The Omega Expedition (17 page)

I was prepared to accept that Excelsior really was an Ahasuerus Project, and that the trustees of the Foundation really might have decided that the time was now ripe for it’s mission to be completed, but that didn’t seem to me to be an adequate explanation for either the place or the time. It would have been easy enough to send Zimmerman’s SusAn chamber back to Earth, so that he could wake up at home, and just as easy to ship specimens for trial runs along with him, in the unlikely event that there were no sleepers on the surface of sufficient antiquity.

It seemed to me that it would have been even easier for the current directors of the Foundation to continue the policy of procrastination that they appeared to have been following for twelve hundred years. Even in my day there had been rumors to the effect that the technology of emortality that Zimmerman had craved already existed, but that the incentive for the Foundation’s directors to postpone the day that would make them effectively redundant was too great to encourage any policy but one of indefinite delay. Davida had already told me that the decision didn’t “seem to have been unanimous” — so how had it crept through now in the face of manifest opposition, when it must have failed to do so a thousand times before?

So far as I could judge, the fact that Adam Zimmerman was being awakened
here
and
now
had to imply that the people who were actually doing the work had something to gain. In other words, Davida Berenike Columella and her weird sisterhood — or the people giving them instructions — must want something, and must think that Adam Zimmerman could help them get it. If Christine Caine and I had
not
been chosen by lot, they must think that we could help them get it too. They must think that we had some special value — or, at the very least, some special significance.

Irritatingly, it was easier to imagine a reason why Christine Caine might be valuable than it was to figure out what special significance I might have.

Christine Caine had killed people, without having anything that could pass for a reasonable motive. If she had been fitted with some kind of fancy IT that could prevent her from doing any such thing again, that same IT was probably able to facilitate her doing it, and perhaps to force her to do it. Christine Caine might, in fact, be a useful assassination weapon, in a day and age when assassination weapons were rare.

I had to remember, though, that no one seemed to know for certain whether the two million people who had been killed by the Yellowstone supervolcano were the victims of an accidental malfunction or deliberate sabotage. With assassination weapons like that around, the only advantage a human assassin could offer was precision.

If Christine Caine were an assassination weapon, I reasoned, then I might be one too — in which case, I thought, I might have been selected precisely because I didn’t have a record of unmotivated violence. Perhaps, if that were the case, Christine Caine was only the decoy, to distract attention away from the real threat.

On the other hand…

It was too complicated. I needed more hard data.

What Excelsior’s datastores could tell me about Michael Lowenthal was limited, but they did reveal that he had been born in 2464. As Davida Berenike Columella had already told me, having drawn the information from the same source, Damon Hart hadn’t died until 2502 — which meant that if Lowenthal had been affiliated to the Inner Circle in his youth, in however humble a capacity, he might have known Damon.

One item of Lowenthal’s background peculiar enough to attract attention from the compiler of the datastore was that although he was not a policeman he had been involved — as an “observer” — in the investigation of a case of serial murder that had occurred in 2495. It wasn’t the last on record, but it had been
very
big news at the time, and it had been a case whose craziness was at least the equal of Christine Caine’s. I wondered whether that might be a reason why Michael Lowenthal might have a particular interest in Christine Caine.

I didn’t want to give the people monitoring my actions too much insight into my suspicions, but I figured that it was probably safe to look into the history of SusAn penology, with particular reference to the possible survival of other “prisoners” of my own era.

At the time of my own incarceration SusAn had been used throughout the world as a repository for criminals of all kinds. It had been widely advertised as “protection without punishment” for half a century: a humane alternative to traditional practices, one wholly befitting the philosophy of the supposed New Utopia. Much had been said and written about “future rehabilitation”: the idea that the increased efficiency of future technologies would more than compensate for the fact that any resources and skills possessed by individuals confined in SusAn would become obsolete. Not only would future IT be able to “treat” or “cure” antisocial tendencies at root, turning psychopaths and recidivists into model citizens, but improved educational systems would allow the remodeled citizens in question to be retrained for whatever useful work might be available.

Everybody with half a brain knew, of course, that it was all bullshit — but it was politically useful bullshit. It provided an ideological basis for getting rid of anyone who proved to be too much of a pest. People who committed minor offenses were put away for a few months or a few years, as a warning to them and to others — and people who couldn’t take the hint were put away indefinitely. Present society washed its hands of them, swept them under the carpet and left the dirt to be tidied up by future generations. Was anyone ever surprised that the future generations never quite got around to it, preferring to discover all kinds of good reasons for continuing to pass the buck? I suspect not.

If the corpsicles had continued to pile up, of course, the situation might have become absurd, and eventually intolerable, but they hadn’t. Unlike all previous penal systems, SusAn incarceration had appeared to be effective, in the crude statistical sense that crime rates began to drop — quite sharply — as the twenty-third century progressed. The drop had been represented by enthusiasts as proof that
this
deterrent actually worked. It was, of course, no such thing. The real reasons for the steady fall in crime rates, my sources assured me, were the gradual but inexorable removal of incentives to commit crime and the gradual but inexorable increase in the certainty of detection.

I had lived in an era where many people were routinely subject to the vagaries of rage and intoxication, and in which the electronic stores where credit was held were still vulnerable to clever tampering. It was also an era in which a great many people — especially the young — took a perverse delight in cheating the surveillance systems that had been set up to make crime difficult, regarding all such measures as a challenge to their ingenuity. In my day, hobbyist criminals were everywhere. Although everyone affected to deplore and despise those whose hobbyism extended to raw violence, especially when it involved murder, there was a widespread fascination with violence. That fascination supported a rich and varied pornography as well as a highly developed risk culture. People newly gifted with IT — especially when the effectiveness of a person’s IT was the most effective badge of wealth and status — were inevitably tempted to test its limitations in all kinds of extreme sports, many of them illegal. According to Excelsior’s data banks, however, all that stuff had faded away as the novelty wore off.

As the cost of IT had come down, attitudes had shifted dramatically; the fascination of violence, pain, and death had never disappeared, but it had become the prerogative of exotic cults whose breakthroughs to the cultural mainstream became increasingly rare. As polite exercise of the self-control that better IT permitted became routine, rage and intoxication dwindled toward extinction. As credit-tracking systems were further refined, successful thefts and frauds became so rare that no rational risk calculation could support them. Even the young ceased to see the erosion of privacy and secrecy as a challenge, and adapted themselves to living in a world where no sin was likely to remain long undetected — or, for that matter, long unforgiven.

By 2300, the use of SusAn as a mode of incarceration had come to seem unnecessary and ridiculously old-fashioned. By 2400, the spectrum of social misdemeanours had altered dramatically throughout the world, and those which persisted were more commonly addressed by mediated reparation and “house arrest.” By that time, SusAn incarceration was only used outside the Earth — and even there, its use declined in spite of the dramatic increase in the extraterrestrial population. The once-rich flow of individuals committed to SusAn because their neighbors wanted them out of the way had fallen to a mere trickle by the time of the Coral Sea Disaster of 2542, and the vast majority of those were rejects from the burgeoning societies of the moon and the microworlds.

But no one had ever taken up arms on behalf of the existing population of sleepers.

The conveniently forgotten corpsicles had never found a champion willing to campaign for their release — or even for the careful discrimination of those who had never done anything to deserve indefinite sentences in the first place. Without such a champion, it had been easy enough to leave the problem to be sorted out by someone who actually cared.

Even now, when a couple of specimen releases had finally been arranged, it was not obvious that anyone
really
cared. Was it incumbent on me, I wondered, to become the champion that the sleepers had never had?

I tucked the thought away for possible future reference; for the time being, I still had to work out exactly what kind of nest of vipers I had been delivered into, and why.

Thirteen

Emortality for All

I
looked up Emily Marchant before looking up Mortimer Gray, and was suitably impressed.

There were, allegedly, no Hardinists in or behind the Outer System Confederation — but that didn’t mean that questions of ownership and stewardship were irrelevant in the outer system. Nor did it mean that the implications of the Tragedy of the Commons hadn’t yet raised their ugly head. Quite the reverse, in fact. Questions of who might be entitled to do what with exactly which lumps of mass — “lumps” ranging in size from asteroids no bigger than an average hometree to Jupiter itself — seemed to have become measurably more acute during the last few centuries, and the increase had accelerated during the last few decades.

In the Outer System, every rock was precious, and every block of ice even more so. That, apparently, was one of the reasons why the ship carrying Michael Lowenthal and Mortimer Gray from Earth had been exposed to the risk of close encounters with snowballs. The settlers of the Oort Halo had been deflecting new comets sunwards for centuries; although the bigger lumps were greedily intercepted, the residual small debris was pouring into the inner system like an everlasting blizzard. That was, apparently, another cause of tension and disputation between the Confederation and the Earthbound.

It didn’t require any data-trawling skill to discover that Emily Marchant was a major player in the Confederation and all its major disputes. She had the money, the prestige, the talent, the know-how, and the charisma to make her opinions felt. She was festooned with painfully quaint nicknames — the Chief Cheerleader of the High Kickers and the Great Architect of the Ice Palaces, to name but two — but her most common label was “the Titaness.” There was even an ultrasmart spaceship with the same name. She was, it seemed, a Snow Queen of sufficient majesty to put the petty villain of Christine Caine’s favorite kiddie flick to shame.

Unfortunately, Emily Marchant wasn’t inbound on the ship that was hurtling inwards to pay the respects of the outer system to the newly awakened Adam Zimmerman; she obviously had better things to do. The Titanian envoy en route from the Jovian moons was a much younger and far less influential woman named Niamh Horne.

I knew that the Irish name Niamh was pronounced to rhyme with “Eve,” but even someone as intrigued by names as I was couldn’t make anything significant of that. Nor could anyone — even someone as paranoid as me — have found the slightest potentially meaningful connection between Emily Marchant or Niamh Horne and Christine Caine or me. It wasn’t until I checked out Mortimer Gray that I found one of those — and it wasn’t one that anyone could have expected, unless the wonderful children of Excelsior knew
much
more about me than they were letting on.

According to the records available on Excelsior, Mortimer Gray’s career was a model of honest endeavor motivated entirely by intellectual curiosity. Unlike Michael Lowenthal’s, his entire life seemed to be an open book, and apart from the probable coincidence of his having shared a couple of character-forming experiences with Emily Marchant he seemed unlikely to have any hidden agenda. But right up there at the head of his basic biography was a name I recognized: a name that, in all probability, no one
but
me in the entire universe would have recognized.

Mortimer Gray’s biological mother — who had, of course, died long before he was born — had been Diana Caisson.
My
Diana Caisson. Damon Hart’s Diana Caisson. There was no doubt about her being the same one; her birth date was right up there alongside his, although her death date was given as “unknown.”

What could it mean?

So far as I could tell, it couldn’t possibly mean anything. How could anyone have known that I had been acquainted with the donor of the egg that had been engineered to produce Mortimer Gray? Why would anyone, including Mortimer Gray, have cared? Surely it had to be a coincidence. There was no imaginable reason why it should be anything else.

I had to switch tack then, so I began gathering information about Excelsior and its peculiar inhabitants, hoping to obtain some insight into their possible motives for involving themselves in Adam Zimmerman’s resurrection.

It didn’t take long to find out that they were even more peculiar than I thought. I had been thinking of Davida Berenike Columella as a girl and her fellows as a sisterhood, but that wasn’t strictly accurate. It wasn’t just the secondary sexual characteristics that arrive with puberty that “she” and her kind had forsaken; “she” had no ovaries either. Nor had “she” a womb, or a clitoris. It was too late to start thinking of her as an “it,” so I decided that I might as well stick with the pronoun I’d first thought of, but the fact remained that she and all her kind were sexless.