Dark Ararat - Brian Stableford [2]
Perhaps. Perhaps not.
Perhaps, Matthew decided, it was best to concentrate on happier thoughts. The happiest thought of all, surely—the one item of news that could not possibly be bad—was that after seven hundred years, Hope had reached an Earth-clone world. That was an idea to savor: a new Earth; a new home; another Ararat; another chance.
One, at least, of the New Noah’s Arks had reached its goal.
Shen had done it. Like Moses, he had brought his Chosen People to the Promised Land.
But the paranoia lingered.
Reading between the lines with a suspicious eye wasn’t a kind of game that Matthew relished, but it was one that he could play like a pro. While he did his level best to provide accurate answers to the questions that bombarded him, therefore, he reserved part of his mind to the task of fitting together the bits of information that Nita Brownell did see fit to provide, and supplementing them with whatever he could deduce from an examination of his surroundings.
The basics seemed simple enough. Hope had arrived in orbit around a planet orbiting a G-type star a billion years older than Earth’s sun. It had an atmosphere and a hydrosphere very similar to Earth’s, and an ecosphere with much the same biomass. So far, so good—but he noticed that Nita Brownell was slightly reluctant to use the word Earth-clone or to endorse its use. There was some kind of problem there.
There was, apparently, no recent news of the other two Arks that had exited the Oort Halo circa 2180, nor was there any reason to believe that the fourth Ark—the so-called Lost Ark—had eventually contrived to follow in their train. Faith and Courage were presumably still searching, if they had avoided ecocatastrophes of their own, while Charity, for whatever reason, was still locked in a cometary orbit around the sun. No good news there, but nothing especially terrible either.
If the calculations of Hope’s patient AIs could be trusted—Dr. Brownell called them sloths, but that was a term with which Matthew was not familiar and whose meaning he had had to ask—then Hope’s announcement of its arrival would reach Earth in 2872. If the gleanings of Hope’s equally patient homeward-directed eyes could be trusted, there would certainly be people on Earth to hear the glad tidings, and to be glad on Hope’s behalf. There would be billions of them—and billions more elsewhere in the system. No bad news there.
Earthly scientific progress had, apparently, faltered slightly in the early twenty-second century, but had picked up pace again soon enough. Biotechnology and nanotechnology had made good on some—perhaps most—of their promises. The people of Earth had discovered the secret of emortality, and had reconfigured their society to accommodate emortality comfortably. All good news there. With what the people of Earth now knew at Hope’s disposal—and what was not yet at Hope’s disposal would surely be placed there once Earth’s reply to Hope’s announcement of her discovery arrived, 116 years down the line—the colonists of the New Earth would surely be able to build a New World fit for their own emortal children.
Surely? When presented with that judgment, Nita Brownell’s reply was a calculatedly moderate “probably,” which seemed so weak as to be little better than a “possibly.”
When asked how the doubt arose, Dr. Brownell procrastinated. Matters weren’t as simple as they might appear. Things were complicated. There would be time for explanations later.
There were hints to be gleaned, but it was difficult to judge their relevance.
The failure-rate of Hope’s SusAn systems—or, more accurately, the deep-frozen bags of flesh, blood, and mind they had contained for so long—had been slightly higher and slightly more complicated than had been hoped. Mortality, if strictly defined,