The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [177]
Alice had one afterthought still to add, though. I thought it might have been a late addition rather than a conclusion planned from the beginning: a belated improvisation shaped to counter an unexpected facet of her first opponent’s argument. Either way, it included a crucial concession that was probably fatal to her chances.
“As for sex,” Alice said, “all the options are within the scope of the metamorphic process. Male, female, hermaphrodite…or none at all. I make no claims about new emotional spectra, because it isn’t something we’ve investigated as yet, but I’m prepared to bet that whatever can be done on Excelsior can be done on Tyre, while the reverse presumably isn’t true.
“The one thing I can’t guarantee, however, is that these abilities are cost-free in terms of potential longevity. They probably aren’t. In fact, the stresses and strains associated with continual metamorphosis may well ensure that people of my kind won’t even live as long as the beneficiaries of standard Zaman transformations. But life isn’t something to be measured in purely quantitative terms; the qualitative aspect is far more important. My kind of emortality will put the worlds of other stars at your disposal, so that you may explore them far more intimately than any of the posthuman inhabitants of the home system.
“Excelsior might be able to offer you the longest potential lifespan, but Tyre can offer you the only kind of life worthy of the attention of an ambitious posthuman. Tyre can’t offer you eternity — but it can offer you freedom instead of imprisonment, indefinite opportunity instead of infinite immaturity.”
I was impressed, and I could see that Adam Zimmerman was thoughtful as well as skeptical, but I knew it wasn’t good enough.
“Do you think he’ll go for it?” Rocambole whispered.
“No,” I replied, confidently. “At least, not yet. He might be glad to have it as an option, but he’s not ready to take on a billion galaxies just yet. I’m not sure that he’s even ready to be a werewolf. As I said before, what he wants first of all is to be a man who doesn’t need to die. That’s his first goal, his leading obsession — and that’s not what they’re offering him.”
“What about you?” Rocambole asked.
“Not quite the same, but near enough,” I said. “Maybe I could be a werewolf or a bold explorer of alien environments, eventually if not right away. I’d certainly like to see the universe some day, and I think Alice is right about needing to go native if we’re really to gets to grips with the broad spectrum of unearthly worlds. But for the present…no. If there really is an escalator now that will allow mere mortals to convert to any and every kind of emortality, I think I need to mature a little more before I contemplate life as a dragon-fly or a liquid organism. What would you prefer to look like, if you weren’t pretending to be human in another machine’s virtual universe?”
“Looks aren’t everything,” he said. I assumed that he was motivated by caution rather than shame.
“Nor is size,” I said, by way of ironic reassurance. “I don’t know yet what the Queen of the Icy Fays has to offer, but I suspect that she might have chosen her opponents a little too carefully. Even Lowenthal might have been able to make Zimmerman a more tempting offer than these, simply because he wouldn’t be so ambitious.”
“You might be right,” he conceded.
I didn’t know exactly what to expect from the third pitch, but I did expect it to be good as well as surprising. I was very interested to find out what she had in mind, because I was at least as anxious