Dark Ararat - Brian Stableford [18]
Frans Leitz colored, but the greenish tint in his skin lent the blush a peculiar dullness. “It’s purely a precaution,” he said.
“I figured that,” Solari came back. “What I want to know is: against what?”
“There have been … policy disagreements concerning the administration of the ship and the control of its resources,” the boy admitted. “I’m really not competent to explain the details—I’m just a medical orderly, and a trainee at that. The captain will tell you everything. But it really is a precaution. No one on the ship has been injured, let alone killed, as a result of the … problem.”
“But who, exactly, is the precaution intended to deter?” Mathew said, modifying Solari’s question slightly without softening the insistence of the demand. “Are we talking about mutineers, or what?”
“I suppose so,” the boy replied, steadfastly refusing to elaborate—but he must have read in Vince Solari’s eyes that he wouldn’t be let off so easily. “The captain will tell you all that. He can explain it far better.”
“I’m sure he can,” Matthew said, drily, “but …”
Frans Leitz had had enough. “Eight-zero,” the boy said, as he turned to flee from the uncomfortable field of discussion. “Before you go,” Solari was quick to say, “can you give us a quick introduction to the equipment by our beds. There’s so much we need to know that the sooner we can make a start ourselves the better equipped we’ll be to ask questions of the captain.”
Leitz hesitated, but he had no grounds for refusal—and he knew that if he were busy lecturing the two of them on basic equipment skills he could probably override more awkward questions with ease.
“Sure,” he said, only a little less warmly than Matthew could have wished.
FIVE
When the first picture of the new world came up on the wallscreen Matthew caught his breath. He had thought himself more than ready for it, but the reality still took him by surprise.
The image reminded him, as he had expected, of the classic twentieth-century images of the Earth as seen from the moon, but the differences leapt out at him much more assertively than he had imagined. The new world’s two moons were much smaller and closer than Earth’s, and they were both in the picture, which had obviously been synthesized from photographs taken from Hope while she was much further away than her present orbit.
The second thing Matthew noticed, after absorbing the shock of the two moons, was the similarity of the clouds. It was as if his mind were making a grab for something reassuring, and that it was able to take some comfort from the notion that the old Earth and the new were clad in identical tattered white shirts.
But everything else was different.
The land masses were, of course, completely different in shape, but that was a trivial matter. The striking difference was a matter of color. Matthew, having been forewarned, was expecting to see purple, but he had somehow taken it for granted that it would be the land rather than the sea that would be imperial purple, and it took him a moment or two to reverse his first impression.
Even at its most intense, the purple of this world’s land-based vegetation was paler than he had expected. It seemed somehow insulting to think in terms of mauve or lilac, although those shades were certainly the most common. So vague and careless had Matthew’s anticipations been that he had not factored in the oceans in at all, and would not have been at all surprised to find them as blue as Earth’s. They were not; they were gloriously and triumphantly purple, more richly and stridently purple than the land.
Matthew remembered that the first aniline dye to be synthesized from coal tar in Earth’s nineteenth century had been dubbed Tyrian purple. That, presumably, was why Tyre had been added to the list of potential names for “the world.” The murex, he supposed, must have been the source of the imperial purple of Rome, and there were probably mollusk-like creatures of a similar sort in the purple oceans of the new world, but Murex did not sound