The woman who had drawn her gun did not return the weapon to its holster. She didn’t say anything; she was still looking at him as if he were a mad dog, utterly unpredictable as well as dangerous. The taller woman had pulled out her phone instead of her gun, but she had turned away in order to speak into it, so that Matthew could not make out what she was saying.
“Have you ever actually fired that thing?” he asked the younger one, letting his annoyance show. “If not, I’d rather you didn’t point it my way.”
“It’s non-lethal,” she retorted. Matthew took that as a no. He also took the whole charade as an indicator of the fact that Konstantin Milyukov really did have it in mind to take his renegade systems back by brutal force of arms if there seemed to be no other way. Matthew didn’t dare to assume that it couldn’t be done. The crew had been building the ship for hundreds of years—the transition from Earth’s solar system to interstellar space had been only a minor punctuation mark in the long text of that endeavor—and they must know its present physical layout far better than Shen’s people, no matter how cleverly Shen had concealed his software shock troops.
The taller woman still had her phone in her hand, and the line was presumably still open, but she had turned to face Matthew again and seemed to be waiting for him to say something more.
“I had an appointment with Professor Lityansky,” Matthew told his captors, “but I fear that I’m a little late. I’m sure he’s as anxious to get on with it as I am, but I’m rather tired. Perhaps we could postpone it until tomorrow, when I’ll be more able to give my full attention to what he has to say. Can you take me back to my room?”
“Did you hear that?” the older woman said, into the mouthpiece of her phone. The answer was presumably affirmative, but Matthew couldn’t hear any of the reply.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” the taller woman told him, when she finally replaced the phone in her belt. “Riddell’s not badly hurt, but you broke Lamartine’s jawbone.”
“I’m sorry about that,” Matthew said, sincerely. “But it willmend. Fists are supposed to be non-lethal too, if you use them sensibly. Am I under arrest?”
“You’ll be down on the surface soon enough,” was the only answer he received. “We’ll take you back to your room.” She gestured to her companion, who only hesitated for a couple of seconds before returning her weapon to its holster. Both women still seemed very nervous, unwilling to get too close to him. When they led him away they stayed ahead of him, and they didn’t look round.
Seven hundred and twenty-seven years before 2090, Matthew calculated, would have been late medieval times in Europe. The Black Death would have come and gone, and populations would have been exploding again in a period of relative climatic generosity. Had a man of that era stepped out of a time warp to confront the people of Earth he would have seemed uncouth in the extreme, and his hosts would have taken it for granted, rightly or not, that his inevitable paranoia might explode into violence at any moment. These people had far more in common with him than the men of the twenty-first century would have had in common with a visitor from 1363—most importantly, a common language—but a tiny, self-enclosed society like that of the crew, afloat on a mote in the hostile void, had to look back on the history of Earth with a certain horror.
The twenty-first century had only been the second most violent in human history, but one of the consequences of the spread of IT and the increasing capability of medical science had been the encouragement of widespread interest in extreme sports, including hobbyist combat of all kinds. Even as a boy, Matthew had never gone in for the kind of fighting that would put his IT to the test, but he belonged to a generation in which even the pettiest disputes had routinely escalated into brawls and knife fights. It had been easy enough to do what he had had to do in order to slip the leash of his subtle captivity, almost unthinkingly. It wasn’t too difficult now, though, to place himself imaginatively in the shoes of the two women from a very different place and time, in order to envisage what he had done as the act of a barbarian, or a dangerous psychopath.
Was that, he wondered, how Milyukov’s people saw allthe Chosen People?
It certainly seemed so when he got back to the room he shared with Vince Solari and found himself confronted with an exceedingly angry Nita Brownell.
“Are you mad?” she demanded. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”
“I had to try to see Shen,” he replied, in a mild tone that was neither feigned nor disingenuous. “It was the only way to get a proper understanding of the situation.”
“You haven’t even begun to understand the situation,” she told him, conveniently forgetting that one of the reasons why he didn’t understand the situation was that she had gone to such perverse lengths to avoid explaining it to him. “Captain Milyukov’s got trouble enough trying to keep the more extreme factions in check, without you adding fuel to the flames. You’ll be down on the surface in two days’ time, but some of us have to live and work up here. What do you think your antics have done to myposition?”
“What extreme factions?” Matthew wanted to know. He couldn’t drum up much sympathy for the doctor’s personal troubles.
“The faction that wants him to dump all the cryonic travelers, pull out and start over,” she replied, unsurprisingly. “The faction that argues that the revolution didn’t go far enough, and has yet to be brought to its proper culmination. The faction that thinks the people of Earth were so criminally negligent in the management of their own world that they oughtn’t to be trusted with another. The faction that thinks that you and I and your children, and everyone else’s children, ought to be regarded simply as genetic raw material, because our minds are so corrupt as to constitute cultural poison.”
“That’s a lot of factions in a population of a few hundred,” Matthew pointed out, mildly.
“Far too many,” the doctor agreed. “Which makes it all the more remarkable that the captain’s on ourside, you poor fool. He’s the one who wants to let us fulfil the quest for which we undertook to be frozen down. He’s the one who wants to helpus. It’s bad enough that Shen Chin Che is rolling round Hope’s decks like a loose cannon, without youblasting off as well.”
While this tirade was in progress Vince Solari had hauled himself off his bed and had come to stand with them, ready to play the peace officer by imposing his body between theirs should it prove necessary. All Matthew said was: “Is it really thatbad? Are the crew so bitterly divided among themselves?”
“Captain Milyukov doesn’t seem to think so,” Solari put in. “The doctor may be a little overanxious. She’s in an awkward position.”
“What do youknow about it?” Nita Brownell retorted.
“Only what the captain told me,” Solari said, soothingly. “Are you all right, Matt?”
“I might have broken a knuckle,” Matthew admitted. “Otherwise, it’s just bruises. My IT has blanked the pain, but I’m a little spaced out and verytired.”
Nita Brownell picked up his right hand and felt the knuckle, without any conspicuous tenderness or concern. “It’s not broken,” she concluded, giving the distinct impression that she would have been happier if it had been. “Unlike the jaw of the man you hit.”
“He was about to hit me,” Matthew pointed out.
“I think we both need sleep,” Solari said. “Perhaps we should postpone further recriminations until morning.”
Nita Brownell was ready enough to agree with that, although she insisted on giving Matthew a further examination once he was horizontal on the bed. Matthew was past caring whether her real concern was for his health or to recover some of the bugs that had recorded his conversation with Shen Chin Che.