Dark Ararat - Brian Stableford [61]
“Maybe that’s why they’re not keen to own up,” the policeman said, drily. “You do have a point, though, about the kind of baggage we brought with us. I dare say you took the same kind of flak I did when you told your friends you were shipping out—probably a lot more, given your celebrity. I didn’t mind being called a coward, but being called a fool stung a little harder. I don’t know how many times I was told that we couldn’t possibly solve Earth’s problems by setting out to spoil another world. I wish I’d had a better answer to give all the people who just assumed that we’d simply repeat all the same mistakes we’d made on Earth, individually and collectively.”
“I was the man who kept reciting the formula that people who fail to learn from prophecies are condemned to enact them,” Matthew reminded him. “If I hadn’t thought that we were capable of learning, I wouldn’t have bothered, but if I hadn’t thought that it was extremely difficult, I wouldn’t have had to.”
“You did take a lot of stick, didn’t you,” Solari remembered, frowning as he tried to think back more than twenty subjective years, to his childhood. “You had the newsvids on your back as well as your friends. The price of fame.”
“I had two daughters to use as an excuse,” Matthew told him. “The newsvids always liked family values.”
“How many of us would have been murderers if we’d have stayed on Earth?” Solari wondered aloud, his voice becoming gradually more somber. “And how many of us would have been murder victims? According to Milyukov, Earth’s in good shape now, but it had to go through hell in order to get there. I never killed anyone, but I was lucky not to have had to. If I’d stayed, I might have had to kill hundreds, if I’d been able to avoid getting killed myself. We may all have come here with the best of intentions, Matt, but that doesn’t mean that we could avoid bringing some pretty sick stuff in our mental luggage. If I was a potential killer back in 2114, I still am—and that applies to everyone else. It’s nothing to do with being a policeman or a scientist—it’s to do with what we’d have done to survive when the crunch came. Everyone here was willing to be frozen down in order to have a chance of escaping the worst, and my bet is that people willing to do that would have been willing to do almost anything to survive when the collapse came. Wouldn’t you?”
“I don’t know,” Matthew said, truthfully. “But that was there, and this is here. We’re not a bunch of rats trapped in a decaying box—we’re a tiny handful of people confronted with a strange and hostile world. Nobody is disposable. The situation aboard Hope makes it all the more necessary for the people on the ground to help and support one another no matter what differences of opinion they have. Murder has no place down there. I only met two of your seven suspects back home, but I can’t believe that any of them would commit cold-blooded premeditated murder.”
“Maybe it wasn’t cold-blooded—or premeditated.”
“If whoever did it forged an alien artifact as a murder weapon, it had to be premeditated—and cold-blooded.”
“If,” Solari repeated, mechanically. “But yes, it looks that way. And I don’t want to believe it of any of the seven, any more than you do—but I hear that you came very close to committing murder yourself out in that corridor, having already planned to make your break before you left me alone with the captain, and for no better reason than resentment of the fact that you were under guard.”
“I wanted to see Shen,” Matthew countered.
“And you had no reason whatsoever to think you could