Текст книги "The Omega Expedition"

Автор книги: Brian Stableford

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 8 (всего у книги 36 страниц)

“Two million, one hundred and thirty-three thousand, seven hundred and eighty-seven people were killed by the great North American Basalt Flow,” I was told. “The deficit was made up within thirty years. Sixty-one percent of the replacements were new births, thirty-nine percent returnees. Forty percent of the returnees came from the moon…”

“ Two million,” I repeated incredulously. “You’re telling me that the northern half of the American continent blew up and only a few more than two million people died?”

“The margin of uncertainty applicable to the figure is approximately nought point two percent. The uncertainty is due to the difficulty in whether numerous ambiguous deaths ought to be attributed to the explosion or to other causes.”

I wasn’t concerned with abstruse matters of definition. “How did the rest of the population escape?” I asked.

“A warning of the impending eruption was broadcast. Approximately fifty percent of the victims were unable to escape the effects of the blast. Most of the remainder were caught in the open by the deluge of ash. The vast majority of people resident in North America or its satellite subcontinents were able to cocoon themselves in time to avoid serious injury.”

“And how many more died in the resultant ecocatastrophe?”

“The figure previously quoted includes all casualties directly or indirectly attributable to the event, within the limitations of the aforementioned margin of uncertainty. There were problems of supply, which meant that a few of the affected individuals had to remain cocooned for as much as a year, but most emerged within days to begin the work of restoration.”

I was impressed – but when I had thought it over, I figured that it wasn’t so very surprising. The people in the thirty-third century didn’t just have better IT and better smartsuits; they had a protective environment that was ever ready to take them in and seal them away from danger. Every city on Earth – every home on Earth – was a kind of Excelsior: a microworld combining all the most useful features of organic and inorganic technology. Posthumans were parasites on and within protective giants of their own manufacture. Even if Earth had been hit by the kind of extraterrestrial missile that had blasted away the last of the dinosaurs, all but a tiny minority of its people could have survived. Even if it were to suffer a nuclear holocaust…

On the other hand, I thought, that kind of defensive capability might make nuclear holocaust a far less unthinkable proposition than it had seemed in my day. And as for plague warfare – well, what kind of weapon was best equipped to worm its way through a protective cocoon to reach the helpless grub within?

Maybe the people of Earth were safe from most natural disasters, but that didn’t make them safe from one another.

I left Los Angeles behind in order to take a look at cities and wildernesses in Africa, Australia, Oceania, New Pacifica, Atlantis, and Siberia.

There was a great deal else that I wanted to see – but there was also a great deal that I needed to know, so I eventually abandoned the tourist trip altogether and retreated to a world of data that wasn’t quite as raw. I played the scholar more earnestly and more insistently than I’d ever done in my own time, although I knew there was far more to learn than I could cope with in a matter of hours, or months, or years.

To educate myself after so long an absence would be the work of several lifetimes. That was a sobering thought. But the likelihood seemed to be that I would have as many lifetimes as I needed. Like Adam Zimmerman, I too would be made emortal – or so I hoped. Had I dared to assume it, I would have; but I was too wary, and too fearful. I was at the mercy of a world whose mores and folkways I could not hope to understand.

It was a mental condition in which all kind of opposites were precariously combined, and I knew that I would not dare to be as glad as I wanted to be until I knew and understood a great deal more.

Ten

Alchemy and the Afterlife

Although I was a stranger in the thirty-third century, I caught on fairly quickly to certain basic political issues once the principal arguments surrounding the concept of “macroconstruction” had been spelled out.

The human race would need the technics of transmutation soon enough. Fusers designed as power plants routinely turned hydrogen into helium, and could already work a few other finger exercises, but it would be necessary in the near future to make fusers of an altogether more ambitious kind: fusers that could do the kind of heavy-duty alchemy to which our modestly sized second-generation sun would never get around. All the heavy elements in the system were supernoval debris, and we would eventually need more: a lotmore. Opinions apparently varied as to when “eventually” might be, but it wasn’t just the carriers of the old type-2 banner who wanted the project started now.

The prospect of manufacturing all the elements that had previously been made in the overfervent hearts of dying stars opened up a number of interesting questions. Where, for instance, was the raw material to come from? And where could the technics be safely tested? Conducting risky experiments in distant gas-giant-rich solar systems posed logistical problems, and couldn’t entirely avoid the safety issues associated with conducting them closer to home. A supposedly domesticated reaction that ran wild might be very problematic, even if it were several light-years away from the nearest substantial human settlement.

“I can see how that possibility would make people nervous,” I said, drily. “Maybe this is one technology that we can do without, for the time being – or maybe forever.”

I was told that there were others who thought a slow and steady schedule might be best, but that nobody believed that the problem could be put off indefinitely. If humankind’s descendants refused to enclose the sun that had given birth to the species they would have to enclose others instead, because they would have no alternative but to try out every possible means of defying the Afterlife.

I had to demand an explanation of that term, because it no longer meant anything that a man of the twenty-second century could have understood by it. It was explained to me, calmly and patiently, that some people preferred to call the Afterlife the Alkahest, or “the Universal Death,” while others – those with a more developed sense of irony, I supposed – were content to call it “the End of Evolution” or “Eternity’s Eve.”

Apparently, the galaxy was full of life, but it was mostly not the kind of life that existed on Earth, or the colony-worlds of Ararat –which was known by its colonists as Tyre – and Maya. Nor was it the kind of life entertained by the so-called sludgeworlds which lurked in interstellar space. The vast bulk of the galaxy’s biomass consisted of a single all-devouring species of nanobacterium: a universal organic solvent that fed avidly upon all higher kinds of life, digesting individual organisms and entire biospheres with equal ease. It did not matter which replicator molecules they used, or how they organized their genomes; they were all grist to the implacable mill.

The Afterlife’s empire already extended three-quarters of the way from the center of the galaxy to the rim, and it was still expanding. Given time, it would conquer and possess the whole of the Milky Way, having gobbled up everything that complex organisms like us might consider “real” life.

Unless it could be stopped.

It might not arrive on Earth for hundreds of thousands of years – perhaps millions – but it wouldarrive, and there would be people of many posthuman kinds to witness its arrival. Natural attrition would probably have killed off nearly all the emortals of the fourth millennium, and nearly all their children too, but a few people alive now would surely live long enough to see the evil day.

I might live to see the evil day myself, I realized – especially if I were to take up Christine Caine’s semi-serious suggestion that I become a perpetual SusAn-borne traveler in time, waking up for a brief while at intervals millennia apart, in order to display myself as a specimen of a species long extinct and unmourned.

Even a threat that lay a million years in the future had to be taken seriously by the kinds of posthumans that lived on Earth and in its neighborhood nowadays.

People gifted with potentially eternal life had more reason to fear the kind of Afterlife they had discovered than mere mortals had ever had for fearing those they could only imagine. Their fear was, however, parent to a determination to avoid their apparent destiny. The AI mentor temporarily entrusted with my education explained, with polite meticulousness, that there were three possible strategies that an intelligent species could adopt in the face of such a threat: fight, flight, and concealment.

Obviously, the best chance of ultimate success lay in trying all three alternatives. Some of humankind’s descendant populations would try their damnedest to find a kind of real life that could devour the devourer and win the galaxy for the cause of complexity. Some would set out to cross the inter-galactic gulf, in the hope that there might be somewhere to run tothat could remain permanently untainted by the monster. And some would build shields bigger than worlds: hopefully incorruptible spheres that would close off the states and empires of their central suns, creating havens of safety – or prisons, depending on one’s point of view.

Transmutation was the key to the final strategy: not the traditional alchemical transmutation of lead into gold, but the kind of wholesale transmutation that supernovas wrought, spinning the whole rich spectrum of heavy elements out of the simpler ones that began to accumulate when hydrogen-to-helium torches finally grew dim. Maybe the people of the solar system could wait a little longer before pressing ahead with a project of that sort, but the ones who wanted to get it under way immediately certainly had an arguable case.

The argument already seemed to be fervent. Perhaps it was only the pressure of my paranoia, but I couldn’t help wondering how long populations which believed themselves to be extremely well defended could refrain from letting fervor spill over into violence. In particular, there seemed to my untutored eye to be an unbridgeable ideological rift between the Earthbound – the most cautious posthuman faction in the solar system – and the colonists of the Jovian and Saturnian satellites, whose reasons for wanting to domesticate pseudosupernoval processes of manufacture were many and various.

It seemed that I had arrived in turbulent times – perhaps the most turbulent the children of humankind had encountered since the Crash and its Aftermath. I had lived my first thirty-nine years in a world that had seemed to be getting better all the time; I had returned to one that had known nothing but good times for centuries, and probably took its good fortune too much for granted.

After listening to my mentor’s account of the Afterlife and its significance as a factor in posthuman affairs I looked at the streets of the newly reborn North American city for a second time, in a subtly different mood. I looked at the virtual people in a different way, too. I soon moved on again, from one American city to another and then to the cities of the “Old World” – which no longer seemed old at all, now that it had been rebuilt by degrees over centuries and millennia. I could see that all the cities were patchworks, which all seemed equally crazy to me except for the oldest of them all, Amundsen, which had housed the official world government for centuries.

Amundsen had been built long after I was put away, but it seemed to me that it retained a faint echo of the world that I had known. For a while, I was told, it had been on the verge of becoming a mere monument, but the reconstruction that had had to be organized after the Yellowstone basalt flow had revitalized the UN for a time, making elected government briefly necessary – and hence briefly powerful – once again.

How, I wondered, did all this information need to be factored into my own personal situation? What difference did it make to me?

It was too soon to tell.

I thought, for a little while, that I had seen what Ice Palaces might be when I had seen Amundsen City and its immediate neighbors, but if I hadn’t had so much else to think about I would have realized that the palaces of the world capital’s satellite towns could only be trial runs for something much more adventurous and grandiose. It was better that I make the mistake, though, because learning to wonder is something we have to do again and again, no matter how long we live or how long we sleep between our intervals of active thought. We always think that we can do it perfectly well, but there’s always another realm beyond the one we can imagine, and another realm beyond that, and so ad infinitum.

Cocooned in my VE nest on Excelsior, while my virtual self was on Earth, wondering at the world that had replaced my own, I had only just begun to realize how many other worlds there were – and I had not yet begun to discover what marvels theymight contain.

I had so much more to see, so much more to discover – and wherever I started, the journey of discovery would be a very long one. For a journey like that, I would need the kind of lifetime with which this world could equip me – but would my need be sufficient to guarantee that I got it? I could not help returning to that anxiety: the idea that I might have been brought to the threshold of eternity only to be turned away, because I was not Adam Zimmerman. I could not believe that I was a convicted murderer either, but I knew that appearances were against me.

I had lived in an era when the Eliminators were big news. I had never been one of them, but I could hardly help applying their slogans to my own case. Was I “worthy of immortality” – or, more correctly, of emortality? Whether I was or not, could I persuade my new hosts that I was, if the need to do so arose?

I had, of course, asked to see any and all references to myself that Excelsior’s data bank could obtain, but the pickings were so sparse that a lesser man might have despaired. To have accomplished so little, and made so slight a mark upon the world, seemed a very meager reward for my efforts – except that I could not believe for a moment that the scarcity of information was accurate. If my patient monitor was not intervening as a censor, then the available records must have been wiped. When? By whom? And above all – why? What had I done to deserve my curiously ambiguous fate? And why, exactly, had my wayward fortunes taken their newest, and strangest, direction?

I had to find out, if I could – and if I couldn’t, I had to do my best in spite of the burden of ignorance. I had to do something, to live up to my name. I was Madoc Tamlin, after all: a ready-made hero of legend. I was not a victim to be exploited, not a pawn to be played with, not a fool to be manipulated. One way or another, and despite every disadvantage, I knew that I had to take charge of the script of my own future life. That thought dominated my consciousness while I waited, with gathering impatience, for Adam Zimmerman’s return.

Eleven

The Politics of Temptation

Imight have delved deeper into the inexhaustible well that was the sum of Excelsior’s mechanically stored knowledge had I not been interrupted by the news that there were two personal calls waiting to be downloaded. I had not expected mail, and I certainly had not expected items of mail to arrive in such profusion as to have to form a queue – even a queue of two – so the news was subtly exciting.

I didn’t take the calls immediately, partly because I wanted to think over what I’d already learned and partly because the notification of their arrival reminded me how long I’d been in VE. I was almost certainly safe to continue, given that the hood I was using was so ridiculously unobtrusive, but old habits die hard. I came back to the meatspace of my cell in order to have another bite to eat. Afterwards, I peered out of the “window” for a few minutes at the starry firmament. Then curiosity got the better of me. I draped the cobweb hood over my head once again, and returned to the infinity of cyberspace.

The first call I took was from Mortimer Gray – or, to be strictly accurate, from a sim made in his image. Gray was the historian who was currently en route to attend Adam Zimmerman’s awakening, on a spaceship with the unlikely name of Peppercorn Seven.

I was oddly relieved to discover that Gray’s sim wore the semblance of a human of my own era. If the appearance could be trusted, he was no taller than I was, and no better looking. His coloring was fairer than my own, and his hair was silver. His eyes matched his name but his smartsuit didn’t – its intricate purple and blue designs were laid upon a black background. I knew that he was a great deal older than I was, in terms of experienced years, but I also knew that he wouldn’t have aged a day since turning twenty-something, so I was surprised that he really did seem ancient, wise, and venerable – and not just because of his hair. Perhaps it was the decor of what was presumably his personal VE, which was tricked up to look like a library: a library with booksin it.

Gray began by apologizing for the fact that a dialogue was still impractical because of the time delay, but assured me that the ship on which he was traveling was making all haste.

“I wanted to introduce myself to you as soon as possible, Mr. Tamlin,” he added, half-apologetically. “I don’t know whether my reputation has preceded me, or whether you have had a chance to look into my background, but I wanted to reassure you that I am neither as unworldly nor as narrowly obsessed with matters of mortality as I am sometimes thought to be. I am traveling to Excelsior as the representative of an association of academic interests, and it is on their behalf that I am inviting you to take up employment…”

At this point the sim suffered a short burst of interference, and the transmission was interrupted.

“Sorry about that,” Gray said, when his false face had coalesced again. “A close encounter with a snowball, I think. A constant hazard hereabouts – one with which this glorified sardine can is barely equipped to deal.”

I was impressed by the fact that he knew what a sardine can was, until I remembered that he was a historian. Like Davida, he was probably cutting the cloth of his conversation in the hope of suiting me.

“I am authorized to offer you an appointment as a lecturer in twenty-second-century history, Mr. Tamlin,” he went on. “You will undoubtedly receive other offers of employment, perhaps at much larger salaries, but I believe that you might find an academic appointment to be more desirable, on the grounds of congeniality and freedom of opportunity. It might well be the most comfortable way for you to make use of your uniquely specialized knowledge, and it would certainly make matters easier for those of us who believe that we have much to learn from you. I am looking forward to meeting you in person, and I hope that we shall soon have an opportunity to discuss this matter in detail. Please give it serious consideration. Thank you for listening.”

He vanished into the ether, leaving me staring at a rest-pattern.

I felt suddenly uncomfortable, totally unsure as to how I was supposed to interpret what he’d said. Had he been issuing a cryptic warning? Had he suggested that he could offer “congeniality and freedom of opportunity” because he wanted me to understand that others would want to restrict my freedom and threaten my congeniality? Or was I just being paranoid?

I got rid of the hood again, and got up from my specially commissioned chair. I stretched my limbs, although I didn’t need to. I knew that my every move was being watched, and that my reaction to what Mortimer Gray had said would be carefully measured.

I felt unusually strong, but I knew that was an illusion of the low gravity. I walked back to the picture window. It was still showing the star field, and I wondered what the watchers would read into my decision to keep it that way. I wondered, too, how I should interpret my own action. Did I think I needed to be constantly reminded of the fact that I was a long way from Earth?

I was surprised by Gray’s offer as well as puzzled. I couldn’t help wondering whether he and his fellows might be laboring under a misconception as to who and what I had been before being committed to SusAn. I couldn’t quite believe that it was an offer he’d have extended to any common or garden-variety criminal. The more I thought about it, though, the more the message seemed like a preemptive strike – and the fact that it had come in at the same time as another suddenly ceased to look like a coincidence.

Marveling at the thought that I might be able to start out on a new career path suddenly seemed to be a silly way to waste time. I asked my patient monitors to display the second message in the window, to save me the bother of putting the hood on again.

This one was from the UN executive who was presumably also a member of the Hardinist Cabal: Michael Lowenthal. Unless his sim had been subtly enhanced, he seemed to be a little taller than me, but that might have been an illusion generated by the fact that he seemed to be hovering in empty space “outside” the room. His complexion wasn’t quite as dark as mine, but his neatly sculpted features made him substantially more handsome and his smartsuit was masterpiece enough to make Gray’s, let alone mine, look like the next best thing to a prison uniform. His hair was a neutral shade of brown, but that only served to emphasize the classicism of his features.

Lowenthal introduced himself as the Secretary to the Ecological Planning Department of the World Government, but I wasn’t stupid enough to think that he was any mere bureaucrat. Like Gray, he was wrapped up in a cocoon in a flying sardine can, but his sim carried his favorite virtual environment with it. No ancient books for Michael Lowenthal: his background was Amundsen’s central square, with the UN parliament building directly behind him, reduced by a trick of perspective to near insignificance.

“I’m calling ahead to prepare the ground for our first meeting, Mr. Tamlin,” Michael Lowenthal said. “I wanted you to know as soon as possible that the United Nations is not merely willing but eager to facilitate your return to Earth and to provide for your rehabilitation and reeducation. I can assure you that any crimes and misdemeanors you might have committed in the distant past are of no further relevance to anyone alive today, and that we are enthusiastic to make you welcome. We shall be happy to provide you with employment, not in any artificial make-work capacity but as a useful and valued member of society. I look forward to meeting you when the ship docks, and to making provision for your eventual return to Earth. Thank you.” His image froze to a still, but didn’t disappear.

No stray “snowball” had dared to interrupt him, although he had help to avoid any such possibility by keeping his message brief.

Personal though these messages were, I knew that they weren’t private. As soon as Michael Lowenthal had finished, I asked to speak to Davida Berenike Columella. Her image immediately displaced his, but she seemed slightly more incongruous floating “outside,” partly because the background behind her head was a blank wall.

“What was all that about?” I demanded, unceremoniously.

She could have been evasive if she’d wanted to be, but she didn’t. “They both want you to go back with them to Earth,” she said. “I’m not privy to their motives, but I suspect that they’re simply being overcautious. They’re afraid that if they don’t obtain your early agreement to return to Earth you might accept an invitation to visit the outer system – Titan, perhaps.”

“Why wouldn’t they want me to go to Titan?”

“They know that Child of Fortuneis heading in from the outer system. Peppercorn Sevenshould arrive first, but only by a matter of hours. Both sets of passengers seem to be treating it as a race, perhaps for no better reason than that each thinks the other might be treating it as a race. Adam Zimmerman is the real propaganda prize, of course – but Lowenthal obviously feels a need to be careful not to miss out on any possibility.”

“ Anypossibility? You mean he sent a similar message to Christine Caine? Gray too?”

“I think you ought to ask that question of Miss Caine,” Davida said, primly – which seemed to me to be as good as a yes.

“I wonder if they’ll offer her an academic position as a historian, or as a psychiatrist,” I mused, unable to help myself saying it aloud.

Davida ignored the remark. “You are, of course, welcome to remain here if you so wish,” she told me. “You might think that the least attractive option, given that we cannot offer you any possibility of social assimilation – but that might be a good reason for taking it, at least in the short term. We canoffer you an interval for careful thought and self-education. Such an interval might prove immensely valuable.”

I could see that there were several layers of implication concealed within that statement, and I took time out to consider how to proceed. It seemed, in the end, most sensible to go back to basics.

“How, exactly, did we come to be here in Excelsior?” I asked her. “Why aren’t the three of us still on Earth?”

“The directors of the Ahasuerus Foundation thought it politic to remove Adam Zimmerman from Earth in the 2540s, following the Coral Sea Catastrophe,” she told me. “Tens of thousands of SusAn chambers were lost at that time, and the moon seemed a much safer environment. The facility in which Zimmerman’s chamber was then held had charge of several hundred other cryonic chambers, some of which were Ahasuerus personnel following in their founder’s footsteps, others – Christine Caine’s among them – having been accepted from correctional facilities following…unfortunate accidents.”

The pause before the final phrase was so profound that you could have flipped a coin into it and never heard the clink.

“You mean that the corpsicles of criminals were popular targets of sabotage or calculated neglect,” I deduced. I had no reason to suppose that the rhetoric underlying Eliminator activity had ever died out, even though it had presumably ceased to be fashionable.

“There were occasional security problems,” was all Davida would admit. “The Foundation was asked to move the government-sponsored chambers of which it had temporary custody along with those for which it had sole responsibility. Eventually, the directors decided that the moon was not the ideal environment either and a specialist microworld was commissioned. In order to make the project economically viable the Foundation offered to take over various other consignments of SusAn chambers from several locations on Earth. It was at that point, I believe, that your own chamber was added to the stock. After several changes of location, the microworld was established in the Counter-Earth Cluster. Excelsior is another Ahasuerus project, and we have all the necessary equipment, so it was the logical base from which to launch the revivification plan.”

“So you sought out the two next-oldest corpsicles for your trial runs,” I recapped. “But you still have hundreds – maybe thousands – of sleepers parked next door.”

“Thousands,” she agreed.

“And who decides when theyget to wake up?”

“That’s a matter of some dispute,” she admitted. “Our own position is that the Ahasuerus Foundation has the sole responsibility and authority. The World Government in Amundsen has a different view, but…” She left the sentence dangling.

“But possession is nine points of the law,” I finished for her. “Is that why Lowenthal’s so keen to take us back to Earth?”

“It’s probably a factor.”

“But why should he or anyone in the outer system care who has custody of Christine or me? What interest do they have in us, or in the thousands like us who remain unthawed?”

“The Earthbound have a view on everything,” Davida told me, with a hint of sarcasm in her tone. “That view, simply put, is that everything that can be left undone should be left undone – but that if something has to be done, they ought to be the ones to say when, how, and by whom. It’s almost reflexive. Anything new, or anything slightly unusual, is always regarded with suspicion on Earth. The people of the outer system, on the other hand, delight in thinking of themselves as the great pioneers of all the new frontiers. They consider the Earthbound to be decadent – a retardant force holding back the cause of progress – and can usually be relied on to disagree with any position the Earthbound take up. If the Earthbound have decided that they want you back on Earth, under their control, the people aboard Child of Fortunewill almost certainly offer to take you elsewhere, for any reason they can think of or none at all.”

“And where do youstand?” I asked.

Either she misunderstood the question or she decided that she had an agenda of her own to set out first. “Many outer-system folk see the remoter inhabitants of Earth orbit and the inner system as potential political allies,” she said, “although as many people on Earth think of us as theirnatural allies. Adam Zimmerman is potentially capable of becoming a significant factor in that ideological conflict, and the Ahasuerus Foundation is his creation. Unfortunately, the Foundation is no longer the closely knit community that it once was, and the Earthbound element of the Foundation doesn’t seem to have been unanimous in approving the decision to revive its founder. Excelsior’s view is that ours is the posthuman community best equipped to fulfill the Foundation’s mission, and we intend to do that if Adam is agreeable.”