Dark Ararat (12 page)

Except, of course, that he was no longer
quite
without sin. He had attacked Riddell, and hurt the other man set to watch him. He was involved now; he had planted his own flag, and stood ready to defend it as stubbornly as anyone.

But the real enemy, he knew, was the darkness and emptiness of the void. Although
Hope
had arrived in a new solar system, the void was still here, still everywhere.

He sat up, peering into the darkness of the inclined corridor.

At first, he could see nothing through the gloom but an arrow of light, but after a few minutes the arrow changed into a text message.

Not Much Further
, it said.

Matthew groaned, and hauled himself back to his feet. The arrow was restored, and Matthew followed it.

He was passing through doorways more frequently now, but the winding corridors were so extensive and so utterly deserted that
Hope
was beginning to seem a ghost ship: a starfaring
Mary Celeste
. There was living space here for tens of thousands, Matthew realized, perhaps hundreds of thousands. The crew must have been working on the inner architecture of
Hope
ever since she had left the system, but their robots had been put away for the time being and they had yet to move on to the next stage in the process of evolution: the one that would make the ship into an authentic microworld, with a microworld’s population. Had they begun to fill these spaces with their own descendants immediately after their departure from the solar system, the reawakened parent-colonists would have found themselves a very tiny minority indeed, but the revolution must have happened in the later phases of the voyage. That part of the revolutionaries’ scheme was still in its early stages—and what disaster might Shen Chin Che’s counterrevolution have precipitated if these spaces had not been empty? Perhaps they would not have been filled in any case, given that space would have had to be reserved for the colonists’ future clone-children, whose generative nuclei had not been removable until they were unfrozen.

Matthew was expecting a return to the light and a genuine rendezvous, but he was disappointed. Instead of a room as homely as Milyukov’s, all he found at the end of his rat-run was one more wallscreen at a darkened corner, displaying a half-familiar face.

There was a camera eye positioned above the screen, but Matthew did not suppose that the glimmer of reflected light could do justice to his features. That, he thought, was a pity. He realized that he had not seen his own face since he came out of SusAn, but he was sure that it could not possibly have changed as much as the face that was peering at him from the wall.

“Shen,” he said, to acknowledge that he could see the face. For the moment, he couldn’t say anything more.

“I’m sorry, Matthew,” the face said. “I can’t take the risk of bringing you in.”

This wasn’t the kind of welcome Matthew had been expecting. It wasn’t the kind of greeting he felt they were both entitled to, after the kind of epic journey they had made.

Had Shen actually been present, Matthew could have bowed first, then thrown his arms around the smaller man … but as things were, he could only stare at the unexpected image on the screen.

Shen Chin Che looked a good deal older than he had been in 2090, when Matthew had last seen him. Matthew realized, belatedly, that what had been a matter of days for him must have been a matter of years, or decades, for the other man.

“We made it, Shen,” he said, defiantly. “No matter how badly the hired help has contrived to fuck it up,
we made it
! Fifty-eight light-years. Seven hundred years.”

Shen Chin Che blinked in surprise, as if he too had forgotten to factor the difference in their ages into the equation. “It
has
been a long time, Matthew,” he conceded.

Matthew remembered what Nita Brownell had told him about the vulnerability of memory, and wondered how well Shen’s memories of him compared to his memories of Shen. He also remembered that the first great prophet to lead his people to a Promised Land, across a wilderness that must have seemed just as intimidating as the desert of the void had seemed to the men of the twenty-first century, had not lived to join his people in that land, seeing it only from a distance. Shen’s age, Matthew realized, might be the greatest advantage Konstantin Milyukov had in the struggle for possession of
Hope
.

The Chosen People had been subject to an age restriction; the idea had been that the parental generation must be old enough to have proved their wisdom, but young enough to have more than half a century of life before them. Shen had obviously made an exception of himself. Shen had remained awake to supervise the building and equipping of his Ark—perhaps a little too long.

“When were you frozen down?” Matthew asked, soberly.

“Not till 2139,” Shen told him.

Matthew made the calculation easily enough, although he couldn’t be sure of the exact fraction of the three years since
Hope
had arrived in orbit that Shen had lived through.

Shen Chin Che was about fifty years older than he had been when Matthew saw him last, when he had already been the older man by more than a decade. He was now more than a hundred years old—and it was probably safe to assume that he would not easily get the benefit of any advances in longevity technology to which the crew had gained access en route.

“Why are we meeting like this?” Matthew asked him, trying not to seem too aggrieved.

“There’s a possibility that Milyukov woke you up in order that you might serve as a Judas goat,” Shen told him. “Even if that wasn’t his sole intention, he’s bound to have sowed your suitskin with the cleverest bugs his people can devise. They have some new tricks, thanks to their exchanges of information with the probes that overtook them—if they hadn’t, I’d have won by now.”

“Well,” Matthew said, philosophically, “it’s good to see you anyway.”

“It’s good to see you too, Matthew,” the old man assured him. “Your memory’s good, I hope—you must remember our last meeting a great deal better than I do.”

“I remember it very well,” Matthew said. “I won’t say that you don’t look a day older, but you always wore well.”

It was true. Shen Chin Che was not a tall man, nor had he entirely resisted a certain inherited tendency to rotundity, but on and off Earth he had been a man of iron discipline as well as a man possessed of state-of-the-art IT and smart clothing. He always had
worn well
. His light brown skin still seemed to have the same near-golden glow that Matthew remembered, undulled by age or by recent years spent beneath the meager glare of the ship’s artificial lighting, but it was wrinkled now.

“We may not have much time,” Shen said. “Some day, I’ll fill you in on the history of my last half century, but that will have to wait. We have to do the important stuff first, in case we never get a chance to do the rest.” His voice was harrowingly bleak.

“I understand,” Matthew said, although he wasn’t entirely sure that he did. “So tell me the important stuff.”

TEN

I
don’t have time to fight a long, drawn-out war of attrition,” Shen Chin Che admitted. “Which is a pity, given that it’s the kind of war I’ve been landed with. I can’t win it, so someone else will have to.” He didn’t name any names.

“How many men have you got?” Matthew asked.

“Let’s not bother with matters of trivial detail,” the face on the screen replied, politely reminding Matthew that even if their conversation were not being monitored it was almost certainly being recorded. “It’s not the number of men that counts. The real battles were fought by AIs. The crew thought they’d disabled all my Trojan horses before they brought me back, but they hadn’t. Unfortunately, they
had
contrived to equip some of their own systems with better defenses than I’d anticipated. This siege seems likely to continue for a
lot
longer than ten years, whether I survive to lead it or not.”

Matthew realized that Shen Chin Che was talking through him as well as to him. Among other things, their conversation was the latest move in a long-running war of words.

“You knew I’d try to make a break when I realized that I was a prisoner, didn’t you?” Matthew said. “That’s what the commotion in the corridor was for—to drive home the point in case I hadn’t noticed. You needn’t have worried. Milyukov was just as keen to annoy me as you were to have me annoyed. He knew that I’d make a break too. Maybe he
wanted
me to run to you, so that he could tell the people on the surface that they wouldn’t be getting a replacement ecologist after all, due to circumstances beyond his control.”

“He’s not that devious, Matthew,” Shen replied, earnestly. “He’s a man completely out of his depth, and I think he’s beginning to realize the fact. You and I know more about politics and public relations than he’ll ever be able to learn. If he were cleverer, he’d be easier to deal with. He thinks he can’t lose this contest in the long run because he has more guns, more people, and more time, but he doesn’t understand that it’s not the kind of war that can be won by force. If force wins, we all lose. The only way to win is to work together—
all of us
.”

“It’s not going to be easy to forge a consensus,” Matthew observed. “I’ve only been awake two days, but I’ve heard enough to know how bad things are.”

“We need something new,” Shen told him. “We need an issue that will allow us to put aside our differences and look to the future. We need a common cause, like the one that brought us all together in the first place.”

“What brought us all together in the first place was the urgent threat of an all-encompassing disaster,” Matthew reminded him. “I remember it as if it were the day before yesterday.”

“Of course you do,” Shen Chin Che retorted, venturing a wry smile. “You were there. You weren’t responsible for the disaster, but you did lend a helping hand to the urgency. I knew its value, even if others didn’t. You were as important to the Ark project as I was, in your own way. I had the money, but I didn’t have the hearts and minds. You were my prophet, my messiah. Cometh the hour, cometh the man. The hour has come around again, Matthew—and so have you. It’s the first stroke of luck I’ve had.”

“I’m a little late,” Matthew felt obliged to point out, even though the flattery was music to his ears. “I don’t have the authority of celebrity any more, even among the Chosen. I was frozen down while most of them were children. The crew don’t even have TV—just VE tapes and mute pictures relayed by flying eyes.”

“I know,” Shen said. “But you can change things. It’s what you do.”

“Two days, Shen,” Matthew murmured. “If you send me back, they’ll put me down on the surface within another three—four at the most. It won’t be easy to catch up. Impossible, even.”

“It won’t stop you, if you’re determined enough,” Shen told him. That, at least, was what his lips said. What his eyes were saying—in a manner that was surely invisible to any bugs Milyukov had planted, no matter how clever they might be—was something else entirely.

What Shen Chin Che’s eyes were saying, loud and clear, was:
You’re the only hope I’ve got left. I’m finished. If you can’t pull the irons out of the fire, no one can
.

As “important stuff” went, there wasn’t much to it—but Matthew had to admit that it was something he needed to know.

“I’m not in a good position, Shen,” he said. “Worse now than before. I showed my hand when I hit Riddell. Milyukov won’t give me any kind of platform.”

“Milyukov’s authority over his own people is slipping,” Shen told him. “Not quickly enough, I admit—but all it will take is one good push to set him sliding. The people on the surface will be ready to listen to you. More than willing. They have no leader, Matthew. They have no direction. They’re losing heart, and they need to get it back. If you can’t find a way to give it to them, no one can.”

Matthew couldn’t help shivering. The cold that had entered into his flesh while he lay on the floor was still there. He knew how desperate Shen must be, to seize such a feeble straw in this fashion. What a foul reward for all that he had done in the home system! He had anticipated—even expected—that the descendants of the crew might have developed their own agenda, but he had underestimated the extent and effectiveness of their treason. Seven centuries had been too long an interval—but the fact that it had taken seven centuries to find a world that even the hopeful pilgrims of
Hope
thought unsatisfactory was eloquent testimony to the difficulty and necessity of their mission.

“The crew think I’m doing all this out of spite, because I won’t play the game unless I’m running the show,” Shen went on, “but you know me better than that, Matthew. You may not understand the situation as yet, but you do trust me.
You
know that I’m not just an old-fashioned capitalist clinging to his property like grim death because I can’t bear to let go. I’m a Hardinist through and through. A
real
Hardinist. The years haven’t changed me.” He seemed slightly anxious, as if he were not at all convinced that Matthew would still recognize and trust him. He did not carry the burden of his extra years lightly.

“I know who you are,” Matthew assured him. “I do understand—better than Milyukov can, I think. All he’s ever known is
Hope
. He can’t really understand what was happening to Earth in the 2080s, or what it meant to people who loved their world enough to leave it. When the IT was pulling me gently out of SusAn, I dreamed I saw the Earth die. It was a vivid dream, even when it became lucid. It could have happened. Milyukov knows that it didn’t, but that knowledge prevents him from obtaining any real understanding of the wellsprings of our motivation.”

“Those who fail to learn from prophesies are condemned to fulfil them,” Shen quoted, with the ghost of a smile. “The stupidest thing about this whole farce is that on the most essential point of all, Konstantin Milyukov and I are in complete agreement. His most fervent desire, and mine, is that the colony should succeed, and succeed gloriously. It would be a terrible irony of fate if our difference of opinion as to who should control
Hope
and its resources were to cause it to fail. I don’t know nearly enough about what’s going on down there, or why the people at the bases have been so badly spooked, but I do know that it would be a dreadful waste of an opportunity that might never come again if they were to throw in the towel and demand to be taken up again. I’m very grateful that you came to talk to me, Matthew—and if Milyukov has any sense he’ll be grateful too. I need you, Matthew. The colony needs you. We need your scientific expertise, and we need your rhetorical skills. They do remember you, Matthew—even the ones who never knew you know who and what you were. They need you.”