Текст книги "The Omega Expedition"

Автор книги: Brian Stableford

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Twenty-Five

History Lessons

Christine feels that she ought to look out for me,” I explained to Mortimer Gray, as I sat up and took the bowl. “We’re both way out of our depth here, and she thinks we need to stick together. I think the broken nose brought out her maternal instincts. People used to have those, you know – the plague of sterility didn’t wipe them out overnight.”

Gray nodded, as if he understood perfectly. He put the water bottle down on the mattress and hesitated, waiting for an invitation to remain. I inferred that he’d been delegated to get what answers he could from me, on the grounds that I seemed to be less hostile to him than to the other contenders.

“You don’t seem very worried,” I observed. “Lowenthal, Handsel, and Horne are all putting on a tough act, but underneath they’re as scared as poor Davida, if not as terrified as Christine, Adam, and I. You’re not – or are you?”

“If you’re looking for evidence of a conspiracy between our captors and me,” he said, having obviously decided to speak plainly, “you’re looking in the wrong direction. I’ve been in mortal danger before – twice, in fact. It’s surprising how quickly one learns from such experiences. Admittedly, I hadn’t had my IT stripped out on either occasion, but I was rescued both times by the same person. Somehow, I can’t seem to escape the conviction that all I have to do is wait for her to come and get me again. I know it’s absurd, but that doesn’t prevent me from being grateful for the feeling of security.”

“Emily Marchant,” I said, remembering the research I’d done in what was fast becoming an alarmingly distant past. “The way I heard it, yourescued herthe first time.”

“That’s the way others tell it,” he agreed. “But I was there.”

“Emily Marchant is Niamh Horne’s boss,” I observed.

“Not true,” he said. “That’s not the way things work in the Confederation, or on Titan. Emily’s very keen on progress, and that makes her a political animal, but she’s not part of any hierarchical power structure.”

“So it wasn’t her who blew up the Earth?”

His eyebrows shot up, but he didn’t explode at me. “No,” he said. “It certainly wasn’t. You seem to be obsessed with the idea that the solar system is about to be plunged into a war, Mr. Tamlin. Did Alice really tell you that a war is imminent?”

“Since you last told me that war is unthinkable,” I pointed out, “we’ve been hijacked by people pretending to be aliens – or maybe aliens pretending to be people pretending to be aliens. According to Alice, their reason for doing it is to try to avert a war that might already be inevitable. So I think I can be forgiven for sticking to what seems to you to be an unreasonable conviction.”

I took a mouthful of warm gruel. After the terrible stuff we’d been fed on Excelsior it tasted pretty good. I’d eaten worse kinds of wholefood in my youth.

He thought over what I’d said. “I can see how you might reach that conclusion,” he conceded, eventually.

“Of course you can,” I said. “You’re a historian. You know what kind of world I come from. What I can’t see is how youcould cling to any other conclusion, given our present situation. No matter how firmly the Earthbound are stuck in the mud, Lowenthal has to figure that the war started ninety-nine years ago, and that he’s now in the thick of it. Since Niamh Horne’s pet spaceship staged that fake emergency we’ve all been living in interesting times. I can see how a historian might find a certain delight in that prospect – but you’ve been drafted to the front line, and if I were in your shoes I wouldn’t be making any assumptions about other people respecting my noncombatant status.”

His eyebrows barely twitched. He reached up reflexively to stroke his fledgling beard. “Our captors seem to have neglected to provide shoes,” he pointed out, making a feeble attempt at humor. “In fact, they seem to be a long way behind the times in all sorts of ways. Do you have any particular reason for suggesting that they might be aliens pretending to be people pretending to be aliens?”

“Just habit,” I told him. “I always look for the wheels within the wheels within the wheels. I wouldn’t be here today if it weren’t for a kidnapping. I might never have seen Damon Hart again once he’d given up street life if his foster father hadn’t been snatched by people pretending to be Eliminators. It turned out to be a convoluted game – but the end result of it was that our lives were both diverted on to an entirely new track. It seems that you and I have both carried the lessons of our personal history into our current situation. I knew your mother, you know.”

Perhaps I should have saved that particular bombshell for later, but it’s difficult to keep something like that up your sleeve when the temptation to use it is always there.

“What do you mean?” he asked, a trifle slow on the uptake.

“Your biological mother,” I said. “Diana Caisson.”

“Egg donors are of no consequence in our world,” he told me, after only the slightest hesitation. “The embryos from which we’re made undergo such extensive engineering that we acquire far more characteristics than we inherit. I may owe a few genetic idiosyncrasies to the particular individuals who provided the egg and sperm to start me off, but Ali Zaman and all his myriad followers were my true biological parents. I owe everything else that I am to my foster parents…and to Emily Marchant.”

“So you don’t want to know about Diana Caisson?” I said. “You’re not curious?”

“I’m a historian,” he reminded me. “I’m curious about everythingyou know about your own world. But we have more urgent matters to consider, do we not?”

I was a trifle disappointed, but I figured that if he wanted to play it that way, I could too.

“Fair enough,” I said. “I’m curious myself – but for me, it’s all new, and all urgent. Are the Earthbound really as decadent as everybody seems to think? Have you really become a dead weight inhibiting further progress? Is that why someone’s trying to administer a sharp object lesson to you and Lowenthal – and Adam Zimmerman?”

He only looked uncomfortable for a moment. After all, I was steering him back to safer ground – to his own intellectual territory.

“There are people in the Outer System who are fond of trying to make that case,” he admitted. “It’s nothing new – I heard little else when I lived on the moon. There are political, ecological, and psychological arguments, but they all boil down to the idea that organisms that are so perfectly adapted to their environment that they never have any reason or inclination to leave it are bound to stagnate. Hard-line cyborganizers and proselytizing outward bounders are both fond of declaring that the only way for emortals to avoid robotization is to pose an infinite series of challenges to their inherited nature, by continually moving into alien environments and never remaining too long in any one of them. But I can’t believe that what’s happening to us here and now is just an object lesson. Something very strange is happening, and we really do need to examine every clue you obtained, however slight. If you can tell us exactlywhat the woman said to you, there might be items of information therein whose significance we can see far better than you.”

I popped the top of the water bottle and drank deeply. It wasn’t until the cool water hit my stomach that I realized how thirsty I had been. Ridiculous as it may seem, I’d lived so long with careful IT that I had fallen out of touch with unmodified sensations. It occurred to me to wonder how much worse Mortimer Gray’s alienation from his body might be.

“I suppose there might,” I conceded. “In fact, there might be details of our surroundings whose significance you can judge far better than I, not to mention details of our physical condition. They seem to have purged our IT, but they weren’t able to purge Niamh Horne’s externals. If anyone’s still capable of communication with the outside world, it’s her. Is that why you’re expecting Emily Marchant to come rescue us?”

He frowned to display his disapproval of my unhelpful attitude, but he answered me anyway. “Solantha Handsel is a cyborg too,” he pointed out, mildly. “Given that we started from Earth orbit, Julius Ngomi might be able to obtain news of our difficulties long before anyone on Titan.”

“Who’s Julius Ngomi?” I asked.

“The only member of the Inner Circle to whom I can confidently put a name,” he said, wearily accepting my agenda, presumably in the hope that I would eventually condescend to get back to his. “He’s another man who once suggested to me that the conflicts of interest that were growing up within the solar system couldn’t be settled with mere words and spontaneous bursts of fellow feeling. There are, I fear, people like him on both sides of the current dispute between Earth and the Confederation.”

I put the spoon aside and sipped gruel direct from the bowl. I was beginning to feel better, but I opened the bottle Alice had given me and tipped out a couple of tablets. I used the gruel to wash them down.

“The sort of person who might want to bomb all hell out of Titan?” I suggested. “Partly to punish the people who probably set off the Yellowstone supervolcano, but mainly to let other interested parties know that nobody messes with the cradle of humankind and gets away with it?”

Gray shook his head. “No,” he said. “Nobody’s that crazy – certainly not Julius. When I say that he doesn’t approve of mere words, I don’t mean to imply that he’s a man of violence. He’s a Hardinist through and through. He thinks that ownership and good stewardship are the answers to all human problems. He just wants to settle the question of who owns what. Did you know that there’s a stock market on Titan now?”

I couldn’t help laughing. “Do you think he brought Adam Zimmerman out of cold storage to do it again?” I asked, not very seriously.

“Not at all,” he replied, keeping his own tone light. “But I think he mighthave brought Adam Zimmerman out of cold storage to remind us all what a great hero he was, and how his cleverness saved the world from the ultimate ecocatastrophe. If he was the one who gave the order to bring Zimmerman out, he must have intended to use him as an instrument of propaganda – perhaps to help prepare the way for a strictly nonviolent revolution, whose ultimate aim is to install a judiciously extended Cabal as owners and stewards of the entire solar system.”

He was obviously being serious – and he wasthe man who was supposed to understand the way the world worked, far better than I did. If the Earthbound really were stuck in the mud, though, the Hardinist Cabal might have retained the habits it had had in my day, when it had consisted of PicoCon and a few good friends. If so, they might indeed have decided to tackle their problems by widening their circle – by welcoming people like Emily Marchant into the fold, on whatever terms were negotiable. Maybe the outer system powers-that-be thought of themselves as the kind of people who’d never go for that kind of deal, but Damon Hart had thought of himself that way at one time. So had I.

If Mortimer Gray was right, I thought, and nobody was crazy enough to go to war, the only matter to be settled was the balance of power at the conference table – including the question of who was entitled to a seat. Maybe this really was the same kind of game that Damon and I had played before, on a slightly bigger board. If Michael Lowenthal and Niamh Horne were only pretending to be adversaries, while their actual purpose was to get together and wrap up a deal to impose a series of Enclosure Acts on the entire solar system, there might be any number of third parties anxious to get a slice for themselves, as well as any number ambitious to sabotage the whole process.

I hoped that I might be beginning to see the light, but I knew that I was overreaching from a position of almost total ignorance. Gray was in a far better position than I was to guess who was doing what to whom and why.

I was saved from further self-torture by yet another knock on the door. Adam Zimmerman came in, without waiting for an invitation. “Mr. Lowenthal wants to call a conference,” he said, mildly. “He thinks we should discuss our situation, and make what plans we can.” Lowenthal had obviously got tired of waiting for Gray to come up with the goods.

I handed my bowl and the empty water bottle back to Mortimer Gray. Reflexively, he took them. “Thanks,” I said.

Gray wasn’t about to be dismissed like that; he hung around to watch the first authentic contact between the man who had once stolen the world and the mysterious monster whose crimes had been erased from the record.

“Are you all right now?” Adam Zimmerman asked me, solicitously.

“Pretty much,” I said. “I’ve been hurt before. How about you? This isn’t the kind of welcome you expected when you took your great leap into the unknown.”

“No,” he admitted, “it certainly isn’t. But it was always a gamble – and if I hadn’t taken it, I’d be dead. I might still get what I wanted – unless you know different.” His face was old and his eyes seemed weak, but that was all deceptive appearance. His mind was as determined as it ever was. He hadn’t been interested in me before but he was interested in me now, because I was the one who had talked to Alice.

“So far as I can tell,” I assured him, “our captors wish us well. We just got caught up in somebody else’s troubles. With luck, we’ll come through this. Even I might still get what I want, if I can figure out what it is.”

The look he gave me then was slightly pitying. He was a man who had known exactly what he wanted throughout his adult life. For him, the goal had always been crystal clear, and perfectly simple. That might make him an innocent, by my standards, or even a fool – but it was an enviable state of mind.

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s go confer, and make what plans we can.”

Twenty-Six

Common Cause

The pain in my face hadn’t gone away, but it had become duller. Moving around no longer increased its effect. At least I’d contrived to miss out on my fair share of the work that had had to be done. By the time I emerged from my cell the common space had been reorganized and tidied. The table had been assembled and set up, and eight chairs had been neatly distributed around it, one at each end and three along each side.

As soon as I saw the array I knew that the chairs at the ends might as well have had Michael Lowenthal’s and Niamh Horne’s names on them. The moment they had decided to call a conference they had set about modeling the situation as they saw it – or as they wanted others to see it. I paused to wonder whether our mysterious captors had done the same thing when they placed us in cells two by two, or whether they had simply sorted us out according to our existing associations.

The other seats about the conference table were distributed according to fairly obvious protocols. Adam Zimmerman had to have one of the middle seats, so that he would be equidistant from Lowenthal and Horne, and Davida had to have the other. Solantha Handsel had to be at Lowenthal’s right hand, and Mortimer Gray filled in the remaining gap on that side of the table. That left Christine and me – and I wasn’t unduly surprised when Lowenthal laid claim to me, seating me between him and Zimmerman. The power to determine the seating suggested that he had the upper hand at this stage, perhaps for no better reason than the fact that he had a bodyguard and Niamh Horne didn’t.

I resisted the temptation to sit where I wasn’t supposed to, or to request a formal agenda, or even to question Lowenthal’s assumption that he could play chairman. I tried, instead, to measure Niamh Horne’s reaction to Lowenthal’s presumption. Because her face was a mask and her eyes were machines, though, there was no expression to be read therein.

“So far,” Lowenthal said, “we’ve been wasting our time in accusations and recriminations. I think we have to accept that none of us knows why we have been taken prisoner, or by whom. Perhaps we’ll be told, in due course, but we can’t rely on it. In the meantime, we’re all in the same boat and we ought to try to work together, as constructively as possible.”

“Assuming that there’s anything constructive to do,” Niamh Horne added, but not in a challenging way.

“I’m not suggesting that we form an escape committee,” Lowenthal went on, keeping his own voice light. “I’m merely suggesting that we collaborate in assessing our situation and trying to figure out how we ought to react to it. I think we can take it for granted that we’re on some kind of spaceship, albeit a very old one – or one constructed according to a very old blueprint. It seems likely that the apparent gravity is simulated by acceleration, but I can’t believe we’re heading out of the system. Do you have anything useful to add to those conclusions, Mr. Tamlin?”

I was slightly surprised to find myself in the hot seat so soon, but I had already had time to think about what I ought and ought not to share with my companions – and what I wanted them to share with me.

“All I know for certain,” I said, modestly, “is that the person I saw looked human, and that the medical apparatus immediately available to her is primitive even by the standards of my time. She seemed to me to be telling the truth when she said that she’d like to explain but that she and her companion were engaged in difficult negotiations with other parties who want us kept in the dark.”

“Companion?” Horne echoed. “In the singular?”

“That’s what she said,” I confirmed. Hopeful of setting up a fair trade of information, I was quick to add: “Does anyone have a means of determining exactly how long we were asleep? That might offer a clue as to how long we’ve been traveling, where we might have been delivered to, and where we might be going.”

Lowenthal exchanged glances with Niamh Horne and Davida Berenike Columella. “I don’t have any way to estimate the interval,” he said.

“Nor I,” said Niamh Horne. If anyone was lying, it was most likely to be her, and she was sufficiently conscious of the fact to make a conciliatory gesture. “If it will help,” she said, “I’m prepared to concede that whoever subverted Child of Fortune’s systems must have had inside assistance. My first thought, having accepted that, is that the ship itself must have been the real target, and that the journey to Excelsior merely provided the opportunity. Seizing control of an AI as sophisticated as the ship’s controller must have required a subversive program of awesome ingenuity, but that’s not unimaginable. What puzzles me, however, is what can have happened afterwards. It’s possible that we have simply been marooned in a convenient location while Child of Fortunehas been taken elsewhere. Excelsior should have been able to keep track of the ship as it moved away, and its inhabitants must have raised the alarm immediately. If that’s the case, rescuers must already be on their way. If not…” She was content to leave the extrapolation of that possibility to us.

It hadn’t occurred to me to wonder whether the ship might have been the real target of the snatch, and that we tourists might have been mere inconveniences to be casually shoved out of the way. If that were so, it might help to explain our present surroundings – but it raised other questions.

“So who might want to hijack a Titanian spaceship?” I asked.

Niamh Horne didn’t answer that, but several other pairs of eyes flickered in Lowenthal’s direction.

“I’m flattered that you think me capable of such cleverness,” he said, “but the Earthbound have had a thousand opportunities to board Outer System ships during the last century, while misfortune brought about a dramatic increase in traffic.”

“Excelsior has had many other visitors from the outer system,” Davida was quick to put in. “It would not have been necessary to awaken Adam Zimmerman to create an opportunity to steal a spaceship, had we the slightest interest in such a theft.” She seemed defensive, though, and I could understand why. If the Outer System didn’tknow yet that Child of Fortunehad been stolen, that was probably because they still thought that it was exactly where it was supposed to be: docked with Excelsior. Perhaps it was.

Adam Zimmerman leaned forward, clearly signaling an intention to speak. Perhaps it was only the fact that he’d kept such a low profile until now that made everyone else give way immediately, or perhaps he really did exercise a charismatic authority over all kinds of posthumans. “Perhaps I’m being stupid,” he said, softly, “but is there any possibility that the pictures relayed to me after the alarm sounded were, in fact, an accurate record of what was happening to us?”

Adam Zimmerman had been born into a world that knew nothing of Virtual Experience, and had only lived long enough to see the technology’s first faltering steps before he was frozen down. He didn’t have the suspicious reflexes that the rest of us had learned as we learned to walk and talk: the reflexes which said that anything experienced in a Virtual Environment had to be reckoned a mere phantom of the imagination until prove otherwise.

No one was in a rush to take charge of Adam’s disenchantment, and it was left to Christine Caine to provide the answer. “It was just a show,” she said. “Third rate space opera. Even I’ve seen better. It can’t have been true.”

“If that’s the case,” the man who stole the world replied, still speaking with carefully contrived mildness, “why bother showing it to us, especially if the real target was the ship and our presence aboard it merely an inconvenience? Why lie so transparently – or at all?”

He had a point.

“That’s a good question,” Mortimer Gray put in, echoing my own thought. “Why tell us that we were being pursued and kidnapped by aliens of a kind whose nonexistence we have every reason to suppose, given that we could not possibly believe it?”

“I could have believed it,” Adam pointed out.

If Zimmerman had been the prime target of the snatch, I thought, the whole show might have been put on purely for his benefit – but if someone had intended to deceive him, they surely wouldn’t have let him join this conference. Alice’s remark about the situation not being of her choosing had implied that we had been foisted on our present custodians, so there might be several different agendas in conflict here. Maybe everyone’s plans were going awry, unraveling under some pressure that we hadn’t yet identified.

“The tape was intended to confuse us,” Niamh Horne opined.

“If so,” Lowenthal said, pensively, “it suggests that whoever designed and used it has something to gain from our confusion. In fact, everything about our present circumstances suggests that we are being deliberately confused. Why?”

“Perhaps we’re not the only ones who saw the tape,” Niamh Horne put in. “Perhaps the lie is bigger and bolder than we imagine, intended to confuse anyone searching for Child of Fortune– or for us.”

“How difficult would it be to find a spaceship once you knew that it had gone astray?” I asked, not knowing whether it was a stupid question.

“Not difficult, in theory,” Niamh Horne answered, “although it would be a great deal easier if the ship – or someone aboard it – were able to send out a distress call. We do try to keep track of all the sizable chunks of matter in the solar system, but it’s an impossible task. There are too many microworlds cutting loose from their orbits, too many spaceships hopping back and forth in every direction, and too many dirty snowballs raining in from the Oort – most of which are continually being nudged this way or that so that interested parties can try to scoop them up. Artificial photosynthetics can turn all kinds of objects matt black in no time at all, and bouncing photons off distant objects isn’t much use as a locator if the target’s switched orbits by the time the signal reaches you. An object that appeared as if out of nowhere, or even one that turned up in an unexpected place, might not be detected for months or years – which would leave a wide margin of opportunity for its subsequent disappearance. Even if every human and mechanical eye in the outer system were looking for Child, she’d be very difficult to find once Excelsior had lost track of her. I don’t know how big thisthing is, but the same probably applies – if no one actually had an eye on it before we arrived here, it’ll be very difficult to detect.”

“If all that’s so,” Adam Zimmerman observed, “it’s surely not impossible that alien starships fitted with exotic drives might have been ducking in and out of the system for centuries.”

Niamh Horne didn’t believe that for a minute – but she couldn’t prove the negative. “There’ve always been stories and sightings,” she conceded, politely, “and anomalous traces on all kinds of recording devices. We dismiss them all as travelers’ tales, hallucinations and mechanical glitches…but everyone who’s spent much time in space has heard the rumors.” For a minute she sounded as if she were halfway to talking herself into it, but then she shook her head.

If we really had been a team, of course, I’d have told them what Christine had told me: that we were aboard the so-called Lost Ark, Charity. Charitywas one of four giant spaceships that had been put together as a desperation measure when the Crash was at its worst and it seemed that the ecocatastrophe might make the Earth’s surface uninhabitable. All four had become effectively redundant before attempting to hitch a ride in the “blizzard” – a cluster of cometary fragments that had crossed the Earth’s orbit for the second time shortly before I was born – but their makers had invested everything they had in their obsession, so they went ahead anyhow. Only three of the vessels had been successfully integrated into the cometary masses, though, because Charityhad been so badly damaged in the process that it had been written off. The colonists aboard that Ark had been transferred to the others.

By the time I was old enough to take notice the Arks were well on the way to being forgotten, but one of them – Hope– had come crashing back into the news seven hundred years later after it had made a landfall on a life-bearing planet: Ararat, also known as Tyre. I’d worked out that if what Alice had told me about herself was true, she must have been a passenger on one of the Arks. I had hesitated over believing that, because I wasn’t at all sure that an Ark lost in the 2100s could still be lost in 3263, presumably having made at least one more pass through the inner system in the meantime – but Niamh Horne had just told me that it could. If so, then it was not inconceivable that some of the prospective colonists had remained aboard rather than transferring to the other Arks. Even if that were not the case, the lost Ark might be an obvious target for other Ark dwellers returning to the system after a very long absence, if they wanted to establish themselves quietly and unobtrusively in a home-away-from-home. Even if everyone in the system had lost track of its orbit, that orbit would still be recorded in the Ark dwellers’ data banks.

Unfortunately, it still left the difficult questions conspicuously unanswered. Why should Ark dwellers of any sort want to hijack a Titanian spaceship? Why, if they did, would they choose to do it while it was playing temporary host to Adam Zimmerman, Michael Lowenthal, and Niamh Horne, to name but three?

If Alice had returned to the solar system from elsewhere – Ararat being the likeliest contender – then she must presumably have the use of a spaceship that was far more advanced than Charity, which could easily have stayed in the Outer System rather than coming all the way in to Earth orbit…

I knew it had to make sense somehow, but I still couldn’t see how. I was keeping it all to myself because I still didn’t know whose side I wanted to be on – and also because I wanted to put a story together before I let the others in on my secret. If and when I came clean I didn’t want to leave anyone in the slightest doubt that a twenty-second-century mortal was as good a man as any thirty-third-century emortal. In the meantime, the people who had Charitywere running the show. I wanted them to think that they could trust me – that I was willing to cooperate with their desire to keep things dark until they had sorted out their own diplomatic problems.

I didn’t think I owed anythingto Davida Berenike Columella, let alone to Michael Lowenthal or Niamh Horne. If we really were in deep trouble, embroiled in something that might turn into a war, the only loyalty I owed was to myself.