Dark Ararat - Brian Stableford [43]
“Good-bye, Matthew,” Shen said. He didn’t add: This will be the last time you ever see me, but it was understood between them.
The screen blanked out before he had time to reply.
Matthew decided that he had been right to make his break from Milyukov’s custody, no matter what effect it would have on the captain’s attitude and conduct. He had needed to see Shen. He had needed to see and know that the past wasn’t dead: that it had leapt the gulf of 700 years to extend itself rudely and proudly into the present. He had needed to get a grip on the fact that the mission was still in progress, and that the torch sustaining it had not begun to dim.
Matthew had never been a Hardinist, nor any other kind of confirmed Capitalist, but he understood—as Konstantin Milyukov probably could not—exactly why Shen Chin Che was the hardest of Hardinists. He understood too exactly why Shen considered that no matter who, if anyone, eventually came to own the vast territories of the new world, he and his allies had an unassailable right to own the new Hope, just as they had owned the old.
ELEVEN
Shen Chin Che posted more green arrows to guide Matthew back through Hope’s inner maze, and Matthew followed them, confident that he would arrive soon enough at a place where Milyukov’s people could welcome him back. While he walked, less hurriedly than before, he tried to make sense of what he had discovered.
Shen’s references to a “war” between his AIs and Milyukov’s had to be largely metaphorical. No armies of superviruses were hurling themselves upon one another in the dark wilderness of the ship’s software space. There were a few systems that were under Shen’s control and a lot that were under Milyukov’s control—but wherever those systems interfaced or performed actions that had consequences within the other there was no control at all, and hence no function. The “war” was a stalemate: a software gridlock whose ramifications were stifling 80 or 90 percent of the activity that should have been going on aboard the ship if it had been offering full support to its own inhabitants, let alone to the bases on the surfaces.
It was no wonder that the people up here were as jittery as those on the ground—and no wonder that everyone had begun to doubt that the colony could ever become viable. But a stalemate was a kind of situation that could change very rapidly once it was broken, no matter how long it had endured. And once the situation became fluid, it became manipulable. The breaking of a stalemate was the ideal opportunity for a fresh voice to be heard—for a fresh message to be heard. It might not matter much if the voice were a voice from the past, even if it were a voice whose knowledge of the present left much to be desired; what mattered was that it could offer a new and brighter future.
He knew that Shen had appealed to him out of sheer desperation, but that didn’t mean that Shen wasn’t right. There were moments in time made for prophets, and perhaps this was one of them. Perhaps Bernal Delgado had understood that. Perhaps whoever had killed him had understood it too. If Bernal had understood it, and had set out to prepare a way, there was a possibility that by stepping into Bernal’s shoes, Matthew might be able to carry his scheme through to completion rather than having to devise one of his own. And perhaps Bernal’s killer understood that too … or was he being too paranoid? The only danger facing him at present was that there were so many empty corridors around him, all cold and all dark. If the arrows were to vanish …
He passed numerous intersections at which unlit corridors led away into the darkness. Now that he was not hurrying he had the opportunity to notice that most of them slanted “upward,” toward the zero-gee core: alien territory, for which even the crewmen were ill-adapted.
The emptiness became increasingly disturbing. The darkness seemed so ominous now that he was no longer playing the buccaneer, that he was astonished by his earlier