“We’ve done the hard work,” Matthew told his companion. “Now we need the luck. We’ve kept them on tenterhooks long enough. It’s time for the denouement. Why aren’t they here? They were plenty curious enough when we first arrived—why have they suddenly turned shy? They didn’t even take the bait we left outside the bubble when I went to sleep last night. Why not?”
“Maybe they’ve got something else on their minds,” Ike suggested.
Matthew didn’t have to ask what that something else might be. They had Dulcie. Although they hadn’t left her body where her phone had fallen, they mighthave killed her and taken the body with them—but the likelihood was that she had been carried away alive. While they had her, still alive, they had a far more convenient focus for their curiosity than Matthew and Ike—and she wouldn’t die any time soon of hunger, even if she only had alien food to eat. A carbohydrate was a carbohydrate, and sugar was always sweet.
It all came down to Dulcie: Dulcie the anthropologist-turned-murderer-turned-ambassador; Dulcie the tarnished heroine.
“Do you think she’s all right?” Ike asked, having divined the reason for Matthew’s sudden descent into sobriety.
“Of course she is,” Matthew said, valiantly. “She’s in her element. This is what she was defrosted for, what she’s lived her whole life for. She’s fine. She’ll come through. She has to. We just have to spin out the story while we’re waiting. We have to do a session on feeding frenzies, speculate about the kinds of triggers that might set off orgies of chimerization and humanoid pyramid building. I got halfway through working out an analogy involving the boat, switching between engines as it turned around to go upstream—we can use that. There’s also a useful analogy to be drawn between the photosynthesizing pyramids and our bubble-domes. Maybe we can draw a useful analogy between the humanoids and the crewpeople, if we try hard enough….”
“Okay,” Ike said. “I get the picture. We go on and on until it’s done, no mater how silly it gets.”
“It’s not silly,” Matthew insisted, earnestly. “Even if only a tenth of it is true, that tenth is marvelous. We have to help the crew and colonists alike to understand that this business is far bigger than any biotech bonanza or potential death trap. It’s a whole new way of life. Maybe it isn’t better than sex, but it’s weirder. Remember what Dulcie said: sex divides, cooking unites.
“We have to stay here, Ike. We have to stay because it isn’t enough to let the aliens go their own way, culturally unpolluted. We have to help them out of their evolutionary blind alley. We have to extend them hospitality, share food, share technologies, share everything. We’re all on the same side, Ike, and we all have to realize that. Everybody on Hope—and I mean everybody, including Konstantin Milyukov—has to realize that destiny has put them here because here’s where it’s at, so they can be part of it too.
“Even though we’re making it all up, it’s not silly. It’s the most important work there is. However rough the draft might be, we’re writing chapter one of the story of the future of humankind, and all the stranger humankinds we’ve yet to meet.”
THIRTY-SEVEN
In spite of his exhaustion, Matthew had trouble sleeping. When he did drift off, he dreamed.
And then awareness returned, as belated reflex forced Matthew to let his breath out and suck in another avid draught of plentiful air, and to stretch his limbs out to their full extent, and to hear what was being said to him, and to put out his own groping hand to still the one that was shaking him …
He was as sober as he had ever been since awakening from SusAn.
“What is it?” he demanded, blindly.
“Lights,” said Ikram Mohammed. “Lots of them.”
Matthew opened his eyes then, and looked out through the transparent fabric of the bubble-tent.
The curved fabric distorted the points of light, making them scintillate like stars. For one confused moment, Matthew thought they might actually be stars, and that the infinite purple canopy had condescended to undergo one of the rare flamboyant transformations of which it surely had to be capable, drawing itself apart in order to display the sky.
Then he scrambled out of the tent, following his companion.
It was Ike, not he, who whispered: “Get the camera! For heaven’s sake, get the camera!”
Matthew did as he was told. At first, he pointed it at Ike, but Ike knocked the lens away, angrily. “Are they receiving?” Ike demanded. “Are they putting this out?”
Matthew didn’t know—but when he was finally able to clear the last vestiges of sleep away and focus his eyes on what Ike was pointing at, he knew immediately what was needed. He dared not shout, but he spoke firmly to whoever was on the other end of the link, instructing the crewman not merely to activate the TV relay but to sound an alarm that would wake up every single member of the crew, and every single colonist on the ground.
He realized, belatedly, that he need not have worried about the crew. He had forgotten that surface-days and ship-days were out of phase. It was midday on Hope, not midnight.
Everyone on Hopewas awake; everyone was watching; everyone was party to the miracle.
All Matthew had to do was point the camera.
The scene at which it was pointing told its own story.
There must have been at least a hundred humanoids: an entire tribe, in all likelihood. They came close enough to make themselves obvious, and then they paused. In fact, they posed—not for the camera, of whose nature they knew nothing, but for the sake of their own dignity and pride, and to signify their own sense of triumph. The crowd distributed itself in a huge semicircle, partly to display itself more bravely and partly because its every member wanted to be able to see the weird aliens, their peculiar hut, and their strange machinery.
They were curious. They were probably more than a little afraid, but they were certainly curious.
At least half their number carried spears, but Matthew couldn’t be bothered to try to make out what the shafts and tips were made of. Some of them carried ropes, some baskets, some hammers, some artifacts of their own making to which he could not put a name. To all of this, he paid scant attention, because the dozen who drew his gaze and made it captive were the ones who were carrying spherical bowls ablaze with light, supported on squat cylinders. The bowls must have been harvested from the treetops, and the cylinders too. They had been carefully shaped, neatly dovetailed, and ingeniously augmented with wicks and devices to deliver the wicks into the bowls by slow degrees.
The twelve aliens were carrying lamps: lamps with reservoirs of oil and burning wicks.
Sex divides, Dulcie Gherardesca had told Lynn Gwyer, with a measure of passion that Matthew had not fully understood at the time. Sex divides, but cooking unites. The foundation of culture was the capacity to delight in the sharing of fire; the beginning of culture—of the meeting of minds and the forging of the elementary social contract—was the Promethean Moment.
Only three of Dulcie’s alien apostles were also carrying stolen machetes, but they were holding them up to the light, showingthem to Matthew and Ike—and also, although they did not know it, to every human being in the system who had responded to Matthew’s urgent call.
Through this crowd-within-a-crowd came Dulcie herself, striding confidently to greet her friends. Her surface-suit was no longer brown or purple; it was silver-and-gold.
Her arms were quite relaxed, swinging at her sides, but her hands spoke nevertheless, casually drawing attention to her achievement, her gift, her repentance, her redemption, her denouement.