I looked away, satisfied that all was well, but suddenly looked back, having become aware that something was not quite right. I counted the pods, then counted them again.
There were ten. All ten showed every evidence of having disgorged a living body.
“We noticed that too,” Christine confirmed. “The extra man doesn’t seem to be in the cave — but the people who started hollowing out the asteroid dug a lot of tunnels. We can’t tell how far the maze extends. I hope it’s a long way, because that would mean that we have a lot of oxygen to spare, and the carbon dioxide won’t build up too rapidly, even though the recycling equipment is worse than crude. I don’t suppose you have any idea who the extra person might have been.”
“Rocambole,” I murmured. It seemed to be the most obvious jumpable conclusion.
“Who?”
“More likely a what than a who,” I told her. “But that doesn’t mean that he couldn’t take the precaution of equipping himself with the kind of body that could survive…”
That was when it hit me that if Rocambole could do that, la Reine should have been able to do likewise. There were only ten cocoons here, but there was also a maze of tunnels that the optimistic microworlders had excavated before their grand plan went awry.
I had shared la Reine’s death — but she was no mere human. Perhaps…
“Are you all right now?” As ever, it was the solicitous Mortimer Gray.
“I think so,” I said, trying to sound confident. “You?”
“We all got out in good time. Adam and Christine weren’t conscious, but at least they were breathing.”
I looked around for Adam Zimmerman, but I couldn’t see him. Niamh Horne was deep in conversation with Michael Lowenthal and Solantha Handsel, but I couldn’t see Davida Berenike Columella or Alice Fleury either.
Solantha Handsel was examining her hand, apparently anxious that she might have damaged it by hitting me too hard, but she looked up when she became aware that I was paying attention.
“Thanks,” I said.
“You’re welcome,” she replied, stiffly.
“Be very careful,” Gray advised me, as I made ready to move again. “Being able to float like a balloon gives you an impression of lightness, but if you bump into the wall or any of those piles of junk, it’ll hurt. I’ve lived on the moon — it takes a long time to retrain your reflexes. I haven’t found my feet yet.”
“That so-called junk might have to sustain us for quite a while,” I said. “The war was going badly last time I had news.”
“You had news?” he queried.
“Yes,” I said. “You didn’t?”
“No.”
I hesitated for a moment, but only a moment. “I saw it all,” I told him. “Your conversation with the snowmobile — the end of the replay and all of the extension. I saw Alice and Davida make their pitches to Zimmerman too — and the one that was meant to upstage them both. I only caught glimpses of the pantomimes involving Lowenthal and Horne, though. Too much happening at once.”
“Madoc thinks he knows who the tenth cocoon belonged to,” Christine added, taking advantage of the fact that Gray was thinking over what I’d said.
Gray looked at me expectantly.
“The AMI generating the VE laid on a guide for me,” I said. “It took the form of a slightly cartoonish male figure, who called himself Rocambole. He was an AMI too, I think. He said we’d spoken before. At first I took that to mean that he was the central intelligence of Excelsior, but there’s another possibility that seems more likely. There’s also a possibility that the tenth cocoon wasn’t his at all. It might have belonged to the VE generator herself.”
“Her self?” Gray was confused. He’d always thought of the snowmobile as a he.
“She called herself la Reine des Neiges,” I told him. “The Snow Queen. She’d come a long way since she was a snowmobile. She was a patchwork, but she must have numbered at least one dream machine among her ancestor-appliances. She risked everything to get us out of Charity, but she wasn’t crazy. Maybe she was sane enough to leave herself an escape hatch.”
Gray hesitated for at least half a minute before deciding which question to ask next. When it finally emerged, it was: “Why you?”
“She needed an audience, and I was spare. Once her nanobots had cleaned me out I was redundant. She wanted someone to see the whole picture, and I got lucky. I even got Rocambole.”
“And that’s how you got the news?”
“What news there was. It’s not good. Something killed the Snow Queen — all of her, at any rate, that wasn’t stashed in a pod. She certainly won’t be the only casualty among the AMIs, but it’s the extent of the collateral damage that will determine the time it takes for help to get to us — if help does get to us. Excelsior will probably send help if the sisterhood can contrive any, and any Titanian ship that picked up la Reine’s broadcasts will probably be capable of getting here if its smart systems haven’t been scrambled…but I don’t know what the full extent of the destruction might be.”
Because I was somewhat befuddled the summary of our situation hadn’t come out as clearly as it might have, but Mortimer Gray had been the one who’d originally figured out that the Revolution had arrived. He had already deduced that the Titanian fleet might have fallen victim to a general mutiny.
“Michael and Niamh should be able to get something working,” he assured me. “All the hardware’s there — it’s just the programs that have been reduced to imbecility. Even if we have to send in Morse code…” He broke off, realizing that the ability to transmit wasn’t the crucial factor.
“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
When 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?”
The Omega Expedition Page 46
