own groping hand to still the one that was shaking him …

He was as sober as he had ever been since awakening from SusAn.

“What is it?” he demanded, blindly.

“Lights,” said Ikram Mohammed. “Lots of them.”

Matthew opened his eyes then, and looked out through the transparent fabric of the bubble-tent.

The curved fabric distorted the points of light, making them scintillate like stars. For one confused moment, Matthew thought they might actually be stars, and that the infinite purple canopy had condescended to undergo one of the rare flamboyant transformations of which it surely had to be capable, drawing itself apart in order to display the sky.

Then he scrambled out of the tent, following his companion.

It was Ike, not he, who whispered: “Get the camera! For heaven’s sake,
get the camera
!”

Matthew did as he was told. At first, he pointed it at Ike, but Ike knocked the lens away, angrily. “Are they receiving?” Ike demanded. “Are they putting this out?”

Matthew didn’t know—but when he was finally able to clear the last vestiges of sleep away and focus his eyes on what Ike was pointing at, he knew immediately what was needed. He dared not shout, but he spoke firmly to whoever was on the other end of the link, instructing the crewman not merely to activate the TV relay but to sound an alarm that would wake up every single member of the crew, and every single colonist on the ground.

He realized, belatedly, that he need not have worried about the crew. He had forgotten that surface-days and ship-days were out of phase. It was midday on
Hope
, not midnight.

Everyone on
Hope
was awake; everyone was watching; everyone was party to the miracle.

All Matthew had to do was point the camera.

The scene at which it was pointing told its own story.

There must have been at least a hundred humanoids: an entire tribe, in all likelihood. They came close enough to make themselves obvious, and then they paused. In fact, they
posed
—not for the camera, of whose nature they knew nothing, but for the sake of their own dignity and pride, and to signify their own sense of triumph. The crowd distributed itself in a huge semicircle, partly to display itself more bravely and partly because its every member wanted to be able to see the weird aliens, their peculiar hut, and their strange machinery.

They were curious. They were probably more than a little afraid, but they were certainly curious.

At least half their number carried spears, but Matthew couldn’t be bothered to try to make out what the shafts and tips were made of. Some of them carried ropes, some baskets, some hammers, some artifacts of their own making to which he could not put a name. To all of this, he paid scant attention, because the dozen who drew his gaze and made it captive were the ones who were carrying spherical bowls ablaze with light, supported on squat cylinders. The bowls must have been harvested from the treetops, and the cylinders too. They had been carefully shaped, neatly dovetailed, and ingeniously augmented with wicks and devices to deliver the wicks into the bowls by slow degrees.

The twelve aliens were carrying
lamps
: lamps with reservoirs of oil and burning wicks.

Sex divides, Dulcie Gherardesca had told Lynn Gwyer, with a measure of passion that Matthew had not fully understood at the time. Sex divides, but cooking unites. The foundation of culture was the capacity to delight in the sharing of fire; the beginning of culture—of the meeting of minds and the forging of the elementary social contract—was the Promethean Moment.

Only three of Dulcie’s alien apostles were also carrying stolen machetes, but they were holding them up to the light,
showing
them to Matthew and Ike—and also, although they did not know it, to every human being in the system who had responded to Matthew’s urgent call.

Through this crowd-within-a-crowd came Dulcie herself, striding confidently to greet her friends. Her surface-suit was no longer brown or purple; it was silver-and-gold.

Her arms were quite relaxed, swinging at her sides, but her hands spoke nevertheless, casually drawing attention to her achievement, her gift, her repentance, her redemption, her
denouement
.

Fire and iron, Matthew thought. There, but for the grace of fire and iron …

And he knew, now that he was absolutely sure that he really had awakened from his febrile dream, that the Ark named
Hope
had not merely found its Ararat, but had also sealed its Covenant.

EPILOGUE

W
hen Michelle Fleury finally came to stand before her father’s tomb in the so-called Palace of Civitas Solis all the carefully repressed bitterness came flooding back. She had heard the explanation for his desertion three times—from the doctor who had supervised her awakening, Frans Leitz; from her stepmother, Dulcie Gherardesca; and from the purple-skinned native with the voice box that formed the human syllables his own natural equipment could not—but she had not yet been able to bring herself to accept it as a valid excuse.

“He couldn’t know that he would die without seeing you again,” Dr. Leitz had said, while he was fitting her surface-suit. “He expected to live another hundred years. We’ve only just begun to realize the full extent of the toll that living on an alien world has exacted from us, and it wasn’t until the technical support began to arrive that we were able to refine our rejuve technologies. He delayed your awakening for the very best of reasons. He wanted you to wake up to a world that was fit to receive you: to a world that could provide for you as a parent should.”

The tomb wasn’t quite as elaborate as Michelle had expected. Alien hands had built it: emortal alien hands, which had never built a tomb before. She hadn’t expected a pyramid—pyramids had an entirely different significance in the native cultures of Tyre—but she had expected something more like a Victorian mausoleum than a mere kiln. It might have seemed more appropriate if the inscriptions on the faces of the shaped stones hadn’t been incomprehensible, but she hadn’t yet learned to decipher the written version of the local language.

“Shall I translate?” Dulcie asked. Dulcie had insisted on coming with her, although she’d had the grace to hang back in the deeper shadows for a few minutes while Michelle came to stand beside the tomb.

“No,” Michelle said, reaching out a hand so that she could trace a few of the engraved hieroglyphics with her right forefinger. “I know more or less what it says. He always wanted to be a messiah. When it became obvious that he couldn’t save his own world, he set out in search of one that might be more open to salvation, and more grateful. This says that he got his wish.”

“That’s not how they thought of him,” Dulcie told her, her voice putting on a show of patient forbearance. “It’s not how they thought of me, either. Maybe from our side we looked like the Prometheus team, bringing the light of the gods to the people of the forest, but they have a very different set of myths based in a very different way of life. To them,
everybody
is a teacher, because everybody has to be. The active members of society are the custodians of hundreds of thousands of years of accumulated knowledge and tradition, which they have to pass on to the rejuvenate twins and triplets when they emerge from their own natural version of SusAn. They don’t have hero myths, because they don’t have outstanding individuals. All their efforts are collective and cooperative. To them, we’re very bizarre, and it was partly in recognition of that strangeness that they made Matthew a tomb. They could never quite make sense of the fact that the human population of the city elected him mayor, because they never single out leaders or symbolic figureheads—but they respected his position, and they decided to mark it. I think he’d have been pleased. I
know
he would.”