Текст книги "The Omega Expedition"

Автор книги: Brian Stableford

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All of which was interesting, in its way, but did not seem to be of any immediate help in penetrating the motives of Davida Berenike Columella and her colleagues.

I now had a better understanding of how they fitted into the unfolding pattern of human history, but the questions still remained.

Why here?

Why now?

Why Christine Caine?

Why me?

And why would the suspicion not be quieted that I wouldn’t like the answers when I finally worked them out, even if I were fortunate enough to live that long?

Fourteen

The Garden of Excelsior

The artificial worlds of the twenty-second century had been little more than glorified tin cans – not quite sardine cans, but near enough. The vast majority had been no farther from the Earth than lunar orbit. Their inhabitants had been understandably enthusiastic to develop their own self-sustaining ecospheres, so I had seen pictures aplenty of their glass-house-clad “fields” and “hydroponic units.” I had carried forward the tacit assumption that Excelsior would be equipped with something similar, until Davida Berenike Columella had put me right.

All the food in Excelsior was produced by artificial photosynthetic systems aggregated into a complex network of vast matt-black “leaves” surrounding a core whose spin simulated gravity. The microworld had no sunlit fields at all. As Davida had told me, though, it did have a garden, whose flora and fauna were purely ornamental. I had a ready-made image of a garden floating in my mind too, but that turned out to be just as wrong as my image of glass-roofed fields.

When Christine and I were finally allowed to go “out,” it was to the garden that we were taken. I had hoped to take a stroll around the corridors of the microworld, in order to get a glimpse of everyday life as it was lived there, but that wasn’t the way things were done on Excelsior. Excelsior didn’t go in for corridors.

When we were ready to go, the wall of my holding cell grew a couple of fancy blisters, which opened up sideways like a cross between a yawning crocodile and a feeding clam.

I had to remind myself that it was just a kind of data suit in order to force myself to step into it, and even then I muttered to Christine: “I’m glad I never suffered from claustrophobia. All those hours I spent editing tapes were better lessons in life than I realized.”

“I always suffered from claustrophobia,” she told me, “but I think they’ve edited out my capacity for panic.”

I thought about that while the cocoon wrapped itself around me so that I could be transported through the body of the giant Excelsior like some parasitic invader captured by an unusually considerate white corpuscle. I was glad that the journey didn’t take long.

I suppose I’d have felt better about the journey if the garden had justified the effort, but it didn’t. I’d seen much better ones in VE. In fact, that was exactly what was wrong with it. It looked like a synthesized cartoon: utterly artificial, every part of the image exaggerated almost to the point of caricature. If the garden really had been a VE mockup it would have been considered gauche even in the twenty-second century. The colors were too bright, the perfumed flowers too numerous as well as too musky. The ensemble had the scrupulously overdone quality of the child-orientated backdrops in the mass-produced virtual fantasies of my own day.

Given that I had already compared Christine to Lilith, and that we were still expecting an Adam, I expected a stream of Eden jokes, but she was nothing if not unpredictable. She didn’t inquire after the Tree of Knowledge or the serpent, and never mentioned the possibility of a fall.

She wasn’t impressed by the garden’s aesthetic quality either.

“It’s much too garish,” she complained. “It’s not quite as awful as the food, but it’s more than awful enough.” Davida was not with us in the flesh, but we both presumed that she was listening to every word. Christine obviously felt no obligation to be diplomatic – but I could sympathize with that.

The animals in the garden were as prolific as the plants. There were brightly colored fish and amphibians swarming in every pond, while svelte reptiles, delicate birds, and athletic mammals peeped out of the foliage of every bush and every tree. There were insects too, but I wasn’t convinced, even for a moment, that they were busy pollinating the flowers. I suspected that the plants and animals alike might be as sexless as their keepers. I also deduced that the apparent predators – which seemed perfectly at ease with the conspicuously unintimidated individuals that would have provided them with food in a natural ecosystem – ate exactly the same nectar that microworlders ate: a carefully balanced cocktail of synthetic nutrients. It was, of course, a nectar that Christine and I couldn’t share, because it wouldn’t be appropriate to our complex nutritional requirements. In a sense, therefore, we were the only “real” animals in the garden: the only creatures forged by nature rather than by artifice.

All my suspicions and deductions turned out to be true. Under the crystal sky of Excelsior, even the blades of grass were sculptures, safe from grazing. They didn’t even feel right. Everything I touched proclaimed its artificiality to my fingers. The knowledge that my fingers were wrapped in some ultramodern fabric that had probably reconditioned my own sense of touch only added to the confusion.

“I get the impression that they haven’t quite fathomed the idea of gardening,” was Christine’s final judgment. I wasn’t so sure. We had brought a different notion over a gulf of a thousand years, but who was to say that ours was right? If they’d taken a vote on Excelsior, the motion would have been carried unanimously, because we wouldn’t have been entitled to express an opinion.

The ungrazable grass and the unpollinatable flowers weren’t the models for every vegetable form. The fruits that grew on the trees were designed – and by no means reserved – for posthuman consumption. When I asked, I was told that it was perfectly safe, and permissible, for me to eat the fruit, but that it wouldn’t be adequate to my dietary needs. Having heard that, I didn’t even bother to experiment. I could live with the disappointment of lousy golden rice, but insipid and essentially unsatisfying apples were a different matter.

In any case, the fruits were too caricaturish. They were far less tempting – to me, at least – than their designers had probably intended.

“Take a look at the Gaean Restoration through one of their cobweb hoods when you get the chance,” I suggested to my companion. “It’s less obvious and less profuse, and a great deal more varied, but it has exactly the same quality of artifice. I couldn’t find any authentic wilderness, even on Earth.”

“Wilderness is overrated,” Christine assured me. “I don’t mind in the least that all this is fake – I just wish it had been better done.”

“They like their kind of food,” I reminded her. “They must like their kind of garden too. Their aesthetic standards aren’t ours. They experience things differently. Imagine what they must think of us.”

“I try,” she assured me.

Given that I didn’t know what to think of her, and couldn’t imagine what she might think of me, I had to suppose that her attempts – and mine too – stood little chance of success. But there had to be a reason why the people of Excelsior had brought us back. I had to hope that it might be comprehensible even if I dared not hope, as yet, that I might be able to deem it good.

“The ship from Earth will be docking in a couple of hours,” I told Christine, in case she hadn’t been informed. “We’ll have a chance to talk to Gray and Lowenthal before the Outer System ship arrives and the main event gets under way. Have you given any thought to their offers of employment?”

“I’m not going back to Earth, she said, with a firmness that took me by surprise.

“Why not?” I asked.

“Been there, done that, took the rap. You should take a look at Titan. Makes the Snow Queen’s magic palace look like an igloo. You don’t have to come with me if you don’t want to.”

“I haven’t even begun to make up my mind,” I told her.

“That’s because you want to play the game,” she said. “You want to get in with Adam, in case he’s going places. I don’t.”

“I can see why you’d want a new start,” I admitted.

“No you can’t,” she told me, sharply. “I told you before – you don’t know shit about me.”

“So tell me,” I retorted. “Why did you kill all those people? Your parents I could probably understand, but what about the others? If my memory serves me rightly, you didn’t have any connection with them at all, let alone a plausible motive.”

She looked at me, and then she looked away, at the garden where lions lay down with lambs and the butterflies lived forever.

“Don’t you believe that VE tape you told me about?” she asked. “I couldn’t stand myself, so I hid in false personalities disguised as ancestral memories, acting out the underlying trauma again and again.”

“No, I don’t believe it,” I said. “The writer claimed that it was taken from your own testimony – but that was only one of the stories you told. I don’t remember exactly, but I think there was at least one epic of harrowing child abuse, and at least one item of bad science fiction in which your foster parents had all been replaced by aliens, and a couple more besides. If you’d stuck to the first one, you might have got off, although you’d have needed an extra wrinkle to accommodate the three strays. There were a lot of bad parents around. They were the first generation who had to get used to a new system of parenthood that was radically different from the biological model, and they incorporated all the badness with which the whole damn world was still infected.”

“My foster parents weren’t bad,” she said. “The marriage broke up – smashed to smithereens – but they tried as hard as they could to protect me from all that.” She sounded as though she hadn’t the faintest idea why she’d done what she’d done.

“So why tell the abuse story?” I asked. “Why tell any of the stories, if they weren’t true?”

“I had to tell the stories,” she said, as if it were as simple as that. “They kept coming back for more, and the one thing they couldn’t abide was silence. They probably told themselves that they were wearing me down, waiting for the truth to emerge when I ran out of lies, but they weren’t. They liked the stories. They always wanted more. So do you. You just want a story – and if I give you one you’ll want another, and another. That’s all I am to you: a story.”

“According to Bad Karma,” I pointed out, “that’s all you were to yourself. Did you ever have the slightest idea why you did it? Or were you making up story after story by way of exploration – or distraction?”

“I got out in the end, didn’t I?” she said, softly. “I’m here. I’m free. I’m never going back. I’m a winner. Maybe I did it in order to be put away, to make sure that I’d be the one to wake up in Wonderland. Maybe Adam Zimmerman is the one who did it the hard way.”

I didn’t believe that, but I could see that she wasn’t going to tell me anything I could believe.

“The woman from the Confederation might not make us an offer,” I said, although I didn’t believe it. “She might think that we belong on Earth, and good riddance to us. We may not have the option of going elsewhere.”

“I don’t think so,” Christine replied, serenely confident. “While we’re the only real humans in the universe, everyone will be interested in us. Even if they begin to bring the others back, there won’t be enough to go round. We’re mortals, Madoc. We’re their ancestors. They need us. They all need us, not just the stick-in-the-muds who cling to the Earth. They all need us because they’ve all forgotten what we were like, and they all need to be reminded.”

I could have objected that Michael Lowenthal and Mortimer Gray seemed human enough, for all their advanced years, but I didn’t. I knew what she meant. I knew, even on the basis of my first faltering inquiries, that emortality had not been acquired without cost, and that Lowenthal and Gray were as profoundly different from me, in their own way, as Davida’s sisterhood and the cyborganizers.

I could also have pointed out that whatever the reason had been, Christine had thought that the most appropriate thing to do to her own self-appointed ancestors was to murder the lot, and three other people besides. I didn’t do that either.

“This isn’t the Omega Point, Christine,” I told her. “It’s not even a fancy VE. It’s just the same old world, with a thousand extra years of history. Its inhabitants may be curious, but they have other things to be interested in that are far more fascinating than us. They’ll lose interest in us soon enough, unless we can find a way to keep some of them on the hook.”

“I don’t run out of stories easily,” she said. “Do you?”

Fifteen

The Ship from Earth

We watched the docking of Peppercorn Seventhrough the “window” in my quarters. Davida Berenike Columella wasn’t with us; she was part of the reception committee that would bring Gray and Lowenthal through the microworld’s mysterious interior to meet us.

The viewpoint from which we watched the spaceship’s final approach was way out on one of Excelsior’s spiny limbs, so we could see a good deal of the microworld as well as the approaching vessel. I’d already studied diagrams of its structure, so I was able to make sense of most of the structures I could see.

The docking station was in Excelsior’s hub: the zero-gee core about which the other environments rotated. The hub was the site of the microworld’s most advanced AIs and the core of its communication system as well as the anchorage of the artificial photosynthetic systems supplying the station’s organics. It also had capacious living spaces of its own, although there were no fabers currently in residence. All that was expectable, but there were a couple of things that the diagram hadn’t shown to full advantage: the tentacles and the ice.

Everything on a diagram tends to look rigid and mechanical, but seen through the camera’s eye Excelsior seemed much more lifelike. It gave the impression of floating in oceanic space like some kind of weird sea creature: a hybrid of wrack and Portuguese man-o’-war, bound to a coral base. Like the man-o’-war, it trailed countless slender tentacles that mostly hung loose, except that their resting positions were determined by the movement of the microworld rather than by gravity. When they became active, they moved with lifelike purpose.

Even while the ship was some distance away the tentacles grouped around the mouth of the docking bay were making their adjustments, as if anticipating a meal. The spinning “wheel” enclosing the weighted components of the microworld was mostly devoid of protective ice, but it had a much smarter surface which presumably had its own ways of dealing with stray dust particles and dangerous surges in the solar wind. It had its own frill of tentacles, but they were much less impressive than the snaky locks of the medusal core.

The “coraline” part of the ensemble was mostly metals and ceramics, but that wasn’t obvious from where we were standing, because the solid and substantial parts of the microworld were encased in cometary ice, which served as an outer shield as well as a resource. The ice hadn’t been sculpted in the careful fashion of the ice palaces of Antarctica and Titan, but it caught sunlight and starlight anyway. Refraction sent the rays every which way before letting them out in a fashion that was far from chaotic, although the patterns were accidental and serendipitous.

From where we looked back at them, Excelsior’s icy vistas sparkled and glowed. Even though I knew full well that all but the tiniest fraction of its internalized light had to originate in the sun, I couldn’t avoid the impression that the show was the product of the millions of stars and galaxies that crowded in the background. Some of the photons deflected through it from those distant sources were mere decades old, but some of them were reaching the climax of a journey that had begun in the aftermath of the Big Bang.

Compared with the complex structure of the microworld, the ship from Earth was disappointingly dull. It had no fins and no obvious propulsion pods. To me it looked like a metal ball that had been carelessly miscast – or very badly scratched and scarred after its removal from the mold – from which a single spike extended with a smaller ball attached to its tip. Seen in isolation, set against the hectic background of stars, the craft might have been any size at all, but when the elastic docking cables reached out with remarkable delicacy and tenderness to complete its deceleration I realized that it was smaller than I had initially imagined.

The ball was no bigger than a five-ton truck, with an internal cubic capacity about the same as that of the room from which we were observing it. The blister on the end of the spike couldn’t have been much more capacious than the four-seater automobiles in which I’d driven around old Los Angeles. The cocoons containing Mortimer Gray, Michael Lowenthal, and Lowenthal’s two “assistants” had to be packed so tight that they would have to disembark one by one, through a crawl space narrow enough to terrify a claus-trophobe.

I recalled, with a slight shudder, that there were two spare cocoons aboard – but only two. If Adam Zimmerman, Christine Caine, and I all elected to travel back to Earth, one of the delegates would have to stay behind on Excelsior. Even though I didn’t have any present intention of going to Earth on Peppercorn SevenI hoped that the blister was flexible enough to accommodate six passengers without cramming them into its core like the pips in an apple. I knew that it had to be made of something radiation-proof, but I figured that it must be more versatile than it looked.

Having made similar calculations, Christine muttered: “Space travel seems to be a lot less comfortable than a first-class cabin in a zeppelin, even after a thousand years of progress.” I couldn’t believe that she’d ever been in a first-class cabin in a zeppelin, but she was obviously a hardened VE tourist in spite of her tender years.

“It’s just like a long session in a bodysuit,” I said. “In fact, it isa long session in a bodysuit. Lowenthal’s probably been taking care of business every step of the way, despite the ever-growing transmission delay. Gray was probably working too.”

“My mothers used to tell me that my muscles would atrophy and my extremities would get gangrene if I stayed in a full suit for more than a couple of hours at a time,” she observed, drily.

“They were exaggerating – and those kinds of medical problems must have been solved long ago,” I said. She must have worked that out for herself, but I couldn’t help adopting a mentor pose. I made a mental note to make absolutely sure that she didn’t begin seeing me as a father figure.

“With an intravenous drip and a catheter a person could probably stay in VE forever, nowadays,” she said, effortlessly taking up the thread of the argument. “We could take up permanent residence in the fantasies of our choice.”

The first title that came to mind, reflexively, was Bad Karma, but I didn’t say so. Way back when, I had always told my critics – and, for that matter, myself – that the fight tapes I made were a public service, because they allowed people with a taste for violence to indulge it harmlessly. There was a grain of truth in the argument, but not enough. If Christine Caine had wanted to commit virtual murders she could have done so, even in the twenty-second century. Maybe the quality of the illusion wouldn’t have lived up to the standards of the world in which we now found ourselves, but that wasn’t the factor that had displaced her murderous passion into the meatware arena. Murder is only murder if you kill real people. Life is only life if you actually live it. Maybe there were some among the Earthbound who really did spend most of their lives in VE nowadays – but I was willing to bet that they were far outnumbered by people who regarded VE as workspace and social space, and only ventured into fantasylands for the sake of occasional relaxation.

Christine Caine, I suppoed, must have seen multiple versions of all her favorite fantasies while she was a child, but it wasn’t just the warnings her mothers had given her that had brought her back to stern reality. Perhaps that was a pity; if she’d become an addict, she’d probably have been harmless.

The umbilical had been attached to Peppercorn Seven’s blister now, although there had been no obvious hatchway on the pitted surface. The tube didn’t seem to be wide enough to accommodate a full-sized human body without bulging, and it was possible to see the vague outline of the first person out of the capsule. The movement of the bolus along the umbilical was smooth, presumably controlled by peristalsis rather than by any undignified wriggling on the part of the passenger.

We counted the four passengers into the body of Excelsior one by one, but once the umbilical had been sealed it was by no means an exciting business.

“The other ship is much bigger, apparently.” I told my companion, slipping back into mentor mode just for a moment. “ Child of Fortuneisn’t just a nest of cocoons – it actually has empty spaces inside, and an ecosphere of sorts.”

I needn’t have bothered; Christine had researched the topic and obviously knew more about Child of Fortunethan I did. She confirmed that the spacecraft built in the outer system were very much more complicated, almost qualifying as microworlds in their own right. “It has an AI brain as big as Excelsior’s,” she concluded. “ Reallybig, and reallysmart – a supersilver. But machines still don’t have the vote.”

The last addendum was phrased as a jokey offhand comment, but I guessed that she’d actually researched that too.

The consensus in our time had been that AIs could never become conscious because there were fundamental limitations in inorganic neural networks – fundamentalmeaning right down at the atomic and subatomic levels. No matter how rapid they were as calculators, nor how capacious they became as datastores, nor how how clever they became at animating human-seeming sims, they would always be automata, according to the best human brains around. Consciousness, according to the dominant view, was something that could only emerge in organic systems, and was precarious even there. What I’d found out about the history of emortality suggested that the same opinion was still dominant – although my reflexive tendency to treat any popular opinion with derision reminded me that there were ideological reasons why “the best human brains” might want to believe that they could never be equaled or surpassed.

“The modern opinion seems to be that it’s far easier for organic brains to become robotized – reduced to mere automata – than it is for automata to acquire the creative, conflicted, and multilayered messiness that’s the fount of consciousness,” I said to Christine.

“Unless and until the people of the glorious thirty-third century actually find a reliable way of detecting and measuring consciousness, it’ll probably remain a matter of opinion,” she retorted. “The ships they use in the outer system have to take much longer trips and they have to be much more versatile, so they have to be a lot smarter too. Thatthing just sits around in an orbital parking lot waiting for people to shuttle up out of the gravity well. It’s a glorified cab that hops back and forth between Earth, Luna, and their neighboring microworlds. The ships they use outside the belt have to be capable of operating on the surfaces of icebound satellites and in the outer atmospheres of gas giants. They have to be extremely smart – and it isn’t just outer system equipment that has to be smart. The people busy terraforming Venus and mining Mercury have much smarter AIs at their disposal than the people on Earth. Outer System AIs could have played a much larger part in the Gaean Restoration, if the Earthbound hadn’t refused them the chance. The Earthbound are afraid of them.”

Are they?I wondered. Or is it just that they won’t pay the asking price for equipment designed and manufactured in the outer system. I knew that there was an AI “metropolis” on Ganymede, where the outer system ships and interstellar probes were mostly built, but I hadn’t carried my research beyond the merest matters of fact. I made a mental note to make a more careful investigation of the balance of trade between the Hardinist Cabal and the Confederation.

There was nothing more to watch, and we didn’t know how long we’d have to wait for our introduction to the ambassadors from Earth, so we turned away from the window.

“Have you looked at Venus?” Christine asked me.

“No,” I said, “but I’ve seen picture-postcard views of Titan and Ganymede. Just like old science fiction tapes. Curiously nostalgic, in a way. I used to know someone who worked on that kind of imagery, until he sold out to PicoCon.”

“Damon Hart,” she guessed. It was the first indication I’d had that she’d been researching me, and that she’d seen the tape of my first conversation with Davida. It was oddly disturbing, although I was aware of the absurdity of thinking that my privacy had been invaded.

“Yes,” I conceded, dully. “Damon Hart.”

“Conrad Helier’s heir. Eveline Hywood’s too. Quite a start in life.”

I knew that Christine had been put away before Hywood hit the headlines as the supposed inventor of para-DNA, and long before para-DNA was anything but a few black blobs carelessly discarded in the Pacific in the unfulfilled hope that it might be misidentified as a natural product. She’d been digging – and now she was fishing. Somehow, it didn’t seem as understandable that she should be interested in me as it was that I should be interested in her. She was the crazy one.

“Yeah,” I said. “It was a real privilege to have known him, I think. I can’t quite shake the suspicion that he had something to do with my being put away, though – and if he didn’t, he doesn’t seem to have lifted a finger to get me out, even though he was firmly established in the Inner Circle long before he died. I still can’t remember…but I have this gut feeling.””

She’d probably have continued probing if we hadn’t been interrupted, but we were. Mortimer Gray and Michael Lowenthal were obviously keen to get on; they couldn’t have lingered more than a couple of minutes exchanging pleasantries with the sisterhood’s welcoming committee before hopping back into yet another glorified white corpuscle and speeding through Excelsior’s bloodstream to us.