The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [120]
“I’m a very long way from home,” I reminded her. “I can’t remember whether I had the choice or not — but if I had, knowing what I know now, I’d have taken it.” I meant it. I wished I had something other than water to wash the manna down, though. It was good, especially by comparison with the food on Excelsior, but it was functional food with no frills. I’d come to a point in my new life where I’d have appreciated a few frills.
“I can understand why you would,” she said. “Mortimer Gray would have volunteered too — but they’re probably a little wary of volunteers. They seem to have been aiming for a more representative cross section.”
“But Gray’s the important one,” I reminded her.
“Gray is humankind’s best hope for a profitable compromise,” she said. “Gray commands affection and respect, even among his own kind. The old saying about prophets and honor seems to have found an exception in his case.”
I wasn’t really interested in the precise shape of Mortimer Gray’s reputation. “I still can’t see where I fit in,” I said. “I’d be very interested to know whether I was a random selection or one of the devil’s nominees.”
She didn’t have to ask what I meant. If the machines really were going to put humankind on trial, she couldn’t suppose that the inclusion of Christine Caine among those summoned by subpoena was an accident. It seemed to me that Christine must have been selected as a bad example: a person who really did seem to be in need of “repair.” I really couldn’t see myself in quite the same way, but I wasn’t sure that others shared my incapacity. At any rate, I was anxious enough to raise the matter.
“I don’t know,” was the only reply I got from Alice. I hoped that it was the simple truth.
“So, do we know where we’re going yet?” was the next question that occurred to me. I didn’t have any expectations, because I had no idea what might qualify as neutral territory in a conflict of this kind.
“Vesta,” she said. “It’s an asteroid.”
“I know,” I said, although I wasn’t absolutely sure I’d have got the answer if it had been a question on a quiz show. “What particular symbolic significance does Vesta have?”
“None at all,” she assured me. “It happens to be in a convenient situation right now. In the end, it all came down to the present positions of the major bodies in the solar system. It’s hours away from anywhere else, communication-wise, but that’s no bad thing. The encounter itself will take place in virtual space, of course — the physical location isn’t really relevant.”
“Encounter? That’s what this is? Not a game or a debate or a trial?” The question came from Michael Lowenthal. The sound of our voices had begun to wake up everyone else; the crowd was already gathering.
“It’s nothing we have a ready-made word for,” Alice told him. “Potentially, at least, it’s the end of the old order and the beginning of the new, but nothing quite like it has ever happened before — not even on Tyre.”
“Never mind the rhetoric,” Lowenthal said. “What I want to know is exactly what your friends intend to do with us now that they have us in their power.”
Alice sat back in her chair, as if gathering her resources. She’d finished her own meal, while Lowenthal, Niamh Horne, and Solantha Handsel were still in the process of forming a rather disorderly queue, so she had a slight advantage. It occurred to me to wonder whether she might have come to us with an entirely different script if Mortimer Gray had come up with a different solution to the mystery, but I put the thought away. I still couldn’t be absolutely certain that I wasn’t in some kind of VE, but it wouldn’t do me any good to get too tightly wrapped up in doubt. However skeptical you are, you have to operate as if things are real, just in case they are.
“I wish I could tell you everything you want to know,” was her reply. “All I can offer is the little that I do know.”
“It’ll be a start,” Michael Lowenthal — ever the diplomat — conceded.
“I don’t know exactly what they’ll do,” she said, “but I do know that the note of derision in your voice when you