Текст книги "Dark Ararat"

Автор книги: Brian Stableford

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Текущая страница: 17 (всего у книги 27 страниц)

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.

“That too is a question that we have not aired in public,” the biochemist said. “It is probable that we all have our own reasons for letting the matter lie. I cannot speak for anyone else, but I suspect that I am not the only one here to feel a profound sense of embarrassment at the mere fact of the crime. I cannot believe that there is anyone here, including the murderer, who does not regret what happened very deeply. If that regret were not so painful, perhaps we would have been more interested in discovering the facts. But there are other factors too. For one thing, I have never felt endangered myself. I do not claim that we all know one another as intimately as might be expected, given the time we have spent here in isolation from the remainder of the colony—we are scientists, after all, accustomed to the introspection of that calling as well as to the distancing effects of the media of communication that dominated the Earth from which we came—but a degree of trust has grown up between us. I cannot suspect anyone here of being a secret psychopath, or of harboring evil motives. I can only imagine that whoever killed Bernal Delgado did so in a moment of sudden anger, entirely without meaning to—and that having done so, he or she is extremely unlikely ever to allow themselves another such lapse. Whoever the killer might be, I have never felt any emotion toward them but pity. Perhaps it is a failure of duty on my part, but that is why I have never sought to increase the shame of the deed by exposure.”

Matthew marveled all over again at the man’s pedantry—although it was by no means unexpected in someone who must have learned English as a second or third language, because it was the language of science—but he did not doubt for a moment that Tang was perfectly sincere. He looked around yet again, half-expecting to be able to identify the murderer by means of the tears in his or her eyes, but most of the faces gathered about the table were studies in stoniness.

“To put it bluntly, Vince,” Ikram Mohammed said, “we don’t really care who did it. We sympathize with their secret misery. We can’t really see ourselves as the cast of an old-fashioned murder mystery, each living in terror of the possibility that we might be the next victim. There’s been no shortage of other puzzles to distract us.”

Vincent Solari had listened to all of this quite impassively, giving not the slightest indication of horror, amusement, disgust, or any other plausible response. When he realized that everyone was now waiting for his judgment of Tang’s speech he had to rouse himself slightly. “Okay,” he said. “So, the general feeling is that you don’t want me to tell you who did it, and that you’d rather I stopped looking for the evidence I need to make a water-tight case.”

Nobody answered that.

“What about you, Matthew?” Solari asked. “What do youthink I ought to do?”

Matthew had no answer ready. “I suppose,” he said, after a moment’s reflection, “that it would depend on the motive. Whywas Bernal killed?”

“So far as I can judge,” Solari told him, “it was exactly what Tang says: a sudden outburst of anger. A crime of passion, if you like. There must have been something deeper behind it, but I no longer think it was premeditated and I don’t think there was any intention to kill. Delgado was very unlucky—nine times out of ten, the blow would have been trivial. Given that it wasn’t, his IT would have been able to pull him through a further nine times out of ten. What happened, in my opinion, is that somebody found him faking the alien artifacts and overreacted, too quickly and too extremely for their own IT to damp it down.”

Solari hadn’t told anyone that it appeared to be Bernal who had made the “alien” artifacts, and Matthew had only let it slip to Tang. If Tang had passed the news on it wasn’t obvious. Matthew concluded that Solari was trying another ploy, in the hope of finding out who already knew what he had only just discovered. He couldn’t help feeling a slight pang of regret at having given the game away, at least to Tang.

“Why would Delgado be faking alien artifacts?” Rand Blackstone said, his voice redolent with sincere disbelief.

“I don’t know,” Solari admitted.

“It’s possible that he wasn’t fakingthem at all,” Matthew put in scrupulously. “It’s possible that he was trying to put himself imaginatively in the city-builders’ shoes, trying to figure out what might have happened to them.”

“Really?” Solari came back, feigning incredulity.

“Verstehen,”Dulcie Gherardesca put in, softly. “Intuitive understanding. The basis on which members of a human society can obtain understanding of other societies, with different norms and rules.”

“And individuals of one another,” Matthew added. “I can’t believe that a man like Bernal would ever have planned to perpetrate a scientific fraud. I think he was trying to put himself in the place of an alien, by doing the only thing that he knew for sure that the aliens did: making tools out of natural glass harvested from local plants. Maybe someone who found out what he was doing leapt to the wrong conclusion, but we mustn’t be tempted to do the same.”

“I’m prepared to buy that,” Solari said, although Matthew immediately recognized it as another ploy, inviting a confession. “It was an accident, then. A misunderstanding.”

No one offered a confession, or gave any sign of wanting to do so.

But we’re not all here, Matthew thought. And Vince has only talked to one person since last telling me he had no suspect. Maybe Blackstone has the wrong suspect in mind. But if Solari’s fishing, he must think he’s fishing in the right pond. Which implies that Maryanne Hyder didn’t do it—but that she might know who did.

When the silence had gone on long enough, Solari let out a slight sigh, and said: “Okay. Nobody wants to come clean. Nobody wants to know. Nobody wants to hold up the boat trip. Fair enough—if the excursion means more to you than the murder, you might as well exercise your priorities. I’m just a humble policeman, after all. You’re scientists.”

Even Matthew felt the contemptuous sting of that remark, but he also felt compelled to leap to the defense of his new colleagues. “There really are bigger questions at stake, Vince,” he said. “And there’s a point that Tang didn’t make. Whoever killed Bernal reacted atypically, and part of the reason they reacted atypically is that everyone here is in a radically alien environment, isolated from the main body of the investigative team. Everyone here is uneasy and anxious, and no matter how ashamed they are of being frightened—because walking on the surface of an alien but Earthlike world is exactly what everyone here signed up for—they can’t help being prey to fear. The world played its part in Bernal’s death, and it might yet be the cause of many more. No matter how determined we may be to follow through our good intentions, there isn’t anyone here who doesn’t know that the crew jumped the gun in their haste to be rid of their inconvenient cargo. This world might be a potential death trap, not just for the nine of us but for everyone at Base One and everyone still in SusAn.

“We need to know what the chances really are of establishing a colony here, and we need to know it sooner rather than later. Milyukov shouldn’t be exerting further pressure on us with arbitrary deadlines, but that’s a trivial matter: the real deadline will be set by the world itself, and we have to make haste to meet it even though we haven’t the slightest idea when it will fall. This trip downriver might not tell us anything definite, but it’s an opportunity we have to seize. It’s more important than knowing who killed Bernal, and far more important than figuring out what we ought to do with the murderer. If that’s a scientist’s view rather than a policeman’s … well, so be it. Bernal was my friend, but I have far more important things to worry about just now than wreaking vengeance on his killer.”

Solari considered this, and then shrugged. Matthew had been fairly confident that he would. He’d already tested the policeman’s response to the phrase “potential death trap.”

“Okay,” Solari said. “The boat sails tomorrow, with the agreed crew. I stay here with Rand, Tang, Godert, and Maryanne. I do my best to make myself useful. No arrests, no charges, no reports to Base One or Hope. Until you get back, at least. Ifyou get back.”

“If we don’t,” Ikram Mohammed said, quietly, “I think we’ll have proved that there are issues that take precedence—and your suspect will probably be dead.”

It was the closest anyone had come to naming a name or making an admission, but it stopped there. The genomicist said nothing more, and no one had anything further to add. It said something for the tolerance of the assembled suspects that they were perfectly happy to eat together, with Solari in their midst. The main course was imitation pizza whose toppings were spread on a base that combined imported wheat-manna with local produce; Matthew was glad to discover that the synthetic cheese and tomato masked the inadequate palatability of the base. Had the conversation been less tense it would certainly have been the most enjoyable meal he had had since waking from SusAn—but he put both those circumstances down to the fact that he had had an unusually tiring day.

When the assembly finally broke up and Matthew returned to his bunk, accompanied by Solari, he took the first possible opportunity to say: “Okay, it’s just you and me now. Who did it?”

He was only mildly astonished by Solari’s reply, which was: “There is no just you and me, Matt. You sided with them. You endorsed their willful ignorance. If you want to know, you can work it out for yourself. All you have to do is look closely at the data in the automatic logs, compare the alibis and ask the right people the right questions. Never mind the motive: concentrate on the opportunity.”

“Fair enough,” Matthew said. “Maybe I’ll go see how Maryanne’s feeling before I turn in. I could probably do with a few words of advice about how to cope with worm stings, in case the worst comes to the worst.”

TWENTY-FIVE

Maryanna Hyder was alone in the accommodation she had shared with Bernal Delgado, but Matthew was not the first visitor she had had since Solari had played his hand. Godert Kriefmann had left the common room before anyone else in order to check her condition.

“God’s already asked me,” she said, as soon as she saw Matthew. “I didn’t finger anyone and I certainly didn’t confess. If it was something I said that tipped the policeman off it was something whose significance I didn’t realize myself.”

“How are you feeling?” Matthew asked, figuring that he might as well go through with his cover story anyway. He sat down on the folding chair that had been set beside the bed to accommodate visitors.

“Much better,” was the answer. “No pain, thanks to my IT, but the cost is that I feel somewhat disconnected from my body—not quite here, even though there’s no place else to be.”

“I know the feeling,” Matthew confirmed.

“They have much better IT on Earth now, allegedly,” she told him. “A member of the new human race probably wouldn’t even have felt the sting, and certainly wouldn’t be laid up with it.”

“The new human race,” Matthew echoed. “Is that what Tang calls them?”

“It’s what they call themselves, according to Captain Milyukov.”

“You seem a trifle skeptical,” Matthew observed.

“Do I? Everything we’ve been told about the state of affairs back home comes from Milyukov. Milyukov has a vested interest in persuading us that we can get better support from home than we can from Hope, if we can just hang on until the cavalry arrives. Not that we’ll know that it’s even set off for another hundred-and-thirteen years.”

“Do you think Milyukov’s lying?”

She moved her head slightly from side to side, stirring the silky halo of her blond hair. She didn’t think that the captain was lying, exactly. It was just that she was reserving judgment as to the manner in which he had filtered and organized the truth.

“Tang thinks that we should be content to hold the fort until they arrive,” Matthew observed.

“I know. Lately, I’ve begun to agree with him, albeit reluctantly.”

“Why reluctantly?”

“If we withdraw to orbit, we’ll be lucky to live long enough to see the beginning of serious colonization, let alone its completion. The crew signed on for a multigenerational enterprise, but I didn’t. And look what it did to the crew.”

“What did Bernal think?” Matthew asked. It was an innocent question, but she didn’t take it that way.

“We didn’t quarrel about it,” she told him, defensively. “I told your friend that even if we had, the quarrel would never have turned violent. Never. Anyway, he hadn’t made up his mind. He was determined not to make up his mind until he’d been downriver.”

“In search of ska?”

“In search of whatever there is to be found. God says Tang stood aside to let you take Bernal’s place. You must have impressed him.”

“I’m not sure that I did. I think he was content with the fact that he’d obviously impressed me. He knows that I’ve got an open mind, because it hasn’t had time to fill up. More important, though, he simply doesn’t want to go. He doesn’t want to go out on a limb, not because he’s a coward but because he understands as well as anyone does how badly the crew have screwed things up. He wants to take his work back to orbit because he thinks that’s the right place for it until we know a lot more about the mysteries of Tyre. He’s grateful to me for being so enthusiastic to put my head into the lion’s mouth instead of his.”

“Bernal didn’t think it was so very dangerous.”

“But you didn’t want him to go,” Matthew guessed.

“That was personal.”

“And you didn’t quarrel about it. Did you know he was making imitation alien spearheads and arrowheads way out in the fields?”

Again she shook her head, more vigorously this time.

Matthew contemplated going back to his room and leaving her to sleep, but he hesitated. There were a couple of questions on the mental list he’d been compiling all day that she was best placed to answer, and he didn’t expect to have another conversation with her before the boat set off.

“If one of the local mammal-equivalents had met up with the critter you ran into,” he said, “it would presumably be dead.”

“Almost certainly,” she confirmed, although she was obviously puzzled by the change of tack.

“Why almost?”

“The toxin’s a blunt instrument, physiologically speaking. That’s why it works as well in the context of an alien metabolism as it does in target flesh—but it’s an organic venom, to which local organisms might be able to build up a degree of tolerance. Nonlethal stings inflicted by smaller organisms could provide an opportunity to do that.”

“Is it purely defensive, or could it also be a way of killing prey?”

The question increased her puzzlement, but again she provided a straight answer. “If you’d asked me yesterday,” she said, “I’d have guessed that it’s purely defensive—but I didn’t know how big they grew, then. That was a fearsome specimen. Trust me to walk right into it! Because they photosynthesize and don’t move around much in daylight they seem very meek, but they can move quite quickly when they need to. I’m not so sure now that they aren’t hunter-killers.”

“They canphotosynthesize,” Matthew said, issuing a mild correction. “But they don’t seem to be very enthusiastic, do they? They skulk in the shadows, even though they don’t seem to have much to fear from predators. At least, the little ones skulk in the shadows. How big do you think they are when they’re fully grown?”

“If you’d asked me yesterday …” she began, but left it at that. After a pause, she added: “Bernal said they probably had some surprises in store. He didn’t mention giants, but he did wonder whether the ones we’d seen might be immature. Ike had told him they had much bigger genomes than they were exhibiting, and he was trying to figure out why that might be.”

“Was he wondering whether they might be larval stages, capable of further metamorphosis into something completely different?”

“He mentioned the possibility,” Maryanne confirmed.

On a sudden impulse, Matthew said: “What did Bernal callthem? Not in his reports, but in his casual speech. Did he have some kind of nickname for them?”

Maryanne thought about that for a moment before saying: “He called them killer anemonesa couple of times—because the tentacle-cluster made them look like sea anemones.”

“ K-A,” Matthew said, immediately. “ S-K-A. Superkiller anemone. There are no seasons to speak of in these parts, so there’s never been any pressure on complex organisms to develop annual life cycles. They can take all the time they need, or all the time they want. We don’t have the slightest idea how long any of the local life-forms hang around if they don’t fall victim to predators or disease.”

“I’m not the best one to ask,” Maryanne pointed out. “But I don’t think Bernal knew. He did say something about the difficulty of adding chimerization to the sex-death equation. A wild variable, he called it.”

“The sex-death equation,” Matthew said. “That’s right. Never underestimate the power of a man’s favorite catchphrases. Back in sound-bite-land that was one of his ways of dramatizing the population problem.”

“I know,” she said. “I used to see him on TV when I was a kid.”

“Another latecomer to the ranks of the Chosen,” Matthew observed. “Did you see me too?”

“Probably,” she said. “I don’t really remember.”

His ego suitably deflated, Matthew muttered: “He was always the good-looking one—always attractive to the very young.”

“I’m an adult now,” she reminded him, tersely. “Only five years younger than Dulcie and ten years younger than Lynn, in terms of elapsedtime.”

“No insult was intended,” Matthew assured her. “What else did Bernal say about the killer anemones? Not the kind of stuff he’d put in his reports—the kind he’d produce when he was speculating, fantasizing? What did he have to say about superkiller anemones?”

“If he’d had anything at all to say, I’d have realized what skameant myself,” she told him, still annoyed in spite of his assurance that no insult had been intended. “He thought it was odd that the ecosphere seems so conspicuously underdeveloped, in terms of animal species, despite the fact that its complexity seemed so similar to that of Earth. He knew that the extant species had to have a hidden versatility that we hadn’t yet had the opportunity to observe, but he couldn’t figure out what it was for.”

“Reproduction,” Matthew said. “Or gradual chimerical renewal. Unless, of course, they’re the same thing. What did he tell you about gradual chimerical renewal?”

“He told me not to think in terms of werewolves,” she said, obviously having seized upon the same mythical bad example as Solari. “Nor insects. He thought we’d need to be more original than that.”

“Did he suggest any possible explanations for the fact that there don’t seem to be any insect-analogues here?”

“He thought it had something to do with the fact that sex didn’t seem to have caught on as an organism-to-organism sort of thing. He said that flight had more to do with sex than most people realized, and more to do with death than people who thought of souls taking wing for Heaven had ever dared to imagine.”

“It’s another part of the same equation,” Matthew realized, following the train of thought. “Death is so commonplace on Earth because it’s a correlate of the reliance on sex as a means of shuffling the genetic deck. Flight is so commonplace for the same reason: it’s at least as much a matter of bringing mates together and distributing eggs as it is of dodging predators. Flying insects occupy a privileged set of niches on Earth because of the role they play in pollination—a role that doesn’t seem to exist here, at least not on a day-to-day basis. Factoring chimerization into the sex-death equation must have all kinds of logical consequences that we’re ill-equipped to imagine, let alone work out in detail. To borrow another hoary catchphrase, this place might not just be queerer than we imagine, but queerer than we canimagine. Is it possible, do you think—is it even remotely conceivable—that the missing humanoids might be a lot more closely related to the worms than we’ve assumed, for the simple reason that everythinghere is much more closely related to everything else than we’ve assumed?”

“The genomics say no, according to Ike and Bernal,” she told him. “Almost all the chimeras we’ve analysed are cousin-aggregations, made up of closely related cells.”

“So closely related,” Matthew said, remembering what Tang had told him about the same matter, “that it’s difficult to see where the selective advantage lies. But what about the chimeras we haven’t analyzed, or even glimpsed? Probably queerer than we can imagine, even after three years of patient work—but Lityansky’s jumped to his optimistic conclusions half a lifetime too soon. My gut reaction was a lot cleverer than he was prepared to credit. Whatever hidden potential this world’s hoarding, it’s something we haven’t even begun to grasp.”

“There’s no real reason to think you’ll find it downriver if we haven’t found it here,” she pointed out, scrupulously.

“Bernal didn’t think so,” Matthew pointed out. “Why was that?”

“Simply because we’d looked here and not found anything very exciting,” she told him. “He thought that it was time to look somewhere else. He didn’t think they were ever going to find anything on Base One’s island, because the priority there is on usurpation of land, the production of Earth-analogue soils, and the growth of Earthly crops. Base Two’s attention is similarly restricted, with exploitation still taking a higher priority than exploration. The grasslands are the most extensive ecosystemic complexes on at least two of the four continents—but it was hope that was guiding Bernal’s expectations, not the calculus of probability.”

“I understand that,” Matthew told her.

“So do I,” she admitted. “But I’m biased. I loved him.”

“You weren’t the only one,” Matthew assured her. “You weren’t even the only one here, were you?”