Dark Ararat Read Online Free PDF Page A

support, it’s been a slow process. The machines kept you asleep as long as possible, but the final phases of the tune-up have to be completed while you’re alert and active. You’ll feel a lot better in a few hours, and you’ll probably be able to leave the room this time tomorrow. You’ll be shuttling down as soon as possible—within fifty hours, if all goes well.”
    “Fifty hours!” Matthew exclaimed.
    “Sorry,” the doctor said. “That’s ship hours. Five days, in the old reckoning.”
    Five days still sounded a trifle hurried to Matthew, although he knew that if he’d been kept aboard ship for an extended period he would soon have become impatient. It was difficult to believe the reassurance that he’d be back to his old self within five days when the effort of standing up seemed so extreme, and the prospect of taking a step almost impossible, but once he’d actually contrived a step and had found it merely uncomfortable, he buckled down to the serious business of reminding his body what human existence was like.
    For the first couple of hours of relative freedom, Matthew and Vince Solari were too wrapped up in what was happening to them to pester their helpers with awkward questions about the situation aboard ship, but the easing of their concerted interrogative pressure didn’t seem to lighten the minds of their coy informants; everything either of them said or did seemed to touch slightly raw nerves.
    Given that the ship’s spin was only simulating half Earth’s gravity, Matthew was not surprised to find that once his muscles had got the hang of working again they soon began to feel quite powerful. Unfortunately, learning to move about efficiently and economically in the unfamiliar gravity-regime was frustratingly difficult. His memories seemed to be virtually unaffected by their long storage, so the exercises and tricks he had learned as he passed from Earth to the moon, and then to remoter parts of the system, were still fresh in his mind. Unfortunately, his body had spent forty years adapting to Earth and a mere matter of months in variable low-gee. All the old expectations were still built in.
    “Don’t worry about it,” Nita Brownell advised him, while she studied the manner of his blundering with a connoisseur’s eye. “It doesn’t matter if you’re awkward and clumsy up here—in fact, it’s better that you don’t have time to begin getting settled. The real task ahead of you is adaptation to the surface. That’s oh point ninety-two Earth-gravity, but you’ll find that oh point oh-eight makes more difference than you’d imagine.”
    “If it’s oh point ninety-two Earth-normal down on the surface,” Matthew growled, “wouldn’t it make more sense to simulate oh point ninety-two up here?”
    “Well, yes it would,” said Nita Brownell, cautiously—but she was immediately interrupted by Frans Leitz.
    “This is crew territory,” Leitz said, brusquely. “It’s adapted to our requirements. It’s always been this way, and there’s no reason to change.”
    “ Your requirements,” Matthew repeated. “ Yours , as opposed to ours . Since when did you and we become opposed sides, with contrasted interests?”
    He realized as he framed the words that it was a stupid question. Since when? Since the twenty-first century, obviously. The corpsicles’ yesterday, the crew’s ancient history. A lot could happen in 700 years, even in a mini-ecosphere set to maintain itself far more rigidly than Mama Gaea. The crew had obviously developed ideas of their own as to what their purpose and destiny ought to be. But how, exactly, had they brought them into conflict with the colonists whose needs they had been put aboard to serve? From what he had been told so far, it was the colonists, not the crew, who were having doubts about their role.
    Nita Brownell had already reverted to what she obviously considered safer ground. “As soon as you go on to autopilot on the surface,” she was saying,