“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 Hopethought 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. Youknow 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 realHardinist. 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 Hopeand 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.”
“They had Bernal,” Matthew pointed out, uneasily. He was uneasy because he knew that few other people on Hoperemembered him as fondly as Shen. Shen had been impressed by Matthew Fleury because Matthew Fleury was a kindred spirit: another lonely voice crying the same warnings in the same dread wilderness—but Shen had not spent much time on Earth during the 2070s, and none at all in the 2080s. He had come to see things from an extraterrestrial perspective, and a prejudiced one. Matthew, like the proverbial prophets of old, had been a man not much honored in his own country—and he had always thought of the whole world as his own country, his potential constituency.
“They didn’t see Bernal as a potential leader,” Shen said, “and rightly so. He was a pleasure seeker at heart, too preoccupied with his prick.”
“They won’t see me as a potential leader either,” Matthew said, soberly. “Not for the same reasons, maybe—but it takes more than a lack of romantic ambition to establish a man as a serious individual. To many of them, I’m more TV personality than scientist, and on Earth in the old days nothing trivialized a man like TV. There’s only one man in this solar system who could assert any kind of real authority over the people on the surface, and that’s you. Milyukov may have misjudged your capacity to hurt him, but so far as the people on the ground are concerned he’s managed to marginalize and neutralize you, Believe me, Shen, I’m no ready-made substitute. Milyukov must know that.”
“He can’t,” Shen said, stubbornly. “He doesn’t know you. You can make a difference, Matthew. I know you can.”
“Almost everyone down there has had three years’ head start,” Matthew countered. “Every single one of them will take it for granted that they understand the world far better than I do—and they’ll be right.”
“You have the advantage of a fresh eye,” Shen pointed out.
“That’s true,” Matthew conceded, perversely glad that he had found a point to concede. “I don’t suppose, by any chance, that you have any idea why Bernal was killed, or by whom?”
“None,” the old man confirmed. “I am, as you must have surmised, somewhat out of touch.” He went straight back to what he thought was the important stuff. “I chose you for a reason, Matthew. Because you were an ecologist, able to see woods where others were only capable of seeing trees, but also because you were a hero. Bernal was as good an ecologist as you were, but he wasn’t as good a hero.”
You heard my voice from far, Matthew thought, and recognized it as an echo of your own. But it wasn’t. It was always mine. The flattery was beginning to wear thin; he had already overdosed on it.
“I can’t win here, Matthew,” Shen went on, his voice little more than a whisper. “I can hold Milyukov at bay, but I can’t win. Perhaps I and my successors can make certain that Hoperemains in this system for a very long time, but that would be self-defeating if we prevent her from offering wholehearted support to the colony in the meantime. We all need a new way to look at things, Matthew, a new way to look forward. Nobody else seems to be capable of providing that. Not even Bernal, although I don’t doubt that he was working on it.”
“I’m heartened by your confidence,” Matthew said, wishing that it might be truer than it was. “But it won’t be easy.”
Shen turned his head, presumably to listen to someone out of shot. Matthew couldn’t hear what was being said, but he studied the nodding of Shen’s head as the old man responded. The motion seemed almost robotic. Shen was still the man that Matthew had known, albeit briefly, in the late 2080s, but his mannerisms had become more distinct. Matthew wondered how much mental flexibility he had lost, how much capacity for self-reinvention. He must be living a hand-to-mouth existence, unless he had sufficient control over a large enough fraction of the ship’s resources to maintain his internal technology and support his most cherished habits. Either way, Shen was an old man by the standards of the world he had left; his IT might be able to sustain his body and mind for another twenty years, but it could not maintain their agility.
Matthew took advantage of the pause to wonder whether he might have made matters worse than they had been before by running away to meet Shen, given that he had not actually learned anything much to his advantage. If he’d inflicted more damage on Riddell or his friend than he’d intended, he might be facing criminal charges himself, without ever getting a chance to find out who had killed Bernal and why. If he had ever had a chance of persuading Konstantin Milyukov that he might be recruited to the crew’s cause, it had gone now. But he had needed to see Shen, if only to reassure myself that he really was alive and well.