The Omega Expedition (15 page)

Transmutation was the key to the final strategy: not the traditional alchemical transmutation of lead into gold, but the kind of wholesale transmutation that supernovas wrought, spinning the whole rich spectrum of heavy elements out of the simpler ones that began to accumulate when hydrogen-to-helium torches finally grew dim. Maybe the people of the solar system could wait a little longer before pressing ahead with a project of that sort, but the ones who wanted to get it under way immediately certainly had an arguable case.

The argument already seemed to be fervent. Perhaps it was only the pressure of my paranoia, but I couldn’t help wondering how long populations which believed themselves to be extremely well defended could refrain from letting fervor spill over into violence. In particular, there seemed to my untutored eye to be an unbridgeable ideological rift between the Earthbound — the most cautious posthuman faction in the solar system — and the colonists of the Jovian and Saturnian satellites, whose reasons for wanting to domesticate pseudosupernoval processes of manufacture were many and various.

It seemed that I had arrived in turbulent times — perhaps the most turbulent the children of humankind had encountered since the Crash and its Aftermath. I had lived my first thirty-nine years in a world that had seemed to be getting better all the time; I had returned to one that had known nothing but good times for centuries, and probably took its good fortune too much for granted.

After listening to my mentor’s account of the Afterlife and its significance as a factor in posthuman affairs I looked at the streets of the newly reborn North American city for a second time, in a subtly different mood. I looked at the virtual people in a different way, too. I soon moved on again, from one American city to another and then to the cities of the “Old World” — which no longer seemed old at all, now that it had been rebuilt by degrees over centuries and millennia. I could see that all the cities were patchworks, which all seemed equally crazy to me except for the oldest of them all, Amundsen, which had housed the official world government for centuries.

Amundsen had been built long after I was put away, but it seemed to me that it retained a faint echo of the world that I had known. For a while, I was told, it had been on the verge of becoming a mere monument, but the reconstruction that had had to be organized after the Yellowstone basalt flow had revitalized the UN for a time, making elected government briefly necessary — and hence briefly powerful — once again.

How, I wondered, did all this information need to be factored into my own personal situation? What difference did it make to
me
?

It was too soon to tell.

I thought, for a little while, that I had seen what Ice Palaces might be when I had seen Amundsen City and its immediate neighbors, but if I hadn’t had so much else to think about I would have realized that the palaces of the world capital’s satellite towns could only be trial runs for something much more adventurous and grandiose. It was better that I make the mistake, though, because learning to wonder is something we have to do again and again, no matter how long we live or how long we sleep between our intervals of active thought. We always think that we can do it perfectly well, but there’s always another realm beyond the one we can imagine, and another realm beyond that, and so ad infinitum.

Cocooned in my VE nest on Excelsior, while my virtual self was on Earth, wondering at the world that had replaced my own, I had only just begun to realize how many other worlds there were — and I had not yet begun to discover what marvels
they
might contain.

I had so much more to see, so much more to discover — and wherever I started, the journey of discovery would be a very long one. For a journey like that, I would need the kind of lifetime with which this world could equip me — but would my need be sufficient to guarantee that I got it? I could not help returning to that anxiety: the idea that I might have been brought to the threshold of eternity only to be turned away, because I was not Adam Zimmerman. I could not believe that I was a convicted murderer either, but I knew that appearances were against me.

I had lived in an era when the Eliminators were big news. I had never been one of them, but I could hardly help applying their slogans to my own case. Was I “worthy of immortality” — or, more correctly, of emortality? Whether I was or not, could I persuade my new hosts that I was, if the need to do so arose?

I had, of course, asked to see any and all references to myself that Excelsior’s data bank could obtain, but the pickings were so sparse that a lesser man might have despaired. To have accomplished so little, and made so slight a mark upon the world, seemed a very meager reward for my efforts — except that I could not believe for a moment that the scarcity of information was accurate. If my patient monitor was not intervening as a censor, then the available records must have been wiped. When? By whom? And above all —
why
? What had I done to deserve my curiously ambiguous fate? And why, exactly, had my wayward fortunes taken their newest, and strangest, direction?

I had to find out, if I could — and if I couldn’t, I had to do my best in spite of the burden of ignorance. I had to do
something
, to live up to my name. I was Madoc Tamlin, after all: a ready-made hero of legend. I was not a victim to be exploited, not a pawn to be played with, not a fool to be manipulated. One way or another, and despite every disadvantage, I knew that I had to take charge of the script of my own future life. That thought dominated my consciousness while I waited, with gathering impatience, for Adam Zimmerman’s return.

Eleven

The Politics of Temptation

I
might have delved deeper into the inexhaustible well that was the sum of Excelsior’s mechanically stored knowledge had I not been interrupted by the news that there were two personal calls waiting to be downloaded. I had not expected mail, and I certainly had not expected items of mail to arrive in such profusion as to have to form a queue — even a queue of two — so the news was subtly exciting.

I didn’t take the calls immediately, partly because I wanted to think over what I’d already learned and partly because the notification of their arrival reminded me how long I’d been in VE. I was almost certainly safe to continue, given that the hood I was using was so ridiculously unobtrusive, but old habits die hard. I came back to the meatspace of my cell in order to have another bite to eat. Afterwards, I peered out of the “window” for a few minutes at the starry firmament. Then curiosity got the better of me. I draped the cobweb hood over my head once again, and returned to the infinity of cyberspace.

The first call I took was from Mortimer Gray — or, to be strictly accurate, from a sim made in his image. Gray was the historian who was currently en route to attend Adam Zimmerman’s awakening, on a spaceship with the unlikely name of
Peppercorn Seven
.

I was oddly relieved to discover that Gray’s sim wore the semblance of a human of my own era. If the appearance could be trusted, he was no taller than I was, and no better looking. His coloring was fairer than my own, and his hair was silver. His eyes matched his name but his smartsuit didn’t — its intricate purple and blue designs were laid upon a black background. I knew that he was a great deal older than I was, in terms of experienced years, but I also knew that he wouldn’t have aged a day since turning twenty-something, so I was surprised that he really did seem ancient, wise, and venerable — and not just because of his hair. Perhaps it was the decor of what was presumably his personal VE, which was tricked up to look like a library: a library with
books
in it.

Gray began by apologizing for the fact that a dialogue was still impractical because of the time delay, but assured me that the ship on which he was traveling was making all haste.

“I wanted to introduce myself to you as soon as possible, Mr. Tamlin,” he added, half-apologetically. “I don’t know whether my reputation has preceded me, or whether you have had a chance to look into my background, but I wanted to reassure you that I am neither as unworldly nor as narrowly obsessed with matters of mortality as I am sometimes thought to be. I am traveling to Excelsior as the representative of an association of academic interests, and it is on their behalf that I am inviting you to take up employment…”

At this point the sim suffered a short burst of interference, and the transmission was interrupted.

“Sorry about that,” Gray said, when his false face had coalesced again. “A close encounter with a snowball, I think. A constant hazard hereabouts — one with which this glorified sardine can is barely equipped to deal.”

I was impressed by the fact that he knew what a sardine can was, until I remembered that he was a historian. Like Davida, he was probably cutting the cloth of his conversation in the hope of suiting me.

“I am authorized to offer you an appointment as a lecturer in twenty-second-century history, Mr. Tamlin,” he went on. “You will undoubtedly receive other offers of employment, perhaps at much larger salaries, but I believe that you might find an academic appointment to be more desirable, on the grounds of congeniality and freedom of opportunity. It might well be the most comfortable way for you to make use of your uniquely specialized knowledge, and it would certainly make matters easier for those of us who believe that we have much to learn from you. I am looking forward to meeting you in person, and I hope that we shall soon have an opportunity to discuss this matter in detail. Please give it serious consideration. Thank you for listening.”

He vanished into the ether, leaving me staring at a rest-pattern.

I felt suddenly uncomfortable, totally unsure as to how I was supposed to interpret what he’d said. Had he been issuing a cryptic warning? Had he suggested that he could offer “congeniality and freedom of opportunity” because he wanted me to understand that others would want to restrict my freedom and threaten my congeniality? Or was I just being paranoid?

I got rid of the hood again, and got up from my specially commissioned chair. I stretched my limbs, although I didn’t need to. I knew that my every move was being watched, and that my reaction to what Mortimer Gray had said would be carefully measured.

I felt unusually strong, but I knew that was an illusion of the low gravity. I walked back to the picture window. It was still showing the star field, and I wondered what the watchers would read into my decision to keep it that way. I wondered, too, how I should interpret my own action. Did I think I needed to be constantly reminded of the fact that I was a long way from Earth?

I was surprised by Gray’s offer as well as puzzled. I couldn’t help wondering whether he and his fellows might be laboring under a misconception as to who and what I had been before being committed to SusAn. I couldn’t quite believe that it was an offer he’d have extended to any common or garden-variety criminal. The more I thought about it, though, the more the message seemed like a preemptive strike — and the fact that it had come in at the same time as another suddenly ceased to look like a coincidence.

Marveling at the thought that I might be able to start out on a new career path suddenly seemed to be a silly way to waste time. I asked my patient monitors to display the second message in the window, to save me the bother of putting the hood on again.

This one was from the UN executive who was presumably also a member of the Hardinist Cabal: Michael Lowenthal. Unless his sim had been subtly enhanced, he seemed to be a little taller than me, but that might have been an illusion generated by the fact that he seemed to be hovering in empty space “outside” the room. His complexion wasn’t quite as dark as mine, but his neatly sculpted features made him substantially more handsome and his smartsuit was masterpiece enough to make Gray’s, let alone mine, look like the next best thing to a prison uniform. His hair was a neutral shade of brown, but that only served to emphasize the classicism of his features.

Lowenthal introduced himself as the Secretary to the Ecological Planning Department of the World Government, but I wasn’t stupid enough to think that he was any mere bureaucrat. Like Gray, he was wrapped up in a cocoon in a flying sardine can, but his sim carried his favorite virtual environment with it. No ancient books for Michael Lowenthal: his background was Amundsen’s central square, with the UN parliament building directly behind him, reduced by a trick of perspective to near insignificance.

“I’m calling ahead to prepare the ground for our first meeting, Mr. Tamlin,” Michael Lowenthal said. “I wanted you to know as soon as possible that the United Nations is not merely willing but eager to facilitate your return to Earth and to provide for your rehabilitation and reeducation. I can assure you that any crimes and misdemeanors you might have committed in the distant past are of no further relevance to anyone alive today, and that we are enthusiastic to make you welcome. We shall be happy to provide you with employment, not in any artificial make-work capacity but as a useful and valued member of society. I look forward to meeting you when the ship docks, and to making provision for your eventual return to Earth. Thank you.” His image froze to a still, but didn’t disappear.

No stray “snowball” had dared to interrupt him, although he had help to avoid any such possibility by keeping his message brief.

Personal though these messages were, I knew that they weren’t private. As soon as Michael Lowenthal had finished, I asked to speak to Davida Berenike Columella. Her image immediately displaced his, but she seemed slightly more incongruous floating “outside,” partly because the background behind her head was a blank wall.

“What was all that about?” I demanded, unceremoniously.

She could have been evasive if she’d wanted to be, but she didn’t. “They both want you to go back with them to Earth,” she said. “I’m not privy to their motives, but I suspect that they’re simply being overcautious. They’re afraid that if they don’t obtain your early agreement to return to Earth you might accept an invitation to visit the outer system — Titan, perhaps.”