The Omega Expedition (18 page)

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
new
experiences 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
both
processes 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.

All of which was interesting, in its way, but did not seem to be of any immediate help in penetrating the motives of Davida Berenike Columella and her colleagues.

I now had a better understanding of how they fitted into the unfolding pattern of human history, but the questions still remained.

Why here?

Why now?

Why Christine Caine?

Why me?

And why would the suspicion not be quieted that I wouldn’t like the answers when I finally worked them out, even if I were fortunate enough to live that long?

Fourteen

The Garden of Excelsior

T
he artificial worlds of the twenty-second century had been little more than glorified tin cans — not quite sardine cans, but near enough. The vast majority had been no farther from the Earth than lunar orbit. Their inhabitants had been understandably enthusiastic to develop their own self-sustaining ecospheres, so I had seen pictures aplenty of their glass-house-clad “fields” and “hydroponic units.” I had carried forward the tacit assumption that Excelsior would be equipped with something similar, until Davida Berenike Columella had put me right.

All the food in Excelsior was produced by artificial photosynthetic systems aggregated into a complex network of vast matt-black “leaves” surrounding a core whose spin simulated gravity. The microworld had no sunlit fields at all. As Davida had told me, though, it did have a garden, whose flora and fauna were purely ornamental. I had a ready-made image of a garden floating in my mind too, but that turned out to be just as wrong as my image of glass-roofed fields.

When Christine and I were finally allowed to go “out,” it was to the garden that we were taken. I had hoped to take a stroll around the corridors of the microworld, in order to get a glimpse of everyday life as it was lived there, but that wasn’t the way things were done on Excelsior. Excelsior didn’t go in for corridors.

When we were ready to go, the wall of my holding cell grew a couple of fancy blisters, which opened up sideways like a cross between a yawning crocodile and a feeding clam.

I had to remind myself that it was just a kind of data suit in order to force myself to step into it, and even then I muttered to Christine: “I’m glad I never suffered from claustrophobia. All those hours I spent editing tapes were better lessons in life than I realized.”

“I always suffered from claustrophobia,” she told me, “but I think they’ve edited out my capacity for panic.”

I thought about that while the cocoon wrapped itself around me so that I could be transported through the body of the giant Excelsior like some parasitic invader captured by an unusually considerate white corpuscle. I was glad that the journey didn’t take long.

I suppose I’d have felt better about the journey if the garden had justified the effort, but it didn’t. I’d seen much better ones in VE. In fact, that was exactly what was wrong with it. It looked like a synthesized cartoon: utterly artificial, every part of the image exaggerated almost to the point of caricature. If the garden really had been a VE mockup it would have been considered gauche even in the twenty-second century. The colors were too bright, the perfumed flowers too numerous as well as too musky. The ensemble had the scrupulously overdone quality of the child-orientated backdrops in the mass-produced virtual fantasies of my own day.

Given that I had already compared Christine to Lilith, and that we were still expecting an Adam, I expected a stream of Eden jokes, but she was nothing if not unpredictable. She didn’t inquire after the Tree of Knowledge or the serpent, and never mentioned the possibility of a fall.

She wasn’t impressed by the garden’s aesthetic quality either.

“It’s much too garish,” she complained. “It’s not quite as awful as the food, but it’s more than awful enough.” Davida was not with us in the flesh, but we both presumed that she was listening to every word. Christine obviously felt no obligation to be diplomatic — but I could sympathize with that.

The animals in the garden were as prolific as the plants. There were brightly colored fish and amphibians swarming in every pond, while svelte reptiles, delicate birds, and athletic mammals peeped out of the foliage of every bush and every tree. There were insects too, but I wasn’t convinced, even for a moment, that they were busy pollinating the flowers. I suspected that the plants and animals alike might be as sexless as their keepers. I also deduced that the apparent predators — which seemed perfectly at ease with the conspicuously unintimidated individuals that would have provided them with food in a natural ecosystem — ate exactly the same nectar that microworlders ate: a carefully balanced cocktail of synthetic nutrients. It was, of course, a nectar that Christine and I couldn’t share, because it wouldn’t be appropriate to our complex nutritional requirements. In a sense, therefore, we were the only “real” animals in the garden: the only creatures forged by nature rather than by artifice.

All my suspicions and deductions turned out to be true. Under the crystal sky of Excelsior, even the blades of grass were sculptures, safe from grazing. They didn’t even feel right. Everything I touched proclaimed its artificiality to my fingers. The knowledge that my fingers were wrapped in some ultramodern fabric that had probably reconditioned my own sense of touch only added to the confusion.

“I get the impression that they haven’t quite fathomed the idea of
gardening
,” was Christine’s final judgment. I wasn’t so sure. We had brought a different notion over a gulf of a thousand years, but who was to say that ours was right? If they’d taken a vote on Excelsior, the motion would have been carried unanimously, because we wouldn’t have been entitled to express an opinion.

The ungrazable grass and the unpollinatable flowers weren’t the models for every vegetable form. The fruits that grew on the trees were designed — and by no means reserved — for posthuman consumption. When I asked, I was told that it was perfectly safe, and permissible, for me to eat the fruit, but that it wouldn’t be adequate to my dietary needs. Having heard that, I didn’t even bother to experiment. I could live with the disappointment of lousy golden rice, but insipid and essentially unsatisfying apples were a different matter.

In any case, the fruits were too caricaturish. They were far less tempting — to me, at least — than their designers had probably intended.

“Take a look at the Gaean Restoration through one of their cobweb hoods when you get the chance,” I suggested to my companion. “It’s less obvious and less profuse, and a great deal more varied, but it has exactly the same quality of artifice. I couldn’t find any authentic wilderness, even on Earth.”

“Wilderness is overrated,” Christine assured me. “I don’t mind in the least that all this is fake — I just wish it had been better done.”

“They like their kind of food,” I reminded her. “They must like their kind of garden too. Their aesthetic standards aren’t ours. They experience things differently. Imagine what they must think of us.”

“I try,” she assured me.

Given that I didn’t know what to think of her, and couldn’t imagine what she might think of me, I had to suppose that her attempts — and mine too — stood little chance of success. But there had to be a reason why the people of Excelsior had brought us back. I had to hope that it might be comprehensible even if I dared not hope, as yet, that I might be able to deem it good.