Michelle looked to her right and left, and then turned around—but when she turned around her eyes were caught by the communications mast and she could not help following its reach into the lilac-tinted sky. That, she thought, was a better symbol of her father’s life and nature than the teeming confusion of the city. He had never been a builder, an agent of civilization. He had been a man who loved to talk, to captivate an audience. He had been a man who would rather invent fantasies than reserve his counsel. She had seen tapes of the broadcasts he had made immediately before the contact, and had listened to Frans Leitz going through his guesses one by one, marveling at the fact that so many of them had turned out to be so nearly right.
“Nobody else had put it all together,” the doctor had said. “Nobody else had been able to. And he carried on putting things together, more cleverly than anyone imagined possible.”
But the one thing he had neglected to put together was his family. How clever was that?
“Matthew always said that this was a more important world than Earth,” Dulcie told her. “He said that the people on Earth, having survived the Crash, would always have to put the safety of the Earth first: to guard it as jealously and as carefully as any cradle. The torch of progress has to be handed on to the other worlds which have accepted humankind: the worlds that have no alternative but to embrace change, and welcome change, and make the most of change. This is the first meeting place, the first melting pot, the first location in which humankind can take its place in the wondrous confusion of all possible modes of life. Earth is alpha, he said, and it has to maintain itself as alpha, preserving its value as a refuge and a reservation—but the future of humankind is an expedition to omega: the ultimate limit of achievement. This is where the omega expedition really begins, he said. This is where we first met alien intelligence, and began our collaboration with alien intelligence. This is where the true horizons of possibility were finally opened up to the imagination.”
“I recognize the rhetorical style,” Michelle told her. “He practiced hard.”
“Yes,” Dulcie admitted. “He certainly did. Do you think you’ll ever be able to forgive him? He’d have expected you to understand.”
That was true too, and Michelle knew it. She turned around again, to look back over the parapet at the city. In the photographs she’d seen of its condition when it was first discovered it had seemed utterly dead, literally enshrouded in imperial purple. Now, it was boldly, relentlessly, stubbornly alive, and astonishingly clean. Even though it was pockmarked here and there by building-sites, from which plumes of dust and smoke rose up to stain the crystalline, its lines were sharp and proud and perfectly clear.
Whatever else he had brought here, and whatever else he had left behind, Matthew Fleury had given the city a future, and the energy to hurry into it.
“I’ll try,” Michelle said—and knew as soon as she said it, by the way that Dulcie Gherardesca smiled, that she might as well have said that she would. For her, a commitment to try was as good as a commitment to do everything possible and to succeed in any merely human task, because she was her father’s daughter—and always would be, for as long as she now might live.
eBook Info
Title:
Dark Ararat
Creator:
Brian Stableford
Subject:
Fiction
Publisher:
A Tom Doherty Associates Book
Contributor:
Brian Stableford
Date:
2002
Type:
Novel
Format:
text/html
Identifier:
0-312-70559-X
Source:
PDF
Language:
en
Copyright © 2002 by Brian Stableford
Table of Contents
DarkArarat
DarkArarat
PART ONEFalling into the Future
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
PART TWODelving into the Past
PART TWODelving into the Past
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
TWENTY-SIX
TWENTY-SEVEN
TWENTY-EIGHT
TWENTY-NINE
THIRTY
THIRTY-ONE
THIRTY-TWO
THIRTY-THREE
THIRTY-FOUR
THIRTY-FIVE
THIRTY-SIX
THIRTY-SEVEN
EPILOGUE
eBook Info
Table of Contents
DarkArarat
DarkArarat
PART ONEFalling into the Future
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FIFTEEN
PART TWODelving into the Past
PART TWODelving into the Past
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
TWENTY-FIVE
TWENTY-SIX
TWENTY-SEVEN
TWENTY-EIGHT
TWENTY-NINE
THIRTY
THIRTY-ONE
THIRTY-TWO
THIRTY-THREE
THIRTY-FOUR
THIRTY-FIVE
THIRTY-SIX
THIRTY-SEVEN
EPILOGUE
eBook Info