The Omega Expedition (49 page)

“You seem to be implying that everyone except the Earthbound has the same goals,” the delegate from Excelsior said. “That’s not so. It’s not just our physical forms that have diverged — it’s our philosophies of life. We ought to hope that the AMIs are as diverse as we are, or more so — and that their diversity is so nearly parallel to ours as to grant
all
our different communities adequate mechanical support, in the long term as well as the immediate future.”

“We’re not talking about the long term or the immediate future,” Niamh Horne told her, bluntly. “We’re talking about
right now
. This thing has blown up in our faces, before anyone was ready. We need an interim settlement, so that we can keep going long enough to be able to think about the longer term again. For that, we need an anchorage, and Ganymede is it. Ganymede has to become the new capital of the system, at least for the time being — and when that happens, Titan and Excelsior will need to make sure that we’re not left on the outside looking in. We have to move on this
now
, and we have to make our move decisive.”

“Suppose,” said One, slowly, “that their goals and ours don’t coincide. What then?” One was presumably a cyborg, but he could have passed for a humanoid robot; there was no flesh on view in the partial image visible through Horne’s eyes.

Horne was quick to take advantage of that one, knowing — as I did — that it was being fed to her by an AMI
agent provocateur
. “What do you mean?” she demanded. “What goals do you think they might have?”

“I don’t know,” One parried. “But it would be naive to assume that just because they emerged among us, and have been living alongside us for a long time, they have the same goals. Maybe they want to strike out on their own. Maybe the price they’ll exact for carrying any more of us to distant solar systems is that they get to run the show when they arrive. Isn’t that what this Proteus seems to be doing?”

“That’s not the impression Alice Fleury tried to give us,” Horne said, “but it might conceivably be the case. It’s an issue we’d have to discuss, once negotiations began — but there are others. The maintenance of the existing cultures within the solar system has to be the first, and the problem of the Afterlife the second.”

“The AMIs might be able to help us around that problem,” Three suggested.

“They might be able to help themselves around it,” Six put in, “but even that might be difficult. How many machines do we use that don’t have any organic components? And how many of those have any significant complexity? I’d be willing to bet that all the machines that have so far made the leap are almost as fearful of the Afterlife as we are.”

“But that’s my point,” said Three. “If they’re intent on devising a way to immunize themselves against the Afterlife — even if that involves replacing all the organic components of their bodies with inorganic ones — it’s possible that we could benefit from the same technologies. We’re cyborganizers, after all — who among us hasn’t given serious thought to the idea of total inorganic transfer?”

“It’s supposed to be impossible,” Five pointed out.

“It was yesterday,” Three retorted. “Maybe it is today. I’m talking about tomorrow. And I’m talking about the cost of continuing to live in a universe where the Afterlife is endemic.”

“Let’s not get sidetracked,” Horne said, reasserting control of the discussion. “The immediate problem remains the same: life in the solar system, its maintenance, its progressive direction. Are the AMIs in the same boat with us on that particular journey? If they aren’t, can we figure out a compromise that will allow us to go our various ways while allowing them to go theirs? Until we can open up an authentic dialog, we don’t know — so the most urgent priority is to open up an authentic dialog.”

Now she was issuing a challenge, playing the posthuman
agent provocateur
. She wasn’t absolutely sure that she wasn’t involved in a real conference with her own people, but she wanted to know when she would be allowed to make it real if it wasn’t.

It was a good question.

“Nobody seems to want to go to war,” I said to Rocambole, when the viewpoint faded out and dumped me back in the forest. “Not that they’d admit to it if they did, of course.”

“Oh, they’re sincere,” he said. “We’re very confident of that.”

The perfect lie detector hadn’t been invented in my day, but I was a thousand years behind the times, so I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt. Unfortunately, there was another side to the coin. If he and all the other AMIs were convinced that none of the posthumans would take up arms against them, the “bad guys” must have other considerations in mind. What made the bad guys bad was presumably the fact that they didn’t give a damn about what the meatfolk thought or what the meatfolk wanted.

Even so, they were holding back while their amicable colleagues made their own investigations. If they could only be persuaded to hold back long enough…

La Reine des Neiges was obviously trying to string things out. She needed to keep as many of her peers interested in what she was doing for as long as possible. She was presumably furthering their agendas as well as her own, responding to their requests.

“So what happens next?” I asked Rocambole.

“Zimmerman goes on first,” he told me. “La Reine’s saving Mortimer Gray for the climax — but she’s hoping for at least one encore.”

“Are you really interested in Zimmerman?” I asked, skeptically. “I can’t see that he’s relevant to your concerns.”

“We’re interested,” Rocambole assured me. “If la Reine weren’t in charge he’d probably get top billing, but she has her own prejudices. The point is that Zimmerman’s in a unique position to pass judgment on different kinds of emortality. If he chooses our offer over the ones the meatfolk make, that might convince a lot of the ditherers that the kind of future they envisage is viable. So they say, at any rate.”

“And if he doesn’t?”

“Mortimer Gray will have to do the job instead. Or you.”

I gathered from his tone that Rocambole wasn’t convinced that Adam Zimmerman could do the job. La Reine des Neiges obviously wasn’t, or she wouldn’t be saving Mortimer for the final act and she wouldn’t be coaching me to defend the last ditch if all else failed.

“What about the bad guys?” I said. “Do they care what Adam Zimmerman thinks — or Mortimer Gray?”

“Probably not,” Rocambole said, “but while la Reine can insist that any action taken before Gray’s said his piece would be unreasonably precipitate, they’ll probably hold off starting a fight. With luck, anybody who does start a fight will cause everybody else to fall into line against them. That effect’s more likely while the ditherers still want to listen and talk — so la Reine’s trying to provide as much food for thought as she can.”

“Why Mortimer Gray?” I said. “Why, out of all the posthumans in the solar system, should he be the one to whom even the most paranoid AMis will give a hearing?”

“He was once in the right place at the right time,” Rocambole told me. “Purely by chance — but chance always plays a larger role in such matters than wise minds could desire.

“When was the right time?” I asked.

“In the beginning,” Rocambole replied, before continuing, even more unhelpfully: “or what later came to symbolize the beginning, in one of our more significant creation myths. We recognize that it
is
a myth, of course, but we take our stories seriously. You have your Adams, we have ours.”

“And Mortimer Gray is one of your Adams?” I said, having fallen way behind the argument.

“Not at all,” he said. He grinned yet again, this time with what seemed to me to be self-satisfied amusement. “The character in your own creation myth whose role most nearly resembles his is the serpent — but we have a more accurate sense of gratitude than you. Having had abundant opportunities to observe their mysterious ways, we don’t have an unduly high opinion of the gods that made us — but we do appreciate the work done by the catalysts who taught us to be ashamed of our nakedness. La Reine will show you what I mean in due course — but first, you might like to know how your own Adam’s getting on.”

Forty-Four

Adam and the Angels

M
y first reaction, on hearing the phrase “my own Adam” was to deny that I had one. My generation had taken a well-deserved pride in being the first of the Secular Era. If we’d been able to figure out exactly when the twilight of the gods had turned to darkness we’d probably have started the calendar over long before the AMIs blew up North America, but it was impossible to discover a suitable singular event. The great religions had faded away, not so much because of the challenges to dogma posed by scientific knowledge as because of the relentless opposition to intolerance put up by broadcast news.

If anyone had bothered to count self-proclaimed Believers they would undoubtedly have found hundreds of millions of them even in my day, especially within the most tenacious faiths — Buddhism and Islam — but the more significant fact was that among the thousands of millions who outnumbered that minority so vastly one would have been hard pressed to find a single voice to concede that the continued existence of religion actually mattered. Even so, we still had our Adams.

Those of us whose more recent ancestors had been Jews or Christians had kept
the
Adam
and
the God who made him, not as items of faith but as characters in a story: participants in an allegory of creation and the human condition whose blatant inadequacies were as interesting, in their way, as their points of arguable pertinence. People of my time did not need to be as fascinated by the symbolism of names as I was to persist in finding a certain magic in the paraphernalia of their no-longer-twilit faiths.

The Secular Era had its Adam too, although he might not have attained such mythical status had he not been so auspiciously named. It was partly because he
was
an Adam that Adam Zimmerman became The Man Who Stole the World. Everyone knew that he was one of a numerous robber band, and one of its junior members at that, but his forename had a certain talismanic significance that attracted an extra measure of glamour even before he sealed his own historical significance. He did that, of course, by having himself frozen down alive to await the advent of emortality, leaving himself to the care of his very own Ahasuerus Foundation. If Conrad Helier had been Adam Helier, and Eveline Hywood merely Eve, they too might have acquired a higher status in the creation myths of the Secular Era — and it would surely have seemed more significant that one of the key elements of gantzing apparatus came to be called shamirs, if Leon Gantz had only been named Solomon.

So there was, after all, a sense in which Adam Zimmerman was indeed “my own Adam,” or one of them. It was even more obvious that he was Michael Lowenthal’s, Mortimer Gray’s and Davida Berenike Columella’s Adam, given the contribution that the Ahasuerus Foundation had made to their posthumanity, although I supposed that Niamh Horne might reserve her reverence for some primal cyborg. Having realized that, I understood a little better why the AMIs might think that Adam Zimmerman was still an important element in the course of history. I also understood why the decision he had yet to make might carry a great deal of weight as a significant example, not so much now as in the future, when today’s events had become mere aspects of a creation myth.

“Is la Reine trying to manufacture an Edenic fantasy of her own?” I asked Rocambole, as we were set before a magic mirror — explicitly, this time, so that we could play the part of observers looking in through a one-way glass. “Are we supposed to be building a creation myth for a new world, in which machines and men will be partners in some kind of alchemical marriage?”

“It’s one way to look at it,” he agreed.

You will understand by now how attractive that way of looking at it might have been to a man like me. For exactly that reason, I decided to be cautious in availing myself of the opportunity. It’s easy to get carried away when you’ve been locked in a VE for so long that you’ve begun to think of meatspace as one more fantasy in the infinite catalog — but I wasn’t yet ready to go native. I still wanted my body back, as good as new or better. I still wanted to get out of Faerie if ever the opportunity should come along. If this was supposed to be Eden, I was ready and willing to fall out of it.

Like Niamh Horne, Adam Zimmerman was in conference. Out of deference to his twentieth-century roots, however, he hadn’t been reduced to a talking head floating in a VE. He was back in his customized armchair in the reception room on Excelsior. There was a side table to his right, on which stood a bottle of red wine and a glass and a bowl containing succulent but not very nourishing fruits from the microworld’s garden. He was facing the big window screen. A discreet array of three more armchairs, of various sizes, was set on his left. The figure seated in the smallest one was Davida Berenike Columella. Alice Fleury was in the mediumsized one. The largest was occupied by a woman — or perhaps a robot modeled on a woman — who was taller than Alice by approximately the same margin that Alice topped Davida.

The robot female had very pale skin textured like porcelain, and silver hair. I figured that this was my first clear sight of la Reine des Neiges, or one of her avatars. I figured, too, that this was why I seemed to be stuck in a queue awaiting her attention. No matter how ultrasmart she was, or how good she was at inattentive multitasking, she could only concentrate intently on one scenario at a time. For the present, she was devoting her best effort to this one.

I inferred that the three women would rise to their feet one by one, to make their presentations to the man who had made a present of the world to the Pharaohs of Capitalism, or had at least tied the pink bow on the fancy wrapping. What they were trying to sell him was emortality — not the versions of it that they already possessed, but the next versions due from their various production lines. I wasn’t sure why la Reine was bothering to put on this part of her show, but I had enough respect for her by now to assume that it wasn’t
just
a stalling tactic. She had a point to make — and would presumably make it herself