Dark Ararat (10 page)

Milyukov didn’t seem to be at all disturbed by the full-frontal assault. “It is in everyone’s best interests that the colony succeed,” he said, mildly. “If it were to fail, that would be a catastrophe from everyone’s point of view. There is a faction on the surface that claims that it is impossible for humans to remain on the surface without precipitating an ecocatastrophe more devastating than the one that was threatening Earth when you and your companions decided to leave it behind—and that the possibility that the planet is inhabited by intelligent humanoids makes that doubly unacceptable. It is my belief that Bernal Delgado was killed because he believed that he had discovered something vital to the settlement of this debate. I believe the crude pretense that he was killed by an alien was intended to favor the cause of those who want to abandon the colony—a cause that he did not support.”

“Are you certain of that?” Solari asked.

“I have no reason to think otherwise,” Milyukov said, blithely ignoring the fact that it was not at all the same thing. “Delgado certainly intended to travel downriver, but he never gave any vocal support to those of his colleagues who looked on the expedition as a straightforward attempt to prove the continued existence of the humanoids. If they do exist, of course, I want to find them as badly as anyone—but I want the matter settled. I need you to put a stop to this ridiculous pretence that Delgado might have been killed by an alien, inspector.”

“And why, exactly,” Matthew put in, “do you need me?”

Milyukov’s eyes were not quite as green as Leitz’s or Riddell’s, but their relative dullness did not make their gaze seem less penetrative.

“For exactly the same reason, professor,” the captain said. “To discover the truth—if you can. I’ve studied your background, just as I’ve studied the inspector’s, but I don’t hold your reputation against you. I’ve seen tapes of your TV performances, but I know that you began your career as an entirely reputable scientist.”

Matthew had been damned with faint praise before, but this seemed a trifle unwarranted. He had always been an entirely reputable scientist, and his TV presence had never compromised his scientific integrity.

“Bernal Delgado was my friend,” Matthew observed. “I’ll do my very best to take up where he left off.”

“And you will also want to see justice done in the matter of your friend’s murder,” Milyukov said. There was no overt trace of sarcasm in the captain’s voice, but Matthew was reasonably sure that the man was completely insincere. Matthew could not believe that he had been brought back from frozen sleep because the captain believed that he was a potential ally. His acquaintance with Shen Chin Che was probably sufficient to make him a potential enemy, in the captain’s eyes. There was a diplomatic game in progress, and his awakening must surely have been a concession to the people on the ground who had demanded that Bernal must be replaced, in order that his work might continue.

Matthew decided that it was time to follow Solari’s example and try to cut through the crap. “Where’s Shen Chin Che?” he asked.

Milyukov was ready for him; the glaucous gaze did not waver. “Somewhere on the microworld,” he said, calmly. “I don’t know where, exactly. It
is
a microworld now, of course, although the recently awakened habitually refer to it as a ship. If
Hope
really were a mere ship, a man could hardly contrive to hide for long, but her inner structure now has the floor space of a sizable Earthly town.”

“Shen’s in
hiding
?” Matthew said, incredulously. “Why?” He already knew why, of course. Shen had built the Ark. Shen had
owned
the Ark. Shen must have come out of SusAn believing that he still owned the Ark, and that he had the final voice in any adventure undertaken by the Ark. The crew had obviously taken a different view—but they had been unable to persuade Shen to align his view with theirs, and they had been unable to hold on to him when he had decided to go his own way.

“Because he laid claim to an authority that was no longer his,” was Milyukov’s version, “and because he resorted to violence in a hopeless attempt to reclaim it. He, more than anyone else, is responsible for the deterioration of the relationship between crew and colonists, and for the factional divisions that have subsequently arisen.”

“He was one of the prime movers in the construction of the four Arks,” Matthew pointed out. “Second in importance only to Narcisse himself.
Hope
was his personal contribution to the great quest. You can hardly blame him for harboring proprietorial sentiments.”

“Shen Chin Che did not build the original
Hope
,” Milyukov retorted, flatly. “He did not shape a single hull-plate, nor did he drive home a single rivet. He merely directed the flow of finance, and the money that he regarded as his was, in fact, the product of long-term dishonest manipulation of markets and financial institutions. Perhaps, within the corrupt economic and political system that then embraced Earth and the extraplanetary extensions of Earthly society, that was sufficient to establish ownership to the original vessel, but even if that claim were justified,
Hope
is a very different structure now. We—the crew—were the builders of the new
Hope
, in a perfectly literal sense. We planned the reconstruction, and we carried it out.
Hope
is ours now, and always will be.”

“Are you telling me there’s been a mutiny?” Matthew said, knowing well enough what Milyukov’s counterclaim would be but wanting to hear it formally stated.

“What I’m telling you, Professor Fleury,” the captain retorted, coldly, “is that there has been a
revolution
.
Hope
’s crew and cargo have been liberated from the crude restraints imposed by the obsolete political and economic system that was temporarily in force when the original
Hope
was constructed.”

Matthew did not want to reply too swiftly to this news. He knew perfectly well that 700 years was a long time in the evolution of a human society, even one that was probably no more than a few hundred strong. It was not difficult to imagine that successive generations of crewmen could have come to a notion of their role in the scheme of things quite different from that imagined by their original employers. It might have been stranger had they contrived to avoid coming to the conclusion, by slow degrees, that the ship they were reshaping again and again was
theirs
and ought to remain
theirs
.

Solari was not as shy as Matthew. “A
revolution
,” he repeated, guardedly. “A
socialist
revolution, you mean?”

“It’s not a word we use,” the captain informed him, “but labels are unimportant. What matters is that we, the makers and inhabitants of the new
Hope
, have set aside all the claims made by the original
Hope
’s so-called owners, on the grounds that they have no proper moral foundation.”

“But what kind of new society are we talking about?” Solari demanded. “A democracy, or an autocracy? Are you telling us that
you
run everything now, or do we still get a vote?”

“It’s not as simple as that,” Milyukov said, as Matthew had expected him to.

“You must always have known that the Chosen wouldn’t play ball,” Solari went on, recklessly. “So you decided to get rid of them at the earliest opportunity. They were promised an Earth-clone, and they don’t think this world qualifies—but you don’t care. You want to maroon them here, whether they have a real chance of survival or not. You’ve turned pirate.”

“Absolutely not,” was Milyukov’s unsurprising judgment of that allegation. “It is, in fact, the crew who are, and always have been, intent on fulfilling their manifest destiny: the role in human affairs that they, and perhaps they alone at present, are capable of fulfilling. Everything we have done in reshaping
Hope
has been devoted to that end. They only pirates aboard
Hope
are Shen Chin Che and his gang of saboteurs.”

Solari had been slightly wrong-footed by the reference to “manifest destiny” but Matthew knew what it must mean.

“The crew have decided that this is the first in a potentially infinite series of seedings,” he told Solari. “They do want to set up a successful colony here, and they’re probably becoming desperate in their attempt to believe that it’s an attainable goal, but their long-term goal is to repeat the exercise again and again. Some of the would-be colonists are realistic enough to settle for delaying
Hope
’s departure for as long as possible, but the rest are holding out for a better Earth-clone. The captain is obviously a reasonable man, so he’s willing to come to an agreement with the former group, but he wants Shen Chin Che out of his hair and down on the surface. He’s trying to persuade us that we should see things his way, by necessity if not by choice.”

“So where does Delgado’s murder fit into the argument?” Solari asked, pointedly addressing the question to Matthew rather than to their host.

“He doesn’t know,” Matthew guessed. “But he daren’t neglect the possibility that if he can’t find a way to use it, someone else will. Bernal’s testimony as to the long-term prospects of the colony might well have been vital to whichever cause he decided to support, not just because he was a leading expert in ecological genomics back on Earth but because of the reputation he brought with him as a prophet and a persuader.”

“I must repeat,” Milyukov said, finally letting his irritation show, “that the situation is more complicated than you can possibly guess. You bring to it an understanding that is seven hundred years out of date. Earth has changed out of all recognition since you went into SusAn, just as
Hope
has, and all the assumptions you brought with you are quite obsolete now.”

Matthew had to restrain himself from expressing aloud the opinion that this was nonsense. The political and economic systems now in place within Earth’s solar system were of no particular relevance to
Hope
’s situation, but the ideologies and ambitions that the would-be colonists had brought into SusAn were very relevant indeed. Whether or not there were still Hardinists on Earth, there was an abundance of them among Shen Chin Che’s Chosen People, and not one of them was likely to accept that his or her politics were now “obsolete” simply because the crew had decided to stage a takeover bid. Earth—a planet apparently still occupied by billions, even after a near-terminal ecocatastrophe—had surely had time for a dozen revolutions, counterrevolutions, and counter-counterrevolutions of its own, and its inhabitants would doubtless react to news of
Hope
’s discovery as they saw fit, but how could that make an iota of difference to the reactions of the awakened colonists? Perhaps the machines ruled Earth now, as some of his rival prophets had warned, operating the Ultimate Autocracy, or perhaps the anarchists had finally contrived a rule of law without corruptible leaders, but here in the new world’s system, all the popular shades of twenty-first century Hardinism, all the nuances of Green Conservatism and all the factions of Gray Libertarianism were alive. Some of them might still be frozen down, but those that were not would be kicking.

Shen Chin Che, whom many had considered to be the boldest of all the pharaohs of Earthly Capitalism, had awakened to find himself a stranger in a society that had reshaped itself in his absence, but it was absurd to imagine that he could ever have accepted a new status quo meekly. Shen had gone to his long sleep not merely a builder and an owner but a hero and a messiah. If he had woken up to find himself an overthrown dictator, fit only for ritual humiliation as the representative of an obsolete order, he would instantly have transformed himself into a revolutionary: a zealot bent on the restitution of the old order. How could Milyukov’s people have failed to anticipate that? By the same token, Matthew thought, how could Shen not have anticipated the possibility of exactly such a revolution as Milyukov’s ancestors had carried out? He must have. Might he actually have expected it to happen? Perhaps. And if he had, might he not have made provisions?

That, Matthew guessed—in spite of Konstantin Milyukov’s assurance that guesswork would not be enough—was why everybody kept telling him that things were not as simple as he had been ready to assume, and why an armed guard had been stationed outside his room, and why the people in the corridor had acted so quickly to ensure that no one could pollute his mind before the captain had briefed him. Perhaps it also accounted for the fact that the ship seemed to be in such a poor state of repair. Shen and his “gang of saboteurs” were not merely in hiding. They were in active opposition. If the shooting had not already started, it soon would—unless a compromise could be attained, and a treaty made.

Matthew felt a sudden wave of despair sweep through his weakened body.
Hope
had been intended to escape all of the curses that had brought Earth to the brink of destruction, not to reproduce them with further savage twists. What hope could there possibly be for the future of humankind, if
Hope
itself were now embroiled by an orgy of internal strife that could very easily lead to the mutual destruction of all involved? Even Gaea had proved so fragile as to have avoided destruction by a fluke; the ecosphere-in-miniature that was her pale shadow here could not tolerate a similar strain.

Vince Solari must have been mulling over the same awkward possibilities and dire anxieties, but his approach was as practical as ever. “So who, exactly, am I supposed to be working for now?” the policeman demanded. “You?” His voice was not disdainful, but it was certainly skeptical.

“For the human race,” Captain Milyukov told him, without a trace of irony. “For the truth. For justice. For all the future generations whose fate will depend on what
we
can accomplish in the years to come.”

“In other words, for
you
,” Solari repeated, making no attempt to keep his own voice free of sarcasm.