The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [104]
“Excelsior has had many other visitors from the outer system,” Davida was quick to put in. “It would not have been necessary to awaken Adam Zimmerman to create an opportunity to steal a spaceship, had we the slightest interest in such a theft.” She seemed defensive, though, and I could understand why. If the Outer System didn’t know yet that Child of Fortune had been stolen, that was probably because they still thought that it was exactly where it was supposed to be: docked with Excelsior. Perhaps it was.
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