Текст книги "The Omega Expedition"

Автор книги: Brian Stableford

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Текущая страница: 34 (всего у книги 36 страниц)

Fifty-Seven

Homecoming

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She had lost me. “What must?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’ll keep in touch,” he promised.

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

Little did I know…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It seems a little silly to be writing an autobiography,” Christine told me, when we set out on our separate labors of love. “Discounting downtime in the freezer, I’m only twenty-three years old. That wasn’t much by the standards of our day – by today’s standards, it’s nothing at all. If it wasn’t for the rash of new births prompted by the war, there’d only be a few hundred people younger than me in the whole world.”

“It’s just the first chapter of a lifelong project,” I told her. “It’s best to start early, because every day that passes consigns a little more of our experience to the abyss of forgetfulness, and turns a few more memories into pale shadows of their former selves. We’re not human any more, and if we want to recollect what it was like to be human, we have to start doing it now. We should, given that we’re two of the most interesting human beings that ever existed.”

“Are we?” she asked, skeptically.

“If we weren’t before,” I said, “we are now. We lived through the aftermath of the last last war but one, and we were in the thick of the last one. Who else can say that?”

“We were innocent bystanders standing on the sidelines,” she pointed out.

“You were an innocent bystander,” I admitted, “but even your innocence had to be proved. I tried as hard as I could to be something more than a mere bystander, and something more than a mere innocent. Maybe I didn’t succeed as well as I could have hoped in my attempts to get involved, but nobody else is going to build up my particular subplot if I don’t. I think I can make myself a littlemore interesting if I try hard. Don’t you?”

She had to say yes.

“We could so easily have been lost,” she said. “I’m glad I had the chance to find myself.”

I remembered wondering whether I owed it to my own kind to be the champion the long sleepers never had: the Moses who would lead them from their wilderness of ice into the Promised Land of Futurity, so that all the murderers and miscreants might have the chance to find themselves. I haven’t done it yet, but I still might. It might be a story worth telling, a drama worth performing.

Christine and I are still together, but there’s no finality in our togetherness. We’ll probably keep company until we find that we no longer have any more in common with one another than we have with our fellow emortals, and then we’ll part, promising to keep in touch. I wouldn’t call that love – but then, I don’t go to operas much, either. Even though I’ve seen and felt what music can amount to, when it achieves perfection, I still prefer the kinds that people make themselves, on obsolete instruments, amplified the old-fashioned way. There are things we all have to learn to appreciate, whether we’re meat or machine; for those of us who don’t happen to find it easy it’s a slow process, but we’ll get there in the end.

I sometimes wonder, of course, whether I might still be dreaming the dreams of a slowly dying man in a derelict icebox stored in an orbital sarcophagus. That’s an understandable side effect of being lost in an infinite maze of uncertainty, and I don’t suppose I’ll ever be completely free of uncertainty – but I know now that it doesn’t really matter whether I’m quite myself or not. Nobody is, because we’re all in the process of becoming, permanently suspended between the self we used to be and the self we’ve yet to generate.

With luck, I’ll have an infinite number of selves to create and leave behind, and I’ll never quite settle into any one of them, unless and until I decide that it’s time to be reborn as an ultrasmart robot. I’ll have to do it one day, if only to discover what stands in for pleasure in the mechanical spectrum of the emotions. Maybe I’ll find it existentially unsatisfying and return to my roots. Maybe I won’t – in which case, I’ll move on. And on.

One thing I won’t change, at least for the foreseeable future, is my name. Whatever faults my foster parents might have had, and whatever mistakes they might have made in nursing me through childhood, they certainly got that right.

I know that I’m only emortal. I know that one day, whether tomorrow or a million years down the line, the bullet with my name on it will be fired. But it will have to find me first, and I intend to lead it a very merry dance before it catches up with me.

I hope I don’t run out of stories in the meantime.

Epilogue

The Last Adam: A Myth for the Children of Humankind

by Mortimer Gray

Part Two

Six

Aided by its links with the corporations for which Adam Zimmerman had worked, the Ahasuerus Foundation weathered all the economic and ecocatastrophic storms of the twenty-first century. It was scarcely affected by the Great Depression and the Greenhouse Crisis, or by the various wars that ran riot until the 2120s. It survived the sporadic hostility of individual saboteurs and Luddite governments. It survived the predations of the new breed of tax-gatherers spawned by the strengthened United Nations when it came to dominate the old nation states. Until the end of the twenty-second century, though, its economic course really was a matter of survival in difficult circumstances. Its two principal fields of technological research – longevity and suspended animation – were widely regarded as irrelevant to the far more urgent problems facing the human community.

Although the research conducted in the twenty-first century by the Ahasuerus Foundation did make many significant contributions to the conquest of disease and the enhancement of immune systems, it was not involved in the first conspicuous breakthrough in life extension. The development of nanotechnological tissue-repair systems was pioneered by the Institute of Algeny, which was subsequently absorbed by the most powerful of the late twenty-second century cosmicorporations, PicoCon. In a sense, this might be regarded as a fortunate failure. Had the breakthrough in question been made by Ahasuerus, it would undoubtedly have suffered the same fate, being swallowed up by a much larger institution and effectively digested. As things stood, the Foundation was allowed to retain much of its independence, following its own agenda in the slipstream of progress. The trustees were undoubtedly subject to considerable pressure from the Cartel of Cosmicorporations, which exercised a right of veto over its publications and products, but it was never formally taken over.

By the time the Ahasuerus Foundation did achieve a crucial breakthrough in longevity technology, the political climate in which it was operating had changed considerably, becoming far more benign. The Cartel had become far less combative internally, and far less assertive in its dealings with the democratic agencies of world government, having long settled into the comfortable routines of what its critics still called “invisible despotism.”

The central institution of the new world older was the New Charter of Human Rights, which sought to establish a right of emortality for everyone. Some historians have asserted that the Cartel only allowed the establishment of the charter because they knew that nanotechnological repair systems had reached the limit of effective achievement and the end of their natural lifetime as a generator of core profits, but this is unnecessarily cynical. What is certain, however, is that the granting of the charter placed a new responsibility on democratic institutions, which could only be discharged with the assistance and good will of the corporations, further enhancing the authority that commerce already exercised over the political apparatus.

Whatever the reasons may have been for its establishment, the New Charter provided the ideal context for purely biotechnological methods of life extension to move from the periphery to the heart of humankind’s progressive endeavours. The quest for “true” emortality – the promise of supportive Internal Technology having stopped some way short of that goal – was rapidly rewarded by the Foundation’s development of the Zaman Transformation.

In an earlier era Ali Zaman and his coworkers might have been coopted by the Cosmicorporations, but the twenty-fifth century was a more relaxed period, when a spirit of laissez faire – symbolized, albeit rather uneasily, by the Great Exhibition of 2405 – was not merely permitted but encouraged by the Earth’s economic directors. Rumors that the Foundation had actually discovered the relevant transformative techniques before Ali Zaman had even been born, but had obligingly kept them secret until the Cartel was fully prepared for their release, are probably false, being merely the latest in a long sequence of absurdly overcomplicated conspiracy theories.

The income flow generated by the increasingly effective and widely customized Zaman Transformations revived the stagnant finances of the Ahasuerus Foundation. Although Adam Zimmerman’s fortune had been considerable by twenty-first-century standards and the expenses of the Foundation were almost entirely met from income rather than capital, it had not been able to match the growth of the world economy. Now, placed firmly in the driving seat of progress, it began to grow richer at a rapid rate. The income available to its trustees increased massively, allowing them to diversify the Foundation’s holdings and researches on and off Earth. The trustees grew exceedingly rich in their own right.

As generation followed generation the custodians of Adam Zimmerman’s frozen body fought off a series of attempts to have him revived, on the grounds that the time was not yet ripe. Again, cynics who contended that their principal motive was to preserve their own authority and wealth from the claims of their founder were probably imagining a conspiracy where none really existed.

There is no doubt at all that the trustees were right to let Adam Zimmerman sleep through the entire era of nanotechnologically assisted longevity. Even the most sophisticated Internal Technology, coupled with occasional intrusive deep-tissue rejuvenation, were plainly inadequate to fulfil the criteria Adam had laid down for his revival. They extended the human lifespan from one hundred twenty years to three hundred but that was obviously far from the true emortality which Adam had coveted. The Zaman Transformation technologies which replaced them were far more effective, but they required genetic engineering of an embryo at a single-cell stage, and were therefore not the slightest use to anyone but the unborn. There could be no question of reviving Adam Zimmerman in response to that development. Perhaps there was a case to be made for Adam’s revival in the thirty-first or thirty-second century, but with genomic engineering still in its infancy in the home system the prudent thing to do was to wait for the further improvements that were bound to come.

The suspicion that Adam would never have been unfrozen had it not been for the AMI intervention is probably groundless. It is doubtless unfortunate, from Adam’s viewpoint, that research dedicated to the further refinement of technologies of emortality between the twenty-fifth and thirtieth centuries was almost entirely concentrated in the area of embryonic engineering, but the concentration is perfectly understandable. After all, no one but Adam and a few thousand others in his situation – most of whom were criminals convicted of terrible crimes – actually stood in need of a technology of emortality applicable to adults.

There were critics within and without the Ahasuerus Foundation who pointed out during this historical phase that since the Foundation was now the prime mover of emortality research, it could have diverted a greater fraction of its resources to the kinds of technology which would have benefited its founder, but the Earthbound trustees of the Foundation were sensibly determined to move forward in measured and unhurried steps. The situation was complicated in the twenty-ninth and thirtieth centuries by the clamor of the cyborganizers, whose contention that hybridization was a better route to complete existential security than pure biomodification had to be considered very carefully indeed.