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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 emortalitywithout 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

Having 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 Hopehad 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 Hopethat 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 Hopehad 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.