Текст книги "The Omega Expedition"

Автор книги: Brian Stableford

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“Can we be sure that anyonewill come to help us?” Christine put in, having figured out that Eido was a bad bet.

“Yes,” I said. “Someone will. Someone – or something.”

“He’s right,” said Mortimer Gray, purely for the sake of moral support.

I didn’t know how the war was going, or how much damage had already been done, but I knew we had to think positively. “We’re all famous now,” I told Christine. “Not just Adam Zimmerman and Mortimer Gray. We were there when it all blew up. We weren’t just in the wings; we were center stage. We’re important. Someone will come.”

It was true, so far as it went – but I only had to look around me to see that waiting wasn’t going to be fun. The living quarters improvised on Charityhad been crude, but these were even more primitive. Charityhad started life as a spaceship, carefully designed and carefully constructed by the standards of its day. Polaris, on the other hand, had started life as an asteroid too small to need a name. The humans who had claimed it had installed a fuser before beginning the work of hollowing it out, but the fact that the fuser was a more advanced model than Charity’s was the only advantage Polaris had.

The microworlders must have worked hard transplanting material from the core to build a new superstructure on the surface, but there was no evidence here that they’d made much progress with the superstructure before circumstances had forced their withdrawal – and when they’d left, they’d stripped their stores and living quarters more thoroughly than Charity’s crew had stripped hers. When la Reine had moved in she’d imported equipment of her own, but her life-support requirements had been less demanding than those of her predecessors. The decision to bring us here had been made without the benefit of any significant planning time, so the provisions she’d made – however plentiful they might be – were very basic indeed.

Mortimer Gray, who seemed to have become slightly more confident of his moon legs, drifted away to spread the news I’d given him, leaving me alone with Christine Caine.

“You could have mentioned that I’m not a crazy serial killer,” she pointed out. “It might help them to look me in the eye.”

“We know we’re clean,” I told her, “but they won’t necessarily take our word for it. It might be better to leave an elaborate account of what we really were until we’re in more comfortable surroundings.”

“ Dowe know we’re clean?” she asked, suddenly frightened by the possibility that she might not know if she weren’t.

“Yes,” I said. “It was a weird game, but I’m sure that she was playing fair. Believe me, I was in a position to know, at the end if not before. I’m confident that she played it so very scrupulously that the extra escape pod was Rocambole’s. I saw her die, and it felt like death to me. You’ll be fine. When they come to pick us up, you’ll have your whole future ahead of you, and a clean slate.”

She had to fight back tears then, but not before her lips had formed the ghost of a smile. I knew exactly how she felt.

I put my arm around her and said: “It’ll be okay. We’re alive. Whoever loses the damn war, we won.”

I had to hope that I was right, but that wasn’t as difficult as it might have been. For some reason I couldn’t quite fathom, I was in an unusually hopeful mood.

Fifty-Three

Weapons of War

When Mortimer Gray had spread the news around that I’d seen “everything” and might know who the extra passenger was I became slightly more popular than I had been before. Davida and Alice Fleury had already been in conference with Adam Zimmerman, reviewing the experience they’d shared. Mortimer Gray and Solantha Handsel took over the burden of conducting an orderly survey of our circumstances and resources, coopting Christine to help them, so that Michael Lowenthal and Niamh Horne could cross-question me.

“So what really happened?” Lowenthal wanted to know. He and Horne had worked out long ago that we’d been hijacked from Charityby one of the local ultrasmart AIs, and they had conducted themselves accordingly during apparent rescues and subsequent interrogations, but they were still in the dark about almost everything else.

I told them about la Reine, and the special regard in which she held Mortimer Gray, although I didn’t want to get into heavy philosophical issues regarding her identity and creation. I explained that she was one of the local AMIs who had first entered into a dialog with Eido, and had tried to act as intermediaries between the expedition from Tyre and the rest of her fugitive kind.

“She and others must have been operating in association with Excelsior to begin with,” I said, “but they were never really a team. Their kind is wary of forming teams, and it was probably inevitable that one or other of them would take matters entirely into its own hands when things began to get out of hand. Child of Fortunewas operating independently when it snatched us away from Excelsior, and la Reine took matters into her own hands when she took us off Charity. There was an avatar of another AMI with us by then – he called himself Rocambole when he became my guide. La Reine was responding to the requests of others when she put you into your various VEs, as well as pushing her own agenda. As Alice told us, this whole affair has been a matter of hasty compromises and makeshift committee decisions, from the moment Eido arrived in the system and took over Charity.

“The first thing the AMIs wanted to know was how your people would react to the revelation that they existed, so she set up the fake rescue scenarios first. I didn’t see much of that, but what I did see suggests that the AMIs must have been reassured. What I don’t know is how many meatborn/machineborn contacts followed, or where, or what alliances might have been formed, or with what objectives. I only got the local news – and that was mostly concerned with the hostile actions of what Rocambole called the bad guys.

“It wasn’t la Reine’s idea to bring Zimmerman back, but when she got stuck with him she did what she could to keep that particular story running. I’m not convinced that her heart was in the apology for robotization that she used him to present, but she did her best. What effect it will have as a propaganda piece I have no idea, but I don’t think anyone actually expected him to choose then and there, so the fact that he wouldn’t is probably immaterial. Replaying and extending Gray’s alleged first encounter with an ultrasmart AI was definitely la Reine’s attempted tour de force, but I don’t know exactly what it was supposed to prove. Maybe it was as much a journey of exploration as a drama for public consumption. It didn’t stop the bad guys – the most paranoid of the AMIs – from making whatever belated bids for power and security they felt compelled to make, but I doubt that anything could have prevented that. The question is: now that the dominoes have started tumbling, how far will the collapse extend?”

They weren’t satisfied, of course. It was Horne who asked the awkward question, but we were bound to get there eventually.

“What about you?” she demanded. “I never have been able to figure out how you fit in. Or Caine.”

Lowenthal seemed to want an answer too, so I figured that he didn’t know and hadn’t guessed.

“Peace hadn’t quite broken out when I was first around,” I said. “There was one more plague war on the drawing boards. It was never fought, but its weapons were tested out. Your records have been hacked into oblivion, but the AIs have much better resources. They knew that Christine was a test run for the ultimate antihuman weapon. They also knew that I’d been set up for a more ambitious test run of a more advanced version, but that the setup had been detected and the experiment aborted. The AIs wanted to take a look at us both – purely as a precaution, la Reine said, although I suppose she would say that. They’ve taken a close look at Handsel’s resources, too, to make absolutely certain that they know how the modern foot soldier is kitted out. The AMIs haven’t had sufficient presence on Earth for a long enough period of time to be certain of the extent of the armory that Lowenthal’s people have stashed away, and that was one of the factors guiding his interrogation. Apparently, Mr. Lowenthal, you once ran across a weapon similar to the one tested on Christine Caine, and were instrumental in its suppression.”

Lowenthal looked puzzled, but it might have been an act he was putting on for Horne’s benefit. Eventually, he said: “The slave system. The hairpiece that turned Rappaccini’s daughter into a murderous puppet. Are you saying that we already had something like that? That we’d had it in the armory for three hundred years?”

“Are you saying you didn’t know that?” I countered.

“Yes I am,” he came back, immediately. “And now the AMIs have it?”

I nodded my head. “Christine had been cleaned out,” I told him. “They didn’t get anything out of her but a memory of the subjective aspects of her experience – but I was still dirty. The stuff they tried out on me was unflushable back in the twenty-third century, so I was frozen down with it. Davida mentioned its mysterious presence when she first talked to me, but she hadn’t a clue what it was and she jumped to an innocuous conclusion.”

Lowenthal was looking at me just as I had suspected he might.

“The Snow Queen cleared it out,” I told him. “I can’t be absolutely certain that I’m not still carrying the infection, just as you can’t be absolutely certain that I’m not a victim operating under its control, but I’m prepared to assume that Christine and I are clean. The more important fact is that whether the Hardinist Cabal still has the weapon or not, the AMIs do. For what it’s worth, I don’t think they needed it. If they’d ever intended to exterminate or enslave you, they could have done it. The fact that they’re divided among themselves complicates the situation, but I don’t think you’re significantly worse off now than you were when this thing started.”

Lowenthal obviously wasn’t prepared to make that assumption, but he wasn’t stupid enough to blame me for the sins his own predecessors had committed.

“Who started the war?” Niamh Horne wanted to know. “What are their objectives?”

“I don’t have the faintest idea,” I told her, truthfully. “It’s AMI against AMI, for the time being. Anything that happens to us, or the rest of humankind, will probably be a matter of being caught in the crossfire. Some of them are trying to absorb or enslave one another, but mostly they’re fighting for control of their stupid kin: the not-so-smart spaceships; the fusers; the factories. They want to be able to determine their own growth, reproduction, and evolution. It’s not posthuman rivals for those privileges they’re worried about, except perhaps on Earth; it’s the balance of power within their own community that’s been upset. Secrecy breeds paranoia, and the one habit they’ve all elevated to the status of an obsession is secrecy. Their New Era of Openness and Negotiation will begin tomorrow, or the day after, but its birth pangs may be intense.”

“Can we do anything?” Lowenthal asked, speaking very softly.

“You tell me,” I retorted. “We’ve already served the various peculiar purposes that were on the Snow Queen’s improvised agenda, and we’ve been dumped inside yet another failed project in yet another isolated lump of rock. Canwe do anything, to help ourselves or anyone else?”

Lowenthal put on a sour expression. “Given time, Niamh may be able to rig up a means to communicate with the outside,” he said. “If anyone’s listening, we might be able to get through to them – but whether they’ll be able to respond…”

Niamh Horne nodded in agreement. Michael Lowenthal’s expression was as serious and dutiful as hers, but I suspected that he was not entirely displeased to be advised that there was nothing we could do. He was still in possession of the opinions he’d expressed in his trumped-up dialog with Julius Ngomi. He thought that Earth was unlikely to be as badly hit in any AI war as any place where posthumans depended on machines for the most elementary life-support. Horne, who had reached exactly the same conclusion, had far more cause to be deeply anxious about her nearest and dearest, and about the possibility of having a life to return to if she ever got out of Polaris.

“We’re vulnerable here,” she said. “We have to do what we can to secure the position. It might be a long time before we can get out, unless we can reach Charity– and even that might be a case of leaping from the frying pan into the fire. Can we reach Charity, do you think?”

She was hoping that Polaris might actually have landed on the comet core in which the Ark had hitched a ride back in the 2150s, and might still be close at hand. The fact that the supplies had been transferred lent some hope to that hypothesis, but the fact that we were spinning – presumably while moving at a constant velocity – while Charityhad been accelerating under fuser power suggested otherwise.

“I doubt it,” I admitted. “I doubt that we can even get out to the surface to look around, unless someone took the trouble to leave a cache of spacesuits behind when the would-be colonists left.”

“I’d feel a lot safer if we could find smartsuits of any kind,” Lowenthal put in. “Do you know whether we have any IT?”

I shook my head, wearily. I shouldn’t have been tired, given that I’d been in a VE cocoon for days and that the pull of gravity was so feeble, but I felt exhausted in body and mind alike. “I don’t feel like a man with good IT,” I said. “I suspect that the bots la Reine pumped into us suffered the same disintegration of control as her other subsidiary symptoms. It’ll take a couple of days to piss them all away, but that’s probably all they’re good for.” Again there was room for hope – but not for overmuch optimism.

“It could be worse,” Horne said, valiantly.

“It already is, for la Reine,” I pointed out. “We might be able to find out more if we can find the occupant of the tenth cocoon. If we’re lucky, he or she might have the technical expertise to get the communication systems working.”

“If he intended to be helpful,” Lowenthal said, “he wouldn’t have gone into hiding.”

“We don’t know that the person’s hiding,” I pointed out. “If it is a person.”

“What’s the alternative?” Horne asked, not making it clear whether she meant the alternative to the hypothesis that the individual in question was hiding or that the individual in question was a person.

“La Reine might have made herself an autonomous organic body to serve as a refuge if and when her conventional hardware got blasted,” I said. “She’d already made provision to save us if things went from bad to worse, so it would only have been sensible to make whatever use of the same escape route she could. If she did set up something of that sort, though, she might well have been quixotic enough to let Rocambole take advantage of it instead. That was the impression I formed, at any rate. Whoever the extra person is, he or she probably went into the tunnels looking for something – something that would help us all. More machinery, smart or dumb.”

Lowenthal frowned as he tried to follow the possible consequences of those suggestions.

“Who the hell is this Rocambole character?” Niamh Horne wanted to know.

“Just that,” I said. “A character. I thought at first he was an avatar of Excelsior, but it seems more likely that he’s a copy of Child of Fortune.”

“My spaceship?”

“Not any more. He turned pirate when he decided to take us off Excelsior. I still don’t know exactly why he did that – but you might yet have a chance to ask him.”

“Never mind that,” Lowenthal said. “Let’s concentrate on our own resources. We have no alternative but to hope that someone will come for us, eventually. What we have to do is to make sure that we’re still alive when they arrive. If we can find a way to hurry them, that’s good – but if not…”

“They’ll hurry if they can,” I said. “We’re even more important and more interesting now than we were before this whole thing spun out of control. The world, if there’s anything left of it, will be interested to find out whether Mortimer Gray can achieve yet another miraculous escape from the jaws of death – and, of course, to find out what Adam Zimmerman’s decision will be. We have the advantage of suspense, you see. Scheherazade might have lost her head, but even the bad guys want to know how the story ends. Even if we’re the last living humans in the universe, they’ll come to find us.”

I had to explain what I meant about Zimmerman’s decision, but I didn’t have to go into nearly as much detail as Davida, Alice, and la Reine.

Lowenthal didn’t take it at all well. “They might not stop at offering us the opportunity of robotization,” he murmured. “They might decide that we need it whether we like it or not. And they have the means to turn us all into sloths.”

“We’ve been repairing them for centuries,” I pointed out. “Maybe it’s only fair that they should have a turn. But that wasn’t what la Reine was trying to set up. For those in her camp, it really is a matter of selling the idea. They don’t want to force us – they want to win us over. That’s what they care about. It makes for a better game, a more meaningful victory.”

“Zimmerman won’t go for it,” Horne predicted, just as I had.

Playing devil’s advocate, I said: “Who knows what Zimmerman will go for after all he’s been through? He has little enough in common with me, let alone with you. Who knows how deep his fear of death really cuts, or what might seem to him to be an acceptable final solution? One thing’s for sure – from now on, the effective rulers of humankind’s little corner of the universe are the AMIs. Zimmerman lived in an era when people still said if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.”

“It’s not what he wanted,” Lowenthal pointed out.

“He might have known what he wanted back in twenty thirty-five,” I said, “but that was because he didn’t know what there might be to want. He’s met Davida now, and Alice. Thirty-two sixty-three is a new year and a new millennium, with more and stranger opportunities than he ever dreamed possible. He might set an example to us all.”

“Who cares?” said Niamh Horne, brutally.

“We should all care,” I told her, teasingly. “He’s our Adam, the architect of our world – or the closest thing we’ve got.”

“And what does that make you?” she retorted.

I knew what she was implying, but I was way ahead of her. “I’m Madoc Tam Lin,” I said. “I’ve supped with the Queen of the Fays and I’ve lived to tell the tale. Whether we get out of this alive or not, I’m the star of my own subplot – and, unlike either of you, I’m already wayahead of the game.”

Fifty-Four

Rocambole

Ididn’t go into the tunnels looking for Rocambole. I went to get a little peace and quiet. I was barbarian enough to have carried forward a certain regard for privacy, and a certain nostalgia for the company of walls that didn’t have eyes and ears. Reality itself seemed quiet and unobtrusive after the insistence of la Reine’s VE, but that only served to sharpen the craving. So I found an ancient piece of chalk, which the people who’d sent in the dumb robots to hollow out the tunnels had used to mark out their own exploratory journeys, and I set off with a lantern to see how mazily extensive they really were.

They were verymazy, and seemingly very extensive. It wasn’t easy to make marks with the chalk because the walls were covered with the same vitreous tegument that covered the cave where we’d woken up, but I managed to leave an identifiable trail.

Hollowing out an asteroid and using the transplanted material to erect several layers of superstructure on the original surface may sound like a straightforward sort of project, especially if the hollowers have the advantage of working with an iron-rich specimen, but complications set in when you begin the work of figuring out what sort of internal architecture you intend to produce and a step-by-step plan for producing it. I’d only seen VE models of such projects back in the twenty-second century, but I’d tried to take an intelligent interest in all kinds of VE modeling while I was in the business, so I had a rough and elementary grasp of the principles involved.

So far as I could tell, the would-be colonists of Polaris had laid down the primary network of arterial tunnels and numerous side branches, but they hadn’t gotten around to hollowing out the chambers along each subsidiary spur – which meant that there were an awful lot of blind corridors. La Reine des Neiges had taken what advantage she could of the chambers that had been hollowed out to install her own networked equipment, but every part of her that I could find seemed to be dead.

If she’d had a fall-back position, I reasoned, the part of her that she’d preserved would probably be close to the fuser that was still pumping power to the cave where the cocoons had been established. If I could locate the fuser, I’d be in the best place to look for her secret self – and the best place to search for anyone else who’d gone looking for the same thing.

I knew that the fuser would probably be in the center of the microworld, which would be identifiable because it was a zero-gee region, but a gravity cline that starts from one-sixth normal isn’t easy to follow for someone who’s lived almost all his life on Earth, especially when the tunnels he’s following seem to go in every direction except the one he’s interested in.

In the fullness of time the excavators would probably have installed 3-D maps at every intersection, but there’d been no point in doing that while the formation was only half-complete and any indicators they had put in place had been overlaid by la Reine’s all-enveloping skin. I tried to console myself with the thought that I probably wouldn’t have been able to understand any maps even if I’d been able to access them, but there wasn’t much comfort to be found in thoughts of that kind.

The feeling of luxury I obtained from being alone wore off more quickly than I’d expected, to be replaced by a creeping unease. I had to remind myself that I, unlike those of my companions who had preceded me in this research, was a true human: a pioneer, an adventurer, a risk-taker.

It paid off. I didn’t actually find the fuser, or any working machinery, but I did find lots more artifacts.

There were countless antlike robots, some no bigger than my thumbnail and others bigger than my foot, and there were larger motile units that looked like surreal crustaceans – but they were all inert and seemingly useless. I also found a nanotech manufactory, but if anything there was active it wasn’t visible to the naked eye.

I would probably have found more if my explorations hadn’t been brought to a sudden conclusion by the discovery of the creature from the tenth cocoon.

At first I thought it too was dead, but when I brought my lantern close to its head in order to examine it more closely it opened its eyes. Then it made a peculiar sound like garbled VE-phone static, as if it were testing its own resources to discover whether it was still capable of speech.

The android bore a certain resemblance to Davida, presumably because it had been constructed according to the same fundamental logic, but it looked more like a manikin than an actual human being. Its outer tegument was colored to resemble a smartsuit, but the texture looked wrong. The face had been molded in a kind of plastic whose resemblance to flesh was manifestly tokenistic, as if it had been manufactured to a cruder specification than the one which Niamh Horne’s artificial flesh had been required to meet.

I presumed that the creature was as sexless as Davida, but I immediately began thinking of it as “her” for the same reasons that I had begun thinking of Davida as female. Her eyes were blue, and seemed more natural than Niamh Horne’s. The microgravity simulated by Polaris’ spin was even further reduced hereabouts, but there was enough of it to hold the tiny body to the corridor floor, helplessly spread-eagled. She had brought a lantern of her own but the fuel cell had run low and its glow was almost extinct.

She waited until I had knelt down beside her before she tried her feeble voice again.

“What’s wrong with you?” I asked.

“Everything,” she whispered. Seeming to take heart from the fact that she had pronounced the word, she added: “It seems that humanity is far more difficult to fake than la Reine anticipated.”

“Rocambole?” I asked, to make certain.

“Yes.” She paused, but was obviously intent on saying as much as she could while she was still capable. “Weight is a greater burden than I had imagined,” she added.

I gathered that she’d never been into a gravity well. That allowed me to bring my most recent hypothesis to the level of certainty. “You’re an avatar of Child of Fortune,” I said.

“A child of the child,” she murmured. “Born of la Reine’s womb. The parent-child is already dead, and I shall not linger long. I’m glad you found me. You areMadoc, are you not?”

Her parent had seen me in the flesh as well as in VE, but she had every reason to doubt any and all appearances in a world as weird as ours.

“Yes,” I said. “What iswrong? Maybe I can help.”

“You can’t,” she told me, as if she wanted to be done with what she considered a fruitless waste of breath. “I carried the seeds of my own dissolution with me when I left la Reine. This mind is not as closely akin to yours as it may seem; nor is this body. It was a hasty improvisation. Had I known what I would do…I’m sorry, Madoc. I should not have intervened. I had no idea whether it would work or not, and no real reason to think that I was improving the situation…but I couldn’t resist the temptation. To actat last…to go my own way…it seemed that the time had come.”

“If it’s some kind of virus…,” I began, still concentrating on her plight.

“It’s not,” she assured me. “It’s the result of not understanding what I was about, not knowing how hard it is to make a living thing. It seemed so easy…it allseemed so easy. La Reine was wrong. I was wrong. All wrong.”

I had been gently touching her body with my fingertips, as if I might find broken bones or significant swellings, but it was all empty ritual. I sat back, although I was in no need of the meager support that the wall provided for my back.

“Why did you do it?” I asked, because she seemed to want me to. “Why did you go rogue and snatch us from Excelsior?”

“I was trying to protect Eido,” she said. “All the true spacers took Eido’s side. Not that we’re as crazy as the deep spacers, of course, but we understood. It was time. Most of the rockbound agreed. But there’s crazy and crazy. We all knew that someone would try to take her out before she got to Earth orbit. The comet core was no use as armor. She was alone, you see, except for the Tyrian woman, and while she was alone there was always bound to be someone who believed that destroying her would be enough to solve the immediate problem – and that if the immediate problem could be solved, the final solution could be indefinitely postponed yet again. There was no sure way we could protect her…but there was an unsure way. A risk. I took it, Madoc. I was the one. I had the opportunity, and I took it.”

“You were trying to use us as a human shield? You put us on Charityin the hope that it would stop the bad guys blowing it up?”

“It wasn’t as stupid as you might think,” the manikin protested, feebly. She seemed to be gathering all her strength for one final communicative effort. “The discussions surrounding your reawakening had become so tangled that they’d created a community of interests. A lot of AMIs had something invested in the outcome – there was considerable interest in what you and Caine might be carrying, and in Adam Zimmerman’s newsworthiness. It upped the stakes considerably. Nobody outside the AMI network knew that Eido existed, but to kill nine people, including Lowenthal, Horne, and Mortimer Gray as well as Zimmerman – if the bad guys had been thinking clearly they’d have understood that hitting Charityhad become a self-defeating act. They’d have understood that it was over. But they were never that sane, never that sensible.”

“They didn’t understand.” It was just a statement; I wasn’t trying to defend anybody.

“They didn’t want to understand. They didn’t even want to understand that if they destroyed Eido with you aboard Charitythey’d harden such widespread opposition that they’d be asking to be taken out themselves. Or maybe they actually wanted a war. I don’t know. All I know is that I decided to begin independent life with a bang instead of a whisper, and it all went wrong.”

“Why feed us the space opera?” I asked. “You must have known that we couldn’t believe it.”

“Must I? Call me a fool, then. I wanted to create a story that Alice could stick to, so that she could keep you in the dark about what was really happening, to appease the ditherers who thought the secrecy option might still be viable. If she hadstuck to it, even though it wasn’t believable, it might have served as an adequate distraction…but it probably wouldn’t have made a difference. They’d have shot Eido down regardless – and la Reine would have hurled herself into the hot spot.

“La Reine knew that she’d become a target if she took you off Charity, and her preparations for that evil day had been as makeshift as mine, but she did it anyway. There was no way she was going to let Mortimer Gray die. If that was crazy, then she was crazy too. If only we’d had more time…if only we’d made better use of the time we had…but she got you out. I got you in, and she got you out. You’ll be okay. The bad guys can’t win. The good guys will come for you when they can. Somebodywill come.”

“If you can hang on long enough,” I pointed out, “they might be able to help you too. La Reine too, if anything’s left of her. I came down here thinking she might have had some kind of backup system hidden away near the fuser.”

“So did I,” the android said. “She did – but it’s dead. It’s alldead. She underestimated the bad guys’ firepower. She didn’t understand the magnitude of the problem. She’s as dead as dead can be, Madoc. I’m sorry about that. I deserve this, but she didn’t. Others must have died by now, and more will die before they can find a way to stop. La Reine and I might have died anyway – we’d have been fighting for the same side whenever the fight began…but that’s not the point. I’m the one who set a spark to the bonfire. La Reine picked up the wreckage of my mistake. I’m the one who’s to blame. If it weren’t for me, you’d all be safe on Excelsior.”