Dark Ararat - Brian Stableford [175]
EPILOGUE
When Michelle Fleury finally came to stand before her father’s tomb in the so-called Palace of Civitas Solis all the carefully repressed bitterness came flooding back. She had heard the explanation for his desertion three times—from the doctor who had supervised her awakening, Frans Leitz; from her stepmother, Dulcie Gherardesca; and from the purple-skinned native with the voice box that formed the human syllables his own natural equipment could not—but she had not yet been able to bring herself to accept it as a valid excuse.
“He couldn’t know that he would die without seeing you again,” Dr. Leitz had said, while he was fitting her surface-suit. “He expected to live another hundred years. We’ve only just begun to realize the full extent of the toll that living on an alien world has exacted from us, and it wasn’t until the technical support began to arrive that we were able to refine our rejuve technologies. He delayed your awakening for the very best of reasons. He wanted you to wake up to a world that was fit to receive you: to a world that could provide for you as a parent should.”
The tomb wasn’t quite as elaborate as Michelle had expected. Alien hands had built it: emortal alien hands, which had never built a tomb before. She hadn’t expected a pyramid—pyramids had an entirely different significance in the native cultures of Tyre—but she had expected something more like a Victorian mausoleum than a mere kiln. It might have seemed more appropriate if the inscriptions on the faces of the shaped stones hadn’t been incomprehensible, but she hadn’t yet learned to decipher the written version of the local language.
“Shall I translate?” Dulcie asked. Dulcie had insisted on coming with her, although she’d had the grace to hang back in the deeper shadows for a few minutes while Michelle came to stand beside the tomb.
“No,” Michelle said, reaching out a hand so that she could trace a few of the engraved hieroglyphics with her right forefinger. “I know more or less what it says. He always wanted to be a messiah. When it became obvious that he couldn’t save his own world, he set out in search of one that might be more open to salvation, and more grateful. This says that he got his wish.”
“That’s not how they thought of him,” Dulcie told her, her voice putting on a show of patient forbearance. “It’s not how they thought of me, either. Maybe from our side we looked like the Prometheus team, bringing the light of the gods to the people of the forest, but they have a very different set of myths based in a very different way of life. To them, everybody is a teacher, because everybody has to be. The active members of society are the custodians of hundreds of thousands of years of accumulated knowledge and tradition, which they have to pass on to the rejuvenate twins and triplets when they emerge from their own natural version of SusAn. They don’t have hero myths, because they don’t have outstanding individuals. All their efforts are collective and cooperative. To them, we’re very bizarre, and it was partly in recognition of that strangeness that they made Matthew a tomb. They could never quite make sense of the fact that the human population of the city elected him mayor, because they never single out leaders or symbolic figureheads—but they respected his position, and they decided to mark it. I think he’d have been pleased. I know he would.”
Michelle understood only too well that Dulcie Gherardesca had known her father far better than she ever had. Dulcie had, after all, shared his life for a hundred years, while Michelle had seen precious little of him even during the years they had allegedly spent “together” on Earth. He and Dulcie had made the first contact with the aliens, had made common cause with the aliens, had accompanied the alien contingent that had decided to return to the abandoned city and rebuild it. He and Dulcie had guided the revolution of ideas that had reinvolved Hope’s crew in the education of the aliens—including the ones who had decided to