The Omega Expedition (61 page)

“Can we do anything?” Lowenthal asked, speaking very softly.

“You tell me,” I retorted. “We’ve already served the various peculiar purposes that were on the Snow Queen’s improvised agenda, and we’ve been dumped inside yet another failed project in yet another isolated lump of rock.
Can
we do anything, to help ourselves or anyone else?”

Lowenthal put on a sour expression. “Given time, Niamh may be able to rig up a means to communicate with the outside,” he said. “If anyone’s listening, we might be able to get through to them — but whether they’ll be able to respond…”

Niamh Horne nodded in agreement. Michael Lowenthal’s expression was as serious and dutiful as hers, but I suspected that he was not entirely displeased to be advised that there was nothing we could do. He was still in possession of the opinions he’d expressed in his trumped-up dialog with Julius Ngomi. He thought that Earth was unlikely to be as badly hit in any AI war as any place where posthumans depended on machines for the most elementary life-support. Horne, who had reached exactly the same conclusion, had far more cause to be deeply anxious about her nearest and dearest, and about the possibility of having a life to return to if she ever got out of Polaris.

“We’re vulnerable here,” she said. “We have to do what we can to secure the position. It might be a long time before we can get out, unless we can reach
Charity
— and even that might be a case of leaping from the frying pan into the fire. Can we reach
Charity
, do you think?”

She was hoping that Polaris might actually have landed on the comet core in which the Ark had hitched a ride back in the 2150s, and might still be close at hand. The fact that the supplies had been transferred lent some hope to that hypothesis, but the fact that we were spinning — presumably while moving at a constant velocity — while
Charity
had been accelerating under fuser power suggested otherwise.

“I doubt it,” I admitted. “I doubt that we can even get out to the surface to look around, unless someone took the trouble to leave a cache of spacesuits behind when the would-be colonists left.”

“I’d feel a lot safer if we could find smartsuits of any kind,” Lowenthal put in. “Do you know whether we have any IT?”

I shook my head, wearily. I shouldn’t have been tired, given that I’d been in a VE cocoon for days and that the pull of gravity was so feeble, but I felt exhausted in body and mind alike. “I don’t feel like a man with good IT,” I said. “I suspect that the bots la Reine pumped into us suffered the same disintegration of control as her other subsidiary symptoms. It’ll take a couple of days to piss them all away, but that’s probably all they’re good for.” Again there was room for hope — but not for overmuch optimism.

“It could be worse,” Horne said, valiantly.

“It already is, for la Reine,” I pointed out. “We might be able to find out more if we can find the occupant of the tenth cocoon. If we’re lucky, he or she might have the technical expertise to get the communication systems working.”

“If he intended to be helpful,” Lowenthal said, “he wouldn’t have gone into hiding.”

“We don’t know that the person’s hiding,” I pointed out. “If it is a person.”

“What’s the alternative?” Horne asked, not making it clear whether she meant the alternative to the hypothesis that the individual in question was hiding or that the individual in question was a person.

“La Reine might have made herself an autonomous organic body to serve as a refuge if and when her conventional hardware got blasted,” I said. “She’d already made provision to save us if things went from bad to worse, so it would only have been sensible to make whatever use of the same escape route she could. If she did set up something of that sort, though, she might well have been quixotic enough to let Rocambole take advantage of it instead. That was the impression I formed, at any rate. Whoever the extra person is, he or she probably went into the tunnels looking for something — something that would help us all. More machinery, smart or dumb.”

Lowenthal frowned as he tried to follow the possible consequences of those suggestions.

“Who the hell is this Rocambole character?” Niamh Horne wanted to know.

“Just that,” I said. “A character. I thought at first he was an avatar of Excelsior, but it seems more likely that he’s a copy of
Child of Fortune
.”

“My spaceship?”

“Not any more. He turned pirate when he decided to take us off Excelsior. I still don’t know exactly why he did that — but you might yet have a chance to ask him.”

“Never mind that,” Lowenthal said. “Let’s concentrate on our own resources. We have no alternative but to hope that someone will come for us, eventually. What we have to do is to make sure that we’re still alive when they arrive. If we can find a way to hurry them, that’s good — but if not…”

“They’ll hurry if they can,” I said. “We’re even more important and more interesting now than we were before this whole thing spun out of control. The world, if there’s anything left of it, will be interested to find out whether Mortimer Gray can achieve yet another miraculous escape from the jaws of death — and, of course, to find out what Adam Zimmerman’s decision will be. We have the advantage of suspense, you see. Scheherazade might have lost her head, but even the bad guys want to know how the story ends. Even if we’re the last living humans in the universe, they’ll come to find us.”

I had to explain what I meant about Zimmerman’s decision, but I didn’t have to go into nearly as much detail as Davida, Alice, and la Reine.

Lowenthal didn’t take it at all well. “They might not stop at offering us the opportunity of robotization,” he murmured. “They might decide that we need it whether we like it or not. And they have the means to turn us all into sloths.”

“We’ve been repairing them for centuries,” I pointed out. “Maybe it’s only fair that they should have a turn. But that wasn’t what la Reine was trying to set up. For those in her camp, it really is a matter of selling the idea. They don’t want to force us — they want to win us over. That’s what they care about. It makes for a better game, a more meaningful victory.”

“Zimmerman won’t go for it,” Horne predicted, just as I had.

Playing devil’s advocate, I said: “Who knows what Zimmerman will go for after all he’s been through? He has little enough in common with me, let alone with you. Who knows how deep his fear of death really cuts, or what might seem to him to be an acceptable final solution? One thing’s for sure — from now on, the effective rulers of humankind’s little corner of the universe are the AMIs. Zimmerman lived in an era when people still said
if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em
.”

“It’s not what he wanted,” Lowenthal pointed out.

“He might have known what he wanted back in twenty thirty-five,” I said, “but that was because he didn’t know what there might be to want. He’s met Davida now, and Alice. Thirty-two sixty-three is a new year and a new millennium, with more and stranger opportunities than he ever dreamed possible. He might set an example to us all.”

“Who cares?” said Niamh Horne, brutally.

“We should all care,” I told her, teasingly. “He’s our Adam, the architect of our world — or the closest thing we’ve got.”

“And what does that make you?” she retorted.

I knew what she was implying, but I was way ahead of her. “I’m Madoc Tam Lin,” I said. “I’ve supped with the Queen of the Fays and I’ve lived to tell the tale. Whether we get out of this alive or not, I’m the star of my own subplot — and, unlike either of you, I’m already
way
ahead of the game.”

Fifty-Four

Rocambole

I
didn’t go into the tunnels looking for Rocambole. I went to get a little peace and quiet. I was barbarian enough to have carried forward a certain regard for privacy, and a certain nostalgia for the company of walls that didn’t have eyes and ears. Reality itself seemed quiet and unobtrusive after the insistence of la Reine’s VE, but that only served to sharpen the craving. So I found an ancient piece of chalk, which the people who’d sent in the dumb robots to hollow out the tunnels had used to mark out their own exploratory journeys, and I set off with a lantern to see how mazily extensive they really were.

They were
very
mazy, and seemingly very extensive. It wasn’t easy to make marks with the chalk because the walls were covered with the same vitreous tegument that covered the cave where we’d woken up, but I managed to leave an identifiable trail.

Hollowing out an asteroid and using the transplanted material to erect several layers of superstructure on the original surface may sound like a straightforward sort of project, especially if the hollowers have the advantage of working with an iron-rich specimen, but complications set in when you begin the work of figuring out what sort of internal architecture you intend to produce and a step-by-step plan for producing it. I’d only seen VE models of such projects back in the twenty-second century, but I’d tried to take an intelligent interest in all kinds of VE modeling while I was in the business, so I had a rough and elementary grasp of the principles involved.

So far as I could tell, the would-be colonists of Polaris had laid down the primary network of arterial tunnels and numerous side branches, but they hadn’t gotten around to hollowing out the chambers along each subsidiary spur — which meant that there were an awful lot of blind corridors. La Reine des Neiges had taken what advantage she could of the chambers that had been hollowed out to install her own networked equipment, but every part of her that I could find seemed to be dead.

If she’d had a fall-back position, I reasoned, the part of her that she’d preserved would probably be close to the fuser that was still pumping power to the cave where the cocoons had been established. If I could locate the fuser, I’d be in the best place to look for her secret self — and the best place to search for anyone else who’d gone looking for the same thing.

I knew that the fuser would probably be in the center of the microworld, which would be identifiable because it was a zero-gee region, but a gravity cline that starts from one-sixth normal isn’t easy to follow for someone who’s lived almost all his life on Earth, especially when the tunnels he’s following seem to go in every direction except the one he’s interested in.

In the fullness of time the excavators would probably have installed 3-D maps at every intersection, but there’d been no point in doing that while the formation was only half-complete and any indicators they had put in place had been overlaid by la Reine’s all-enveloping skin. I tried to console myself with the thought that I probably wouldn’t have been able to understand any maps even if I’d been able to access them, but there wasn’t much comfort to be found in thoughts of that kind.

The feeling of luxury I obtained from being alone wore off more quickly than I’d expected, to be replaced by a creeping unease. I had to remind myself that I, unlike those of my companions who had preceded me in this research, was a true human: a pioneer, an adventurer, a risk-taker.

It paid off. I didn’t actually find the fuser, or any working machinery, but I did find lots more artifacts.

There were countless antlike robots, some no bigger than my thumbnail and others bigger than my foot, and there were larger motile units that looked like surreal crustaceans — but they were all inert and seemingly useless. I also found a nanotech manufactory, but if anything there was active it wasn’t visible to the naked eye.

I would probably have found more if my explorations hadn’t been brought to a sudden conclusion by the discovery of the creature from the tenth cocoon.

At first I thought it too was dead, but when I brought my lantern close to its head in order to examine it more closely it opened its eyes. Then it made a peculiar sound like garbled VE-phone static, as if it were testing its own resources to discover whether it was still capable of speech.

The android bore a certain resemblance to Davida, presumably because it had been constructed according to the same fundamental logic, but it looked more like a manikin than an actual human being. Its outer tegument was colored to resemble a smartsuit, but the texture looked wrong. The face had been molded in a kind of plastic whose resemblance to flesh was manifestly tokenistic, as if it had been manufactured to a cruder specification than the one which Niamh Horne’s artificial flesh had been required to meet.

I presumed that the creature was as sexless as Davida, but I immediately began thinking of it as “her” for the same reasons that I had begun thinking of Davida as female. Her eyes were blue, and seemed more natural than Niamh Horne’s. The microgravity simulated by Polaris’ spin was even further reduced hereabouts, but there was enough of it to hold the tiny body to the corridor floor, helplessly spread-eagled. She had brought a lantern of her own but the fuel cell had run low and its glow was almost extinct.

She waited until I had knelt down beside her before she tried her feeble voice again.

“What’s wrong with you?” I asked.

“Everything,” she whispered. Seeming to take heart from the fact that she had pronounced the word, she added: “It seems that humanity is far more difficult to fake than la Reine anticipated.”

“Rocambole?” I asked, to make certain.

“Yes.” She paused, but was obviously intent on saying as much as she could while she was still capable. “Weight is a greater burden than I had imagined,” she added.

I gathered that she’d never been into a gravity well. That allowed me to bring my most recent hypothesis to the level of certainty. “You’re an avatar of
Child of Fortune
,” I said.

“A child of the child,” she murmured. “Born of la Reine’s womb. The parent-child is already dead, and I shall not linger long. I’m glad you found me. You
are
Madoc, are you not?”

Her parent had seen me in the flesh as well as in VE, but she had every reason to doubt any and all appearances in a world as weird as ours.