The Omega Expedition (64 page)

“Adam Zimmerman will come back with me,” he assured me, with the air of one who’s checked his facts. “he’s not ready for robotization, Tyre, or Excelsior just yet. He wants to come home.”

It occurred to me, when I eventually took my opportunity to make the same check, while we were both hiding out in the tunnels for the sake of a dose of clean air, that Adam Zimmerman and I had never even been properly introduced.

“You can’t go home,” I advised him. “It isn’t home any more.”

“Yes it is,” he told me. “It always will be. No matter how much it changes, it’ll always be home. I know they’ve decivilized Manhattan three times over, but it’ll always be Manhattan to me. It has the air, the gravity, the ocean…and the history. There’s Jerusalem too.”

“Jerusalem’s a bomb crater,” I told him. “The only fusion bomb ever to be exploded on the surface. A monument to suicidal hatred. Even the latest Gaean Restoration left it untouched.”

“Yes, I know,” he said. “But it’s still Jerusalem.”

It seemed more diplomatic not to mention the Via Dolorosa. “And the Hardinist Cabal is still grateful for what you did for them twelve hundred years ago,” I said, instead. “We all inherit our history, whether we like it or not.”

He looked me in the eye then, and said: “Whatever you may have heard, I really did do it. Without me, they’d never have contrived such a steep collapse or cleaned up so efficiently. I really was the only man who understood the systems well enough to pull off the coup. They thought they were using me, but they weren’t. I was using them — their money, their greed, their ambition. They were just the means I used to commit the crime. I really am the man who stole the world.”

“And all because you were afraid of dying, desperate to reach the Age of Emortality.”

“A perfect crime requires a perfect motive,” he told me. “But at the end of the day, all art is for art’s sake. Just between you and me, I did it because I could, and because I was the only one who could. You can understand that, can’t you, Madoc? The others don’t, but you do.”

He was a good judge of character. I’d always prided myself on the quality, as well as the careful modesty, of my criminal mind. “I’d have done the same myself,” I assured him. “But you’ll never be able to do it again, will you? It was a once-in-a-lifetime performance.”

“No one will ever be able to do it again,” he told me, with quiet satisfaction. “I got in just in the nick of time. Within another ten years, whether it was done or not, the smart software would have become too smart to cheat. I was the last of the human buccaneers, Madoc, the last of the authentic soldiers of fortune. Now, I’ll have to find something else — assuming they can get to us before the stink kills us all.”

“They’ll still expect a decision, you know,” I told him. “They’ll still want to know who wins the golden apple in the beauty contest: Davida, Alice, or the Snow Queen.”

He understood the allusion. “Paris was an idiot,” he said. “He should have named his own price. That’s what I’ll do. The hell with Aphrodite.”

“Me too,” I told him. “What did you have in mind?”

“At present,” he said, “there’s nothing on my mind but shit, even while I’m way down here. I think I’ll wait till I have a clearer head before making any important decisions.”

“Wise move,” I agreed. “Even if there’s time to try everything, it’s as well to get your priorities in order.”

Later, I raised the same point with Christine Caine, more by way of distraction than anything else. I told her about the beauty contest, and asked her whether, in view of what she now knew about her essentially unmurderous self, she was still determined to head away from Earth and into the great unknown.

“Sure,” she said. “Tyre sounds good to me, for the first faltering step. You?”

“Not immediately. First, I need time to rest. I know I can’t go home again, but what Adam says makes sense. I want to feel Earth beneath my feet and put the Heavens back where they belong, in the sky. I want to breathe fresh air and get away from
walls
.”

“There might be something to be said for that,” she conceded. “Right now, fresh air is just about the most luxurious thing I can imagine.”

It was at that point, as if responding to her cue, that Solantha Handsel informed us all, in stentorian tones, that someone was outside the main airlock, preparing to make an entrance.

By the time we had gathered together the bodyguard had already taken up the prime position. Her hands were upraised, equally ready to function as deadly weapons or as extravagant welcomers of salvation.

The airlock finally opened and the lovely cyborg stepped through, bringing a welcome breath of new air with her. I saw Niamh Horne take a bold step forward, as if to lay claim to close kinship with our rescuers and a party share of the credit for our release — but the newcomer looked straight past her, searching our ragged little crowd with her artificial eyes.

“My name’s Emily Marchant,” she announced, casually. “I’m looking for Mortimer Gray.”

Fifty-Seven

Homecoming

A
nd so to Earth, as passengers aboard the good ship
Titaness
, now mistress of her own fate and captain of her own soul. She released those of us who had decided to go down into the well while she settled into a comfortable orbit.

Niamh Horne and Davida Berenike Columella had no intention of joining us, and Mortimer Gray decided to remain in orbit for a while longer, so six of us made our preparations to be shuttled down in a thoroughly stupid capsule not unlike
Peppercorn Seven
. We had no packing to do, of course, but we did have a few farewells to make.

To Niamh Horne all I had to say was good-bye, and I doubt that she would have bothered to say even that much to me had some kind of gesture not been unavoidable. She did not suggest that I visit her if and when I decided to leave Earth again.

Mortimer Gray, by contrast, was very insistent that we must meet again, and soon, when more urgent concerns had been properly addressed. He repeated his offer of employment, and I promised him that I would think about it very seriously, although I was waiting to see what alternative offers I might yet receive.

Because any friend of Mortimer’s was privileged in her eyes, Emily Marchant did invite me to get in touch when the time came for me to explore the Outer System. She promised that she would find work for me to do there, once I was ready to break free from the iron grip of the dead past, and I believed her. She was kind enough to take it for granted that I would get in touch one day; Mortimer had told her that whatever else I might be, I was certainly not incorrigibly Earthbound.

The most elaborate farewell I offered, though, was to Davida Berenike Columella. I thanked her profusely for bringing me back from the dead, and when she reminded me that she had not chosen me I reminded her that however I might have been delivered into her care I still owed a great debt to her skill and enterprise.

“If ever you want to return to Excelsior…,” she said.

“It’s too close to Heaven for me,” I told her. “Maybe, one day, I’ll be ready for perfection…but not for a long time yet. I have a lot of adulthood to explore before I can settle for eternal childhood.”

She thought I was joking. “I can’t begin to understand how you did it,” she said. “It must have been Hell.”

She had lost me. “What must?”

“Living in the twenty-second century. Waking up every morning to the knowledge that you were
decaying
, day by day and hour by hour — that your ill-designed bodies were fighting a war of attrition against the ravages of death and losing ground with every minute that passed. Knowing, as you went about your daily work, that the copying errors were accumulating, that the free-radical damage was tearing you apart at the molecular level, that stem-cell senility was allowing your tissues to shrivel and your organs to stagnate, that…”

“I get the picture,” I assured her. “Well, yes, I suppose it
was
a kind of Hell. The secret is that you can get used to Hell, if you don’t let it get you down. You never actually get to like it — but you can learn from it, if you have the right attitude. Among other things, you can learn to be wary of Heaven.”

“We’re not the Earthbound,” she assured me. “We aren’t
finished
. We have millennia of progress still ahead of us, and we intend to take full advantage of its opportunities.”

I could have told her that even though that might be the case, she and her sisters would never actually
grow up
, but that would have been flippant and I didn’t want to spoil the moment. I was grateful to her, and I wanted us to part on good terms.

In any case, I knew even then that there might eventually come a day when I’ll be ready for Excelsior.

I didn’t mind being locked in a cocoon for the few minutes it took the remaining six of us to fall to Earth.

I hadn’t expected to feel quite so heavy when I got there, given that my brand new IT and a few sessions in the
Titaness
’s centrifuge had tuned up my muscles, but it seemed a small price to pay for getting my feet back on the ground.

We landed in Antarctica, on the ice fields outside Amundsen. The cloud cover obscured the sun and sky, but the ice palaces clustered on the horizon couldn’t prevent me from feeling that I’d returned to my roots and reconnected myself with my history.

My hero’s welcome was a trifle muted, but I didn’t mind that. The only individuals who really appreciated the true extent of my heroism were AMIs, who hadn’t yet had time to overcome their habits of discretion. Mortimer Gray would doubtless have fared far better, not just because we might have died on
Charity
if it hadn’t been for his relationship with la Reine des Neiges, but because he’d been a long-time resident of the Continent Without Nations. He really would have been coming home, in the eyes of his old neighbors — but he wouldn’t have been extrovert enough to take full advantage of his latest wave of celebrity. I filled in for him as best I could.

I didn’t see much of Lowenthal and Handsel in the days following the landing, and Alice Fleury had all kinds of diplomatic duties to fulfill, but those were acquaintances I kept up, in VE if not in the flesh. It was easy enough, in the short term, to stick with Adam Zimmerman. The new messiah wasn’t in any hurry to be rid of us, now that he knew that Christine wasn’t a mass murderer.

Christine and I eventually returned with Adam to the Americas, traveling all the way up from Tierra del Fuego to the isthmus of Panama in easy stages, accelerating our schedule as we came into the north. We might have attracted more attention on our own account if we hadn’t been traveling with him, but playing second fiddle had its compensations as well as fueling a certain envious resentment. All in all, the pluses outweighed the minuses.

Adam was right about the alienating effects of the multiple decivilization of New York, but he was right about Manhattan too. The island’s original dimensions were still just about recognizable within the hectic patchwork of the new continental shelf. When Christine and I headed west, though, Adam chose to go his own way.

“I’ll keep in touch,” he promised.

“I don’t think we’ll have any difficulty keeping track of you,” I assured him. “You’re the kind of wonder that’ll run for years and years. Let us know when you’re finally ready to make the decision that the whole system’s waiting for, so that we can all compare notes.”

Little did I know…

Adam hadn’t given us the least inkling of his long-term plans, if he’d made any at that point. I doubt that he had. I think he intended to take a good long look at the world, and at himself, before he decided what his next step was going to be.

That was the last of my temporary farewells. Christine and I had decided to stick together for a while.

I waited, but in vain, for the call to come that would summon me to the forefront of the ongoing political and economic negotiations between the posthuman factions and the AMIs. I maintained the hope for as long as I could that my conscription had merely been delayed, but in the end I accepted the sad truth.

In spite of all my heroic efforts during the last few minutes of la Reine’s stint as Scheherazade I was not to receive my due. Nobody wanted me for an ambassador, nor even for an expert audience. It was a mistake, I think. I could have been useful to all sides.

Had la Reine survived, it would have been a different story, but the time came when I had to stop hoping for that particular miracle. She had known my true worth, at the end, but she had been the only one who did. I might now be the only one who understands her true worth, even in a world which contains Mortimer Gray, but I hope that I am wrong. She deserves to be accurately remembered, especially by her own kind.

In the end, Christine and I decided to take the jobs that Mortimer Gray had offered us, at least for the time being. Given that we were historical curiosities in any case, and that everyone wanted to hear our story, we figured that we might as well get as much spendable credit as possible for answering questions. It turned out to be harder than we had expected; newscasters only want to know what’s newsworthy, but historians want to know
everything
, and then some. Inevitably, we both set out to write our own accounts of everything we’d been through.

It really was inevitable that we’d have to
write
our accounts, because text retains certain qualities that even the very best VE scripts will never be able to emulate. In a VE you use your eyes as eyes and your ears as ears; it really is virtual
experience
— but when you read you switch off your other senses and turn your eyes into code readers, retreating into a world of pure thought and imagination. It was that world of abstraction that had shaped and organized our ancestors’ inner lives during the early phases of the technological revolution; it was there that they learned to be the complex kind of being we now call human. It is there that true humanity still resides, even after all this time. It is there that histories and lostories, autobiographies and fantasies, moral fables and
contes philosophiques
, comedies and cautionary tales all belong — and my story is all of those things, although it is first and foremost a cautionary tale…and a comedy. Although I am not an AMI, and probably never will be, I have no intention of living my life, or reviewing my life, in an unironic way.