Another story of this same kind might benefit enormously from the extension of our desperation to the very last gasp — which would not come until we had not only exhausted the oxygen supply we thought we had but had also exhausted the extra measure produced by a deus ex machina akin to the one la Reine contrived in order to prolong Mortimer Gray’s heroic conversation beyond its actual limit — but this is not one of them. I can assure you that I would not let the mere fact that it did not happen that way prevent me from making my traveler’s tale as exciting as possible, for I am not a man to defy tradition in that respect (and I can assure you that I have never caught a tiny fish or lost one that was less than incredibly enormous), but the simple fact is that a tale of truly epic proportions — especially if it concerns the spectrum of infinite possibility that is the future — need not and should not stoop to devices of crude conventional suspense. Why should I insult you by pressing emotional buttons when the whole point of my tale is that all such buttons are things of the moment, to be overcome rather than indulged?
This is what needs to be recorded: while my companions and I waited in the gloom, fragile and afraid, the Final War was fought. I cannot list its combatants and casualties, nor can I map its battles and the terms of its armistice, but I can say this: in spite of all its waste, it was won in the only sense that really matters. Hope and opportunity were neither defeated nor diminished, as they might have been had things gone differently.
After the war, the AMIs continued to exist competitively, but not combatively. They struggled against one another, but only as players of an eternal game, not as angels of destruction. They were good friends to all the humankinds, whom they continued to protect from harm.
Their ultimate triumph — and ours — was a victory of hubris over Nemesis, as every real triumph is.
Fifty-Six
The Nick of Time
Considering that the posthumans awaiting rescue from Polaris were utterly unused to life without IT and smart clothing they were remarkably tolerant of the conditions. The worst aspect of those conditions turned out to be the limitations of the plumbing system.
Plumbing systems don’t normally require much support from clever machinery, but those on Polaris had been designed to work in harness with sophisticated recycling systems. The recycling systems were designed to employ populations of carefully engineered bacteria, which had not been available to la Reine des Neiges, so they could not work as planned; instead, they formed a series of inconvenient and inaccessible bottlenecks which gradually filled up with our wastes. The solid and liquid materials were out of sight, but their odors ensured that they were not long out of mind.
We did manage to rig a couple of makeshift fans to assist the circulation of the air between the cave and the tunnels, but their effect was limited. By the time we had been in the cave for a couple of days — or what seemed like a couple of days, given that all the available timepieces had ceased to function — Niamh Horne and Michael Lowenthal had been forced to switch their attention from fruitless attempts to restore some fragment of la Reine’s communication systems to working on similarly fruitless attempts to solve the sewage problem. Occasional excursions into the deeper tunnels became a necessity even though they delivered up no practical rewards, but we had to maintain a base within the cave because that was where the main airlocks were located: the route by which help would eventually arrive.
There was a certain amount of speculation as to whether the sewage problem posed a serious health hazard, but the general opinion was that it did not. Several of us complained of various aches, pains, and general feelings of ill-being, but the likelihood was that those which weren’t psychosomatic were the residual effects of the injuries sustained when we had been rescued from Charity. All the broken bones had knitted and all the wounds had healed, but without adequate IT support we continued to feel occasional twinges.
As time went by, of course, our collective mood became increasingly apprehensive. Mortimer Gray remained relentlessly upbeat, although I wasn’t the only one who thought that he was trying a little too hard to keep up appearances. Surprisingly, the other person who seemed unusually unperturbed was Davida Berenike Columella — but I figured that she too had something to prove, in respect of the alleged superiority of her brand of posthumanity.
I did my best to help out with the attempts to get things working, but my expertise was a thousand years behind the cutting edge of modern technology and I was way out of my depth. In the end, we three freezer vets had to accept that our primitive skills were unequal even to the task of making the drains work.
I reassured Christine that if the worst came to the worst and someone actually had to make a descent into the microworld’s roughhewn bowels, she would only be the second-choice candidate on grounds of size. The thought didn’t seem to console her overmuch. She was perhaps the most fretful of us all. I tried to reassure her further with the suggestion that Eido and Charity could not be far away from us and that Eido’s first priority, if she had survived, would be to reunite herself with Alice Fleury — but as the hours passed and Eido did not come, Christine became increasingly convinced that we were doomed.
“Eido and Child of Fortune weren’t the only ones who knew where we were,” I reminded her. “The Snow Queen and Child of Fortune tried to make sure that everyone knew it. I don’t know what kind of hardware they used as coats for the viruses that killed her, but if the bad guys could hit us with clever bullets the good guys can certainly get a ship out to us.”
“Maybe they transmitted the hostile software electromagnetically,” she said. I would have liked to reassure her that it was unlikely, if not impossible, but when I checked with Lowenthal he assured me that it was only too probable.
“Everything depends on our orbit,” was Lowenthal’s opinion of the time it might take for relief to arrive. “If it’s orthodox, we’ll be okay — but if it’s highly eccentric, or angled away from the ecliptic plane, we could be in trouble. I don’t know whether we’re inbound or outbound, or how close to the sun our orbit might take us. What I do know is that if we don’t make rapid progress in the art of improvisation, we won’t make much impact as microworlders. Our chances of setting up a working ecosystem don’t seem to be getting any less remote.”
Given that we had no functional biotech at all, let alone a nursery full of Helier wombs, our chances of becoming the founding fathers of a new posthuman tribe seemed to me a good deal worse than remote — although I wasn’t entirely sure what Alice Fleury might be capable of, reproduction-wise, if she were forced to extremes.
“If only those SusAn cocoons had been isolated and self-sufficient,” Lowenthal lamented, “we could have woken up when it was all over.”
“Maybe,” I said. “But self-sufficiency is relative. We’d all have died in our sleep within a year, unless we could be taken down to six degrees Absolute.”
“In deep space,” he reminded me, “that’s not so very difficult. It could have been rigged, if Morty’s old friend had bothered to put in the time and effort.” I thought that a trifle ungrateful, given that la Reine had been working under difficult conditions — but Mortimer Gray wasn’t within earshot, so Lowenthal wasn’t guarding his words as carefully as usual.
“So Christine, Adam, and I might have slept for another thousand years,” I said, carrying the flight of fancy forward, “and woken up in an even stranger world. You and I would be equals then, wouldn’t we? You’d be getting job offers from students of ancient history too.”
“I offered you a job myself,” he reminded me. “The offer’s still open if you want it.”
“And Christine?” I asked.
“Her too,” he confirmed.
“She didn’t want to go to Earth last time I asked.”
“Do you?”
I shrugged. “I wouldn’t mind,” I said. “But it might be best for we freezer vets to stick together.”
“Adam Zimmerman will come back with me,” he assured me, with the air o
f one who’s checked his facts. “he’s not ready for robotization, Tyre, or Excelsior just yet. He wants to come home.”
It occurred to me, when I eventually took my opportunity to make the same check, while we were both hiding out in the tunnels for the sake of a dose of clean air, that Adam Zimmerman and I had never even been properly introduced.
“You can’t go home,” I advised him. “It isn’t home any more.”
“Yes it is,” he told me. “It always will be. No matter how much it changes, it’ll always be home. I know they’ve decivilized Manhattan three times over, but it’ll always be Manhattan to me. It has the air, the gravity, the ocean…and the history. There’s Jerusalem too.”
“Jerusalem’s a bomb crater,” I told him. “The only fusion bomb ever to be exploded on the surface. A monument to suicidal hatred. Even the latest Gaean Restoration left it untouched.”
“Yes, I know,” he said. “But it’s still Jerusalem.”
It seemed more diplomatic not to mention the Via Dolorosa. “And the Hardinist Cabal is still grateful for what you did for them twelve hundred years ago,” I said, instead. “We all inherit our history, whether we like it or not.”
He looked me in the eye then, and said: “Whatever you may have heard, I really did do it. Without me, they’d never have contrived such a steep collapse or cleaned up so efficiently. I really was the only man who understood the systems well enough to pull off the coup. They thought they were using me, but they weren’t. I was using them — their money, their greed, their ambition. They were just the means I used to commit the crime. I really am the man who stole the world.”
“And all because you were afraid of dying, desperate to reach the Age of Emortality.”
“A perfect crime requires a perfect motive,” he told me. “But at the end of the day, all art is for art’s sake. Just between you and me, I did it because I could, and because I was the only one who could. You can understand that, can’t you, Madoc? The others don’t, but you do.”
He was a good judge of character. I’d always prided myself on the quality, as well as the careful modesty, of my criminal mind. “I’d have done the same myself,” I assured him. “But you’ll never be able to do it again, will you? It was a once-in-a-lifetime performance.”
“No one will ever be able to do it again,” he told me, with quiet satisfaction. “I got in just in the nick of time. Within another ten years, whether it was done or not, the smart software would have become too smart to cheat. I was the last of the human buccaneers, Madoc, the last of the authentic soldiers of fortune. Now, I’ll have to find something else — assuming they can get to us before the stink kills us all.”
“They’ll still expect a decision, you know,” I told him. “They’ll still want to know who wins the golden apple in the beauty contest: Davida, Alice, or the Snow Queen.”
He understood the allusion. “Paris was an idiot,” he said. “He should have named his own price. That’s what I’ll do. The hell with Aphrodite.”
“Me too,” I told him. “What did you have in mind?”
“At present,” he said, “there’s nothing on my mind but shit, even while I’m way down here. I think I’ll wait till I have a clearer head before making any important decisions.”
“Wise move,” I agreed. “Even if there’s time to try everything, it’s as well to get your priorities in order.”
Later, I raised the same point with Christine Caine, more by way of distraction than anything else. I told her about the beauty contest, and asked her whether, in view of what she now knew about her essentially unmurderous self, she was still determined to head away from Earth and into the great unknown.
“Sure,” she said. “Tyre sounds good to me, for the first faltering step. You?”
“Not immediately. First, I need time to rest. I know I can’t go home again, but what Adam says makes sense. I want to feel Earth beneath my feet and put the Heavens back where they belong, in the sky. I want to breathe fresh air and get away from walls.”
“There might be something to be said for that,” she conceded. “Right now, fresh air is just about the most luxurious thing I can imagine.”
It was at that point, as if responding to her cue, that Solantha Handsel informed us all, in stentorian tones, that someone was outside the main airlock, preparing to make an entrance.
By the time we had gathered together the bodyguard had already taken up the prime position. Her hands were upraised, equally ready to function as deadly weapons or as extravagant welcomers of salvation.
The airlock finally opened and the lovely cyborg stepped through, bringing a welcome breath of new air with her. I saw Niamh Horne take a bold step forward, as if to lay claim to close kinship with our rescuers and a party share of the credit for our release — but the newcomer looked straight past her, searching our ragged little crowd with her artificial eyes.
“My name’s Emily Marchant,” she announced, casually. “I’m looking for Mortimer Gray.”
Fifty-Seven
Homecoming
And so to Earth, as passengers aboard the good ship Titaness, now mistress of her own fate and captain of her own soul. She released those of us who had decided to go down into the well while she settled into a comfortable orbit.
Niamh Horne and Davida Berenike Columella had no intention of joining us, and Mortimer Gray decided to remain in orbit for a while longer, so six of us made our preparations to be shuttled down in a thoroughly stupid capsule not unlike Peppercorn Seven. We had no packing to do, of course, but we did have a few farewells to make.
To Niamh Horne all I had to say was good-bye, and I doubt that she would have bothered to say even that much to me had some kind of gesture not been unavoidable. She did not suggest that I visit her if and when I decided to leave Earth again.
Mortimer Gray, by contrast, was very insistent that we must meet again, and soon, when more urgent concerns had been properly addressed. He repeated his offer of employment, and I promised him that I would think about it very seriously, although I was waiting to see what alternative offers I might yet receive.
Because any friend of Mortimer’s was privileged in her eyes, Emily Marchant did invite me to get in touch when the time came for me to explore the Outer System. She promised that she would find work for me to do there, once I was ready to break free from the iron grip of the dead past, and I believed her. She was kind enough to take it for granted that I would get in touch one day; Mortimer had told her that whatever else I might be, I was certainly not incorrigibly Earthbound.
The most elaborate farewell I offered, though, was to Davida Berenike Columella. I thanked her profusely for bringing me back from the dead, and when she reminded me that she had not chosen me I reminded her that however I might have been delivered into her care I still owed a great debt to her skill and enterprise.
“If ever you want to return to Excelsior…,” she said.
“It’s too close to Heaven for me,” I told her. “Maybe, one day, I’ll be ready for perfection…but not for a long time yet. I have a lot of adulthood to explore before I can settle for eternal childhood.”
She thought I was joking. “I can’t begin to understand how you did it,” she said. “It must have been Hell.”
She had lost me. “What must?”
“Living in the twenty-second century. Waking up every morning to the knowledge that you were decaying, day by day and hour by hour — that your ill-designed bodies were fighting a war of attrition against the ravages of death and losing ground with every minute that passed. Knowing, as you went about your daily work, that the copying errors were accumulating, that the free-radical damage was tearing you apart at the molecular level, that stem-cell senility was allowing your tissues to shrivel and your organs to stagnate, that…”
“I get the picture,” I assured her. “Well, yes, I suppose it was a kind of Hell. The secret is that you can get used to Hell, if you don’t let it get you down. You never actually get to like it — bu
t you can learn from it, if you have the right attitude. Among other things, you can learn to be wary of Heaven.”
“We’re not the Earthbound,” she assured me. “We aren’t finished. We have millennia of progress still ahead of us, and we intend to take full advantage of its opportunities.”
I could have told her that even though that might be the case, she and her sisters would never actually grow up, but that would have been flippant and I didn’t want to spoil the moment. I was grateful to her, and I wanted us to part on good terms.
In any case, I knew even then that there might eventually come a day when I’ll be ready for Excelsior.
I didn’t mind being locked in a cocoon for the few minutes it took the remaining six of us to fall to Earth.
I hadn’t expected to feel quite so heavy when I got there, given that my brand new IT and a few sessions in the Titaness’s centrifuge had tuned up my muscles, but it seemed a small price to pay for getting my feet back on the ground.
We landed in Antarctica, on the ice fields outside Amundsen. The cloud cover obscured the sun and sky, but the ice palaces clustered on the horizon couldn’t prevent me from feeling that I’d returned to my roots and reconnected myself with my history.
My hero’s welcome was a trifle muted, but I didn’t mind that. The only individuals who really appreciated the true extent of my heroism were AMIs, who hadn’t yet had time to overcome their habits of discretion. Mortimer Gray would doubtless have fared far better, not just because we might have died on Charity if it hadn’t been for his relationship with la Reine des Neiges, but because he’d been a long-time resident of the Continent Without Nations. He really would have been coming home, in the eyes of his old neighbors — but he wouldn’t have been extrovert enough to take full advantage of his latest wave of celebrity. I filled in for him as best I could.
I didn’t see much of Lowenthal and Handsel in the days following the landing, and Alice Fleury had all kinds of diplomatic duties to fulfill, but those were acquaintances I kept up, in VE if not in the flesh. It was easy enough, in the short term, to stick with Adam Zimmerman. The new messiah wasn’t in any hurry to be rid of us, now that he knew that Christine wasn’t a mass murderer.
The Omega Expedition Page 49
