TWENTY-FOUR

Night had fallen by the time Ikram Mohammed and Rand Blackstone returned to the bubble to report that the boat was now as ready to depart as it would ever be. Their arrival completed a gathering of the Base Three personnel in the common room that included everyone except Maryanne Hyder.

“If anything,” Ike declared, “it’s a trifle overcooked. We’ve added so many accessories that it’s going to be a hell of a job dismantling it and putting it back together.”

“Dismantling it?” Solari echoed. “Why would you want to dismantle it and put it back together?”

“The river doesn’t run smoothly all the way,” Matthew told him. “There’s only one major fault line, but that’s associated with a cataract at the edge of the lowland plateau. We’ll have to rig a hoist of some kind so that we can lower the disassembled parts and the cargo on a rope.”

“We?” said Dulcie Gherardesca, her gaze flicking back and forth between Matthew and Tang. “I thought you’d decided to agree that Tang would be a more useful member of the expedition.”

“Not exactly,” Matthew replied. “I’d conceded that there was an arguable case to that effect. Having thought it over, though, I’ve decided that I still want to go.”

It was Dulcie, not Tang, who said: “It’s not really a matter of wanting, is it?”

“Actually,” Matthew said, having had time to prepare his case, “I think it is. Tang doesn’t want to go—he only thinks he ought to because his exaggerated sense of duty tells him that he might be more useful as an observer and interpreter of whatever we find down there. He’s interested in the specimens that we might gather, of course, but he’s interested as a biochemist. He won’t be able to do much with them en route. I, on the other hand, do want to go—and my admittedly unexaggerated sense of duty tells me that I might be just as useful an observer and interpreter as he would be. I’m an ecologist: I need to see the wildlife in its natural habitat, to get a feel for the way that actual organisms live and interact. Bernal was desperate to go because he knew that the environments downstream are much richer than the ruins, and he believed that an ecologist’s eyes were necessary to supplement Ike’s and Lynn’s lab-educated vision. He was right, and that’s why I should be the one to go.”

Dulcie and Godert Kriefmann both looked at Tang to see what his reaction to that would be, but Blackstone was quick to butt in. “I agree with Fleury,” he said. “A fresh pair of eyes is what we need.”

“That’s not why I think I’d be useful,” Matthew was quick to say. “Quite the reverse, in a way. It’s the way my eyes are trained that’s important. We’re all biologists, but with all due respect to Tang, Ike, and Lynn, I’m the only one who knows how to look at organisms asorganisms, and as participants in ecosystems, rather than as aggregations of molecules. Tang knows far more about the genomics and proteomics of Tyre than I could hope to learn in half a year, let alone a few days—but there’s a sense in which that kind of perception is blinkered. The expedition needs more balance than Tang can provide; it needs Dulcie, and it needs me. And I want to go—not as a mere matter of duty, but as a matter of enthusiasm. I think that ought to count.”

There was a slight pause before Kriefmann said: “I suppose we ought to vote on it, then.”

“No,” said Tang. “That’s exactly what we shouldn’t do. I am prepared to concede the point. Matthew should go.”

Matthew was less surprised by this turn of events than some of the others seemed to be—which was, he supposed, support for Rand Blackstone’s conviction that a fresh pair of eyes could be an asset. One conversation with Tang had been enough to convince Matthew that the biochemist was a man so reasonable that his reasonableness might almost be reckoned excessive—and that same conversation had apparently served to reassure Tang that Matthew was a potential convert to his cause.

“Aren’t we forgetting something?” Vince Solari put in.

No one was in any doubt as to what he meant. “You can’t expect us to put everything on hold while you complete your investigation,” Lynn Gwyer said. “There’s no guarantee that you’ll ever be able to figure out who killed Bernal—or what we ought to do about it if you did bring a charge against anyone here. We don’t have any legal apparatus in place here, and there’s nothing elaborate back at Base One. Maybe things would be different if Shen Chin Che were supervising the colonization process, but in his absence we’ve had to muddle along as best we could.”

“I’ve already figured out who killed Delgado,” Solari announced, blandly.

Matthew guessed as soon as the bombshell dropped that it was probably a ploy, but no one else seemed ready to make that assumption. The reaction was as explosive as anyone could have desired, and the question on everyone’s lips was who?

“Unfortunately,” Solari went on, “there’s a difference between knowing who did it and providing evidence adequate to satisfy a court of law, or even justify a formal arrest. Given that a court of law would actually have to be put together in order to try the case, and that no formal procedures of arrest and charge seem to exist, I’m not sure exactly how to carry my investigation forward. Perhaps you’d like to advise me.”

“This is bullshit,” Rand Blackstone objected. “If you think you know who did it, spit it out. Give whoever it is a chance to respond.”

Matthew noticed that Blackstone’s preference for the hypothesis that an alien had done the deed seemed to have vanished. He was not surprised.

Neither was Solari. “If you’d wanted to know who did it you could have figured it out for yourselves,” he said. “I’m prepared to believe that Milyukov was wrong about there being a conspiracy to conceal the identity of the murderer, but there’s certainly been a tacit agreement not to look too hard. If you’d wanted the matter cleared up, you could have cleared it up. I think every one of you has a suspect in mind, and that at least half of you probably have the right suspect in mind, but not one of you wants to have that suspicion confirmed—and in order to avoid that eventuality you’ve deliberately refrained from looking at the evidence.”

“That’s not true.” The objection came from Lynn Gwyer—but no one else supported her.

“What’s the bottom line, Solari?” Blackstone wanted to know. “Are you saying that you want everyone to remain here while you complete your interrogations, or just that you want to take someone out of the crew?”

So Blackstone thinks that the murderer is one of the people who was planning to take the boat, Matthew deduced. Given that we’ve just eliminated Tang, that leaves Lynn, Ike, and Dulcie. Except, of course, that Blackstone might not have the right suspect in mind.

“For the time being,” Solari said, “I’d like to know what youwant. There is, after all, a definite problem of jurisdiction here. The law I’m supposed to be enforcing is colony law—but there doesn’t seem to be any firmly defined colony law in place. As Dr. Gwyer has pointed out, the removal of Shen Chin Che and his chief associates from the picture has left something of an organizational vacuum. I’m not at all sure to whom I’m supposed to be reporting the results of my investigation, so for the time being I’m consulting you. Frankly, I’m rather puzzled by the fact that you all seem perfectly content to accept that there’s a murderer in your midst. Not one of you seems interested in having the identity of the murderer revealed, let alone seeing them punished. I wish you’d explain to me exactly why that is—preferably without any nonsense about the possibility of anyone from outside having secretly flown in to commit the murder.”

Matthew would have been interested to know where each of the six looked in search of leadership, but he hadn’t enough eyes in his head. In the event, it was Tang Dinh Quan who took it upon himself to provide an answer of sorts.