The Omega Expedition (51 page)

Maybe I did want to be an angel, if only to try it out. Maybe I’d want to try
everything
on my long journey to the Omega Point. If the opportunity was there, how could I possibly ignore it forever?

But it certainly wasn’t going to be my first choice, if and when I got to make one.

Forty-Five

Wonderland

A
lice Fleury candidly admitted that she’d never had the opportunity to take Davida’s route into the hinterlands of superhumanity. She had not long passed puberty when she had been frozen down along with her father and elder sister, but she was long past it now. On the other hand, she said, she did understand Davida’s frustrations with the anatomical and biochemical fudges of Earthly natural selection. On Tyre — where evolution had proceeded at a more leisurely pace — necessity had not hastened quite as many awkward improvisations.

Alice used the windowscreen from the very beginning to illustrate her pitch. At first she used it as if it were indeed a window looking out into the strange purple “glasslands” of Tyre. She showed Adam Zimmerman Tyre’s native fauna, including its intelligent humanoid natives as they had been when her father first displayed them to the world and to the home system. Then she showed him the cities of Tyre, tracking their growth over time. She showed us the pyramids that were the reproductive structures carefully employed by the Tyrian indigenes as a substitute for the kind of sexual reproduction that served the purposes of Earthly creatures.

All this was, however, a mere prelude to her discourse on the potential of genomic engineering. Once she got stuck into the technicalities of this new technical field Alice moved on with remarkable rapidity to matters of ferocious complexity. Adam Zimmerman must have been left floundering as soon and as badly as I was, but Alice had the look of a teacher working under pressure, who had no time to make her explanations clear. The reason she was sprinting through the fundamental biochemistry in this casual fashion, I supposed, was to establish her scholarly credentials. She wasn’t blinding us with science so much as trying to build our confidence that she really could deliver on the promises she was going to make.

Alice conceded that Davida’s arguments had a lot going for them, but contended that they were fatally flawed in two understandable respects. The first was that Davida’s notion of winning free of the follies and foibles of natural selection was unnecessarily restricted.

Natural selection, Alice said, had not made as bad a job of adapting human anatomy to the environments of Earth as Davida made out. Yes, there were flaws in human anatomical design, and the messiness of human biochemistry cried out for intervention in the name of order and economy — but it was a blinkered and narrow-minded approach to the solution of such problems to imagine that the goal was merely to achieve a better adaptation of human physiology to the environments of Earth. Nor was it sufficient to take in the kinds of modifications that fabers had found convenient to equip themselves with for life outside gravity wells.

“The solar system is a very small place,” Alice reminded Adam Zimmerman. “There are four hundred billion stars in the home galaxy, and there are more than a hundred billion galaxies. Other solar systems are not like ours. Other life-bearing planets are not like ours. Even those which qualify as Earth-clones in terms of such elementary measures as gravity and atmospheric composition harbor exotic ecospheres. If you want to think of the future in terms of thousands or tens of thousands of years you must stop thinking merely in terms of the future of the solar system, or even in terms of the future of the galaxy. The Afterlife may limit our options severely, at least in the short term, but we must begin thinking, even now, of our future
in the universe
.

“The limitations of the philosophy of terraformation are obvious even within the solar system. Even if the present projects can be brought to a satisfactory conclusion, Mars and Venus will never be Earth-clones. Tyre
could
be terraformed, but nobody who lives there wants to do that now that they realize what it would cost. We cannot and should not attempt to expand into the universe by exterminating existing ecospheres and substituting copies of our own. It isn’t practical and it certainly isn’t right. The better option, from every point of view, is to adapt ourselves to the environments offered by other worlds. Yes, of course we should construct new life-bearing environments where none presently exist, within the home system as well as without, but we should be prepared to exercise our creativity to the limit in so doing. We need not and should not carry the imprint of Earthly evolution wherever we go.

“We could, of course, produce colonists for alien environments in Helier wombs, inventing at least one new species for every new world. That will undoubtedly be the initial pattern of our procedure as we become citizens of the galaxy and citizens of the universe. But we may also become more versatile as individuals, especially if we make the fullest possible use of the lessons in genomic engineering that we have learned on Tyre. Even if we are to design and produce populations of colonists narrowly and specifically designed to inhabit alien environments, it will be necessary to bridge the gaps that exist between those species and their differently adapted kin. The first generation of each specialist species will benefit considerably from being raised and educated by foster parents who can simulate their form, and subsequent generations will benefit from trade conducted through intermediaries who can do likewise.

“The future of posthumanity does not belong to individuals made in the image that natural selection foisted upon the children of Earth, nor even to individuals reformed in images appropriate to life in one or another very different environment; it belongs to individuals who have freed themselves from all such restraints. If you intend to live a very long time, and to see even a tiny fraction of what the universe has to offer, then you will be best served by the greatest versatility you can cultivate, in your flesh as well as in your mind.”

The second flaw in Davida’s argument, according to Alice, lay in Davida’s characterization of the problem of robotization. In Davida’s account, this was essentially a problem of physiology, to be solved in the same terms, but Alice saw it differently.

Yes, Alice conceded, robotization could indeed be opposed by maintaining the brain in a “juvenile” state, sustaining an elasticity that would otherwise be ground down by the routinization of useful mental pathways and the withering of potential alternatives — but that was only half the story. Robotization was also an experiential problem: a matter of the invariety of the environments in which an individual operated, and of the limited number of the tasks which an individual routinely attempted. Preserving the potential of the brain was only the beginning; resistance to robotization also required that individuals preserve their capacity for new experience.

This could only be fully achieved, Alice argued, by moving through an infinite series of different environments and by maintaining a wide repertoire of possible modes in which those environments could be experienced.

At this point, Alice briefly forsook the screen, on which images had appeared and disappeared all the while, in awful profusion and at a hectic pace. The time had come for her to do her own party piece.

I was ready for it, of course. I knew what the Queen of the Fays had done to Tam Lin while she hoped to prevent Janet of Carterhaugh from reclaiming his soul.

Alice had already told us that her talents as a shapeshifter were very limited, as yet. Although she was currently a virtual individual in a virtual environment, the rules laid down by la Reine des Neiges restricted her to a close mimicry of what was accomplishable in meatspace. Had she been capable of it, I hope she might have been sufficiently respectful of Earthly tradition to turn herself into a wolf, but the possibility was not there. The transformations she did display were paltry by comparison with the werewolves that had haunted hundreds of cheap VE melodramas in my day, but the remarkable fact was that they were done at all.

Alice could grow taller and she could shrink; she could change her face and the length of her limbs. She could alter her fingers and her toes. Some of the less appealing details of her self-modifications were obscured by the fact that her smartsuit changed as she did, remolding itself to her new form, but the miracle was that this was only a beginning.

I had no way of knowing how much energy was required to fuel these transformations, although Alice seemed drained and exhausted when her original form emerged again at the end of the sequence. Perhaps she could have done more had she had the opportunity to replenish herself, but her time was running out. She had to reactivate the screen in order to demonstrate the further ranges of this kind of possibility. Again she used it as a window, displaying exotic morphs achieved by humans, by Tyrian natives, and by some individuals who seemed to be hybrids.

The more adventurous forms included a huge bird with multicolored iridescent plumage and an awesome wingspan. There were several reptilian morphs, including a dragonlike lizard and a huge constrictor snake, whose scales were as brightly patterned as the avian form’s feathers. These were creatures that might have been plausible inhabitants of Earth — but the whole point of the show was to display plausible inhabitants of worlds less Earthlike than Tyre.

Like Alice herself, the models grew taller and shorter, but they also grew limbs of many different kinds, arranged in many different patterns. They became more fluid and they became more adamantine. They really did look like alien beings fit for life on alien worlds.

All in all, it was an impressive presentation. One had to be prepared to set aside doubts about the energy-economics of the process, but I was prepared to do that. One also had to shelve reservations about the ability of bodies to sustain and protect themselves during the transitional phases of what were, after all, fairly slow and carefully measured metamorphoses — but I was prepared to do that, too. I had no way of knowing whether doubts of those kinds had occurred to Adam Zimmerman, but his expression suggested that he definitely had doubts.

I wondered if he had caught on to the fact that all this was virtual experience. He was the only one of us who ought to have been gullible, but he might have seen enough thirty-third-century technology by now to be suspicious. Having been told that no one but a fool could be taken in by
Child of Fortune’s
imaginary alien invasion, he might be wary of this experience too — for the wrong reasons. He might well be thinking that it was
all
faked, including Alice’s demonstrations of what Tyrian biotechnology could do.

It
could
, of course, have been faked. In VE, everyone can be a werewolf; programming can easily support such illusions. I was certain, though, that the contest had to be fair, because it had to be seen to be fair by real experts. It wasn’t so much the relative modesty of the metamorphoses on display that persuaded me of the reality of Alice’s claims as the conviction that la Reine des Neiges had to play straight for the sake of her audience.

At the end of the day, I figured, la Reine had to be doing all of this for her own benefit. Her desire to avoid conflict had to be perfectly sincere, but she had to have more to gain from all this than the thanks of those AMIs who wanted peace. She had a pitch of her own to make, not merely to Adam Zimmerman and all the multitudinous posthumans who still had existential options open to them, but to her own kind. She had to let Davida and Alice make the best pitches they could, because she had to beat them fair and square if she were to beat them at all.

I couldn’t believe that Adam Zimmerman — even with the aid of such forewarning as she had given us on
Charity
— had been able to make anything at all of Alice’s explanation of Tyrian biochemistry or the molecular mechanics of genomic engineering. But that didn’t matter: the logic of her opposition to Davida’s claims was clear enough, and so was the kind of offer she was making.

Come to Tyre, she was saying to Adam Zimmerman, and we will make you a Child of Proteus. Come to Tyre, and it will be the first step on an existential journey that will ultimately take you anywhere you want to go — anywhere, at least, that is not already infested with the Afterlife.

It was obviously a serious offer, but I didn’t think it could possibly be a winning entry in the competition, any more than Davida’s could. Alice was in the contest because la Reine wanted her there, and perhaps because la Reine needed her there. Alice wasn’t there merely to counterbalance the Excelsior option; she was there to offer Adam Zimmerman the universe, and a way to adapt himself to the demands of the cosmic perspective — but la Reine had to be confident that she had a way to top that option and win, if not in Adam Zimmerman’s eyes or mine, then at least in the eyes of her own multimetamorphic folk.

Alice had one afterthought still to add, though. I thought it might have been a late addition rather than a conclusion planned from the beginning: a belated improvisation shaped to counter an unexpected facet of her first opponent’s argument. Either way, it included a crucial concession that was probably fatal to her chances.

“As for sex,” Alice said, “all the options are within the scope of the metamorphic process. Male, female, hermaphrodite…or none at all. I make no claims about new emotional spectra, because it isn’t something we’ve investigated as yet, but I’m prepared to bet that whatever can be done on Excelsior can be done on Tyre, while the reverse presumably isn’t true.

“The one thing I can’t guarantee, however, is that these abilities are cost-free in terms of potential longevity. They probably aren’t. In fact, the stresses and strains associated with continual metamorphosis may well ensure that people of my kind won’t even live as long as the beneficiaries of standard Zaman transformations. But life isn’t something to be measured in purely quantitative terms; the qualitative aspect is far more important. My kind of emortality will put the worlds of other stars at your disposal, so that you may explore them far more intimately than any of the posthuman inhabitants of the home system.