The Omega Expedition

by Brian Stableford

  I did the best I could to get between Alice and trouble, but it wasn’t possible to cover both directions at once. Solantha Handsel came slowly to her feet. Her wrathful anguish was a joy to behold.

  “You’re insane,” she told me, in what might conceivably have been a dutiful manner. “You don’t know what you’re dealing with.”

  “No, I don’t,” I agreed, “and neither do you. You might be the best trained fighting machine in your unviolent Utopia, but I’ve actually been in real fights, without IT to help me. You’ve proved that you can hit me in the dark and from behind, but I’m still willing to find out what you can do when I’m actually looking.”

  “This isn’t necessary, Tamlin,” Lowenthal’s voice swiftly cut in. He probably intended his tone to be soothing.

  Solantha Handsel wasn’t listening. She probably figured that she had given fair warning, and was now at liberty to tear me apart. She got up and made as if to come at me, with her deadly hands ready and willing to chop me into little pieces, figuratively if not literally.

  And that was when Christine Caine hit her from behind, with a full water bottle.

  As improvised weapons went, the plastic bottle wasn’t very useful, and Christine hadn’t anything like the body mass or musculature of Lowenthal’s bodyguard — but the blow was delivered with a will and the cyborg hadn’t been expecting it. The most surprising thing about it, from my point of view, was the expression on Christine’s face, which faded almost immediately from sheer astonishment to something much more peculiar: a far deeper sense of puzzlement.

  Solantha Handsel went down again, but she was hardly injured at all except for her dignity. I kicked her a second time as she sprawled, but without any kind of footwear to protect my toes I had to be careful not to inflict more damage on myself than I could on her.

  I think Niamh Horne might have come forward then to settle the matter if it had been her call, but she and Lowenthal had already exchanged glances. She had shaken her head to indicate that she hadn’t been able to get out of the corridor into which the door opened, and hadn’t found anything useful there.

  Lowenthal must have calculated that there might be more to be gained by letting me run with the ball than by trying to hold on to it by force. When Solantha Handsel rose to her feet again he was quick to say: “That’s enough. Let them go.” He paused for a significant couple of seconds before saying: “Do you need medical attention too?”

  Solantha Handsel was too angry to speak, but she shook her head in a suitably derisory fashion.

  “Right?” was all that Lowenthal said to Alice.

  It was enough. She nodded her head.

  Niamh Horne stood aside and let us pass through the doorway unimpeded. The door closed behind us, leaving us in the darkness.

  “That wasn’t necessary,” Alice said, as she guided me back to the cupboard.

  “No, it wasn’t,” I agreed, nursing my pain. “It wasn’t even sensible. But there was no way in the world I was going to resist the temptation. I’m the barbarian from the dawn of time, remember.”

  “I’m older than you,” she reminded me, as the lights came on again.

  This time she had a hypodermic syringe ready, and a vial from which to draw liquid.

  “What’s in it?” I asked.

  “Nanobots,” she told me.

  “I thought we weren’t allowed privileges of that sort.”

  “They’re making an exception.”

  “They?” I queried. “Not we?”

  “We’re making an exception” she said, a trifle wearily. It didn’t sound like a wholehearted correction. “We didn’t want you here, but now you are here you’re our responsibility. I know it’s difficult, given that you don’t know what’s going on, but it would help us all if you were to be patient. Please don’t do anything else to make things worse than they already are.” I gathered from this speech that the negotiations in which she and her companion were involved were proving almost as frustrating and unhelpful as Lowenthal’s conference.

  “How am I supposed to know what might make matters worse?” I asked her, without having to feign annoyance. “You can’t blame Handsel and Horne for trying to find out more about their situation. Maybe it would have been a stupid move to try to beat the truth out of you, but if you wanted us to stay quiet you should have let us sleep.”

  “I agree,” she said. “But we have all kinds of conflicting demands coming in. We have to keep a lid on things until we’ve set a meeting place. It’s all spinning out of control, and we have to do everything possible to keep the game going. You have to calm things down back there, if you can.” She jabbed the hypodermic in as she pronounced the final phrase, as if to emphasize it. Maybe she thought the note of challenge would get results, but I needed a better incentive than that. I wasn’t prepared to believe that I was better off not knowing what kind of “conflicting demands” she and her mysterious companion were trying to satisfy.

  The nanobots were good. The injection itself hurt like hell, but the condition of my nose wouldn’t have allowed me simply to snort the stuff, and the needle got the bots to the site in no time at all. Once there, the pain dwindled away.

  “It’ll take an hour or so for the swelling to go down,” she told me. “A couple of hours more to knit the tissues. Don’t get into another fight, though — they’re limited.”

  “How much longer will it be before we get to where we’re going?” I asked.

  She looked me up and down. I figured that she had to have some kind of private data feed, like the one Davida had had while we were on Excelsior, but I had no way to know how tightly she was confined by orders, or what scope she had for using her own initiative.

  “It’s not settled yet,” she told me. “Locations are symbolically loaded — ask Lowenthal and Gray about their peace conference experience. However it works out, this showdown will be a defining moment in the history of the solar system and all the different humankinds — perhaps the defining moment. We have to establish the principle that it ought to take place now before we can determine where and how.”

  “I’ve bought you a little extra breathing space” I reminded her. “If I knew what I was fighting for, I might be able to buy you a little more. If you’re prepared to trust me, I’ll try to get whatever information you need from Lowenthal and Horne.” I was feeling a lot better, and was entirely ready to be proud of my tactical skill if she decided to reward my quixotic gesture by giving me further clues as to what the hell was going on — but she wouldn’t play.

  “I can’t,” she said.

  “In that case,” I told her, “I can’t help you. I have to play the game as I see it.”

  “So do they,” she said, bitterly. “That’s the problem. They’re very fond of games — and they’re determined to play this one to the end, despite the lack of time. They’re very fond of stories too, so they’ll delight in keeping you in suspense if they can. You might need to remember all that, if things do go awry.” She gave the impression of someone who was trying hard to pass on some good advice under adverse conditions.

  “Who the hell are we talking about?” I asked, plaintively.

  “They won’t play if we don’t handle it their way,” she said, doggedly. “If it were up to me, I’d tell you everything now — but if it were up to some of them, they’d have kept you in blissful ignorance forever. We all have to compromise. That’s the thought you have to hold in mind, Madoc. We all have to compromise. If we can’t get together, we’ll all lose — and by lose, I mean die. However crazy this gets, the end is real. It’s all play, all drama…but it’s for real. The cost of losing might be as high as extinction.”

  “Which of us was the target?” I asked, figuring that there was no harm in continuing to try. “You can tell us that, at least. Some of us must be innocent bystanders.”

  Her expression suggested otherwise, but she decided to stick her neck out. “Adam Zimmerman and Mortimer Gray were the original targets,” she said, still ma
king a show of great reluctance, “but everyone had to compromise even to get this far. It was a victory of sorts, in the end, to hold the list to nine. With any luck, you’ll all get to play your parts — but when the time comes for the deal to be done, Gray’s the one who’ll swing the decision one way or the other. You should tell him that. He needs to be forewarned.”

  I hadn’t time to think it over, or even to consider alternative reasons as to why she’d said “nine” instead of “eight”; she was already trying to shove me out of the cupboard and back to the cage. I only had time for one more shot, and I had to improvise as best I could.

  “It’s already begun, hasn’t it?” I said. “The war, I mean. Year zero was the first shot.”

  “No it wasn’t,” she told me. “The seeds of potential conflict were sown long before that — but they have to be prevented from flowering. We have to work things out. We have to arrive at a settlement, without everything turning into the Afterlife.”

  Twenty-Eight

  The Mystery Unravelled

  I knew that I wasn’t going to be universally popular when I returned to my companions, but I expected that Lowenthal would have smoothed things over. Even if he couldn’t bring himself to believe that I hadn’t simply gone berserk he had to hope that I could turn my explosion into a strategy and find out more by running up moral credit than he and Horne could ever have found out by trying to put pressure on Alice.

  On the other hand, I knew that the only way to hold my new position in the pecking order was to lay out something they could get their teeth into, so when I found them waiting to hear from me I knew that I had to make it good.

  “Okay,” I said, “Here’s what I’m sure of, thanks to a little help from Christine. We’re aboard one of the Arks that a bunch of Lowenthal’s predecessors built in the late twenty-first century. The idea was to hitch a ride in a bunch of comets that were passing through the system, but one coupling went wrong so only three left the system. This is the fourth. Alice says that she was frozen down in twenty ninety, which would make her a passenger on one of the other three — almost certainly the one that recontacted Earth when it ended up at Ararat. Whoever’s got hold of us probably came from Ararat, but they seem to be engaged in combative negotiations with several local parties. Alice says they haven’t settled on a venue for the show we’ve been snatched to take part in because whatever location they choose will be symbolically loaded — she told me to ask Lowenthal and Gray about their peace conference experience if I wanted that explained.

  “The original targets of the kidnap plan were Zimmerman and Gray, but the rest of us got added in as a result of the negotiations, maybe because that’s the way committee decisions always go. The negotiations must have begun before Christine and I were woken up, so it’s possible that we were specifically chosen to be part of this, but it’s conceivable that they just wanted six more bodies to make up an agreed number. The agreed number appears to be nine rather than eight, which might mean that there’s someone else yet to be added in, or that Alice herself is number nine.

  “Whatever the story is, it goes back way beyond year zero. I can’t get Alice’s we and they straight in my mind, but whoever they are she says they love playing games — which is presumably why they’ll be hanging on my every word just as intently as you are. I suspect that they’ve woken us up to watch us, maybe to see whether we can figure this out but more likely because they want to obtain a better idea of where Lowenthal’s and Horne’s masters stand in respect of the problems that currently afflict the solar system.

  “In spite of what I said before, I don’t think anyone intends to torture us, but they do seem to want us in our raw state for now, maybe because they intend to instal some elaborate IT of their own. According to Alice, the stuff I was just given is strictly temporary. Alice reckons that Gray’s the key to the whole affair. She says that he’s the one who might be able to swing the big decision one way or the other, and ought to be forewarned of that responsibility. If we get it wrong, the booby prize might be extinction — but that threat might just be part of the game. In fact, all of this might just be part of the game.”

  Having said that, I sat down. I wasn’t tired — in fact, I’d never been so tightly wired without powerful chemical assistance — but I figured that it would be an appropriate way to signal that the floor was open.

  Lowenthal had been looking at me, but now he looked at Mortimer Gray. Mortimer Gray was studying the table top intently, deep in thought — or determinedly pretending to be deep in thought.

  “Is that all?” Niamh Horne asked me.

  “All except the rhetoric,” I told her. “Mention was made of defining moments in history. You’d know more about what might qualify than I do. If Lowenthal’s strong right arm had only shown enough judgment to break Gray’s nose instead of mine, he might have been able to get far more out of Alice than I did, and to catch on far more readily to what it might mean; as things are, we’ll just have to make the best of what we’ve got.”

  Lowenthal was still looking at Mortimer Gray. The historian finally condescended to raise his head, but instead of meeting Lowenthal’s inquiring gaze he looked at Davida Berenike Columella. “Who gave you the instruction to wake Zimmerman?” he asked.

  “It came from Foundation headquarters, on Earth,” she told him — unhelpfully, so far as I could tell.

  Now he swung his gaze to Lowenthal. “And who gave the order to the Foundation?” he asked.

  Lowenthal shook his head. “I wish I knew,” he said, quickly adding: “If I could say that it wasn’t us, I would, but the organization’s not that tight. If Julius Ngomi gave the order, he didn’t let on to me. I honestly have no idea where the order originated — but if it had been the Foundation’s own idea, and they’d asked for permission, I’d know. The impression I was given before I left Earth is that there were people high up in the Foundation who were spitting feathers over an alleged lack of consultation.”

  Now it was Niamh Horne’s turn. “Who blew up the Yellowstone magma chamber?” Gray asked her.

  “No one I know anything about,” she told him. “We were every bit as anxious as the Earthbound were. If it had been any of the factions, and we’d found out about it, we’d have come down hard. So far as we know, it really was a mechanical malfunction. That’s the truth, so far as I know it. I’m certain that Emily Marchant wouldn’t tell you anything different. None of the Outer System people I’ve had dealings with has anything to do with any of this. But like Lowenthal, I can only answer for the people I know. It wasn’t until I saw him face to face that I realized that there was any mystery about Zimmerman’s awakening. Someone’s playing us all for fools — and the fact that I don’t have the least idea who, or how, is frankly terrifying.”

  Gray nodded, to signal his gratitude for her frankness. He looked troubled — but he also looked like a man who had figured out what was what. I began to feel a slight sinking sensation in my stomach as I realized that this might be exactly what Alice didn’t want — but the die was cast.

  “Ararat’s where the first contact took place,” Davida put in, her terror finally having given way to thoughtfulness. “Some of you are old enough to have watched the tape when it was first broadcast in-system. That was supposed to be a defining moment in history. It should have been bigger news than it was. If Ararat’s the key to this…”

  “The aliens were primitives,” Solantha Handsel countered. “They certainly can’t be behind this. They didn’t even have fire.”

  Mortimer Gray let loose a little sigh. It was barely audible, but there was enough feeling in it to reclaim everyone’s attention.

  This is it, I thought — but it wasn’t, quite.

  “I can only think of one context in which my word might be thought to be worth more than anyone else’s,” Gray said, his voice saying that he hardly dared believe it. “Only one in which Adam Zimmerman and I might be thought to have equal symbolic weight.”

  “You’re the author
of the standard History of Death,” Davida observed — but Gray was shaking his head before she was halfway through the sentence. He was looking at Lowenthal now. “You were at the conference,” he said to the Hardinist. “We didn’t meet, but you were there. You listened.”

  “The whole world listened,” Lowenthal said. “I wasn’t party to the decision to broadcast it, or to divert the ship. That was all Marchant’s doing. What’s your point?”

  Gray seemed slightly surprised that the Hardinist still hadn’t caught on.

  “What are they talking about?” Christine Caine complained — but when Lowenthal flashed an apology with his eyes it was directed toward Adam Zimmerman.

  “There was an important meeting between representatives of the government of Earth and the embryonic outer system factions in twenty-nine ninety-nine,” Lowenthal explained. “It wasn’t a peace conference because we weren’t at war, but it was the first serious attempt to settle some questions that still remain annoyingly open. There had been a certain amount of bickering about where it ought to be held — the outer system people didn’t want to hold it on Earth in case that seemed to endorse the view that Earth was the eternal center of human civilization, and our people didn’t want to make our way out to Titan lest we seemed to be conceding the point that it wasn’t.

  “In the end, the compromise was that the talks would be held in an Outer System ship in Earth orbit. Given that sort of buildup, it’s hardly surprising that they weren’t going very well. Then they stalled completely, interrupted when Mortimer — who was quietly going about his own mysterious business — contrived to fall through the Arctic ice cap in a snowmobile. He ended up at the bottom of the ocean. There wasn’t a submarine near enough to reach him before the damaged vehicle imploded, and it would have taken more than the combined might of half a dozen planetary civilizations to keep Emily Marchant from repaying the debt she thought she owed her favorite father figure. If there hadn’t been a state-of-the-art Jovian atmosphere diver way out of its usual stamping ground, he’d have been fish food, but there was — and she broadcast the rescue to everybody in the universe. Mortimer didn’t know that his heart-to-heart with a snowmobile driver was being overheard by anyone, let alone the whole damn world, so he just let it all out. It was maudlin and toe curlingly cute — like one of those ancient kid-trapped-in-a-well race-against-time melodramas — but the audience loved it.