Dark Ararat - Brian Stableford [73]
“How do you calculate two hundred years?” Matthew asked, interestedly.
“Fifty-eight plus fifty-eight is a hundred and sixteen,” Blackstone pointed out. “That’s the minimum time in which we could begin to get a proper update on the scientific and technological progress made on Earth since we left—everything the crew has picked up en route is just crumbs. When the news arrives, it will have to be integrated and exploited and acted upon if Hope is to get the benefit. Any new hardware they need will take a lot longer than fifty-eight years to get here, no matter what sort of acceleration it can contrive and maintain. In addition to that, Hope has to restock, both mass-wise and organic-resources–wise. This system has hardly any halo and not much asteroidal debris—nothing much bigger than a football in Tyre-crossing orbits. Shen was phenomenally lucky to pick up cometary ices so easily during the blizzard in the home system—believe me, a hundred and sixteen years plus eighty-four is a conservative estimate. Milyukov must know that he won’t live to see the culmination of his grand plan—he’s just a megalomaniac trying to put his stamp on history. The sooner one of his cronies puts a knife in his back the better—pity it had to happen down here, to the wrong man.”
“I thought you weren’t prepared to believe that it was one of Bernal’s cronies who killed him,” Matthew said, a trifle sourly. His legs and spine were aching badly now, and despite all Nita Brownell’s reassurances he felt that breathing through the suit’s membranes was becoming increasingly and stiflingly difficult.
“I’m not,” Blackstone said. “None of us had motive enough, and none of us had a glass dagger stashed away. When I said it was a pity I meant that things are bad enough without adding fuel to the Tyrian Lib case.”
“Tyrian Lib?” Matthew echoed, incredulously.
Blackstone was unimpressed by the implication that he must be joking. He stopped briefly in order to readjust the distribution of his inconvenient load.
“Yeah,” he said. “Shen must have been looking the other way when that lot snuck aboard. Imagine coming fifty-eight light-years to plant a colony and then finding you’ve got a gaggle of whingers aboard who can’t stand the thought of polluting a virgin ecosphere. How else can we find a place to live?”
“I thought the reservations of the doubters had more to do with Tyre’s radically different genomics than the idea that we have no right to introduce ourselves into any alien ecosphere,” Matthew said, just about managing to get through the sentence without gasping.
“Radically different,” Blackstone echoed, disgustedly. “It’s purple, damn it. When you get right down to it, that’s all it is. Okay, the grass on the plain is tree-high, and the tree-high things in the hills look and sometimes feel like the debris from an explosion in a barbed-wire factory, and a lot of the local critters are poisonous as well as not too pretty—but what did we expect? I come from Australia, where everything’s weird and everything’s pretty much poisonous. Believe me, anyone who’s seen Aussie spiders, let alone been bitten by Aussie snakes and stung by Aussie jelly-fish, isn’t likely to get the wind up about a few giant rats with hypodermic tongues and slugs with tentacles. My ancestors lived alongside redbacks and funnel-webs all their lives—had them in the house, the garden, everywhere—and none of them ever got bit. Far as I can judge, the really dangerous species hereabouts are as rare and shy as Tasmanian tigers, so why the hell are the idiots at Base One, who live on an island and never stick their noses out of their bubbles anyway, getting their knickers in a twist? We’re all here, and we’re all here to stay, and everything would be going a hell of a lot more smoothly if everybody could just get used to the idea. We need to get our heads straight here, so that we can get this colony licked into shape. Here’s the big bubble, by the way—you look as if you need a rest.