The “coraline” part of the ensemble was mostly metals and ceramics, but that wasn’t obvious from where we were standing, because the solid and substantial parts of the microworld were encased in cometary ice, which served as an outer shield as well as a resource. The ice hadn’t been sculpted in the careful fashion of the ice palaces of Antarctica and Titan, but it caught sunlight and starlight anyway. Refraction sent the rays every which way before letting them out in a fashion that was far from chaotic, although the patterns were accidental and serendipitous.
From where we looked back at them, Excelsior’s icy vistas sparkled and glowed. Even though I knew full well that all but the tiniest fraction of its internalized light had to originate in the sun, I couldn’t avoid the impression that the show was the product of the millions of stars and galaxies that crowded in the background. Some of the photons deflected through it from those distant sources were mere decades old, but some of them were reaching the climax of a journey that had begun in the aftermath of the Big Bang.
Compared with the complex structure of the microworld, the ship from Earth was disappointingly dull. It had no fins and no obvious propulsion pods. To me it looked like a metal ball that had been carelessly miscast — or very badly scratched and scarred after its removal from the mold — from which a single spike extended with a smaller ball attached to its tip. Seen in isolation, set against the hectic background of stars, the craft might have been any size at all, but when the elastic docking cables reached out with remarkable delicacy and tenderness to complete its deceleration I realized that it was smaller than I had initially imagined.
The ball was no bigger than a five-ton truck, with an internal cubic capacity about the same as that of the room from which we were observing it. The blister on the end of the spike couldn’t have been much more capacious than the four-seater automobiles in which I’d driven around old Los Angeles. The cocoons containing Mortimer Gray, Michael Lowenthal, and Lowenthal’s two “assistants” had to be packed so tight that they would have to disembark one by one, through a crawl space narrow enough to terrify a claus-trophobe.
I recalled, with a slight shudder, that there were two spare cocoons aboard — but only two. If Adam Zimmerman, Christine Caine, and I all elected to travel back to Earth, one of the delegates would have to stay behind on Excelsior. Even though I didn’t have any present intention of going to Earth on Peppercorn Seven I hoped that the blister was flexible enough to accommodate six passengers without cramming them into its core like the pips in an apple. I knew that it had to be made of something radiation-proof, but I figured that it must be more versatile than it looked.
Having made similar calculations, Christine muttered: “Space travel seems to be a lot less comfortable than a first-class cabin in a zeppelin, even after a thousand years of progress.” I couldn’t believe that she’d ever been in a first-class cabin in a zeppelin, but she was obviously a hardened VE tourist in spite of her tender years.
“It’s just like a long session in a bodysuit,” I said. “In fact, it is a long session in a bodysuit. Lowenthal’s probably been taking care of business every step of the way, despite the ever-growing transmission delay. Gray was probably working too.”
“My mothers used to tell me that my muscles would atrophy and my extremities would get gangrene if I stayed in a full suit for more than a couple of hours at a time,” she observed, drily.
“They were exaggerating — and those kinds of medical problems must have been solved long ago,” I said. She must have worked that out for herself, but I couldn’t help adopting a mentor pose. I made a mental note to make absolutely sure that she didn’t begin seeing me as a father figure.
“With an intravenous drip and a catheter a person could probably stay in VE forever, nowadays,” she said, effortlessly taking up the thread of the argument. “We could take up permanent residence in the fantasies of our choice.”
The first title that came to mind, reflexively, was Bad Karma, but I didn’t say so. Way back when, I had always told my critics — and, for that matter, myself — that the fight tapes I made were a public service, because they allowed people with a taste for violence to indulge it harmlessly. There was a grain of truth in the argument, but not enough. If Christine Caine had wanted to commit virtual murders she could have done so, even in the twenty-second century. Maybe the quality of the illusion wouldn’t have lived up to the standards of the world in which we now found ourselves, but that wasn’t the factor that had displaced her murderous passion into the meatware arena. Murder is only murder if you kill real people. Life is only life if you actually live it. Maybe there were some among the Earthbound who really did spend most of their lives in VE nowadays — but I was willing to bet that they were far outnumbered by people who regarded VE as workspace and social space, and only ventured into fantasylands for the sake of occasional relaxation.
Christine Caine, I suppoed, must have seen multiple versions of all her favorite fantasies while she was a child, but it wasn’t just the warnings her mothers had given her that had brought her back to stern reality. Perhaps that was a pity; if she’d become an addict, she’d probably have been harmless.
The umbilical had been attached to Peppercorn Seven’s blister now, although there had been no obvious hatchway on the pitted surface. The tube didn’t seem to be wide enough to accommodate a full-sized human body without bulging, and it was possible to see the vague outline of the first person out of the capsule. The movement of the bolus along the umbilical was smooth, presumably controlled by peristalsis rather than by any undignified wriggling on the part of the passenger.
We counted the four passengers into the body of Excelsior one by one, but once the umbilical had been sealed it was by no means an exciting business.
“The other ship is much bigger, apparently.” I told my companion, slipping back into mentor mode just for a moment. “Child of Fortune isn’t just a nest of cocoons — it actually has empty spaces inside, and an ecosphere of sorts.”
I needn’t have bothered; Christine had researched the topic and obviously knew more about Child of Fortune than I did. She confirmed that the spacecraft built in the outer system were very much more complicated, almost qualifying as microworlds in their own right. “It has an AI brain as big as Excelsior’s,” she concluded. “Really big, and really smart — a supersilver. But machines still don’t have the vote.”
The last addendum was phrased as a jokey offhand comment, but I guessed that she’d actually researched that too.
The consensus in our time had been that AIs could never become conscious because there were fundamental limitations in inorganic neural networks — fundamental meaning right down at the atomic and subatomic levels. No matter how rapid they were as calculators, nor how capacious they became as datastores, nor how how clever they became at animating human-seeming sims, they would always be automata, according to the best human brains around. Consciousness, according to the dominant view, was something that could only emerge in organic systems, and was precarious even there. What I’d found out about the history of emortality suggested that the same opinion was still dominant — although my reflexive tendency to treat any popular opinion with derision reminded me that there were ideological reasons why “the best human brains” might want to believe that they could never be equaled or surpassed.
“The modern opinion seems to be that it’s far easier for organic brains to become robotized — reduced to mere automata — than it is for automata to acquire the creative, conflicted, and multilayered messiness that’s the fount of consciousness,” I said to Christine.
“Unless and until the people of the glorious thirty-third century actually find a reliable way of detecting and measuring consciousness, it’ll probably remain a matter of opinion,” she retorted. “The ships they use in the outer system have to take much longer trips and they have to be much more versatile, so they have to be a lot smarter too. That thing just sits around in an orbital parking lot waiting for people t
o shuttle up out of the gravity well. It’s a glorified cab that hops back and forth between Earth, Luna, and their neighboring microworlds. The ships they use outside the belt have to be capable of operating on the surfaces of icebound satellites and in the outer atmospheres of gas giants. They have to be extremely smart — and it isn’t just outer system equipment that has to be smart. The people busy terraforming Venus and mining Mercury have much smarter AIs at their disposal than the people on Earth. Outer System AIs could have played a much larger part in the Gaean Restoration, if the Earthbound hadn’t refused them the chance. The Earthbound are afraid of them.”
Are they? I wondered. Or is it just that they won’t pay the asking price for equipment designed and manufactured in the outer system. I knew that there was an AI “metropolis” on Ganymede, where the outer system ships and interstellar probes were mostly built, but I hadn’t carried my research beyond the merest matters of fact. I made a mental note to make a more careful investigation of the balance of trade between the Hardinist Cabal and the Confederation.
There was nothing more to watch, and we didn’t know how long we’d have to wait for our introduction to the ambassadors from Earth, so we turned away from the window.
“Have you looked at Venus?” Christine asked me.
“No,” I said, “but I’ve seen picture-postcard views of Titan and Ganymede. Just like old science fiction tapes. Curiously nostalgic, in a way. I used to know someone who worked on that kind of imagery, until he sold out to PicoCon.”
“Damon Hart,” she guessed. It was the first indication I’d had that she’d been researching me, and that she’d seen the tape of my first conversation with Davida. It was oddly disturbing, although I was aware of the absurdity of thinking that my privacy had been invaded.
“Yes,” I conceded, dully. “Damon Hart.”
“Conrad Helier’s heir. Eveline Hywood’s too. Quite a start in life.”
I knew that Christine had been put away before Hywood hit the headlines as the supposed inventor of para-DNA, and long before para-DNA was anything but a few black blobs carelessly discarded in the Pacific in the unfulfilled hope that it might be misidentified as a natural product. She’d been digging — and now she was fishing. Somehow, it didn’t seem as understandable that she should be interested in me as it was that I should be interested in her. She was the crazy one.
“Yeah,” I said. “It was a real privilege to have known him, I think. I can’t quite shake the suspicion that he had something to do with my being put away, though — and if he didn’t, he doesn’t seem to have lifted a finger to get me out, even though he was firmly established in the Inner Circle long before he died. I still can’t remember…but I have this gut feeling.””
She’d probably have continued probing if we hadn’t been interrupted, but we were. Mortimer Gray and Michael Lowenthal were obviously keen to get on; they couldn’t have lingered more than a couple of minutes exchanging pleasantries with the sisterhood’s welcoming committee before hopping back into yet another glorified white corpuscle and speeding through Excelsior’s bloodstream to us.
Sixteen
The Men from Earth
Michael Lowenthal and Mortimer Gray were so keen to see us, in fact, that they were practically elbowing one another out of the way as they approached. They both headed directly for me, but that might have been because Christine, gripped by a sudden fit of modesty, had dropped back to a position almost directly behind me.
Davida Berenike Columella tried to catch up with them in order to make the introductions, but Lowenthal wouldn’t wait for her. He introduced Gray, although that was hardly necessary, and his two other companions. One of them was a soberly clad male named Jean de Comeau, whose title I didn’t catch because I was too busy concentrating my attention on the one who obviously wasn’t a UN bureaucrat: a female named Solantha Handsel.
Solantha Handsel had enough hardware built into her smartsuit — and probably into her own flesh — to give the appearance of being half-robot. It seemed to me that she might as well have had the word “bodyguard” stenciled on her flat but muscular chest.
It occurred to me that traveling with a bodyguard might be a social status thing — a matter of mere ornamentation — but my paranoia wasn’t prepared to let me make the assumption. Nor was it prepared to write off the cyborg as an item of intimidatory showmanship. What my paranoia said was that if Michael Lowenthal had brought a minder with him, he expected to need minding. Maybe the sisters weren’t as harmless as they seemed, and maybe he was anxious about
Christine Caine’s reputation, but the more worrying possibility was that he had cause to be worried about Niamh Horne’s yet-to-arrive entourage, or that he thought he had cause to be worried about me.
I’m not quite sure how it happened, but while I was busy formulating these thoughts Lowenthal cut me out from the crowd with well-trained expertise and somehow contrived — perhaps with Solantha Handsel’s aid — to establish an invisible cordon sanitaire around us.
“Welcome back, Mr. Tamlin,” he said, smiling broadly. “I understand that you used to work for us.”
“Only as a subcontractor,” I assured him, without bothering to quibble about the use of the word us. “Why, do you think you owe me money?”
He laughed politely. “If we did,” he said, “the compound interest would have inflated it into a tidy sum by now. Unfortunately, we have no record of it, and the credit balance in your own accounts was sequestered long ago to pay for your incarceration.”
“That’s just the accounts you know about,” I told him. I figured that if he wanted to imply that I was seriously poor, I might as well fight back. “It’ll need some serious investigation to find out about the others. Not that I can compete with Christine, of course. She’s got all those royalties owing to her for Bad Karma.”
He must have known that I was fishing. “We don’t have a copy of it, I’m afraid,” he assured me. “Mortimer may be able to turn one up. He spends a lot of time in the mountains — even more than he used to, now that their contents have been even more extensively trashed than they were before. We do, however, have copies of some of your old tapes, along with other data. All discarded by publicly accessible datastores, I fear. It seemed very unlikely to the custodians of our history that the items in question would ever be required again.”
“But you squirreled it away regardless,” I said. I tried to maintain a light tone as I said: “I don’t suppose you know why I was put into SusAn in the first place? I seem to have mislaid the memory.”
He didn’t seem surprised by the question — but he did seem slightly suspicious, as if he didn’t believe that I’d lost the memory and didn’t mind my knowing it. “That’s an intriguing mystery,” he said, blandly. “We don’t have any record of your conviction for a crime. As I said, our financial records show that your existing credit was seized to pay for the upkeep of your frozen body. Damon Hart neglected to make any provision for that purpose — but that was probably a genuine oversight.”
I couldn’t believe that he’d use a phrase like “probably a genuine oversight” unless he intended to imply the opposite, or that he’d have mentioned Damon Hart at all unless he too was fishing for information. In which case, I deduced, he probably didn’t have the faintest idea why I’d been put away — although he was certainly interested in finding out.
“I suppose I ought to be glad that I was looked after so well, even though my credit ran out,” I said. “I seem to have slept through at least two major disasters — I do hope that I haven’t been revived on the eve of a third.”
He didn’t laugh at that suggestion. “This is a far better world than the one you left behind, in terms of the existential opportunities it presents,” he assured me. “We’ll be happy to help you in any way we can to adapt yourself to it, if that’s your wish.”
“Did you know Damon Hart personally?” I asked, abruptly.
“Slightly,” Lowenthal admitted. “It’s not surprising tha
t he never mentioned you in conversation, but I can’t find any reference to you in the files he left behind. It’s almost as if someone deleted you from the record of his life — and from all the other records to which he had access.”
It was obvious that he didn’t mean “almost as if” at all, and that he thought the someone in question must have been Damon.
“It must be easy enough for a person as unimportant as me to be forgotten,” I said, trying to match his bland tone. “Damon was my friend for twenty years, but he lived for three hundred more after I was frozen down. He must have become a completely different person. I expect he forgot about such trivialities as my upkeep long before he died.”
“Perhaps so,” Lowenthal agreed, insincerely. I took note of the fact that although Solantha Handsel seemed perfectly relaxed she was still within arm’s reach, and the way she occasionally glanced at me was neither unwary nor incurious. If Lowenthal knew more about me than he was prepared to say, or even if he merely had more cause to be suspicious than he was prepared to reveal, what he knew or suspected seemed to be enough to put him on his guard.
“I understand that the delegation from the Outer System will be here soon,” I said, mildly. “I’m looking forward to meeting them — all the more so now I’ve seen your cyborganizer.”
“I’m looking forward to it too,” Lowenthal assured me. I didn’t believe him. Solantha Handsel seemed to be about to say something — perhaps to deny that she was a cyborganizer in the strictest sense of the term — but she shut up as soon as it became clear that her boss had more to say.
“To be perfectly frank,” Lowenthal went on, seeming to me to be speaking anything but frankly, “it’s good to have an excuse to meet Niamh face to face. All kinds of problems seem to get in the way of people like her traveling to Earth, or people like me visiting Titan. This little party should provide a very valuable opportunity for a frank and informal exchange of views. To be honest, that’s the real reason I’m here — and presumably the real reason for her presence. But that’s not to say that I’m not interested to meet you, and Adam Zimmerman too. My offer of useful employment is perfectly sincere, and I hope that you’ll accept it.”
The Omega Expedition Page 15