The Omega Expedition (31 page)

“Nor I,” said Niamh Horne. If anyone was lying, it was most likely to be her, and she was sufficiently conscious of the fact to make a conciliatory gesture. “If it will help,” she said, “I’m prepared to concede that whoever subverted
Child of Fortune
’s systems must have had inside assistance. My first thought, having accepted that, is that the ship itself must have been the real target, and that the journey to Excelsior merely provided the opportunity. Seizing control of an AI as sophisticated as the ship’s controller must have required a subversive program of awesome ingenuity, but that’s not unimaginable. What puzzles me, however, is what can have happened afterwards. It’s possible that we have simply been marooned in a convenient location while
Child of Fortune
has been taken elsewhere. Excelsior should have been able to keep track of the ship as it moved away, and its inhabitants must have raised the alarm immediately. If that’s the case, rescuers must already be on their way. If not…” She was content to leave the extrapolation of that possibility to us.

It hadn’t occurred to me to wonder whether the ship might have been the real target of the snatch, and that we tourists might have been mere inconveniences to be casually shoved out of the way. If that were so, it might help to explain our present surroundings — but it raised other questions.

“So who might want to hijack a Titanian spaceship?” I asked.

Niamh Horne didn’t answer that, but several other pairs of eyes flickered in Lowenthal’s direction.

“I’m flattered that you think me capable of such cleverness,” he said, “but the Earthbound have had a thousand opportunities to board Outer System ships during the last century, while misfortune brought about a dramatic increase in traffic.”

“Excelsior has had many other visitors from the outer system,” Davida was quick to put in. “It would not have been necessary to awaken Adam Zimmerman to create an opportunity to steal a spaceship, had we the slightest interest in such a theft.” She seemed defensive, though, and I could understand why. If the Outer System
didn’t
know yet that
Child of Fortune
had been stolen, that was probably because they still thought that it was exactly where it was supposed to be: docked with Excelsior. Perhaps it was.

Adam Zimmerman leaned forward, clearly signaling an intention to speak. Perhaps it was only the fact that he’d kept such a low profile until now that made everyone else give way immediately, or perhaps he really did exercise a charismatic authority over all kinds of posthumans. “Perhaps I’m being stupid,” he said, softly, “but is there any possibility that the pictures relayed to me after the alarm sounded were, in fact, an accurate record of what was happening to us?”

Adam Zimmerman had been born into a world that knew nothing of Virtual Experience, and had only lived long enough to see the technology’s first faltering steps before he was frozen down. He didn’t have the suspicious reflexes that the rest of us had learned as we learned to walk and talk: the reflexes which said that anything experienced in a Virtual Environment had to be reckoned a mere phantom of the imagination until prove otherwise.

No one was in a rush to take charge of Adam’s disenchantment, and it was left to Christine Caine to provide the answer. “It was just a show,” she said. “Third rate space opera. Even I’ve seen better. It can’t have been true.”

“If that’s the case,” the man who stole the world replied, still speaking with carefully contrived mildness, “why bother showing it to us, especially if the real target was the ship and our presence aboard it merely an inconvenience? Why lie so transparently — or at all?”

He had a point.

“That’s a good question,” Mortimer Gray put in, echoing my own thought. “Why tell us that we were being pursued and kidnapped by aliens of a kind whose nonexistence we have every reason to suppose, given that we could not possibly believe it?”

“I could have believed it,” Adam pointed out.

If Zimmerman had been the prime target of the snatch, I thought, the whole show might have been put on purely for his benefit — but if someone had intended to deceive him, they surely wouldn’t have let him join this conference. Alice’s remark about the situation not being of her choosing had implied that we had been foisted on our present custodians, so there might be several different agendas in conflict here. Maybe everyone’s plans were going awry, unraveling under some pressure that we hadn’t yet identified.

“The tape was intended to confuse us,” Niamh Horne opined.

“If so,” Lowenthal said, pensively, “it suggests that whoever designed and used it has something to gain from our confusion. In fact, everything about our present circumstances suggests that we are being deliberately confused. Why?”

“Perhaps we’re not the only ones who saw the tape,” Niamh Horne put in. “Perhaps the lie is bigger and bolder than we imagine, intended to confuse anyone searching for
Child of Fortune
— or for us.”

“How difficult would it be to find a spaceship once you knew that it had gone astray?” I asked, not knowing whether it was a stupid question.

“Not difficult, in theory,” Niamh Horne answered, “although it would be a great deal easier if the ship — or someone aboard it — were able to send out a distress call. We do try to keep track of all the sizable chunks of matter in the solar system, but it’s an impossible task. There are too many microworlds cutting loose from their orbits, too many spaceships hopping back and forth in every direction, and too many dirty snowballs raining in from the Oort — most of which are continually being nudged this way or that so that interested parties can try to scoop them up. Artificial photosynthetics can turn all kinds of objects matt black in no time at all, and bouncing photons off distant objects isn’t much use as a locator if the target’s switched orbits by the time the signal reaches you. An object that appeared as if out of nowhere, or even one that turned up in an unexpected place, might not be detected for months or years — which would leave a wide margin of opportunity for its subsequent disappearance. Even if every human and mechanical eye in the outer system were looking for
Child
, she’d be very difficult to find once Excelsior had lost track of her. I don’t know how big
this
thing is, but the same probably applies — if no one actually had an eye on it before we arrived here, it’ll be very difficult to detect.”

“If all that’s so,” Adam Zimmerman observed, “it’s surely not impossible that alien starships fitted with exotic drives might have been ducking in and out of the system for centuries.”

Niamh Horne didn’t believe that for a minute — but she couldn’t prove the negative. “There’ve always been stories and sightings,” she conceded, politely, “and anomalous traces on all kinds of recording devices. We dismiss them all as travelers’ tales, hallucinations and mechanical glitches…but everyone who’s spent much time in space has heard the rumors.” For a minute she sounded as if she were halfway to talking herself into it, but then she shook her head.

If we really had been a team, of course, I’d have told them what Christine had told me: that we were aboard the so-called Lost Ark,
Charity. Charity
was one of four giant spaceships that had been put together as a desperation measure when the Crash was at its worst and it seemed that the ecocatastrophe might make the Earth’s surface uninhabitable. All four had become effectively redundant before attempting to hitch a ride in the “blizzard” — a cluster of cometary fragments that had crossed the Earth’s orbit for the second time shortly before I was born — but their makers had invested everything they had in their obsession, so they went ahead anyhow. Only three of the vessels had been successfully integrated into the cometary masses, though, because
Charity
had been so badly damaged in the process that it had been written off. The colonists aboard that Ark had been transferred to the others.

By the time I was old enough to take notice the Arks were well on the way to being forgotten, but one of them —
Hope
— had come crashing back into the news seven hundred years later after it had made a landfall on a life-bearing planet: Ararat, also known as Tyre. I’d worked out that if what Alice had told me about herself was true, she must have been a passenger on one of the Arks. I had hesitated over believing that, because I wasn’t at all sure that an Ark lost in the 2100s could still be lost in 3263, presumably having made at least one more pass through the inner system in the meantime — but Niamh Horne had just told me that it could. If so, then it was not inconceivable that some of the prospective colonists had remained aboard rather than transferring to the other Arks. Even if that were not the case, the lost Ark might be an obvious target for other Ark dwellers returning to the system after a very long absence, if they wanted to establish themselves quietly and unobtrusively in a home-away-from-home. Even if everyone in the system had lost track of its orbit, that orbit would still be recorded in the Ark dwellers’ data banks.

Unfortunately, it still left the difficult questions conspicuously unanswered. Why should Ark dwellers of any sort want to hijack a Titanian spaceship? Why, if they did, would they choose to do it while it was playing temporary host to Adam Zimmerman, Michael Lowenthal, and Niamh Horne, to name but three?

If Alice had returned to the solar system from elsewhere — Ararat being the likeliest contender — then she must presumably have the use of a spaceship that was far more advanced than
Charity
, which could easily have stayed in the Outer System rather than coming all the way in to Earth orbit…

I knew it had to make sense somehow, but I still couldn’t see how. I was keeping it all to myself because I still didn’t know whose side I wanted to be on — and also because I wanted to put a story together before I let the others in on my secret. If and when I came clean I didn’t want to leave anyone in the slightest doubt that a twenty-second-century mortal was as good a man as any thirty-third-century emortal. In the meantime, the people who had
Charity
were running the show. I wanted them to think that they could trust me — that I was willing to cooperate with their desire to keep things dark until they had sorted out their own diplomatic problems.

I didn’t think I owed
anything
to Davida Berenike Columella, let alone to Michael Lowenthal or Niamh Horne. If we really were in deep trouble, embroiled in something that might turn into a war, the only loyalty I owed was to myself.

Twenty-Seven

Further Possibilities

W
hile I was trying hard to make my own headway with the puzzle into which I’d been precipitated, the discussion went on around me. At present, Chairman Lowenthal wasn’t making any obvious attempt to control its direction, perhaps because he was locked in his own private struggle to get one up on his rivals.

Adam and Christine had both lived in eras which had looked forward to the possibility of contact with extraterrestrial species, and they both took advantage of Niamh Horne’s recklessness to wonder whether there might not be aliens about whom we knew nothing, who had been keeping tabs on us ever since we announced our existence to the cosmos by inventing radio. Mortimer Gray told them that everything our space probes had reported back to us suggested that complex extraterrestrial life was extremely rare, especially by comparison with the all-conquering Afterlife — but that assurance only brought forth a further string of prevarications.

Was it not stupidly arrogant of us, Christine asked, to assume that the evolution of complexity had never happened at a much earlier state of galactic history? And if it had, was it not perfectly reasonable to suppose that those complex species must have developed technological devices far in advance of ours?

It was left to Solantha Handsel, the professional paranoid, to react to the fact that the hypothesis did not advance the discussion at all. “Whoever or whatever they are,” she asked, impatiently, “what could they possibly want with
us
?”

“They don’t want
you
,” Christine Caine responded, with surprising asperity. “The timing tells us, as plainly as you like, that the one they want is Adam.”

“Fine,” the bodyguard snapped back. “So what do they want with
him
?”

Adam Zimmerman was a picture of perplexity — but when he looked around for an answer to that question his gaze soon settled on Michael Lowenthal.

My nose had begun to hurt again. I needed more codeine — or something stronger.

“I think we ought to get back to the mysterious Alice,” Lowenthal said, smoothly. “She told Tamlin that she was trying to prevent a war. If that’s true, what war is she talking about? And why would kidnapping any of us make the slightest difference to the likelihood of it being fought?”

Nobody replied immediately. It was Niamh Horne who eventually said: “There isn’t going to be a war. The weapons we have are too powerful. No one wants to take the risk.” I wished she sounded more convincing.

“They used to say that in
his
day,” I countered, with a nod in Adam Zimmerman’s direction, “but it didn’t stop them.”

“Yes it did,” said Mortimer Gray. “Even the primitive nuclear weapons you had then were used with the utmost discretion — and the ultimate plague war was very carefully fought with nonlethal weaponry. Your warmakers did everything they possibly could to avoid having to deploy the full extent of their firepower. No one within the solar system would ever dream of using fusion bombs, let alone a biological weapon akin to the Afterlife.”

“A fair point,” I conceded. “With an interesting qualification.”

It only took him a minute to catch up. “Are we back to the hypothetical aliens again?” he said wearily — but he knew as well as I did that there were others outside the solar system as well as hypothetical aliens.

“I suppose you didn’t bother to ask her which war she was trying to prevent?” Michael Lowenthal put in.