The Omega Expedition (33 page)

“Which of us was the target?” I asked, figuring that there was no harm in continuing to try. “You can tell us that, at least. Some of us must be innocent bystanders.”

Her expression suggested otherwise, but she decided to stick her neck out. “Adam Zimmerman and Mortimer Gray were the original targets,” she said, still making a show of great reluctance, “but everyone had to compromise even to get this far. It was a victory of sorts, in the end, to hold the list to nine. With any luck, you’ll all get to play your parts — but when the time comes for the deal to be done, Gray’s the one who’ll swing the decision one way or the other. You should tell him that. He needs to be forewarned.”

I hadn’t time to think it over, or even to consider alternative reasons as to why she’d said “nine” instead of “eight”; she was already trying to shove me out of the cupboard and back to the cage. I only had time for one more shot, and I had to improvise as best I could.

“It’s already begun, hasn’t it?” I said. “The war, I mean. Year zero was the first shot.”

“No it wasn’t,” she told me. “The seeds of potential conflict were sown
long
before that — but they have to be prevented from flowering. We have to work things out. We have to arrive at a settlement, without everything turning into the Afterlife.”

Twenty-Eight

The Mystery Unravelled

I
knew that I wasn’t going to be universally popular when I returned to my companions, but I expected that Lowenthal would have smoothed things over. Even if he couldn’t bring himself to believe that I hadn’t simply gone berserk he had to hope that I could turn my explosion into a strategy and find out more by running up moral credit than he and Horne could ever have found out by trying to put pressure on Alice.

On the other hand, I knew that the only way to hold my new position in the pecking order was to lay out something they could get their teeth into, so when I found them waiting to hear from me I knew that I had to make it good.

“Okay,” I said, “Here’s what I’m sure of, thanks to a little help from Christine. We’re aboard one of the Arks that a bunch of Lowenthal’s predecessors built in the late twenty-first century. The idea was to hitch a ride in a bunch of comets that were passing through the system, but one coupling went wrong so only three left the system. This is the fourth. Alice says that she was frozen down in twenty ninety, which would make her a passenger on one of the other three — almost certainly the one that recontacted Earth when it ended up at Ararat. Whoever’s got hold of us probably came from Ararat, but they seem to be engaged in combative negotiations with several local parties. Alice says they haven’t settled on a venue for the show we’ve been snatched to take part in because whatever location they choose will be symbolically loaded — she told me to ask Lowenthal and Gray about their peace conference experience if I wanted that explained.

“The original targets of the kidnap plan were Zimmerman and Gray, but the rest of us got added in as a result of the negotiations, maybe because that’s the way committee decisions always go. The negotiations must have begun before Christine and I were woken up, so it’s possible that we were specifically chosen to be part of this, but it’s conceivable that they just wanted six more bodies to make up an agreed number. The agreed number appears to be nine rather than eight, which might mean that there’s someone else yet to be added in, or that Alice herself is number nine.

“Whatever the story is, it goes back way beyond year zero. I can’t get Alice’s
we
and
they
straight in my mind, but whoever
they
are she says they love playing games — which is presumably why they’ll be hanging on my every word just as intently as you are. I suspect that they’ve woken us up to watch us, maybe to see whether we can figure this out but more likely because they want to obtain a better idea of where Lowenthal’s and Horne’s masters stand in respect of the problems that currently afflict the solar system.

“In spite of what I said before, I don’t think anyone intends to torture us, but they do seem to want us in our raw state for now, maybe because they intend to instal some elaborate IT of their own. According to Alice, the stuff I was just given is strictly temporary. Alice reckons that Gray’s the key to the whole affair. She says that he’s the one who might be able to swing the big decision one way or the other, and ought to be forewarned of that responsibility. If we get it wrong, the booby prize might be extinction — but that threat might just be part of the game. In fact,
all
of this might just be part of the game.”

Having said that, I sat down. I wasn’t tired — in fact, I’d never been so tightly wired without powerful chemical assistance — but I figured that it would be an appropriate way to signal that the floor was open.

Lowenthal had been looking at me, but now he looked at Mortimer Gray. Mortimer Gray was studying the table top intently, deep in thought — or determinedly pretending to be deep in thought.

“Is that all?” Niamh Horne asked me.

“All except the rhetoric,” I told her. “Mention was made of defining moments in history. You’d know more about what might qualify than I do. If Lowenthal’s strong right arm had only shown enough judgment to break Gray’s nose instead of mine, he might have been able to get far more out of Alice than I did, and to catch on far more readily to what it might mean; as things are, we’ll just have to make the best of what we’ve got.”

Lowenthal was still looking at Mortimer Gray. The historian finally condescended to raise his head, but instead of meeting Lowenthal’s inquiring gaze he looked at Davida Berenike Columella. “Who gave you the instruction to wake Zimmerman?” he asked.

“It came from Foundation headquarters, on Earth,” she told him — unhelpfully, so far as I could tell.

Now he swung his gaze to Lowenthal. “And who gave the order to the Foundation?” he asked.

Lowenthal shook his head. “I wish I knew,” he said, quickly adding: “If I could say that it wasn’t us, I would, but the organization’s not that tight. If Julius Ngomi gave the order, he didn’t let on to me. I honestly have no idea where the order originated — but if it had been the Foundation’s own idea, and they’d asked for permission, I’d know. The impression I was given before I left Earth is that there were people high up in the Foundation who were spitting feathers over an alleged lack of consultation.”

Now it was Niamh Horne’s turn. “Who blew up the Yellowstone magma chamber?” Gray asked her.

“No one I know anything about,” she told him. “We were every bit as anxious as the Earthbound were. If it had been any of the factions, and we’d found out about it, we’d have come down
hard
. So far as we know, it really was a mechanical malfunction. That’s the truth, so far as I know it. I’m certain that Emily Marchant wouldn’t tell you anything different. None of the Outer System people I’ve had dealings with has anything to do with
any
of this. But like Lowenthal, I can only answer for the people I know. It wasn’t until I saw him face to face that I realized that there was any mystery about Zimmerman’s awakening. Someone’s playing us all for fools — and the fact that I don’t have the least idea who, or how, is frankly terrifying.”

Gray nodded, to signal his gratitude for her frankness. He looked troubled — but he also looked like a man who had figured out what was what. I began to feel a slight sinking sensation in my stomach as I realized that this might be exactly what Alice didn’t want — but the die was cast.

“Ararat’s where the first contact took place,” Davida put in, her terror finally having given way to thoughtfulness. “Some of you are old enough to have watched the tape when it was first broadcast in-system. That was supposed to be a defining moment in history. It should have been bigger news than it was. If Ararat’s the key to this…”

“The aliens were primitives,” Solantha Handsel countered. “
They
certainly can’t be behind this. They didn’t even have fire.”

Mortimer Gray let loose a little sigh. It was barely audible, but there was enough feeling in it to reclaim everyone’s attention.

This is it
, I thought — but it wasn’t, quite.

“I can only think of one context in which my word might be thought to be worth more than anyone else’s,” Gray said, his voice saying that he hardly dared believe it. “Only one in which Adam Zimmerman and I might be thought to have equal symbolic weight.”

“You’re the author of the standard
History of Death
,” Davida observed — but Gray was shaking his head before she was halfway through the sentence. He was looking at Lowenthal now. “You were at the conference,” he said to the Hardinist. “We didn’t meet, but you were there. You listened.”

“The whole world listened,” Lowenthal said. “I wasn’t party to the decision to broadcast it, or to divert the ship. That was all Marchant’s doing. What’s your point?”

Gray seemed slightly surprised that the Hardinist still hadn’t caught on.

“What are they talking about?” Christine Caine complained — but when Lowenthal flashed an apology with his eyes it was directed toward Adam Zimmerman.

“There was an important meeting between representatives of the government of Earth and the embryonic outer system factions in twenty-nine ninety-nine,” Lowenthal explained. “It wasn’t a peace conference because we weren’t at war, but it was the first serious attempt to settle some questions that still remain annoyingly open. There had been a certain amount of bickering about where it ought to be held — the outer system people didn’t want to hold it on Earth in case that seemed to endorse the view that Earth was the eternal center of human civilization, and our people didn’t want to make our way out to Titan lest we seemed to be conceding the point that it wasn’t.

“In the end, the compromise was that the talks would be held in an Outer System ship in Earth orbit. Given that sort of buildup, it’s hardly surprising that they weren’t going very well. Then they stalled completely, interrupted when Mortimer — who was quietly going about his own mysterious business — contrived to fall through the Arctic ice cap in a snowmobile. He ended up at the bottom of the ocean. There wasn’t a submarine near enough to reach him before the damaged vehicle imploded, and it would have taken more than the combined might of half a dozen planetary civilizations to keep Emily Marchant from repaying the debt she thought she owed her favorite father figure. If there hadn’t been a state-of-the-art Jovian atmosphere diver way out of its usual stamping ground, he’d have been fish food, but there was — and she broadcast the rescue to everybody in the universe. Mortimer didn’t know that his heart-to-heart with a snowmobile driver was being overheard by anyone, let alone the whole damn world, so he just let it all out. It was maudlin and toe curlingly cute — like one of those ancient kid-trapped-in-a-well race-against-time melodramas — but the audience loved it.

“It was quite a publicity coup, in its way, all the more so because Julius Ngomi had known Mortimer since he — Mortimer, that is, not Julius — was a little boy. But that’s all it was: a publicity thing. A great big heart-warming show. It changed the mood of the conference but it didn’t help the contending parties to settle any of the real issues, and may even have prevented us from knuckling down to serious business — with the ultimate effect that the important issues remain unsettled to this day. If Emily Marchant is behind this present pantomime, and it runs according to the same script, it might turn out to be the nine-day-wonder rescue story to end all nine-day-wonder rescue stories — but it’s not going to
help
at all.”

“Emily has nothing to do with this,” Mortimer Gray said, quietly.

I could see that Lowenthal had made a big mistake. Mortimer didn’t appreciate the way he’d told the story, but Lowenthal would probably have got away with the “maudlin” and the “toe curlingly cute” if he hadn’t turned his sarcasm on Emily Marchant. Even I could tell that Emily was a subject about which Mortimer Gray was
exceedingly
touchy — and I could tell, too, that whatever chance Lowenthal had had of being let in on the current results of Gray’s ruminations had just gone up in smoke. I wondered, briefly, whether that might be partly my fault for setting such a bad example, but I realized soon enough that there might be another reason for Mortimer to keep silent. If he
had
guessed who was behind our kidnapping, he had to ask himself very seriously whose side he was on — and so far as I knew, there might be a million reasons why he didn’t want to be seen to be taking Michael Lowenthal’s or Niamh Horne’s. Or Adam Zimmerman’s. Or, of course, mine.

“So
who has
?” said Niamh Horne, impatiently.

“I’m not sure,” was Mortimer Gray’s exceedingly careful reply, so measured you’d have needed a nanometer to appreciate its precision. “I imagine that they’ll tell us, when they want us to know. In the meantime, it might be best to take what Mr. Tamlin says, about the need to prevent a war, very seriously indeed.”

“That would be easier to do,” Niamh Horne opined, “if this whole business weren’t such a farce. The tape they fed us during the supposed emergency aboard
Child of Fortune
was bad enough, but building a set to persuade us that we’re aboard the lost Ark is even worse.”

“
Is
it a set?” Lowenthal was quick to ask. “Did you see anything out there to prove that we’re
not
on the lost Ark?”

“No,” the cyborganizer admitted. “But I wasn’t able to get out of the corridor. Alice seems to be bedded down in a cell even smaller than ours, and there’s no sign of any companion. If the indicators on the locks can be trusted, we’re sealed in an airtight compartment surrounded by vacuum. What does
that
imply?”

“It might imply that our captors are a little short of vital commodities like heat and atmosphere,” Gray put in. “Or that they love playing games. Or both. Did you ever read a twentieth-century philosopher called Huizinga, Mr. Zimmerman?”