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.