“So, all in all,” Solari said, “you don’t think Delgado could have been murdered by a humanoid who shifted out of some other form and then shifted back?”
“I don’t know enough yet to rule it out completely,” Matthew said, cautiously, figuring that it would be unwise to say that anythingwas impossible until he had a much firmer grasp of the facts. “I’d have to say, though, that it seems extremely unlikely by comparison with the hypothesis that one of your seven suspects stabbed him for reasons we haven’t yet determined. Or, for that matter, with the hypothesis that someone sneaked over from Base One in a microlite aircraft.”
“It’s a hell of a long way,” Solari said. “The people at Base One have started establishing fuel dumps and supply caches to make long-distance travel feasible, but it would be extremely difficult for anyone to make an intercontinental flight without making elaborate preparations. To do it without anyone else knowing about it would be extremely difficult, especially with comsat eyes in the sky. My money has to be on one of the seven. But which one?”
“The real question,” Matthew observed, “is why? I can’t believe that any of them would have gone so far as to kill a man in order to prevent him revealing some discovery he’d made. Not so much because all of them except Blackstone are scientists—although that would surely be reason enough—but because they’re all Shen’s Chosen People. No one would have signed up for this crazy expedition unless he or she had a very powerful commitment to the notion of starting over with a clean sheet, trying to avoid allthe mistakes that cursed the development of human history on Earth. They must all have arrived here with a strong determination to keep murder out of the picture for as long as humanly possible. If one of the seven did do it, I can’t imagine the kind of shame he—or she—must be feeling, knowing that his—or her—name will go down in history as this world’s Cain.”
“Maybe that’s why they’re not keen to own up,” the policeman said, drily. “You do have a point, though, about the kind of baggage we brought with us. I dare say you took the same kind of flak I did when you told your friends you were shipping out—probably a lot more, given your celebrity. I didn’t mind being called a coward, but being called a fool stung a little harder. I don’t know how many times I was told that we couldn’t possibly solve Earth’s problems by setting out to spoil another world. I wish I’d had a better answer to give all the people who just assumed that we’d simply repeat all the same mistakes we’d made on Earth, individually and collectively.”
“I was the man who kept reciting the formula that people who fail to learn from prophecies are condemned to enact them,” Matthew reminded him. “If I hadn’t thought that we were capable of learning, I wouldn’t have bothered, but if I hadn’t thought that it was extremely difficult, I wouldn’t have had to.”
“You did take a lot of stick, didn’t you,” Solari remembered, frowning as he tried to think back more than twenty subjective years, to his childhood. “You had the newsvids on your back as well as your friends. The price of fame.”
“I had two daughters to use as an excuse,” Matthew told him. “The newsvids always liked family values.”
“How many of us would have been murderers if we’d have stayed on Earth?” Solari wondered aloud, his voice becoming gradually more somber. “And how many of us would have been murder victims? According to Milyukov, Earth’s in good shape now, but it had to go through hell in order to get there. I never killed anyone, but I was lucky not to have had to. If I’d stayed, I might have had to kill hundreds, if I’d been able to avoid getting killed myself. We may all have come here with the best of intentions, Matt, but that doesn’t mean that we could avoid bringing some pretty sick stuff in our mental luggage. If I was a potential killer back in 2114, I still am—and that applies to everyone else. It’s nothing to do with being a policeman or a scientist—it’s to do with what we’d have done to survive when the crunch came. Everyone here was willing to be frozen down in order to have a chance of escaping the worst, and my bet is that people willing to do that would have been willing to do almost anything to survive when the collapse came. Wouldn’t you?”
“I don’t know,” Matthew said, truthfully. “But that was there, and this is here. We’re not a bunch of rats trapped in a decaying box—we’re a tiny handful of people confronted with a strange and hostile world. Nobody is disposable. The situation aboard Hopemakes it all the more necessary for the people on the ground to help and support one another no matter what differences of opinion they have. Murder has no place down there. I only met two of your seven suspects back home, but I can’t believe that anyof them would commit cold-blooded premeditated murder.”
“Maybe it wasn’t cold-blooded—or premeditated.”
“If whoever did it forged an alien artifact as a murder weapon, it had to be premeditated—and cold-blooded.”
“If,” Solari repeated, mechanically. “But yes, it looks that way. And I don’t want to believe it of any of the seven, any more than you do—but I hear that you came very close to committing murder yourself out in that corridor, having already planned to make your break before you left me alone with the captain, and for no better reason than resentment of the fact that you were under guard.”
“I wanted to see Shen,” Matthew countered.
“And you had no reason whatsoever to think you could find him,” Solari pointed out. “Like I said—we all brought some pretty sick stuff in our mental luggage. Reflexes shaped by Earthly distress and paranoia. Reflexes that make us lash out, even at people adapted for life in half-gee, who might not be able to take the punches. Maybe it was a reflex of exactly the same kind that killed Delgado. Maybe the glass spearhead was never intended as a murder weapon—maybe it was just the first thing that came to hand. The person who stabbed him might have seen those knife-fight VE-tapes they were beginning to peddle back on Earth, and got the impression that good IT could protect people from wounds of that sort. Delgado was unlucky, you know—if the blade hadn’t slid between his ribs and penetrated his heart he’d have been okay. Any of them could have done it, Matt. Even the ones you think you know. If you didn’t have such a good alibi, I’d have to suspect you. You’d be suspect number one, after what you did to that poor guy’s jaw.”
“Okay,” Matthew said, conceding the point. “That was a mistake. I’m ashamed—but the bastard was following me, and he was on to me as soon as I’d tried and failed to put the gunman down. Maybe he didn’t have the power to hurt me the way I hurt him, but it wouldn’t have stopped him trying. It wasn’t me who decided that crew and cargo are no longer on the same side. That was the so-called revolutionaries.”
“The people on the surface also seem to have decided that they aren’t all on the same side any more,” Solari pointed out. “And having decided that … we all come from a violent society, Matt. Even those of us who never lifted a hand against anyone. I wish we had arrived here with a determination to do no violence to anyone, but the simple fact is that we haven’t had the practice necessary to lend force to any such determination.”
Matthew could see his point. He could also see that, given the situation aboard Hope, the potential for further violence—not merely of murder but of all-out war—was far too considerable for comfort.
FIFTEEN
The shuttle in which Matthew had left Earth had been a reassuringly solid construction shaped as a shuttle ought to be shaped, with extendable delta wings for use on reentry. It had, admittedly, been hitched to an intimidatingly massive rocket cylinder, which he could not help but imagine as a potential bomb, but the statistics of past failure and success had made the possibility of disaster seem comfortingly remote.