Dark Ararat - Brian Stableford [39]
The Chosen People had been subject to an age restriction; the idea had been that the parental generation must be old enough to have proved their wisdom, but young enough to have more than half a century of life before them. Shen had obviously made an exception of himself. Shen had remained awake to supervise the building and equipping of his Ark—perhaps a little too long.
“When were you frozen down?” Matthew asked, soberly.
“Not till 2139,” Shen told him.
Matthew made the calculation easily enough, although he couldn’t be sure of the exact fraction of the three years since Hope had arrived in orbit that Shen had lived through.
Shen Chin Che was about fifty years older than he had been when Matthew saw him last, when he had already been the older man by more than a decade. He was now more than a hundred years old—and it was probably safe to assume that he would not easily get the benefit of any advances in longevity technology to which the crew had gained access en route.
“Why are we meeting like this?” Matthew asked him, trying not to seem too aggrieved.
“There’s a possibility that Milyukov woke you up in order that you might serve as a Judas goat,” Shen told him. “Even if that wasn’t his sole intention, he’s bound to have sowed your suitskin with the cleverest bugs his people can devise. They have some new tricks, thanks to their exchanges of information with the probes that overtook them—if they hadn’t, I’d have won by now.”
“Well,” Matthew said, philosophically, “it’s good to see you anyway.”
“It’s good to see you too, Matthew,” the old man assured him. “Your memory’s good, I hope—you must remember our last meeting a great deal better than I do.”
“I remember it very well,” Matthew said. “I won’t say that you don’t look a day older, but you always wore well.”
It was true. Shen Chin Che was not a tall man, nor had he entirely resisted a certain inherited tendency to rotundity, but on and off Earth he had been a man of iron discipline as well as a man possessed of state-of-the-art IT and smart clothing. He always had worn well. His light brown skin still seemed to have the same near-golden glow that Matthew remembered, undulled by age or by recent years spent beneath the meager glare of the ship’s artificial lighting, but it was wrinkled now.
“We may not have much time,” Shen said. “Some day, I’ll fill you in on the history of my last half century, but that will have to wait. We have to do the important stuff first, in case we never get a chance to do the rest.” His voice was harrowingly bleak.
“I understand,” Matthew said, although he wasn’t entirely sure that he did. “So tell me the important stuff.”
TEN
I don’t have time to fight a long, drawn-out war of attrition,” Shen Chin Che admitted. “Which is a pity, given that it’s the kind of war I’ve been landed with. I can’t win it, so someone else will have to.” He didn’t name any names.
“How many men have you got?” Matthew asked.
“Let’s not bother with matters of trivial detail,” the face on the screen replied, politely reminding Matthew that even if their conversation were not being monitored it was almost certainly being recorded. “It’s not the number of men that counts. The real battles were fought by AIs. The crew thought they’d disabled all my Trojan horses before they brought me back, but they hadn’t. Unfortunately, they had contrived to equip some of their own systems with better defenses than I’d anticipated. This siege seems likely to continue for a lot longer than ten years, whether I survive to lead it or not.”
Matthew realized that Shen Chin Che was talking through him as well as to him. Among other things, their conversation was the latest move in a long-running war of words.
“You knew I’d try to make a break when I realized that I was a prisoner, didn’t you?” Matthew said. “That’s what the commotion in the corridor was for—to drive home the point in case I hadn’t noticed. You needn’t have worried. Milyukov was just as keen to annoy me as you were to