The Omega Expedition (19 page)

“The ship from Earth will be docking in a couple of hours,” I told Christine, in case she hadn’t been informed. “We’ll have a chance to talk to Gray and Lowenthal before the Outer System ship arrives and the main event gets under way. Have you given any thought to their offers of employment?”

“I’m not going back to Earth, she said, with a firmness that took me by surprise.

“Why not?” I asked.

“Been there, done that, took the rap. You should take a look at Titan. Makes the Snow Queen’s magic palace look like an igloo. You don’t have to come with me if you don’t want to.”

“I haven’t even begun to make up my mind,” I told her.

“That’s because you want to play the game,” she said. “You want to get in with Adam, in case he’s going places. I don’t.”

“I can see why you’d want a new start,” I admitted.

“No you can’t,” she told me, sharply. “I told you before — you don’t know shit about me.”

“So tell me,” I retorted. “Why did you kill all those people? Your parents I could probably understand, but what about the others? If my memory serves me rightly, you didn’t have any connection with them at all, let alone a plausible motive.”

She looked at me, and then she looked away, at the garden where lions lay down with lambs and the butterflies lived forever.

“Don’t you believe that VE tape you told me about?” she asked. “I couldn’t stand myself, so I hid in false personalities disguised as ancestral memories, acting out the underlying trauma again and again.”

“No, I don’t believe it,” I said. “The writer claimed that it was taken from your own testimony — but that was only one of the stories you told. I don’t remember exactly, but I think there was at least one epic of harrowing child abuse, and at least one item of bad science fiction in which your foster parents had all been replaced by aliens, and a couple more besides. If you’d stuck to the first one, you might have got off, although you’d have needed an extra wrinkle to accommodate the three strays. There were a lot of bad parents around. They were the first generation who had to get used to a new system of parenthood that was radically different from the biological model, and they incorporated all the badness with which the whole damn world was still infected.”

“My foster parents weren’t bad,” she said. “The marriage broke up — smashed to smithereens — but they tried as hard as they could to protect me from all that.” She sounded as though she hadn’t the faintest idea why she’d done what she’d done.

“So why tell the abuse story?” I asked. “Why tell any of the stories, if they weren’t true?”

“I had to tell the stories,” she said, as if it were as simple as that. “They kept coming back for more, and the one thing they couldn’t abide was silence. They probably told themselves that they were wearing me down, waiting for the truth to emerge when I ran out of lies, but they weren’t. They liked the stories. They always wanted more. So do you. You just want a story — and if I give you one you’ll want another, and another. That’s all I am to you: a story.”

“According to
Bad Karma
,” I pointed out, “that’s all you were to yourself. Did you ever have the slightest idea why you did it? Or were you making up story after story by way of exploration — or distraction?”

“I got out in the end, didn’t I?” she said, softly. “I’m here. I’m free. I’m never going back. I’m a winner. Maybe I did it in order to be put away, to make sure that I’d be the one to wake up in Wonderland. Maybe Adam Zimmerman is the one who did it the hard way.”

I didn’t believe that, but I could see that she wasn’t going to tell me anything I could believe.

“The woman from the Confederation might not make us an offer,” I said, although I didn’t believe it. “She might think that we belong on Earth, and good riddance to us. We may not have the option of going elsewhere.”

“I don’t think so,” Christine replied, serenely confident. “While we’re the only real humans in the universe, everyone will be interested in us. Even if they begin to bring the others back, there won’t be enough to go round. We’re mortals, Madoc. We’re their ancestors. They need us. They all need us, not just the stick-in-the-muds who cling to the Earth. They all need us because they’ve all forgotten what we were like, and they all need to be reminded.”

I could have objected that Michael Lowenthal and Mortimer Gray seemed human enough, for all their advanced years, but I didn’t. I knew what she meant. I knew, even on the basis of my first faltering inquiries, that emortality had not been acquired without cost, and that Lowenthal and Gray were as profoundly different from me, in their own way, as Davida’s sisterhood and the cyborganizers.

I could also have pointed out that whatever the reason had been, Christine had thought that the most appropriate thing to do to her own self-appointed ancestors was to murder the lot, and three other people besides. I didn’t do that either.

“This isn’t the Omega Point, Christine,” I told her. “It’s not even a fancy VE. It’s just the same old world, with a thousand extra years of history. Its inhabitants may be curious, but they have other things to be interested in that are far more fascinating than us. They’ll lose interest in us soon enough, unless we can find a way to keep some of them on the hook.”

“I don’t run out of stories easily,” she said. “Do you?”

Fifteen

The Ship from Earth

W
e watched the docking of
Peppercorn Seven
through the “window” in my quarters. Davida Berenike Columella wasn’t with us; she was part of the reception committee that would bring Gray and Lowenthal through the microworld’s mysterious interior to meet us.

The viewpoint from which we watched the spaceship’s final approach was way out on one of Excelsior’s spiny limbs, so we could see a good deal of the microworld as well as the approaching vessel. I’d already studied diagrams of its structure, so I was able to make sense of most of the structures I could see.

The docking station was in Excelsior’s hub: the zero-gee core about which the other environments rotated. The hub was the site of the microworld’s most advanced AIs and the core of its communication system as well as the anchorage of the artificial photosynthetic systems supplying the station’s organics. It also had capacious living spaces of its own, although there were no fabers currently in residence. All that was expectable, but there were a couple of things that the diagram hadn’t shown to full advantage: the tentacles and the ice.

Everything on a diagram tends to look rigid and mechanical, but seen through the camera’s eye Excelsior seemed much more lifelike. It gave the impression of floating in oceanic space like some kind of weird sea creature: a hybrid of wrack and Portuguese man-o’-war, bound to a coral base. Like the man-o’-war, it trailed countless slender tentacles that mostly hung loose, except that their resting positions were determined by the movement of the microworld rather than by gravity. When they became active, they moved with lifelike purpose.

Even while the ship was some distance away the tentacles grouped around the mouth of the docking bay were making their adjustments, as if anticipating a meal. The spinning “wheel” enclosing the weighted components of the microworld was mostly devoid of protective ice, but it had a much smarter surface which presumably had its own ways of dealing with stray dust particles and dangerous surges in the solar wind. It had its own frill of tentacles, but they were much less impressive than the snaky locks of the medusal core.

The “coraline” part of the ensemble was mostly metals and ceramics, but that wasn’t obvious from where we were standing, because the solid and substantial parts of the microworld were encased in cometary ice, which served as an outer shield as well as a resource. The ice hadn’t been sculpted in the careful fashion of the ice palaces of Antarctica and Titan, but it caught sunlight and starlight anyway. Refraction sent the rays every which way before letting them out in a fashion that was far from chaotic, although the patterns were accidental and serendipitous.

From where we looked back at them, Excelsior’s icy vistas sparkled and glowed. Even though I knew full well that all but the tiniest fraction of its internalized light had to originate in the sun, I couldn’t avoid the impression that the show was the product of the millions of stars and galaxies that crowded in the background. Some of the photons deflected through it from those distant sources were mere decades old, but some of them were reaching the climax of a journey that had begun in the aftermath of the Big Bang.

Compared with the complex structure of the microworld, the ship from Earth was disappointingly dull. It had no fins and no obvious propulsion pods. To me it looked like a metal ball that had been carelessly miscast — or very badly scratched and scarred after its removal from the mold — from which a single spike extended with a smaller ball attached to its tip. Seen in isolation, set against the hectic background of stars, the craft might have been any size at all, but when the elastic docking cables reached out with remarkable delicacy and tenderness to complete its deceleration I realized that it was smaller than I had initially imagined.

The ball was no bigger than a five-ton truck, with an internal cubic capacity about the same as that of the room from which we were observing it. The blister on the end of the spike couldn’t have been much more capacious than the four-seater automobiles in which I’d driven around old Los Angeles. The cocoons containing Mortimer Gray, Michael Lowenthal, and Lowenthal’s two “assistants” had to be packed so tight that they would have to disembark one by one, through a crawl space narrow enough to terrify a claus-trophobe.

I recalled, with a slight shudder, that there were two spare cocoons aboard — but only two. If Adam Zimmerman, Christine Caine, and I all elected to travel back to Earth, one of the delegates would have to stay behind on Excelsior. Even though I didn’t have any present intention of going to Earth on
Peppercorn Seven
I hoped that the blister was flexible enough to accommodate six passengers without cramming them into its core like the pips in an apple. I knew that it had to be made of something radiation-proof, but I figured that it must be more versatile than it looked.

Having made similar calculations, Christine muttered: “Space travel seems to be a lot less comfortable than a first-class cabin in a zeppelin, even after a thousand years of progress.” I couldn’t believe that she’d ever been in a first-class cabin in a zeppelin, but she was obviously a hardened VE tourist in spite of her tender years.

“It’s just like a long session in a bodysuit,” I said. “In fact, it
is
a long session in a bodysuit. Lowenthal’s probably been taking care of business every step of the way, despite the ever-growing transmission delay. Gray was probably working too.”

“My mothers used to tell me that my muscles would atrophy and my extremities would get gangrene if I stayed in a full suit for more than a couple of hours at a time,” she observed, drily.

“They were exaggerating — and those kinds of medical problems must have been solved long ago,” I said. She must have worked that out for herself, but I couldn’t help adopting a mentor pose. I made a mental note to make absolutely sure that she didn’t begin seeing me as a father figure.

“With an intravenous drip and a catheter a person could probably stay in VE forever, nowadays,” she said, effortlessly taking up the thread of the argument. “We could take up permanent residence in the fantasies of our choice.”

The first title that came to mind, reflexively, was
Bad Karma
, but I didn’t say so. Way back when, I had always told my critics — and, for that matter, myself — that the fight tapes I made were a public service, because they allowed people with a taste for violence to indulge it harmlessly. There was a grain of truth in the argument, but not enough. If Christine Caine had wanted to commit virtual murders she could have done so, even in the twenty-second century. Maybe the quality of the illusion wouldn’t have lived up to the standards of the world in which we now found ourselves, but that wasn’t the factor that had displaced her murderous passion into the meatware arena. Murder is only murder if you kill real people. Life is only life if you actually live it. Maybe there were some among the Earthbound who really did spend most of their lives in VE nowadays — but I was willing to bet that they were far outnumbered by people who regarded VE as workspace and social space, and only ventured into fantasylands for the sake of occasional relaxation.

Christine Caine, I suppoed, must have seen multiple versions of all her favorite fantasies while she was a child, but it wasn’t just the warnings her mothers had given her that had brought her back to stern reality. Perhaps that was a pity; if she’d become an addict, she’d probably have been harmless.

The umbilical had been attached to
Peppercorn Seven
’s blister now, although there had been no obvious hatchway on the pitted surface. The tube didn’t seem to be wide enough to accommodate a full-sized human body without bulging, and it was possible to see the vague outline of the first person out of the capsule. The movement of the bolus along the umbilical was smooth, presumably controlled by peristalsis rather than by any undignified wriggling on the part of the passenger.

We counted the four passengers into the body of Excelsior one by one, but once the umbilical had been sealed it was by no means an exciting business.

“The other ship is much bigger, apparently.” I told my companion, slipping back into mentor mode just for a moment. “
Child of Fortune
isn’t just a nest of cocoons — it actually has empty spaces inside, and an ecosphere of sorts.”

I needn’t have bothered; Christine had researched the topic and obviously knew more about
Child of Fortune
than I did. She confirmed that the spacecraft built in the outer system were very much more complicated, almost qualifying as microworlds in their own right. “It has an AI brain as big as Excelsior’s,” she concluded. “
Really
big, and
really
smart — a supersilver. But machines still don’t have the vote.”