The Omega Expedition (24 page)

Davida finally got in touch shortly after breakfast, but Adam Zimmerman still hadn’t asked to meet me. I had to put up with the next best thing, which was an invitation to join the great man on a tour of Niamh Horne’s super-duper spaceship. I accepted with alacrity.

Any lingering hope I might have entertained of seeing more of the microworld vanished when yet another pod grew out of the wall, avid to embrace me. When I stepped into it the fleshy interior hugged me so tightly that I didn’t even notice the gradual easing of the pseudogravitational attraction until it spat me out into the ship — at which point I would have floated helplessly away if the floor hadn’t grabbed the soles of my feet.

I’d got to the point where it was nice to see any kind of open space — but any elation that might have accompanied the discovery that I was in a real corridor was offset by the terrible sensation of weightlessness. My IT, like Christine

Caine’s, had edited out my capacity for panic, but it had no provision for me to feel good about the things that might have panicked me.

There was quite a crowd awaiting me, but Mortimer Gray was the only one who seemed to care whether I needed help. Once he had ascertained that I had never been in zero-gee before he took up a position beside me, ready to steady me as I took my first faltering steps into the brightly lit interior of
Child of Fortune
. I had to focus on my internal organs, which seemed to be taking advantage of their newfound opportunities by rearranging themselves.

“It’s okay,” Gray told me. “Your IT will help you adapt if you let it. All you have to remember is to move slowly and deliberately until you get the hang of it, and always to keep one foot on the floor. The floor’s as smart as the fabric of your suit; together they’ll keep you right way up and on track.”

“I suppose you do this all the time,” I said, through teeth that were only slightly gritted.

“Hardly ever,” he assured me. “But I’ve lived on the moon, which isn’t so very different. It was a long time ago now, and the conscious memory’s exceedingly hazy, but the body has a memory of its own. The autonomic reflexes soon come back. Just relax.”

I decided to accept my discomfort as evidence of the fact that I wasn’t just a mechanical simulation, and that everything I was experiencing was really happening. I told myself that if I really was going to live for a thousand or a hundred thousand years I’d probably be spending a great deal of time in zero-gee, given the size of the universe and the ratio of nothingness to substance.

Fortunately, we had a few minutes’ grace before the party was finalized by Christine Caine’s arrival. She made ten. Lowenthal and Handsel were there, but not de Comeau or Conwin. Davida was stationed to one side of Adam Zimmerman, Niamh Horne to the other. There was one other humaniform cyborg, whose feet were on the “floor,” plus a faber cyborg whose four limbs were all arms — one of which was lazily extended to the webbing that dressed the “vertical” walls.

Nobody volunteered to introduce me to Adam Zimmerman, and I didn’t feel sufficiently confident of my footing to stride across the eight meters that separated our stations and offer to shake his hand. He must have looked me up and down while I was still confused, but he had looked away by the time I was capable of meeting his gaze. We both watched Christine Caine emerge from her pod.

She was just as awkward as I had been, and Gray was still the only one with social conscience enough to help her. He was even polite enough to murmur “excuse me” to me as he moved to do it. I would have helped if I could, but I couldn’t.

Niamh Horne was obviously the one in charge now that we were on her territory, and everyone looked to her to take the lead — which she did with an imperious manner that seemed almost insulting. She swept Adam Zimmerman away with her, and her two cronies moved with effortless ease to form a barrier between the two of them and the rest of us.

We had to move two abreast, and that left Davida looking distinctly spare as Lowenthal and his bodyguard fell in behind the two cyborgs. Gray motioned to me to carry on, obviously figuring that Christine had more need of his support than I did, so I tried to fall into step with the cryogenicist.

“Congratulations,” I muttered. “You brought it off. He looks as fit as a flea.”

It wasn’t an expression she recognized or appreciated, but she acknowledged the compliment anyway, adding: “This is as new to me as it is to you. I’ve never been aboard a Titanian ship before. Not that there’ll be much actually to
see
. It’s just a minimicroworld, after all.”

“How’s Zimmerman taking it?” I asked, curiously. “He can’t have expected to be away so long.” I diplomatically refrained from asking how pissed off he was at the Foundation’s board of directors for letting him lie so long.

“He’s fine,” she assured me. “Excited. Interested. Delighted.” She didn’t sound like someone trying to convince herself, but the list was distinctly clipped. Unlike me, she was used to operating in zero-gee, so whatever discomfort she was feeling couldn’t have the same cause as mine. Movement wasn’t doing my internal organs any favors; they still seemed to be in dispute with one another as to how to arrange themselves now that they no longer had to fall in line with the dictates of gravity.

I was too far back in the column to hear more than the odd few words of the commentary that Niamh Horne was delivering to Adam Zimmerman — she wasn’t making any strenuous effort to raise her voice — but it seemed to me that Davida was absolutely right about there not being much actually to
see
. There were brightly decorated corridors. There were multitudinous display screens. There were sphincters opening the way into fixed pods, and blister patches where new pods could be formulated if required. There were suggestive curves and lumps.

On the other hand, there were no instrument panels full of flashing lights, no levers for human hands to pull, no wheels for human hands to turn, no triggers for human fingers to squeeze. I saw no bridgehead, no control room, no recreation area. There were a few crewmen hanging around, who might have been working but were far more likely to be trying to catch a glimpse of Adam Zimmerman, while proudly showing off their own posthumanity. The fabers looked weird enough, and the cyborg fabers even weirder, but they weren’t as ostentatious about their modifications as Solantha Handsel, and the way they looked at me reminded me that I was the alien one, the one who belonged in a cage.

If I’d known more about what I was supposed to be looking at I’d probably have got more out of the excursion, but Adam Zimmerman was getting the sole benefit of the running commentary and Mortimer Gray probably had more interesting information to whisper in Christine’s ear than Davida offered to me. The one thing that was impressed upon me was how
big
the ship was, and even that seemed to be a kind of statement: an insistence on behalf of the inhabitants of the Outer System that they, not the Earthbound, were the masters of modern technology and the custodians of future progress. But as I looked back at all the posthumans who were looking at me, I began to see something of the complexity of their society.

Even if the Earthbound could be firmly kept in their place, I guessed, the question of how to distribute ownership and control of the solar system’s usable mass wasn’t going to be an easy one to settle. If I really had lived long enough to witness the dawn of an era in which even Jupiter’s mass couldn’t safely be set aside as a common resource, available to anyone who cared to appropriate what they could, there was little or no hope that the Outer System factions could agree among themselves once the Earthbound were impotent to provide a natural party of opposition.

I hadn’t tried to read up on Mortimer Gray’s theories of history, but I thought I could make a fair guess at Michael Lowenthal’s ideological standpoint, given that he had been born and bred within the Hardinist Cabal. His view had to be that firm distinctions of ownership needed to be made, however inequitable they might be, in order to protect the system’s resources from wastage. His aim had to be the stabilization — maybe even the robotization — of the patterns of resource exploitation, in the interests of building a system that could endure forever, or at least until the Afterlife arrived. There might be a dozen or a hundred different ways of setting up some such stable situation, but there had to be a thousand or a million different ways of destabilizing it, so however many disputes Lowenthal might be embroiled in, Niamh Horne had to be embroiled in a great many more. And no matter how convinced Mortimer Gray might be that the posthuman races had put away the violent habits of their ancestors, I had no difficulty at all imagining those kinds of disputes extending into warfare — even the kinds of warfare that could exterminate whole ecospheres and civilizations.

It seemed to me that we had been walking for a long way before disaster struck, although that might have been an illusion based in the unfamiliarity of the way I was walking.

When disaster
did
strike, however, it seemed that a certain conspicuously lacking equality was restored. When the lights turned red and the mechanical voice began booming out from every direction, everybody — including Niamh Horne and her cyborg chums — was suddenly thrust into unknown existential territory.

The reaction of the locals strongly suggested that one of the things modern spaceship crews never bothered to practice was lifeboat drill. Their IT was supposed to insulate them against the worst effects of panic, but their immunity was purely physiological and it didn’t inhibit the initial burst of adrenalin that prepared them for fight or flight. They jumped like scalded cats — and if the wildness of their eyes could be believed, the fear that set in thereafter wasn’t about to submit meekly to chemical calming.

Extreme danger!
the mechanical voice said, displaying a fine flair for melodrama.
All crew and passengers to emergency life support. Immediate response required. All crew and passengers to emergency life support. Extreme danger! Immediate response required
.

Nobody seemed to know which way to go. We had been shown preformed pods and generative blisters aplenty, and had stared at them with the dutiful interest expected of interested tourists, even though they looked exactly the same as the pods on Excelsior that served as transportation devices and VE immersion suits — but none of us, including Niamh Horne, knew how to find or manifest the right kind of pod, or to open it. None of us knew which way to run.

I didn’t even know how to run, when the only thing holding me to the “floor” was the floor itself. Fortunately, the floor and the walls
did
know what to do. They were not only smart, but the kind of smart that didn’t need rehearsals. The real function of the mechanical voice wasn’t to urge us to action but to prepare us to be acted upon.

The corridors, which had seemed to my ungrateful eye to be merely corridors, had abilities that might have been explained to Adam Zimmerman, but came as a complete surprise to me. I wasn’t in any state to notice exactly how they coped with the fact that we had been walking two abreast in our horribly ungainly fashion, but they sorted us out with no difficulty at all. They closed in on us, and engulfed us.

Maybe Niamh Horne and her fellow crew members knew enough to be reflexively grateful for that, but I hadn’t been educated to their kind of world. I was terrified. I had the words
extreme danger
ringing in my ears, and I had no idea what form that extreme disaster might take. When the walls rushed in upon me I had no way of judging whether that might be an aspect of the danger in question rather than my salvation: a danger whose extremity would make itself manifest by crushing me to a pulp, or perhaps by asphyxiating me.

I might have screamed — but if I had, I don’t think anyone could have heard me. I didn’t hear anyone else’s scream.

Twenty

Invaders from Beyond

T
he impression that I was in the process of being unceremoniously killed can’t have lasted more than five or six seconds, but time really does become elastic when you’re in the grip of that kind of terror. The moments stretch as your mind tries to make the most of the little time you have left, and the terror is compounded by the tortuous strain of their extension. My IT must have been doing its best to help, but IT can only deal efficiently with the underlying physiology; consciousness remains a mystery, which works in its own strangely creative ways.

In retrospect, I suppose I should have been glad of the terror and the way it expanded to fill the horizons of time, on the grounds that it offered further evidence that I really was alive and that I really was myself. Alas, I wasn’t capable of being grateful at the time.

When the moment came to realize that I was actually in the process of being saved — that the walls were bearing me away to the pod where I was supposed to be, snugly and securely cocooned against any probable disaster — I was in no mental state to seize the realization. More hideous seconds had to tick by while I was lost in confusion, unable to recognize the mercy of my situation.

Somehow, the pod didn’t feel like a pod at all. My internal organs still seemed to be jostling for position, but now it was impossible to tell whether they were still confined by my body wall. I had a peculiar sensation of having been turned inside out. It was false, but it was the kind of illusion that my clever IT couldn’t even begin to cope with.

Subjectively speaking, it took a long time for me to reconcile myself to the fact that I wasn’t dead, or dying, or in pain, or mad…and that all I had to do to retake control of myself was to accept that I was still alive and still in the game. “In the game” was, I realized, the best way to think about my predicament. I had played my share of scary games while wearing a full-body VE suit. I had done this sort of thing for fun, and still could, if I could only calm down and go with the flow.

It wasn’t until I finally opened my eyes that I realized that I wasn’t blind. The ship’s AI could feed information to me exactly as if I were in a VE immersion suit — which, in essence, I was. Even then, it wasn’t until I had been looking out into a visual field filled with mile-high letters saying