Shen Chin Che blinked in surprise, as if he too had forgotten to factor the difference in their ages into the equation. “It hasbeen 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 Hopehad 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
Idon’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 hadcontrived to equip some of their own systems with better defenses than I’d anticipated. This siege seems likely to continue for a lotlonger 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 wantedme 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.