The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [106]
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