The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [100]
His eyebrows barely twitched. He reached up reflexively to stroke his fledgling beard. “Our captors seem to have neglected to provide shoes,” he pointed out, making a feeble attempt at humor. “In fact, they seem to be a long way behind the times in all sorts of ways. Do you have any particular reason for suggesting that they might be aliens pretending to be people pretending to be aliens?”
“Just habit,” I told him. “I always look for the wheels within the wheels within the wheels. I wouldn’t be here today if it weren’t for a kidnapping. I might never have seen Damon Hart again once he’d given up street life if his foster father hadn’t been snatched by people pretending to be Eliminators. It turned out to be a convoluted game — but the end result of it was that our lives were both diverted on to an entirely new track. It seems that you and I have both carried the lessons of our personal history into our current situation. I knew your mother, you know.”
Perhaps I should have saved that particular bombshell for later, but it’s difficult to keep something like that up your sleeve when the temptation to use it is always there.
“What do you mean?” he asked, a trifle slow on the uptake.
“Your biological mother,” I said. “Diana Caisson.”
“Egg donors are of no consequence in our world,” he told me, after only the slightest hesitation. “The embryos from which we’re made undergo such extensive engineering that we acquire far more characteristics than we inherit. I may owe a few genetic idiosyncrasies to the particular individuals who provided the egg and sperm to start me off, but Ali Zaman and all his myriad followers were my true biological parents. I owe everything else that I am to my foster parents…and to Emily Marchant.”
“So you don’t want to know about Diana Caisson?” I said. “You’re not curious?”
“I’m a historian,” he reminded me. “I’m curious about everything you know about your own world. But we have more urgent matters to consider, do we not?”
I was a trifle disappointed, but I figured that if he wanted to play it that way, I could too.
“Fair enough,” I said. “I’m curious myself — but for me, it’s all new, and all urgent. Are the Earthbound really as decadent as everybody seems to think? Have you really become a dead weight inhibiting further progress? Is that why someone’s trying to administer a sharp object lesson to you and Lowenthal — and Adam Zimmerman?”
He only looked uncomfortable for a moment. After all, I was steering him back to safer ground — to his own intellectual territory.
“There are people in the Outer System who are fond of trying to make that case,” he admitted. “It’s nothing new — I heard little else when I lived on the moon. There are political, ecological, and psychological arguments, but they all boil down to the idea that organisms that are so perfectly adapted to their environment that they never have any reason or inclination to leave it are bound to stagnate. Hard-line cyborganizers and proselytizing outward bounders are both fond of declaring that the only way for emortals to avoid robotization is to pose an infinite series of challenges to their inherited nature, by continually moving into alien environments and never remaining too long in any one of them. But I can’t believe that what’s happening to us here and now is just an object lesson. Something very strange is happening, and we really do need to examine every clue you obtained, however slight. If you can tell us exactly what the woman said to you, there might be items of information therein whose significance we can see far better than you.”
I popped the top of the water bottle and drank deeply.