The Omega Expedition (30 page)

His eyebrows barely twitched. He reached up reflexively to stroke his fledgling beard. “Our captors seem to have neglected to provide shoes,” he pointed out, making a feeble attempt at humor. “In fact, they seem to be a long way behind the times in all sorts of ways. Do you have any particular reason for suggesting that they might be aliens pretending to be people pretending to be aliens?”

“Just habit,” I told him. “I always look for the wheels within the wheels within the wheels. I wouldn’t be here today if it weren’t for a kidnapping. I might never have seen Damon Hart again once he’d given up street life if his foster father hadn’t been snatched by people pretending to be Eliminators. It turned out to be a convoluted game — but the end result of it was that our lives were both diverted on to an entirely new track. It seems that you and I have both carried the lessons of our personal history into our current situation. I knew your mother, you know.”

Perhaps I should have saved that particular bombshell for later, but it’s difficult to keep something like that up your sleeve when the temptation to use it is always there.

“What do you mean?” he asked, a trifle slow on the uptake.

“Your biological mother,” I said. “Diana Caisson.”

“Egg donors are of no consequence in our world,” he told me, after only the slightest hesitation. “The embryos from which we’re made undergo such extensive engineering that we acquire far more characteristics than we inherit. I may owe a few genetic idiosyncrasies to the particular individuals who provided the egg and sperm to start me off, but Ali Zaman and all his myriad followers were my true biological parents. I owe everything else that I am to my foster parents…and to Emily Marchant.”

“So you don’t want to know about Diana Caisson?” I said. “You’re not curious?”

“I’m a historian,” he reminded me. “I’m curious about
everything
you know about your own world. But we have more urgent matters to consider, do we not?”

I was a trifle disappointed, but I figured that if he wanted to play it that way, I could too.

“Fair enough,” I said. “I’m curious myself — but for me, it’s all new, and all urgent. Are the Earthbound really as decadent as everybody seems to think? Have you really become a dead weight inhibiting further progress? Is that why someone’s trying to administer a sharp object lesson to you and Lowenthal — and Adam Zimmerman?”

He only looked uncomfortable for a moment. After all, I was steering him back to safer ground — to his own intellectual territory.

“There are people in the Outer System who are fond of trying to make that case,” he admitted. “It’s nothing new — I heard little else when I lived on the moon. There are political, ecological, and psychological arguments, but they all boil down to the idea that organisms that are so perfectly adapted to their environment that they never have any reason or inclination to leave it are bound to stagnate. Hard-line cyborganizers and proselytizing outward bounders are both fond of declaring that the only way for emortals to avoid robotization is to pose an infinite series of challenges to their inherited nature, by continually moving into alien environments and never remaining too long in any one of them. But I can’t believe that what’s happening to us here and now is just an
object lesson
. Something very strange is happening, and we really do need to examine every clue you obtained, however slight. If you can tell us
exactly
what the woman said to you, there might be items of information therein whose significance we can see far better than you.”

I popped the top of the water bottle and drank deeply. It wasn’t until the cool water hit my stomach that I realized how thirsty I had been. Ridiculous as it may seem, I’d lived so long with careful IT that I had fallen out of touch with unmodified sensations. It occurred to me to wonder how much worse Mortimer Gray’s alienation from his body might be.

“I suppose there might,” I conceded. “In fact, there might be details of our surroundings whose significance you can judge far better than I, not to mention details of our physical condition. They seem to have purged our IT, but they weren’t able to purge Niamh Horne’s externals. If anyone’s still capable of communication with the outside world, it’s her. Is that why you’re expecting Emily Marchant to come rescue us?”

He frowned to display his disapproval of my unhelpful attitude, but he answered me anyway. “Solantha Handsel is a cyborg too,” he pointed out, mildly. “Given that we started from Earth orbit, Julius Ngomi might be able to obtain news of our difficulties long before anyone on Titan.”

“Who’s Julius Ngomi?” I asked.

“The only member of the Inner Circle to whom I can confidently put a name,” he said, wearily accepting my agenda, presumably in the hope that I would eventually condescend to get back to his. “He’s another man who once suggested to me that the conflicts of interest that were growing up within the solar system couldn’t be settled with mere words and spontaneous bursts of fellow feeling. There are, I fear, people like him on both sides of the current dispute between Earth and the Confederation.”

I put the spoon aside and sipped gruel direct from the bowl. I was beginning to feel better, but I opened the bottle Alice had given me and tipped out a couple of tablets. I used the gruel to wash them down.

“The sort of person who might want to bomb all hell out of Titan?” I suggested. “Partly to punish the people who probably set off the Yellowstone supervolcano, but mainly to let other interested parties know that nobody messes with the cradle of humankind and gets away with it?”

Gray shook his head. “No,” he said. “Nobody’s that crazy — certainly not Julius. When I say that he doesn’t approve of mere words, I don’t mean to imply that he’s a man of violence. He’s a Hardinist through and through. He thinks that ownership and good stewardship are the answers to all human problems. He just wants to settle the question of who owns what. Did you know that there’s a stock market on Titan now?”

I couldn’t help laughing. “Do you think he brought Adam Zimmerman out of cold storage to
do it again
?” I asked, not very seriously.

“Not at all,” he replied, keeping his own tone light. “But I think he
might
have brought Adam Zimmerman out of cold storage to remind us all what a great hero he was, and how his cleverness saved the world from the ultimate ecocatastrophe. If he was the one who gave the order to bring Zimmerman out, he must have intended to use him as an instrument of propaganda — perhaps to help prepare the way for a strictly nonviolent revolution, whose ultimate aim is to install a judiciously extended Cabal as owners and stewards of the entire solar system.”

He was obviously being serious — and he
was
the man who was supposed to understand the way the world worked, far better than I did. If the Earthbound really were stuck in the mud, though, the Hardinist Cabal might have retained the habits it had had in my day, when it had consisted of PicoCon and a few good friends. If so, they might indeed have decided to tackle their problems by widening their circle — by welcoming people like Emily Marchant into the fold, on whatever terms were negotiable. Maybe the outer system powers-that-be thought of themselves as the kind of people who’d never go for that kind of deal, but Damon Hart had thought of himself that way at one time. So had I.

If Mortimer Gray was right, I thought, and nobody was crazy enough to go to war, the only matter to be settled was the balance of power at the conference table — including the question of who was entitled to a seat. Maybe this really was the same kind of game that Damon and I had played before, on a slightly bigger board. If Michael Lowenthal and Niamh Horne were only pretending to be adversaries, while their actual purpose was to get together and wrap up a deal to impose a series of Enclosure Acts on the entire solar system, there might be any number of third parties anxious to get a slice for themselves, as well as any number ambitious to sabotage the whole process.

I hoped that I might be beginning to see the light, but I knew that I was overreaching from a position of almost total ignorance. Gray was in a far better position than I was to guess who was doing what to whom and why.

I was saved from further self-torture by yet another knock on the door. Adam Zimmerman came in, without waiting for an invitation. “Mr. Lowenthal wants to call a conference,” he said, mildly. “He thinks we should discuss our situation, and make what plans we can.” Lowenthal had obviously got tired of waiting for Gray to come up with the goods.

I handed my bowl and the empty water bottle back to Mortimer Gray. Reflexively, he took them. “Thanks,” I said.

Gray wasn’t about to be dismissed like that; he hung around to watch the first authentic contact between the man who had once stolen the world and the mysterious monster whose crimes had been erased from the record.

“Are you all right now?” Adam Zimmerman asked me, solicitously.

“Pretty much,” I said. “I’ve been hurt before. How about you? This isn’t the kind of welcome you expected when you took your great leap into the unknown.”

“No,” he admitted, “it certainly isn’t. But it was always a gamble — and if I hadn’t taken it, I’d be dead. I might still get what I wanted — unless you know different.” His face was old and his eyes seemed weak, but that was all deceptive appearance. His mind was as determined as it ever was. He hadn’t been interested in me before but he was interested in me now, because I was the one who had talked to Alice.

“So far as I can tell,” I assured him, “our captors wish us well. We just got caught up in somebody else’s troubles. With luck, we’ll come through this. Even I might still get what I want, if I can figure out what it is.”

The look he gave me then was slightly pitying. He was a man who had known exactly what he wanted throughout his adult life. For him, the goal had always been crystal clear, and perfectly simple. That might make him an innocent, by my standards, or even a fool — but it was an enviable state of mind.

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s go confer, and make what plans we can.”

Twenty-Six

Common Cause

T
he pain in my face hadn’t gone away, but it had become duller. Moving around no longer increased its effect. At least I’d contrived to miss out on my fair share of the work that had had to be done. By the time I emerged from my cell the common space had been reorganized and tidied. The table had been assembled and set up, and eight chairs had been neatly distributed around it, one at each end and three along each side.

As soon as I saw the array I knew that the chairs at the ends might as well have had Michael Lowenthal’s and Niamh Horne’s names on them. The moment they had decided to call a conference they had set about modeling the situation as they saw it — or as they wanted others to see it. I paused to wonder whether our mysterious captors had done the same thing when they placed us in cells two by two, or whether they had simply sorted us out according to our existing associations.

The other seats about the conference table were distributed according to fairly obvious protocols. Adam Zimmerman had to have one of the middle seats, so that he would be equidistant from Lowenthal and Horne, and Davida had to have the other. Solantha Handsel had to be at Lowenthal’s right hand, and Mortimer Gray filled in the remaining gap on that side of the table. That left Christine and me — and I wasn’t unduly surprised when Lowenthal laid claim to me, seating me between him and Zimmerman. The power to determine the seating suggested that he had the upper hand at this stage, perhaps for no better reason than the fact that he had a bodyguard and Niamh Horne didn’t.

I resisted the temptation to sit where I wasn’t supposed to, or to request a formal agenda, or even to question Lowenthal’s assumption that he could play chairman. I tried, instead, to measure Niamh Horne’s reaction to Lowenthal’s presumption. Because her face was a mask and her eyes were machines, though, there was no expression to be read therein.

“So far,” Lowenthal said, “we’ve been wasting our time in accusations and recriminations. I think we have to accept that none of us knows why we have been taken prisoner, or by whom. Perhaps we’ll be told, in due course, but we can’t rely on it. In the meantime, we’re all in the same boat and we ought to try to work together, as constructively as possible.”

“Assuming that there’s anything constructive to do,” Niamh Horne added, but not in a challenging way.

“I’m not suggesting that we form an escape committee,” Lowenthal went on, keeping his own voice light. “I’m merely suggesting that we collaborate in assessing our situation and trying to figure out how we ought to react to it. I think we can take it for granted that we’re on some kind of spaceship, albeit a very old one — or one constructed according to a very old blueprint. It seems likely that the apparent gravity is simulated by acceleration, but I can’t believe we’re heading out of the system. Do you have anything useful to add to those conclusions, Mr. Tamlin?”

I was slightly surprised to find myself in the hot seat so soon, but I had already had time to think about what I ought and ought not to share with my companions — and what I wanted them to share with me.

“All I know for certain,” I said, modestly, “is that the person I saw looked human, and that the medical apparatus immediately available to her is primitive even by the standards of my time. She seemed to me to be telling the truth when she said that she’d like to explain but that she and her companion were engaged in difficult negotiations with other parties who want us kept in the dark.”

“Companion?” Horne echoed. “In the singular?”

“That’s what she said,” I confirmed. Hopeful of setting up a fair trade of information, I was quick to add: “Does anyone have a means of determining exactly how long we were asleep? That might offer a clue as to how long we’ve been traveling, where we might have been delivered to, and where we might be going.”

Lowenthal exchanged glances with Niamh Horne and Davida Berenike Columella. “I don’t have any way to estimate the interval,” he said.