Free Dark Ararat by Brian Stableford Page B

a maggot’s way of making more maggots, of course, but if the gimmick worked so well on Earth, why not here, where there certainly doesn’t seem to be any shortage of maggoty things? The lack of birds and mammals might not be surprising if the mammals that do exist hadn’t contrived to evolve a humanoid—albeit one that may no longer exist.”
    “Maybe Earth was the beetle planet, and this one’s the slug and snail capital of the universe,” Solari suggested. “It could have been worse.” Matthew guessed that he was probably thinking about spiders again.
    Matthew nodded sympathetically. “It certainly looks like it,” he agreed. “Unless we only got half the story. It’s difficult to believe that nothing flies down there but a few itty-bitty bats and the time.”
    The door of their room opened, making them both start slightly. Time had indeed flown while they were engrossed. Eight-zero had apparently arrived, and the someone Leitz had promised had arrived to lead them to the captain. The way Solari nodded to the newcomer told Matthew that it must be Riddell, the man who had been standing guard outside their door.
    Matthew inspected the holstered sidearm, and decided that it was indeed a darter. The armed man’s suitskin was the same color as Frans Leitz’s, but its present shape had been organized to give the impression of sharper edges and physical efficiency. On the whole, though, he looked like a soft person pretending to be solid, not a natural tough guy. As such, he seemed to fit the general situation surprisingly well.
    It was not until Matthew raised himself up, putting all his weight back on his feet, that he realized how soft he too seemed to have become. He cursed himself for not taking the opportunity to lie down and get some proper rest, but he knew that he still had an enormous amount to learn, and not much time to learn it, if he were to be able to take a significant hand in the unfolding history of the new world.
    “Okay,” he said to their appointed protector. “Take us to your leader.” It wasn’t until he saw the blank look on Riddell’s face, signaling a complete failure to recognize and appreciate the cliché, that Matthew finally began to feel the width and depth of the cultural gulf that separated the two of them.

SEVEN
    T he corridors through which Matthew and Vince Solari were conducted were narrow and mazy, with no ninety-degree turns. They reminded Matthew of the subsurface lunar habitat in which he’d stayed before joining the frozen Chosen, but that wasn’t surprising. That too had been a mini-ecosphere located within a much larger, essentially inhospitable, mass. He guessed that the principal differences between the two habitats would only be obvious on a much larger scale—a scale that was difficult to appreciate from within.
    The Mare Moscoviense maze had been a cone whose sharp end pointed toward the moon’s center of gravity; life on the kind of space-habitat that Hope now was had to be organized in cylindrical layers, in which “down” was also “out” because gravity was simulated by spin. Knowing this, Matthew found nothing surprising in the fact that the spaces inhabited by Hope ’s mini-Gaea were curved and intricately curled. Nor was there anything particularly startling about the fact that so many of the side passages were dark; many parts of Mare Moscoviense had been fitted with human-responsive switches that provided light where and when it was needed and allowed darkness to fall when there were no human eyes.
    What did surprise him, a little, was the dust. Mare Moscoviense had not been an unduly tidy environment, and its walls had accumulated a rich heritage of ingeniously stubborn graffiti, but it had been relentlessly swept clean by resident nanobots programmed to collect flakes of human skin and other associated organic debris for recycling. Hope must have started out on its long journey equipped with similar nanobots, but they seemed to have fallen