Dark Ararat - Brian Stableford [170]
When he had finished, he asked Ikram Mohammed how it had played. Ike, as usual, misunderstood what he had been doing.
“You don’t know that any of that is true,” the genomicist complained. “You made it all up, from beginning to end.”
“I had to,” Matthew pointed out. “Facts don’t speak for themselves, and the story Vince was hinting at was wrong from every possible viewpoint, except perhaps that of a policeman building a case.”
“Reality is what you can get away with? Do you really believe that, Matthew? What kind of a scientist does that make you?”
“Of course I don’t believe that reality is what you can get away with. Reality is what it is, and science is the best description of it we can possibly obtain. But you can’t test the hypotheses unless you come up with them, and even scientists need motivation. Everything has to start with fantasy, Ike. Knowledge is what you finish up with, if you’re lucky, after you’ve done the hard work—but the hard work needs passion to drive it. People need reasons to be interested, reasons to be committed, reasons to do their damnedest to find the truth. This mission has been floundering for three years, almost to the point of turning into a farce, because all the passion has gone into defining factions and formulating competing plans. That would never have happened if Shen Chin Che hadn’t been kept out of the picture, but it shouldn’t have happened in any case. It shouldn’t have been allowed to happen.
“I spent the greater part of my adult life trying to stop it happening on Earth, but I was fighting ten thousand years of history and ten million of prehistory. Here, we had a chance to start afresh. We still have that chance. What I’m doing is to remind people that what happens here is important—just as important, in its way, as everything that’s happened on Earth since we left. I’m trying to make it into a story because that’s what it is: a story of confrontation with the alien, of the attempt to understand the alien, to create a mutually profitable relationship between Earth and Tyre, Earthly life and Tyrian life, human and humanoid. I’m trying to make it the best story I can, with heroes for characters instead of fools, because that’s the kind of story it is.”
Matthew was glad to note, as he finished this tirade, that he was recovering something of the mental state that had carried him through his earlier orations.
“You’re going to broadcast that, aren’t you?” Ike said, shaking his head in mock-disbelief. “Even now, you’re still in rehearsal, still making up the script as you go.”
“You could join in,” Matthew pointed out.
“Imaginative fiction isn’t my forte.”
“No, but you’ve always been a first-rate experimental genomicist. They also serve who only ask the questions. Milyukov’s crewmen are still trying to knock me down, even though they ought to know better. What I need is a straight man who’ll help to build me up. You want to try it?”
After a pause, Ike said: “Lynn would have been better.”
“I’ll take that as a yes,” Matthew told him. “Do you want to rehearse? Ask me a question.”
Ike shook his head yet again, but he was grinning now. “Why did the city fail?” he said. “Why did social progress do a U-turn here?”
Matthew was ready for that one. “For exactly the same reason that it very nearly failed on Earth,” he said. “For the same reason, in fact, that you and I became so firmly convinced that Earth was doomed that we accepted the riskiest bet available and signed up for Hope.”
“What reason is that?” Ike said, falling into the role of straight man as if born to it.
“We think of the birth of agriculture and animal husbandry as a great leap forward,” Matthew went on, “because it represented the beginning of everything we now hold dear: the crucial step that made rapid technological progress possible. But for the people who did it, it was a desperation move. Their ancestors had been hunter-gatherers for the best part of a million