Dark Ararat Read Free Page A

appointed to the Arks in twos, for safety’s sake, and he had not been able to recall the name of his counterpart, his adopted twin.
    Bernal Delgado was the name he had not been able to pluck from the vault of memory: Bernal Delgado, expert in ecological genomics; Bernal Delgado, media celebrity and prophet; Bernal Delgado, long-term friend, rival, role model, and companion-in-arms to the slightly younger Matthew Fleury. Not that the mirror image had been perfect; there had also been Bernal Delgado, ladies’ man, who fancied himself the twenty-first century’s answer to Don Juan. Bernal Delgado was a single man, not a widowed father of two bright and beautiful daughters …
    Except that it wasn’t was but had been .
    Bernal Delgado, it appeared, was dead.
    “Bernal’s dead!” Matthew exclaimed, a little belatedly. It didn’t qualify as a question in Dr. Brownell’s opinion, and she was making herself busy in any case with the battery of machines that was still holding him captive, ignoring him as resolutely as she was now ignoring Vince Solari. Matthew had no alternative but to think the matter through himself.
    Bernal Delgado had died on the New World, on the peak of the other Ararat, before Matthew had had a chance to join him and shake his hand in joyous congratulation. He had died in sparse company, because new awakenings were only being initiated on the basis of “urgent need.” The colonization plan had stalled. Something was wrong with the Earth-clone world. There was a serpent in Eden. Matthew had been revived in order to take Bernal’s place. Why, then, had Vince Solari been yanked out of the freezer?
    “Are you an ecologist too?” Matthew asked his companion, dazedly.
    “No,” Solari told him, a trifle abstractedly, having been following his own train of thought. “I’m a policeman.”
    “A policeman?” Matthew echoed, taken completely by surprise. “Why should Bernal’s death create an urgent need for a policeman?” He had addressed the question to Nita Brownell, but she wasn’t in any hurry to answer it.
    “It wouldn’t,” Solari pointed out, having evidently given the question some consideration already. “Unless, of course, he was murdered. Was he murdered, Dr. Brownell?”
    “Yes,” she said, brusquely. “The captain will brief you, just as soon as …”
    She left the sentence dangling, trailing the implication that she had work to do, and that they would get their answers sooner if they let her do it. Her concern was their bodily welfare, not the reasons for their reawakening—but when she eventually left the room again it seemed to Matthew that she was running away, with her work not quite done.
    “Whatever the story is,” Matthew observed, “she’s embarrassed to tell us. She thinks we’re going to disapprove. However they’ve screwed up, they’re obviously self-conscious about it.”
    “The machines must have reassured her that we’re doing okay physically,” Solari said. “She already checked our memories. Maybe now she’ll let someone come in to tell us what’s gone wrong. Apart from Delgado being murdered, that is. Somehow, I get the feeling that that’s just the tip of the iceberg—if they have icebergs on. Did she mention the world’s name?”
    “No,” Matthew said. “She didn’t.”
    The door opened again. This time, it was a young man who stepped through.
    There had been nothing conspicuously out of the ordinary about Nita Brownell. She hadn’t looked a day over thirty, according to the “natural” standard that had already become obsolescent when the construction of Hope began, although she was actually in her mid-forties in terms of actively experienced time. Her appearance and her mannerisms had seemed familiar ; the moment Matthew had set eyes on her he had made the assumption—without even bothering to think twice about it, that she was a well-educated, well-groomed twenty-first century utilitarian, crisis-modified version. Like Matthew,