Fire and iron, Matthew thought. There, but for the grace of fire and iron …
And he knew, now that he was absolutely sure that he really had awakened from his febrile dream, that the Ark named Hopehad not merely found its Ararat, but had also sealed its Covenant.
EPILOGUE
When Michelle Fleury finally came to stand before her father’s tomb in the so-called Palace of Civitas Solis all the carefully repressed bitterness came flooding back. She had heard the explanation for his desertion three times—from the doctor who had supervised her awakening, Frans Leitz; from her stepmother, Dulcie Gherardesca; and from the purple-skinned native with the voice box that formed the human syllables his own natural equipment could not—but she had not yet been able to bring herself to accept it as a valid excuse.
“He couldn’t know that he would die without seeing you again,” Dr. Leitz had said, while he was fitting her surface-suit. “He expected to live another hundred years. We’ve only just begun to realize the full extent of the toll that living on an alien world has exacted from us, and it wasn’t until the technical support began to arrive that we were able to refine our rejuve technologies. He delayed your awakening for the very best of reasons. He wanted you to wake up to a world that was fit to receive you: to a world that could provide for you as a parent should.”
The tomb wasn’t quite as elaborate as Michelle had expected. Alien hands had built it: emortal alien hands, which had never built a tomb before. She hadn’t expected a pyramid—pyramids had an entirely different significance in the native cultures of Tyre—but she had expected something more like a Victorian mausoleum than a mere kiln. It might have seemed more appropriate if the inscriptions on the faces of the shaped stones hadn’t been incomprehensible, but she hadn’t yet learned to decipher the written version of the local language.
“Shall I translate?” Dulcie asked. Dulcie had insisted on coming with her, although she’d had the grace to hang back in the deeper shadows for a few minutes while Michelle came to stand beside the tomb.
“No,” Michelle said, reaching out a hand so that she could trace a few of the engraved hieroglyphics with her right forefinger. “I know more or less what it says. He always wanted to be a messiah. When it became obvious that he couldn’t save his own world, he set out in search of one that might be more open to salvation, and more grateful. This says that he got his wish.”
“That’s not how they thought of him,” Dulcie told her, her voice putting on a show of patient forbearance. “It’s not how they thought of me, either. Maybe from our side we looked like the Prometheus team, bringing the light of the gods to the people of the forest, but they have a very different set of myths based in a very different way of life. To them, everybodyis a teacher, because everybody has to be. The active members of society are the custodians of hundreds of thousands of years of accumulated knowledge and tradition, which they have to pass on to the rejuvenate twins and triplets when they emerge from their own natural version of SusAn. They don’t have hero myths, because they don’t have outstanding individuals. All their efforts are collective and cooperative. To them, we’re very bizarre, and it was partly in recognition of that strangeness that they made Matthew a tomb. They could never quite make sense of the fact that the human population of the city elected him mayor, because they never single out leaders or symbolic figureheads—but they respected his position, and they decided to mark it. I think he’d have been pleased. I knowhe would.”
Michelle understood only too well that Dulcie Gherardesca had known her father far better than she ever had. Dulcie had, after all, shared his life for a hundred years, while Michelle had seen precious little of him even during the years they had allegedly spent “together” on Earth. He and Dulcie had made the first contact with the aliens, had made common cause with the aliens, had accompanied the alien contingent that had decided to return to the abandoned city and rebuild it. He and Dulcie had guided the revolution of ideas that had reinvolved Hope’s crew in the education of the aliens—including the ones who had decided to remain in the forest—and he and Dulcie had spearheaded the development of the new technological discipline of genomic engineering. Together they had seen the birth or rebirth of a dozen Tyrean cities…. all the while leaving herto sleep alongside her sister, excluded from everything.
This was the only reunion left to her now: to stand beside her father’s tomb, in a monstrous edifice whose inner darkness belied the name that Matthew Fleury had attached, on humanity’s behalf, to the city that had become the focal point of the great collaboration: the collaboration that would change humankind as sharply and as irrevocably as it had changed humankind’s new partners in evolution.
“We should have been with him,” Michelle whispered. “He shouldn’t have left us out.” Alice was still left out, one of the few colonists still in SusAn aboard the microworld. Michelle intended to get her out as soon as she was allowed to take the decision. It was not only right but necessary that they should be together.
She took her hand back, knowing that she had not really touched the surface at all. Her own fingers were overlaid by the surface-suit Leitz had provided, which still seemed alien to her: an interface separating her from a world that was not her own.
“He wasn’t leaving you out,” Dulcie Gherardesca told her. “He was trying to prepare the way for your return. He missed you, always. He wanted to see you again, desperately—but he wanted to make things right first. You can’t imagine how messed up things were when he came out of SusAn. Everything was wrong. The world wasn’t as Earthlike as it was supposed to be. It posed all kinds of puzzles and problems. The colony was on the brink of failure for a long time—long after we met the aliens. Matthew was the one who pulled us together when we nearly fell apart, by making everyone understand that we had to make it work, not just for our sake but for the sake of the natives. There was so much we could teach them, and so much they could teach us. Matthew did more than anyone else to unite us in that cause—certainly more than Konstantin Milyukov and Shen Chin Che, who carried their feud to their own graves. He knew before anyone else—although Andrei Lityansky has done his level best to take the credit—that there was an opportunity here for us to develop a new technology of emortality quite different from the one they use on Earth. Some of his guesses were a little wide of the mark, of course, but he was the first person on this world who actually sawwhat was going on here, and what the differences between this world’s genomics and Earth’s actually meant, in terms of the probable history and possible futures of complex life in the galaxy … in the universe. He wanted you to benefit from the new technologies, Michelle. He didn’t want you to die before you could reap the reward of all his endeavors. He left you and Alice where you were because he lovedyou, more than anything else in the universe. He wanted you with him, but there was something else he wanted even more. He wanted you to have the gifts that this world offers. He wanted you to have a chance to be emortal.”
“He could have put himself back into SusAn,” Michelle countered. “He could have waited with us, to become emortal himself.”
“No, he couldn’t,” Dulcie said, softly.
That was true, of course. Michelle understood that much. Somebody had to do the work. An entire generation of mortals had had to commit itself to the labor of making sure that the generations that came after would be better equipped. To have walked away from that responsibility, even if his companions had sanctioned it, would have been a terrible dereliction of duty. Her father had always understood that messiahs usually had to be martyrs too, and if he hadn’t been prepared to accept that he’d never have joined Shen’s chosen people.