He did feel a flicker of momentary panic as his sight was obscured, but nothing actually touched his eyes and he was able to open them again after a moment’s uncertainty.
He kept them open, even though there was nothing to see but a silvery mist. He wanted to remain in control, to keep his adrenaline in check by the authority of his will. To be blanked out by his protective IT, he thought, would be an undue humiliation.
“Matthew?” said Solari’s voice, coming from a point not much more than a meter away now that the detective was ensconced in his own cocoon.
“I’m here,” Matthew replied. “I guess it’s not so bad. How long did the captain say the drop is scheduled to take?”
“We should be down within an hour,” Solari said. “Some fall.”
Matthew already felt virtually weightless, and wondered if he would be able to tell when Hopeexpelled the landing craft. The moment would have to be very carefully picked, to minimize the amount of maneuvering that the craft would have to do on its own behalf once it was adrift in the atmosphere.
When the expulsion eventually took place, though, he felt the shift distinctly, and was almost immediately seized by dizzying vertigo. He knew that the reaction was psychosomatic, produced by his imagination rather than any rude agitation of the statocysts in his inner ear, but he couldn’t help gasping. He knew that his adrenaline level must have taken a jolt, but he fought to suppress the flow, to keep it below the threshold at which his internal guardians would take fright. Subjectively, the biofeedback training he had undergone at school was less than forty years behind him. It should still have been second nature even though he’d never had much call to test its limits while he was on Earth, but exercising self-control seemed to be a struggle now.
“Are you okay, Matt?” Solari said again.
Matthew knew that the policeman was seeking reassurance on his own behalf, but he certainly did not begrudge it. “Fine,” he said. “You?”
“It’s not so bad. A roller-coaster freak wouldn’t think twice about it. Never liked them myself. Too much imagination, I guess. Saw too many traffic accidents before robotization became compulsory—and too many afterward, come to think of it.”
Matthew had been frozen down while the debate about the right to drive had still been fierce. He had even taken part in televised debates in which spokesmen for the drivers’ lobby had argued that robotization would only make “joyriders” and “highwaymen” more reckless, as well as turning them into criminals. He had only seen the victims of traffic accidents on film, but he had not needed any more intimate contact to make him nervous.
“There’ll be fresh air waiting for us at the other end,” he said, by way of building morale. “Fresh-ish anyway, once our suits have filtered it. There’ll be open sky and things like trees, and hills and a river. Not unlike home, as seen though lilac-tinted spectacles, with gravity just a fraction less than normal. Better than that damned ship with its twisting corridors and off-color lights and green-tinted crew.”
“Perfect,” Solari said drily. “Pity they won’t be pleased to see us, isn’t it? Well, maybe they’ll be glad to see you—and I’ve had plenty of practice bearing bad news to victims and staring down the hostility of suspects. It’ll be home-dyed purple, like you say. I think I could get used to weightlessness, you know, if all I had to do in zero-gee was lie down. It’s the clumsiness that I hate.”
“Sure. This is okay. I can even bear to think about what’s really happening. Do you think we’ve hit the atmosphere yet?”
“No idea.” After a pause, Solari continued: “This is what we came for, isn’t it. I almost forgot that, you know, with all this stuff about the murder and the revolution. It was only a few days ago, subjectively speaking, but that long gap’s still there. I lost touch a little, with the motives that brought me here. This was what it was all about: the chance to shuttle down to a brand new world, to have a second chance, to have a hand in starting something momentous. Everything that happened to us till now was just a prelude to this moment. We’re both the same age now, you know, give or take a couple of months, even though we were born years apart. Forty-eight years of active life from the moments of our birth to this one. Forty-eight years and fifty-eight light-years. We wanted a new start, and this is it. Ararat, Tyre, whatever … this is it. The rest is just so much trivia. I’ve been falling since the moment I was born; this is just the landing phase.”
It was an oddly poignant speech, and an effective one. It reminded Matthew of his own reasons for being here—reasons that had somehow been shunted aside by the tide of information that had deluged him since the moment of his awakening. It reminded him that this was supposed to be the turning point of his life, an end and a beginning. Until he had quit Hopehe had still been trapped by the hard and soft artifices of his old life, but now, cocooned though he was in artifacts of similar provenance, he was breaking free. When he emerged from his chrysalis onto the surface of the new world he would be a new being. This was, as Solari said, merely the landing phase of a fall that had begun the moment he was born. Seen from the viewpoint of the present, his old life had been something he was passing through, on the way to this.
“This is it,” Matthew agreed, echoing Solari’s judgment. “The first footfall of the most prodigious leap in human history. Myfirst footfall, anyway. Nothing will ever be the same again, no matter how things work out aboard Hope. Humanity is an interstellar species, and you and I are part of the vanguard. Maybe we’re three years behind the first landing, but what’s three years in the cosmic timescale? With luck, you’ll be the first man here to identify and arrest a murderer. There are worse precedents to set.”
“It’s not a matter of luck,” Solari assured him. “It’s a matter of procedure. Procedure and patience.”
They were still falling. They seemed to have been falling for a long time. Matthew wished that he had some way to tell how many minutes had actually passed. He had been given his wrist-unit along with his other personal possessions, and had immediately strapped it on, but he could not look at the face of his watch now. He had not thought to put his goggles on, so that he could summon virtual displays by blinking his eyes.
“Will procedure and patience be enough, given that so much time has passed since the actual event?” Matthew asked, reflexively.
“I have to believe so,” the policeman told him, scrupulously. “I’ve made a good start on the data relayed back by Blackstone and the material already on file. It’s just a matter of following through.”
“You already have a prime suspect?” Matthew asked, surprised that Solari hadn’t seen fit to mention it.
“Not exactly. It doesn’t do to jump conclusions. Guesswork can confuse your objectivity. You start twisting things to fit your hypothesis. Like you, I’d rather none of them was guilty—but I don’t want it to be aliens either. That would be a pity too, maybe the worst scenario of all. We were supposed to meet the alien openhanded, ready to join forces as friends and collaborators.”
“So we were,” Matthew murmured. It was true. The idea that man and alien would have to meet as enemies, competitors in a Darwinian struggle for existence that extended across the entire cosmic stage, had come to seem horribly twentieth century even to hard Darwinians. Hopehad been called Hopebecause she lent new hope to humankind’s prospects of surviving the ecocatastrophic Crash that had destabilized Earth’s biosphere, but she was an incarnation of all kinds of other hopes too. One such hope—perhaps the most important—had been the hope that if the ship didmanage to find an “Earthlike” world complete with smart aliens, they might be able to recognize an intellectual kinship and contrive some kind of mutual aid.