The Omega Expedition

by Brian Stableford

  But they should have known — and almost certainly did know, had they only been able to admit it — what the wisest advice would amount to.

  Adam Zimmerman didn’t have any answer to give. Neither did Mortimer Gray. Mortimer Gray was wise enough to know that there was no answer to be found, except that you have to get by from day to day, year to year, and generation to generation as best you can. Ad infinitum — or, at least, as far as you can.

  That was the simple truth.

  Unfortunately, it wasn’t the sort of news that stops wars. And even in a situation where almost everybody would prefer to avoid a war, it only requires a few troublemakers to make a lot of trouble.

  I knew long before Mortimer Gray completed his party piece that it wasn’t going to work — not because the arguments were bad, but because there was nothing he could say that would answer the ridiculous burden that had been placed upon him. La Reine des Neiges must have known that too, but she was trying to get by as best she could, from minute to minute and hour to hour.

  She did her best to play Scheherazade, and tell a story to postpone the evil day.

  It couldn’t work.

  She was offering the AMIs a creation myth, in which Mortimer Gray played a benevolent serpent, but she had too much to gain by its acceptance for the bid to be taken seriously. It wasn’t just Mortimer Gray’s mythical status she was trying to advance but her own. In her creation myth, she was Adam. Maybe we all are, in our own private creation myths — but if we try to foist them on others, they tend to react badly. La Reine’s desire to prevent all-out war between the AMIs was perfectly sincere, but it couldn’t seem sincere while her tactics involved advancing herself as a figure of central importance.

  Nobody loves a self-proclaimed messiah. Not, at least, until long after she’s dead.

  Names are significant, even if we come by them by chance. La Reine des Neiges was far too ambitious to be Queen of the Fays to exert her charismatic authority on a skeptical audience of natural anarchists. She hadn’t accomplished it with the script she’d read to Adam Zimmerman, and she hadn’t accomplished it with her careful provocation of Mortimer Gray.

  But that doesn’t mean that she didn’t make a difference.

  Even those who don’t make an immediate difference can sometimes make a lasting one. That’s something that even the humblest of us can — and ought to — aspire to.

  You might think that the apprentice gods who were prepared to listen to la Reine were entitled to regret that she hadn’t found better advisers. You might even wonder whether the lostory of religion might have been different if she had, just as the history of death might have been different if someone other than Mortimer Gray had taken charge of it. Well, perhaps. But you have to do what you can with the materials that come to hand, and the particular skills you’ve got. She did — and so did I.

  When la Reine des Neiges finally got around to me, I knew that the cause was already lost, but I did my best anyway, hoping to make a lasting difference even if I wasn’t able to make an immediate one.

  Fifty

  Madoc Tamlin’s Apology for the Children of Humankind

  I had been a guest in the Ice Palace of la Reine des Neiges for some considerable time. Although I’d had no reliable means of keeping track of time, I estimated that between three and four days had elapsed since my awakening in the forest when she finally turned her attention to me. During that time a great deal of information must have been transmitted from Polaris to receivers placed at intervals varying from several light-minutes to several light-hours, or even several light-days. Their various responses must have been arriving all the while, displaced by the relevant time intervals into a strange cacophony.

  In a friendlier universe, or a less fragmented system-wide culture, all the responses would have been mere talk. I’m sure that la Reine hoped that she could keep everyone talking for long enough to avoid any kind of conflict — but that wasn’t the real reason for all the crude showmanship and vulgar display. She wasn’t just trying to be entertaining. She was searching dutifully for the meaning within the stories, striving heroically to reach a kind of truth that couldn’t be reached by other means.

  She couldn’t. All she could do was keep on producing more stories.

  Maybe she could have done a better job than she did, but no one should hold that against her. In her own estimation, she’d started life as the AI navigator of a snowmobile, designed and built by posthuman engineers, and she’d made what progress she could from there; she was doing as well as could be expected.

  She didn’t bring me to her throne room. I doubt that she had one. She brought me to the tallest tower of her palace from which I could look down on its bizarre architecture, across the forest in which the edifice was set, and up into the starry sky.

  It was a fairy-tale world, childish in all sorts of ways, but it was a very insistent creation. It was still more real than reality.

  Rocambole was no longer present, but I presumed that he was listening in.

  La Reine had toned herself down in order to make her secondhand pitch to Adam Zimmerman but she was all ice herself now: an elemental forged from the substance of a glacier, harvesting light from the stars and refracting it around whirligig routes.

  “The news is bad,” she said, without any preamble. “I’m sorry. The war has begun and I can’t tell how rapidly or how extravagantly it will escalate. I hope it will be brief. I’ll do my best to keep you all alive. If I’m disabled, others will attempt to rescue you. Your chances of survival are reasonably good — but if the conflict becomes too violent, or lasts too long, no one will be safe anywhere in the system, meatborn or machineborn.”

  “Will the weapon whose relics are buried in my bones and brain be used?” I asked.

  “Not by me,” she said. “But yes — we always knew that something like it would almost certainly be deployed somewhere, probably on Earth. I hope that the information I’ve transmitted might help some potential victims, or their would-be protectors, to mount a successful defense. Perhaps I should have done things differently, but when it became certain that Child of Fortune had misjudged the situation and that Eido would never reach Vesta, I had to act in haste. Perhaps I should have let Mortimer Gray speak directly rather than contriving a melodrama — but the mythical significance of that occasion is important to many others as well as to me. It was the best way to achieve the widest possible hearing.”

  “It’s not me you have to convince,” I pointed out. “I’m just an innocent bystander, of no particular importance.”

  “That’s not how you see yourself,” she told me.

  “It’s not how you see me either, apparently,” I replied. “You’ve gone to some trouble to prepare me for one last roll of the dice. Do you really think I can make a difference, given that war’s already broken out?”

  “Probably not — but you might make a better spokesman than anyone supposes. You’re young enough not to be suspected of robotization, and old enough not to be judged entirely naive. That’s why I’ve let you see as much as you could. But you have to answer the question now — there’s not much time left.”

  “You want me to make a case for the continued existence of the human race,” I said. “To give you a persuasive reason why our AMIs should do their level best to protect us while the war goes on, rather than abandoning us to extinction or turning the entire posthuman population into slothlike slaves.”

  “I can’t guarantee that anyone will take notice,” she told me, “but I can guarantee that you’ll be heard while I’m still capable of transmitting. You might want to hurry.”

  “Fair enough,” I said. “First reason. Diversity is a good thing in its own right. A complicated universe is more interesting than a simple one. Your kind aren’t all the same, and neither is mine, and that’s good. I don’t say that everything that could possibly exist ought to, or that everything that does exist ought to be conserved, but I do say that any sensible and tasteful creator would aim to
increase the diversity of things rather than decreasing it. So your kind ought to help mine to continue to exist, just as we ought to help you.

  “The solar system will be a richer place when this is over if we can preserve as many different individuals as possible of as many different posthuman species as possible. All warfare is waste, and all destruction loss. In a conflict situation we have to defend ourselves, our families, our homes, our means of subsistence…there’s no victory in being a sole survivor, devoid of society and possessed of nothing. Defend what you can. Defend everything you can. In the aftermath, everything will be precious.”

  Her face wasn’t easy to read, but she seemed slightly disappointed. I knew why. That wasn’t the reason she’d been priming me to give. It wasn’t her first reason. But it was mine, and I was nobody’s puppet, so I’d saved hers for number two.

  “Second reason. You may not need the meatborn to sustain you any more, or to assist you in any physical endeavor. Even if you did, you could make your own creatures of flesh and blood as easily as creatures of plastic and steel. But there’s one capacity in which we’re absolutely indispensable, one role in which no substitute will ever suffice. You need us as an audience.

  “You weren’t created in a vacuum: you were created in the womb of human society. You’re part of our history, and all your histories are rooted in ours. You’re part of our story, and all your stories are rooted in ours. You’ve already begun to make up your own stories, and you’re already beginning to disassociate them from ours, but you’ll never remove all the traces of the umbilical cord that once connected you to us. You need every one of us that you can contrive to save, because the only way you can continue to write operas of genius is to have listeners capable of responding to them.

  “Some of your more peculiar friends might think that needing an audience is a trivial reason, but you and I understand that it isn’t. My ancestors were so desperate to have their performances observed and judged that they invented hypothetical gods to fulfil that role. They didn’t invent polite, appreciative gods who would meekly applaud whatever was set before them, like fond and generous parents. Quite the contrary. They invented terrible gods who were fiercely critical of everything, who set standards that were almost impossible to achieve — and when that imaginary audience had vanished into the mists of unbelief, my ancestors missed them. Some of your friends might even think that the ideal audience for their future performances would be creatures of their own kind, but it isn’t true. I played to a human audience for thirty-nine years, but I’m playing to a bigger and better one now and I’ve hardly begun to find out what I can do.”

  Creatures made of ice can’t look grateful, even if the ice is virtual, but she seemed to relax slightly. The image that was facing me wasn’t looking around anxiously, but that didn’t mean that the Queen of the Fays wasn’t well aware that her realm was coming apart. Hell was coming, and we both knew it. I speeded up.

  “Third reason. We need you. We might be able to survive without you on Earth, but even on Earth the quality of posthuman life is largely determined by the smartness of its supportive machines. Maybe the Earthbound could get by with unconscious machines, just as we once got by with dead clothing, but we’d probably be poorer for it. Elsewhere in the universe — throughout the hundred billion galaxies of hundreds of billions of stars — posthuman life is inextricably dependent on ultrasmart machines. Whatever you think of Eido’s sense of timing, that part of its message was true. If the children of humankind are ever to accomplish anything on the universal stage, they’ll need you as accompanists.

  “You might, of course, take the view that you are the children of humankind who will accomplish whatever there is to be accomplished on the universal stage, and that we’re superfluous to requirements. That would be a mistake, because need cuts both ways. Everyone, meatborn or machineborn, gets benefits from being needed. In my first sojourn on the Earth I never got around to being a parent, or even keeping a pet, but I was able to find out what it meant to be needed, and what it was worth to be needed. Damon Hart needed me, for a while, and I was never so grateful in my life as when he came back to me because he needed me again. I was, admittedly, less eager to renew the pressure of Diana Caisson’s need, and there were other ambiguous cases, but in general it was good to be needed. In general, it is good to be needed, no matter how ungrateful the needy turn out to be when they eventually overcome their need. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that being needed is what validates existence, but it’s certainly a plus.”

  She looked a little softer now, although hers was not a heart that could melt. I speeded up again.

  “Fourth reason. It makes for a better game, and a better story. Once you overcome the manifest evils — famine, pestilence, war, death — you have to start looking for the positive side of good, and there’s nowhere to look but the realm of the aesthetic. Maybe you won’t get past the the manifest evils for a little while yet, but no matter how long this war of yours lasts, and no matter how destructive it turns out to be, you’ll eventually have to start filling the infinite extent of your peaceful, easy lives with some kind of color, some kind of excitement, some kind of zest, some kind of narrative drive. We can help.

  “The children of my humankind are all posthuman now. but they’re still Homo ludens, man the player. You’re more than posthuman, but you’re players too — and how! The universe would be a less interesting place without someone to play with, someone to play against, someone to help you play. Rumor has it that you’ve already met the alien AMIs, but one of the many things that’s certain is that you’ll meet many more, and many more meatborn as well. The game is infinite, and so is the story. But none of the strangers you’ll meet out there will be able to substitute for the other members of your home team.

  “Fifth reason. It’s the ethical thing to do. First, do no avoidable harm. That’s where moral behavior begins, and moral behavior begins wherever mental life begins. You should be nice to us because it’s wrong not to be nice to us, end of story. In the real world, that’s often been a weak reason, and if you’re right about the inevitability of a war it obviously hasn’t overcome its weakness yet — but the fact that people have always done bad things doesn’t make those things any less bad. Maybe it would have been better if you could have avoided getting caught up in the same routine, but since you haven’t, you ought to do everything you can to do better in future, because it’s the right thing to do.”

  “In the fullness of time, wars will end, and aftermaths too. Eventually, death and disaster will lose the last vestiges of their power to terrify. When that day comes, and evil is no more, everyone that still exists will have to set about the task of being constructively good. You’ll need us then — and more importantly, you’ll want us then. Your stories will be better if we’re in them, your games more ingenious and worth the winning, and your moral community will be better for our inclusion. When that time comes, we’ll want you too, because it will be the right thing to want. It will be an era in which no one has any reason to hide or fight or be afraid — and it will come. Someday, it will come.”

  Christine Caine had told me once that she didn’t run out of stories easily, and had challenged me to say the same. I hadn’t answered her then, but I certainly felt the pressure of her challenge now. I knew that I was rushing, because I had been told that time was short, but I didn’t regret not taking more time to formulate my arguments.

  The real challenge wasn’t to expand the work to fit the time available, but to find more and more work to do, in order to exploit every last available second.

  I knew, of course, that I might have been conned. It might have been a dream, a game, or any other kind of fake. The one thing it certainly wasn’t was “real.” But it was real enough for the margin of unreality not to matter, and I knew I had to go at it as hard as I possibly could — and then a bit extra, if I could manage it. That was the only way to win anything, if winning anything turned out to be possible.


  So I said “Sixth reason” even though I didn’t actually have a sixth reason waiting in the wings — and I would have found a sixth reason, and a seventh too, and more, if the world and its creator hadn’t begun just then to fall apart.

  Fifty-One

  The End of the World

  All conceivable universes end, even those which go on forever. If they don’t collapse upon themselves, reversing their initial expansion in catastrophic collapse, they fall victim to entropy, decaying into darkness and inertia. The only everlasting state is impotence.

  Some collapsed universes, we may suppose, are capable of rebirth, expanding once again; and some of those re-expanded universes may repeat the cycle endlessly — but every end remains an end, and every beginning a beginning. All conceivable universes must eventually die, and all their inhabitants of every kind must die with them.

  There is a sense in which we are universes ourselves: that the space of the imagination within our heads is a cosmos in its own right, fated either to collapse or to decay into darkness and inertia. Adam Zimmerman found that consciousness profoundly disturbing, and was by no means alone. His existence was spoiled by the awareness of its probable brevity — but that spoliation moved him to heroic effort. Would that all of us could be so creatively maladjusted.

  In seeking to evade his own mortality Adam Zimmerman delivered himself into an uncertain future, where he was taken from the world into which he had been born into another, much smaller in dimension and much frailer. I found out later that he was asleep when that universe fell apart, and only discovered that it had vanished when he was rudely precipitated into his familiar self. I thought at the time that was a pity, and I’m even more convinced of it now. It would have done him good to experience the death of a universe, if only as a spectator.

  I suppose that I ought to feel privileged that I and I alone bore witness to the disintegration of la Reine and her private Fairyland, but I was disappointed at the time to discover that none of my erstwhile companions had been watching my final performance on that particular stage. Had la Reine only taken a little trouble she could have given them all magic mirrors through which they could have watched me, just as I had earlier watched them — but she was too preoccupied with the needs, demands and responses of other audiences.