Dark Ararat - Brian Stableford [13]
When they’d gone, Solari said: “This isn’t quite the awakening I envisaged. The party atmosphere isn’t up to much, is it?”
“It was always a danger,” Matthew reminded him, soberly. “There was no shortage of prophets to tell the people of my generation that we couldn’t escape Earth’s problems by running away, because we’d only freeze them down along with us: all the festering conflicts; all the innate self-destructive tendencies. Those who fail to learn from prophecies are doomed to enact them. I can understand the differences of opinion—what I can’t understand is how they’ve become so bitter. We were all supposed to be on the same side—that was the heart and soul of the whole enterprise. How can it have soured so badly? What are they still not telling us?”
“The crew have had seven hundred years to develop their own ideas and their own internal conflicts,” Solari said, pensively. “It’s not just their feet that they’ve modified. The ship is their territory, the kid said. They have plans of their own—perhaps more than one, maybe with a few undecided votes holding the balance up here too. One of the things they’re not telling us is what’s happened to Shen Chin Che. Did you know him personally?”
“Yes, I did,” Matthew said, wondering how much the people who must be presumed to be listening in on the conversation knew about his relationship with the Ark’s owner, “and I’d certainly like to know where he is.”
“Jail, maybe?”
“Maybe. But holding out on us isn’t the right way to win us to their side, is it? Quite the reverse, in fact.” He was speaking as much to the hypothetical eavesdroppers as to Solari, and the policeman understood that.
“Right,” Solari confirmed. “If I were the captain, I’d be down here right now, laying everything on the line. I can’t understand why he isn’t.”
“Me neither,” Matthew lied. He presumed that the reason the captain wasn’t laying his cards on the table was that the captain wanted to know exactly where his new guests stood before doing so. The captain wanted to know which way they were likely to jump, once they understood what was at stake and how many different sides there were in the conflict. But to what lengths might he be willing to go, if he decided that they were likely to take a side of which he didn’t approve?
“Well,” Solari said, “it could have been worse. We might never have come out of the freezer at all. We might have come out without our most cherished memories. The mere fact that we’re here makes us winners—and if nobody else is prepared to celebrate, let’s raise a salute to one another.”
Matthew raised his arm willingly enough, and met Vince Solari’s desperately tired gaze as frankly and as forthrightly as he could.
“Congratulations, Vince,” he said. “A tiny step in humankind’s conquest of the galaxy, but a great leap forward for you and me.”
“Congratulations, Matt,” Solari replied. “Wherever we are, we sure as hell made it. Whatever we’re mixed up in, we’re already way ahead of the game. Amen.”
“Amen,” Matthew echoed, and meant it.
FOUR
The smartsuits Matthew and Solari were given to wear while their surface suits were being tailored were very similar to the ones they’d worn in the months before being frozen down, and not much different from the ones Matthew had worn on Earth—he’d never been a follower of fashion or a devotee of exotic display. They were, however, conspicuously unlike the white exterior presented by Nita Brownell or the pale blue-gray one manifested by Frans Leitz, which were presumably the “specialized ship suits” they weren’t being given. The main color of the smartsuits was modifiable, but only from dark blue to black and back again, and such style as they possessed was similarly restricted. Matthew guessed that if he and Solari were to go a-wandering they would stick out like sore thumbs in any line of sight they happened to cross.
The doctor told them that they’d get their personal possessions back “in due course.”
By the time that he and Solari