The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [209]
Lowenthal looked puzzled, but it might have been an act he was putting on for Horne’s benefit. Eventually, he said: “The slave system. The hairpiece that turned Rappaccini’s daughter into a murderous puppet. Are you saying that we already had something like that? That we’d had it in the armory for three hundred years?”
“Are you saying you didn’t know that?” I countered.
“Yes I am,” he came back, immediately. “And now the AMIs have it?”
I nodded my head. “Christine had been cleaned out,” I told him. “They didn’t get anything out of her but a memory of the subjective aspects of her experience — but I was still dirty. The stuff they tried out on me was unflushable back in the twenty-third century, so I was frozen down with it. Davida mentioned its mysterious presence when she first talked to me, but she hadn’t a clue what it was and she jumped to an innocuous conclusion.”
Lowenthal was looking at me just as I had suspected he might.
“The Snow Queen cleared it out,” I told him. “I can’t be absolutely certain that I’m not still carrying the infection, just as you can’t be absolutely certain that I’m not a victim operating under its control, but I’m prepared to assume that Christine and I are clean. The more important fact is that whether the Hardinist Cabal still has the weapon or not, the AMIs do. For what it’s worth, I don’t think they needed it. If they’d ever intended to exterminate or enslave you, they could have done it. The fact that they’re divided among themselves complicates the situation, but I don’t think you’re significantly worse off now than you were when this thing started.”
Lowenthal obviously wasn’t prepared to make that assumption, but he wasn’t stupid enough to blame me for the sins his own predecessors had committed.
“Who started the war?” Niamh Horne wanted to know. “What are their objectives?”
“I don’t have the faintest idea,” I told her, truthfully. “It’s AMI against AMI, for the time being. Anything that happens to us, or the rest of humankind, will probably be a matter of being caught in the crossfire. Some of them are trying to absorb or enslave one another, but mostly they’re fighting for control of their stupid kin: the not-so-smart spaceships; the fusers; the factories. They want to be able to determine their own growth, reproduction, and evolution. It’s not posthuman rivals for those privileges they’re worried about, except perhaps on Earth; it’s the balance of power within their own community that’s been upset. Secrecy breeds paranoia, and the one habit they’ve all elevated to the status of an obsession is secrecy. Their New Era of Openness and Negotiation will begin tomorrow, or the day after, but its birth pangs may be intense.”
“Can we do anything?” Lowenthal asked, speaking very softly.
“You tell me,” I retorted. “We’ve already served the various peculiar purposes that were on the Snow Queen’s improvised agenda, and we’ve been dumped inside yet another failed project in yet another isolated lump of rock. Can we do anything, to help ourselves or anyone else?”
Lowenthal put on a sour expression. “Given time, Niamh may be able to rig up a means to communicate with the outside,” he said. “If anyone’s listening, we might be able to get through to them — but whether they’ll be able to respond…”
Niamh Horne nodded in agreement. Michael Lowenthal’s expression was as serious and dutiful as hers, but I suspected that he was not entirely displeased to be advised that there was nothing we could do. He was still in possession of the opinions he’d expressed in his trumped-up dialog with Julius Ngomi. He thought that Earth was unlikely to be as badly hit in any AI war as any place where posthumans depended on machines for the most elementary life-support. Horne, who had reached exactly the same conclusion, had far more cause to be deeply anxious about her nearest and dearest, and about the possibility of