“Ideas are fine to play with in a university. But they don’t have a lot to do with life. I can’t imagine killing for any kind of abstraction. And I certainly would not sacrifice myself. Agopian would. He has.”
Eddie said, “What are you and Derek going to do? That’s what I want to know.”
I looked at him.
“Are you going to tell this story to the people at the camp?”
“No.”
Eddie looked surprised—and hopeful, if I was reading his expression right.
“That’s up to Agopian. If he decides to keep quiet, or if anything happens to him, Derek and I will tell. Otherwise, no.”
“Scratch plan A,” said Derek. “Which is to shut up Agopian in one way or another. Lixia, you’re closer to the coffee.”
I refilled his cup.
“There’s no escape, Eddie. Agopian’s going to make his big confession. And we’re going to start to think about staying on this planet. He made Earth sound really unpleasant.”
“He might be wrong,” said Eddie. “Or lying. There’s no reason to believe him.”
I leaned forward. “He kept copies of the messages. The original ones. The data is—are—there.”
“He must have the biggest personal file on the ship,” said Derek.
“He could have altered those messages. Maybe they’re the fake ones.”
Derek said, “You’re suggesting that Agopian’s story is a lie, and that he has been spending his spare time creating a fake history of Earth—which he’ll now present as the real, suppressed history.”
“Why not?” asked Eddie.
“It’s a wonderful paranoid fantasy. But when we start looking, we’re going to find his instructions to the comm system. We’ll delete them and then we’ll start to get messages that have not been changed. There’s no way Agopian can fix the information that’s still in transit. He may have been able to change the past. He can’t change the future.”
Eddie shook his head. “I still don’t understand why they did it. If Agopian is telling the truth.”
“Why did you ask us to change what Ivanova said when we translated for her?” I asked.
He looked angry. After a moment he said, “I will do what I have to, to keep the people here from suffering the way my people have suffered.”
“They were trying to save the expedition,” Derek said. “And—I think—they were trying to save what they could from the past. They didn’t want us to lose what had been lost on Earth.” He stood up. “I think it’s time for breakfast.” He went into the cabin.
Eddie and I sat in silence, drinking coffee.
Derek came back out with muffins, butter, jam, and a fresh pot of coffee.
We ate. When we were done, Eddie stood. “I’m going to talk to Ivanova and Mr. Fang. We have to decide when we’re going to leave.”
I gathered the dishes and took them to the galley, washed up and went back on deck. Derek had gone off somewhere. My early morning happiness had disappeared. Now I felt tense and a bit depressed. I wasn’t looking forward to going back to camp. There was going to be a truly enormous fight. I liked Agopian. Now he had turned into someone I didn’t recognize. I had thought I knew my planet’s history. But it was changing and vanishing—like what? Fog or mist. My past was burning off.
I decided to go up to the village.
It felt different today. There was an undercurrent of tension. Nothing I could point to exactly. Something in the way that people moved, something in the way they spoke or didn’t speak.
It made me uncomfortable. I went to the edge of the village and wandered there, avoiding people and watching the bugs in the vegetation. The day grew hot. The air smelled of dung and the dry plain. Now and then the wind blew the odor of wood smoke to me.
So much beauty!
So much beauty!
Why do we waste our time?
I did my yoga, looking out at the plain, then turned and saw a dozen children. There were little ones like cubs—round and fat and naked except for their fur—and lanky ones like colts—edgy, full of energy, ready to run. These last wore clothes: faded tunics and ragged kilts. Play clothes.
One of the older children asked, “What are you doing?”
I didn’t know the word for “exercise” or the word for “meditation.”
“I am pulling out my body and pulling in my mind.”
“Hu! You are strange!”
“That might be.”
I asked them their names. They told me. They asked me when I was leaving. I said I didn’t know.
“Tell us before you go,” said one. “We want to go down to the river and see your boats that move on their own.”
Another one—a little one—said, “Like fishes! Like lizards!”
“All right.”
I walked back through the village. The children accompanied me. They were silent most of the time. Now and then one would speak.
“That is my mother’s tent.”
“I shot a bird with my new bow.”
“What is it like to have no hair?”
“Cool,” I said. “I am able to feel the wind.”
“But in the winter, you must be cold.”
I made the gesture of agreement.
“I’d rather have fur.”
We reached the far side of the village, and the children gestured farewell.
Agopian was on my boat, sitting on the deck. Derek and Eddie and Ivanova sat with him.
I climbed onboard.
“We were waiting for you,” Derek said.
Agopian said, “It’s done.”
“I am not happy with Mesrop’s precautions,” Ivanova said. “He’s acting as if I am some kind of criminal.”
Agopian looked up. “Elizaveta, we have broken laws.”
“For good reasons.”
“That is something I’m having trouble understanding,” I said. “What were the reasons? And where is the beer?”
“The usual place,” said Derek. “Get one for me and Agopian.”
When I came back out Ivanova said, “You will understand when you hear the messages. Socialism does not mean a reduction of everything to the lowest common denominator. It means giving people the freedom to achieve their full potential. It means a lifting of humanity. An ennobling.” She paused. “How long did it take us? Four centuries? Two hundred years of struggle to end that horrible system and two hundred years of hard work to clean up the mess that it left behind. How many people died of hunger or were poisoned by all the different kinds of pollution? Have you ever looked at the statistics on starvation and disease?
“How many people were murdered because they wanted a union or a free election? Or something very simple. The right to decide whom they were going to love. The right to decide how many children they were going to bear.
“All that suffering—those generations of struggle.” She had been looking down. Now she lifted her head. There were lines in her face that I didn’t remember.
“We thought we had won. When we left Earth, when we began this journey, it seemed that humanity was about to achieve a golden age. A true socialist society.
“We woke at the edge of this system and found—I don’t know how to describe it.”
“Garbage,” said Agopian. “It’s as if the lowest and worst human thinking had become predominant. It really is awful, Lixia.”
“You rewrote the messages because you didn’t like them,” I said. “History hadn’t turned out the way you wanted it to. So you tried to remake it. Undo it.”
“No,” said Ivanova.
Agopian said, “Maybe.”
Ivanova frowned at him, then looked at me. “What is going to happen next?”
“We’ll go back to camp, and you and Agopian will tell your story.”
She looked at Eddie. “Do you think this is a good idea?”
“No. But I can’t see any way to shut up Lixia and Derek and Agopian.”