Dark Ararat - Brian Stableford [176]
This was the only reunion left to her now: to stand beside her father’s tomb, in a monstrous edifice whose inner darkness belied the name that Matthew Fleury had attached, on humanity’s behalf, to the city that had become the focal point of the great collaboration: the collaboration that would change humankind as sharply and as irrevocably as it had changed humankind’s new partners in evolution.
“We should have been with him,” Michelle whispered. “He shouldn’t have left us out.” Alice was still left out, one of the few colonists still in SusAn aboard the microworld. Michelle intended to get her out as soon as she was allowed to take the decision. It was not only right but necessary that they should be together.
She took her hand back, knowing that she had not really touched the surface at all. Her own fingers were overlaid by the surface-suit Leitz had provided, which still seemed alien to her: an interface separating her from a world that was not her own.
“He wasn’t leaving you out,” Dulcie Gherardesca told her. “He was trying to prepare the way for your return. He missed you, always. He wanted to see you again, desperately—but he wanted to make things right first. You can’t imagine how messed up things were when he came out of SusAn. Everything was wrong. The world wasn’t as Earthlike as it was supposed to be. It posed all kinds of puzzles and problems. The colony was on the brink of failure for a long time—long after we met the aliens. Matthew was the one who pulled us together when we nearly fell apart, by making everyone understand that we had to make it work, not just for our sake but for the sake of the natives. There was so much we could teach them, and so much they could teach us. Matthew did more than anyone else to unite us in that cause—certainly more than Konstantin Milyukov and Shen Chin Che, who carried their feud to their own graves. He knew before anyone else—although Andrei Lityansky has done his level best to take the credit—that there was an opportunity here for us to develop a new technology of emortality quite different from the one they use on Earth. Some of his guesses were a little wide of the mark, of course, but he was the first person on this world who actually saw what was going on here, and what the differences between this world’s genomics and Earth’s actually meant, in terms of the probable history and possible futures of complex life in the galaxy … in the universe. He wanted you to benefit from the new technologies, Michelle. He didn’t want you to die before you could reap the reward of all his endeavors. He left you and Alice where you were because he loved you, more than anything else in the universe. He wanted you with him, but there was something else he wanted even more. He wanted you to have the gifts that this world offers. He wanted you to have a chance to be emortal.”
“He could have put himself back into SusAn,” Michelle countered. “He could have waited with us, to become emortal himself.”
“No, he couldn’t,” Dulcie said, softly.
That was true, of course. Michelle understood that much. Somebody had to do the work. An entire generation of mortals had had to commit itself to the labor of making sure that the generations that came after would be better equipped. To have walked away from that responsibility, even if his companions had sanctioned it, would have been a terrible dereliction of duty. Her father had always understood that messiahs usually had to be martyrs too, and if he hadn’t been prepared to accept that he’d never have joined Shen’s chosen people.
I could have been a martyr too, Michelle thought. I could have helped do the work that would give future generations opportunities we didn’t have, I could have been with him. I could have died with him.
And that, she knew, was precisely