It didn’t take long for Matthew to appreciate just how relative such terms could be. He revised his estimate regarding the accuracy of Milyukov’s boasts; the welcome party had obviously arrived so quickly because they’d got a fix on the likely landing place long before the capsule touched down.

Matthew half-expected Blackstone to fall into step with Vince Solari as soon as the policeman demonstrated that he was the stronger of the two newcomers, but the Australian shortened his own step to take up a position at Matthew’s shoulder, letting Solari take the lead. Now that he knew what direction to take, Solari accepted the responsibility. Matthew realized why Blackstone had made the move when the tall man murmured in his ear: “Is Shen ready to take the ship yet?”

“What?” was Matthew’s astonished response.

Blackstone looked down at him impatiently. “You haveseen Shen?” Rumors obviously bounded from world to world as rapidly in the new system as they had in the old. Solari hadn’t turned around, but Matthew knew that the policeman must be listening hard.

“Yes, I saw him,” he admitted, “but not for long, and only on a screen.”

“So what’s the word? Surely he gave you a message to deliver. You can trust me—I wouldn’t go so far as to say that we’re all on his side down here, because most of the bastards at Base One can’t seem to see further than their own noses, but nobody in his right mind could want that slimeball Milyukov to press on with his crazy hijack plans. Even Tang wants Shen in charge up top—he thinks he can deal with Shen.”

“Shen didn’t give me any message,” Matthew said. “He couldn’t. I was carrying bugs Milyukov’s people had planted on me.”

Blackstone sighed. “Okay, so he had to be discreet. I suppose you’re still worried about the bugs. All I want to know is whether there’ll be a settlement soon. Every day that passes raises the anxiety level down here just a little further—and that’s bad. It’s way too high already.”

“I got the impression that the situation on the ship is an impasse,” Matthew told him. “Nothing suggested that it would be resolved any time soon.”

Blackstone cursed under his breath. “It’s all so stupid,” he said. “Everybody knows that it will be at least two hundred years before the ship could leave, even if anyone were crazy enough to be in a hurry. Milyukov will be dead by then and a whole new generation will be calling themselves the crew. The so-called revolution will belong to a period of their history so obviously dead and so obviously irrelevant that no amount of propaganda is going to make anything stick on Milyukov’s say-so.”

“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 beginto 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 Hopeis 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, Hopehas 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 anyalien 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.”

Matthew’s head had dropped as the rifle had become increasingly burdensome, and it wasn’t until Blackstone gave him the cue to look up that he realized that they had almost reached their destination. He realized too that whatever else Blackstone was right or wrong about, the ex-soldier was certainly right about his needing a rest.

As soon as they were inside the double door Blackstone said: “I’ll just get rid of this stuff, then I’ll show you where you’re bunking. We put you in together, if that’s okay.”

Matthew nearly asked why he couldn’t have Bernal Delgado’s bunk, but he remembered in time what Solari had said about Bernal and Maryanne Hyder playing “happy families.” He put Blackstone’s gun down, resting it against the plastic outer wall of the dome. Then he leaned against it himself, glad of the respite.

While they were briefly alone, Solari took the opportunity to say: “I didn’t expect it to be thisbad. There were plenty of places back home where a cop was as welcome as a plague-bearing rat, but I didn’t expect this to be one of them.”

“It’s not just you,” Matthew said. “I reckon we came in on the end of a bigargument—and I suspect that was only one item in an ongoing war. There’s been a serious breakdown of consensus here. Bernal’s death might have caused the cracks to widen, but there’s a lot more to it than that.”