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
While 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.
“I made a few suggestions,” I retorted, “but she didn’t react to any of them. She said things were more complicated than Earth versus the Outer System. I believed her — but I’m in no position to guess how complicated things might really be. That’s your province.”
He wouldn’t play. “I agree with Niamh and Mortimer,” he said, stubbornly. “No one wants a war. No one would be so foolish as to start one.”
I shrugged my shoulders theatrically. “I guess we’ll have to wait until they decide to tell us who they are and what they’re up to,” I said. “But there is one more thing we ought to consider.”
“What?” said Niamh Horne, bluntly.
“I was involved in a kidnap once before,” I said. “Fortunately, I wasn’t the one kidnapped — but I remember it as if it were yesterday. They flushed his IT just as they’ve flushed ours. They did it because they wanted to interrogate him. Personally, I don’t have any information that anyone nowadays would want to extract by force — but if I had, I’d be a little nervous. If any one of you does have any valuable secrets tucked away in your head, I wouldn’t rely on being able to keep them secret for long.”
I could tell that Michael Lowenthal had already thought about the possibility. Niamh Horne was still expressionless. Davida still seemed to be so terrified that she could hardly speak. Solantha Handsel was the only one who looked mortally offended by the suggestion, and it was she who said: “They flushed yours too. Are you so certain that you haven’t got anything they might want to know?”
“Yes,” I said. “And I’m also certain that if there was anything they wanted to know, I wouldn’t try to hold out on them. In my experience, though — and I really do have experience — torturers never settle for what you tell them straight away, even when it’s the truth.”
Maybe it was a seed that would have been better left unsown. Maybe it was what provoked our careful hosts to make their next move. If so, they might have done better to resist the provocation.
The biggest of the wallscreens flickered into life, and Alice’s face appeared. “If Mr. Tamlin would care to make his way to the same door as before,” she said, a trifle impatiently, “and the rest of you would please stand clear, I can now give him something that will further reduce his pain and help his injuries heal.”
In a different context, it wouldn’t have sounded ominous at all. In view of what I’d just been saying, nobody was about to take the offer entirely at face value — but I was the only one who knew how much I could have told the others and hadn’t, so I was perfectly prepared to play along.
“Sure,” I said, rising to my feet without the slightest hesitation. “Whatever you’ve found, it has to be better than codeine. I’m on my way.”
I didn’t know what to expect as I walked towards the door, while my companions obediently held back, but I was looking forward to another opportunity to talk to Alice. I didn’t suppose that she’d answer my questions any less guardedly than before, but I figured that the mere fact of my having a second session closeted away with her would increase my advantage over my fellow prisoners. Even if I couldn’t contrive actually to become an officially designated go-between, I figured, I could at least pretend.
Like a fool, I was too busy formulating my own grand plan to anticipate what actually happened next.
I had reached the threshold and was just about to cross over into the waiting darkness, when I was struck down from behind. I was shoved hard, and cleverly, so that I went down face first, sprawling across the open doorway.
If I’d had even half a second’s warning I’d have been able to get my hands spread, in such a way as to prevent my nose coming into contact with the floor, but I didn’t. Once I’d actually been hit, mere reflexes weren’t up to the job.
As the pain exploded in my mind I lost track of everything, except that two feet came down in the small of my back, one after the other. They didn’t belong to the same person; two people bounded over my fallen body, each one using it as a springboard as they hurled themselves through the doorway.
That seemed to me to be adding insult to injury, twice over.
I fought with all my might to recover my presence of mind, and the capacity to act in spite of the agony, but I still needed to be picked up and helped to my feet. Yet again, it was Mortimer Gray who took the lead in rendering assistance, but this time Adam Zimmerman had come to help him.
I couldn’t reply immediately to their inane inquiries as to whether I was “all right” but it must have been obvious that I wasn’t. I was incandescent with pain — and with rage.
I still couldn’t see properly when Solantha Handsel dragged a struggling Alice through the doorway, but I knew that the person still missing had to be Niamh Horne — the only member of our tiny community fully kitted out to see almost as well in near darkness as she did in ordinary light.
The sane and sensible thing to do would have been to stand clear and get myself into proper fighting trim, but fighting isn’t a sane and sensible business. I was still near enough to the door to get in the bodyguard’s way, although I had to shake off a couple of restraining arms to make a good show of it.
“Let her go,” I said to Solantha Handsel, with all the menace I could muster.
She actually looked surprised.
“Sorry,” she said, “but I had to do it that way, or we’d have lost the opportunity.
“Just let her go,” I said.
“Don’t be stupid,” she retorted, undiplomatically. She couldn’t help the reflex that made her hold on to her captive just a little more tightly. That was when I hit her, right between the eyes.
Her nose didn’t break, and I had the impression that it wouldn’t have broken even if I’d hit an inch lower, at the most vulnerable point. My knuckle was probably a good deal more vulnerable than any part of her — but she was used to the protection of state-of-the-art IT, and she wasn’t expecting the uninsulated shock and pain that followed the punch. She wasn’t expecting the kick in the belly either, but it would have hurt a lot more if I hadn’t been barefoot.
The bodyguard let go of Alice, and collapsed in a heap that must have seemed even more undignified to the astonished observers than the heap I’d been in when she hit me from behind.
Nobody else surged forward to grab Alice when Solantha Handsel let her go, but Niamh Horne had already returned from her excursion. The cyborg was blocking the doorway, so there was no opportunity for Alice to run into the darkness.
The Omega Expedition Page 24