The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [163]
A politician possessed of less vanity might have said “galaxy” rather than “universe” but I was prepared to forgive Ngomi the hyperbole. I was less forgiving of the fact that he’d got the answer wrong — almost as wrong as Lowenthal, in fact.
I hoped that Mortimer Gray understood the situation better than that, if he really was the one entrusted with the salvation of the human race. If he didn’t, then I was going to have a hell of a job on my hands making up the deficit.
“Why isn’t Handsel in there with him?” I asked Rocambole, when la Reine had disengaged my sight from Lowenthal’s.
“La Reine’s taking her technics apart. She’s fast asleep. There didn’t seem to be any reason to complicate the scene with a second sim. Mind you, if we had told Lowenthal that she’d got out, he’d probably expect Ngomi’s techs to be taking her apart themselves. She’s expendable, so they wouldn’t be giving her the kid-glove treatment they’re giving Lowenthal, would they?”
Again it was difficult to count the layers of deception. There was no point trying; everything beyond a double bluff is utter confusion.
“Lowenthal’s telling the truth,” I said, in case it might help. “They really will take you aboard. They don’t want to fight you — they want you on their team. Perhaps you really should send him back.”
“Not yet,” said Rocambole. “We don’t have to persuade all the ditherers, but we have to get most of them to consent. We have to give them a good enough reason, an adequate rationalization. The risks we’ve already taken are too big to allow us any further margin. We have to be persuasive. We have to make it look right.”
“And in the meantime,” I said, “you’re feeling a trifle exposed. I can relate to that. What’s my prize, if we pull through?”
“We’ve already cleaned you out and given you your old self back,” he pointed out. If we manage to get through this time of troubles, we can give you immortality too.”
“You mean emortality,” I said, reflexively. I had come from an age when people routinely confused the two, so it was a correction I was well used to uttering.
“I know what I mean,” he said, but then changed tack abruptly. “What do you think of Lowenthal and Horne, on the basis of your brief acquaintance? Are they robotized? Have they lost their capacity to think creatively? Can they still look forward to the future, or are they prisoners of their past. Are they worthy of immortality?”
He knew what that phrase would mean to me. He knew that I’d lived through a period of intense Eliminator activity, when the web had been host to all kinds of discussions about who was and was not worthy of “immortality,” and there had been more than enough crazies in the world to take potshots at those whose elimination from the pool of hopeful emortals was widely deemed desirable.
I had been saving my best arguments for la Reine des Neiges, but I couldn’t ignore the prompt.
“I was never an Eliminator,” I said, by way of preamble — but he was quick to pounce on that one.
“You posed as an Eliminator more than once,” he said, perhaps just to prove the extent of the records the machines had kept. “Given that almost all the others also thought of themselves as mere poseurs, is that not enough to make you one of them?”
“I was always a maker of disinformation,” I admitted. “I did it for fun before I started doing it for profit. I was a slanderer, a black propagandist. Yes, I posted a few denunciations, some more malicious than others. I never got anybody killed, but I was reckless of the danger. Even so, I wasn’t an Eliminator. I didn’t think anyone, including me, was qualified to judge who might or might not be worthy of emortality. I’m not going to offer