“Jail, maybe?”
“Maybe. But holding out on us isn’t the right way to win us to their side, is it? Quite the reverse, in fact.” He was speaking as much to the hypothetical eavesdroppers as to Solari, and the policeman understood that.
“Right,” Solari confirmed. “If I were the captain, I’d be down here right now, laying everything on the line. I can’t understand why he isn’t.”
“Me neither,” Matthew lied. He presumed that the reason the captain wasn’t laying his cards on the table was that the captain wanted to know exactly where his new guests stood before doing so. The captain wanted to know which way they were likely to jump, once they understood what was at stake and how many different sides there were in the conflict. But to what lengths might he be willing to go, if he decided that they were likely to take a side of which he didn’t approve?
“Well,” Solari said, “it could have been worse. We might never have come out of the freezer at all. We might have come out without our most cherished memories. The mere fact that we’re here makes us winners—and if nobody else is prepared to celebrate, let’s raise a salute to one another.”
Matthew raised his arm willingly enough, and met Vince Solari’s desperately tired gaze as frankly and as forthrightly as he could.
“Congratulations, Vince,” he said. “A tiny step in humankind’s conquest of the galaxy, but a great leap forward for you and me.”
“Congratulations, Matt,” Solari replied. “Wherever we are, we sure as hell made it. Whatever we’re mixed up in, we’re already way ahead of the game. Amen.”
“Amen,” Matthew echoed, and meant it.
FOUR
The smartsuits Matthew and Solari were given to wear while their surface suits were being tailored were very similar to the ones they’d worn in the months before being frozen down, and not much different from the ones Matthew had worn on Earth—he’d never been a follower of fashion or a devotee of exotic display. They were, however, conspicuously unlike the white exterior presented by Nita Brownell or the pale blue-gray one manifested by Frans Leitz, which were presumably the “specialized ship suits” they weren’t being given. The main color of the smartsuits was modifiable, but only from dark blue to black and back again, and such style as they possessed was similarly restricted. Matthew guessed that if he and Solari were to go a-wandering they would stick out like sore thumbs in any line of sight they happened to cross.
The doctor told them that they’d get their personal possessions back “in due course.”
By the time that he and Solari finally got to eat an authentic meal, in the middle of the second day of their new life, Matthew was expecting a veritable orgy of sensual delights. He was disappointed; the flavors were too bland for his taste, the textures too meltingly soft and the net effect slightly nauseating. The doctor and her assistant had left them to it, so they had no one to complain to but one another.
“It is the food, or us?” Solari asked.
“Mainly us, I think,” Matthew told him. “Our expectations were probably too high. Until our stomachs are back to normal they’ll be sending out queasiness signals. On the other hand, the crew have had seven hundred years of cultural isolation, so their tastes have probably changed quite markedly.”
“Have to wait till we get to the surface, then,” Solari said, philosophically. “At least they’ll have had three years practice growing Earthly crops.”
“I don’t suppose it’ll be a great deal better,” Matthew said, “given that their staples will be whole-diet wheat-and rice-mannas. If we’re lucky, though, these gutskins they’re going to extend from our lips to our arseholes via our intestinal labyrinths will enhance taste sensations rather than muffling them, and nausea will be out of the question.”
“I’m beginning to get a sense of how long I’ve been away,” Solari mused. “The fitter I get, the more obvious the differences become. Bound to happen, of course.”
“It was always going to be a wrench,” Matthew agreed. “But things are definitely more awkward than we could have wished. I suppose we have to be patient, with ourselves as well as our careful hosts. We’ll rediscover all the pleasures, given time—and we’ll probably find that the keyboards attached to those hoods and display screens are a lot more user-friendly than they seem at first glance. Seven hundred years of progress can’t have obliterated the underlying logic. Once we get used to them, we’ll presumably have access to the ship’s data banks—and then we can catch up with allthe news, good and bad alike.”
Solari looked over his shoulder at the consoles behind his bedhead, then up at the hoods and dangling keyboards. He pulled down a hood and fitted it over his head and eyes, but had to lift it up again to reach for a keyboard.
Now that the two of them were free to sit up in their beds, or even reconfigure the beds as chairs, it was easy enough to bring down the hoods over their heads or activate wraparound screens, and use any of half a dozen touchpads. Unfortunately, no one had taken the trouble as yet to brief them on the use of the controls. In theory, everything they might want to know was probably at their fingertips, but Hope’s crew seemed to be in no hurry to educate their fingertips in their art of searching.
“We could probably figure them out, given time,” Solari said, as he pushed the hood back up again. “But will we have the time? They seem keen to send us down to the surface beforewe can figure out exactly what’s going on up here. There’s a hell of a lot to be learned and we’ve been thrown in at the deep end. The colony’s first bases are already in place, if not exactly up and running—although the endeavor’s obviously made enough progress to produce its first major crime.”
“Its first unsolvedmajor crime,” Matthew said. “The first, at any rate, that has proved so awkwardly problematic as to provoke demands for an investigation by fresh and practiced eyes—and a replacement for the victim. Thrown in at the deep endis probably an understatement.”
Solari had decided that he had had enough to eat some time before Matthew finally decided to give up. The detective had pushed his plate away in order to begin playing with the overhead apparatus, but he gave up on that now in favor of more adventurous action. He took one last swig of water before swinging his legs over the side of the bed and dropping lightly to the floor. Once he had tested the strength of his limbs he went to the door of the room and pressed the release-pad.
The door slid open immediately, affording Matthew some slight reassurance, although he knew that it wasn’t actually necessary to lock a door in order to secure a prison.
When Solari stepped out into the corridor the door slid shut behind him, cutting off the sound of his voice as soon as he had begun to speak.
Matthew shoved his own food away and took a last sip of water before stepping down from his own bed. He looked speculatively at the door, but there was a certain luxury in being alone for the first time since his emergence from SusAn, so he took time out to dispose of the degradable plates and utensils they had employed.
By the time he had finished clearing up the door had opened again and Solari was coming back into the room.
The policeman came to stand very close to him and spoke in a confidential whisper, although he must have known that lowering his voice was unlikely to be enough to prevent his being overheard.
“There’s a man standing guard outside,” he said. “He says his name’s Riddell. Same uniform as the boy—except for the sidearm. Same feet too. He says he’ll be only too glad to take one or both of us anywhere we might want to go, when we’re well enough.”
“What kind of sidearm?” Matthew wanted to know.