Текст книги "Dark Ararat"

Автор книги: Brian Stableford

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PART TWO

Delving into the Past

SIXTEEN

Had the landing worked out exactly as planned it would only have been necessary for Matthew to step down onto the new world’s surface, exactly as he had imagined doing. Unfortunately, the braking shuttle had been driven by the wind into an inconvenient stand of treelike structures, where the parachute-web had become entangled with the branches. Although the capsule itself was far too heavy to be prevented from descending to solid ground it had come to a rest at an awkward tilt.

The hatchway from which Matthew had to make his escape was three meters above the ground and his egress was blocked by clustered “leaves,” which bore more resemblance to plastic plates and leathery fans than the leaves of Earthly trees. Some of these structures had shattered, leaving jagged shards hanging loosely from broken branches, but the majority were whole, their more elastic elements having grudgingly made way for the arrival of the capsule in their midst.

He could see through the tangle that there wasa crowd hurrying to greet him—seven strong, as he had hoped—but they were still some way off, descending a slope made treacherous by loose gravel. He knew that he must be almost completely hidden from them, and had not space to wave a greeting. The manner of his entrance was obviously going to leave much to be desired: he would have to force his way through the purple tangle in a most ungainly fashion, confused as much by the peculiar textures of the barrier as by the sudden recovery of almost all his Earthly weight.

“Can you get down?” Vince Solari asked, having divined that there were problems.

“It’s okay,” Matthew assured him, after further investigation. “Not many thorns, no vicious wildlife. It’s just a matter of treading carefully.”

Fortunately, the branches of the dendrite seemed strong enough and dense enough to facilitate a gradual descent. He hesitated slightly over the business of thrusting himself into their midst, because he was wary of the sudden intimate contact with any local life-form, no matter how innocuous it seemed to be, but he wanted to proceed with an appropriate boldness and he did.

The twisted “boughs” of the dendrite looked and felt more like a work of art than an active organism, the foundations in which the plates and fans were set having a texture more like vulcanized rubber than wood. He was glad that there would be no need to handle any of the bulbous structures that were suspended from the end of each branch, although he had no reason to think that they were dangerous.

Eventually, he arrived on the ground and scrambled out into the open.

By this time the people he had seen approaching were all gathered about the thicket, but they hung back and waited for him to emerge, having realized that pressing forward would only make things more difficult.

Lynn Gwyer was the first to step forward and the only one to hug him, although Ikram Mohammed’s greeting was only marginally less enthusiastic. It was Ikram Mohammed who introduced him to the others, but the round of handshakes was hectically confused. He had expected to be able to recognize the faces readily enough from the photographs Vince Solari had displayed on the wallscreen, but the heavy-duty smartsuits made more difference than he had expected to their coloring and their hairstyles. Maryanne Hyder had preserved her blond tresses, albeit in a more economical form, but Lynn Gwyer had opted to go bald. Dulcie Gherardesca’s scars were no longer visible beneath the extra dermal layer and Godert Kriefmann looked a good deal younger than his picture. Tang Dinh Quan and Rand Blackstone were the only two who had contrived to maintain their Earthly appearances; the fact that Blackstone was wearing a wide-brimmed hat and carrying a rifle only served to emphasize his image.

Matthew was slightly disappointed by the hesitancy of so many of their responses, and wondered for a moment whether they had mistaken him for the policeman sent to interrogate them, improbable as that might seem. It only took a few seconds, however, to realize that they were almost as awkward with one another as they were with him. It occurred to him that they might not have assembled into a single company for some time. They were, apparently, divided among themselves. Bernal Delgado’s death had presumably emphasized those divisions rather than bringing them together.

The manner in which the capsule had come to rest posed obvious problems so far as unloading the cargo was concerned, but the difficulties should have been easily overcome. As soon as Rand Blackstone began barking orders the mood of the seven seemed to suffer a further deterioration. No one actually started a quarrel over the tall man’s dubious right of command, and the instructions he gave were sensible enough, but the resentment was almost palpable. Having been briefed by Solari, Matthew had no difficulty figuring out that Tang Dinh Quan and Maryanne Hyder were the two most seriously at odds with the Australian, and that none of the other scientists wanted to take his side unequivocally.

“What’s the hurry?” Matthew asked, when he had tried and failed to introduce the newly arrived Vince Solari to the company. “There’s nothing in there likely to rot.”

“It’s going to rain,” was the answer he got from Blackstone. A glance at the sky told him that it was true, although it hardly seemed excuse enough for the impoliteness.

The blatant tokenism of the responses Solari did receive to his tentative greetings suggested that the seven were exceedinglyunenthusiastic about welcoming the policeman into their midst, but Matthew wasn’t certain whether that could be taken as a sign of collective guilt. Unhappily, he let Solari draw him aside, so that they would not inhibit Blackstone’s attempts to organize a human chain to begin unshipping the cargo.

“The doctor was right about the weight,” Solari complained. “It doesn’t feel too oppressive, as yet, but it does feel distinctly peculiar.”

Matthew had been too preoccupied with the minutiae of his descent to pay too much heed to the restoration of nearly all his Earthly weight, but as soon as Solari mentioned it he became acutely conscious of the additional drag. As the policemen said, it didn’t feel toouncomfortable, as yet, but it did feel odd. The oddness didn’t seem to be confined within him, though—it seemed to have accommodated itself automatically to the general alienness of the environment.

It wasn’t until he concentrated hard on his own inner state that Matthew realized that his heart was pounding and that his breathing was awkward. His internal technology had masked the extra effort, but he realized that even standing still was putting a strain on him. Adaptation to the new gravity regime was going to take time.

He looked up reflexively, in the direction from which he had come, almost as if he expected to see Hopeglinting in the sky. Even the sun was invisible behind a mass of gray clouds, but there was a margin of clear sky visible behind the hilltops in what Matthew assumed to be the north. The sky was blue, but not the pure pale blue of Earth’s sky; there was a hint of purple there too.

In every other direction, the purple coloration of the landscape seemed to leap out at his wandering gaze in a fashion akin to insult, if not to flagrant contempt. The color was not in the least unexpected, of course, but everything he had seen on Hope’s screens—even the large wallscreen—had been bordered and contained. The colors had been true, but the frame surrounding them had robbed them of a certain awe-inspiring vividness, and of their subtler sensual context.

Matthew had imagined stepping down onto alien soil a thousand times before, amid vegetation that was as bizarre as he could visualize, but he had seen too many “alien planets” in VE melodramas to be prepared for the sensory immediacy of the real thing. Even the best VE suits were incapable of duplicating the complexity of real touch sensations, let alone the senses of smell and taste. His surface-suit, by contrast, was geared to making the most of all the molecules whose passage was not forbidden. The air of the new world presumably smelled and tasted even more peculiar than it was allowed to seem to him, but the seeming was all the more striking to a man who had been enclosed in sterilized recycled air since the moment of his reawakening, and for some considerable time before.

Matthew felt dizzy. His reawakened senses reeled, and he had to take a sudden step back.

“Are you okay, Matthew?” Ikram Mohammed asked. He was the only one who had paused in his work long enough to take note of Matthew’s reactions. Blackstone had organized the others to cut and shape an easily navigable path to the hatchway, and they still seemed more than ready to direct their resentful attention exclusively to the Australian rather than the newcomers.

“We’re fine, Ike,” Matthew assured him. “Just give us a minute or two to get our heads together.”

Vince Solari stood on one leg, experimentally, then on the other. “Not so bad, all things considered,” was his judgment. “Could be worse, I guess.” Although the direct reference was to the renewal of his weight, his tone suggested that he felt that the unreadiness of his suspects to approve of his arrival was a trifle overdone.

The bubble-domes of Base Three were not visible from where they stood, although Matthew assumed that Milyukov’s boast about the accuracy of his delivery system had been justified. The expectant crowd could not have assembled so quickly had the base been more than three or four hundred meters away.

Matthew was still clutching the bag containing his personal possessions, but he finally condescended to clip it to his belt. He rubbed his hands as if in anticipation of getting to work, but he resisted the temptation to force his way back into the tangled vegetation in pursuit of the machete-wielding scientists. He suspected that his Earth-trained reflexes were not yet sufficiently reaccommodated to let him grapple with the branches as skillfully as his new companions, and would certainly betray him if he tried to take a place in the human chain that was now taking definitive shape.

“Sorry about this, Matthew,” Ikram Mohammed said, waving an arm at the remainder of the company, who were working away with their backs to Matthew and Solari. “We’re not used to visitors, and Milyukov’s made us wait for an extra week to get the last few pieces of the boat.” He stepped closer and lowered his voice before adding: “He said that it didn’t make sense to send two consignments—which is true, of course, but it didn’t stop us thinking that what he really wanted to do was make sure that we all had to stay at the base until his detective arrived to finger one of us as a murderer. No offense, Mr. Solari.”

“None taken,” Solari assured him, insincerely.

“I’ll talk to you later, Matthew,” the genomicist said. “Got to pull my weight. Don’t try to join in yet—wait till you get your land legs. Look around.”

Matthew did as he was told. He took another look at the sullen sky, from which the first raindrops were just beginning to fall, rattling the leaves of the dendrites. He searched the bushes for signs of animal life, but nothing seemed to be moving. There was hardly any wind, and everything but the thicket where the capsule had come down seemed still and somnolent. The ground between the stands of trees was mostly bare, exposing black rock and gray scree slopes. The more distant slopes were already blurring behind curtains of rain, except where the ribbon of bluish sky still maintained its defiant stance. There, the many shades of lilac and purple stood out far more clearly.

But I’m standing here on my own two feet, Matthew reminded himself, naked but for an artificial skin that’s no more than a millimeter thick save for the soles of my feet and the codpiece. It’s a strange place, but it’s a place where human beings can breathe, and live, and work, and play. It’s a place that could be home. Isn’t it?

One or two of the reluctant laborers were glancing back at him now, some more furtively than others. Lynn Gwyer flashed him a smile, rolling her eyes apologetically as if to assure him that she would be glad to offer a proper welcome when the crowd had dispersed. Tang Dinh Quan’s glances were speculative, trying to weigh him up. Godert Kriefmann and Dulcie Gherardesca seemed to be paying more attention to Solari than to him. Maryanne Hyder didn’t seem to be meeting anybody’s eye—certainly not Blackstone’s—although there was something about her bearing that suggested that her fierce concentration was by no means evidence of self-sufficiency.

“At least the crew were all on the same side,” Solari whispered in Matthew’s ear, having obviously made similar observations of his own.

“No they weren’t,” Matthew replied, in a similarly confidential tone. “They just put on a better act for our sake. Here, the strains show—and with Bernal not long dead, a victim to violence, I’m not surprised.” But they are all on the same side, he added, privately. Underneath the stresses and the strains, they know that. They have to be on the same side, and so do we. The only undecided matter is how well we’re going to play the game.

Enough cargo had now been transferred back to the bare ground to facilitate its separation into individual units. More glances were being exchanged as the potential carriers measured the mass and awkwardness of various piles. It was, inevitably, Rand Blackstone who stepped up to one that seemed too much for any one man and said: “I’ll take this one.” Before picking up his chosen burden, though, he picked up the rifle he had set down on his arrival—the rifle that he carried to protect his fellows from attack by humanoids that none of them had ever seen—and handed it to Matthew. “Can you take care of this?” he demanded.

The weapon seemed ridiculously heavy, and its length made it remarkably inconvenient, but Matthew resisted the temptation to pass it on to Solari. “Okay,” he said.

“You’d better come back with me, Matthew,” Blackstone added. “Nothing much you can do here—can’t go throwing stuff around down here when you’ve been up in half-gravity for the last few days. If you didn’t hurt yourself you’d be sure to drop something.”

Matthew took immediate offence at this assumption, although he knew that it was not entirely unjustified. He realized that the Australian wanted to separate himself from the rest of the company, and to take Matthew with him. Matthew’s first impulse—like everyone else’s, apparently—was to refuse to play along with the Australian. He looked around for a preferable companion. “I’ll wait for Ike,” he said.

Ikram Mohammed turned around, obviously out of breath. The genomicist’s surface-suit did not allow the least bead of sweat to show upon his face, but it did not inhibit the deeper coloration that spread across his cheeks and forehead. “You go on, Matt,” he said. “It’s going to take some time to sort this stuff out.”

“I’ll be back as soon as I can,” Blackstone put in, smugly.

Matthew tried to catch Lynn Gwyer’s eye, feeling oddly irritated that none of the others seemed in the least eager to make his acquaintance. Even those he had not met must have known his name. Like Vince Solari, they must have seen him on TV. He had been a famous man, at least in the circles these people had inhabited. He was fifty-eight light-years from home and three years late out of the freezer, but he could not believe that he had become less interesting than the inanimate objects shipped down with him. He noticed Tang Dinh Quan eyeing him surreptitiously yet again, but the moment Matthew’s gaze tried to fix upon his eyes the biochemist looked away.

Well, Matthew thought, if they aren’t deliberately shielding a murderer, they’re sure as hell ashamed of something.

Lynn Gwyer came over to him, but even she hesitated. “Go back with Rand,” she advised him. “You’ll need to take it easy for a while, and Ike’s right about needing to sort this stuff out. I’ll catch up with you in half an hour or so.”

“We made it, Lynn,” Matthew said, softly. “We made it. Across the void, across the centuries. You might have grown used to it, but I haven’t.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, only a trifle belatedly. “I do know how you feel. I only wish that Bernal could be here too.”

Mercifully, Blackstone refrained from pointing out that if Delgado were still able to be here, Matthew would still be in the deep-freeze.

“I’m sorry that we had to meet under such unfortunate circumstances, Dr. Gwyer,” Solari said, watching her like a hawk.

The bald woman was content to stare back at the detective as if she were watching a dangerous dog for signs of imminent aggression.

“Come on, Matthew,” Blackstone said, gruffly. “We’re wasting time.” He set off without waiting for Matthew to give any indication that he was ready to follow his lead.

Matthew’s last recourse was to lock eyes with Vince Solari. “Come on, Vince,” he said. “Better do as we’re told.” Solari, who must have known that Blackstone’s careful repetition of Matthew’s name had been a deliberate snub, seemed grateful for the invitation.

SEVENTEEN

Matthew and Solari set off in the Australian’s wake, but Matthew made no attempt to draw level, preferring to keep company with Solari. For the moment, at least, Blackstone seemed content with that arrangement.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Matthew said to Solari, speaking loudly enough for Blackstone to hear in the hope of easing the tension. “It looked good on screen, but that’s a poor preparation for the real thing.”

Blackstone shrugged slightly, as if adjusting his load. Beautifulwas obviously not the first adjective that sprang to his mind nowadays when he looked around him. Solari, on the other hand, readily followed the lead of Matthew’s gaze as it swept through a 180 degree tour.

The shallow slope they were ascending was one of many. Although the terrain was insufficiently precipitous to be called mountainous it was not gentle enough to be merely hilly. Had its physical geography not been so strangely dressed Matthew might have been reminded of Scandinavia, but the contrast between Scandinavia’s evergreen forests and the purple “trees” was too great to facilitate any such comparison. Pines grew very straight, and their needles and cones had always seemed to Matthew to be decorous and disciplined. Nothing here grew straight; what each of the dendrites they passed had instead of a trunk and boughs was like something that might be plucked out of a chaotic heap of corkscrews and lathe-turnings. Nor was there anything in the least decorous or disciplined about what the local vegetation had instead of leaves and cones.

If the dendrites bore ready comparison to anything, Matthew thought, it was absurdly overdressed dancers in some cheap casino show, all ruffles, pompoms and flares … and yet, there was not the slightest suggestion that these monstrous growths were ready to hurl themselves into an energetic cancan. There was, as he had already noted, an eerie stillnesshere. The rain was noisy in the branches, but the branches did not shake and rustle as Earthly branches would have done. They creaked a little, and moaned rather plaintively, but they gave the impression that they would bend, however grudgingly, to any pressure.

There was no birdsong to disturb the air, nor any insect hum, but there were other whispers at the very threshold of aural perception, like white noise magnified by dead Earthly seashells into the sound of waves breaking softly on a very distant shore. There was nothing in his memory to which Matthew could meaningfully connect that barely audible murmur. On Earth, tiny sounds that were never consciously apprehended could nevertheless be categorized and filed by the brain according to a habit-formed system. Here … well, he decided, here there was a lot of learning still to do, a lot of custom yet to be established.

“It doesn’t matter that Earth didn’t die,” Vince Solari said, joining in with Matthew’s determination to make the most of the moment in spite of the awkward attitude of his suspects. “What matters is that we’re here. We’ve found an island in the void: a haven; a land of opportunity. Our Ararat.”

Solari’s eyes were roaming the horizons that could be glimpsed between the twisted purple masses. Matthew wondered whether he was trying to deflect Rand Blackstone’s attention from the fact that he was a policeman—but even if that were the case, he sounded perfectly sincere.

“This planet,” Rand Blackstone said over his shoulder, with enviable certainty, “is called Tyre. New Earth is for unimaginative sentimentalists. Ararat is a crew name. Murex is too fancy. Down here, this is Tyre, and always will be. Might as well take it aboard now—you won’t be going back to crew territory, whatever Tang may think.”

An old-style alpha male, Matthew thought. Playing the role of colonist so zealously that he’s become a parody. Now that Blackstone’s gun had had the full force of the new world’s gravity upon it for several minutes it had begun to put a severe strain on his arms, so he shifted its weight on to his shoulder, trying to disregard the absurdly macho pose that he was assuming. His legs were already protesting the effort of walking, but he only had to shorten his stride by a fraction to cause Blackstone to take note of his weakness. The Australian was quick to assure him that the walk to the bubble-complex was “very short,” without “too many” upslopes.

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.”

“So what caused today’s big argument?” Solari wanted to know.

Blackstone returned just in time to field the question. “The boat,” he said, succinctly. “Four berths, one of which fell vacant when Delgado was killed. If anyone was its captain, he was, which means that no one knows how to decide whether the empty slot goes to Matthew here, or whether Tang should take it.”

“I should get it,” Matthew was quick to say. “I’m down here as Bernal’s replacement.”

“And Lynn will back you up. Ike Mohammed too. They think that’s a majority, since they were the other two-thirds of the original transfer team and still are two-thirds of the remnant of the boat’s intended crew. Tang isn’t happy with that way of deciding things. Maryanne’s on Tang’s side in everything now. Dulcie didn’t want to commit herself; God never does; I wanted to meet you before casting a vote, if I have one. Democracy in action!”