Dark Ararat - Brian Stableford [38]
But the real enemy, he knew, was the darkness and emptiness of the void. Although Hope had arrived in a new solar system, the void was still here, still everywhere.
He sat up, peering into the darkness of the inclined corridor.
At first, he could see nothing through the gloom but an arrow of light, but after a few minutes the arrow changed into a text message.
Not Much Further, it said.
Matthew groaned, and hauled himself back to his feet. The arrow was restored, and Matthew followed it.
He was passing through doorways more frequently now, but the winding corridors were so extensive and so utterly deserted that Hope was beginning to seem a ghost ship: a starfaring Mary Celeste. There was living space here for tens of thousands, Matthew realized, perhaps hundreds of thousands. The crew must have been working on the inner architecture of Hope ever since she had left the system, but their robots had been put away for the time being and they had yet to move on to the next stage in the process of evolution: the one that would make the ship into an authentic microworld, with a microworld’s population. Had they begun to fill these spaces with their own descendants immediately after their departure from the solar system, the reawakened parent-colonists would have found themselves a very tiny minority indeed, but the revolution must have happened in the later phases of the voyage. That part of the revolutionaries’ scheme was still in its early stages—and what disaster might Shen Chin Che’s counterrevolution have precipitated if these spaces had not been empty? Perhaps they would not have been filled in any case, given that space would have had to be reserved for the colonists’ future clone-children, whose generative nuclei had not been removable until they were unfrozen.
Matthew was expecting a return to the light and a genuine rendezvous, but he was disappointed. Instead of a room as homely as Milyukov’s, all he found at the end of his rat-run was one more wallscreen at a darkened corner, displaying a half-familiar face.
There was a camera eye positioned above the screen, but Matthew did not suppose that the glimmer of reflected light could do justice to his features. That, he thought, was a pity. He realized that he had not seen his own face since he came out of SusAn, but he was sure that it could not possibly have changed as much as the face that was peering at him from the wall.
“Shen,” he said, to acknowledge that he could see the face. For the moment, he couldn’t say anything more.
“I’m sorry, Matthew,” the face said. “I can’t take the risk of bringing you in.”
This wasn’t the kind of welcome Matthew had been expecting. It wasn’t the kind of greeting he felt they were both entitled to, after the kind of epic journey they had made.
Had Shen actually been present, Matthew could have bowed first, then thrown his arms around the smaller man … but as things were, he could only stare at the unexpected image on the screen.
Shen Chin Che looked a good deal older than he had been in 2090, when Matthew had last seen him. Matthew realized, belatedly, that what had been a matter of days for him must have been a matter of years, or decades, for the other man.
“We made it, Shen,” he said, defiantly. “No matter how badly the hired help has contrived to fuck it up, we made it! Fifty-eight light-years. Seven hundred years.”
Shen Chin Che blinked in surprise, as if he too had forgotten to factor the difference in their ages into the equation. “It has been a long time, Matthew,” he conceded.
Matthew remembered what Nita Brownell had told him about the vulnerability of memory, and wondered how well Shen’s memories of him compared to his memories of Shen. He also remembered that the first great prophet to lead his people to a Promised Land, across a wilderness that must have seemed just as intimidating as the desert of the void had seemed to the men of the twenty-first century, had not lived to join his people in that land, seeing it only from a distance. Shen’s age, Matthew realized, might be