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

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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