Текст книги "The Omega Expedition"

Автор книги: Brian Stableford

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 9 (всего у книги 36 страниц)

“Do you really think he’ll want to be remade as one of you?” I asked, astonished by the seeming absurdity of the possibility.

“He’s a free individual,” Davida said, flatly. “We shall do everything within our power to ensure that he makes an informed decision.”

“But whatever he decides, you’ll want to practice on me – or Christine?”

“Not unless you volunteer,” she assured me. “We were unable to seek your informed consent before releasing you from your long imprisoment, but we had no reason to think that you would raise any objection. Now that you are available for consultation, however, we would not dream of subjecting you to any further treatment without your full cooperation. We shall be pleased to assist you in securing your own emortality when you have considered the opportunities open to you, as recompense for the services you have already rendered.”

I took the inference that she wouldn’t be overly disappointed if Christine and I decided to go to Earth, or set off for the outer system, before seeking any further bodily modification. Adam Zimmerman was the prize on which her own eyes were fixed – but for that very reason, I realized, he was also the prize for which the other contingents would fight hardest.

I wondered how much it mattered, and to whom. I wondered, too, how flattered I ought to be that Mortimer Gray and Michael Lowenthal were at least prepared to pretend an interest in me.

“Lowenthal must be one of the oldest of the emortals,” I remarked, judiciously.

She took the bait. “He is. He has a well-deserved reputation for careful dealing.”

“He’s not just a UN functionary then – he’s a key member of the Inner Circle?”

“The Zaman Transformation was an Ahasuerus project, initially,” Davida observed, again coming at my question from a tangential angle, “but the whole Foundation was Earthbound then, and the terms of our operation were controlled externally. Michael Lowenthal was one of the very first generation of true emortals – but he wasn’t one of ours.”

There was nothing faint about her meaningful emphasis, but I wasn’t sure how much she was trying to imply. I wondered if she had known, even before I mentioned it to Christine Caine, that I had been instrumental – albeit in a veryminor capacity – in tying Ahasuerus down in the days when the entire Foundation was a loose cannon rolling around PicoCon’s well-scrubbed deck. In a world of emortals, I realized, people might hold grudges for a very long time. Davida Berenike Columella was never going to say it in so many words, but the people behind her were probably still at odds with the people behind Michael Lowenthal, and might be for a long time to come.

“So the people in the outer system probably wouldn’t give a damn about any of us,” I said, to make sure I was keeping up with the news, “except for the fact that the Earthbound dohave an ax to grind – for which reason, the outer system folk might want to throw a monkey wrench in the works. You only give a damn about Adam Zimmerman, so you don’t care whether either the two ships takes Christine and me off your hands, although you’ll be very pissed off indeed if Zimmerman elects to go too.”

Davida paused before answering, perhaps needing to consult her friendly neighborhood data bank as to what a monkey wrench was or what being pissed off involved. Then, speaking rather grudgingly but with all apparent honesty, she said: “There are a great many people in the outer system who regard Adam Zimmerman as a hero and a bold pioneer. The delegates aboard Child of Fortunemay regard him as a kindred spirit, at least potentially. If he were to ally himself with one or more of their most cherished causes, they might have reason to be delighted. Lowenthal must know that too.” I realized then that she wasn’t just trying to keep me informed – she was talking to me like this because she was trying to work through a few uncertainties of her own.

I thought about that for a moment, then said: “You don’t have a clue which way he’s going to jump, do you? Neither does anyone else.”

“Adam Zimmerman is, admittedly, something of a mystery to us…as he is to anyone born in this era.”

“But perhaps not to me,” I pointed out, grasping the opportunity to restate my own case for further involvement in the scheme of which I had unwittingly become a part, “or even to Christine Caine. Is that why Lowenthal took the trouble to talk to me? He must think – rightly – that I might be better placed to get through to Zimmerman than you, or him, or his rivals from Titan. So why hasn’t anyone working for the other side contacted me yet?”

“Are you certain that they haven’t?”

I figured that I’d have been told if there were any more messages waiting, so I couldn’t see what she was getting at for a moment. Then I did.

“But Gray’s Earthbound, like Lowenthal,” I said, when I had twigged. “Why would he be playing for the other side?” Thinking back, I realized that he hadn’t actually said that the “association of academic interests” he supposedly represented was Earthbound.

“Gray’s as thoroughly Earthbound as anyone in his attitudes,” Davida agreed. “But he has some very influential friends on the frontier. I know of no reason why you shouldn’t take his offer of employment at face value – but I doubt that the representatives of the World Government would be prepared to trust Mortimer Gray to act in what they see as Earth’s best interests. He saved Emily Marchant’s life in the Coral Sea Disaster, and she’s used him as a propaganda tool before.”

I hadn’t a clue who Emily Marchant was, but I figured that I could look her up. I certainly intended to investigate Michael Lowenthal. The plot of which I was a part seemed to be thickening around me, and I didn’t know whether to be glad or annoyed. Christine Caine, I supposed, would reckon it one more blessing to count or one more irony to chuckle at, but I was as different from her as I was from Adam Zimmerman. If my assistance proved to be a tradeable asset, that might be to my advantage – but if my interference were to be reckoned a possible nuisance by Michael Lowenthal or anyone else, that might place me in peril. Having already served a sentence of a thousand years plus for misdemeanors I couldn’t even remember, I figured that I could do without any disadvantages or prejudices hovering over the inception of my second slice of life.

I had to educate myself quickly, but it wasn’t going to be easy to work out what I needed to know, if everyone who offered to help me had their own vested interests – however slight – to look after.

“Thanks,” I said to Davida Berenike Columella.

“You’re welcome,” she replied, the phrase falling from her tongue as if she’d never used it before and did not expect ever to need its like again.

Twelve

The Temptations of Paranoia

Throughout my former life I had always taken pride in maintaining a level of paranoia appropriate to my various professions. As I began my second span, however, I was acutely conscious of the fact that I had not been paranoid enough to anticipate that I might end up in the cooler, or that once I was there my custodians – not to mention my friends – would allow me to languish indefinitely. Knowledge of this failure, I must admit, made me a trifle oversensitive to the direr possibilities implicit in my new situation. The research that I contrived to do during the next few hours of wakefulness was guided by a fervent desire to figure out why my hosts might be lying to me.

I knew, of course, that there was a possibility that Davida Berenike Columella was telling me the truth and nothing but, but it seemed safer and wiser to work from the opposite assumption. If there really were thousands of corpsicles stored in a gargantuan coffin ship somewhere in the Counter-Earth Cluster, I reasoned, the probability that Christine Caine and I just happened to be the nearest contemporaries of Adam Zimmerman was slight. If we weren’t his nearest contemporaries, then we must have been selected for awakening on different grounds – and even if we were, there were still question marks hanging over the matter of our revival, and Adam Zimmerman’s too.

Why here? Why now?

I was prepared to accept that Excelsior really was an Ahasuerus Project, and that the trustees of the Foundation really might have decided that the time was now ripe for it’s mission to be completed, but that didn’t seem to me to be an adequate explanation for either the place or the time. It would have been easy enough to send Zimmerman’s SusAn chamber back to Earth, so that he could wake up at home, and just as easy to ship specimens for trial runs along with him, in the unlikely event that there were no sleepers on the surface of sufficient antiquity.

It seemed to me that it would have been even easier for the current directors of the Foundation to continue the policy of procrastination that they appeared to have been following for twelve hundred years. Even in my day there had been rumors to the effect that the technology of emortality that Zimmerman had craved already existed, but that the incentive for the Foundation’s directors to postpone the day that would make them effectively redundant was too great to encourage any policy but one of indefinite delay. Davida had already told me that the decision didn’t “seem to have been unanimous” – so how had it crept through now in the face of manifest opposition, when it must have failed to do so a thousand times before?

So far as I could judge, the fact that Adam Zimmerman was being awakened hereand nowhad to imply that the people who were actually doing the work had something to gain. In other words, Davida Berenike Columella and her weird sisterhood – or the people giving them instructions – must want something, and must think that Adam Zimmerman could help them get it. If Christine Caine and I had notbeen chosen by lot, they must think that we could help them get it too. They must think that we had some special value – or, at the very least, some special significance.

Irritatingly, it was easier to imagine a reason why Christine Caine might be valuable than it was to figure out what special significance I might have.

Christine Caine had killed people, without having anything that could pass for a reasonable motive. If she had been fitted with some kind of fancy IT that could prevent her from doing any such thing again, that same IT was probably able to facilitate her doing it, and perhaps to force her to do it. Christine Caine might, in fact, be a useful assassination weapon, in a day and age when assassination weapons were rare.

I had to remember, though, that no one seemed to know for certain whether the two million people who had been killed by the Yellowstone supervolcano were the victims of an accidental malfunction or deliberate sabotage. With assassination weapons like that around, the only advantage a human assassin could offer was precision.

If Christine Caine were an assassination weapon, I reasoned, then I might be one too – in which case, I thought, I might have been selected precisely because I didn’t have a record of unmotivated violence. Perhaps, if that were the case, Christine Caine was only the decoy, to distract attention away from the real threat.

On the other hand…

It was too complicated. I needed more hard data.

What Excelsior’s datastores could tell me about Michael Lowenthal was limited, but they did reveal that he had been born in 2464. As Davida Berenike Columella had already told me, having drawn the information from the same source, Damon Hart hadn’t died until 2502 – which meant that if Lowenthal had been affiliated to the Inner Circle in his youth, in however humble a capacity, he might have known Damon.

One item of Lowenthal’s background peculiar enough to attract attention from the compiler of the datastore was that although he was not a policeman he had been involved – as an “observer” – in the investigation of a case of serial murder that had occurred in 2495. It wasn’t the last on record, but it had been verybig news at the time, and it had been a case whose craziness was at least the equal of Christine Caine’s. I wondered whether that might be a reason why Michael Lowenthal might have a particular interest in Christine Caine.

I didn’t want to give the people monitoring my actions too much insight into my suspicions, but I figured that it was probably safe to look into the history of SusAn penology, with particular reference to the possible survival of other “prisoners” of my own era.

At the time of my own incarceration SusAn had been used throughout the world as a repository for criminals of all kinds. It had been widely advertised as “protection without punishment” for half a century: a humane alternative to traditional practices, one wholly befitting the philosophy of the supposed New Utopia. Much had been said and written about “future rehabilitation”: the idea that the increased efficiency of future technologies would more than compensate for the fact that any resources and skills possessed by individuals confined in SusAn would become obsolete. Not only would future IT be able to “treat” or “cure” antisocial tendencies at root, turning psychopaths and recidivists into model citizens, but improved educational systems would allow the remodeled citizens in question to be retrained for whatever useful work might be available.

Everybody with half a brain knew, of course, that it was all bullshit – but it was politically useful bullshit. It provided an ideological basis for getting rid of anyone who proved to be too much of a pest. People who committed minor offenses were put away for a few months or a few years, as a warning to them and to others – and people who couldn’t take the hint were put away indefinitely. Present society washed its hands of them, swept them under the carpet and left the dirt to be tidied up by future generations. Was anyone ever surprised that the future generations never quite got around to it, preferring to discover all kinds of good reasons for continuing to pass the buck? I suspect not.

If the corpsicles had continued to pile up, of course, the situation might have become absurd, and eventually intolerable, but they hadn’t. Unlike all previous penal systems, SusAn incarceration had appeared to be effective, in the crude statistical sense that crime rates began to drop – quite sharply – as the twenty-third century progressed. The drop had been represented by enthusiasts as proof that thisdeterrent actually worked. It was, of course, no such thing. The real reasons for the steady fall in crime rates, my sources assured me, were the gradual but inexorable removal of incentives to commit crime and the gradual but inexorable increase in the certainty of detection.

I had lived in an era where many people were routinely subject to the vagaries of rage and intoxication, and in which the electronic stores where credit was held were still vulnerable to clever tampering. It was also an era in which a great many people – especially the young – took a perverse delight in cheating the surveillance systems that had been set up to make crime difficult, regarding all such measures as a challenge to their ingenuity. In my day, hobbyist criminals were everywhere. Although everyone affected to deplore and despise those whose hobbyism extended to raw violence, especially when it involved murder, there was a widespread fascination with violence. That fascination supported a rich and varied pornography as well as a highly developed risk culture. People newly gifted with IT – especially when the effectiveness of a person’s IT was the most effective badge of wealth and status – were inevitably tempted to test its limitations in all kinds of extreme sports, many of them illegal. According to Excelsior’s data banks, however, all that stuff had faded away as the novelty wore off.

As the cost of IT had come down, attitudes had shifted dramatically; the fascination of violence, pain, and death had never disappeared, but it had become the prerogative of exotic cults whose breakthroughs to the cultural mainstream became increasingly rare. As polite exercise of the self-control that better IT permitted became routine, rage and intoxication dwindled toward extinction. As credit-tracking systems were further refined, successful thefts and frauds became so rare that no rational risk calculation could support them. Even the young ceased to see the erosion of privacy and secrecy as a challenge, and adapted themselves to living in a world where no sin was likely to remain long undetected – or, for that matter, long unforgiven.

By 2300, the use of SusAn as a mode of incarceration had come to seem unnecessary and ridiculously old-fashioned. By 2400, the spectrum of social misdemeanours had altered dramatically throughout the world, and those which persisted were more commonly addressed by mediated reparation and “house arrest.” By that time, SusAn incarceration was only used outside the Earth – and even there, its use declined in spite of the dramatic increase in the extraterrestrial population. The once-rich flow of individuals committed to SusAn because their neighbors wanted them out of the way had fallen to a mere trickle by the time of the Coral Sea Disaster of 2542, and the vast majority of those were rejects from the burgeoning societies of the moon and the microworlds.

But no one had ever taken up arms on behalf of the existing population of sleepers.

The conveniently forgotten corpsicles had never found a champion willing to campaign for their release – or even for the careful discrimination of those who had never done anything to deserve indefinite sentences in the first place. Without such a champion, it had been easy enough to leave the problem to be sorted out by someone who actually cared.

Even now, when a couple of specimen releases had finally been arranged, it was not obvious that anyone reallycared. Was it incumbent on me, I wondered, to become the champion that the sleepers had never had?

I tucked the thought away for possible future reference; for the time being, I still had to work out exactly what kind of nest of vipers I had been delivered into, and why.

Thirteen

Emortality for All

Ilooked up Emily Marchant before looking up Mortimer Gray, and was suitably impressed.

There were, allegedly, no Hardinists in or behind the Outer System Confederation – but that didn’t mean that questions of ownership and stewardship were irrelevant in the outer system. Nor did it mean that the implications of the Tragedy of the Commons hadn’t yet raised their ugly head. Quite the reverse, in fact. Questions of who might be entitled to do what with exactly which lumps of mass – “lumps” ranging in size from asteroids no bigger than an average hometree to Jupiter itself – seemed to have become measurably more acute during the last few centuries, and the increase had accelerated during the last few decades.

In the Outer System, every rock was precious, and every block of ice even more so. That, apparently, was one of the reasons why the ship carrying Michael Lowenthal and Mortimer Gray from Earth had been exposed to the risk of close encounters with snowballs. The settlers of the Oort Halo had been deflecting new comets sunwards for centuries; although the bigger lumps were greedily intercepted, the residual small debris was pouring into the inner system like an everlasting blizzard. That was, apparently, another cause of tension and disputation between the Confederation and the Earthbound.

It didn’t require any data-trawling skill to discover that Emily Marchant was a major player in the Confederation and all its major disputes. She had the money, the prestige, the talent, the know-how, and the charisma to make her opinions felt. She was festooned with painfully quaint nicknames – the Chief Cheerleader of the High Kickers and the Great Architect of the Ice Palaces, to name but two – but her most common label was “the Titaness.” There was even an ultrasmart spaceship with the same name. She was, it seemed, a Snow Queen of sufficient majesty to put the petty villain of Christine Caine’s favorite kiddie flick to shame.

Unfortunately, Emily Marchant wasn’t inbound on the ship that was hurtling inwards to pay the respects of the outer system to the newly awakened Adam Zimmerman; she obviously had better things to do. The Titanian envoy en route from the Jovian moons was a much younger and far less influential woman named Niamh Horne.

I knew that the Irish name Niamh was pronounced to rhyme with “Eve,” but even someone as intrigued by names as I was couldn’t make anything significant of that. Nor could anyone – even someone as paranoid as me – have found the slightest potentially meaningful connection between Emily Marchant or Niamh Horne and Christine Caine or me. It wasn’t until I checked out Mortimer Gray that I found one of those – and it wasn’t one that anyone could have expected, unless the wonderful children of Excelsior knew muchmore about me than they were letting on.

According to the records available on Excelsior, Mortimer Gray’s career was a model of honest endeavor motivated entirely by intellectual curiosity. Unlike Michael Lowenthal’s, his entire life seemed to be an open book, and apart from the probable coincidence of his having shared a couple of character-forming experiences with Emily Marchant he seemed unlikely to have any hidden agenda. But right up there at the head of his basic biography was a name I recognized: a name that, in all probability, no one butme in the entire universe would have recognized.

Mortimer Gray’s biological mother – who had, of course, died long before he was born – had been Diana Caisson. MyDiana Caisson. Damon Hart’s Diana Caisson. There was no doubt about her being the same one; her birth date was right up there alongside his, although her death date was given as “unknown.”

What could it mean?

So far as I could tell, it couldn’t possibly mean anything. How could anyone have known that I had been acquainted with the donor of the egg that had been engineered to produce Mortimer Gray? Why would anyone, including Mortimer Gray, have cared? Surely it had to be a coincidence. There was no imaginable reason why it should be anything else.

I had to switch tack then, so I began gathering information about Excelsior and its peculiar inhabitants, hoping to obtain some insight into their possible motives for involving themselves in Adam Zimmerman’s resurrection.

It didn’t take long to find out that they were even more peculiar than I thought. I had been thinking of Davida Berenike Columella as a girl and her fellows as a sisterhood, but that wasn’t strictly accurate. It wasn’t just the secondary sexual characteristics that arrive with puberty that “she” and her kind had forsaken; “she” had no ovaries either. Nor had “she” a womb, or a clitoris. It was too late to start thinking of her as an “it,” so I decided that I might as well stick with the pronoun I’d first thought of, but the fact remained that she and all her kind were sexless.

Why?

There was no shortage of information on file to explain the decision to eliminate sex from the design of Excelsior’s inhabitants, although the sheer profusion of that information was testimony to the controversy that must have surrounded the plan.

Apparently, several schools of thought had recently grown up as to the merits of arresting the aging process in different phases. The school that had settled on the position that the ideal age for an emortal was prepuberal had extrapolated the line of thinking a step further, reasoning that if the sexual organs were better left undeveloped it would be better still to eliminate them altogether, liberating valuable anatomical space for useful augmentation within the basic “functionally evolved corpus.”

Taking the research a step farther back into the realm of theory and technics, I soon became lost in specialisms of which I had not the least understanding, but I gradually pieced together a picture of the background against which this strange experiment had been set.

It seemed to me that it all came down, in the final analysis, to the Miller Effect.

Morgan Miller was the twentieth-century scientist who first stumbled upon a technology of longevity: a rejuvenation technique that worked by diverting a mature organism’s reproductive apparatus to the production of stem cells that could enhance the organism’s powers of self-repair dramatically. There were, however, two catches. Firstly, Miller’s method only worked on organisms in possession of the appropriate reproductive apparatus – which is to say, females. Secondly, the relevant power of self-repair enabled the cells in the organism’s brain to recover all the neuronal connections that experience had selectively withered – which is to say that it obliterated memory and learning on a massive scale.

Rejuvenation of the kind that Miller discovered continually restored the innocence of the individual. Mice could cope with that kind of continual loss, because they could learn everything they needed to know to get along as mice over and over again. Higher mammals couldn’t; even dogs rejuvenated by the Miller technique were reduced to helpless imbecility, unable to learn as quickly as their learning evaporated. That was why rejuvenation research in the following century had been concentrated on more selective and more easily controllable Internal Technologies: technologies which my generation were the first to exploit on a wholesale basis.

People of my generation had hoped – maybe even expected – that nanotech systems would continue to improve as we got older, so that every extra decade of life we obtained would produce further rewards. What the history book told me now, though, was that the escalator had run into the law of diminishing returns.

Two hundred years of life became routine, three hundred just about possible for the very rich and the very lucky. Damon’s three-hundred-and-thirty-some year span had been highly unusual even for members of the Inner Circle. Repairing the body parts below the neck had not been unduly problematic in the majority of cases, although periodic invasive and incapacitating “deep-tissue rejuvenations” had been required to support the routine work of IT repair, but keeping the brain going without destroying the mind within had proved much more difficult.

The menace posed by “Millerization” had been complemented soon enough by “robotization”: the loss of a brain’s capacity to further refine its neuronal configurations. Carefully protected from the obliteration of memory and personality, the brains of men of Damon’s generation had tended to the opposite extreme, settling into a quasimechanical rut which made them incapable of assimilating newexperiences or reformulating their memories. Attempts had been made to get around this problem by means of inorganic augments – meatware/hardware collaborations involving various kinds of “memory boxes” – but none had succeeded in forging a workable alliance and most had exaggerated the problems they were attempting to solve.

The advent of the Zaman Transformation, which involved engineering fertilized ova for extreme resistance to the aging process, had not only sidestepped many of the problems associated with IT repair systems but had appeared to strike a balance in the brain between Millerization and robotization. The neurones of ZT brains retained a greater capacity for self-regeneration than the neurones of ordinary mortals, but they retained the switching capacity that permitted rapid learning. Although the first generations of true emortals could keep a firm enough grip on their memories and learned skills, they seemed to be equally capable of further adaptation. Their memories of times past became increasingly vague, but never lost their coherence, while their capacity to assimilate new experience remained undiminished – or so, at least, the argument went.

Not everyone, it seemed, was convinced.

Many people believed that robotization remained a threat – and that many living individuals had, indeed, been robotized, although they retained the illusion of being fully human and continued to maintain that appearance. Opinions differed, as one might expect, as to exactly which individuals might have become existentially becalmed in this way.

On the other hand, many people believed that the bugbear of Millerization had not been entirely overcome, and that the real existential threat facing the new emortals was not mental petrifaction but a loss of the continuity of the self: too much change rather than too little.

Some people, of course, believed that bothprocesses were observable in the world around them – usually, but not necessarily, in different individuals.

At any rate, the quest for a perfect mental balance within a brain whose developmental course avoided both the Scylla of Millerization and the Charybdis of robotization had not been abandoned once Zaman Transformations became the norm. Far from it. All kinds of research were continuing, based in many different theories and ideologies.

So-called cyborganizers had resuscitated many formerly abandoned lines of research into meatware/hardware collaboration, while “Zamaners” – including those sponsored by the Ahasuerus Foundation – had hardly paused to draw breath before producing hundreds of variations and refinements of their basic technique. The situation had been further complicated, it seemed, by a leap forward in the field of “genomic engineering” following the discovery elsewhere in the galaxy of natural genomic systems differing quite markedly from the one that was fundamental to Earth’s ecosphere.

In brief, there were now many different humankinds and not-so-humankinds, most of which laid claim to sole possession of the ideal emortality. The people of Excelsior seemed to me to be among the weirder lines in the posthuman spectrum – although that was not an impression encouraged by their own data banks – but there were undoubtedly others every bit as weird to be found among the fabers of the outer system microworlds and the cyborganizers of the Jovian and Saturnian satellites, not to mention the carefully adapted colonists of Ararat and Maya.