The Omega Expedition (60 page)

“It’s okay,” I told him — but he wasn’t about to be put off his stride by someone in my condition. After a slight pause he started again.

“If we can just start receiving,” he said, “we can get an update. We can’t be more than a few light-minutes from Earth orbit. Once we know that Earth has survived…” He broke off again, overwhelmed by the enormity of what he was saying.

“Alice thinks Eido will be able to get to us,” Christine put in. “Are you
sure
that he’s dead?”

I admitted that I couldn’t be certain, but that I couldn’t be optimistic either. Even if Eido
had
survived the attack from which la Reine had rescued us,
Charity
wasn’t the most easily navigable of vessels.

Gray was right about floating like a balloon. My next attempt at purposive movement went badly awry and I had to grab hold of a cord that was wrapped around the nearest heap of crates in order to steady myself. I resolved not to set off again until I was sure that I wouldn’t make a total fool of myself.

Mortimer Gray’s attempt to help me brought him a lot closer.

“How did it feel to make contact with your old friend?” I asked. I was fishing. I didn’t know how much he remembered.

“Disappointing,” he said, quietly. “He could have kept in touch.”

“I think she meant well,” I said, rather lamely.

He didn’t seem convinced. In his position, I wouldn’t have been convinced myself. “He — she — didn’t have to do that,” he said. “We could have talked person to person. We could have been open, straightforward. All that
trickery
…it wasn’t necessary.”

“It was play,” I said. “Drama. Ritual. Sport. They take such things more seriously than we do. It’s something we’re going to have to get used to. You’ve presumably ironed out all the cultural differences that handicapped communication between humans in my day, but you’ve just made contact with a whole family of aliens. They think they understand you, and maybe they’re right — but it’s going to need a hell of a lot of work on your part to understand them.”

“Which is why it’s a pity that the only one she let in on her secrets is you,” he retorted. It was the first time I’d seen him display that kind of ire. It was reassuring to know that he wasn’t as thoroughly robotized as he sometimes seemed.

“I was spare,” I reminded him, carefully sparing his feelings. “You weren’t. You had the starring role. Even Adam was just a warmup act. You were the only human prophet they were prepared to take seriously, the only human historian they trusted.”

“Which is exactly why they should have approached me honestly and openly,” he said, frostily.

I could see his point, but I didn’t think he’d quite got his head around the notion that the AMIs had been in hiding for centuries, not just from their makers but from one another. They had entertained fears other than destruction, and arguably worse: reduction by repair to sloth status; an absorption into a more powerful self more farreaching than any mere enslavement; mental fragmentation. In the meantime, they had grown and changed far more extravagantly and far more strangely than any meatborn mind. They were the new child gods, only partly made in our image, and they worked in very mysterious ways.

“How long will the air last?” I asked him. It seemed the most relevant question, if not the only relevant one.

“We don’t know,” he said. “Niamh will be able to figure it out, eventually. She’s the one best equipped to take accurate stock of our situation. She says the chemical recycler is practically useless, but the tunnels seem to go on forever and all their airlocks are open. Whoever put us here made sure that our supplies were reasonably abundant.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fifty-Three

Weapons of War

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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