Dark Ararat Read Free

in was as narrow and Spartan as any Lagrange compartment, although there were slots in the wall from which chairs and tables could be folded out. The screens were still blank. There were a couple of VE-hoods mounted over their beds, with extendable keyboards as well as overcomplicated consoles whose layouts seemed disturbingly unfamiliar to Matthew’s roaming eye, but they were out of reach as yet. Their beds were surrounded by as much equipment as any man in fear of his life and sanity could ever have desired to see, but Matthew was already enthusiastic for release. He wanted to stand on his own two feet. He wanted to be able to shake Vince Solari by the hand and say: “We made it.” He wanted to jump, and walk, and maybe even dance. He wanted to see what was outside the door: what Hope had become, after 700 years of crew activity.
    He took note of the fact that the ship must be spinning, albeit at a slightly slower velocity than he might have contrived had the choice been his. Everything obviously had weight, but maybe only three times as much weight as it would have had in Mare Moscoviense. It was difficult to be sure while he was still half-cocooned, but half Earth-gravity was the best estimate he could make.
    In theory, Matthew knew, his muscles should still be tuned for Earth gravity. The somatic modifications he had undergone, the special IT with which he had been fitted, and the rigorous exercise programs that he had followed since leaving the home-homeworld should have seen to that. He also knew, though, that he and Vince Solari would have to shuttle down to the new world in a matter of days if the low-weight environment wasn’t to begin taking a toll. Maybe that was why none of his old acquaintances was here: Hope was crew territory, save for specialisms the crew didn’t include, like Nita Brownell’s. Had the half-gravity always been part of Shen Chin Che’s plan? He couldn’t remember.
    In any case, he and Solari would presumably be turned over to a very different set of machines once they were allowed out of bed, to make sure that their muscles would be able to take the strain.
    Within himself, and apart from his paradoxical tiredness, Matthew felt pretty fit. Seven hundred years in SusAn hadn’t left him with any discernible weakness or nagging pain—or if it had, the machine-maintained sleep in which he’d dreamed of Earth’s destruction had seen him through it while his IT did its curative work.
    His dream of Earth’s destruction had, it seemed, been born of needless anxiety—but while Nita Brownell could hesitate over the when of his daughters’ reawakening, and could seem so anxious about matters she was not prepared to spell out, there was definitely cause for anxiety of another kind.

TWO
    W hen Dr. Brownell came back the conversational tables were turned. Matthew had a good dozen questions ready. The doctor must have flagged him as the man more likely to ask awkward questions, though, because she went to Solari first and showed blatant prejudice in attending to what he had to say.
    It didn’t do her much good. Solari had his own questions ready, and they were awkward enough. What fraction of Hope ’s human cargo had so far been defrosted? Less than a fifth, she admitted. Why so few, in three long years? Because further awakenings were only being initiated, for the time being, on the basis of urgent need.
    Curiouser and curiouser, Matthew thought.
    “ What urgent need?” Vince Solari asked, grimly—wanting to know, of course, what urgent need had forced his own emergence.
    Perhaps it was the grimness of his tone that made Dr. Brownell repent of her earlier favoritism and turn to Matthew, or perhaps she felt that she had nowhere else to turn.
    “Dr. Delgado’s death,” she said, following her medically sanctioned policy of cutting every answer to the bone.
    That, Matthew remembered, was one of the things he had not been able to remember in his dream. The Chosen People had been