Chapter 15

Hatred, Meiersdottir mused. Unreasoning hatred. And unreasoning fear, too. How terrible that they drive so much human thinking, and by thinking actions as well.

In the two days since the dramatic confrontation in MacPherson's cabin there had been a great deal of activity. First and most immediately, the Ark's course had been righted. The ship had been on the proper trajectory, merely moving far too slowly to reach worm speed in anything like adequate time. But with all of its thrusters now outputting full power it was making up for lost time. Now with full access to the on-board computers Cromartie could calculate that it would be only a further eleven days before they could jump to the Eden system, and deceleration there to make orbit of Eden would take no longer than about nine and a half weeks.

At first Igwanda was nearly beside himself with self-recrimination. "We screen everybody, everybody!" he kept repeating. "But it never even occurred to me to screen SES officers. It just slipped right through the cracks!"

Both Heisinger and Meiersdottir tried to console him. "They probably wouldn't have caught it anyway," his grandmother told him. "From what little he said I gather he was a last-minute convert, some of the more persuasive anti-Rescue people paying him a visit after he'd already been selected and giving him a huge con job."

The young man shook his head vigorously. "We could have tried. That screening program has done a great job of keeping the crazies away. A really super job. And then I just let them bypass it and we wind up with one of the nuts actually running the most important part of the whole operation! Shit, I put the lunatic in charge of the asylum. I let it happen!"

Whether justified or not, though, his regrets had to be cut short. The reality was that the time they would have on the planet itself before the emanations from Chen's nova could obliterate it would be severely curtailed. There could be no recovering the five and a half weeks wasted. But there would still be time, albeit drastically foreshortened, for the evacuation, and plans had to be restructured.

Some things would have to be sacrificed. They'd hoped to retrieve specimens of other Eden plant and even animal species not available at the Edenites' primary settlement from more distant locations; now that would be impossible. They'd even considered seeking out some rudimentary harvest of the planet's marine life, notwithstanding the Edenites' own expressed disdain for it; now likewise largely impossible in the time available save for the few local species. Many other things on the human wish-list also had to be dropped.

"We'll have maybe three weeks on the planet!" Heisinger had exclaimed as Cromartie had clarified the revised schedule. "Just three weeks to get everybody and everything on board and get out!"

"Not what we'd planned, I know," said Meiersdottir. "But we have to make do with the time we have."

"I know," the younger woman acknowledged. "It's not like we can ask for an extension. Back in school we'd do that sometimes for major papers, and sometimes they'd even grant it. Those were the days! Well, nothing to do but work it out as best we can. Carlie and I are on it."

The remainder of the Ark's small complement had taken the news of the change of command fairly calmly. MacPherson's almost complete withdrawal from shipboard society from the outset of their trip had left him with no apologists or sympathists among them. Yuan, seemingly most conservatively minded of the crew, had pressed for a detailed explanation, but when Heis­inger complied even she subsided quickly.

And the erstwhile captain, formerly a self-determined recluse in his quarters, was now imprisoned there. The locks had been recalibrated so that any keys he'd managed to sequester no longer worked. He'd been supplied with an ample assortment of packaged prepared meals, reconstitution equipment was already in his cabin, he had private toilet facilities, and there was no need for anyone to enter.

At Meiersdottir's request Igwanda had also scoured the cabin for anything MacPherson might use to harm either his jailers or himself. He'd removed several knives, a few items from the medicine cabinet, and otherwise rendered the quarters as innocuous as possible. But, also at her behest, he'd left the astonishingly impressive supply of liquor. "If he wants to drink," she'd told him, "let's allow him that. He can kill himself slowly that way, if it's what he chooses to do."

So, with her son and his girlfriend hard at work realigning the evacuation plans, the old woman was left once again with little but her own thoughts. And they'd strayed, randomly as thoughts will, to the motivation that might lie behind the attempted sabotage of their mission.

Hatred and fear, her thinking continued, fear and hatred. Are they so different, I wonder. Or are they merely different manifestations of the same thing? Is hatred spawned by fear, or fear by hatred? Or do they arise simultaneously and feed off each other? Am I simply asking which came first, the chicken or the egg?

And how is it that either of those destructive emotions comes into being at all? What's the starting point, the kickoff? How does a brave, honorable and evidently compassionate man who'll risk his ship and his life to save those in his charge become so fearful, so hateful that he'll deliberately try to sacrifice the lives of an entire species he's never even met? I call myself a sociologist, yet I can't even answer that basic question.

For a time she simply contemplated the matter to herself. But after a while it occurred to her that there was perhaps a way to answer at least some of her questions. MacPherson was on board with nowhere to go and nothing to do; she had likewise nothing else with which to occupy herself in the still nearly three months before their arrival at Eden. Why not use that time to explore her so-many questions?

"I'm going to visit MacPherson," she said abruptly to Igwanda and Heisinger. "I'm not needed here, and I'd like to try to talk to him, to understand him a little."

Igwanda shook his head. "Grandmother, he's isolated for a reason," he told her. "We can't trust him. What if he takes you hostage? Or grabs your key from you, lets himself out and goes on some kind of rampage? I know you want to help everybody around you, it's part of why I love you so much, but we have to draw a line."

"Perhaps, but not here," she said firmly. "If he takes me hostage, so what? I'm the least important member of the crew, and I've so little time left it scarcely matters. I won't take a key in, I'll take a communicator and call when I'm ready to leave, you can come get me. We can even use a password if you like; I'll, oh, I'll call Alicia Al if I'm OK, you know I never say it but he doesn't. And he has no weapons, nothing he can even use as one, if he comes out fighting you can subdue him.

"Anyway, I don't believe it will happen. He wouldn't even charge the laser he had, remember? I don't think he'll attack me."

"I expect he'll be drunk as a lord," Igwanda said cynically. "We left him the booze, remember? But OK, I guess, try it if you're so eager."

"'OK?'" she said tartly. "Carlie, I wasn't asking permission, I was just telling you so you'd know where I was. I'm your grandmother, not your child." Heisinger, sitting within earshot, snickered audibly. "And don't be a smartass, Alicia," the old woman added as she moved away.