Текст книги "The Omega Expedition"

Автор книги: Brian Stableford

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Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 36 страниц)

Sixteen

The Men from Earth

Michael Lowenthal and Mortimer Gray were so keen to see us, in fact, that they were practically elbowing one another out of the way as they approached. They both headed directly for me, but that might have been because Christine, gripped by a sudden fit of modesty, had dropped back to a position almost directly behind me.

Davida Berenike Columella tried to catch up with them in order to make the introductions, but Lowenthal wouldn’t wait for her. He introduced Gray, although that was hardly necessary, and his two other companions. One of them was a soberly clad male named Jean de Comeau, whose title I didn’t catch because I was too busy concentrating my attention on the one who obviously wasn’t a UN bureaucrat: a female named Solantha Handsel.

Solantha Handsel had enough hardware built into her smartsuit – and probably into her own flesh – to give the appearance of being half-robot. It seemed to me that she might as well have had the word “bodyguard” stenciled on her flat but muscular chest.

It occurred to me that traveling with a bodyguard might be a social status thing – a matter of mere ornamentation – but my paranoia wasn’t prepared to let me make the assumption. Nor was it prepared to write off the cyborg as an item of intimidatory showmanship. What my paranoia said was that if Michael Lowenthal had brought a minder with him, he expected to need minding. Maybe the sisters weren’t as harmless as they seemed, and maybe he was anxious about

Christine Caine’s reputation, but the more worrying possibility was that he had cause to be worried about Niamh Horne’s yet-to-arrive entourage, or that he thought he had cause to be worried about me.

I’m not quite sure how it happened, but while I was busy formulating these thoughts Lowenthal cut me out from the crowd with well-trained expertise and somehow contrived – perhaps with Solantha Handsel’s aid – to establish an invisible cordon sanitairearound us.

“Welcome back, Mr. Tamlin,” he said, smiling broadly. “I understand that you used to work for us.”

“Only as a subcontractor,” I assured him, without bothering to quibble about the use of the word us. “Why, do you think you owe me money?”

He laughed politely. “If we did,” he said, “the compound interest would have inflated it into a tidy sum by now. Unfortunately, we have no record of it, and the credit balance in your own accounts was sequestered long ago to pay for your incarceration.”

“That’s just the accounts you know about,” I told him. I figured that if he wanted to imply that I was seriously poor, I might as well fight back. “It’ll need some serious investigation to find out about the others. Not that I can compete with Christine, of course. She’s got all those royalties owing to her for Bad Karma.”

He must have known that I was fishing. “We don’t have a copy of it, I’m afraid,” he assured me. “Mortimer may be able to turn one up. He spends a lot of time in the mountains – even more than he used to, now that their contents have been even more extensively trashed than they were before. We do, however, have copies of some of yourold tapes, along with other data. All discarded by publicly accessible datastores, I fear. It seemed very unlikely to the custodians of our history that the items in question would ever be required again.”

“But you squirreled it away regardless,” I said. I tried to maintain a light tone as I said: “I don’t suppose you know why I was put into SusAn in the first place? I seem to have mislaid the memory.”

He didn’t seem surprised by the question – but he did seem slightly suspicious, as if he didn’t believe that I’d lost the memory and didn’t mind my knowing it. “That’s an intriguing mystery,” he said, blandly. “We don’t have any record of your conviction for a crime. As I said, our financial records show that your existing credit was seized to pay for the upkeep of your frozen body. Damon Hart neglected to make any provision for that purpose – but that was probably a genuine oversight.”

I couldn’t believe that he’d use a phrase like “probably a genuine oversight” unless he intended to imply the opposite, or that he’d have mentioned Damon Hart at all unless he too was fishing for information. In which case, I deduced, he probably didn’t have the faintest idea why I’d been put away – although he was certainly interested in finding out.

“I suppose I ought to be glad that I was looked after so well, even though my credit ran out,” I said. “I seem to have slept through at least two major disasters – I do hope that I haven’t been revived on the eve of a third.”

He didn’t laugh at that suggestion. “This is a far better world than the one you left behind, in terms of the existential opportunities it presents,” he assured me. “We’ll be happy to help you in any way we can to adapt yourself to it, if that’s your wish.”

“Did you know Damon Hart personally?” I asked, abruptly.

“Slightly,” Lowenthal admitted. “It’s not surprising that he never mentioned you in conversation, but I can’t find any reference to you in the files he left behind. It’s almost as if someone deleted you from the record of his life – and from all the other records to which he had access.”

It was obvious that he didn’t mean “almost as if” at all, and that he thought the someone in question must have been Damon.

“It must be easy enough for a person as unimportant as me to be forgotten,” I said, trying to match his bland tone. “Damon was my friend for twenty years, but he lived for three hundred more after I was frozen down. He must have become a completely different person. I expect he forgot about such trivialities as my upkeep long before he died.”

“Perhaps so,” Lowenthal agreed, insincerely. I took note of the fact that although Solantha Handsel seemed perfectly relaxed she was still within arm’s reach, and the way she occasionally glanced at me was neither unwary nor incurious. If Lowenthal knew more about me than he was prepared to say, or even if he merely had more cause to be suspicious than he was prepared to reveal, what he knew or suspected seemed to be enough to put him on his guard.

“I understand that the delegation from the Outer System will be here soon,” I said, mildly. “I’m looking forward to meeting them – all the more so now I’ve seen yourcyborganizer.”

“I’m looking forward to it too,” Lowenthal assured me. I didn’t believe him. Solantha Handsel seemed to be about to say something – perhaps to deny that she was a cyborganizer in the strictest sense of the term – but she shut up as soon as it became clear that her boss had more to say.

“To be perfectly frank,” Lowenthal went on, seeming to me to be speaking anything but frankly, “it’s good to have an excuse to meet Niamh face to face. All kinds of problems seem to get in the way of people like her traveling to Earth, or people like me visiting Titan. This little party should provide a very valuable opportunity for a frank and informal exchange of views. To be honest, that’s the real reason I’m here – and presumably the real reason for her presence. But that’s not to say that I’m not interested to meet you, and Adam Zimmerman too. My offer of useful employment is perfectly sincere, and I hope that you’ll accept it.”

“I haven’t made up my mind,” I told him. “Maybe I’ll wait to see what Adam decides. And Christine, of course. We true humans may need to stick together for a while, until we figure out exactly what’s what.”

He condescended to laugh at that – and having made whatever point he had intended to make, he passed on, leaving me to face the curiosity of Mortimer Gray.

“I’m delighted to meet you,” the historian said, with what seemed like touching honesty after Lowenthal’s practiced diplomatic manner. “It’s not often one has the opportunity to meet a witness to history as remote as yours.”

“There are thousands more just over the way,” I reminded him. “Although you might need to let some of them lie for a few decades more, until they ripen to the appropriate remoteness.”

He actually blushed. “I’m sorry,” he said, just as honestly. “Michael told me what happened to you. It must be a terrible shock, to have been forgottenlike that.”

“The shock,” I told him, drily, “is in being remembered. Everyone tells me that I’ve been lucky, because there are so many more possibilities open to me nowadays.”

“That’s true, of course,” he conceded, “but I can understand why you might think you’ve paid a heavy price for the privilege. To be separated from everyone and everything you knew, and not even to know why…it must be difficult. You’ll adjust, though. Michael and I belong to the last generation raised by mortal parents, so we understand loss a little better than the generation which came after us. We’ve also lived through major catastrophes – the Coral Sea Disaster, the North American Basalt Flow – so we have a better understanding of grief and its associated emotions than we might have expected or wished for. You and I aren’t so very different, even though you’ve yet to decide which particular form of posthumanity to embrace. You’re very young, by our standards. In time, you’ll adapt fully to the new Earth, no matter how strange it may seem at first. By the time you’re my age…”

“I haven’t made up my mind whether to go to Earth,” I told him, figuring that it was about time I interrupted. “May I ask you a question about something that’s been troubling me?”

“Of course,” he said, with all the enthusiasm of an authentic sucker.

“Why does Michael Lowenthal have a bodyguard with him?”

Unfortunately, Mortimer Gray’s act was no act. He laughed, as if at a simple misunderstanding. “Solantha isn’t a bodyguard,” he assured me, blithely. “Cyborganization is mostly a matter of fashion, on Earth at least. Life in the outer system requires a degree of functional cyborgization, but it’s purely a matter of aesthetics at home. Did you think he was worried about meeting Christine Caine?”

“No,” I said. I figured that I might as well go all the way, given that he didn’t seem to be taking me seriously. “I wondered whether he was worried about meeting Niamh Horne, and the possibility of war breaking out between Earth and the Outer System.”

Gray seemed genuinely puzzled. “Where did you get that idea from?” he asked. “Humankind hasn’t had a war since…well, before you were born. Emortals don’t fight wars – they have too accurate a notion of the value of life.”

“You don’t think blowing up North America and plunging Earth into nuclear winter counts as an act of war?” I said, feigning astonishment. “In my day, most people thought that every stomach upset was probably the first shot in the next plague war.”

Mortimer Gray stared at me, seemingly anxious as well as puzzled. “I suppose that must have been the case,” he said, cautiously. “But things have changed. Mores, attitudes, habits…everything is different now. I can’t believe that the Basalt Flow was the result of a deliberate act of sabotage. There are political conflicts within the solar system, but we all understand that our only hope of beating the Afterlife is to work together as a community of species. Do you know what the Afterlife is?”

“I read up on it,” I confirmed. “I understand the argument that a common threat makes it necessary for potential enemies to work together – but I’m not convinced. In my day, as you presumably know, there was a school of thought which held that social contracts were only reliable because men were mortal and prey to pain. In a world of true emortals with efficient IT, the theory went, there could be no effective sanctions forcing people to fulfill their obligations and keep their promises. One corollary of the theory was that a world of emortals would be more prone to conflict, not less.”

He found the notion too alien to be threatening. “But the truth is exactly the opposite, as history has proved,” he protested. “People who might live for a very long time in the company of their peers have very powerful reasons for honoring their obligations, because there’s no way to escape the consequences of failure. We have to deal honestly with one another, because we can’t afford the consequences of being exposed as liars, let alone the consequences of violent behaviour. You really need to understand that, Mr. Tamlin – and I’m sure you will, given time.”

I would have taken more comfort from his words if he’d glanced sideways at Christine Caine while he was closing his argument, but he didn’t. He kept right on looking me in the eyes as he pronounced words like “liars” and “violent behavior.” He wasn’t scared of me – he would have thought the suggestion that he might need a bodyguard absurd – but he wasn’t laboring under any delusion that I was a man like him. When he said that he and I weren’t so very different, he was talking about a narrow range of emotional responses, not about the extent of our evolution beyond Neanderthal brutality.

“So there isn’t going to be a war?” I said, meeting his gaze squarely.

“No,” he said, flatly. I couldn’t tell whether he was so definite because he was genuinely convinced, or because he desperately wanted to believe it. Paranoid as I was, I favored the latter hypothesis. In any case, I thought it best to change the subject.

“You said that I’ve yet to decide which particular form of posthumanity to embrace,” I reminded him. “I don’t suppose anyone cares what decision I make – but Adam Zimmerman must be a different proposition. Lots of people must be interested in his decision, given that he had to change the course of history in order to give himself the chance to make it.”

“People are interested, of course,” Gray said, a little warier now of where the conversation might be heading, “but not as much as you might suppose. Adam Zimmerman didn’t actually changethe course of history. If he hadn’t done what he did, someone else would have. The timing might have been slightly different, but the eventual result would have been the same.”

“Is it just Adam Zimmerman,” I asked, genuinely interested in the question, “or don’t you believe in pivotal individuals at all? Would the eventual result have been the same if Conrad Helier had been an early casualty of the plague wars – or if you hadn’t saved Emily Marchant’s life in the Coral Sea Disaster?”

He raised his eyebrows in frank astonishment. “We can all make a difference, Mr. Tamlin,” he said. “It’s because so many of us can that none of us has the power to change everything. I do hope you’ll consider the offer of employment I made – you might be even more useful to us as a window into the past than we had hoped. An account of your personal history would be fascinating.”

It was supposed to be a compliment, but I couldn’t take it that way. He was telling me that I appeared to be an even freakier freak than his friendly neighborhood zookeepers had imagined. No matter how smart I tried to seem, I realized, I would always be a monkey doing tricks. Nobody was ever going to think that I might have anything to contribute to the understanding of the world as it now was. For a moment, I almost pitied Adam Zimmerman.

“There’s nothing hi about my story,” I told him. “It’s essentially lo – and for the moment, quite lost.”

He frowned, unable to see the joke for a few moments. Then he got it, and tried to contrive a weak smile. I couldn’t blame him for his lack of amusement. Some jokes are best kept private.

“Even so,” he said, “we’d be very interested. You’re a unique resource, whose experiences will be even more interesting in juxtaposition with those of your companions.”

All three of us were unique, even though we were in the same boat, because we’d come from different eras: we made up quite a goodie bag for a historian. There were thousands more of us still to be thawed, but every one would be unique from Mortimer Gray’s point of view.

“I’ll think it over,” I assured the historian. “I’ll come back to you when I have more questions.”

I wanted to talk to Solantha Handsel, but I didn’t get the chance. The party was already winding down – over, it seemed, almost as soon as it had begun – because Michael Lowenthal had decided that he had had enough, and that it was time to let the sisterhood whisk him away.

I didn’t see the Earthpeople again until the following day. Even Christine absented herself for a while, although she reappeared when the time came to watch the “real” spaceship coming into dock.

That, apparently, was the kind of experience she liked to share – or one of them, at any rate.

Seventeen

The Cyborganizers

Christine hadn’t exaggerated when she had rhapsodized about how much more impressive the ship from the Outer System would be than the ferry that had arced across the diameter of the Earth’s orbit. Child of Fortunewas at least thirty times as big as Peppercorn Seven, and there was not the least possibility that the neatly chiseled workings on its surface might be mistaken for incompetent molding or accidental scratching. It didn’t have fins, but it did have what looked to me like a massive pair of furled wings.

Although the station looked like a chimerical sea creature, the ship from the Jovian moons had the air of an authentic flier: a bird that was merely bobbing on the surface of the ocean, quite able to transform itself into something altogether more spectacular. Because it was decelerating, Child of Fortunewas headed toward us hind end first, its fuser doubtless spitting out the last few gobs of reaction mass with the utmost discretion. It bore a faint and temporary resemblance to a massive whale or basking shark, with its mouth wide open, but everything about its design proclaimed that it was a much finer creature than that.

When Excelsior had extended its tentacles toward the Earth ship the microworld had been a huge scavenger gobbling up a stray morsel, but when it reached out to touch the Outer System vessel it was more like a tentative greeting between alien equals, albeit of very different sizes and shapes.

“How many people are aboard?” I asked Christine, figuring that I might as well take advantage of her research.

“About sixty, apparently,” she told me. “The permanent crew is about fifty strong. They’re fabers – I think they’ll disembark in shifts, but only as far as the microworld’s core.

She was presumably right, but the umbilicals established between ship and station were much more substantial than those connected to Peppercorn Seven. It was impossible to see individuals passing through them.

I was even more curious about Niamh Horne’s delegation than I had been about Lowenthal’s, and I couldn’t help feeling aggrieved that they didn’t show anything like the same alacrity in calling on us.

Christine and I waited until it would have seemed absurd to wait any longer, then returned to our separate researches in the virtual world, half-hoping that giving up would somehow function as a catalyst and precipitate the expected meeting.

It didn’t.

I had been immersed in solitary visions of Titan and Ganymede for more than two hours when the visitors finally arrived – and when they did, there were only two of them, in addition to Davida Berenike Columella.

At least I was spared the ultimate indignity of talking to a flunky. Niamh Horne had the grace to appear in person. She also had the grace to let Davida perform the introductions in a sensible ceremonial fashion. Her companion was a male named Theoderic Conwin.

Niamh Horne and Theoderic Conwin were both cyborgs, but I saw immediately – if slightly belatedly – what Mortimer Gray had meant about the difference between functional and ornamental cyborganization. I had taken Solantha Handsel for a bodyguard because her modifications had been shaped and coordinated to display the suggestion that she was half fighting machine, but I realized now how ostentatious her adaptations were.

There was nothing manifestly obtrusive or calculatedly suggestive about the modifications that had been made to the two Titanians. It required close and considered inspection to determine that their outer teguments were much thicker than the additional skins Davida and I were wearing, because they were camouflaged to give an appearance of real skin and conventional clothing. Their eyes and ears, though artificial, were similarly formed to resemble their natural counterparts. It was impossible to judge exactly how much their seeming solidity owed to the bulk of their smartsuits, but I formed the impression that within their relatively stout frames there were two unfashionably thin individuals making no effort whatsoever to get out.

“Davida tells me that you don’t want to go home to Earth,” Niamh Horne said, after a few cursory pleasantries. Nobody had taken the trouble to invite Christine in from the adjoining room, although I felt a slight twinge of guilt about my failure to raise the issue.

“I haven’t made any final decision,” I told her. “But I have a certain sympathy with Christine’s view that we’re so radically dislocated anyway that we might as well go somewhere authentically alien.”

“Been there, done that, took the rap,” the cyborg woman quoted. Her tone suggested a wry smile, but her lips didn’t seem to go in for that sort of thing.

“But the terrestrial surface you left behind is very different from the present one,” her male companion pointed out.

“Not in the essentials,” I said. “Atmosphere, gravity…anyway, rumor has it that you people think Earth is hopelessly decadent, incapable of any realchange. A rest home for the robotized, holding back the cause of progress.”

It would have been easier to judge their response to that if they had been smilers; as things were, I had to grin at my own joke to defuse it.

“It’s only natural that the Earthbound should be conservative and conservationist,” Theoderic Conwin said, displaying his tolerance proudly. “They’re the custodians of the planet that produced humankind – and our explorations of the galaxy suggest that such worlds are exceedingly rare and precious.”

“Someone has to be prepared to be fanatical in looking after what we have,” Niamh Horne added, with equally ostentatious generosity. “If the Earthbound weren’t able to maintain a safe anchorage for the posthuman project, our own capacity to innovate and experiment might be inhibited. There’s no conflict between the outer satellites and Earth. Our differences of opinion are polite, and entirely healthy.”

I gathered from this speech that she’d been thoroughly briefed on what I’d said to Mortimer Gray. The historian hadn’t denied that there were conflicts, I remembered; he had been content to refute the notion that they could ever become violent. She obviously wanted to ram the point home. Even if I’d been less paranoid than I was I wouldn’t have taken their assurances seriously for a moment.

“Well,” I said, glibly, “I’m glad to be able to add an extra measure, however small, to the posthuman spectrum. I’m sure I’d find cause for discomfort in a world where differences weren’t polite, healthy, and welcome. Do you think I’d be able to find useful work on Titan?”

“Ganymede might be more appropriate,” she said, somewhat to my surprise.

“I thought Ganymede was the AI Utopia,” I said.

“Exactly,” she came back. “The roles filled there by human beings are relatively menial and less challenging than those available elsewhere. On the other hand, you might be able to adapt more rapidly to a smaller and more easily comprehensible world – one of the belt habitats, for instance.” It would have stung less if she’d smiled, but I had a suspicion that it wasn’t simply the inflexibility of her cheeks that was getting in her way this time.

“I take it that means you won’t be matching Lowenthal’s job offer,” I said, trying to keep my own lips tight.

“You shouldn’t take that one either, in my opinion,” she told me. “Investigate the belt, Mr. Tamlin. That’s where you’re most likely to find a comfortable future.”

“If I’d wanted a comfortable future,” I retorted, “I probably wouldn’t have ended up in the freezer in the first place.”

“That’s not what Adam Zimmerman thought,” Theoderic Conwin put in. I still couldn’t tell whether or not he was joking.

“So you’re not going to offer hima job either?” I commented, sardonically.

“We’re going to offer him a tour of the solar system,” Conwin told me.

“May I come too?” I asked.

He had to pass that one along to his boss. “Certainly you may,” Niamh Horne assured me, with what appeared to me to be a total lack of enthusiasm. “Adam Zimmerman may well desire to have company of his own kind. I’m sure you’d find the tour very instructive – but you shouldn’t rush any of the decisions you’ll have to make. There’s no hurry.”

“There is while I’m still mortal,” I pointed out. “If I have to decide what kind of eternal youth to opt for, I need to do it while I’m still young. It’s a difficult choice to make, given that there seem to be so many options – all fraught with risks.”

Davida wanted to answer that one, but she didn’t manage to get her reply in first and she was too polite to compete.

“The risks,” Conwin said, smoothly, “are exaggerated.” There was nothing in his artificial eyes to register annoyance, but I supposed that the risks he had in mind were those at the robotization end of the spectrum, and that the reason he had them in mind was that he was sensitive about the possibility of being mistaken for a victim. I decided to let the matter lie, for now.

“Suppose Adam Zimmerman doesn’t want to go on the grand tour just yet,” I said. “Will your offer remain open?” I was careful to phrase the question ambiguously, so that he wouldn’t be sure whether I was referring to their offer to Adam Zimmerman or their markedly less generous offer to me.

It was Niamh Horne who answered, although she had to hurry because Davida’s mouth was open yet again, presumably to make some offer of her own. “We’ll give sympathetic consideration to any request you care to make,” she said.

Davida finally found her opportunity to say: “It might be as well if you were all to remain here for a while,” she said. “We need to monitor your condition, and to make sure that the IT we’ve installed is working properly. You’re very welcome to remain here as our guests indefinitely, but if you do decide to take up an offer of employment on Earth, you’d be wise to delay the move until we’ve completed our own research program. You might also have a useful role to play in the continuation of the project.”

That was news to Niamh Horne as well as to me.

“Continuation?” the cyborg repeated. “You intend to bring them allback? Why?”

I was tempted to ask “Why not?” but I refrained.

“I don’t know what the Foundation intends,” Davida confessed. “I’m working to instructions – but I had assumed that if the first revivals went to plan…”

“ Whoseplan?” Niamh Horne was quick to ask.

Davida’s little-girl face seemed utterly guileless and deeply confused. “Why, the Foundation’s,” she said.

“To the best of my knowledge,” the cyborg said, frostily, “no one associated with the Foundation in the Outer System had the slightest inkling that this matter was under serious discussion, let alone that a decision had been taken. Lowenthal tells me that he had the same impression from his acquaintances on Earth. They seem to believe that your people took the decision yourselves, entirely independently.”

For the moment, they seemed to have forgotten that I was there. Davida was a picture of innocent confusion, but my paranoia warned me that the innocence and the confusion might be every bit as deceptive as her nine-year-old appearance.

“That’s not possible,” Davida said. “There was no question…”

“Are you saying that the matter of Adam Zimmerman’s revival wasn’t even under discussion among the Foundation’s Outer System personnel?” I said to Niamh Horne, partly to take the pressure off Davida and partly to serve my own curiosity. “Even though the whole purpose of the Ahasuerus Foundation was to bring him back once the technology existed to make him emortal?”

Now it was Horne’s turn to look slightly confused. It was Conwin who said: “All Niamh is saying is that the Foundation people we know had not been notified that a decision was imminent. Given that the revival of Adam Zimmerman is, as you say, the Foundation’s perennial central concern, they were surprised – and a little hurt – to find that they had not been consulted.”

“I can’t imagine…” Davida began.

I cut her off again, as easily as I might if she really had been a child intruding upon an adult discussion. “So you think Lowenthal’s lying,” I said. “You think the decision was taken on Earth, for reasons that have more to do with Earth’s interests than the Foundation’s?”

I was glad to discover that I hadn’t lost my touch. That suggestion finally won an expression of sorts from Niamh Horne’s synthetic features. “That’s not what I meant at all,” she said. Then she hesitated, presumably realizing that if she denied any suspicion that Lowenthal had lied to her – a suspicion that she surely ought to be prepared to entertain – she might as well be saying that she was convinced that Davida Berenike Columella was a liar.

“What are youtrying to imply, Mr. Tamlin?” Theoderic Conwin asked, having observed that his boss was floundering.

“I’m just trying to find out how I got here,” I told them all, flatly. “The fact that none of you seems to know for sure who decided to set the wheels in motion makes me a little wary of the notion that I just happened to be the obvious target for a trial run. I can’t remember why I was put away, and someone seems to have taken the trouble to destroy all the relevant information – so I can’t help wondering whether someone might want meawake again, and might be using Adam Zimmerman’s revival as a cover.”

“That’s absurd,” said Davida.

Niamh Horne seemed to agree with her. “I can understand your disorientation,” the cyborg said. “I can understand, too, that you’re looking at the situation from your own peculiar perspective. But Adam Zimmerman’s awakening is the bone of contention here. I can assure you that neither I nor Michael Lowenthal has any particular interest in you, Mr. Tamlin – nor, for that matter, in Christine Caine. Perhaps you should stop searching for conspiracies and simply be grateful for whatever freak of chance brought you here.” She probably meant the last comment, but I was more interested in reading between the lines of what she’d said before.