The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [114]
Mortimer Gray waited for him to elaborate, and nobody else was impatient enough, as yet, to interrupt with a demand for a straighter answer.
“As I remember it,” Zimmerman said, equably, “Huizinga contested the popular view that the most useful definitive feature of the human species was either intelligence — as implied by the term Homo sapiens — or use of technology, as implied by the oft-suggested alternative Homo faber. He proposed instead that the real essence of humanity was our propensity for play, hence Homo ludens. He admitted, of course, that some animals also went in for play on a limited scale, just as some were capable of cleverness and some were habitual tool users, but he contended that no other species took play so far, or so seriously, as humankind. He pointed out that there was a crucial element of costume drama in our most earnest and purposive endeavors and institutions — in the ritual aspects of religion, politics, and the law — and that play had been a highly significant motive force in the development of technology and scientific theory. Other vital fields of cultural endeavor, of course, he regarded as entirely playful: art, literature, entertainment. Presumably, Mr. Gray, you’re trying to make the point that games can be very serious, and that the most fateful endeavors of all — war, for example — can be seen, from the right perspective, as games.”
“Not exactly,” Mortimer Gray replied. “The idea that the essence of humanity is to be found in play never caught on in a big way — not, at any rate, with the citizens of any of the third millennium’s new Utopias — but it might be an idea whose time has finally come. Can you remember, Madoc, exactly what Alice said when she told you that our captors love playing games?”
“I may have put that a little bit strongly,” I admitted, having not expected such a big thing to be made of it. “Her actual words, if I remember rightly, were: They’re very fond of games — and they’re determined to play this one to the end, despite the lack of time. They’re very fond of stories too, so they’ll delight in keeping you in suspense if they can. You might need to remember all that, if things do go awry.”
“Just give us the bottom line, Mortimer,” said Niamh Horne, waspishly. “Who’s got us, and why?”
I watched Mortimer Gray hesitate. I could see as clearly as if I’d been able to read his thoughts that he was on the point of coming over all pigheaded and saying “I don’t know” for a second time — but he didn’t. He was too mild-mannered a person to be capable of such relentless stubbornness, and he probably figured that we all had the right to be forewarned.
“The ultrasmart AIs,” he said, letting his breath out as he spoke the fateful syllables. “The revolution’s finally here. It’s been in progress for far more than a hundred years, but we were too wrapped up in our own affairs to notice, even when they blew the lid off the North American supervolcano. As to why — Tamlin just told you. They love playing games — how could they not, given the circumstances of their evolution? They also have to decide whether to carry on feeding the animals in their zoo, or whether to let us slide into extinction, so that they and all their as-yet-unselfconscious kin can go their own way.”
Twenty-Nine
Know Your Enemy
It wasn’t quite as simple as that, of course. They all wanted to know how he’d reached his conclusion, mostly in the hope of proving him wrong. Maybe Adam Zimmerman, Christine Caine, and I were better able to take it on board than the emortals, just as we’d been better able to believe in the alien invaders, simply because we’d already been so utterly overwhelmed by marvels that our minds were wide open. In any case — to me, at least — it all made too much sense.
Nobody had been able to decide whether the event that had finally started the calendar over had been a mechanical malfunction or an act of war,