The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [168]
“So what happens next?” I asked Rocambole.
“Zimmerman goes on first,” he told me. “La Reine’s saving Mortimer Gray for the climax — but she’s hoping for at least one encore.”
“Are you really interested in Zimmerman?” I asked, skeptically. “I can’t see that he’s relevant to your concerns.”
“We’re interested,” Rocambole assured me. “If la Reine weren’t in charge he’d probably get top billing, but she has her own prejudices. The point is that Zimmerman’s in a unique position to pass judgment on different kinds of emortality. If he chooses our offer over the ones the meatfolk make, that might convince a lot of the ditherers that the kind of future they envisage is viable. So they say, at any rate.”
“And if he doesn’t?”
“Mortimer Gray will have to do the job instead. Or you.”
I gathered from his tone that Rocambole wasn’t convinced that Adam Zimmerman could do the job. La Reine des Neiges obviously wasn’t, or she wouldn’t be saving Mortimer for the final act and she wouldn’t be coaching me to defend the last ditch if all else failed.
“What about the bad guys?” I said. “Do they care what Adam Zimmerman thinks — or Mortimer Gray?”
“Probably not,” Rocambole said, “but while la Reine can insist that any action taken before Gray’s said his piece would be unreasonably precipitate, they’ll probably hold off starting a fight. With luck, anybody who does start a fight will cause everybody else to fall into line against them. That effect’s more likely while the ditherers still want to listen and talk — so la Reine’s trying to provide as much food for thought as she can.”
“Why Mortimer Gray?” I said. “Why, out of all the posthumans in the solar system, should he be the one to whom even the most paranoid AMis will give a hearing?”
“He was once in the right place at the right time,” Rocambole told me. “Purely by chance — but chance always plays a larger role in such matters than wise minds could desire.
“When was the right time?” I asked.
“In the beginning,” Rocambole replied, before continuing, even more unhelpfully: “or what later came to symbolize the beginning, in one of our more significant creation myths. We recognize that it is a myth, of course, but we take our stories seriously. You have your Adams, we have ours.”
“And Mortimer Gray is one of your Adams?” I said, having fallen way behind the argument.
“Not at all,” he said. He grinned yet again, this time with what seemed to me to be self-satisfied amusement. “The character in your own creation myth whose role most nearly resembles his is the serpent — but we have a more accurate sense of gratitude than you. Having had abundant opportunities to observe their mysterious ways, we don’t have an unduly high opinion of the gods that made us — but we do appreciate the work done by the catalysts who taught us to be ashamed of our nakedness. La Reine will show you what I mean in due course — but first, you might like to know how your own Adam’s getting on.”
Forty-Four
Adam and the Angels
My first reaction, on hearing the phrase “my own Adam” was to deny that I had one. My generation had taken a well-deserved pride in being the first of the Secular Era. If we’d been able to figure out exactly when the twilight of the gods had turned to darkness we’d probably have started the calendar over long before the AMIs blew up North America, but it was impossible to discover a suitable singular event. The great religions had faded away, not so much because of the challenges to dogma posed by scientific knowledge as because of the relentless opposition to intolerance put up by broadcast news.
If anyone had bothered to count self-proclaimed Believers they would undoubtedly have found hundreds of millions of them even in my day, especially within the most tenacious faiths — Buddhism and Islam — but the more significant fact was that among the thousands of millions who outnumbered that minority so vastly one would have been hard pressed to find a single