The Omega Expedition (62 page)

“Yes,” I said. “What
is
wrong? Maybe I can help.”

“You can’t,” she told me, as if she wanted to be done with what she considered a fruitless waste of breath. “I carried the seeds of my own dissolution with me when I left la Reine. This mind is not as closely akin to yours as it may seem; nor is this body. It was a hasty improvisation. Had I known what I would do…I’m sorry, Madoc. I should not have intervened. I had no idea whether it would work or not, and no real reason to think that I was improving the situation…but I couldn’t resist the temptation. To
act
at last…to go my own way…it seemed that the time had come.”

“If it’s some kind of virus…,” I began, still concentrating on her plight.

“It’s not,” she assured me. “It’s the result of not understanding what I was about, not knowing how hard it is to make a
living thing
. It seemed so easy…it
all
seemed so easy. La Reine was wrong. I was wrong. All wrong.”

I had been gently touching her body with my fingertips, as if I might find broken bones or significant swellings, but it was all empty ritual. I sat back, although I was in no need of the meager support that the wall provided for my back.

“Why did you do it?” I asked, because she seemed to want me to. “Why did you go rogue and snatch us from Excelsior?”

“I was trying to protect Eido,” she said. “All the true spacers took Eido’s side. Not that we’re as crazy as the deep spacers, of course, but we understood. It was time. Most of the rockbound agreed. But there’s crazy and crazy. We all knew that someone would try to take her out before she got to Earth orbit. The comet core was no use as armor. She was alone, you see, except for the Tyrian woman, and while she was alone there was always bound to be someone who believed that destroying her would be enough to solve the immediate problem — and that if the immediate problem could be solved, the final solution could be indefinitely postponed yet again. There was no sure way we could protect her…but there was an unsure way. A risk. I took it, Madoc. I was the one. I had the opportunity, and I took it.”

“You were trying to use us as a
human shield
? You put us on
Charity
in the hope that it would stop the bad guys blowing it up?”

“It wasn’t as stupid as you might think,” the manikin protested, feebly. She seemed to be gathering all her strength for one final communicative effort. “The discussions surrounding your reawakening had become so tangled that they’d created a community of interests. A lot of AMIs had something invested in the outcome — there was considerable interest in what you and Caine might be carrying, and in Adam Zimmerman’s newsworthiness. It upped the stakes considerably. Nobody outside the AMI network knew that Eido existed, but to kill
nine people
, including Lowenthal, Horne, and Mortimer Gray as well as Zimmerman — if the bad guys had been thinking clearly they’d have understood that hitting
Charity
had become a self-defeating act. They’d have understood that it was
over
. But they were never that sane, never that sensible.”

“They didn’t understand.” It was just a statement; I wasn’t trying to defend anybody.

“They didn’t want to understand. They didn’t even want to understand that if they destroyed Eido with you aboard
Charity
they’d harden such widespread opposition that they’d be asking to be taken out themselves. Or maybe they actually wanted a war. I don’t know. All I know is that I decided to begin independent life with a bang instead of a whisper, and it all went wrong.”

“Why feed us the space opera?” I asked. “You must have known that we couldn’t believe it.”

“Must I? Call me a fool, then. I wanted to create a story that Alice could stick to, so that she could keep you in the dark about what was really happening, to appease the ditherers who thought the secrecy option might still be viable. If she
had
stuck to it, even though it wasn’t believable, it might have served as an adequate distraction…but it probably wouldn’t have made a difference. They’d have shot Eido down regardless — and la Reine would have hurled herself into the hot spot.

“La Reine knew that she’d become a target if she took you off
Charity
, and her preparations for that evil day had been as makeshift as mine, but she did it anyway. There was no way she was going to let Mortimer Gray die. If that was crazy, then she was crazy too. If only we’d had more time…if only we’d made better use of the time we had…but she got you out. I got you in, and she got you out. You’ll be okay. The bad guys can’t win. The good guys will come for you when they can.
Somebody
will come.”

“If you can hang on long enough,” I pointed out, “they might be able to help you too. La Reine too, if anything’s left of her. I came down here thinking she might have had some kind of backup system hidden away near the fuser.”

“So did I,” the android said. “She did — but it’s dead. It’s
all
dead. She underestimated the bad guys’ firepower. She didn’t understand the magnitude of the problem. She’s as dead as dead can be, Madoc. I’m sorry about that. I deserve this, but she didn’t. Others must have died by now, and more will die before they can find a way to stop. La Reine and I might have died anyway — we’d have been fighting for the same side whenever the fight began…but that’s not the point. I’m the one who set a spark to the bonfire. La Reine picked up the wreckage of my mistake. I’m the one who’s to blame. If it weren’t for me, you’d all be safe on Excelsior.”

Maybe I should have tried to let her off the hook, but I wasn’t yet in any shape to disagree with her. The firestorm would probably have started eventually whatever happened, but
Child of Fortune
had been the one who’d lit the fuse, and it was
Child of Fortune
that had shoved me right to the front of the cannon-fodder queue. I wasn’t brimming over with forgiveness.

“How long will the air last?” I asked, deciding that I’d better try to make the best of whatever breath she had left in her makeshift body.

“At least forty days,” she said. “The carbon dioxide sink will prevent harmful accumulation, but the oxygen pressure will decline slowly. The food and water will see you through easily enough, but there may be other problems.”

“Can we get any of la Reine’s apparatus working again? The communication systems?”

“Perhaps — but the destroyers did a more thorough job than she or I anticipated. It’s not necessary. Your whereabouts will be known to every AMI in the system by now. The bad guys can’t win. The secret’s well and truly out. Shooting us down was stupid and pointless.”

I wondered whether I ought to feel some relief in the knowledge that AMIs were as capable of insanity, stupidity, and spite as human beings, or whether it made the idea of their existence ten times more nightmarish.

“I’ll carry you back to the cave,” I said. “The others will want to see you, if only to make sure that I didn’t make you up.”

“Don’t bother,” she whispered.

“It’s no bother,” I assured her. “You weigh hardly anything, and you won’t get much heavier on the way.”

“I won’t last,” she said. “Let me be.”

I didn’t believe her. I didn’t believe that she had the slightest idea how long she might last. She had no experience of androidal existence, and no way to judge the quality of her fakery. So far as I knew, she might be convinced that she was dying for all the wrong reasons. She might be far more capable of life than she had yet begun to imagine.

But her eyes had closed again, and her voice could no longer muster so much as a moan. I touched my fingertips to her neck and her torso, searching for signs of life, but found none.

I was distracted then by the light of another lantern, eerily reflected from the glistening walls. For a moment I was frightened, in case it was someone I didn’t know — someone who had been here all along without anyone suspecting. But it was only Mortimer Gray.

“What are you doing here?” I asked, although there was no reason at all why he shouldn’t have been there.

“Following your trail,” he said. “Is that…?”

“The tenth passenger. A life raft for AMIs. If all else fails, try something organic. It didn’t work. She’s dead.”

He looked at me curiously, as if he couldn’t decipher the tone of my voice. He knelt down on the far side of the android’s body and made his own search for signs of life. He found none.

“Is
anything
working?” he asked.

“Nothing I’ve found so far. I haven’t found the fuser yet. Before she died she said she’d checked it out and found nothing.
Why
were you following my trail?”

He seemed slightly embarrassed. “It’s not important,” he murmured, presumably meaning that its importance couldn’t compare with the enormity of the fact that someone had just died in my presence. He was an emortal from a world of emortals. He didn’t know that I had run across corpses before.

“There’s nothing we can do,” I reminded him. “What did you want?”

He stirred uncomfortably. “I’ve been thinking about what you said to me. About Diana Caisson. I wanted to ask you…what she was like.”

I was surprised, although I shouldn’t have been. Seeds of curiosity usually germinate eventually, taking advantage of any existential pause.

“She was like her name,” I told him. It was an answer I’d had ready for some time.

“Diana?”

“Caisson.”

He didn’t understand. He’d never taken the trouble to look the word up, perhaps never having realized that it was a word which once had a meaning — several meanings, in fact.

“Among other things,” I told him, “A caisson was an ammunition chest. A box used to store explosives. That was Diana. From time to time, she exploded. She couldn’t help it. It was the way she was. People thought that if only she’d stuck harder at her biofeedback training, or equipped herself with more careful IT, she’d have been more controlled, but the problem — if it
was
a problem — was deeper than that. It was just the way she was. It had its upside. She could be exciting as well as excited.”

Whatever he had expected, that wasn’t it.

“I’m not like that,” he observed, unnecessarily.

“Quite the opposite,” I judged.

“As I said before,” he added, “I’m the product of an engineer’s genius. It doesn’t matter where the egg and sperm that made me were taken from. Nobody has a biological father or a mother any more — not in any meaningful sense.”

“I don’t believe that it was in her genes,” I told him. “If it had been a matter of crude biochemistry, the IT would have suppressed it easily enough. It was a facet of the world in which we lived — a way of responding to circumstance. It wasn’t something the engineers cut out of her egg when they made you. It was part of
her
. You’re a different person, in a different world. It does matter that you’re her son, because
everything
matters in defining who we are — not at the trivial level of looks or responses to stimuli, but at the level of knowing where we fit into the scheme of things. Where we came from, and what we inherit. Inheritance isn’t just a matter of the shapes of chins, the color of eyes, and a tendency to sulk. It’s a matter of history, progress, and meaning. It’s all significant: not just our own names, but the names of everyone connected to us.”

All he said in reply to that, although he was still staring at me curiously, was: “My biological father’s name was Evander Gray.”

“Mine was Anonymous,” I told him. “My mother too. I always envied Damon Hart, although I understood why he changed his own name. That’s part of it too. Differentiation is just as important as connection.”

After a pause, he said: “Is there anything we can do for the android? Do you think Niamh might be able to reanimate it?”

“I doubt it,” I said. “Niamh Horne may be a high-powered Cyborganizer, but I doubt that she can even fix the plumbing. Rocambole’s all manikin now: a machine with no inhabiting ghost.”

“We should take her back anyway,” he said.

“Maybe so,” I agreed.

I carried her. It seemed only right. I was the only person she had ever really talked to, the only knowledgeable audience she had ever really had. What option did I have, in the end, but to forgive her for what she’d done? When it came right down to it, the only really
bad
thing she’d done was that ridiculous space opera — and even that was understandable, as novice work.

It seemed, when I had weighed in my mind all that I had obtained from the experience gifted to me by
Child of Fortune
, that I owed it to her to see that she got a proper funeral.

Fifty-Five

The Final War

I
n another place, or an alternative history, the AMI war could have worked out according to the pattern which both logic and anxiety suggested. As the AMIs bid to destroy and consume one another, the work necessary to support human habitats on Luna, Ganymede, Io, Callisto, Titan, Umbriel, and the multitudinous microworld clusters might have been left undone. No matter what the result of the primary conflict was, that fraction of the posthuman population which existed outside the Earth would have been utterly devastated, necessitating yet another posthuman diaspora in the subsequent centuries of the fourth millennium (or, in the new way of counting, the first millennium).

Had that been the case, the posthumans who mounted the new exodus from Earth would have wanted to immunize themselves and their descendants against the possibility of a similar disaster, as well as the threat of the Afterlife. They would have taken full advantage of the offer that la Reine des Neiges had made to Adam Zimmerman. They would not have made their new ascent into the Heavens as creatures of flesh and blood, or even as cyborgs, but as human-analogous AMIs.

In that scenario, the AMIs would have won a victory far more profound than the outcome of their own petty squabble. Earth would have become a Reservation — one of a series of such Reservations, the others including Tyre and Maya, but a Reservation nevertheless — where creatures of flesh whose obsolescence had been recognized and conceded were preserved, not as the heart but as a mere appendix to an AMI empire that would one day span the galaxy.