The Omega Expedition (21 page)

“Of course,” he said, with all the enthusiasm of an authentic sucker.

“Why does Michael Lowenthal have a bodyguard with him?”

Unfortunately, Mortimer Gray’s act was no act. He laughed, as if at a simple misunderstanding. “Solantha isn’t a
bodyguard
,” he assured me, blithely. “Cyborganization is mostly a matter of fashion, on Earth at least. Life in the outer system requires a degree of functional cyborgization, but it’s purely a matter of aesthetics at home. Did you think he was worried about meeting Christine Caine?”

“No,” I said. I figured that I might as well go all the way, given that he didn’t seem to be taking me seriously. “I wondered whether he was worried about meeting Niamh Horne, and the possibility of war breaking out between Earth and the Outer System.”

Gray seemed genuinely puzzled. “Where did you get that idea from?” he asked. “Humankind hasn’t had a war since…well, before you were born. Emortals don’t fight wars — they have too accurate a notion of the value of life.”

“You don’t think blowing up North America and plunging Earth into nuclear winter counts as an act of war?” I said, feigning astonishment. “In my day, most people thought that every stomach upset was probably the first shot in the next plague war.”

Mortimer Gray stared at me, seemingly anxious as well as puzzled. “I suppose that must have been the case,” he said, cautiously. “But things have changed. Mores, attitudes, habits…everything is different now. I can’t believe that the Basalt Flow was the result of a deliberate act of sabotage. There are political conflicts within the solar system, but we all understand that our only hope of beating the Afterlife is to work together as a community of species. Do you know what the Afterlife is?”

“I read up on it,” I confirmed. “I understand the argument that a common threat makes it necessary for potential enemies to work together — but I’m not convinced. In my day, as you presumably know, there was a school of thought which held that social contracts were only reliable because men were mortal and prey to pain. In a world of true emortals with efficient IT, the theory went, there could be no effective sanctions forcing people to fulfill their obligations and keep their promises. One corollary of the theory was that a world of emortals would be more prone to conflict, not less.”

He found the notion too alien to be threatening. “But the truth is exactly the opposite, as history has proved,” he protested. “People who might live for a very long time in the company of their peers have very powerful reasons for honoring their obligations, because there’s no way to escape the consequences of failure. We have to deal honestly with one another, because we can’t afford the consequences of being exposed as liars, let alone the consequences of violent behaviour. You really need to understand that, Mr. Tamlin — and I’m sure you will, given time.”

I would have taken more comfort from his words if he’d glanced sideways at Christine Caine while he was closing his argument, but he didn’t. He kept right on looking me in the eyes as he pronounced words like “liars” and “violent behavior.” He wasn’t scared of me — he would have thought the suggestion that he might need a bodyguard absurd — but he wasn’t laboring under any delusion that I was a man like him. When he said that he and I weren’t so very different, he was talking about a narrow range of emotional responses, not about the extent of our evolution beyond Neanderthal brutality.

“So there isn’t going to be a war?” I said, meeting his gaze squarely.

“No,” he said, flatly. I couldn’t tell whether he was so definite because he was genuinely convinced, or because he desperately wanted to believe it. Paranoid as I was, I favored the latter hypothesis. In any case, I thought it best to change the subject.

“You said that I’ve
yet to decide which particular form of posthumanity to embrace
,” I reminded him. “I don’t suppose anyone cares what decision I make — but Adam Zimmerman must be a different proposition. Lots of people must be interested in his decision, given that he had to change the course of history in order to give himself the chance to make it.”

“People are interested, of course,” Gray said, a little warier now of where the conversation might be heading, “but not as much as you might suppose. Adam Zimmerman didn’t actually
change
the course of history. If he hadn’t done what he did, someone else would have. The timing might have been slightly different, but the eventual result would have been the same.”

“Is it just Adam Zimmerman,” I asked, genuinely interested in the question, “or don’t you believe in pivotal individuals at all? Would the eventual result have been the same if Conrad Helier had been an early casualty of the plague wars — or if you hadn’t saved Emily Marchant’s life in the Coral Sea Disaster?”

He raised his eyebrows in frank astonishment. “We can all make a difference, Mr. Tamlin,” he said. “It’s because so many of us can that none of us has the power to change everything. I do hope you’ll consider the offer of employment I made — you might be even more useful to us as a window into the past than we had hoped. An account of your personal history would be fascinating.”

It was supposed to be a compliment, but I couldn’t take it that way. He was telling me that I appeared to be an even freakier freak than his friendly neighborhood zookeepers had imagined. No matter how smart I tried to seem, I realized, I would always be a monkey doing tricks. Nobody was ever going to think that I might have anything to contribute to the understanding of the world as it now was. For a moment, I almost pitied Adam Zimmerman.

“There’s nothing hi about my story,” I told him. “It’s essentially lo — and for the moment, quite lost.”

He frowned, unable to see the joke for a few moments. Then he got it, and tried to contrive a weak smile. I couldn’t blame him for his lack of amusement. Some jokes are best kept private.

“Even so,” he said, “we’d be very interested. You’re a unique resource, whose experiences will be even more interesting in juxtaposition with those of your companions.”

All three of us were unique, even though we were in the same boat, because we’d come from different eras: we made up quite a goodie bag for a historian. There were thousands more of us still to be thawed, but every one would be unique from Mortimer Gray’s point of view.

“I’ll think it over,” I assured the historian. “I’ll come back to you when I have more questions.”

I wanted to talk to Solantha Handsel, but I didn’t get the chance. The party was already winding down — over, it seemed, almost as soon as it had begun — because Michael Lowenthal had decided that he had had enough, and that it was time to let the sisterhood whisk him away.

I didn’t see the Earthpeople again until the following day. Even Christine absented herself for a while, although she reappeared when the time came to watch the “real” spaceship coming into dock.

That, apparently, was the kind of experience she liked to share — or one of them, at any rate.

Seventeen

The Cyborganizers

C
hristine hadn’t exaggerated when she had rhapsodized about how much more impressive the ship from the Outer System would be than the ferry that had arced across the diameter of the Earth’s orbit.
Child of Fortune
was at least thirty times as big as
Peppercorn Seven
, and there was not the least possibility that the neatly chiseled workings on its surface might be mistaken for incompetent molding or accidental scratching. It didn’t have fins, but it did have what looked to me like a massive pair of furled wings.

Although the station looked like a chimerical sea creature, the ship from the Jovian moons had the air of an authentic flier: a bird that was merely bobbing on the surface of the ocean, quite able to transform itself into something altogether more spectacular. Because it was decelerating,
Child of Fortune
was headed toward us hind end first, its fuser doubtless spitting out the last few gobs of reaction mass with the utmost discretion. It bore a faint and temporary resemblance to a massive whale or basking shark, with its mouth wide open, but everything about its design proclaimed that it was a much finer creature than that.

When Excelsior had extended its tentacles toward the Earth ship the microworld had been a huge scavenger gobbling up a stray morsel, but when it reached out to touch the Outer System vessel it was more like a tentative greeting between alien equals, albeit of very different sizes and shapes.

“How many people are aboard?” I asked Christine, figuring that I might as well take advantage of her research.

“About sixty, apparently,” she told me. “The permanent crew is about fifty strong. They’re fabers — I think they’ll disembark in shifts, but only as far as the microworld’s core.

She was presumably right, but the umbilicals established between ship and station were much more substantial than those connected to
Peppercorn Seven
. It was impossible to see individuals passing through them.

I was even more curious about Niamh Horne’s delegation than I had been about Lowenthal’s, and I couldn’t help feeling aggrieved that they didn’t show anything like the same alacrity in calling on us.

Christine and I waited until it would have seemed absurd to wait any longer, then returned to our separate researches in the virtual world, half-hoping that giving up would somehow function as a catalyst and precipitate the expected meeting.

It didn’t.

I had been immersed in solitary visions of Titan and Ganymede for more than two hours when the visitors finally arrived — and when they did, there were only two of them, in addition to Davida Berenike Columella.

At least I was spared the ultimate indignity of talking to a flunky. Niamh Horne had the grace to appear in person. She also had the grace to let Davida perform the introductions in a sensible ceremonial fashion. Her companion was a male named Theoderic Conwin.

Niamh Horne and Theoderic Conwin were both cyborgs, but I saw immediately — if slightly belatedly — what Mortimer Gray had meant about the difference between functional and ornamental cyborganization. I had taken Solantha Handsel for a bodyguard because her modifications had been shaped and coordinated to display the suggestion that she was half fighting machine, but I realized now how ostentatious her adaptations were.

There was nothing manifestly obtrusive or calculatedly suggestive about the modifications that had been made to the two Titanians. It required close and considered inspection to determine that their outer teguments were much thicker than the additional skins Davida and I were wearing, because they were camouflaged to give an appearance of real skin and conventional clothing. Their eyes and ears, though artificial, were similarly formed to resemble their natural counterparts. It was impossible to judge exactly how much their seeming solidity owed to the bulk of their smartsuits, but I formed the impression that within their relatively stout frames there were two unfashionably thin individuals making no effort whatsoever to get out.

“Davida tells me that you don’t want to go home to Earth,” Niamh Horne said, after a few cursory pleasantries. Nobody had taken the trouble to invite Christine in from the adjoining room, although I felt a slight twinge of guilt about my failure to raise the issue.

“I haven’t made any final decision,” I told her. “But I have a certain sympathy with Christine’s view that we’re so radically dislocated anyway that we might as well go somewhere authentically alien.”

“Been there, done that, took the rap,” the cyborg woman quoted. Her tone suggested a wry smile, but her lips didn’t seem to go in for that sort of thing.

“But the terrestrial surface you left behind is very different from the present one,” her male companion pointed out.

“Not in the essentials,” I said. “Atmosphere, gravity…anyway, rumor has it that you people think Earth is hopelessly decadent, incapable of any
real
change. A rest home for the robotized, holding back the cause of progress.”

It would have been easier to judge their response to that if they had been smilers; as things were, I had to grin at my own joke to defuse it.

“It’s only natural that the Earthbound should be conservative and conservationist,” Theoderic Conwin said, displaying his tolerance proudly. “They’re the custodians of the planet that produced humankind — and our explorations of the galaxy suggest that such worlds are exceedingly rare and precious.”

“Someone has to be prepared to be fanatical in looking after what we have,” Niamh Horne added, with equally ostentatious generosity. “If the Earthbound weren’t able to maintain a safe anchorage for the posthuman project, our own capacity to innovate and experiment might be inhibited. There’s no conflict between the outer satellites and Earth. Our differences of opinion are polite, and entirely healthy.”

I gathered from this speech that she’d been thoroughly briefed on what I’d said to Mortimer Gray. The historian hadn’t denied that there were conflicts, I remembered; he had been content to refute the notion that they could ever become violent. She obviously wanted to ram the point home. Even if I’d been less paranoid than I was I wouldn’t have taken their assurances seriously for a moment.

“Well,” I said, glibly, “I’m glad to be able to add an extra measure, however small, to the posthuman spectrum. I’m sure I’d find cause for discomfort in a world where differences weren’t polite, healthy, and welcome. Do you think I’d be able to find useful work on Titan?”

“Ganymede might be more appropriate,” she said, somewhat to my surprise.

“I thought Ganymede was the AI Utopia,” I said.

“Exactly,” she came back. “The roles filled there by human beings are relatively menial and less challenging than those available elsewhere. On the other hand, you might be able to adapt more rapidly to a smaller and more easily comprehensible world — one of the belt habitats, for instance.” It would have stung less if she’d smiled, but I had a suspicion that it wasn’t simply the inflexibility of her cheeks that was getting in her way this time.