Dark Ararat - Brian Stableford [103]
“But you don’t actually want to go,” Matthew said.
“That’s correct,” Tang said. He still wasn’t showing any glaringly obvious signs of strain or acute anxiety, but Matthew was beginning to realize what it was that Godert Kriefmann had picked up on.
“In fact,” Matthew added, “you don’t actually want to be here at all. You’d far rather be on Hope with Andrei Lityansky, maintaining a safe distance from your subject matter.” He reminded himself that Tang was a biochemist: a man for whom reality was contained in chemical formulas and metabolic cycles.
“That too is not a matter of wanting,” Tang told him, very calmly indeed. “it is a matter of responsibility and common sense.”
“Responsibility to whom?” Matthew challenged.
Tang sat back in his chair and regarded him very carefully. “Since you were awakened, Dr. Fleury,” he said, “you have been briefed by Konstantin Milyukov and Andrei Lityansky. It’s rumored that you have also talked to Shen Chin Che. You have certainly heard Rand Blackstone’s opinion, and Lynn Gwyer’s. Every one of those five is opposed to the notion of a temporary or permanent withdrawal from Tyre, and every one will therefore have taken some care to represent the opposing case as a matter of cowardice or foolishness—but I do not believe that you are the kind of man to take aboard the ideas of others unthinkingly. I was rather young when I first encountered your work, and not yet twenty-five when you disappeared from the media landscape, but I have had time enough to familiarize myself with your writings and your intellectual legacy. I may be mistaken, but I feel that I know you rather better than some of the people who first encountered you in the flesh—people like Lynn Gwyer and Ikram Mohammed, perhaps even Bernal Delgado. I feel confident, therefore, that you will not have prejudged this question, and that you will understand far better than many others the true significance of the changes in our situation that have taken place since Hope left Earth’s solar system.”
Wrong-footed yet again by the earnest flattery, Matthew had no idea how to reply to it. In the end, wariness defeated his reflexive impulse to try to guess what Tang might mean. “Okay,” he said. “I’m listening. Convince me.”
Tang nodded, as if this was no more than he had expected. “When we enlisted for this mission,” he said, “we did so in the expectation that Earth was about to enter a new Dark Age. You joined the ranks of the frozen in 2090 or thereabouts, more than twenty years before me, but you were a prophet of no mean ability and Mr. Solari must have told you that the situation in the early 2110s seemed every bit as desperate as you had anticipated. The ecosphere was suffering a near-universal collapse, and new plagues were in the process of sterilizing every human female on Earth. I always trusted that the human race would pull through, but I expected a drastic interruption of scientific and social progress. It seems, however, that you and I were too pessimistic.
“There was indeed a Crash, but the rebound was more rapid than you or I would have dared hope. The intelligence gleaned by Hope’s patient crew during the last few centuries suggests that the Dark Age lasted less than half a century, and that technological progress had resumed its ever-more-enormous strides by the end of the twenty-second century. Even then, it seems, men dared to hope that they could live long enough to be the inheritors of authentic emortality. It appears that they were wrong, but a potent technology of longevity was discovered soon enough—three hundred years in what is now our past. You and I, Dr. Fleury, would be members of the last generation of mortal men were it not for the fact that we both have mortal children in suspended animation aboard