Dark Ararat - Brian Stableford [1]
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