DARK ARARAT - THE LOST TEXT
The Second Dream Sequence to be inserted between the first and second paragraphs of chapter 37:
He dreamed that his
IT was chiding him for his perverse insistence on continually undoing
all its good work, and threatening that if he didn't begin to behave
himself, it would throw in the towel and leave him to rot in agony.
He dreamed that Bernal
Delgado's ghost appeared to him, demanding that he set the record
straight and crying out for justice.
Bernal's ghost told
him that the man it had once been had always been a fake and a fraud,
exactly like Matthew himself, and that Shen Chin Che had paired them
off in the register of his Ark because they were fakers and frauds,
and because the entire science which they were supposed to represent
was a fraud, because ecology itself was no more than a confidence
trick perpetrated against honest biochemists.
Bernal's ghost also
told him that the man it once had been had never loved Dulcie Gherardesca,
and that the love affair Matthew had manufactured in his imagination
could never have taken place, and that Dulcie was a malicious psychopath
who had to be put to death for her crime, by being burned at the stake
as a witch.
He dreamed that he
was put on trial for heresy, and that all the broadcasts he had made
from the purple twilight of the glasslands were summoned as witnesses
to prove the prosecution's case. The chief prosecutor was Vince Solari,
and the judge was Konstantin Milyukov, but the cameraman filming the
proceedings for the official record was Death.
"There is no
such thing as heresy," he said, in his defence. "Thought
cannot be censored. Ideas cannot be banned. All history is fantasy.
All fantasy is history. The future is as yet unmade, and the work
of its making begins with speculation. Those who cannot learn from
prophecies
are condemned to fulfil them. You
can enact this trial as tragedy or as farce. The choice
is yours."
But when he turned
towards the jury, which had been carefully selected to include equal
numbers of crewpeople and colonists, he saw that they were now all
aliens.
He dreamed that the
bubble-tent in which he slept was attacked by aliens, who stabbed
Ikram Mohammed to death with spear-thrusts, but that he escaped and
undertook an amazingly long and arduous journey across the face of
the continent and the intervening ocean, carrying the warning to Base
One that an attack was imminent, only to arrive too late, to find
every last man, woman and child butchered, and that he searched through
the ruins until he found the corpses of his own daughters, still wet
with the red blood that had spilled from a hundred wounds, and that
he swore vengeance against the enemy, but that Konstantin Milyukov
refused to send nuclear weapons down from Hope, or instruments
of plague war, or food, or fresh water, or anything that would sustain
Matthew in his great crusade....
He dreamed that Konstanin
Milyukov appeared on TV as a newsreader to say that Earth had not,
after all, survived the Crash, and that all the news he had prevouly
biroadcast was nothing but a tissue of clever fabrications devised
in order to maintain morale among the crew and the colonists, but
that the illusion was no longer sustainable and that morale no longer
mattered, because Hope was lost in the wilderness of space,
and would never find a planet on which its hopeful colonists could
live, and that there was nothing left to do now but admit that they,
the sole survivors of the human race, had been guilty of the murder
of Earth, and that the fact that they hd not known what they were
doing was no excuse, and that he, as captain of the ultimate
DARK ARARAT - THE LOST TEXT
Ark, had taken the decision to open all the airlocks
and deliver the last remnant of humankind to the void, to
defeat, to death, to justice....
And when the camera
panned away, it contrived to turn back upon itself to reveal the face
of the hidden cameraman....
Who was Death.
"No," he
said, now that Death's camera was directed at him. "I will not
admit this. I have seen the future and this is what it must contain:
"Konstantin
Milyukov must welcome Shen Chin Che back from his cold exile, and
meet him on camera, and shake hands with him, and declare that henceforth
the two of them will work in concert to support the colony and the
native humanoids in every possible progressive way.
"Alice and Michelle
and the two daughters of Tang Dunh Quan will awake, with all their
memories and all their love intact, having forgotten nothing and no
one, and they will live on Tyre and never grow old, because our alliance
with the humanoids will teach us a new and better way to adult emortality,
which will allow us to avoid the dire consequences of the Miller Effect.
"More ships
from Earth will arrive in a hundred and eighty years time, bringing
more scientists and more colonists and more newscasters, who will
marvel at our achievements. Earth is not dead, they will say, and
everyone who lives there is emortal, but nothing we have done can
compare to the miracles that you have wrought, with the aid of a way
of life of which we had never dared to dream until you sent us news
of its existence.
"Frans Leitz
will meet the newcomers, having come into his inheritance, and he
will say: Yes, I knew Matthew Fleury. I knew Bernal Delgado and I
knew Dulcie Gherardesca. I knew them all. I was the person to whom
Matthew Fleury entrusted the first news of the first contact,
and it changed my life as it changed
the life of every person on and above the world, because
it was the news that made the Ark an Ark in truth, the
dove that carried the olive branch, the rainbow inscribed
upon the firmament, the climax and culmination of what we
had all set out to do and be....."
But Death laughed,
and the airlocks hummed as their motors were activated....
He dreamed that he
held his breath in order avoid to having the air sucked out of his
lungs, that he rolled himself up into a foetal crouch in the hope
of withstanding the cold, that he closed his ears to avoid the sound
of the news, that he refused to acknowledge the sense of touch in
order not to know that he was being shaken, shaken, shaken.....
© Brian Stableford 2002.
