DARK ARARAT - THE LOST TEXT
Prologue:
Matthew Fleury dreamed
that he was witness to the death of the Earth.
He felt that he had
been dreaming for a long time, but his dreaming had only recently
become lucid, so he could not be sure that the vision had not been
born with its own history inbuilt.
He was conscious
of his own history too, but because he knew that he was dreaming he
was not entirely certain that it really was his history rather than
an illusory one. He was aware - and afraid - of the possibility that
when he awoke, if he ever did awake, he might not actually be the
person that he seemed to be in his dream, but someone else: a stranger,
who would have to live in a world yet to be destroyed and yet to be
understood.
This made him try
all the harder to make sense of his dream. One day, he knew, he would
have to spin its visionary fabric into a TV show, and he would need
to construct a commentary for that show. That was the purpose
of his dream, the work of his dream.
How could the Earth
be allowed to die without a suitable obituary? Who but he could be
trusted to intone that obituary? Who but he could even improvise an
obituary for a species and a planet?
"The Earth did
not die," Matthew told the camera "as a direct result of
the cometary blizzard, as some of my rival prophets threatened. The
planet was struck by at least a dozen icy fragments, but the damage
was local and the casualties light - light, that is, by comparison
with the casualties inflicted by what less scrupulous newscasters
have variously called the Second Plague War, the Third Plague War
or the Fourth Plague War, according to their particular accounting-schemes.
The Earth's reprieve from the blizzard
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is symbolized by the lovely meteor showers that its
residual particles will produce for centuries to come,
although I fear that the Last Defenders of Christianity
ask too much of us when they demand that such showers
must be reckoned as the seal of a second Covenant.
"In the end,
the arrival and departure of the comet cluster proved to be a blessing
rather than a curse.
"The arrival
of the cluster was a blessing because it tilted a delicate balance
within what less scrupulous newscasters call the Cosmicorp Cabal,
the Dominant Shareholders or the Nine Unknown, thus allowing the drip-feed
of finance for Space Exploitation to become a temporary flood. Had
the ill-cleared wilderness that would one day be Garden Earth actually
been threatened by a direct impact with a massive core even the resources
of the Cosmicorp Cabal might not have been adequate to ensure a deflection,
but fuser research took off anyway. If anyone Earthbound dared to
complain too loudly about the lives that might have been saved on
the surface had the money been less recklessly spent... well, the
twenty-first century has been the Golden Age of conspiracy theories,
and it has all been said and heard a thousand times before.
"Had there been
no blizzard there might have been no Arks, and had there been no blizzard
to lend the Arks precious momentum, any Arks that had been launched
would have had to search much further afield for their shells of ice,
and more than one would likely have been lost before they crossed
the Halo into intersystemic space...."
He had always been
a good broadcaster, for a career scientist: always adept at thinking
on his feet....
...or in his dreams.
In Matthew Fleury's
dream, the Earth really was Gaea: an organism, a goddess, an entity
cursed with sensitivity and the potential for trauma.
In the dream, Gaea
died because she had lost the
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will to live. The feedback mechanisms which had
maintained the relative stability of her biospheric
corpus for millions of years were stretched to breaking
point, and when her internal food chains were shattered
Chaos came again, as he had five times before.
Such representations
were not typical of Matthew's thought-patterns. He liked to think
of himself as a scrupulous scientist in spite of his media profile...
but even scientists dream, and all dreams delight in defying the scruples
of consciousness.
"During the 65,000,000
years previous to the death of the Earth, " he told the camera,
earnestly, "Gaea's feedback mechanisms absorbed the effect of
at least a dozen supervolcanic explosions, and twice as many impacts
with sizeable extraterrestrial bodies, but they could not withstand
the environmental impact of the human population explosion. They reacted
convulsively.
"Gaea the organism
had a fit. Gaea the Goddess fell, vomiting. Gaea the sensitive became
Gaea the traumatized...."
He noticed, merely
as an emotionally - inconsequential matter of fact, that the figure
carrying the TV camera on his shoulder was Death: a smiling skeleton
in a hood. Balanced on his other shoulder - the right - Death still
carried his scythe, but it was supported by the crook of his arm.
In his skeletal hands he carried an old-fashioned lantern, which served
instead of studio lights to light Matthew's dream.
And beneath Death's
skeletal foot, the Earth shrivelled and died, lit by the glow of that
strange mute lantern.
Matthew the dreamer
saw it all, just as Matthew the prophet had foreseen it all in the
days before he became Matthew the coward.
He saw it happen
as he had foredrawn it, in text and in virtual experience, again and
again and again, crying in the wilderness, as prophets had always
cried since the art of prophecy had been devised in the caves where
shaman-painters sought the womb of Creation in Gaea's motherly depths.
He saw it all, laid
out before him as a vast panorama, unfolded by the artifice of sensurround
representation....
Or was the unfolding
panorama simply one more virtual experience couched within the archetypal
Virtual Experience of the dream?
Perhaps it was, given
the way that his mind's eye moved and soared, and the way the visual
field chopped and changed, only requiring some split-screen or rapid
motion effect to make its falsity clear.
How, after all, could
one man, even with the aid of TV and VE, see so many other people
dying? Surely this had to be an edited version, an existential synopsis.
Surely he could not really be seeing all that he was seeing, even
in a dream, unless he were dreaming of a virtual experience, perhaps
one of his own scripts....
In which case, surely
he could not be dreaming of the actual death of the Earth,
but only the death as foreseen, the death as feared.
Could any mere man
see the death of an entire world? Could any merely human mind encompass
the extinction of a race? Could any prophet, even at the birth of
the Third Millennium, produce anything more than a quasi-Biblical
cartoon, a Deluge in a teacup, a Revelation in which the produce of
a whole world could be scythed down by four horsemen without a pair
of stirrups between them?
But Matthew had tried.
What kind of a man would he have been had he not tried?
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Matthew Fleury saw
the death of the Earth, as prophesied by many, including himself.
He had not been the last of the prophets, but he had been one of the
best, at least in his own estimation. Thanks to TV, he had certainly
been one of the loudest.
Even so, he had been
a voice crying in the wilderness, unheeded no matter how hard he tried
to make himself heard
It seemed to Matthew
that his vision had already lasted for a very long time, and that
there was a great deal more of it yet to come; but he dared not let
his attention lapse. It was a prophet's duty to see and understand,
if he could, what the import was of all his rhetoric and all his statistics.
It was a prophet's
duty to reveal, to comment, to guide: a duty not to be taken lightly.
In a world where
justice was - if any such fiction could ever be found - the sentence
passed on a prophet had to be that he must see his prophesies unfold,
sharing every single death that he had foretold.... including the
death of the Earth itself.
It was not, of course,
the death of the Earth as Matthew had predicted it. The work
of a prophet was not to predict but to sound the alarm, always
in the hope that the catastrophe to come might be prevented. The death
of the Earth that he had imagined and mapped in such lurid detail
had been a rhetorical artifact, forged in the hope that the event
might not come to pass at all.
Why, he wondered,
would the modern followers of the great religions never condescend
to understand that? Why did they prefer the horrors implicit in the
notion of destiny to the far kinder and far more likely hypothesis
that the function of a Revelation was to prevent its visions
from coming true?
"Those who cannot
learn from prophecy," Matthew had been overfond of quoting, "are
doomed to fulfil it."
Sometimes, perhaps
too often and certainly too glibly, he had stared hard into the camera
lens added "if not as tragedy, then as farce."
Prophets, on the
other hand, were doomed to live their fears as visions. But was this
the tragedy or the farce? He knew that he ought to be able to work
that out, but he could not.
Was he weeping as
he watched? If so, were his tears the signs of grief or hysteria?
That question, once
brought almost to consciousness in the increasingly lucid dream, was
a real puzzle.
Matthew did not know
the answer. He did not know whether he was weeping, or what his tears
might signify. How could that be, unless there were forces working
within him to suppress his emotional responses?
The prophets of old
had never imagined forces of that kind. Quite the reverse, for what
were Heaven and Hell but emotional responses set free from the prison
of the flesh? But the prophets of old, unable to invent the stirrup,
had been unable to foresee the advent of Internal Technology.
They had seen Him,
but not IT.
Was this dream, Matthew
wondered, also a product of IT?
He decided, eventually,
that it probably wasn't - but either way, he had no alternative but
to wait. The transition of awakening was beyond his control, no matter
how lucid his dreaming might become.
So Matthew Fleury
dreamed of the death of the Earth: of the wrath of the lifeless sea,
battering at the fringes of civilization; of the choking atmospheric
bubbles overladen with carbon dioxide and depleted of oxygen; of the
riot of decay consuming forests and pasturelands alike, staining the
face of the continents in camouflage colours, hectic smears of dark
green and rust-brown; of the last surviving people, sick
DARK ARARAT - THE LOST TEXT
and starving in spite of their layers of subtle
insulation, tongues bloated for lack of clean water and
lungs filling up with grey phlegm.
He saw the animals
lying dead in what had once been fields, little more than leather-and-bone;
the gaunt husks of storm-battered buildings slowly crumbling into
the concrete deserts that had once been cities; the cracking roads
littered with the corpses of cars and trucks.
He dreamed of emptiness,
and silence, and the end of the great game, and death and more death
and yet more death....but also of Hope and Faith and
Charity, and of Courage. He dreamed of Shen Chin Che
and the moon, of Lagrange-5 and the blizzard, and of the cold.
Earth, Matthew had
to suppose, would be consumed by the ice again. The polar ice had
melted for a while, but it would return and it would begin to extend
its empire south of the Arctic and north of the Antarctic, as it had
so many times before.
"At the end
of every fever is a chill," he said, still staring into the dark
eye of Death's camera.
The blasted ecosphere
would cover itself in ice, and the ice would kill the worst of the
rot, and separate out the primal metazoans: the metazoans which would
start the eternal process of progress all over again, as they had
before, probably a dozen times on Earth and perhaps a hundred times
elsewhere, if the panspermists turned out to be right.
The Earth would live
again, perhaps long enough to produce something akin to humankind.
And perhaps not.
But there was the
blizzard, and the moon, and Lagrange-5, and the fuser, and Hope
and Faith and Charity, and Courage - only one
of which had been lost - and whether the panspermists were right or
not about the past, the alarmist prophets still had their opportunity
to prevent the
worst of what they foresaw.
Matthew saw the Arks
set forth, and knew then that he was certainly not dreaming anything
he had actually seen, because he knew that he could never have been
in any situation from which he could see the Arks depart.
He was a prophet,
and one of the Chosen People. He had been Chosen by Shen Chin Che,
and that meant that even if he had seen the Earth die, through whatever
medium and from whatever range, he could not have seen the Arks depart
in search of the life-bearing worlds of other stars, because he was
one of the two-by-two, as were his children: the children already
paired, he coupled in the lists with....
Who?
He could not remember.
There were other things,
Matthew felt sure, that he could not remember; but was that really
so unusual, in a dream? Was it not part and parcel of the dreaming
process to narrow the focus of the mind, to cancel the responses of
the limbs, to sever the ties of memory? Was it not more surprising,
all things considered, that he could remember his own name?
It was his
own name; he was sure of that much. The death of the Earth might conceivably
be a pantomime fed to his eyes by a deceptive VE-hood, or by some
clever IT, but he was inside himself and he was definitely Matthew
Fleury. Any doubt which attached to his own identity was not to do
with the name at all, but with something deeper.
Who, after all, was
Matthew Fleury? Was he really a prophet, a specialist in ecological
genomics turned hypothetical terrorist and TV personality, an alarmist
configuring cries of Woe! for the illimitable host of the vidveg?
Or was he another Matthew Fleury, a man of little power and no celebrity,
whose dream of implication in the end of the world might merely be
the dream of a starveling with choked
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lungs, wishing that there were some nobler purpose
before him than living in plague-inflicted misery till he
died in IT-blotted pain? Was he Hope, or was he merely
Charity, beginning and ending at home in his own blotched
and ragged flesh? Was he a really a coward?
No, he decided,
after a moment's more- than-perfect lucidity. I really am THE Matthew
Fleury.
He almost awoke then,
and would have done had he been capable of managing his own awakening,
but something - some tender and tiny machinery - pulled him back into
the dream.
Sometimes, when he
had dreamed before (how long ago was that, and why did the question
prick him with a brief spark of terror?) Matthew had realised, upon
his dream becoming lucid, that it was a pleasant one: a desirable
luxury. He had made his own efforts to continue such serendipitous
finds, to string them out, to milk their euphoric quality to the last
drop. Alas, the determination to do that, the very process of forging
the will to remain asleep, had always dispelled sleep, in a mockingly
paradoxical fashion.
This time, it was
not his will that was retaining him in sleep in spite of his
lucidity.
It had to be a drug,
or some related IT safety-mechanism.
If it were the latter,
he was presumably in peril, but might be in even greater peril were
he allowed to wake.
How tragic, then,
or how farcical, that he had only been able to dream of the death
of the Earth.
Why, if he had to
remain asleep, had his dreams not been seductive, luxuriant, euphoric,
ambrosial....
And why was he so
uncertain of exactly who he was, in spite of the fact that he knew
his name?
Was it possible that
he was in the process of becoming something else?
It seemed unlikely.
He was one of the Chosen People, after all. The lifeless sea would
not have him, and the rot that camouflaged the continents would not
hide his bones. He was Saved, by courtesy of Narcisse the New Noah
and his favourite sons, Shen, Han and....Nadir?
Narcisse and Nadir,
Ark-builders? Surely there was something wrong there, something out
of place.
Had they really "caught
the blizzard"? Had they really "fused the cosmic storm"?
Had they really "made the wombs and the tombs"? Had they
really brought order out of all that confusion, by "taming the
produce of Chaos"?
Matthew's guiding
myths seemed to have become tangled up, perhaps inextricably. He had
no idea what he was thinking about, even though the words formed themselves
clearly enough, all in a hectic rush.
He had forgotten
too much. Maybe he would get it back, when he woke up, but while he
was still dreaming, however lucidly, he could not get a grip on himself.
He knew his name, but he could not quite contrive to discover the
person behind the name.
He felt sure that
he would, in time, and he felt equally sure that he had all the time
in the world, or had had....
Which was odd, was
it not, if the Earth really had died?
Perhaps not, he decided.
If the Earth really
had died, it was not in the least odd that he had all the time in
the world, because the resurrection of the ecosphere would take millions
of years - perhaps billions, if the criterion by which success were
to be judged was the reappearance of a species vaguely akin to humankind.
Except, of course, that he could not afford to wait, as a mere human
being himself. No matter what the New Adam might think, SusAn could
not sustain a man forever. She was a chrysalis, not a rent in time;
her tenancy was strictly leasehold. So it was odd that he should
be under the illusion that he had
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all the time in the world, when he clearly had not. In
fact, whatever the drug or the protective IT was doing in
keeping him asleep even though his lucidity had begun to
break through the barrier of his dream, it was wasting
time.
Valuable time.
There was work to
be done, was there not? Was he not one of the Chosen People, appointed
in the name of Hope? Was he not bound for an Ararat, and was
there not a world to be remade, in the image of humankind's Gaea?
That was when Matthew
remembered what he was: everything that he was, had been, and
was ambitious to be.
And that was when
the IT finally released its hold, and allowed him to wake up.
He did not need to
ask where he was, but there was another a question on his lips.
"How long?"
Matthew asked, as soon as he had opened his eyes and focused his gaze
on the white-clad woman who was looking down at him while he rested
in his mechanical cocoon, intricately hooked up to an absurd assortment
of drip-feeds and waste-disposal conduits.
"Seven hundred
years," she said, "give or take a dozen, and a little relativistic
shrinkage."
"But we made
it?" he said, as the rush of exultation surged past the insulating
barriers erected by his Internal Technology and its external collaborators.
"Maybe,"
the woman replied, with a note of sour irony and resignation in her
voice, "and maybe not. Either way, it's just the beginning."
©Brian Stableford 2002
