Dark Ararat - Brian Stableford [66]
“It’s not a matter of luck,” Solari assured him. “It’s a matter of procedure. Procedure and patience.”
They were still falling. They seemed to have been falling for a long time. Matthew wished that he had some way to tell how many minutes had actually passed. He had been given his wrist-unit along with his other personal possessions, and had immediately strapped it on, but he could not look at the face of his watch now. He had not thought to put his goggles on, so that he could summon virtual displays by blinking his eyes.
“Will procedure and patience be enough, given that so much time has passed since the actual event?” Matthew asked, reflexively.
“I have to believe so,” the policeman told him, scrupulously. “I’ve made a good start on the data relayed back by Blackstone and the material already on file. It’s just a matter of following through.”
“You already have a prime suspect?” Matthew asked, surprised that Solari hadn’t seen fit to mention it.
“Not exactly. It doesn’t do to jump conclusions. Guesswork can confuse your objectivity. You start twisting things to fit your hypothesis. Like you, I’d rather none of them was guilty—but I don’t want it to be aliens either. That would be a pity too, maybe the worst scenario of all. We were supposed to meet the alien openhanded, ready to join forces as friends and collaborators.”
“So we were,” Matthew murmured. It was true. The idea that man and alien would have to meet as enemies, competitors in a Darwinian struggle for existence that extended across the entire cosmic stage, had come to seem horribly twentieth century even to hard Darwinians. Hope had been called Hope because she lent new hope to humankind’s prospects of surviving the ecocatastrophic Crash that had destabilized Earth’s biosphere, but she was an incarnation of all kinds of other hopes too. One such hope—perhaps the most important—had been the hope that if the ship did manage to find an “Earthlike” world complete with smart aliens, they might be able to recognize an intellectual kinship and contrive some kind of mutual aid.
How much easier would that have been if the panspermists or the extreme convergence theorists had been right, he wondered. How much difference did it make now that they had been proved wrong—doubly wrong if you added the biochemical version of Gause’s axiom to the package? How much hope was left, when even Hope had been riven by conflict and virtually torn in two, each part far less than the ruined whole? What comfort was there in having to hope that one of the seven humans at Base Three had killed their colleague, because the alternative was even more discomfiting?
“Matthew?” Solari said, again, although it was he who had let the silence fall.
“Still here,” Matthew said. “Still awake. A petty triumph, I suppose, but one I can still treasure.”
“I keep waiting for the bump,” Solari said. “Utterly pointless tensing my muscles, I know, but I can’t help it.”
Until Solari had mentioned it, Matthew hadn’t tensed his own muscles at all, but now that the subject had been raised he felt himself flinching in anticipation … then relaxing…. then flinching again …
“We’ll be down soon enough,” he muttered, trying to jerk himself out of the absurd pattern.
And soon enough, they were.
The impact was distinct, but not in the least dangerous. It felt like an elevator coming to rest after sliding down the core of a building.
“What happens now?” Solari asked.
The glorified dandelion seed provided his answer by splitting apart, as if it were indeed some kind of seed. The silvery mist before Matthew’s eyes was oddly illuminated, as if the threads of his cocoon were transmitting the sparkling light and reflecting it at the same time, dividing the rays of the new sun into a million glittering shards.
Then the cocoon began to split too, to deliver its precious cargo to the peak of Ararat, the broad sweep of Tyre … or whatever.