The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [3]
With Tamlin’s aid, and the ambivalent encouragement of interested parties within the Hardinist Cabal, Damon contrives to arrive at the truth of the matter before various rival investigators, who include representatives of the Ahasuerus Foundation as well as the police. He and Tamlin are then faced with awkward decisions regarding the uses to which they might put the information they have gained, and the new career opportunities that have opened up for them.
Another recurrent factor in the series’ future history introduced in this volume is a set of technologies gathered under the nickname “gantzing,” the reference being to a pioneer of biological cementation named Leon Gantz. At this relatively early stage, gantzing microorganisms do little more than stick formerly unpromising materials together in order to make building blocks, but as the series advances gantzing techniques become fundamental to all construction and demolition processes.
Volume three, Dark Ararat, complicates the chronological sequence of the series in being set three years after the arrival of the space Ark Hope in orbit around an “Earth-clone” world in a distant solar system (in 2817, according to the ship’s calendar). Hope had been built as a response to the ecocatastrophic Crash that occurred between volumes one and two; the Ark had been completed in 2153 and had left the solar system in 2178. The central character of the story, Matthew Fleury, is one of the would-be colonists carried by the Ark in cryonic suspension; from his viewpoint, no time has elapsed since he was frozen down with his two daughters, Michelle and Alice, in 2090.
While the Ark has been en route its crew-members have lived through several generations; during that time they have formed a new view of their mission and destiny that is at odds with the ideas of the Ark’s Hardinist builder, Shen Chin Che — whose claim to own the Ark they fervently dispute. As a result of this difference of opinion the colonization project has gone badly awry. Many of the colonists taken down to the surface of the new world have concluded that the world is not a close enough twin to their homeworld to enable them to flourish there. The genetics of the new world’s ecosphere are peculiar, the native life-forms having cultivated a kind of natural emortality with the aid of a mechanism that echoes Morgan Miller’s ill-fated experiments. Further complications are added to the situation by the knowledge that Earth had not been utterly devastated by the Crash, and that the most recent news from the home planet — which is more than eighty years old — suggests that it is now a burgeoning paradise of near-emortals. (The Ark’s passengers are, of course, mere mortals.)
In the great tradition of Ark-staffing, Matthew was recruited to the human cargo as one member of a pair, in his case of ecological geneticists. He has been revived because his counterpart, Bernal Delgado, has been murdered while investigating the ruins of a city whose unexpected — and rather belated — discovery has added more fuel to the debate about the hospitability of the new world. The humanoid aliens who built the city may well be extinct, but if they are not they must have suffered a social and technological regression so extreme as to have given up on the domestication of fire. The city’s investigators were about to undertake a trip down the nearby river to a peculiar plain, in the hope of clearing up this mystery, when the murder took place. The weapon used to kill Delgado was a crude nonmetallic blade modeled on those once used by the indigenes, but of recent manufacture.
The plot of the novel follows the process of Matthew’s slightly incredulous discovery of Hope’s circumstances, and then describes the expedition from the city to the plain in search of further enlightenment as to the fate of the humanoid aliens. Matthew’s hope that solving the mystery might also allow him to heal the breach between the various rival factions is further emphasized by the knowledge that the future of