Dark Ararat - Brian Stableford [32]
“Because he laid claim to an authority that was no longer his,” was Milyukov’s version, “and because he resorted to violence in a hopeless attempt to reclaim it. He, more than anyone else, is responsible for the deterioration of the relationship between crew and colonists, and for the factional divisions that have subsequently arisen.”
“He was one of the prime movers in the construction of the four Arks,” Matthew pointed out. “Second in importance only to Narcisse himself. Hope was his personal contribution to the great quest. You can hardly blame him for harboring proprietorial sentiments.”
“Shen Chin Che did not build the original Hope,” Milyukov retorted, flatly. “He did not shape a single hull-plate, nor did he drive home a single rivet. He merely directed the flow of finance, and the money that he regarded as his was, in fact, the product of long-term dishonest manipulation of markets and financial institutions. Perhaps, within the corrupt economic and political system that then embraced Earth and the extraplanetary extensions of Earthly society, that was sufficient to establish ownership to the original vessel, but even if that claim were justified, Hope is a very different structure now. We—the crew—were the builders of the new Hope, in a perfectly literal sense. We planned the reconstruction, and we carried it out. Hope is ours now, and always will be.”
“Are you telling me there’s been a mutiny?” Matthew said, knowing well enough what Milyukov’s counterclaim would be but wanting to hear it formally stated.
“What I’m telling you, Professor Fleury,” the captain retorted, coldly, “is that there has been a revolution. Hope’s crew and cargo have been liberated from the crude restraints imposed by the obsolete political and economic system that was temporarily in force when the original Hope was constructed.”
Matthew did not want to reply too swiftly to this news. He knew perfectly well that 700 years was a long time in the evolution of a human society, even one that was probably no more than a few hundred strong. It was not difficult to imagine that successive generations of crewmen could have come to a notion of their role in the scheme of things quite different from that imagined by their original employers. It might have been stranger had they contrived to avoid coming to the conclusion, by slow degrees, that the ship they were reshaping again and again was theirs and ought to remain theirs.
Solari was not as shy as Matthew. “A revolution,” he repeated, guardedly. “A socialist revolution, you mean?”
“It’s not a word we use,” the captain informed him, “but labels are unimportant. What matters is that we, the makers and inhabitants of the new Hope, have set aside all the claims made by the original Hope’s so-called owners, on the grounds that they have no proper moral foundation.”
“But what kind of new society are we talking about?” Solari demanded. “A democracy, or an autocracy? Are you telling us that you run everything now, or do we still get a vote?”
“It’s not as simple as that,” Milyukov said, as Matthew had expected him to.
“You must always have known that the Chosen wouldn’t play ball,” Solari went on, recklessly. “So you decided to get rid of them at the earliest opportunity. They were promised an Earth-clone, and they don’t think this world qualifies—but you don’t care. You want to maroon them here, whether they have a real chance of survival or not. You’ve turned pirate.”
“Absolutely not,” was Milyukov’s unsurprising judgment of that allegation. “It is, in fact, the crew who are, and always have been, intent on fulfilling their manifest destiny: the role in human affairs that they, and perhaps they alone at present, are capable of fulfilling. Everything we have done in reshaping Hope has been devoted to that end. They only pirates aboard Hope are Shen Chin Che and his gang of saboteurs.”
Solari had been slightly wrong-footed by the reference to “manifest destiny” but Matthew knew what