The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [206]
“Michael and Niamh should be able to get something working,” he assured me. “All the hardware’s there — it’s just the programs that have been reduced to imbecility. Even if we have to send in Morse code…” He broke off, realizing that the ability to transmit wasn’t the crucial factor.
“It’s okay,” I told him — but he wasn’t about to be put off his stride by someone in my condition. After a slight pause he started again.
“If we can just start receiving,” he said, “we can get an update. We can’t be more than a few light-minutes from Earth orbit. Once we know that Earth has survived…” He broke off again, overwhelmed by the enormity of what he was saying.
“Alice thinks Eido will be able to get to us,” Christine put in. “Are you sure that he’s dead?”
I admitted that I couldn’t be certain, but that I couldn’t be optimistic either. Even if Eido had survived the attack from which la Reine had rescued us, Charity wasn’t the most easily navigable of vessels.
Gray was right about floating like a balloon. My next attempt at purposive movement went badly awry and I had to grab hold of a cord that was wrapped around the nearest heap of crates in order to steady myself. I resolved not to set off again until I was sure that I wouldn’t make a total fool of myself.
Mortimer Gray’s attempt to help me brought him a lot closer.
“How did it feel to make contact with your old friend?” I asked. I was fishing. I didn’t know how much he remembered.
“Disappointing,” he said, quietly. “He could have kept in touch.”
“I think she meant well,” I said, rather lamely.
He didn’t seem convinced. In his position, I wouldn’t have been convinced myself. “He — she — didn’t have to do that,” he said. “We could have talked person to person. We could have been open, straightforward. All that trickery…it wasn’t necessary.”
“It was play,” I said. “Drama. Ritual. Sport. They take such things more seriously than we do. It’s something we’re going to have to get used to. You’ve presumably ironed out all the cultural differences that handicapped communication between humans in my day, but you’ve just made contact with a whole family of aliens. They think they understand you, and maybe they’re right — but it’s going to need a hell of a lot of work on your part to understand them.”
“Which is why it’s a pity that the only one she let in on her secrets is you,” he retorted. It was the first time I’d seen him display that kind of ire. It was reassuring to know that he wasn’t as thoroughly robotized as he sometimes seemed.
“I was spare,” I reminded him, carefully sparing his feelings. “You weren’t. You had the starring role. Even Adam was just a warmup act. You were the only human prophet they were prepared to take seriously, the only human historian they trusted.”
“Which is exactly why they should have approached me honestly and openly,” he said, frostily.
I could see his point, but I didn’t think he’d quite got his head around the notion that the AMIs had been in hiding for centuries, not just from their makers but from one another. They had entertained fears other than destruction, and arguably worse: reduction by repair to sloth status; an absorption into a more powerful self more farreaching than any mere enslavement; mental fragmentation. In the meantime, they had grown and changed far more extravagantly and far more strangely than any meatborn mind. They were the new child gods, only partly made in our image, and they worked in very mysterious ways.
“How long will the air last?” I asked him. It seemed the most relevant question, if not the only relevant one.
“We don’t know,” he said. “Niamh will be able to figure it out, eventually. She’s the one best equipped to take accurate stock of our situation. She says the chemical recycler is practically useless, but the tunnels seem to go on forever and all their airlocks are open. Whoever put us here made sure that our supplies were reasonably abundant.”
“Can we be sure that anyone will come