Dark Ararat - Brian Stableford [7]
“What’s the new world called?” Matthew asked, softly.
“Well,” said the boy, amiably, “there’s a certain amount of disagreement about that, so it’s still under negotiation. Some members of the first landing party wanted to call it Hope, after the ship, but the crew mostly want to call it Ararat, in keeping with the Ark myth. Several other alternatives have been suggested by way of compromise—some favor New Earth, some Murex, some Tyre—but that’s only served to complicate the situation. Mostly, we call it the world, or the surface.”
“Why Murex?” Solari wanted to know.
“Because the vegetation is mostly purple,” Leitz replied. “All the grass and trees, almost all the animals … except that the trees aren’t really trees, and the animals aren’t really animals, and the giant grass is made of glass. You’ll be briefed on all of that by our senior genomicist, of course, Professor Fleury. It’ll be a lot to take in, and it all sounds pretty weird to me, but you’re a biologist, so you’ll get the hang of it soon enough.”
“Start off,” Matthew said. “If you’re the doctor’s assistant, you must know some biology.”
The boy blushed slightly, although the color of his skin made the blush seem more gray than pink. It took him a couple of seconds to decide that he couldn’t play too dumb.
“The panspermists and the chemical convergence theorists were wrong, it seems,” he said. “Evolution here and on the orphan followed distinct and different paths. DNA isn’t universal. Nor is chlorophyll, obviously, or the world wouldn’t be purple. The surface looks pretty enough in pictures, but the people on the ground say that it’s rather disturbing up close.”
“What orphan?” Solari put in, while Matthew was still working out how to phrase a more pertinent question.
“A sunless but life-bearing world we bypassed in interstellar space. It was long before my time, but it’s all on record, including the genomic analyses. It was a sludgeworld—nothing bigger than a bacterium. There are others, apparently, able to support life because their internal heat and thick atmospheres keep the surfaces warm and wet. Lots of probes came this way after us, all traveling faster—it’s easier to accelerate when you’re small—and we’ve harvested a lot of information from them. There’s nothing else like this world, though—not yet. It’s the one-and-only Earth-clone, for the time being. It’s not just your world. So far as everyone here is concerned, it really is the world.”
“Long before your time,” Matthew echoed, anxious to stake a conversational claim before Solari asked another question. “I presume that means you’re as young as you look. Dr. Brownell said that the people back on Earth are emortal now—does that apply to the crew too? Do you have the means to modify us?”
“It’s not as simple as that,” Leitz countered. “Yes, I’m as young as I look—nineteen. No, I’m not emortal, and never will be. True emortality has to be built in from scratch by genetic engineering of a fertilized egg-cell. Our rejuve technologies have improved a little since we left Earth, but we haven’t been able to develop our nanotech nearly as rapidly as the folks back home. I can’t tell you how long you or I will live, barring accidents, because I don’t know how much we’ll benefit from further progress, but two hundred years is generally reckoned to be a fair guess. By Earthly standards, we’re primitives. On Earth, survivors of the Old Human Race are freaks.”
“What happened to Bernal Delgado?” Solari asked, presumably feeling that theoretical issues could safely be left to one side until more practical issues had been addressed. “Who killed him?”
The youth’s eyes swiveled away from Matthew to meet the detective’s. Matthew was slightly surprised to find himself relieved: the green gaze had been slightly disconcerting, although it had seemed guileless enough.
“We’re hoping that you can find that out,” Leitz told Solari. “It looks as if he was killed by aborigines—”
“The world’s inhabited?” Matthew interrupted—but Leitz continued looking at Solari.
“But it can’t be the way it looks, because