The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [165]
“I’m ready to guess,” I said, with a sigh, “if the fairy queen is ready to listen.”
Apparently, she wasn’t.
Forty-Three
Outward Bound
Niamh Horne wasn’t in any kind of containment facility, but she didn’t need to be. She was supposed to think that she was aboard a ship that wouldn’t be docking anywhere for quite a while.
Her stare was as fixed as Lowenthal’s had been, but I was wary of reading too much into that. She had artificial eyes. Their artificiality didn’t seem to make a vast difference to the visual quality of what I could see when la Reine’s magic mirror gave me the ability to share her viewpoint, but that was partly because the lighting was perfectly normal and partly because my brain didn’t have the wiring necessary to make the most of signals relayed by artificial eyes. What was different, however, was the way ghosts could float in a curious limbo within her visual field, seemingly neither inside nor outside her head.
Unlike Lowenthal, Niamh Horne wasn’t talking to someone in higher authority. She was talking to the sims of people who were at most her equals; I caught on quickly enough to the fact that there were some of them to whom she was used to giving orders.
There were eight faces linked into the spectral video conference, arranged in a near semicircle. They didn’t have name tags. The only one I thought I recognized was Davida Berenike Columella, who was on the far right of the array, isolated from the rest as if she were a slightly inconvenient guest; after a double take, however, I realized that it wasn’t actually Davida but one of her siblings. For my own convenience I gave the rest of them numbers, starting on the far left.
“We may have an advantage here,” the cyborganizer was explaining to her colleagues and underlings. “I don’t know how many sedentary AMIs there are within the solar system, but I know where the largest concentration has to be.”
“Ganymede,” guessed Five, a cyborg whose head seemed to be fitted with at least two extra sense organs, one shaped as a pair of antennae, the other as an extra pair of eyelets.
“Right,” said Horne. “Ganymede is now the key to everything. If any posthuman faction already knows about the AMIs, it’s the Ganymedans. Even if they don’t, they’re occupying a crucial position. They’re bound to become the primary mediators. We have to increase our own presence on Ganymede, and we have to make sure that we and the Ganymedans are ready to present a united front in either direction.”
“Are we sure the AMIs’ society, such as it is, is well based?” asked Three, a woman whose actual face seemed to be unmodified, although the part of her suitskin overlaying it was highly decorated. “If Child of Fortune has been a secret rogue for some while, how many other ship-controlling AIs might be biding their time? If they have a hierarchy — and how can they not have a hierarchy of some sort? — the groundlings may well be at the bottom of the heap. Maybe we should be looking to the docking orbits, perhaps even to the Oort.”
“We don’t have time to communicate with the Oort crowd,” Horne said, “and they’re strung out on a necklace that’s trillions of kilometers long. This business has to be conducted quickly, and it has to involve considerable populations of people and machines. We can bring in the whole Jovian system if need be, but there has to be a substantial focal point, and no matter how contemptuous we may be of well-worms this kind of business needs a solid anchorage. If the choice is between Ganymede and Earth we have to do everything we can to make sure that it’s Ganymede. There’ll never be a greater upheaval in the political geography of the system, and our first task is to make sure that it settles in favor of the Outer System — there’ll be time after that to bring the Inner System factions