Although Matthew had not been party to the subsequent discussion he soon gathered that a crime-of-passion defense was unlikely to find a sympathetic jury among the crew or the colonists.

Matthew knew that he had to counter these setbacks, even though he was no longer riding the same wave of assertive self-confidence that had carried him through the previous day.

Taking the easiest point first, he gave a suitably impassioned account of Bernal Delgado the man and the scientist. He explained, with measured but righteous anger, that Bernal Delgado had not been a forger or a faker, and that he could not possibly have intended his “alien artifacts” to fool anyone.

Bernal’s first motive, he insisted, must have been to work himself into a better position to understand how the aliens had lived: specifically, how they had developed a technology without the assistance of fire. Given the degraded state of the objects the people at Base Three had managed to recover from within the walls, he argued, it had been far from clear that they really were artifacts, or what their purposes might have been. It had not been clear, until Bernal had proved it, that the multitudinous vitreous substances produced by the plantlike organisms of the hill country were capable of being worked, shaped, and honed. Such a demonstration had been necessary.

Having made the artifacts, Matthew argued, Bernal had realized that they might be very useful in the context of the expedition downriver. When the humanoids had abandoned the city, or when the city-dwellers had died out, there must have been a substantial loss of technology because the resources of the region were different, and perhaps far richer, than those of the plain. What better way to attempt contact, therefore, than by offering the aliens of the plains recognizable artifacts that might now be rare and precious? What better way could there be of creating a bond between such very different species than demonstrating that the newcomers could work with native materials in exactly the same way that the indigenes had once worked with them?

By the same token, Matthew went on to argue, Bernal Delgado had not been a forger or a faker in the realm of emotions and human relationships. He carefully reproduced the account he had improvised for Dulcie, and did his best to turn it into a tragedy of classical proportions. He made much of Dulcie’s former insistence on wearing the scars that she had acquired in the plague wars, claiming that they constituted a heroic badge of courage, and of the sacrifice that the decision must have entailed. He insisted, too, that Bernal Delgado was the kind of man who would have understood, appreciated, and respected such a gesture. He did his utmost to turn Bernal and Dulcie into a middle-aged Romeo and Juliet, rudely torn apart by their sojourn in SusAn and by the failure of memory that had robbed Bernal of the great love of his life and driven Dulcie temporarily mad. He imagined the confrontation scene, when she had found him patiently at work on the alien artifacts, and had finally snapped under a strain that had been wound up so tightly as to have become unsustainable and unbearable.

When he had finished, he asked Ikram Mohammed how it had played. Ike, as usual, misunderstood what he had been doing.

“You don’t know that anyof that is true,” the genomicist complained. “You made it all up, from beginning to end.”

“I had to,” Matthew pointed out. “Facts don’t speak for themselves, and the story Vince was hinting at was wrong from every possible viewpoint, except perhaps that of a policeman building a case.”

“Reality is what you can get away with? Do you really believe that, Matthew? What kind of a scientist does that make you?”

“Of course I don’t believe that reality is what you can get away with. Reality is what it is, and science is the best description of it we can possibly obtain. But you can’t test the hypotheses unless you come up with them, and even scientists need motivation. Everything has to start with fantasy, Ike. Knowledge is what you finish up with, if you’re lucky, after you’ve done the hard work—but the hard work needs passion to drive it. People need reasons to be interested, reasons to be committed, reasons to do their damnedest to find the truth. This mission has been floundering for three years, almost to the point of turning into a farce, because all the passion has gone into defining factions and formulating competing plans. That would never have happened if Shen Chin Che hadn’t been kept out of the picture, but it shouldn’t have happened in any case. It shouldn’t have been allowedto happen.

“I spent the greater part of my adult life trying to stop it happening on Earth, but I was fighting ten thousand years of history and ten million of prehistory. Here, we had a chance to start afresh. We still have that chance. What I’m doing is to remind people that what happens here is important—just as important, in its way, as everything that’s happened on Earth since we left. I’m trying to make it into a story because that’s what it is: a story of confrontation with the alien, of the attempt to understand the alien, to create a mutually profitable relationship between Earth and Tyre, Earthly life and Tyrian life, human and humanoid. I’m trying to make it the best story I can, with heroes for characters instead of fools, because that’s the kind of story it is.”

Matthew was glad to note, as he finished this tirade, that he was recovering something of the mental state that had carried him through his earlier orations.

“You’re going to broadcast that, aren’t you?” Ike said, shaking his head in mock-disbelief. “Even now, you’re still in rehearsal, still making up the script as you go.”

“You could join in,” Matthew pointed out.

“Imaginative fiction isn’t my forte.”

“No, but you’ve always been a first-rate experimental genomicist. They also serve who only ask the questions. Milyukov’s crewmen are still trying to knock me down, even though they ought to know better. What I need is a straight man who’ll help to build me up. You want to try it?”

After a pause, Ike said: “Lynn would have been better.”

“I’ll take that as a yes,” Matthew told him. “Do you want to rehearse? Ask me a question.”

Ike shook his head yet again, but he was grinning now. “Why did the city fail?” he said. “Why did social progress do a U-turn here?”

Matthew was ready for that one. “For exactly the same reason that it very nearly failed on Earth,” he said. “For the same reason, in fact, that you and I became so firmly convinced that Earth was doomed that we accepted the riskiest bet available and signed up for Hope.”

“What reason is that?” Ike said, falling into the role of straight man as if born to it.

“We think of the birth of agriculture and animal husbandry as a great leap forward,” Matthew went on, “because it represented the beginning of everything we now hold dear: the crucial step that made rapid technological progress possible. But for the people who did it, it was a desperation move. Their ancestors had been hunter-gatherers for the best part of a million years, manipulating their environment in all kinds of subtle ways: irrigation, the encouragement of useful plants; the elimination of competitors and predators. But they were too successful. Their numbers increased to the point at which they became their own worst enemy, literally as well as metaphorically.”

“You don’t know that, either,” Ike pointed out.

“Not for certain—but it makes sense. Agriculture and animal husbandry were desperation moves, because fields and herds were the only way they could increase their resources fast enough, and keep them safe enough from competitors, to sustain their exploding population. And that, in essence, was the story of the next ten thousand years. They had to keep on increasing the efficiency of the system, in terms of their means of production and their means of protection. Their technics had to keep getting better and better and better, and the faster their population growth accelerated the faster their technological growth accelerated, until the whole thing went Crash. Hopegot out before the Crash hit bottom, because no one aboard her had any faith in humankind’s ability to pick itself up again, dust itself off, and work out a new modus vivendi. We were too pessimistic, it seems, but it was a damn close-run thing.