Dark Ararat - Brian Stableford [169]
To make matters worse, the captain had an even better spoiler still in reserve: Vince Solari. When Matthew went on the air for the second time, he discovered that all three surface bases had now acquired their own TV equipment, and that Solari had been interviewed and cross-questioned as to the progress of his investigation.
Scrupulous honesty had, inevitably, prevailed over evasive caution. Solari had not taken the trouble to avoid the word fake when reporting his conclusion that Bernal Delgado had been manufacturing spearheads and arrowheads from local plant products. He had obviously been talking to Lynn Gwyer, and the fact that it was technically hearsay had not prevented him from informing the world that Dulcie Gherardesca—who was, according to the logs and cross-correlated witness statements, the only person who had had the opportunity to commit the murder—had confessed to the crime while contemplating suicide the day before her capture.
Although Matthew had not been party to the subsequent discussion he soon gathered that a crime-of-passion defense was unlikely to find a sympathetic jury among the crew or the colonists.
Matthew knew that he had to counter these setbacks, even though he was no longer riding the same wave of assertive self-confidence that had carried him through the previous day.
Taking the easiest point first, he gave a suitably impassioned account of Bernal Delgado the man and the scientist. He explained, with measured but righteous anger, that Bernal Delgado had not been a forger or a faker, and that he could not possibly have intended his “alien artifacts” to fool anyone.
Bernal’s first motive, he insisted, must have been to work himself into a better position to understand how the aliens had lived: specifically, how they had developed a technology without the assistance of fire. Given the degraded state of the objects the people at Base Three had managed to recover from within the walls, he argued, it had been far from clear that they really were artifacts, or what their purposes might have been. It had not been clear, until Bernal had proved it, that the multitudinous vitreous substances produced by the plantlike organisms of the hill country were capable of being worked, shaped, and honed. Such a demonstration had been necessary.
Having made the artifacts, Matthew argued, Bernal had realized that they might be very useful in the context of the expedition downriver. When the humanoids had abandoned the city, or when the city-dwellers had died out, there must have been a substantial loss of technology because the resources of the region were different, and perhaps far richer, than those of the plain. What better way to attempt contact, therefore, than by offering the aliens of the plains recognizable artifacts that might now be rare and precious? What better way could there be of creating a bond between such very different species than demonstrating that the newcomers could work with native materials in exactly the same way that the indigenes had once worked with them?
By the same token, Matthew went on to argue, Bernal Delgado had not been a forger or a faker in the realm of emotions and human relationships. He carefully reproduced the account he had improvised for Dulcie, and did his best to turn it into a tragedy of classical proportions. He made much of Dulcie’s former insistence on wearing the scars that she had acquired in the plague wars, claiming that they constituted a heroic badge of courage, and of the sacrifice that the decision must have entailed. He insisted, too, that Bernal Delgado was the kind of man who would have understood, appreciated, and respected such a gesture. He did his utmost to turn Bernal and Dulcie into a middle-aged Romeo and Juliet, rudely torn apart by their sojourn in SusAn and by the failure of memory that had robbed Bernal of the great love of his life and driven Dulcie temporarily mad. He imagined the confrontation scene, when she had found him patiently at