Matthew’s sleep that night was fitful, filled with uncertain dreams that fled into the dark, forgetful depths of his mind the moment he awoke. Blinking, he looked around the sleeping quarters of the Corvus and found that he was alone.
Sam and Dunne weren’t in their berths.
Matthew rubbed a hand over his eyes and got up to search the ship. First he went to the airlock, where he found the door wide open. He craned his neck outside and looked around, but the landscape was empty. In the airlock, he knelt to check the gun locker. It was still locked tight. The speeder was still in the airlock as well.
Matthew pressed a button to close the airlock and then went to the lab. As he’d expected, Dunne was there, hunched over a handheld display. She lifted her head as he walked into the room.
“Working already?” Matthew asked. “How long have you been at it?”
“Couple hours,” Dunne said, dropping the handheld to run her hands over her eyes. “I couldn’t sleep. Too many questions.”
Matthew nodded. “What about Sam? Where did he go?”
“He’s gone? He was still asleep when I got up.”
“I can’t find him anywhere. The airlock was wide open.”
Dunne’s expression grew worried, the lines on her forehead and at the corners of her eyes deepening. “Did you check the guns? The speeder?”
Matthew nodded. “The guns are still locked up. Wherever Sam is, he’s unarmed. The speeder’s still here too.”
“Good.”
“Yes, but where is he?”
Dunne shrugged. “To be perfectly honest, I don’t care. If we’re lucky, he’ll do something stupid and get himself killed out there. Good riddance. We’d be better off without him.”
Matthew flinched to hear the harshness of Dunne’s words, but he didn’t disagree with her. He found Sam’s moods puzzling, and a little frightening. When he’d first met him, Sam had simply seemed boorish, loud and full of bluster, but the way he’d turned sullen and broody when they encountered the Vagri perplexed Matthew—and the things he’d said the night before as they walked back to the ship made Matthew begin to think that Sam was slightly unhinged.
“What’s wrong with him, you think?” Matthew asked. “With Sam, I mean.”
“He’s afraid, that’s all,” Dunne said, looking Matthew square in the eyes and speaking as if the answer were obvious. “He’s afraid, and his fear makes him angry. There’s nothing difficult to understand about Sam. He’s the kind of person who thinks his hatreds are holy, that his prejudices are written into the DNA of the universe. He despises what he doesn’t understand. And he’d destroy it if he got the chance.”
As Dunne spoke, Matthew’s heart beat faster and his veins thrummed with the thrill of hearing someone say something that was so obviously true and right—of articulating something that he’d felt but couldn’t, until then, put into words.
Of course. Sam hated the Vagri because he didn’t understand them. Because he was afraid of them. Their gray skin, their society where women, not men, were in control, where sex and family and authority were so different than they were on the Earth they’d left behind—it was foreign and strange, and unnerving to Sam. To all of them, really. But only Sam thought, somehow, that his fear made him righteous, and that the Vagri’s strangeness made them evil.
“Is that what he’s doing, then? Trying to come up with a way to destroy the Vagri?” Matthew asked.
“My guess is that he’s moping somewhere, licking his wounds, feeding on his own anger.” Dunne’s focus wandered and she shook her head with disgust. “He’s powerless here. Those men with their spears and their arrows could put him down in seconds if they had to. It’s not him we have to worry about. It’s Earth. If this ends up being a planet where we can live, there are plenty more people like Sam who will flood to this place. Thousands, millions of them. What do you think happens to the Vagri then?”
Matthew took a deep, slow breath, Kiva’s face flashing before his eyes. She was powerful—the most powerful person in her village. Matthew had seen what she could do; he’d felt her power surging through his veins, so strong he felt as though it might tear him apart from the inside out. But she was vulnerable, too. Settlers from Earth wouldn’t hesitate to destroy her and the society she led if the Vagri came between them and what they wanted.
“So what do we do?” he asked.
Dunne shook her head. “I don’t know. We just need time. This is the human race’s first contact with sentient creatures from another planet. This is history. We have the opportunity to get things right this time. Maybe we can live in peace with the Vagri, if we understand them first. That’s what I’m working on today—analyzing these blood and tissue samples that I took yesterday.”
Matthew nodded. “I’m going back to the village. Kiva asked me to come.”
“Do you need company?”
Matthew shook his head. “No. She told me to come alone.”
Dunne squinted. “Be careful. Try not to get shot this time.”
Matthew chuckled and left Dunne to her work in the laboratory, making his way toward the airlock.
Making his way toward Kiva.