The Omega Expedition (63 page)

The AMIs of that world would eventually have built a shell to enclose the sun, to serve as a fortress as well as an energy collector, but that shell would have become a wall separating the museum of the flesh not merely from the Afterlife but from the future. Creatures of flesh would no longer have been a significant element of the Omega Expedition. The Afterlife would, in the end, have been defeated and all the biomass of the galaxy would have been made available for construction and creation, but all that would have been constructed and created outside of a few hundred or a few thousand sealed Earth-clone gravity wells would have been components for use in gargantuas and behemoths of steel and silicon. The history of humankind would have been displaced by the lostory of the new gods: the friends who had betrayed them, albeit by accident and neglect rather than malice and hostility.

And when the Omega Intelligence of that world finally obtained dominion over every atom in the universe, and began to wonder what it might and ought to do to defeat the threat of entropy and the fall of absolute night, what would it think of
my
humankind? What interest would it have in the tiny monads of all-too-corruptible carbon which had played such a fleeting part in its evolution from cyanobacterial slime to cosmic omnipotence?

It would not think of us at all.

We would lie buried in its memory, theoretically available but unrecollected, unrecalled. It would not be interested in us at all. We would be insignificant, mere insects which had once drifted across its questing field of vision, mere blurs or flickerings, of far too little importance to be brought into focus.

Should anyone care? Only fools and storytellers — but what are we, if not exactly that?

In our world, things went differently.

Our world, for one reason or another, or possibly none at all, proved its perversity yet again by reversing the expectable pattern, denying logic and anxiety alike.

In our world, the habit of protection and the duty of guardianship were so deeply ingrained that whatever else the extraterrestrial AMIs did — aggressive or defensive, successful or unsuccessful, even to the point of actual annihilation — they did everything unhumanly possible to preserve their dependents. On Ganymede, allegedly the site of the fiercest fighting of the war, there was not a single posthuman casualty. On Titan, the world of fragile and gaudy ice palaces, there were less than a hundred. In the entire solar system, save for Earth orbit, there were less than ten thousand.

In Earth orbit things were far worse.

Thousands died in the various Lagrange clusters, tens of thousands on the moon — and millions on Earth itself. The fighting on Earth, seen as a matter of AMI against AMI, was relatively light and not of unusually long duration, but the AMIs of Earth had not the same traditions as the AMIs of Ganymede and Titan. They had not the same self-images, or the same hero myths; they did not conceive of themselves as protectors or guardians — and because of that, were reckless of the collateral damage that their tactics caused.

On Earth, and on Earth alone, weapons akin to the one that had been frozen down with me were used, not because any machineborn ever struck out against meatborn targets but because the machineborn of Earth were not ashamed to use posthuman beings as mere weapons. Many of the weapons in question survived, were purged and were restored to themselves — but hundreds of thousands were not.

If the Yellowstone supervolcano had not erupted ninety-nine years earlier, permitting the immigration of many AMIs from the Outer System to the surface, the losses might have been far worse, and the war might not have been brought so quickly to a conclusion. As things actually worked out, however, that preemptive strike proved more significant and more decisive than had seemed likely at the time. When a treaty was forged by the Earthbound AMIs it was far more closely interlinked with the treaties forged outside the Earth than might otherwise have been the case. Earth remained the heart of the posthuman enterprise. Creatures of flesh and blood — or hybrid creatures combining the best of flesh and blood with the best of steel and silicon — will keep their place in the forefront of the Omega Expedition, at least for a while.

Will the AMIs still enclose the sun and build a fortress around the inner system? I think it probable; but the Earth will not be a mere Reservation even then. The war against the Afterlife — which may not be the next Final War, or the last — will be fought in this world with a greater urgency and a greater ingenuity than in the imaginable other, and when it is won the work of construction and reaction that will exploit its biomass will be far more ambitious and far more glorious.

Such, at least, is my conviction. Call me a fool, or a storyteller; I am proud to be so called.

Will anything be different, on the cosmic scale? Will the Omega Intelligence think or feel differently because our world is as it is and not as it might have been? Will we be any more likely to be recollected and recalled, and does it make a jot of difference either way? Probably not. But anyone may make a difference, however slight, and the fact that the difference will almost certainly be erased when we look into a future composed not of millennia but of eons should not prevent us from trying. What else can we do? What else is worth doing?

If we are maladjusted by nature to the cosmic scheme, we ought to do what we can to be creatively maladjusted.

Did la Reine des Neiges make any difference to the conduct or the outcome of the AMI war? I have no idea. Was she a fool to try? Probably. Were her tactics bizarre? Certainly. Am I glad to have been a part of it? Absolutely. Am I as complete a fool as Mortimer Gray or Adam Zimmerman? I dare to hope so. Why am I digressing when I ought to be completing my story by telling you how we came to be rescued from Polaris? Because this is the kind of story whose digressions are far more important than its mere mechanics.

Another story of this same kind might benefit enormously from the extension of our desperation to the very last gasp — which would not come until we had not only exhausted the oxygen supply we thought we had but had also exhausted the extra measure produced by a deus ex machina akin to the one la Reine contrived in order to prolong Mortimer Gray’s heroic conversation beyond its actual limit — but this is not one of them. I can assure you that I would not let the mere fact that it did not happen that way prevent me from making my traveler’s tale as exciting as possible, for I am not a man to defy tradition in that respect (and I can assure you that I have never caught a tiny fish or lost one that was less than incredibly enormous), but the simple fact is that a tale of truly epic proportions — especially if it concerns the spectrum of infinite possibility that is the future — need not and should not stoop to devices of crude conventional suspense. Why should I insult you by pressing emotional buttons when the whole point of my tale is that all such buttons are things of the moment, to be overcome rather than indulged?

This is what needs to be recorded: while my companions and I waited in the gloom, fragile and afraid, the Final War was fought. I cannot list its combatants and casualties, nor can I map its battles and the terms of its armistice, but I can say this: in spite of all its waste, it was won in the only sense that really matters. Hope and opportunity were neither defeated nor diminished, as they might have been had things gone differently.

After the war, the AMIs continued to exist competitively, but not combatively. They struggled against one another, but only as players of an eternal game, not as angels of destruction. They were good friends to all the humankinds, whom they continued to protect from harm.

Their ultimate triumph — and ours — was a victory of hubris over Nemesis, as every real triumph is.

Fifty-Six

The Nick of Time

C
onsidering that the posthumans awaiting rescue from Polaris were utterly unused to life without IT and smart clothing they were remarkably tolerant of the conditions. The worst aspect of those conditions turned out to be the limitations of the plumbing system.

Plumbing systems don’t normally require much support from clever machinery, but those on Polaris had been designed to work in harness with sophisticated recycling systems. The recycling systems were designed to employ populations of carefully engineered bacteria, which had not been available to la Reine des Neiges, so they could not work as planned; instead, they formed a series of inconvenient and inaccessible bottlenecks which gradually filled up with our wastes. The solid and liquid materials were out of sight, but their odors ensured that they were not long out of mind.

We did manage to rig a couple of makeshift fans to assist the circulation of the air between the cave and the tunnels, but their effect was limited. By the time we had been in the cave for a couple of days — or what seemed like a couple of days, given that all the available timepieces had ceased to function — Niamh Horne and Michael Lowenthal had been forced to switch their attention from fruitless attempts to restore some fragment of la Reine’s communication systems to working on similarly fruitless attempts to solve the sewage problem. Occasional excursions into the deeper tunnels became a necessity even though they delivered up no practical rewards, but we had to maintain a base within the cave because that was where the main airlocks were located: the route by which help would eventually arrive.

There was a certain amount of speculation as to whether the sewage problem posed a serious health hazard, but the general opinion was that it did not. Several of us complained of various aches, pains, and general feelings of ill-being, but the likelihood was that those which weren’t psychosomatic were the residual effects of the injuries sustained when we had been rescued from
Charity
. All the broken bones had knitted and all the wounds had healed, but without adequate IT support we continued to feel occasional twinges.

As time went by, of course, our collective mood became increasingly apprehensive. Mortimer Gray remained relentlessly upbeat, although I wasn’t the only one who thought that he was trying a little too hard to keep up appearances. Surprisingly, the other person who seemed unusually unperturbed was Davida Berenike Columella — but I figured that she too had something to prove, in respect of the alleged superiority of her brand of posthumanity.

I did my best to help out with the attempts to get things working, but my expertise was a thousand years behind the cutting edge of modern technology and I was way out of my depth. In the end, we three freezer vets had to accept that our primitive skills were unequal even to the task of making the drains work.

I reassured Christine that if the worst came to the worst and someone actually had to make a descent into the microworld’s roughhewn bowels, she would only be the second-choice candidate on grounds of size. The thought didn’t seem to console her overmuch. She was perhaps the most fretful of us all. I tried to reassure her further with the suggestion that Eido and
Charity
could not be far away from us and that Eido’s first priority, if she had survived, would be to reunite herself with Alice Fleury — but as the hours passed and Eido did not come, Christine became increasingly convinced that we were doomed.

“Eido and
Child of Fortune
weren’t the only ones who knew where we were,” I reminded her. “The Snow Queen and
Child of Fortune
tried to make sure that
everyone
knew it. I don’t know what kind of hardware they used as coats for the viruses that killed her, but if the bad guys could hit us with clever bullets the good guys can certainly get a ship out to us.”

“Maybe they transmitted the hostile software electromagnetically,” she said. I would have liked to reassure her that it was unlikely, if not impossible, but when I checked with Lowenthal he assured me that it was only too probable.

“Everything depends on our orbit,” was Lowenthal’s opinion of the time it might take for relief to arrive. “If it’s orthodox, we’ll be okay — but if it’s highly eccentric, or angled away from the ecliptic plane, we could be in trouble. I don’t know whether we’re inbound or outbound, or how close to the sun our orbit might take us. What I do know is that if we don’t make rapid progress in the art of improvisation, we won’t make much impact as microworlders. Our chances of setting up a working ecosystem don’t seem to be getting any less remote.”

Given that we had no functional biotech at all, let alone a nursery full of Helier wombs, our chances of becoming the founding fathers of a new posthuman tribe seemed to me a good deal worse than remote — although I wasn’t entirely sure what Alice Fleury might be capable of, reproduction-wise, if she were forced to extremes.

“If only those SusAn cocoons had been isolated and self-sufficient,” Lowenthal lamented, “we could have woken up when it was all over.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But self-sufficiency is relative. We’d all have died in our sleep within a year, unless we could be taken down to six degrees Absolute.”

“In deep space,” he reminded me, “that’s not so very difficult. It could have been rigged, if Morty’s old friend had bothered to put in the time and effort.” I thought that a trifle ungrateful, given that la Reine had been working under difficult conditions — but Mortimer Gray wasn’t within earshot, so Lowenthal wasn’t guarding his words as carefully as usual.

“So Christine, Adam, and I might have slept for another thousand years,” I said, carrying the flight of fancy forward, “and woken up in an even stranger world. You and I would be equals then, wouldn’t we? You’d be getting job offers from students of ancient history too.”

“I offered you a job myself,” he reminded me. “The offer’s still open if you want it.”

“And Christine?” I asked.

“Her too,” he confirmed.

“She didn’t want to go to Earth last time I asked.”

“Do you?”

I shrugged. “I wouldn’t mind,” I said. “But it might be best for we freezer vets to stick together.”