“That too is a question that we have not aired in public,” the biochemist said. “It is probable that we all have our own reasons for letting the matter lie. I cannot speak for anyone else, but I suspect that I am not the only one here to feel a profound sense of embarrassment at the mere fact of the crime. I cannot believe that there is anyone here, including the murderer, who does not regret what happened very deeply. If that regret were not so painful, perhaps we would have been more interested in discovering the facts. But there are other factors too. For one thing, I have never felt endangered myself. I do not claim that we all know one another as intimately as might be expected, given the time we have spent here in isolation from the remainder of the colony—we are scientists, after all, accustomed to the introspection of that calling as well as to the distancing effects of the media of communication that dominated the Earth from which we came—but a degree of trust has grown up between us. I cannot suspect anyone here of being a secret psychopath, or of harboring evil motives. I can only imagine that whoever killed Bernal Delgado did so in a moment of sudden anger, entirely without meaning to—and that having done so, he or she is extremely unlikely ever to allow themselves another such lapse. Whoever the killer might be, I have never felt any emotion toward them but pity. Perhaps it is a failure of duty on my part, but that is why I have never sought to increase the shame of the deed by exposure.”
Matthew marveled all over again at the man’s pedantry—although it was by no means unexpected in someone who must have learned English as a second or third language, because it was the language of science—but he did not doubt for a moment that Tang was perfectly sincere. He looked around yet again, half-expecting to be able to identify the murderer by means of the tears in his or her eyes, but most of the faces gathered about the table were studies in stoniness.
“To put it bluntly, Vince,” Ikram Mohammed said, “we don’t really care who did it. We sympathize with their secret misery. We can’t really see ourselves as the cast of an old-fashioned murder mystery, each living in terror of the possibility that we might be the next victim. There’s been no shortage of other puzzles to distract us.”
Vincent Solari had listened to all of this quite impassively, giving not the slightest indication of horror, amusement, disgust, or any other plausible response. When he realized that everyone was now waiting for his judgment of Tang’s speech he had to rouse himself slightly. “Okay,” he said. “So, the general feeling is that you don’t want me to tell you who did it, and that you’d rather I stopped looking for the evidence I need to make a water-tight case.”
Nobody answered that.
“What about you, Matthew?” Solari asked. “What do youthink I ought to do?”
Matthew had no answer ready. “I suppose,” he said, after a moment’s reflection, “that it would depend on the motive. Whywas Bernal killed?”
“So far as I can judge,” Solari told him, “it was exactly what Tang says: a sudden outburst of anger. A crime of passion, if you like. There must have been something deeper behind it, but I no longer think it was premeditated and I don’t think there was any intention to kill. Delgado was very unlucky—nine times out of ten, the blow would have been trivial. Given that it wasn’t, his IT would have been able to pull him through a further nine times out of ten. What happened, in my opinion, is that somebody found him faking the alien artifacts and overreacted, too quickly and too extremely for their own IT to damp it down.”
Solari hadn’t told anyone that it appeared to be Bernal who had made the “alien” artifacts, and Matthew had only let it slip to Tang. If Tang had passed the news on it wasn’t obvious. Matthew concluded that Solari was trying another ploy, in the hope of finding out who already knew what he had only just discovered. He couldn’t help feeling a slight pang of regret at having given the game away, at least to Tang.
“Why would Delgado be faking alien artifacts?” Rand Blackstone said, his voice redolent with sincere disbelief.
“I don’t know,” Solari admitted.
“It’s possible that he wasn’t fakingthem at all,” Matthew put in scrupulously. “It’s possible that he was trying to put himself imaginatively in the city-builders’ shoes, trying to figure out what might have happened to them.”
“Really?” Solari came back, feigning incredulity.
“Verstehen,”Dulcie Gherardesca put in, softly. “Intuitive understanding. The basis on which members of a human society can obtain understanding of other societies, with different norms and rules.”
“And individuals of one another,” Matthew added. “I can’t believe that a man like Bernal would ever have planned to perpetrate a scientific fraud. I think he was trying to put himself in the place of an alien, by doing the only thing that he knew for sure that the aliens did: making tools out of natural glass harvested from local plants. Maybe someone who found out what he was doing leapt to the wrong conclusion, but we mustn’t be tempted to do the same.”
“I’m prepared to buy that,” Solari said, although Matthew immediately recognized it as another ploy, inviting a confession. “It was an accident, then. A misunderstanding.”
No one offered a confession, or gave any sign of wanting to do so.
But we’re not all here, Matthew thought. And Vince has only talked to one person since last telling me he had no suspect. Maybe Blackstone has the wrong suspect in mind. But if Solari’s fishing, he must think he’s fishing in the right pond. Which implies that Maryanne Hyder didn’t do it—but that she might know who did.
When the silence had gone on long enough, Solari let out a slight sigh, and said: “Okay. Nobody wants to come clean. Nobody wants to know. Nobody wants to hold up the boat trip. Fair enough—if the excursion means more to you than the murder, you might as well exercise your priorities. I’m just a humble policeman, after all. You’re scientists.”
Even Matthew felt the contemptuous sting of that remark, but he also felt compelled to leap to the defense of his new colleagues. “There really are bigger questions at stake, Vince,” he said. “And there’s a point that Tang didn’t make. Whoever killed Bernal reacted atypically, and part of the reason they reacted atypically is that everyone here is in a radically alien environment, isolated from the main body of the investigative team. Everyone here is uneasy and anxious, and no matter how ashamed they are of being frightened—because walking on the surface of an alien but Earthlike world is exactly what everyone here signed up for—they can’t help being prey to fear. The world played its part in Bernal’s death, and it might yet be the cause of many more. No matter how determined we may be to follow through our good intentions, there isn’t anyone here who doesn’t know that the crew jumped the gun in their haste to be rid of their inconvenient cargo. This world might be a potential death trap, not just for the nine of us but for everyone at Base One and everyone still in SusAn.
“We need to know what the chances really are of establishing a colony here, and we need to know it sooner rather than later. Milyukov shouldn’t be exerting further pressure on us with arbitrary deadlines, but that’s a trivial matter: the real deadline will be set by the world itself, and we have to make haste to meet it even though we haven’t the slightest idea when it will fall. This trip downriver might not tell us anything definite, but it’s an opportunity we have to seize. It’s more important than knowing who killed Bernal, and far more important than figuring out what we ought to do with the murderer. If that’s a scientist’s view rather than a policeman’s … well, so be it. Bernal was my friend, but I have far more important things to worry about just now than wreaking vengeance on his killer.”