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By Root 1612 0

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 you think 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. Why was 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 faking them 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