The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [101]
“I suppose there might,” I conceded. “In fact, there might be details of our surroundings whose significance you can judge far better than I, not to mention details of our physical condition. They seem to have purged our IT, but they weren’t able to purge Niamh Horne’s externals. If anyone’s still capable of communication with the outside world, it’s her. Is that why you’re expecting Emily Marchant to come rescue us?”
He frowned to display his disapproval of my unhelpful attitude, but he answered me anyway. “Solantha Handsel is a cyborg too,” he pointed out, mildly. “Given that we started from Earth orbit, Julius Ngomi might be able to obtain news of our difficulties long before anyone on Titan.”
“Who’s Julius Ngomi?” I asked.
“The only member of the Inner Circle to whom I can confidently put a name,” he said, wearily accepting my agenda, presumably in the hope that I would eventually condescend to get back to his. “He’s another man who once suggested to me that the conflicts of interest that were growing up within the solar system couldn’t be settled with mere words and spontaneous bursts of fellow feeling. There are, I fear, people like him on both sides of the current dispute between Earth and the Confederation.”
I put the spoon aside and sipped gruel direct from the bowl. I was beginning to feel better, but I opened the bottle Alice had given me and tipped out a couple of tablets. I used the gruel to wash them down.
“The sort of person who might want to bomb all hell out of Titan?” I suggested. “Partly to punish the people who probably set off the Yellowstone supervolcano, but mainly to let other interested parties know that nobody messes with the cradle of humankind and gets away with it?”
Gray shook his head. “No,” he said. “Nobody’s that crazy — certainly not Julius. When I say that he doesn’t approve of mere words, I don’t mean to imply that he’s a man of violence. He’s a Hardinist through and through. He thinks that ownership and good stewardship are the answers to all human problems. He just wants to settle the question of who owns what. Did you know that there’s a stock market on Titan now?”
I couldn’t help laughing. “Do you think he brought Adam Zimmerman out of cold storage to do it again?” I asked, not very seriously.
“Not at all,” he replied, keeping his own tone light. “But I think he might have brought Adam Zimmerman out of cold storage to remind us all what a great hero he was, and how his cleverness saved the world from the ultimate ecocatastrophe. If he was the one who gave the order to bring Zimmerman out, he must have intended to use him as an instrument of propaganda — perhaps to help prepare the way for a strictly nonviolent revolution, whose ultimate aim is to install a judiciously extended Cabal as owners and stewards of the entire solar system.”
He was obviously being serious — and he was the man who was supposed to understand the way the world worked, far better than I did. If the Earthbound really were stuck in the mud, though, the Hardinist Cabal might have retained the habits it had had in my day, when it had consisted of PicoCon and a few good friends. If so, they might indeed have decided to tackle their problems by widening their circle — by welcoming people like Emily Marchant into the fold, on whatever terms were negotiable. Maybe the outer system powers-that-be thought of themselves as the kind of people who’d never go for that kind of deal, but Damon Hart had thought of himself that way at one time. So had I.
If Mortimer Gray was right, I thought, and nobody was crazy enough to go to war, the only matter to be settled was the balance of power at the conference table — including the question of who was entitled to a seat. Maybe this really was the same kind of game that Damon and