The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [211]
I had to explain what I meant about Zimmerman’s decision, but I didn’t have to go into nearly as much detail as Davida, Alice, and la Reine.
Lowenthal didn’t take it at all well. “They might not stop at offering us the opportunity of robotization,” he murmured. “They might decide that we need it whether we like it or not. And they have the means to turn us all into sloths.”
“We’ve been repairing them for centuries,” I pointed out. “Maybe it’s only fair that they should have a turn. But that wasn’t what la Reine was trying to set up. For those in her camp, it really is a matter of selling the idea. They don’t want to force us — they want to win us over. That’s what they care about. It makes for a better game, a more meaningful victory.”
“Zimmerman won’t go for it,” Horne predicted, just as I had.
Playing devil’s advocate, I said: “Who knows what Zimmerman will go for after all he’s been through? He has little enough in common with me, let alone with you. Who knows how deep his fear of death really cuts, or what might seem to him to be an acceptable final solution? One thing’s for sure — from now on, the effective rulers of humankind’s little corner of the universe are the AMIs. Zimmerman lived in an era when people still said if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.”
“It’s not what he wanted,” Lowenthal pointed out.
“He might have known what he wanted back in twenty thirty-five,” I said, “but that was because he didn’t know what there might be to want. He’s met Davida now, and Alice. Thirty-two sixty-three is a new year and a new millennium, with more and stranger opportunities than he ever dreamed possible. He might set an example to us all.”
“Who cares?” said Niamh Horne, brutally.
“We should all care,” I told her, teasingly. “He’s our Adam, the architect of our world — or the closest thing we’ve got.”
“And what does that make you?” she retorted.
I knew what she was implying, but I was way ahead of her. “I’m Madoc Tam Lin,” I said. “I’ve supped with the Queen of the Fays and I’ve lived to tell the tale. Whether we get out of this alive or not, I’m the star of my own subplot — and, unlike either of you, I’m already way ahead of the game.”
Fifty-Four
Rocambole
I didn’t go into the tunnels looking for Rocambole. I went to get a little peace and quiet. I was barbarian enough to have carried forward a certain regard for privacy, and a certain nostalgia for the company of walls that didn’t have eyes and ears. Reality itself seemed quiet and unobtrusive after the insistence of la Reine’s VE, but that only served to sharpen the craving. So I found an ancient piece of chalk, which the people who’d sent in the dumb robots to hollow out the tunnels had used to mark out their own exploratory journeys, and I set off with a lantern to see how mazily extensive they really were.
They were very mazy, and seemingly very extensive. It wasn’t easy to make marks with the chalk because the walls were covered with the same vitreous tegument that covered the cave where we’d woken up, but I managed to leave an identifiable trail.
Hollowing out an asteroid and using the transplanted material to erect several layers of superstructure on the original surface may sound like a straightforward sort of project, especially if the hollowers have the advantage of working with an iron-rich specimen, but complications set in when you begin the work of figuring out what sort of internal architecture you intend to produce and a step-by-step plan for producing it. I’d only seen VE models of such projects back in the twenty-second century, but I’d tried to take an intelligent interest in all kinds of VE modeling while I was in the business, so I had a rough and elementary grasp of the principles involved.
So far as I could tell, the would-be colonists of Polaris had laid down the primary network of arterial tunnels and numerous side branches, but they hadn’t gotten around to