Dark Ararat - Brian Stableford [41]
“The crew think I’m doing all this out of spite, because I won’t play the game unless I’m running the show,” Shen went on, “but you know me better than that, Matthew. You may not understand the situation as yet, but you do trust me. You know that I’m not just an old-fashioned capitalist clinging to his property like grim death because I can’t bear to let go. I’m a Hardinist through and through. A real Hardinist. The years haven’t changed me.” He seemed slightly anxious, as if he were not at all convinced that Matthew would still recognize and trust him. He did not carry the burden of his extra years lightly.
“I know who you are,” Matthew assured him. “I do understand—better than Milyukov can, I think. All he’s ever known is Hope. He can’t really understand what was happening to Earth in the 2080s, or what it meant to people who loved their world enough to leave it. When the IT was pulling me gently out of SusAn, I dreamed I saw the Earth die. It was a vivid dream, even when it became lucid. It could have happened. Milyukov knows that it didn’t, but that knowledge prevents him from obtaining any real understanding of the wellsprings of our motivation.”
“Those who fail to learn from prophesies are condemned to fulfil them,” Shen quoted, with the ghost of a smile. “The stupidest thing about this whole farce is that on the most essential point of all, Konstantin Milyukov and I are in complete agreement. His most fervent desire, and mine, is that the colony should succeed, and succeed gloriously. It would be a terrible irony of fate if our difference of opinion as to who should control Hope and its resources were to cause it to fail. I don’t know nearly enough about what’s going on down there, or why the people at the bases have been so badly spooked, but I do know that it would be a dreadful waste of an opportunity that might never come again if they were to throw in the towel and demand to be taken up again. I’m very grateful that you came to talk to me, Matthew—and if Milyukov has any sense he’ll be grateful too. I need you, Matthew. The colony needs you. We need your scientific expertise, and we need your rhetorical skills. They do remember you, Matthew—even the ones who never knew you know who and what you were. They need you.”
“They had Bernal,” Matthew pointed out, uneasily. He was uneasy because he knew that few other people on Hope remembered him as fondly as Shen. Shen had been impressed by Matthew Fleury because Matthew Fleury was a kindred spirit: another lonely voice crying the same warnings in the same dread wilderness—but Shen had not spent much time on Earth during the 2070s, and none at all in the 2080s. He had come to see things from an extraterrestrial perspective, and a prejudiced one. Matthew, like the proverbial prophets of old, had been a man not much honored in his own country—and he had always thought of the whole world as his own country, his potential constituency.
“They didn’t see Bernal as a potential leader,” Shen said, “and rightly so. He was a pleasure seeker at heart, too preoccupied with his prick.”
“They won’t see me as a potential leader either,” Matthew said, soberly. “Not for the same reasons, maybe—but it takes more than a lack of romantic ambition to establish a man as a serious individual. To many of them, I’m more TV personality than scientist, and on Earth in the old days nothing trivialized a man like TV. There’s only one man in this solar system who could assert any kind of real authority over the people on the surface, and that’s you. Milyukov may have misjudged your capacity to hurt him, but so far as the people on the ground are concerned he’s managed to marginalize and neutralize you, Believe me, Shen, I’m no ready-made substitute. Milyukov must know that.”
“He can’t,” Shen said, stubbornly. “He doesn’t know you. You can make a difference, Matthew. I know you can.”
“Almost everyone down there has had three years’ head start,” Matthew countered. “Every