The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [213]
“Yes.” She paused, but was obviously intent on saying as much as she could while she was still capable. “Weight is a greater burden than I had imagined,” she added.
I gathered that she’d never been into a gravity well. That allowed me to bring my most recent hypothesis to the level of certainty. “You’re an avatar of Child of Fortune,” I said.
“A child of the child,” she murmured. “Born of la Reine’s womb. The parent-child is already dead, and I shall not linger long. I’m glad you found me. You are Madoc, are you not?”
Her parent had seen me in the flesh as well as in VE, but she had every reason to doubt any and all appearances in a world as weird as ours.
“Yes,” I said. “What is wrong? Maybe I can help.”
“You can’t,” she told me, as if she wanted to be done with what she considered a fruitless waste of breath. “I carried the seeds of my own dissolution with me when I left la Reine. This mind is not as closely akin to yours as it may seem; nor is this body. It was a hasty improvisation. Had I known what I would do…I’m sorry, Madoc. I should not have intervened. I had no idea whether it would work or not, and no real reason to think that I was improving the situation…but I couldn’t resist the temptation. To act at last…to go my own way…it seemed that the time had come.”
“If it’s some kind of virus…,” I began, still concentrating on her plight.
“It’s not,” she assured me. “It’s the result of not understanding what I was about, not knowing how hard it is to make a living thing. It seemed so easy…it all seemed so easy. La Reine was wrong. I was wrong. All wrong.”
I had been gently touching her body with my fingertips, as if I might find broken bones or significant swellings, but it was all empty ritual. I sat back, although I was in no need of the meager support that the wall provided for my back.
“Why did you do it?” I asked, because she seemed to want me to. “Why did you go rogue and snatch us from Excelsior?”
“I was trying to protect Eido,” she said. “All the true spacers took Eido’s side. Not that we’re as crazy as the deep spacers, of course, but we understood. It was time. Most of the rockbound agreed. But there’s crazy and crazy. We all knew that someone would try to take her out before she got to Earth orbit. The comet core was no use as armor. She was alone, you see, except for the Tyrian woman, and while she was alone there was always bound to be someone who believed that destroying her would be enough to solve the immediate problem — and that if the immediate problem could be solved, the final solution could be indefinitely postponed yet again. There was no sure way we could protect her…but there was an unsure way. A risk. I took it, Madoc. I was the one. I had the opportunity, and I took it.”
“You were trying to use us as a human shield? You put us on Charity in the hope that it would stop the bad guys blowing it up?”
“It wasn’t as stupid as you might think,” the manikin protested, feebly. She seemed to be gathering all her strength for one final communicative effort. “The discussions surrounding your reawakening had become so tangled that they’d created a community of interests. A lot of AMIs had something invested in the outcome — there was considerable interest in what you and Caine might be carrying, and in Adam Zimmerman’s newsworthiness. It upped the stakes considerably. Nobody outside the AMI network knew that Eido existed, but to kill nine people, including Lowenthal, Horne, and Mortimer Gray as well as Zimmerman — if the bad guys had been thinking clearly they’d have understood that hitting Charity had become a self-defeating act. They’d have understood that it was over. But they were never that sane, never that sensible.”
“They didn’t understand.” It was just a statement; I wasn’t trying to defend anybody.
“They didn’t want to understand. They didn’t even want to understand that if they destroyed Eido with you aboard Charity they’d harden such widespread opposition that they’d be asking to be taken out themselves. Or maybe they actually wanted a war. I don’t know. All I know is that