“Maybe you can and maybe you can’t,” Matthew countered, “but a brave and honest man wouldn’t even try. A man who thought he had a good case to argue would be only too pleased to take his opponent on in open forum.”
“If you say that on air I’ll cut you off immediately,” the captain insisted, stubbornly.
“In propaganda terms, that would be the next best thing to cutting your own throat,” Matthew told him. “You can’t hide any more. You can fight, but you can’t run away. It was always bound to come to this, as you should have realized before you brought the first colonist out of the freezer.”
“There was no evidence that Ararat was inhabited by intelligent aliens,” Milyukov said, mistaking the nature of the argument yet again. “We had no reason to think that the colonization could not go ahead as we had planned.”
“You live in a world with very narrow horizons, Captain Milyukov,” Matthew observed. “Maybe that’s not so surprising, given that you’re fourth- or fifth-generation spaceborn, but there’s really no excuse for it. You brought all of Earth with you, and all of the universe too. You only had to use your VE-apparatus intelligently. You really don’t understand what’s happening here, do you? If you’d had the slightest idea of the true significance of what we’ve found here, you wouldn’t have wasted a year hoping it didn’t exist and doing everything within your meager power to prevent its discovery.”
“I will not permit the colony to withdraw,” Milyukov said. “No matter what you find or what you say, I will not withdraw the colonists.”
“Because you can’t stand the thought of being outnumbered and outvoted in the corridors of your precious worldlet,” Matthew said. “If Hopewere to become an observation station, manned by Shen’s Chosen People, what power and reward would there be in the rank of ship’s captain? Well, so what? Can’t you see that you have a chance to inscribe your name in the annals of human history? I can only transmit to you and yours, but you can transmit to the solar system. You won’t get a reply for a hundred and sixteen years, but you can set yourself in place as anchorman of the greatest show off Earth. Why stop me when you can simply take my place, for the only audience that really matters?”
“That’s not the kind of man I am,” the captain told him. “I repeat, I will not withdraw the colony. Disembarkation of the remaining colonists will be resumed whether you can provide final proof that the world is inhabited or not. Whatever you say while you have the attention of crew and colonists alike, I have the power and the authority to make certain of that.”
“Of course you have,” Matthew assured him, and switched off the camera’s power. He knew that he had to economize. “Let’s go,” he said to Ikram Mohammed.
The two of them started walking, immediately falling into step. They held to the same heading they’d been following all day, although they hadn’t seen any obvious sign of a trail for some time. They both knew that they had no chance of catching up with the aliens if the aliens didn’t want to be caught, but it wasn’t a topic they wanted to discuss.
Above the canopy the afternoon sky had clouded over, and the light was getting steadily worse, but their eyes had adapted to the perpetual purple twilight well enough and they hadn’t encountered any unusually treacherous ground as yet.
“Milyukov really doesn’t understand,” Matthew said, to break the silence. “He hasn’t a clue how this script is going to work out.”
“Nor have you,” said Ike, drily.
“Yes I have,” Matthew told him. “Even if the worst comes to the worst, and the aliens let me down on this particular trip, I know how the story’s going to work out. Maybe I won’t be the one who gets to broadcast the news, but that’s not what matters, is it?”
“No, it’s not,” Ike replied. “And I’m relieved to know that you haven’t forgotten it.”
Matthew could have wished for more light, in order to study the structures of the canopy more carefully, but it was an inherently frustrating task. When the light was brighter it was reflected and refracted in confusing ways, and now it was dimmer the whole panoply became blurred and uncertain.
After a while, though, it became necessary to pay more attention to the ground than the infinite ceiling. No matter how untreacherous it was, it was far from even and the last thing they needed was for one of them to trip up and turn an ankle.
Matthew suspected that the ground vegetation might be as interesting, in a purely scientific sense, as the canopy, but he would have needed to get down on his hands and knees with a flashlight and a magnifying glass to have any chance of appreciating its intricacies. He wondered more than once whether it might not be more sensible to stay put and hope that the aliens came to them rather than keeping moving, but he reckoned that it would be the wrong decision, if only in dramatic terms.
The crewmen who were following the attempted rescue with an excessively avid interest—because it was the first realmelodrama to which they had ever been exposed—would expect movement, and the one thing he knew for sure was that moving was no worse than standing still. The one place the aliens wouldn’t want to make contact was the boat; even if it had been purple rather than pea-green it would simply have been too exotic and too alarming.
They waited until it was too dark to continue safely before making the next broadcast, even though their audience had to wait an extra quarter of a metric hour to hear the next installment of Matthew’s commentary on Tyrian life, and then had to look at his face eerily lit by a flashlight.
“Back home on Earth,” he said to the camera, picking his words carefully, although he tried not to give that impression, “the descendants of the folk we left behind have discovered the secret of true emortality. They made a couple of false starts along the way, but they got there. We should be glad, although we can’t reap the benefit ourselves. There’s cause for a certain pride in being the last mortal humans ever to live and die, if that’s what we turn out to be. We mustn’t forget, though, that death is another of the other things that we, as products of Earth’s ecosphere, fell into the habit of taking for granted.
“Death was the price that complex Earthly organisms paid for reproduction and evolution. The simplest Earthly organisms always had emortality. The bacteria who came with us on our great adventure, as passengers within our bodies, can keep on dividing and dividing indefinitely. All bacterial deaths are accidental. Bacteria starve, or they get poisoned—by their own wastes or by antibiotics—or they get eaten, but if they avoid all those kinds of fates they just go on dividing forever.
“Complex Earthly organisms are different, but that’s because there’s a sense in which a multicelled organism is just a transitional phase in the life of a single-celled organism. As the old saying has it, a chicken is just an egg’s way of making more eggs. So is a human being. A complex organism is just a reproductive mechanism whose necessity is temporary, and which therefore has obsolescence built in.
“As multicellular reproductive systems became more and more complex, of course, it became much easier to think of them as the ends and the eggs as the means rather than the other way around—and once they learned to think for themselves, that seemed to be the only way to see it. We humans see our mortal multicellular aspects as ourselves because those are the aspects that do the seeing, while those of our eggs that attain emortality by fusing with sperm and going on to make more and more of themselves have always been mute, microscopic, and increasingly irrelevant to adult concerns.
“But suppose things had been different. Suppose complexity had been invented by single-celled organisms not merely as the temporary means of manufacturing more single-celled organisms, with sexual variations, but as authenticmulticellular extrapolations of their simpler ancestors. Suppose that these multicellular extrapolations retained the same innate emortality as their single-celled ancestors, reproducing in the same fashion, by binary fission. There would still be selective advantages in inventing sex, because it would provide the same useful means of shuffling genes around—but there would also be selective advantages in retaining and refining other kinds of reproductive apparatus—apparatus that would free complex organisms from the necessity of reverting to their single-celled phase in every generation.”