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 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 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.
Earthly scientific progress had, apparently, faltered slightly in the early twenty-second century, but had picked up pace again soon enough. Biotechnology and nanotechnology had made good on some—perhaps most—of their promises. The people of Earth had discovered the secret of emortality, and had reconfigured their society to accommodate emortality comfortably. All good news there. With what the people of Earth now knew at Hope's disposal—and what was not yet at Hope's disposal would surely be placed there once Earth's reply to Hope's announcement of her discovery arrived, 116 years down the line—the colonists of the New Earth would surely be able to build a New World fit for their own emortal children.
Surely? When presented with that judgment, Nita Brownell's reply was a calculatedly moderate "probably," which seemed so weak as to be little better than a "possibly."
When asked how the doubt arose, Dr. Brownell procrastinated. Matters weren't as simple as they might appear. Things were complicated. There would be time for explanations later.
There were hints to be gleaned, but it was difficult to judge their relevance.
The failure-rate of Hope's SusAn systems—or, more accurately, the deep-frozen bags of flesh, blood, and mind they had contained for so long—had been slightly higher and slightly more complicated than had been hoped. Mortality, if strictly defined, had been less than one percent, but kick-starting brains sometimes failed to recover the whole person. About one in four awakeners exhibited some degree of memory-loss: hence the intensive interrogation to which Matthew and Vince Solari were currently being subjected.
The problem afflicting the majority, Nita Brownell told them in dribs and drabs, was restricted to the process by which short-term memory was converted into long-term. Most sufferers had lost less than a couple of days, only a handful more than a week. Most of the lost time could be deemed "irrelevant," in that it consisted entirely of preparation for freezing down—hours of dull routine spent in the Spartan environment of Lagrange-5 or Mare Moscoviense—or in riding a shuttle to the far side of Earth's orbit, depending on the timing of the person's invitation to join the Chosen People. A minority, on the other hand, had lost more than that. Some of the full-scale amnesiacs had recovered all or part of themselves eventually, but some had not.
Matthew and Vince were apparently among the luckier ones—but when Matthew remembered the long, lucid dream he had had while his IT was preparing to wake him, he could not help but wonder whether it had been a close-run thing.
Mercifully, by the time Matthew had wrinkled and worked all this out, Dr. Brownell had established that if either he or Vince Solari had lost anything, it was a matter of hours—irrelevant hours, if any hours out of a human life could be reckoned irrelevant.
Compared with 700 years of downtime, Matthew thought, a few hours might indeed be reckoned irrelevant. He remembered saying au revoir to Alice and Michelle, and that was the important thing. With luck, they would remember saying au revoir to him, when their turn came to be reawakened.
Except that Nita Brownell hesitated for just a fraction of a second over the word when, and that fleeting moment of evident doubt cast a dark shadow over everything she said thereafter. The problems of awakening from SusAn were not the real problems; they were the problems Nita Brownell was using as a screen to hide the problems that would have to be explained at another time, preferably by someone else. She was a doctor, it was not her job, not her place.…
It was too easy to be paranoid, Matthew told himself, as sternly as he could while he was still spaced out. He had come from a bad place, and he had had bad dreams, but he was a winner in the game. He had cast his lot with Shen Chin Che, and he had pulled out a major prize.
Earth had not died, but that did not mean that its people had had an easy ride in the wake of the Plague Wars. Earth, in the twenty-eighth century, had the secret of emortality, which the Earth he had left behind had not, so he might yet be a winner twice over, of a New World and a new life. Given that he had awakened from his long sleep with his memories intact, to find Hope in orbit around a life-bearing planet with a breathable atmosphere, what could possibly be wrong? What kind of worm could possibly have infected the bud of his future?
Eventually, Nita Brownell's dogged interrogation stuttered to an end, and she left her patients to get acquainted with one another. Matthew knew, however, that she would return soon enough. When she returned, she would be more vulnerable to his questions.
"How do you feel?" Vince Solari asked him.
"All things considered, pretty well," Matthew told him. "Tired and tranquilized." Turning to face his companion was extraordinarily difficult, but he figured it was worth the effort, if only to say hello.
"When were you frozen down?" he asked.
"Fourteen," Solari replied, presumably meaning 2114. "I was a late applicant. You were one of the first wave, I guess—the real Chosen People. I was only in my twenties when you went into the freezer, but I guess we're the same age now, give or take a few months."
"We might both get to be a lot older," Matthew observed, remembering that the great pioneers of SusAn technology had encouraged its development in order that they might sleep until their fellows had invented an efficient technology of longevity, rather than for the purpose of traveling to the stars.
"Crazy, isn't it?" Solari said. "You sleep for seven hundred years, you wake up tired. Tireder than when they put me to bed. Good to be back, though, isn't it?"
"Very good," Matthew confirmed. "But I was expecting a warmer welcome. My daughters are still in SusAn, apparently, but it's been three years, and I had a lot of friends—acquaintances, anyway—in the first wave of volunteers. Why aren't they here with flowers and champagne?"
"I expect they're already down on the surface," Solari said. "Apart from people with the doctor's special expertise, there'd be no need for any of the colonists to remain on the ship for very long. The crew don't seem to have done much with the decor while they've been in flight, do they?"
Matthew looked around again. The room that he and Solari were 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-world 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.
Copyright © 2002 by Brian Stableford
