Dark Ararat - Brian Stableford [177]
“Come up to the roof,” Dulcie said. “His body may be in there, but his legacy is all around us, as far as the eye can see. That’s the way to get in touch with him, to understand what he did and why.”
Michelle knew that there was no point in asking for more time. The tomb was an alien creation, an alien testament. It had nothing more to say to her. Meekly, she followed Dulcie Gherardesca up a series of stone staircases, cunningly illuminated by arrays of rectangular windows. The steps felt strange beneath the thickened soles of her augmented feet, and there was a curious odor hanging in the air. It could not be the stones themselves, or the mortar sealing them in place, so it had to be something clinging to them: a translucent vegetable veneer. Even the walls of the city had a false skin. The air was cool in spite of the sunlight streaming through the windows, and the filters to which she had not yet become accustomed made it seem thin and curiously unsatisfying.
The roof of the palace carried a massive TV mast studded with satellite dishes. There was a telescope mounted on the parapet to which Dulcie Gherardesca led her, but the xenanthropologist ignored it; she had brought Michelle here to see the broad panorama of Civitas Solis, not to pick out hidden details upon its horizon.
Michelle had to admit that the city was impressive, even though the walls she had seen on ancient photographs had all been dismantled so that their constituent stones might be put to better uses. The multitudinous domes were the brightest elements because they reflected the light of the ruddy sun, but the walls that soaked up the same light with such avidity provided a magnificently elaborate setting for the hemispherical jewels. And then there were the fields: huge tracts of land glowing purple or green or purple-and-green, hugging the valleys and the lakeside, and following the river downstream as far as the eye could see. With the ingenuity of human biotechnology to protect them, even the alien fields no longer had any need of walls of stone: and their new protective devices would not fail, no matter what pestilential chimerical legions might gather to assault them.
The streets and shops of the city were as busy with human traffic as native crowds. Michelle knew that the population now numbered 40,000, evenly divided between the two races. Higher in the hills she could see three vivid pyramids that testified to the efforts that the natives were making to increase their population further, in frank opposition to the weight of tradition. The humans had done the same, after their own fashion. While she and other children of the Hope’s pioneers had languished in the freezer, new individuals had been created in their thousands as soon as full details of the Zaman transformation and the equipment to implement it had arrived—not from Earth, so rumor had it, but from a nearer source: a base established on an uninhabitable but material-rich world by AI miners and manufacturers. How strange to obtain the secret of human emortality from machines!
Michelle looked to her right and left, and then turned around—but when she turned around her eyes were caught by the communications mast and she could not help following its reach into the lilac-tinted sky. That, she thought, was a better symbol of her father’s life and nature than the teeming confusion of the city. He had never been a builder, an agent of civilization. He had been a man who loved to talk, to captivate an audience. He had been a man who would rather invent fantasies than reserve his counsel. She had seen tapes of the broadcasts he had made immediately before the contact, and had listened to Frans Leitz going through his guesses one by one, marveling at the fact that so many of them had turned out to be so nearly right.
“Nobody else had put it all together,” the doctor had said. “Nobody else had been able to. And he carried on putting things together, more cleverly than anyone imagined possible.”
But the one thing he had neglected to put together was his family. How clever was