The advent of the Zaman Transformation, which involved engineering fertilized ova for extreme resistance to the aging process, had not only sidestepped many of the problems associated with IT repair systems but had appeared to strike a balance in the brain between Millerization and robotization. The neurones of ZT brains retained a greater capacity for self-regeneration than the neurones of ordinary mortals, but they retained the switching capacity that permitted rapid learning. Although the first generations of true emortals could keep a firm enough grip on their memories and learned skills, they seemed to be equally capable of further adaptation. Their memories of times past became increasingly vague, but never lost their coherence, while their capacity to assimilate new experience remained undiminished — or so, at least, the argument went.
Not everyone, it seemed, was convinced.
Many people believed that robotization remained a threat — and that many living individuals had, indeed, been robotized, although they retained the illusion of being fully human and continued to maintain that appearance. Opinions differed, as one might expect, as to exactly which individuals might have become existentially becalmed in this way.
On the other hand, many people believed that the bugbear of Millerization had not been entirely overcome, and that the real existential threat facing the new emortals was not mental petrifaction but a loss of the continuity of the self: too much change rather than too little.
Some people, of course, believed that both processes were observable in the world around them — usually, but not necessarily, in different individuals.
At any rate, the quest for a perfect mental balance within a brain whose developmental course avoided both the Scylla of Millerization and the Charybdis of robotization had not been abandoned once Zaman Transformations became the norm. Far from it. All kinds of research were continuing, based in many different theories and ideologies.
So-called cyborganizers had resuscitated many formerly abandoned lines of research into meatware/hardware collaboration, while “Zamaners” — including those sponsored by the Ahasuerus Foundation — had hardly paused to draw breath before producing hundreds of variations and refinements of their basic technique. The situation had been further complicated, it seemed, by a leap forward in the field of “genomic engineering” following the discovery elsewhere in the galaxy of natural genomic systems differing quite markedly from the one that was fundamental to Earth’s ecosphere.
In brief, there were now many different humankinds and not-so-humankinds, most of which laid claim to sole possession of the ideal emortality. The people of Excelsior seemed to me to be among the weirder lines in the posthuman spectrum — although that was not an impression encouraged by their own data banks — but there were undoubtedly others every bit as weird to be found among the fabers of the outer system microworlds and the cyborganizers of the Jovian and Saturnian satellites, not to mention the carefully adapted colonists of Ararat and Maya.
All of which was interesting, in its way, but did not seem to be of any immediate help in penetrating the motives of Davida Berenike Columella and her colleagues.
I now had a better understanding of how they fitted into the unfolding pattern of human history, but the questions still remained.
Why here?
Why now?
Why Christine Caine?
Why me?
And why would the suspicion not be quieted that I wouldn’t like the answers when I finally worked them out, even if I were fortunate enough to live that long?
Fourteen
The Garden of Excelsior
The artificial worlds of the twenty-second century had been little more than glorified tin cans — not quite sardine cans, but near enough. The vast majority had been no farther from the Earth than lunar orbit. Their inhabitants had been understandably enthusiastic to develop their own self-sustaining ecospheres, so I had seen pictures aplenty of their glass-house-clad “fields” and “hydroponic units.” I had carried forward the tacit assumption that Excelsior would be equipped with something similar, until Davida Berenike Columella had put me right.
All the food in Excelsior was produced by artificial photosynthetic systems aggregated into a complex network of vast matt-black “leaves” surrounding a core whose spin simulated gravity. The microworld had no sunlit fields at all. As Davida had told me, though, it did have a garden, whose flora and fauna were purely ornamental. I had a ready-made image of a garden floating in my mind too, but that turned out to be just as wrong as my image of glass-roofed fields.
When Christine and I were finally allowed to go “out,” it was to the garden that we were taken. I had hoped to take a stroll around the corridors of the microworld, in order to get a glimpse of everyday life as it was lived there, but that wasn’t the way things were done on Excelsior. Excelsior didn’t go in for corridors.
When we were ready to go, the wall of my holding cell grew a couple of fancy blisters, which opened up sideways like a cross between a yawning crocodile and a feeding clam.
I had to remind myself that it was just a kind of data suit in order to force myself to step into it, and even then I muttered to Christine: “I’m glad I never suffered from claustrophobia. All those hours I spent editing tapes were better lessons in life than I realized.”
“I always suffered from claustrophobia,” she told me, “but I think they’ve edited out my capacity for panic.”
I thought about that while the cocoon wrapped itself around me so that I could be transported through the body of the giant Excelsior like some parasitic invader captured by an unusually considerate white corpuscle. I was glad that the journey didn’t take long.
I suppose I’d have felt better about the journey if the garden had justified the effort, but it didn’t. I’d seen much better ones in VE. In fact, that was exactly what was wrong with it. It looked like a synthesized cartoon: utterly artificial, every part of the image exaggerated almost to the point of caricature. If the garden really had been a VE mockup it would have been considered gauche even in the twenty-second century. The colors were too bright, the perfumed flowers too numerous as well as too musky. The ensemble had the scrupulously overdone quality of the child-orientated backdrops in the mass-produced virtual fantasies of my own day.
Given that I had already compared Christine to Lilith, and that we were still expecting an Adam, I expected a stream of Eden jokes, but she was nothing if not unpredictable. She didn’t inquire after the Tree of Knowledge or the serpent, and never mentioned the possibility of a fall.
She wasn’t impressed by the garden’s aesthetic quality either.
“It’s much too garish,” she complained. “It’s not quite as awful as the food, but it’s more than awful enough.” Davida was not with us in the flesh, but we both presumed that she was listening to every word. Christine obviously felt no obligation to be diplomatic — but I could sympathize with that.
The animals in the garden were as prolific as the plants. There were brightly colored fish and amphibians swarming in every pond, while svelte reptiles, delicate birds, and athletic mammals peeped out of the foliage of every bush and every tree. There were insects too, but I wasn’t convinced, even for a moment, that they were busy pollinating the flowers. I suspected that the plants and animals alike might be as sexless as their keepers. I also deduced that the apparent predators — which seemed perfectly at ease with the conspicuously unintimidated individuals that would have provided them with food in a natural ecosystem — ate exactly the same nectar that microworlders ate: a carefully balanced cocktail of synthetic nutrients. It was, of course, a nectar that Christine and I couldn’t share, because it wouldn’t be appropriate to our complex nutritional requirements. In a sense, therefore, we were the only “real” animals in the garden: the only creatures forged by nature rather than by artifice.
All my suspicions and deductions turned out to be true. Under the crystal sky of Excelsior, even the blades of grass were sculptures, safe from grazing. They didn’t even f
eel right. Everything I touched proclaimed its artificiality to my fingers. The knowledge that my fingers were wrapped in some ultramodern fabric that had probably reconditioned my own sense of touch only added to the confusion.
“I get the impression that they haven’t quite fathomed the idea of gardening,” was Christine’s final judgment. I wasn’t so sure. We had brought a different notion over a gulf of a thousand years, but who was to say that ours was right? If they’d taken a vote on Excelsior, the motion would have been carried unanimously, because we wouldn’t have been entitled to express an opinion.
The ungrazable grass and the unpollinatable flowers weren’t the models for every vegetable form. The fruits that grew on the trees were designed — and by no means reserved — for posthuman consumption. When I asked, I was told that it was perfectly safe, and permissible, for me to eat the fruit, but that it wouldn’t be adequate to my dietary needs. Having heard that, I didn’t even bother to experiment. I could live with the disappointment of lousy golden rice, but insipid and essentially unsatisfying apples were a different matter.
In any case, the fruits were too caricaturish. They were far less tempting — to me, at least — than their designers had probably intended.
“Take a look at the Gaean Restoration through one of their cobweb hoods when you get the chance,” I suggested to my companion. “It’s less obvious and less profuse, and a great deal more varied, but it has exactly the same quality of artifice. I couldn’t find any authentic wilderness, even on Earth.”
“Wilderness is overrated,” Christine assured me. “I don’t mind in the least that all this is fake — I just wish it had been better done.”
“They like their kind of food,” I reminded her. “They must like their kind of garden too. Their aesthetic standards aren’t ours. They experience things differently. Imagine what they must think of us.”
“I try,” she assured me.
Given that I didn’t know what to think of her, and couldn’t imagine what she might think of me, I had to suppose that her attempts — and mine too — stood little chance of success. But there had to be a reason why the people of Excelsior had brought us back. I had to hope that it might be comprehensible even if I dared not hope, as yet, that I might be able to deem it good.
“The ship from Earth will be docking in a couple of hours,” I told Christine, in case she hadn’t been informed. “We’ll have a chance to talk to Gray and Lowenthal before the Outer System ship arrives and the main event gets under way. Have you given any thought to their offers of employment?”
“I’m not going back to Earth, she said, with a firmness that took me by surprise.
“Why not?” I asked.
“Been there, done that, took the rap. You should take a look at Titan. Makes the Snow Queen’s magic palace look like an igloo. You don’t have to come with me if you don’t want to.”
“I haven’t even begun to make up my mind,” I told her.
“That’s because you want to play the game,” she said. “You want to get in with Adam, in case he’s going places. I don’t.”
“I can see why you’d want a new start,” I admitted.
“No you can’t,” she told me, sharply. “I told you before — you don’t know shit about me.”
“So tell me,” I retorted. “Why did you kill all those people? Your parents I could probably understand, but what about the others? If my memory serves me rightly, you didn’t have any connection with them at all, let alone a plausible motive.”
She looked at me, and then she looked away, at the garden where lions lay down with lambs and the butterflies lived forever.
“Don’t you believe that VE tape you told me about?” she asked. “I couldn’t stand myself, so I hid in false personalities disguised as ancestral memories, acting out the underlying trauma again and again.”
“No, I don’t believe it,” I said. “The writer claimed that it was taken from your own testimony — but that was only one of the stories you told. I don’t remember exactly, but I think there was at least one epic of harrowing child abuse, and at least one item of bad science fiction in which your foster parents had all been replaced by aliens, and a couple more besides. If you’d stuck to the first one, you might have got off, although you’d have needed an extra wrinkle to accommodate the three strays. There were a lot of bad parents around. They were the first generation who had to get used to a new system of parenthood that was radically different from the biological model, and they incorporated all the badness with which the whole damn world was still infected.”
“My foster parents weren’t bad,” she said. “The marriage broke up — smashed to smithereens — but they tried as hard as they could to protect me from all that.” She sounded as though she hadn’t the faintest idea why she’d done what she’d done.
“So why tell the abuse story?” I asked. “Why tell any of the stories, if they weren’t true?”
“I had to tell the stories,” she said, as if it were as simple as that. “They kept coming back for more, and the one thing they couldn’t abide was silence. They probably told themselves that they were wearing me down, waiting for the truth to emerge when I ran out of lies, but they weren’t. They liked the stories. They always wanted more. So do you. You just want a story — and if I give you one you’ll want another, and another. That’s all I am to you: a story.”
“According to Bad Karma,” I pointed out, “that’s all you were to yourself. Did you ever have the slightest idea why you did it? Or were you making up story after story by way of exploration — or distraction?”
“I got out in the end, didn’t I?” she said, softly. “I’m here. I’m free. I’m never going back. I’m a winner. Maybe I did it in order to be put away, to make sure that I’d be the one to wake up in Wonderland. Maybe Adam Zimmerman is the one who did it the hard way.”
I didn’t believe that, but I could see that she wasn’t going to tell me anything I could believe.
“The woman from the Confederation might not make us an offer,” I said, although I didn’t believe it. “She might think that we belong on Earth, and good riddance to us. We may not have the option of going elsewhere.”
“I don’t think so,” Christine replied, serenely confident. “While we’re the only real humans in the universe, everyone will be interested in us. Even if they begin to bring the others back, there won’t be enough to go round. We’re mortals, Madoc. We’re their ancestors. They need us. They all need us, not just the stick-in-the-muds who cling to the Earth. They all need us because they’ve all forgotten what we were like, and they all need to be reminded.”
I could have objected that Michael Lowenthal and Mortimer Gray seemed human enough, for all their advanced years, but I didn’t. I knew what she meant. I knew, even on the basis of my first faltering inquiries, that emortality had not been acquired without cost, and that Lowenthal and Gray were as profoundly different from me, in their own way, as Davida’s sisterhood and the cyborganizers.
I could also have pointed out that whatever the reason had been, Christine had thought that the most appropriate thing to do to her own self-appointed ancestors was to murder the lot, and three other people besides. I didn’t do that either.
“This isn’t the Omega Point, Christine,” I told her. “It’s not even a fancy VE. It’s just the same old world, with a thousand extra years of history. Its inhabitants may be curious, but they have other things to be interested in that are far more fascinating than us. They’ll lose interest in us soon enough, unless we can find a way to keep some of them on the hook.”
“I don’t run out of stories easily,” she said. “Do you?”
Fifteen
The Ship from Earth
We watched the docking of Peppercorn Seven through the “window” in my quarters. Davida Berenike Columella wasn’t with us; she was part of the reception committee that would bring Gray and Lowenthal through the microworld’s mysterious interior to meet us.
The viewpoint f
rom which we watched the spaceship’s final approach was way out on one of Excelsior’s spiny limbs, so we could see a good deal of the microworld as well as the approaching vessel. I’d already studied diagrams of its structure, so I was able to make sense of most of the structures I could see.
The docking station was in Excelsior’s hub: the zero-gee core about which the other environments rotated. The hub was the site of the microworld’s most advanced AIs and the core of its communication system as well as the anchorage of the artificial photosynthetic systems supplying the station’s organics. It also had capacious living spaces of its own, although there were no fabers currently in residence. All that was expectable, but there were a couple of things that the diagram hadn’t shown to full advantage: the tentacles and the ice.
Everything on a diagram tends to look rigid and mechanical, but seen through the camera’s eye Excelsior seemed much more lifelike. It gave the impression of floating in oceanic space like some kind of weird sea creature: a hybrid of wrack and Portuguese man-o’-war, bound to a coral base. Like the man-o’-war, it trailed countless slender tentacles that mostly hung loose, except that their resting positions were determined by the movement of the microworld rather than by gravity. When they became active, they moved with lifelike purpose.
Even while the ship was some distance away the tentacles grouped around the mouth of the docking bay were making their adjustments, as if anticipating a meal. The spinning “wheel” enclosing the weighted components of the microworld was mostly devoid of protective ice, but it had a much smarter surface which presumably had its own ways of dealing with stray dust particles and dangerous surges in the solar wind. It had its own frill of tentacles, but they were much less impressive than the snaky locks of the medusal core.
The Omega Expedition Page 14